Entangled Embodied Subjectivity
Perhaps philosophy's essence is its tenacious investigation of the subject's contribution to experience and how this contribution affects what we ought to believe.
An acquaintance habitually exaggerates. I fix her reports of events by imagining a less dramatic actuality than the one presented. It's easy to create similar examples that involve political or religious bias. The point is that we experience others as more or less unreliable narrators.
This kind of thinking was radicalized in philosophy when methodological solipsism became a dominant, 'obvious' ontological foundation for further inquiry. Even Hume seems to simply inherit it.
[quote=Hume]
We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.
[/quote]
https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/2/6
The problem with this view is that external objects like eyes and apples are tacitly taken as external in order to make this indirect realism plausible in the first place. When this tacit dependence is made explicit, this indirect realism (aka methodological solipsism) loses its obviousness.
Yet philosophy is correct to address subjectivity. Methodological solipsism even looks to be the proper approach if applied at the level of the species. The world in its meaning and color and ubiquitous normativity is not dependent on any particular subject, but our talk of a reality independent of every human nervous system is analogous to our talk about round squares. It's impossible to parse. We write a check we don't know how to cash.
The human body with its living brain, in other words, is not simply one object among others for a disembodied subject. The world that encompasses this flesh is at the same time always strangely given through this same flesh. The world is not a mere vision or dream, but we can only talk of it as given to a subject.
Please note that we can of course exclude ourselves from various useful models, but an honest ontology must tell [the essence of] the whole truth. Is philosophy finally the place where we don't cut corners ?
Please let me know what you think. Let's do some conversational research.
An acquaintance habitually exaggerates. I fix her reports of events by imagining a less dramatic actuality than the one presented. It's easy to create similar examples that involve political or religious bias. The point is that we experience others as more or less unreliable narrators.
This kind of thinking was radicalized in philosophy when methodological solipsism became a dominant, 'obvious' ontological foundation for further inquiry. Even Hume seems to simply inherit it.
[quote=Hume]
We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obvious of itself, that nothing is ever really present with the mind but its perceptions or impressions and ideas, and that external objects become known to us only by those perceptions they occasion.
[/quote]
https://davidhume.org/texts/t/1/2/6
The problem with this view is that external objects like eyes and apples are tacitly taken as external in order to make this indirect realism plausible in the first place. When this tacit dependence is made explicit, this indirect realism (aka methodological solipsism) loses its obviousness.
Yet philosophy is correct to address subjectivity. Methodological solipsism even looks to be the proper approach if applied at the level of the species. The world in its meaning and color and ubiquitous normativity is not dependent on any particular subject, but our talk of a reality independent of every human nervous system is analogous to our talk about round squares. It's impossible to parse. We write a check we don't know how to cash.
The human body with its living brain, in other words, is not simply one object among others for a disembodied subject. The world that encompasses this flesh is at the same time always strangely given through this same flesh. The world is not a mere vision or dream, but we can only talk of it as given to a subject.
Please note that we can of course exclude ourselves from various useful models, but an honest ontology must tell [the essence of] the whole truth. Is philosophy finally the place where we don't cut corners ?
Please let me know what you think. Let's do some conversational research.
Comments (189)
It also seems to be seeing that primarily discloses things as indentifiable objects and perhaps this leads dialectically to the notion of disembodied subject, at least until it is realized that we actually need to move around to synthesize the notion of an environment external to the body.
This is very cursory and needs a good deal of fleshing out of course.
I think you are right that the emphasis on sight misleads us. Strangely enough, Husserl's careful analysis of sight is also curative. The spatial object is always given to us from this or that perspective. The 'total object' is 'transcendent' in the sense that it's never given to the eyes all at once.
For practical purposes, we seem to ignore how the object is given. The report and the reporter are 'transparent' except to the degree that they are relevant.
Yes, I consider myself very much in the phenomenological camp. Merleau-Ponty, inspired by Husserl, famously stressed the flesh as a metaphysical concept (so I am processing influences here).
I think that Hegel is maybe the grandfather, if Husserl is the father of phenomenology.
Consider this shocking understanding of idealism.
[quote=Hegel]
The proposition that the finite is ideal constitutes Idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being. Every philosophy is essentially an idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is actually carried out. ... A philosophy which ascribed veritable, ultimate, absolute being to finite existence as such, would not deserve the name of philosophy; the principles of ancient or modern philosophies, water, or matter, or atoms are thoughts, universals, ideal entities, not things as they immediately present themselves to us, ... in fact what is, is only the one concrete whole from which the moments are inseparable.
[/quote]
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/mean08.htm
Idealism is named after its awareness that all finite objects are ideal (useful or pleasing fictions.) A finite object is a disconnected object, an object that makes sense on its own. Hegel's idealist sees the semantic interdependence of entities. Subject and substance are entangled.
Scientific realism (the ontological thesis of the pure or independent object) thinks it can see around all human subjects because it can see around (in a certain sense, itself to be further clarified) any particular subject.
But [and this for me anyway was the breakthrough, however simple it looks in retrospect], the concept of the subject only has meaning from our typical experience as social creatures with sense organs in a shared world. The subject is just as dependent on the object as the object is on the subject. Similarly, there's no left without right.
Cool. I look forward to continuing the conversation. This topic is my jam lately.
The only world that we live in and care about and can talk about meaningfully (the 'lifeworld' in its fullness and depth) seems to depend, mostly tacitly, on the life of our flesh. When humans talk about reality, they implicitly talk about something that involves the perception thoughtful flesh, which we drag along everywhere, like it or not.
Some people say colors aren't real, because our nervous system paints them on some Reality that's never seen naked. But I say that instead the rose is red. It's only a fictional confused rose that has no color or shape and is the gray or vanishing fantasy of a metaphysician. Instead of a layer of appearance between us and reality, we can think in terms of depth. We always have the real, but we can also always have it more adequately and clearly.
Scare quotes for "the mind" because it seems to imply a universal generalised 'realm of ideas' in which your mind and my mind float ethereally in a universe of ideas, supping on the nourishing philosophies that abide there and remaining essentially disembodied.
"A mind" might better be imagined as the emergent will of the population of cells that constitute a body in interpenetrative relation to an environment. Where 'will' can be understood as the action of the organism, in terms of a discriminating response. Air is taken in, oxygen is preferentially absorbed and CO2 is preferentially released in exhalation, and that discrimination continues until the organism dies. These cells always knew the difference that science has lately named.
Science is then an aspect of the emergent (constructed) will of a social species, emerging from a 'method' or practice of interaction with the distinguished social and physical environments. The method in turn being distinguished from more varied (chaotic) practices that did not make the hard distinction between the social and the physical as religions and polities.
Thus a crude physicalism in outline.
Physicalism has a bit of a blurry meaning, so I'll try to more carefully specify that what I'm challenging is the intelligibility of the species-independent 'pure' object. I freely grant that mountains and mothers are independent of any particular individual human being, at least in a powerful sense that rules out crude egocentric. But I don't think we can talk more than nonsense and round squares about a world apart from human cognition. It's almost tautological, and yet the simplest things are sometimes slipperiest.
Quoting unenlightened
I suggest that ideas do indeed exist at something like the 'more subjective' or 'less material' end of the spectrum. How they exist is something we can clarify endlessly. Where we seem to agree is that the individual subject is very much embodied. So is the 'cultural subject,' but more strangely.
You mention penetration anxiety, and I think that is related to a more general flight from vulnerability. It's a bit of a tangent, but I suggest that the spirituality of science involves living more in more in something like Popper's 'world 3' and identifying more and more with culture that depends on human bodies in general but no human body in particular.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper%27s_three_worlds
The flame of knowledge leaps from melting candle to melting candle. We lose (even get bored with) the idiosyncratic mortal self except as 'hardware' for the infinite game of rationality's endless selfclarification. I imagine old Socrates, no longer troubled by the usual lust or greed, more interested in world-revealing critical conversation than anything else. Objectivity is implicitly social.
I, am an impenetrable fortress. Nothing, I repeat nothing, from that "external world" can infiltrate my defenses, and move me. All which exists within my mind comes from the inside. Thus is my reality.
There is however, a sense in which ideas come to my mind from somewhere other than my mind. Since they cannot penetrate through my fortress, and enter from the external, and "ghostly phenomena" is silly talk, I conclude that they enter my mind through "inner space". And since the ideas which enter my mind through inner space seem to be very similar to the ideas which enter your mind through inner space, I can conclude that we are very well connected through inner space.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, it's good to understand "inner space" in terms of disembodiment because there cannot be any spatial extension, which is a requirement for bodies, in the intensional realm.
Quoting unenlightened
Now you've lost me. You're talking about the internal "mind" in terms of external bodies and movements, and things penetrating the impenetrable fortress. I suggest you go back to the drawing board, and refigure your ideas from the inside. Don't let that thing you call "science" penetrate your soul from the outside inward, thereby corrupting the entirety of your mind.
Quoting unenlightened
Science was a mistaken venture from its outset. The human beings thought that they could proceed outward from the inner space, and find freedom in a supposed vast expanse of the assumed outer realm. But they are now finding out that there is really no way to escape the penitentiary to the outside, as there really is no outside, no such thing as an external world, or "outer space". The humans have found out that everything which happens happens through the inside, and we just misrepresent these happenings, and mistakenly misunderstand them through three dimensional or four dimensional geometry which portrays, or models, all this activity as outside.
Until we recognize that true freedom can only be found through inner space, we'll be continually banging our heads against that impenetrable wall to the external; a process which prevents us from the freedom of disembodiment. Why bang our heads endlessly against a barrier which we know from experience has real substantial existence, instead of turning around and finding true freedom through the interrelations of inner space?
Quoting unenlightened
Physicalism is dead. The scientific method which kept knocking itself silly by banging its head on the impenetrable boundary has finally given up the ghost, which has retreated to the inner space.
Yeah, I'm more trying to encapsulate the difficulties of physicalism than present the creed for adoption. It's dead, but it continues as a zombie to consume life.
Science seems to begin in a Cartesian dualism of mind and body that at first limits itself to bodies as it's proper subject, but ends up having to deal with mind and subjectivity that it has explicitly ruled out of its domain. Philosophers of science and neuroscientists and scientific psychologists have somehow to give an objective account of subjectivity, which contradiction necessarily results in a mixture of fiction, nonsense and vacuity.
So given that an objective account of subjectivity is impossible, I return to Descartes' characterisation of subjectivity in terms of 'thinking'. Philosophers valorise thinking, and make an identification with it. I think - I cannot doubt that I think because to doubt is to think, therefore I am certain of my existence as thought.
*Silent pause ...*
In those pauses, when there is no thought, yet there is subjectivity. I conclude that thought is a mechanical physical process such as a computer or a neural network performs, that a subject can be aware of in their own brain, not subjectivity itself, and what thought cannot doubt is not thereby confirmed to be the case, because one can be aware of the silence of thought.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sounds a bit like the internet. But I think you are continuing the Cartesian split and trying to account subjectively for objectivity which must result in the same kind of contradiction - here we are sharing ideas through physical means, are we not? Interior requires an inexplicable exterior and neither can account for the other that it rejects. Can we not reject the split, except as a methodological tool for understanding one aspect of a single world? And then characterise that aspect that our scientific method brackets off, not as another world, and not as ideas, but as the meaning and the caring of the world.
Quoting unenlightened
It may be a parasite on the glory of technology. Granted that we worship power, any philosophy that seems to ride that particular coattail is a good bet. A rising politician needs a sophist to write speeches, not some angsty phenomenologist or a suspiciously detached Socrates content with no more than the conditions for the possibility of free-critical truth-seeking conversation. I might start another thread about the unworldly foolishness of the philosopher as opposed to the pragmatic sophist.
Exactly. The heart of all of this is holism. Fundamental ontology is a holism that doesn't cut corners or rip out a mere aspect or piece of reality and try to put it under the rest.
:rofl: "I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical; "
Quoting plaque flag
So the project is to find a way to explore that aspect that science has neglected by design, that we are calling subjectivity for the moment, and that cannot be the scientific method, but might be, I don't know, poetic, confessional, artistic, moral, sentimental, meditative, spiritual? Perhaps the method of no method?
I think Husserl had the right general idea in his conception of phenomenology, which doesn't mean he was always right on the details. He understood very well that such 'science' is fallibly done with others.
https://smartnightreadingroom.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/meeting-the-universe-halfway.pdf
I like what you wrote in that thread.
The observer and the observed are entangled in the observation, and this observation displays the same entanglement as every observation. The separation of the observer from the observed is never more than a convenient approximation that is never completely true.
Hegel wrote that any disconnected or finite entity was a mere fiction, had no genuine being. He then defined this view as the essence of idealism. So 'idealism' is the recognition that disconnected (finite) entities are ideal, imaginary, fictional. For Hegel, [good] philosophy is idealism as just holism, which is to say realism.
This claim gets something right but it's a little reckless.
The "objects" to which our performances must be held accountable are not something outside discursive practice itself. Discursive practice cannot be understood as an intralinguistic structure or activity that then somehow "reaches out" to incorporate or accord to objects.
The objects are not independent of our conceptualization of them, but our conceptualization is not independent of the object. A meaningful and genuine subject is, in my view, an embodied subject in an actual world that is not just whatever the subject wants it to be. Also discursive practice melts uselessly into vague human coping if it's not basically or prototypically good old written and verbal discourse. The ameobic metaphor of such research reaching out to include a new object (a new species of cave fish) does not strike me as problematic.
I think this is right. There's an argument people make that because humans and bees perceive flowers differently, every human being lives in their own private Idaho.
I think we have to accept both that what we experience as the 'external world' is a construction, and that we know this precisely because we do know something about how this construction is done.
Hume figured this out, and noted that he lacks the power not to believe in the persistence of objects, and concluded that there are things Nature deemed too important to leave to our frail reason.
Damasio emphasizes that a brain's first task is keeping the body it's in in the homeostatic happy zone. The brain only models the world in order to better maintain the body it's responsible for.
What thought signifies to me is need, lacking. We think because we are in need. So when Descartes put thinking in relation to being, he should have recognized that we think because we are lacking in our being. We are, each of us, incomplete. So I think, not because I am, but because I want to be.
Quoting unenlightened
I am not actually denying the exterior. It is what it is, and that is what I described as a faulty representation. That does not make it unreal, as a representation it is real, but faulty. Likewise, "the physical" is very real, as a representation, it is just lacking in its capacity to accurately model how the universe actually behaves. So we can go to the "single world" scenario, but only by recognizing that the scientific method is not properly modeling the single world.
So here's the point. It seems like we share ideas through the external world, speaking writing, radio, internet, etc.. This is what you call physical means. In a basic sense, we reach outward, touch things, and move them around. But these supposed outward movements all come from an inner source, supposedly moving outward, and they end by altering the inner aspects somewhere else.. The supposed outward movement changes the supposed external world, in a way which other people can sense, perceive, and interpret for meaning. But this may be a complete misunderstanding.
Now imagine that there is nothing out there, nothing external, and all this activity is really happening in the internal aspects of bodies, and through the relations of inner space. There must be a boundary between the inner space, and the external nothingness. So each time that it seems like I reach out with my hand to touch something I am really hitting that external boundary behind which is nothing. The activity which you, or anyone else might see, and interpret as me reaching outward and touching an object is really all occurring within internal space, and you're actually seeing it through inner space. Though we model this interaction as occurring through external space, and as the external boundaries of objects hitting and moving each other, the real activity is occurring within the inner space of the objects, and their internal relations to each other. So when I reach out and move the object with my hand, we model it as the external part of my body exerting a force against the external part of the object, and this moves the object. In reality, I am moving it by means of the internal aspects of my body affecting the internal aspects of the object, through inner space, and it simply appears like the external part of my body exerts force on the external part of the object. through external space.
The problem with the construction view (if taken too far anyway) is that we only believe we are trapped inside a construction because we take that same construction as a reality. Indirect realism, which seems admirably cautious, is incautious in what it takes for granted --- a meaningful concept of the subject doesn't depend on the same commonsense direct realism it sets itself against.
Are the sense organs their own product ? If we live in a construction, why should we believe there are really brains and eyes and ears that construct ? I prefer some kind of direct realism: There are eyes and ears and brains, and there is the being of the world (not the being of an image of the world) for a 'conscious' human. We have no experience apart from (by other means) than thru this living flesh.
That makes sense. I see all entities on a the semantic inferential plane. We see our spouse's eyes and not internal images of those eyes --- even though we see with the eyes and light in complicated ways.
As I see it, a phenomenological direct realist is more willing to grant the reality of the brain than most. For it is not an illusion paradoxically created by itself.
Discursive practice is made of the fundamental particles of the universe which is the intra-action. She talks about discursive practice rather than the atomic 'speech act'. Our discussion and her book are defining each other in a mutual process, a thread is an experiment that might work or not.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Psychologically, this rings true. The world pours into the emptiness of awareness, never filling it. Being unfolds in time. But thought is unimportant, in the sense that it does nothing to complete us and fill the void, only love can do that. But for the rest, it looks to me that you have simply swapped interior and exterior and repeated the Cartesian dualism. So you end up as an idealist trying to think happy thoughts instead of a pleasure-seeking materialist.
I think we are mostly on the same page. The 'Lifeworld' is a dynamic meaningdripping unity. But it's given through or to distinct personalities in distinct bodies, which are admittedly permeable and do not have exact boundaries.
I would agree that love fills the void, and love is expressed in actions rather than thoughts, but I think thought is still required in a secondary way, as a cause of loving acts. Isn't it true that thoughtfulness is an indication of love, even if love does not actually require thoughtfulness for its existence? I don't see how thoughtlessness could be consistent with "love". This relationship between thoughtfulness and love demonstrates that thoughtfulness is dependent on love, such that love is essential to, or necessary for thoughtfulness. And loving acts are dependent on thoughtfulness in much the same way, such that thoughtfulness is necessary for loving acts. And loving acts are necessary to fill the void.
We might say that love comes from somewhere deeper than thought, and is prior to thought, therefore does not require thought, but the outward actions which express love require thought. So thought is like a filter between love and the actions it produces, it attempts to constrain the actions to be truly consistent with what is needed. Loving acts, though they may succeed in filling the gap of what is lacking, and what is needed, are really just an outward expression, or representation, of the true love which is deep within, as the cause of action. And love itself is even deeper within than thought is, as prior to (cause of) the thoughtfulness which itself is prior to the loving acts as the cause of conformity; that is conforming to what appears to fill the void.
But it's all a backward representation, because the true "void" which needs to be filled, is deepest within,
inherent within the thoughts, inherent within the love itself, whose lacking and need produces the inclination for action in the first place.
Quoting unenlightened
I really cannot understand how dualism is avoidable in an accurate understanding of reality. This is due to the nature of time. The problem is that the future is indeterminate, consisting of possibilities, while the past consists of what actually is determined. Being unfolds in time, as you say, and this is at the present, so the living being partakes in both the undetermined future, full of possibilities, and the determined past, full of actualities. How can we understand this two-fold reality without a dualist framework?
:up:
Yes, ethically motivated.
At the very least, earnest ontology is a will toward truth. I bring no blueprint for the better mousetrap. I like to think that I aspire toward a relatively radical self-honesty for its own sake (which is maybe to say that I find self-honesty apriori noble or worthy and worth striving towards.) It's important to be honest with others, but this is trickier, for reasons I probably don't need to go into.
When I say thought, I mean linguistic thought. Love begins in caring and nurture, you know nests, sitting on eggs, wagging your tail when the human looks at you.
Quoting plaque flag
For Husserl, the brain is indeed real, but then he analyzed the real as a higher level construction of intentional acts, just as real spatial objects are constituted out of correlated perceptions. The object, whether brain or rock or atom, is not an illusion, rather it is an achievement of subjective and intersubjective idealization that is never completely fulfilled. All facts of nature for Husserl are contingent and relative. Consequently, we cant use the reality of the brain as an explanatory grounding for the constitutive process out of which it emerges as an ideal object. The real for Husserl is only ever a secondary and derived grounding.
Right, that's why I said love is prior to thought, and thought requires love, in the sense that love is necessary for thought. This is evident in human beings, as thoughtfulness is the result of love, and thoughtlessness is what results from a lack of love.
Thought is derived from love, as a necessary precondition. So love is even deeper within the internal than thoughts are.
Constituted without the help of brains ? I love Husserl, but I won't follow him just anywhere.
I continue to claim that we can't circumvent the assumption of an embodied social-linguistic community in an environment together. Bracketing is fine, but we can't forget that bracketing is a reduction, resulting therefore in a potentially useful fiction / map.
Quoting Joshs
Note that you write we cant use the reality. Who is this brainless we ? I think it's Feuerbach's 'we' of 'Reason.' It floats 'above' (independently) of any particular embodied human subject, but it is simply not intelligible as independent of all such flesh.
In Husserls phenomenology of embodiment, then, the lived body is a lived center of experience, and both its movement capabilities and its distinctive register of sensations play a key role in his account of how we encounter other embodied agents in the shared space of a coherent and ever-explorable world.
https://iep.utm.edu/husspemb/
This lived body is always with us, even if we ignore it for this or that purpose. I cannot make sense of human experience that doesn't involve a living brain. Some people believe in ghosts and that Christ rose from the dead. I don't.
I can make sense of studying how the world is given to us rather than focusing on what is given. This 'how' tends to be 'transparent.' It's undervalued and ignored, until a Husserl comes along.
I would suggest that love refers to a human perception of ontologically primitive relation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Perhaps by understanding that the past is determined only within phenomenon, and has agential, rather than temporal, separability from either the future or the present. The living being does not simply partake, but, like all material bodies, acquires specific boundaries and properties through open-ended dynamics of intra-activity - as Barad says, humans are part of the world-body space in its dynamic structuration.
Quantum mechanics has demonstrated that time is not a container in which observer-independent objects move and interact, and has called into question assumptions of representationalism, individualism and this intrinsic separability of knower and known. Bohr has argued that this requires a radical revision of our attitude towards the problem of physical reality.
One's report reflects how one interprets and characterises truth, the truths one deems relevant and which are emphasised. Perceiving what is, is thoughtless, it shouldn't be lumped in with any process that requires the making of choices, such as understanding.
Understanding can be validated, but what it accomplishes isn't necessarily truth, nor must it aim for that. For example, a report might aim at conveying to its reader important bits of information, so they can quickly and easily understand all that they need to know. Taking a view of what the reader needs to know, or what the report needs to convey is necessary, but demonstrates how the goal is not truth.
I think we can better understand subjectivity by perceiving individuals as being overburdened with truths and being required to organise them. In organising them, we must make choices, that is subjectivity.
Respectfully, is this statement itself a lie then ? Or should I at least be careful not to assume your intention to be honest with me ? Are you not telling me how things are ?
I grant that we curate for relevance.
In my experience, it's way too easy for us humans to wander into performative contradiction.
I agree that some serious organization is going on. 'Choices' seems correct, but I think we need to add a temporal dimension. I am responsible for what I have been and done. I am my past in the mode of no longer being it. I am my future in the mode of not being able yet to be it. [ Sartre ]. I am the history from which I'm trying to awake, thrown projection. Temporal, aspirational, responsible.
And what of this activity we're engaged in right now ? Critical rationality. You can disagree with me but not with yourself. Same for me. We both appeal to norms that transcend us both, finding our better self in a 'projected' 'ideal' perfected rational subject.
Quoting plaque flag
When one knowingly states falsehood it is a lie, but a report of truth, yet not the whole truth, can be a lie when it is intentionally misrepresentative. As I haven't knowingly stated any falsehood and I am not being intentionally misrepresentative, the statement is not a lie.
It's truth arranged, curated as you say, as I write to you, I am overburdened by how much I could say, how many points I could make, but I can't share everything. I have to choose my words carefully, to convey what I want to convey and to succeed in my objectives.
I wouldn't take for granted our need for relevance, it's a crucial part of subjectivity. Once I've selected the relevant truths, interpreted them, and made my argument or my account, don't disregard that. Even if my statement is true, it wasn't made to convey mere truth, it has a purpose, it was made.
Quoting plaque flag
Why do we need to add a temporal dimension? Many factors go into why we choose as we do, beyond ourselves. Culture, environment, context, biology and so on. We can agree that many factors are involved, but I'm unaware of the purpose you believe would be served by going into detail about them.
Quoting plaque flag
We're in a philosophical discussion, if I would ignore the rules of that, others won't participate in them with me. If you're going to highlight my choice, let me ask, how much of a choice do I even have? How would it serve me to ignore the established norms?
The norms don't "transcend" me, my compliance is useful to me, and in some ways, coerced.
The factors involved in my choices are complex. My circumstances in many ways, are different than yours, but are also in many ways very similar, I hope you find that answer satisfying, but perhaps not.
I'm sorry. Who are you ? Why are you asking me this ?
The temporal dimension is us keeping score on who's said what and who owes who an explanation or elaboration, etc. So you ask me a question about a claim I made a few minutes ago, holding me responsible.
Quoting plaque flag
Is corporeality is fundamental to transcendental subjectivity? What then do we make of Husserl's analyses of the primordial stratum of constitution in which no body has yet been constituted?
In Ideas II, Husserl points to a pre-bodily stratum in which consciousness is possible without a body: He identifies a lowest level stratum of constitution of the sensuous thing, wherein sense perceptions exist prior to the construction of a corporeal Body (no dependence on the Body has yet been taken into account(Ideas II, p.319)).
Again, in a note , Husserl speculates
Quoting plaque flag
For Husserl, the pre-bodily ego is utterly particular in its mineness, even though it has not yet constituted itself as a human subject.
Purple cheese leaps from the nostrils of hello.
That violates semantic norms, right ? Or does it mean whatever I want to it mean, because I meant (in more familiar lingo) 'have a wonderful evening in Toledo.' Point is I don't pick the meanings of words. Or how one claim implies another, etc.
Are you not implicitly asking me to argue in terms of rational norms that transcend me to justify my claim ? Or do I get my own logic ? Critical thinking is essentially normative. If you don't think so, then why I should I care ? unless you have the leverage on me of my (our) commitment to facing criticism and making a case for our claims ?
Science is a heroic [ normative ] endeavor, not some search algorithm.
It's just not Husserl. Other thinkers engage in the same sci-fi, sometimes quite brilliantly. I'm not even saying it's worthless or completely wrong. As a holist, I'm suspicious, and I'm telling you why.
In general (not just in response to Husserl) my gripe is that subjectivity gets its meaning from the typical experience of a community of cooperative and adversarial bodies in a shared environment. The subject is held responsible for what its body does and says. One soul per body. Now what's the logical necessity of one soul per body ? Sci-fi gives us lots of souls in a single body. But there's a practical 'necessity.' Easier to track, reward, punish.
The subject only makes sense against other subjects and a world. No left without right, that sort of thing. Why would a varying stream of being be a subject ? How is the 'interiority' generated? I think it's smuggled in from actual experience. Just like the alien hotties in the first Star Trek are all really just pneumatically advantaged human females painted green.
I don't know what you mean by "transcend". I agree that we are following norms, of language, of conversation and of thinking. We follow them because they're useful, and partially because we're compelled. I take there to be no higher meaning than that, do you?
Don't worry. I'm an atheist. I don't even believe in ghosts.
I like etymology:
mid-14c., "escape inclusion in; lie beyond the scope of," from Old French transcendre "transcend, surpass," and directly from Latin transcendere "climb over or beyond, surmount, overstep," from trans "across, beyond" (see trans-) + scandere "to climb" (see scan (v.)). Meanings "be surpassing, outdo, excel; surmount, move beyond" are from early 15c
https://www.etymonline.com/word/transcend
Quoting Judaka
I think it's true that they are useful. It's also true that we are [ sometimes ] compelled. But the central Enlightenment idea of autonomy means that we 'legislate' our own norms. We are bound to no norms we do not willingly embrace -- to nothing 'alien' to us (like an inscrutable god who just gives commands, or a tyrant with more guns than reasons.)
Critical rationality further determines or explicates its own essence or concept. When we drop an eternal god, we set out to sea on Neurath's boat.
We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurath%27s_boat
In other words, I argue in terms of current logical-semantic norms for the elaboration, modification, or extension of these same norms.
Quoting plaque flag
I characterise choice by the quality of the choices available. If I can select between ten options, but nine of them are unthinkable to select, then I may as well just have one. Do I abide by the norms of language because I prefer them over the alternative? Yes. Are there any alternatives I can reasonably accept? No. Okay, then, I do not have a choice.
Autonomy allows me to control myself, and it makes sense for me to adapt to my environment. That doesn't mean I think highly of it.
In philosophy, we think in "we", the group that is not a group, this "we" exists more in a technical sense than in a real one. I am but one person, I was born into this world, and I act as is sensible for me to act. It sits between willing and unwilling.
It's difficult to understand subjectivity in the context of philosophy since it often violates this "we" notion, it breaks those rules. I think this is a weakness of philosophy. We're all on the same ship, so we should work together, but it doesn't always work out that way in reality. It's not a criticism of you, but I understand subjectivity through the lens of one's objectives not necessarily coinciding with what would be good for the group, or in general. Though we might explain ourselves in ways that obfuscate this intention.
How about you let me do your thinking for you ?
This joke is to wake you up maybe to what autonomy really means in this context. A philosopher who thinks for his fucking self and doesn't believe whatever he's told is exactly what I'm talking about. Autonomy means you must be convinced. You sit on judgment on the claims of strangers.
On the flip side, one of Sartre's famous line is that we are condemned to be free. It's a pain in the ass to have to be responsible all the time. Part of us wants a safe, comfortable slavery. Bread, television, and nap time. Or we want a book with all the answers and a leader who can't be wrong. King Trump, or that guy with the funny mustache, or that chap from the Bible.
I really can't understand this. Could you try to explicate? What does it mean to say that the past has agential separability, for example? And what does "open-ended dynamics of intra-activity" mean?
It's interesting you say that, and it may be different for different people, but I think it is easier to be honest with others, an honesty of expression which may or may not consist in, go along with, being honest with oneself. In other words, I think it is easier to honestly express the views we are conscious of holding, than it is to determine whether the views we consciously hold are coming from a place of honesty or dishonesty, meaning from a place of impartial rationality as opposed to other motivations.
Determining this comes down to self-examination and the attempt to make conscious what might be unconscious motivations that may be misleading me. That all said, I want to emphasize what I've already acknowledged, and admit that this is only coming from reflection on my own experience, and it may well not be the same for others,
Quoting plaque flag
This all-or-nothing "joke" misses the point completely, and represents the entire problem with the conceptualisation of "free will". I have the power to legislate my own norms in a technical sense only, if I abandoned any sense of pragmatism, any desire for compromise, or any concern for consequence, then I can legislate my own norms. So long as I have some sense, there's a significant limit to it.
Responsibility & free will, are two ideas I have many issues with, but it seems quite a tangential topic from the OP. It seems we, maybe agree on the topic of subjectivity, but I'm having trouble tracking some of these tangential topics. Is this about what we "ought" to believe?
As I understand philosophy, it is an intellectual exercise from the perspective of the group, the "we". An understanding that benefits me, at the expense of society, is a logic that is antithetical to philosophy. This is its bias. Sometimes I see the value in that, and at other times, I don't.
Understand the limitations of rationality and logic, that most philosophers seem blind to. There is no "whole truth", we are forced to select truths and logic, one must. If you understand this, you can put to rest any notion of "whole truth". All philosophy does is dictate the goal, the species-wide level goal, as a bias that serves as a template for "arranging truth".
Time is not objectively linear - there is no inherent temporal separability between past and present. Rather, we enact this cut within the phenomenon of experiencing temporality, and the boundaries and properties of the past and the present, living being remain dynamic, ever-changing in relation to each other, whenever and however they intra-act (as opposed to interact which implies pre-determined boundaries/properties).
The apparent determinacy of the past is inseparable from its present intra-action, enacting a particular embodied cut within such intra-action that delineates the past from agencies of observation, including the present. Any difference between one such agential cut and another may not be obvious, but it is NOT zero.
Both the past and the future are full of possibilities in which we can partake. We are continually reconfiguring, reworking and re-articulating the past, including what we have previously considered to be determined or actual.
I suggest that you've wandered into performative contradiction. You tell me to understand the 'limitations of rationality and logic.' Wouldn't this understanding be through rationality and logic ?
Or is the 'understanding' you have in mind mystical ? Does it wait in the arms of Jesus ? Or in a dose of DMT ? Am I to understand you as some guy at the bar pontificating after a couple of beers ?
Quoting Judaka
Are you are preaching the finitude of human knowledge ? That we are not omniscient ? Who claimed otherwise ? You seem to just not understand me, and to be charging at a personal windmill.
It's possible that you are saying something existential here, along of the lines of my dramaturgical ontological. When we are born, we cry that we are come / To this great stage of fools. As individuals, we have to stand naked on our own in some sense, and live courageously with certain decisions that we can't know are the best ahead of time or even afterward.
If you are saying something like that, then of course I agree. Note that this is also a grand thesis about the structure of life, a knowledge claim.
Only in the sense that all critical rationality is. My OP is a fairly ambitious ontological thesis that explains the relationship of what's called 'mind' and 'matter'. My direct realism is easier to understand once one grasps our shared situation as discursive rational/normative subjects. This is the condition of possibility for science and philosophy. To deny this condition is to engage in performative contradiction.
Of course you don't rule the world. A tyrant can hang you for calling him a silly bald motherfucker. Actual life, as the foil of the ideal, is always compromised and tainted. The topic is the quest for or toward greater autonomy. What ideal does critical rationality depend on or aim at ?
The perfect circle has probably never been and never could be instantiated, but imperfect circles are only circles in terms of this ideal circle. No actual human or group is perfectly rational or just. But these concepts play a huge role in our lives as goals.
To understand is to be sympathetically or knowledgeably aware. Understanding through rationality and logic alone do not allow for sympathetic awareness or love, let alone any relation to the illogical or unknown. What is excluded from mattering must form part of our understanding, if we are to be fully accountable.
Well, sure, but, respectfully, this is obvious and tangential. Consider also that you'd have to argue for this claim if it wasn't so obviously true.
I don't think philosophy is reducible to edification or wise homilies. To call out popular forms of self-contradicting irrationalism is not to imply that life is just about critical thinking. It's to play the game of philosophy on a philosophy forum.
What I was hinting at is that people don't want the truth from me -- or from you. Or they only want a little bit of it, the piece they need to get the bills paid or feel pretty. White lies, mere omission of a truth that would embarrass, euphemism, pretending to have not noticed the embarrassing misstep.
I wouldn't want potential employers to have access to my philosophical writing. They'd probably be afraid I wouldn't respect them enough or be offended by my atheism. I don't talk much politics, but as a critic of nonsense on both sides of the culture war, I'd piss off everyone but a statistically unlikely weirdo contrarian like myself. ( Well there are lots of us, but why cast pearls before swine who won't listen, reject calm discussion.)
I work in academia sometimes, and I can feel the fear and caution. Maybe I'm just older and more aware and cautious, but it seems to me sometimes that life has changed since I was younger, that we are more on the stage than ever before, faker and more fearful than ever before --in my lifetime I mean. In my teens and 20s, my circle of acquaintances had all kinds of views and we dealt with it in our Gen-X live-and-let-let individualism. But I worked menial jobs then, so maybe I just didn't need to care about certain norms. Still, the internet so quickly communicates scandal. The eye of Big Mother (of the digital mob) is always watching in our cell-phone panopticon. One alternative is to become a polarized bigmouth like Peterson or some lefty counterpart. But something gross happens to personality when it becomes a product. And personality at that level of fame is almost always a smoothed-over self-marketing product --- no longer able to be vulnerable, given the increased cost of such honesty on the battlefield.
I'm very much with you on the angst and difficultly of self-critical self-knowledge.
Quoting plaque flag
Nothing supernatural at play. The understanding is achieved through logic, yes. The limitation isn't in what logic can do, it's the same as truth, it's the abundance of logic, the overwhelming amount of options, and that we are forced to select a tiny portion of it. The limitation is in its inability to capture everything. Our goal as thinkers isn't to be guided by truth or logic or even to be rational.
We have a goal, an aim, and to accomplish it, one must have the right understanding, using the right logic. What is "right" is what accomplishes the goal. You're demonstrating that you're doing this in every response to me. You know so much truth, and you share but a fraction of all that you know with me. You've got so many ways you could respond to me, different arguments that you aren't bringing up but could.
I'm not talking about the things you don't know, your finite knowledge. I'm talking about the limitations of using the vast knowledge you already have. As I said earlier, our selecting the "relevant" knowledge as a process, shouldn't be trivialised. It's so commonplace, such an obvious thing to do, that it's easy to overlook but think about the implications of it. How do you select what is "relevant"? Relevant to what? You've got to make decisions, and your decisions aim to accomplish something, and what you aim to accomplish and how you go about it is an important part of subjectivity.
It's trivial, I know. Your hand is forced, it's necessary, I know. But I think it's key to understand that it's necessary. We need a framework, we need goals, we need selection biases, and philosophy provides these, these and not the "whole truth". I say it's a limitation, but that may have been misleading, my intention is to say it can't be the whole truth. Having to "arrange truth" isn't a flaw, it's just necessary.
Quoting plaque flag
I'm with you in a general sense, as I think we've established. I take you to be saying something nobody in their right mind would disagree with, so long as you think of it that way, then we're probably on the same page.
Quoting plaque flag
Such a shame :cry: .
Quoting plaque flag
I subscribe to a pragmatic and context-dependent approach to evaluating ideas and information. I value the skill of critical analysis for specific purposes, without embracing a broader philosophical or systematic framework of critical rationality. Philosophy is one particular context, with its own biases, and here I play by those rules, but I won't have these biases present in all my endeavours in life. I admit, within the context of philosophy, this is essentially treason, but alas.
I take you to be articulating a valuable pragmatist insight. I read the neopragmatist Rorty very intensely and closely, and I was strongly influenced by his anarchism. Here's a taste:
In Rortys view, both Deweys pragmatism and Darwinism encourage us to see vocabularies as tools to be assessed in terms of the particular purposes they may serve. Our vocabularies, Rorty suggests, have no more of a representational relation to an intrinsic nature of things than does the anteaters snout or the bowerbirds skill at weaving (TP, 48).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rorty/
There's something liberating and 'transcendent' in this (allowing us to see our vocabularies more from the outside), but there's also something absurd in this kind of seductively sophisticated irrationalism. Rorty's intention is to tell the truth about how things are --- about the intrinsic nature of things. In my view, antiphilosophers turn out to be philosophers with a new lever for prying at old issues. But in their vanity they think they've transcended the game that buries its gravediggers.
You say that : what is "right" is what accomplishes the goal. I see the value in this, but I maintain that you are still trying to tell me a truth here. It's not just instrumental. If it is, it has no authority. It's only true if I believe it, in other words, given that your desire is presumably to persuade.
We agree very much on this. One of my pet themes is the 'hero myth' that structures a personality. We need a grand metanarrative or basic map to navigate this world. I'd call this the ontological necessity of existentialism. The world is given to or through entire personalities which seem to be organized around 'ego ideals' or a sense of the heroic. I live toward some conception or image or 'statue' of the virtuous person. I suffer from a sense of distance from this ideal, when I've made a serious mistake.
But I'd stress that we also contrast ourselves with others. Virtue is purity from taint. I'm not irrational, racist, stupid, greedy, ugly, incompetent, unspiritual, superstitious, uptight, sloppy....like all those other people. I call this finite personality because it's bounded and exclusive -- defined by exclusion, projecting a hated shadow --- its disavowed temptations and tendencies.
:up:
Yes, it's intended to make explicit what is obvious once we notice/recall it.
Quoting plaque flag
I'm not familiar but after reading a summary, perhaps that's a mistake I ought to correct, the thinking is surely similar to mine.
Quoting plaque flag
Sure, I am trying to tell you a truth, several in fact, bundled up neatly together and presented for you. My point is that this argument of mine is the product of my creative effort, it involves my biases, and my intentions and serves my goals. It is not mere truth. However, I think it's important since we are talking about truth, for me to critique the word.
In this context, I imagine you are using the word "truth" to roughly reference "being in accordance with reality". The other common use is through logic. The two combine to create a significant grey area for me. Let me ask a simple question, is a dog a dog? I think most people would agree, that it's objectively true, that a dog is a dog. But why? I think it's fair to say that language isn't part of reality, and the categorisation of a dog as a dog isn't either. So, it must be logic that makes it true.
Long story short, I think it's clear that truth is working in reverse here, it's not that "a dog is a dog in reality". It's "When a thing, in reality, meets all the prerequisites to be a dog, then it is a dog". So, if an animal meets all the prerequisites to be a dog, then it's objectively true that it's a dog.
Equally, the "truth" of my argument, involves interpreting reality as meeting the prerequisites of something like "useful". It's true that my argument seems correct, or it's true that my argument seems accurate, or something like that.
In the simplest terms, if a method achieves its goal then that is a truth, and it's this kind of truth we seek, not "that which is in accordance with reality", barely anyone gives a shit about that. In a very real sense, anything useful is truth, specifically in its use.
Quoting plaque flag
Glad to hear it.
As do I, and that kind of clarity for truth obtains for any thing whatsoever, by reducing to the simple proposition that truth, generally, is the accordance of a cognition with its object.
Agreed.
Quoting Judaka
A deep issue ! Articulating the essence of articulation.
Quoting Judaka
I think you bring up a fascinating issue. The concept dog is different from any actual dog, yet in some sense it makes that actual dog possible as a dog. This last claim is controversial, and I would defend it from within an anthropocentric phenomenological direct realist framework.
In such a framework, conceptuality (language) is very much a part of a reality. The world apart from human conceptuality is a sometimes useful fiction --and an ontological mistake? That's part of the essence of the OP. Our culture-loaded human nervous system is profoundly entangled with the world.
I can understand the motivation, but I'd say that a crucial ontological breakthrough occurs precisely when we stop pretending that we as philosophers are ever on the outside looking in. I made such a big deal about critical rationality because the concept of the project of philosophy has profound implications with tend to go unnoticed. Any ontological thesis that contradicts a condition for the possibility of rational discourse is a performative contradiction.
This means that our inquiry is not outside of reality looking in but rather its logical center. Semantic inferentialism suggests that we think of all entities (itches and cows and complex numbers) on the same 'layer' of reality. Scrap dualism, I say, because no entity or concept is intelligible apart from the entire network of all other concepts. 'Mental and 'physical' entities are semantically and causally interdependent, so the distinction is a mere tool among so many others, nothing absolute.
Logic/semantics is fundamental, not something trapped outside looking in --- not for 'we the logical' who assume before any ontological claim that such a claim must be justified. This is not to say that the world is only concepts. Of course it's not. But philosophers traffic in concepts. Ontology is conceptual. We still want composers and painters. And even here the critique of logocentrism is rational as a reminder that being (the world) is not merely conceptual.
I applaud the insistence of relevance. I agree with your cynicism (hence my thread on the foolishness of ontology). But you seem to be on the edge of performative contradiction. What's the truth about the goal you have in making that very claim ? Let's assume you want to convince me. Then the statement is true because I believe it ?
Let's imagine many different individuals have basically the same belief or method, but some of them succeed and others fail their goal. Is the statement both true and false ? I like the idea that 'P is true' is largely just asserting P. Now the essence of assertion can be clarified endlessly, I suspect.
But maybe let's shift from the relationship between language and the world to that between one claimant and another.
[quote=Brandom]
The parrot, the photocell, and the chunk of iron can serve as instruments for the detection of red things or wet things, because they respond differentially to them. But those responses are not claims that things are red or wet, precisely because they do not understand those responses as having that meaning or content. By contrast, when you respond to red things or wet things by saying Thats red, or Thats wet, you do understand what you are saying, you do grasp the content, and you are applying the concepts red and wet. What is the difference that makes the difference here? What practical know-how have you got that the parrot, the photocell, and the chunk of iron do not? I think the answer is that you, but not they, can use your response as the premise in inferences. For you, but not for them, your reponse is situated in a network of connections to other sentences, connections that underwrite inferential moves to it and from it. You are disposed to accept the inference from Thats red, to Thats colored,, to reject the move to Thats green,, and to accept the move to it from Thats a stoplight. You are willing to make the move from Its wet, to There is water about, to infer it from It is raining, to take it as ruling out the claim We are in a desert, and so on. Because you have the practical ability to sort inferences in which it appears as a premise or conclusion into good ones and bad ones, your response Thats red, or Its wet, is the making of a move in a language game, the staking of a claim, the taking of a stand that commits you to other such claims, precludes some others, and that could be justified by still others. Having practical mastery of that inferentially articulated spacewhat Wilfrid Sellars calls the space of reasonsis what understanding the concepts red and wet consists in. The responsive, merely classificatory, non-inferential ability to respond differentially to red and wet things is at most a necessary condition of exercising that understanding, not a sufficient one.
[/quote]
So this is more of what I'd call us realizing our ontological centrality. This entangles the conceptual aspect of the world with the human community's inferential standards.
But what about the future though? Isn't it necessary to have a "cut" between future and past, to distinguish between what is possible and what is impossible. Perhaps you don't believe this?
Quoting Possibility
Do you really believe this? The possibilities of the past are known as counterfactuals, and that's completely different from the possibilities of the future. If you really believe what you say here, can you explain to me how the past, which we've previously considered to be determined, could consist of real possibilities which we could choose from, to actualize through our actions, just like we do with future possibilities. I mean, aren't you saying we can choose to change things in the past?
Quoting plaque flag
My point about what makes it true that a dog is a dog, wasn't primarily a critique of language, but of truth. That truth is a function of logic, and language is an example, it has set up a system of linguistic references. When a thing is referred to correctly, that creates "truth". In other words, truth is not a reflection of reality, it's a quality given to a reference.
The statement isn't true because you believe it, but if it's correct to reference it as true. The reason why a reference is correct isn't differentiated between, just as it isn't in logic.
The word "truth" doesn't carry the weight many seem to think it does, it really needs to be contextualised. Maybe we generally only bother to ask whether something is true, in contexts where we think it matters if it is or not. Perhaps that's why the word's trivial reference isn't reflected in our perception of it.
Quoting plaque flag
Ontology confuses me, I'm not sure I understand your claims. I may not be a great discussion partner for discussing ontology.
Any description of the past OR the future is always in relation to a particularly embodied present. It seems to me that what youre referring to is the difference between a living beings relation to the past and their relation to the future, in terms of what is possible and what is impossible for them, in that moment. There is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the past and the future - an embodied intra-action (observation/measurement) occurs with one OR the other, but not both simultaneously.
I would say that we change our relation to the past, including our description of what happened, how or why it happened, etc. as well as how we respond to the what, how or why, whenever we intra-act with information available (marks on bodies) in relation to that past. This, in turn, changes any subsequent relation to the future. Every time we intra-act with, and observe/measure the past, we effect it indeterminably, altering our relation to what is possible/impossible in the future. That this effect can seem negligible does not make it zero.
But the important point is that all of this separability occurs within the phenomenon of ones unique temporality. No inherent subject-object distinction exists. So the past as we describe it is only relatively determined - Newtonian physics justifies ignoring this relativity by presuming that one can always reduce the effect of measurement interactions to the point where they are negligible. Quantum physics has demonstrated this presumption to be false.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im not talking about changing things as if these were the primary ontological units, with words as the primary semantic units. Quantum physics demonstrates an ongoing, dynamic reconfiguring of the world that is purely relational at base. By changing material-discursive practices, measurements and observations of the past (marks on bodies) change, which can alter the facts of what happened.
What Im referring to has nothing to do with counterfactuals or intentionally choosing to change things in the past according to the classical ideal of causality. It isnt that the past or the future consist of possibilities, but that intra-actions change the very possibilities for change and the nature of change. In this sense, how we may intra-act in the future with the past (through techno-scientific practices, for instance) remains full of possibilities in gaining new information about the past, while other information becomes irrelevant to the future. To paraphrase Barad, since there is no inherent distinction between object and instrument, these possibilities cannot meaningfully be attributed to either abstract object (the past) or abstract measuring instrument (the future).
I use 'ontology' as a synonym of 'philosophy' in its more 'scientific' ambition to articulate the structure of reality.
Quoting Judaka
I think you are making the point that assertions are true or false. Some thinkers say that this means there is no truth without discursive beings like ourselves. I think they have a point. Indeed, I agree with thinkers who suggest that we ourselves 'provide' the conceptual aspect of the world. Along these lines, talk of a world independent of human experience is confused or absurd. So I reject scientific realism as nonempirical -- basically a useful fiction that ignores the normatively subjectivity it nevertheless depends on without being forced to notice it. Bad ontology doesn't necessarily prevent technology from improving.
Yeah, the deflationists are probably mostly right. Being able to call a statement true has certain metacognitive uses, but mostly 'P is true' doesn't add anything to 'P.'
But what is it to assert P ? Is there something irreducible here ? Is there a raw bottom-most essence of language that just 'is' the conceptual aspect of the real ?
Quoting plaque flag
I see... I think once we begin to articulate an understanding, we've necessarily entered into the realm of subjectivity. It's too free, too many choices are being made.
Quoting plaque flag
Not if that still leaves us with understanding truth as "that which is in accordance with reality" and thinking of an assertion as about reality. I understand the logic allowing us to refer to something as true or false as manmade. You might've understood that already, but maybe not.
Quoting plaque flag
I am not making an ontological argument in my critique of "truth", it's just a word to me, a poorly constructed one, one largely misunderstood. There's subjectivity in describing things. If you want to articulate the structure of reality, my view is that your aspiration is doomed from the start. Articulation is inherently subjective.
Quoting plaque flag
Its meaning is contextual, maybe it means something, maybe it doesn't, we'd need to look at the logic involved.
Quoting plaque flag
The logic for P being true is invented. What does irreducible mean?
The logic of language is invented, all of it.
In language, we refer to things with words, and there is a meaning to referring to something as something. That's all language is really. So, I don't really understand what you're talking about. What is the "raw bottom-most essence"? Do you understand language differently?
I suppose you are talking about how we feel about the world of appearances*1, in which we are entangled & embodied, as opposed to what we believe about its ultimate objective cosmic reality. In other words, Phenomenology vs Ontology. For example, "how do you feel about God" versus "do you believe that God is really out there?"
One could ask a true-believer, what does it feel like to know God or Jesus, despite their lack of phenomenal properties, i.e. direct experience? What the subject "contributes", brings to the table, is prior experiences & beliefs. All together, those embodied meanings form our belief system. But what makes the belief feel real? How do we derive feelings of trust & hope from indirect experiences?
I have only superficial knowledge of Phenomenology --- never read any Husserl, etc --- but I am philosophically interested in how subjective Consciousness emerged from the evolution of the objective insensible material world. We typically believe our own senses, yet some beliefs are not based on sensory information, but on cultural concepts. So, how do we transform cultural phenomena (words ; semiology??) into personal ideas & beliefs, such as "salvation"? :smile:
*1. Nagel's query about "what is it like to be bat" : the subjective feeling of being a sound-seeing flying mammal? For us primarily visual mammals --- like all consciousness questions --- that un-experienced experience is hard to imagine, and even harder to explain in words. The bat is "entangled" in the same physical world, but experiences different subjective sensations, due to unique features of its embodiment.
This looks like a [ presumably accidental ] performative contradiction. You present the [ objective ] ontological thesis that articulation is inherently subjective. That is of course an articulation of the structure of reality, which by its own testimony is subjective (biased, unjustified, etc.) In my view, many forms of skepticism turn out to be precisely the kind of metaphysical claim they mean to forbid. I've held many such positions myself, especially a far-out neopragmatism, but also the default two-edged psychologism --- which one never abandons, because sometimes we have to think of people as clockwork rather than discursive responsible subjects. [ I'm not going to debate some drunk asshole at a bar --- not that I go to bars anymore -- but try to push buttons that allow for evasion, etc. ]
How much can we say about the blueness of blue ? Blue is just blue. In the same way, assertion might be something so fundamental that assertions about assertions just muddy the water.
Another example : arithmetic with natural numbers is more convincing than any philosophy that might try to offer a foundation for such arithmetic. Candle in the sun.
Don't you think culture is somewhat constrained by biology ? Translation seems to be common and relatively successful. Is it by chance that invented logics are sufficiently close for this to be possible ? Derrida and others have made the point that philosophy pretty much depends on the idea of translatable content -- the idea of ideas, in other words.
This sounds like the default 'nomenclature' theory effectively criticized by Saussure and Wittgenstein. I think language is far more complex than that, though it includes references to entities. To name one complexity, Saussure talks of the sign as the fusion of an arbitrary signifier and an arbitrary signified, but the signified is a concept (not the worldly thing that concept may be applied to), and the signifier is form rather than substance (because no one ever says a word exactly the same way twice.)
Then there's Brandom's inferentialism in which the meaning of concepts is caught up in the norms governing the inferential relationships of claims to other claims. Deep water. I'm not sure we'll ever get the bottom of it.
I'm definitely more interested in what we think and ought to think. As a phenomenological direct realist (a phrase I may have made up), I don't believe in a world of appearances and yet some other world of realities.
I claim there's just the usual world of helicopters and toothaches and prime numbers and marriage vows ---all caught up in the same causal-semantic nexus. This suggests either a radical pluralism that minimizes the drama of the mental/physical dyad or a logical monism that celebrates the necessary if too often disavowed connection of all inferentially interdependent entities. It's so tapwater anti-mystical that it probably sounds mystical. I'd say the view is nothing but self-consciousness, nothing but what we are already doing all the time made explicit to us. It falls out of Brandom's Hegel, but it's implicit (folded up in) the very concept of philosophy as a critical-rational [onto-]logical enterprise.
I'd say that people who haven't dipped their nose in the texts have a mistaken view of phenomenology. There's a mundane use of 'pragmatism' that's far from C. S. Peirce. Same with 'phenomenology.'
Indirect realists [ dualists ] are pretty much doomed to misunderstand the project, thinking it focuses on appearances rather than realities. Actually it focuses on how realities are given. The lamp on my desk is real. I can see it as the same lamp from an infinity of shifting perspectives. Or I can look at a picture of Humphrey Bogart and understand that the picture intends (is of) Humphrey Bogart. Or I can grasp that talk of the Eiffel Tower is actually about the Eiffel Tower and not my idea of the Eiffel Tower. Or I can contemplate the difference between my idea of the number 2 just now and the publicly available number 2 which is not merely my idea. You might say that phenomenology is about the way that reality appears, but it is not about appearance as some layer that gets between us and reality. The big difference is that practical ordinary life just looks 'through' the way this stuff is given to what is given in its utility. So the phenomenologist foregrounds what's usually in the background.
Note that such direct realism doesn't pretend to infallibility or omniscience. Reality is profoundly horizonal (we know the mountain has another side, that we could definitely get clearer on Hegel, etc.) We can be wrong, confused, see things at different levels of clarity. The physicists sees the chair in the kitchen in ways that the child can't, for the physicist has learned to enrich the object by weaving it into the scientific image. A philosopher will also see the chair in more complex and complete way than the child.
My point is that indirect realism is often motivated by our fallibility as if the only way to explain being mistaken is in terms of not being mistaken [ about some incorrigible representative image that may or may not somehow (?) be congruent with the pre-psychical (?) unknowable 'Reality.' ] As an escapee from indirect realism's tentacular confusions, I can't help teasing on it.
In my opinion, the hard problem is made harder (pointlessly harder) by the confusions of dualism. I will perhaps please the Spiritual crowd by agreeing with them that the subject is absolutely crucial. I reject scientific realism understood as the dead pure object existing utterly apart from an embodied subject. But I say we should understand subjectivity as a perspective on worldly being. So consciousness is 'just' the being of the world 'for' or 'from' this or that perspective. And, far as we can say, as empirical rational-critical epistemically humble folk, that's the only way the world exists.
So I agree that a certain kind of scientistic ontology is very much blind to its dependence on subjectivity. From a practical point of view, it's a mostly harmless error, because it doesn't stop the next iPhone from being made, hence my other thread about the worldly foolishness of philosophy. But for the anal retentive fools who really like their stories straight, there's a logical foul in the thought of the mind-independent object. But there's the same foul, structurally speaking, in the independent fleshless outsideless communityless subject. Hence my OP and the thesis of interdependent entanglement ---correlationism with a new coat of paint.
Quoting plaque flag
Do you associate subjective with unjustified? That would be unfortunate, it's sad how this word has been butchered.
As I've already explained, and you seemingly agreed with, my argument is the result of my creative effort, it's got my biases, my choices, my views attached. "Articulation is inherently subjective", that's my understanding of articulation, my understanding of "inherently", my rules for applying "inherently", my understanding of "subjective" my rules for applying "subjective". I chose the words and not some other words. I sequenced them as they are. It's my creation, and its construction is tied to my thinking.
Isn't that sufficient to say that my words and reasonings are subjective? The view is mine to its very core.
Quoting plaque flag
I don't understand what you mean by "muddy the water", and I remain just as confused, sorry.
Quoting plaque flag
We've got words to reference things such as colours, animals, objects, and words to reference concepts such as culture, biology and constrained. It should translate well.
Quoting plaque flag
Fair enough. I'll provide a brief explanation of my view of language.
We use words to refer to things, but by referring to something as something, we're saying something about it. The word "dog" isn't representative of dogs, it's a type of animal, and when you refer to an animal as a dog, you're calling it a dog. What it means to refer to something as a "dog" depends on the context, and the meaning can vary greatly. Let's say someone is telling me how loyal their dog is, and I say "Yep, well, she is a dog after all", what does that mean? My meaning is something like "A dog is a loyal animal, so it makes sense that the dog is loyal". The logic of what it means to refer to something as something is complex, influenced by culture, context, tone and interpretation.
There's a lot of subtext to the logic of reference that can convey meaning as well. For example, referring to something as overpriced might indicate that you think the price should be lowered or that you're not going to buy it. We need the context to understand it, why is this person calling this thing overpriced? But the context may make it quite obvious, along with tone and emphasis, what this person means.
The logic that makes something overpriced is omitted, it's made up, and we'd need to hear the reason. The context matters greatly for determining the rules involved in whether it's acceptable to refer to something as something.
So even a word like "truth", I don't think a dictionary definition helps that much, we need to ask, what does it mean to refer to something as truth, and what are the rules for it? What does it mean for something to be truth and how should we treat something upon knowing that it's the truth? All of these questions are relevant to understanding the word, though context can influence this greatly.
That's far from a comprehensive explanation, and I could've written this much better but it should be enough that you understand my perspective, maybe.
Consider the larger context. You wrote : If you want to articulate the structure of reality, my view is that your aspiration is doomed from the start. My point is that you were doing what I'd call articulating the structure of reality in that very statement. Can we help but articulate the structure of reality ?
I realize that they are your words. I think you mostly had to conform to semantic norms that transcend you, because I understand you all too well otherwise. But surely those particular words are a function of you in particular as well.
Your comments on language all seem quite reasonable to me. You might like these passages.
[quote=Robert Brandom]
A characteristic distinguishing feature of linguistic practices is their protean character, their plasticity and malleability, the way in which language constantly overflows itself, so that any established pattern of usage is immediately built on, developed, and transformed. The very act of using linguistic expressions or applying concepts transforms the content of those expressions or concepts. The way in which discursive norms incorporate and are transformed by novel contingencies arising from their usage is not itself a contingent, but a necessary feature of the practices in which they are implicit. It is easy to see why one would see the whole enterprise of semantic theorizing as wrongheaded if one thinks that, insofar as language has an essence, that essence consists in its restless selftransformation (not coincidentally reminiscent of Nietzsches selfovercoming). Any theoretical postulation of common meanings associated with expression types that has the goal of systematically deriving all the various proprieties of the use of those expressions according to uniform principles will be seen as itself inevitably doomed to immediate obsolescence as the elusive target practices overflow and evolve beyond those captured by what can only be a still, dead snapshot of a living, growing, moving process. It is an appreciation of this distinctive feature of discursive practice that should be seen as standing behind Wittgensteins pessimism about the feasibility and advisability of philosophers engaging in semantic theorizing
...
[T]he idea that the most basic linguistic knowhow is not mastery of proprieties of use that can be expressed once and for all in a fixed set of rules, but the capacity to stay afloat and find and make ones way on the surface of the raging whitewater river of discursive communal practice that we always find ourselves having been thrown into (Wittgensteinian Geworfenheit) is itself a pragmatist insight. It is one that Dewey endorses and applauds. And it is a pragmatist thought that owes more to Hegel than it does to Kant.
[/quote]
Yes. And I for one think philosophy is largely about clarifying meaning, getting a better grip on our basic concepts...or getting a better on grip on why that's not possible...or figuring out whether it is possible...and so on.
Surely the dog is what it is absent the concept or more precisely name, "dog". Actually 'dog' by itself does not seem to be a concept but is so only on account of all the associations which it carries; associations which come into play after the familiarity cultivated by seminal cognition and subsequent re-cognitions.
The concepts associated with the name 'dog' transform the mere name into a category constructed out of observed characteristics and attributes.
"I see", said the blind philosopher. So, as a "naive realist" you disagree with Aristotle, Descartes, & Kant that we can't believe our perceiving eyes, because they deceive us with subjective beliefs about the non-self "other" (unreal or ideal) world that our senses purport to inform us of?*1 Hence, your worldview is direct & monistic with no filters?*2 No need for philosophical doubt about percepts? And no need for notions of Ideal Forms underlying the Facts. Do we still need the gods, though, to bestow upon us The Given?*3
That probably would have been my own worldview in earlier days, before I belatedly began to think scientifically & philosophically. Have I been deceived by those anti-religious thinkers into denying the "facts" reported to me by my personal senses? Or, have I been deceived by eons of evolution, to interpret reality in terms of meanings that have proven to be favorable for the continuation of biological species over many lifetimes?*4 If I can't believe my own senses, or my own mind, or the dons of science, what hope is there for me to cope with the slings & arrows of non-self-serving Reality? :cool:
PS__Did I mis-interpret your opinion of the way "we ought to think" : I.e. naively instead of skeptically?
*1. Arguments against direct realism :
[i]This argument was "first offered in a more or less fully explicit form in Berkeley . . .
One concern with indirect realism is that if simple data flow and information processing is assumed then something in the brain must be interpreting incoming data. This something is often described as a homunculus, although the term homunculus is also used to imply an entity that creates a continual regress, and this need not be implied.[/i]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_and_indirect_realism
Note -- That invisible interloping "interpreter" -- coming between the mind and reality -- may also be the culprit that makes the Problem of Consciousness "hard". Perhaps its that devious interpreter who pulls a curtain between Self & Non-Self; denying our holistic "entanglement" in the Cosmic System of Reality.
*2. Faith Filters :
Your beliefs, both good and bad, create your entire perception of how you see and experience the world.
https://limbicperformancesystem.com/beliefs-as-filters/
*3. Save the Appearances :
[i]known for his attack on the myth of the given.
But you start from a kind of cognitive freebie: whats given to you in experience.[/i]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
Note -- With no formal training in philosophy, I've never read any of Sellars' work either. So my knowledge of his opinions is "indirect", mostly from Wikipedia. Anyway, the notion of "the given" sounds like inborn prejudices of the human brain, designed by evolution to do some of our thinking for us, in the form of prepackaged beliefs & kneejerk reactions.
*4. Evolution's benevolent deception :
The interface theory of perception is the idea that our perceptual experiences don't necessarily map onto what exists in the reality of itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman
I think you may have a 'naive' view of phenomenological direct realism. I went out of my way to spare you the confusion.
Quoting plaque flag
Note also that my 'one-level' ontology includes hallucinations and toothaches and memories of apple pie. I hope that blows your hair back. Hallucinations and direct realism ? You betcha.
I happen to agree with that assessment, except to point-out that scientistic Materialism is a metaphysical monism. Hence, Brain & Mind are not two different substances, but simply a singular machine with the function of interpreting Reality in a way that behooves a temporary material creature in a sometimes hostile world. For the purposes of a life-preserving mechanism, the subjective Self is the "crucial" fact of Reality. That's one way of resolving the "confusion of dualism".
I also agree that scientifically dis-entangling the embodied Self from the Cosmic System (observer from environment) is a mindless-soulless worldview. That's why I prefer to re-integrate Matter & Mind, Part & Whole in a monism that might "please the Spiritual crowd" --- except that it has no need for the accretion of myths about the ultimate absolute Reality that hypothetically encompasses our local relative reality. I won't go into the details of that proximate Dualism within ultimate Monism in this post. It's a complex & controversial explanation for the apparent materiality of the world in which we are myopically entangled. And has been roundly rejected by the Scientism crowd. :smile:
Quoting plaque flag
I didn't take myself to be articulating the structure of reality there... I had imagined something broader, something closer to the "whole truth", as you say. Something overarching. Was I wrong?
Quoting plaque flag
Although I don't have to, I generally add words that qualify that demonstrate that my words reflect my point of view. I had said I was talking about my view, and I provided an explanation of the problem earlier in my comment. Nonetheless, if I wanted to find a nuance that allowed me to avoid the performative contradiction, it would be doubtless easy. Such is the fickle nature of logic and reason, after all.
Quoting plaque flag
I'm glad you feel that way. The passage is nice, I too value a pragmatic understanding of language, and I share the dislike of semantic theorising.
I apologize for my dumminess! My naive notion of "direct realism" is limited to the Wiki summary. Since I have no formal training in the abstruse enigmas of academic philosophy, your clarification must have sailed right over my little pointy head. Can you read me into your more sophisticated view, without getting into technicalities that will only confuse me further. I sense that our worldviews are not far apart, but perhaps on the other side of the mountain. :smile:
PS__It may help to penetrate my opaque skull, for you to reply directly to some of the alternative views I linked to in the post.
I don't think it's that simple. Of course I see why one would say so. But are mountains mountains in the same way without us grasping them as mountains with all that that entails ? I'm serious about my anthropormorphic ontology. The independent object (the pure dog untainted by being grasped as a dog by a cultural being) is a useful fiction --so useful that it seems silly to call it a fiction. Yet the concept dog evolved (and so therefore did the lifeworld), and that's another complexity worth discussing.
***
Consider also the difference between a rare tool seen by someone who knows what it's for as opposed to someone else who only guesses it's a tool.
When I say 'structure of reality,' I mean the whole truth in essence, because there's an infinity of facts. I also emphasize what's atemporal in reality, as is typical with philosophical knowledge (we want our truths to stay true.) Does that help ?
Ah, but if logic was indeed too fickle, I don't think it would be easy, because whether you avoided the performative contradiction wouldn't be definite or stable. You are even using the proposed 'fickle nature of logic and reason' to support a claim, right ? Let me reiterate that I intend no rudeness. I'm just interested in only apparently skeptical performative contradictions that function by making grand ontological claims .
I think it's just different ways of talking. I don't know what mountains are independently of humans recognizing them as mountains, but it seems reasonable to think that they somehow do exist independently of humans grasping and recognizing them as mountains. Of course, I don't claim to know that, for all I know nothing at all would exist if there were no humans.
For me the phenomenologically (and spiritually) important thing is precisely our not knowing. If we knew everything, or even in principle could know everything, then there would be real mystery, only things yet to be known, and thus no room for faith. Faith, different faiths, open up whole areas of thinking and feeling. And as I've said, for all we know our faith-based speculations do open up windows to what lies "beyond the veil", although of course we can't know that is the case either.
I love the "divine ignorance" of humanity as much as I love its knowledge. Divine ignorance is the dialectical counterpart of knowledge and a profound source of creativity.
This seems contradictory to me. If an embodied intra-action occurs with one or the other, but not both, then this implies that there is an unambiguous way to distinguish between past and future. The embodied intra-action, as described clearly provides the means for an unambiguous differentiation, because it must occur with one or the other and not both. And to say that "there is no unambiguous way to differentiate" contradicts what is implied by the description of the embodied intra-action.
Quoting Possibility
The reason why "the past as we describe it is only relatively 'determined'", is because of our mode of description. There is always intent, purpose behind any use of language, therefore any type of description. Intent, or purpose is a view toward the future, therefore "the past as we describe it" is always conditioned by the future as we anticipate it, as the description is conditioned by intent. But the future we know is full of possibility, and so this possibility is allowed to be reflected into the past which we describe. Therefore we allow that the past is only relatively determined, in our descriptions, because this allows the past to be more consistent with the future which we know as undetermined, thereby supporting our physical representations, or models of temporal continuity.
Quoting Possibility
I really don't understand what you are saying with this statement. Things change, marks on bodies change such that a measurement of the marks might be different in a remeasurement than in the original measurement. But these changes do not happen in the past, they happen at the present, while time is passing. So I do not see how changing material-discursive practices can cause the past to change.
Quoting Possibility
There very clearly is a meaningful distinction to be made between the object and instrument, as there clearly is a distinction to be made between the act of operating, and the thing being operated on. To deny this distinction is simply to deny the reality of the distinction between active and passive. And if we deny this then all things become equally active and passive, such that we rob ourselves of any principles of causation, along with any hope of understanding temporal reality.
I'd say my view is built from several pieces that work together all at the same time.
It's a form of rationalism in that it puts us as reasoners as the undeniable center of reality. We cannot rationality doubt our own rational community, for we demand justifications for claims, and any such justification assumes that very community. So the community is given and undeniable. The details of the world and even of rationality itself can be debated endlessly.
It's a form of direct realism because in rational conversations we almost always care about the public object. As Husserl saw, I intend the coffee table or London Bridge and not some picture of it in my mind ---though we can also intend what's on our mind if we want. Note that my direct realism doesn't exclude mental entities. Your daydream exists in my world, because we can reason about it. But you have special access to it, while I have to trust your reports. Access to numbers is also different than access to chairs. But we intend (usually) the public number and the public chair.
Related to this, I think the subject and object are interpendent. There is no world except 'for' or 'through' subjects, but there are no subjects who aren't in this world. Like my Klein bottle icon. Or like a donut and a donut hole. Or the right and left hand. My argument for this is empirical, semantic, and holist. But it's in the OP, so I'll stop there.
:up:
It seems reasonable. But I could only project experience based on a combination of my own living brain and other worldly objects. I've got no experience of a world apart from this brain. It's a bit like a lamp that I've never switched off.
Quoting Janus
I will join you in celebrating the inexhaustible infinity of the world. I want very much for there to always be something around the corner, something at least a little new. I want more to learn and the same old good stuff to further clarify. I had a bout of religion in my youth, but I think I'm wired for immanence. I never looked much at the stars in the sky. Always stuck on people. Beauty and wit and kindness. When the conditions are right down here, it's everything I want. Paradise would be renewed youth, friends lovers philosophy and music, sunny days, cool 55 degree air. But I'm pretty happy even without everything on that wish list anyway. I know it can't last, but that too I try to forget or forgive.
:up:
I can relate. And even knowledge is almost a byproduct of joyful exploration, joyful creativity. To play at ontology is to play seriously a science. Nonfiction is the goal, but it's also a constraint like the form of a sonnet.
I want to add that I've often heard it said the we humans are the world coming to know itself, and in that sense, it didn't exist until it came to be known by us. But then what about the other animals, whose cognitive umwelts are (mostly) hidden from us?
If the pre-cognitive world is at worst altogether non-existent and at best totally "dark" and totally blind, what if we and the other animals are expressions, manifestations of that darkness, blindness and ignorance as much as we are the expressions, manifestations of newborn knowledge (in every sense of the word)?
Of course, this "vision" precludes a God or universal intelligence, or at least allows only a blind striving deity like Schopenhauer's "Will". The very idea of an all-knowing God seems to be an affront to the dignity and sanctity of both animals and humans.
Well that's one of the more beautiful myths/hypothesis I've heard in a while. Nice !
Quoting Janus
I like the idea of all the sentient creatures as different kinds of 'eyes.' Humans are the grand conceptual eyes, but eagles actually see better and more. What is it to hear like an owl ? To smell like a bloodhound ? I do love animals. Their umwelts are entities we are forced to see from the outside. I totally admit them as entities. Like someone else's dream : it exists in my world (the one world we all share), but not in the same manner as it does for the dreamer. Differential access in a direct realist context.
Quoting plaque flag
Sadly no, what is "the whole truth in essence"? Well, I doubt it matters, it's clearly a creative endeavour using language, an undertaking that will involve making choices by necessity, and not because there's a right answer.
Quoting plaque flag
Logic is just thought, it's present in every opinion, from the most foolish to the most clever.
We need "good" logic. Though that's not good enough either, we need good selection biases, good understanding, good interpretation, good emphasis, and good clear thinking. Having all of these and whatever else be "good" is no guarantee of a "good" result, but that's what trial and error is for, right?
Can't the performative contradiction you talking about be resolved by the word "good"? If not "good" then just the same thing by some other clever name. Isn't this word or set of words we use nuanced, complex and reliant on interpretation? I don't like my logic because it's logic, there's some "good" thrown in there, somewhere, right? Doesn't logic need to be compelling? Isn't logic so easily wrong? I know you know that, so, help me understand the performative contradiction.
I can see that, and I will try to clarify. The important point is that this differentiation occurs within phenomena - the separability is agential, not inherent. What Im describing is two setups, two phenomena: one in which the embodied present (inseparable from the future) unambiguously differentiates from the past, and one in which the embodied present (inseparable from the past) unambiguously differentiates from the future. There are no inherent boundaries or properties to speak of here, no outside observer, and no way to describe the entire system. The description always occurs from within.
So when I state that there is no unambiguous way to differentiate between the past and the future, Im viewing both phenomena from outside, within a new phenomenon, in which case both the past and the future are treated not as these previously defined objects-within-phenomena, but as entanglements inseparable from their respective embodied intra-actions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you suggesting there is a mode of description, observation or measurement that does objectively determine the past? This is my point: that regardless of intentionality, language or other human exceptionalism, there is no referring to an inherent, fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects, except under Newtonian assumptions that have since been scientifically disproven, over and over. It is more accurate that the past, the future, whatever matters is substance in its intra-active becoming - not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency... phenomena in their ongoing materialisation.
Attributing possibility to the future or the past is inseparable from the phenomenon in which we are embodied as that part of the world to which such possibility makes a difference.
I can see how what youre saying here makes sense classically, but an honest ontology needs to combat human exceptionalism and the disproven assumptions of Newtonian physics:
So theres a paradigm shift required in how we describe reality. Our physical representations and models of temporal continuity are largely inaccurate, and have been proven so. To continue shoe-horning our ontology to fit these assumptions seems to me an ignorant and dishonest way to do philosophy. Ive been working my way out of this, and have lately found Barad to be helpful in articulating the connections Ive been seeing.
You claim there is no right answer. That's the whole truth in essence, no ? The big one that gives you leverage. Think in those terms. What meta-claims give a speaker leverage ? They often take a skeptical form, truly mistaking themselves for humility. But 'no right answer' is a claim not only about you but about everyone else. A massive ontological claim that not just you but all of us are doomed to quest in vain for more than pragmatic delusions ---but why wouldn't that be a pragmatic delusion that serves your personally ?
Please note that this is not a personal attack. I'm trying to make a larger point that transcends us both.
Quoting plaque flag
It's a definitive answer to the question of the whole truth, at least.
Quoting plaque flag
I wouldn't have called them "pragmatic delusions", so long as we're aware they're pragmatic, it seems unfair to call them delusions.
Quoting plaque flag
I'd prefer to hear your answer to it actually. You've agreed with every premise in my argument, what exactly do you disagree with? Thinking requires arranging truth, and truth is created by correct references. My arguments are my creative effort, produced by my choices, my biases, and my goals. Why aren't these conditions leading you to conclude as I do?
Made me think of Donald Hoffman's reframing of the "construction view."
And then this part gets at:
But then what about the other animals, whose cognitive umwelts are (mostly) hidden from us?
Sorry, that view-splaining was as clear as a donut hole, and as straightforward as a klein-bottle. You had me at "holist", but it's the other bits that don't fit --- into my unsophisticated semantic receptacle. I guess, for now, I'll just have to muddle along with the naive Wiki definition of Direct Realism.
PS__As I mentioned before, it would help me to hear your response to the alternative views of Direct Realism linked in my previous post.
OK, it's a bit unfair. But there's something self-eating about instrumentalism. And I've wallowed in the mud of it myself --- it's even intoxicating the way it turns on itself.
If there's no truth but only useful fictions, then that itself is just a useful fiction. There's also no fact of the matter about whether or not a fiction is useful. So we'll have to decide if it's useful to believe that it's useful to believe that it's useful to believe...
Another version: truth is 'just' consensus. But how do we find out if we have a consensus ? We need a consensus to determine whether there's a consensus to determine whether there's a consensus and so on.
To be fair, such maxims can be taken as edifying moderately ironic speech acts -- and this may be how they are intended. But maybe it's good for me to point out how they seem to fail as serious ontological assertions.
To some degree, we can't help but model one another as unfree objects determined by their environment. Hence the constant temptation toward psychologism. But too much psychologism is a performative contradiction, a denial of our own 'freedom' (responsibility),dignity, and our rationality itself --- hence the trustworthiness of self-subverting psychologizing claims.
You might be tempted to tell me that I'm just being sentimental, but such accusations of sentimentality (of motivated reasoning) would just be 'irrational' opining on your part unless you have some leverage on me in terms of norms binding us both. I could trivially turn folk psychology on you and say you are just antisocial, superstitious, etc. [ Of course I see us as in a friendly conversation here, so I'm just offering examples. ]
Do we aspire to be more than shit throwing superstitious monkeys ? The dignity and the freedom of the individual are entangled with the concept (ideal on the horizon?) of a universal rationality.
I very much think philosophy is correctly obsessed with subjectivity. But I also (for now) think indirect realism is a bad approach. A sophisticated phenomenology-enriched direct realism is just must cleaner, largely in terms of 'Hegelian' insights. As 'scientists' as opposed to mystics or daydreamers, we've already made (mostly tacit) deep ontological commitments that affect what other commitments are sensible.
A very simple point found in Husserl (and surely in some AP guys) is that we intend the public object. I talk about our real number system, not my own experience of it -- except that Husserl might intend that experience, which is possible, to make this very distinction. The normative discursive self (Brandom is great on this) is profoundly social: the "I that is We, We that is I." Dramaturgical ontology ! It makes no sense for 'science' (the inquiring normative community) to put itself outside of the 'Object,' for it co-determines the 'Object' of which it must be part.
Hopefully these quotes from Zahavi's book on Husserl will help.
Some good stuff from Zahavi's book on Husserl (pdf not hard to find, paperback well worth the price):
According to Husserl, reality is not simply a brute fact detached from every context of experience and from every conceptual framework, but is a system of validity and meaning that needs subjectivity, that is, experiential and conceptual perspectives if it is to manifest and articulate itself. It is in this sense that reality depends on subjectivity, which is why Husserl could claim that it is just as nonsensical to speak of an absolute mind-independent reality as it is to speak of a circular square (Hua 3/120).
This is obviously not to deny or question the existence of the real world, but simply to reject an objectivistic interpretation of its ontological status. What does it mean to be a transcendent object? For Husserl, this question can only be answered critically, that is, undogmatically, by turning to the phenomenologically given, namely to the objects qua appearing. To speak of transcendent objects is to speak of objects that are not part of my consciousness and that cannot be reduced to my experience of them. It is to speak of objects that might always surprise us, that is, objects showing themselves differently than we expected. However, it is not to speak of objects as independent of or inaccessible to my perspective in any absolute sense.
On the contrary, Husserl believes that it only makes sense to speak of transcendent objects insofar as they are transcendent for us. The objects only have significance for us through our consciousness of them. To be real, to be an objectively existing object, is to have a specific regulated structure of appearance, it is to be given for a subject in a certain way, with a certain meaning and validity, not in the sense that the object can exist only when it actually appears, but in the sense that its existence is connected to the possibility of such an appearance. To claim that there are objects that are not actually experiencedstones on the backside of the moon, plants in the Amazon jungle, or colors in the ultraviolet spectrum, for instanceis to claim that the objects in question are embedded in a horizon of experience and could be given in principle (though there might be empirical or anthropocentric difficulties connected to this). It is precisely for this reason that every transcendent object is said to remain part of the phenomenological field of research.
Occasionally, Husserl describes his idealism as an attempt to comprehend and clarify the richness and transcendence of the world through a systematic analysis of constituting intentionality (Hua 1/34). In this sense, Husserl's transcendental idealism can be seen as an attempt to redeem rather than renounce the realism of the natural attitude. Or, to put it differently, Husserl would claim that the transcendental reduction enables us to understand and account for the realism that is intrinsic to the natural attitude. In fact, Husserl writes that his transcendental idealism contains natural realism within itself (Hua 9/254).41 [T]he transcendent world; human beings; their intercourse with one another, and with me, as human beings; their experiencing, thinking, doing, and making, with one another: these are not annulled by my phenomenological reflection, not devalued, not altered, but only understood (Hua 17/282 [275]). That the world exists, that it is given as an existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy (Hua 5/152-153). There can be no stronger realism than this, if by this word nothing more is meant than: 'I am certain of being a human being who lives in this world, etc., and I doubt it not in the least.' But the great problem is precisely to understand what is here so obvious' (Hua 6/190-191 [187]).
...
In making these claims, Husserl is not only approaching Kant's famous dictum about the compatibility of transcendental idealism and empirical realism, he is also getting close to what has occasionally been called internal realism. To a certain extent, it might actually be said that Husserl's criticism of representationalism does support a kind of (direct) realism. We are ... directed at real existing objects, and this directedness is not mediated by any intramental objects. But if one wants to call this position realism, it has to be emphasized that it is a realism based on experience. It is an experiential realism or an internal realism not unlike the one espoused by Hilary Putnam, having no affinities with a metaphysical realism. In the same breath, and perhaps even more appropriately, one might say that Husserls criticism of representationalism can be seen as a criticism of both realism and idealism. If one defines the opposition between realism and idealism with the use of the doublet internal representation/external reality, idealism claiming that the only entity existing is the intramental representation, while realism claims that the mental representation corresponds to an extramental and mind-independent object, it is obvious that Husserl must reject both.
Is my recollection of our discussion wrong? I thought you agreed with most of what I've said, quite abruptly, it seems as though it must've been the opposite.
Quoting plaque flag
Okay... but I thought you had agreed with my views on truth, I'm puzzled.
Quoting plaque flag
Huh... This is a straw man, but I won't correct it.
Quoting plaque flag
This seems like more straw-manning, at least, I can't see anything I've said in this.
Quoting plaque flag
First time hearing about this, and it's not an argument, just telling me this is not a great start.
I asked for an explanation on why you thought I was wrong and you haven't provided one. But if you want to finish things up here, that's fine as well.
In case it helps:
I suggested that 'P is true' is (roughly) the assertion of P.
Then I said that assertion was possibly irreducible.
I'm just showing some classic problems with attempts to reduce truth to something else.
Sorry if I offended you somehow. I felt quite calm and friendly and when I wrote all that.
I think you just misunderstood my explanation --or I misunderstood what you wanted explained.
I don't mention ethics for sentimental reasons. Rationality is fundamentally ethical (implicitly about autonomy and freedom), though psychologism tends to try to [s]reduce[/s] evade the normative dimension.
Also the passages quoted on language, about its protean character, don't destroy [ paradoxically ] a 'faith ' (trust) in conceptuality but inspire a respect for the complexity of the situation.
Quoting plaque flag
Does that represent a substantial disagreement?
I'm not opposed to the idea that saying "P is true" is roughly an assertion of P. If I say, it's true that an item is overpriced, I am asserting that it's overpriced. Is that claim irreducible? Sure, generally speaking.
Quoting plaque flag
The classic problem of requiring an infinite series of consensuses?
Quoting plaque flag
I have no idea what you're even criticising so searingly in your response, but it's in a response to me, with a bunch of straw-mans, and talk of shit-throwing superstitious monkeys. I am annoyed, but I won't hold a grudge about it, and I appreciate that I've interpreted you in ways that weren't intended.
Quoting plaque flag
What's the relevance of psychologism? I feel like you've made a lot of implicit assertions, but I want them to be spelled out.
Quoting plaque flag
As opposed to what? Am I arguing against the concept of something being overpriced? Or any other concept? Concepts are fundamental to language, the relevance of your comment is lost on me.
The differentiation might be "agential" in the sense that it is a feature of the agent's sensibility, and carried out through the process of sensation combined with other agential processes, memory anticipation, etc., therefore be inherent within the phenomena, or, it might be performed by the agent's application of logical processes. The application of logic to the sense appearances (phenomena) produces a differentiation which is distinct from the differentiation which inheres within the phenomena, produced by the agent's pre-conscious systems. The application of logic toward understanding any phenomenon as actually different from how it appears in sense perception is what Plato strongly argued for when he insisted that the senses deceive us.
Because of this, the proposed agential separation must be understood as complex and multi-faceted. Consequently, restrictions to differentiation, which are fundamentally within the phenomena, making some aspects of separability of the phenomena appear to be impossible, are not really impossible with the appropriate application of logic.
Quoting Possibility
These "setups" you describe would be logical separations. They are not separations which are within the phenomena itself. These are propositions for logical proceedings. The problem here is that because there are "no inherent boundaries or properties to speak of here", as you say, within the phenomena, which is how the present appears to us, then such distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, and not necessarily in correspondence with reality. This implies that we need to determine a reality which is beyond, or transcends, phenomenal reality, in order to ground such distinctions in something real.
From the perspective of phenomenal reality, i.e. empirical evidence,and what appears by way of sensation as 'reality', no clear boundary between past and future can be supported. Therefore the unambiguous differentiations you propose, between past and present, and future and present, cannot actually be made without reference to a transcendental reality. Without this, "the present" remains vague, and so do any differentiations proposed.
Quoting Possibility
According to what I stated above, you need reference to a transcendental reality in order to justify the perspective of "outside". The "new phenomenon" which you propose is not a phenomenon at all, being independent, or "outside" all sense appearances, and simply the basis for propositions or premises for logical proceedings. But unless the propositions can be justified, they are nothing other than imaginary, fictitious fantasies. We might consider the axioms of pure mathematics as an example. These axioms are not "new phenomenon", nor are they grounded in any sort of phenomenon, they are taken to be prior to phenomenon, and this is the way that mathematics gets "outside" phenomena.
Quoting Possibility
What I am suggesting is that there are strong indications that it must be possible to objectively determine 'the past'. And, the reason why we cannot, at the current position of human evolution is that we have not established the necessary logical premises. I would also propose that the only way to "objectively determine 'the past'" is to establish a very clear and unambiguous understanding of "the present". "The present" is where the future and past meet. The required principles (premises) are not as you propose, a clear distinction between past and present, and future and present, because this would leave the entirety of "the present" as inconsistent with both the past and the future, rendering "the present" as completely unintelligible from any temporal, empirically derived principles. This sense of "the present" gives us eternal immutable Platonic Forms, along with the so-called "interaction problem", and it validates the realm of imaginary, fictitious and fantastic mathematical axioms So the required principles are not as such, but I propose that they are those which establish a clear distinction between past and future.
So the problem which is now arising, is that Newtonian physics, and the physics of "objects" in general are based in a faulty understanding of "the present". The object is represented by Newton's first law as a static continuity of being, staying the same through time, eternally, unless caused by a force to change. The object is then represented by its past existence, and the cause of change to it, is generally represented as the past existence of another object which exerts a force. The consequence of this model is determinism.
The problem which I mentioned is that this is not a proper representation of the object's past existence, because it is actually produced with a view toward the future. The purpose or intent is to model the continued existence of the the object, into the future, for the sake of prediction. Generally speaking, this is the purpose of the conception of "mass" to show a continuity of the object from past into future through inertia. The issue is that this supposed continuity between past and future, is not real. It has been created just for that purpose of prediction. And this presupposes that eternal continuous existence of the object, at the present, unless caused to change. That is temporal continuity.
Quoting Possibility
Clearly I agree with this. The issue with temporal continuity is mentioned above. The problem is the assumed continuity of inertia, taken for granted by Newton's first law. Phenomena gives us the appearance of objects, and these objects are apprehended as a continuity of sameness. That continuity of sameness is expressed in Newton's first law. The problem is that this observed continuity and the ensuing proposition, as that law, is not supported by necessity. This lack of necessity is accounted for by change, and in Newton's laws, the concept of force, which is the cause of change. So the eternal continuity is not a necessity, but this is qualified with "a force is required to alter it". And so long as we can understand the cause of change, and model the forces involved, the lack of necessity doesn't not present us with a problem. We model the causes of change as other temporally continuous objects, and we get the illusion of a determinist world. But when we get to the finer aspects of the universe, free will for example, and some aspects of particle physics, the forces involved are not well understood. Then we reach the limits of capacity for this type of representation, that of temporal continuity, and much of reality remains as unintelligible. So, we must accept that it is required to dismiss this type of representation in order to go further in our understanding.
:up:
If we agree, as we seem to here, at least, then beliefs as 'pragmatic delusions' (my phrase) don't seem to work. Of course I can get behind mere fallibilism.
Quoting Judaka
I really did mean in all in a friendly tone. I paraphrased part of an argument I found in a book that changed my mind about certain relativistic positions I once found convincing.
Quoting Judaka
I think we 'have' to separate logic in its ideal / normative sense from logic as a mere description of our fallible often illogical (in a normative sense) thinking process. I'd say that truly logical thinking ought to compel us. We ought to defer to the 'force' of the better reason. But we may in fact be more impressed by sophistry. This might be what you meant by logic being 'so easily wrong.'
This is tautological. I mean I'm trying to explicate the normative sense of logic -- unfold what is folded/implicit.
This is where you pretty directly write as a pragmatist. Later I try to show the issue with that position.
Quoting plaque flag
You call it a strawman, but I don't see why it's a strawman. Pragmatism is close to instrumentalism and the idea of useful fictions. In some version of prag/inst, the claims/beliefs are more like shovels, neither truth nor false,
It's part of the family of post-philosophical 'irrationalisms' that 'reduce' rationality and logic.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Psychologism
The issue is that psychological claims are only authoritative if logic is. In our context, I tried to use logic to show that pragmatism has serious issues. We seem to agree that truth is about assertion. But this means truth transcends utility.
'P is useful to believe' is different 'P is true.' Correct ?
I really didn't mean that to come off as shrill. I was just trying to be vivid about the implications of irrationalism. The culture of personal responsibility and freedom is 'based on' or 'equivalent to' a normative conception of rationality. An instrumentalist concept has us confusing ourselves with optimization algorithms. And this confusion is tempting because it looks daring and openminded and unsentimental. And my harping on the normativity of rationality looks sentimental. But my motives are primarily logical. I want to tell the unsentimental and 'embarrassing' truth --- that ethics is first philosophy.
Quoting plaque flag
No worries.
Quoting plaque flag
English is cunning, the way logical refers to logic-based thinking but also just "clear and good" thinking I find intentionally deceptive. By "logical" thinking, you mean "good", including where logical implies good because it must be good, right? We refer to thinking as good thinking to call it good. If you'd never refer to bad thinking as "truly logical", why is it wrong to think of "truly logical thinking" as just "good thinking"? If "truly logical thinking" includes bad thinking, then give me an example.
Quoting plaque flag
I'll reiterate that my view is that truth is created when it is correct to reference something as something. Which includes things that are subjective, such as that something is "overpriced". That's just how language and thought work, I don't know of an alternative.
Quoting plaque flag
I don't find the involvement of these terms helpful, but I do find your critique of pragmatism to be a straw man. Logic and truth are necessary for language, and just thinking, that's part of why they're fickle, they have to be, otherwise, people wouldn't be able to express themselves. I would disagree with you also by saying that truth isn't "about" assertion, while there's an implicit assertion, it's about a correct reference, and the intention is in that.
The reason why P is true isn't because I "assert it", it's true because the necessary prerequisites to be true have been met, whatever they may be. This is to say, things aren't "overpriced" just whenever I feel like it, I have an understanding of what it means for something to be overpriced that must be qualified for, my understanding is influenced by a myriad of factors, cultural, social, and economic. It can be contested, and you could show my thinking to be unreasonable using a variety of tools and arguments.
Therefore, truth isn't influenced by "consensus", ironically, it's instead your precious concepts that are influenced by consensus. The very idea of rationality is a useful fiction, and the idea of logic is a useful fiction. I could take your critiques of pragmatism, and apply them to your concepts, though, it's not a critique I want to make. As surely, any pragmatist would defend the ideas of logic and rationality using the merits of their usefulness, I wonder if that doesn't describe you as well.
Of course. That's so obvious that I'm surprised you'd misunderstand me like that. The point I was making is that calling P true is different than calling P useful.
Quoting Judaka
I agree that the world is intended. There's all kinds of philosophy written about the relationship of true statements (linguistic and/or conceptual) and the world. I think Husserl's idea of a fulfilling intuition is pretty good on this matter. I can claim there are plums in the icebox from the back yard. That's an 'empty' intention. But I can go look in the icebox and have my intention fulfilled by seeing the plums. 'Categorial intuition' might be a necessary posit here, but I'm OK with that as a phenomenological direct realist.
Quoting Judaka
I think I've made a case already that that's just confused unjustifiable irrationalism. How could you begin to make a case for the unreality or impossibility of making a case ? Are we back to utility being truth ? Because I'll grant that philosophy is foolish in worldly terms.
Quoting plaque flag
Fair enough, I suppose I don't understand your point. I don't think we can just use the word "true" by itself without context. I want to know what is true, and depending on what is true and why, I'd compare that to calling something useful. Otherwise, I don't think any comparison could be made.
I think I've lost track of what we're talking about, I'm just responding to comments at this point, sorry. I don't have a clear picture of what I'm currently arguing against or what I'm arguing for.
I respect the honesty, and I'm sorry that I wasn't more careful with my words. If you feel like it, what do you make of the OP ? I think we moved from that quickly of right away. But I'd like to hear your opinion on it.
Quoting plaque flag
I'm not sure. My main criticism was that it seems like you're conflating perception and understanding. You talk about the reports of your acquaintance being biased to set up "subjectivity", but then start talking about the perceiving of apples. So, I don't really get it, but I do find it hard to understand, so maybe that's the issue.
Ah, I see. I was trying to explain how some ordinary situations inspired some philosophers to think that we don't see real objects at all but only representations of them.
Basically they went from us seeing the same actual world differently to us each seeing our own private 'internal' world and not seeing the common real world at all.
I'd say we all see actual worldly real apples when we see, even if we see them from different angles, and even if I'm colorblind and you are nearsighted. We look at and talk about the same apple that is out there in the world. We aren't trapped in a dreambubble.
The distinction youre referring to here is between two different phenomena: in the first, the agent is involved in producing their sense appearances, but in the second the agent is thinking about the production of sense appearances (the first phenomenon) - in which case the agent from the first is bounded and propertied differently to the agent from the second, and the distinction between sensation and memory in the second is probabilistic at best.
But perhaps I need to clarify a couple of things before we continue:
Bohrs phenomena is more complex than Kants phenomena (sense appearances), in that they include all relevant features of the experimental arrangement. That is, phenomena as Im referring to here would also incorporate the agent, their processes and systems as youve described here, as well as the object of their sensibility.
Agency is not a property of certain agents to varying degrees. The inherent dynamism of a reality that consists not of objects in time but of interrelating events (Rovelli) / intra-acting phenomena (Barad) IS agency.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The new phenomenon isnt independent, though. Outside is in scare quotes precisely because being outside one phenomenon is necessarily described (quantum mechanically) from inside another. Were not talking about objects or passive observing instruments here, but relational configurations as 4D events/phenomena, each with their own time relativity, entanglements and superpositioning.
I do get what youre saying, though - there needs to be logical structure to understanding phenomena from the outside. As far as I can see, thats quantum mechanics. The ongoing issues physicists have with using words to describe a reality that aligns with quantum mechanics, are the same ones were running into here. Newtonian assumptions are embedded in our language use.
Lets see if we agree on the following:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im not saying there can be no meaningful distinction, only that there is no inherent one. We make meaningful distinctions all the time, whenever we intra-act within phenomena. But I wonder how necessary is a distinction between active and passive things, if reality is found to consist of interrelating events, rather than objects in time? Carlo Rovellis The Order of Time is worth a read in terms of our hope of understanding temporal reality.
Quoting plaque flag
Ah, I see, so I guess I was right when I thought your OP was talking about something I'd consider common sense. As our discussion progressed, my criticism of the OP was quickly resolved, but I still didn't fully understand it, I have a better understanding now, but yeah, I've got nothing to add.
I think it is a defense of common sense against the rampant indirect realism found among philosophers.
But I do reject scientific realism ('mind-independent objects'), and that part probably goes against commonsense.
:up:
I relate to this. People tend to forget the crucial 'contribution' of the 'subject.' This subject is
the 'ontological community' or 'the Conversation,' which is not outside of the reality it articulates but arguably its necessary center.
Quoting plaque flag
What do you reject about scientific realism?
It's a vague term, so let me specify what I reject.
Metaphysically, realism is committed to the mind-independent existence of the world investigated by the sciences.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/
Note that I am still a phenomenological direct realist. The world is real, but I anthropomorphically insist that we pretty much tautologically can only talk meaningfully about the world as it is entangled with the human nervous system.
Has anyone ever seen the world without eyes and a brain ? The world is given, so far as we know, perspectively, through this or that pair of eyes. Consciousness is just the being of the world from a perspective.
Note that this nervous system is part of the world, so it's a bit like the world looking at itself, but that looking can't be removed except within a potentially useful fiction.
What are the significant characteristics involved with being reliant on the human nervous system?
To tell you what you already know, we have a lot of corroborating factors involved, for example, I see a table in front of me, I then reach out and I can touch it in the place I saw it, and then I put my water bottle on top of it. All of that seemingly validates my vision. Hence our ability to know about hallucinations and illusions, where corroborating factors are scarce or contradictory.
Can you provide an example of an issue that convinced you to reject scientific realism? Or do you just take it to be semantically inaccurate?
Mostly the second. Let me explain why I find it problematic. If we [try to] imagine what the world is like without us looking at it, we are just using our living brain to remember what the world looks through our human eyes while pretending we aren't there ---- but we are still there, doing the imagining.
What makes scientific realism so tempting is that we people come and go in this world that endures as a stage for this coming and going. And yet this universal stage is still, as far as we know from experience, given only perspectively ---to and through the actors on this same stage. Entangled.
The semantic issue is that we can't give any meaning to the world-in-itself that isn't stolen from the world-for-us.
I'm a direct realist. The world is real and we look at it and not at some representation of it. Consciousness is just the being of the world for you or me. But we are entangled with it. It's not a dream, but it's also not a thing that's part from us ---or at least I can't make sense of such a claim.
Your hallucination is real and it exists in our shared world. You just have different access to that particular entity. It's still inferentially linked to all other entities, or it'd be meaningless. No dualism needed. Different kinds of entities in the world. Toothaches are as real as pennies. You can't see my lamp. I can't see your toothache. We can both see [math] \sqrt{2} [/math] according to our preparedness to look at it (with different intensities of understanding, because maybe one of us knows more math).
Quoting plaque flag
I'll give that there's some faith involved in thinking of a mind-independent world, I don't experience it, but I believe it's there. On the other hand, I live as a consciousness, and that's my reality, the world began when I was born, and will end when I die. I'd need a reason to care, and some pros and cons before I could begin thinking about it. Not that I expect you to provide me with that, by the way.
:up:
I'd just say that the world you live in is also my world --- but from a different perspective. The world that we can reason about together must be the world we share.
Quoting Judaka
This is connected to my thread about the foolishness of philosophy. Some issues have no obvious practical relevance, and yet some of us sometimes really like trying to get clear on such issues. Maybe (I don't know) some of this could help with interpretations of theories in physics, but that's not why I do it. It's the challenge of telling the most coherent story.
I read this far too late at night, and am now re-reading it after some sleep. The clearest distinction between past and future is an understanding of the present not as an object, but as a phenomenon, or quantum mechanical system. Forget objects - youre not going to get anywhere with those. So, its not just about coming up with principles, but recognising that the structure of reality as we describe it has to change.
The conception of mass is more clearly understood as a measurement process - that is, a phenomenon in Bohrs sense of the entirety of an experimental arrangement. Youre still looking for this linear continuity that you can call time, but the very concept of time as we commonly understand it is also a measurement process in itself.
We need to stop assuming that nouns in our use of language are observer-independent objects, and start seeing them as material-discursive practices instead. All of them. As quantum mechanical systems whose values, boundaries and properties are relative to an embodied (temporal) intra-action. This doesnt render the present unintelligible, and doesnt imply the existence of eternal immutable Platonic Forms. Quite the opposite. It enables us to focus on the precision of the intra-action, rather than how we describe it, by recognising ourselves as necessarily involved.
I think the difference between your position and mine (or Barads), though, is that we dont believe there is an inherent distinction of the subject - certainly not as necessarily central to the reality it articulates. Theres a Copernican Turn of sorts required here, to decentralise language, if we are to more accurately understand reality and our role in it.
Perhaps you are making some anti-logocentric point about 'knowing' reality nondiscursively. I readily grant that conceptuality is merely one 'dimension' or 'aspect' of a reality is also colorful and loud and feelingful and smells like beer or cotton candy. If that's the case, it's a basically Romantic point I can relate to.
But our own central contribution to the world's conceptual aspect looks hard to deny, especially given the role of thinkers in determining/articulating precisely that --- even to say such is not the case. What else could we be doing here ? And the more radical our intentions, the more radically the world's 'meaningstructure' is potentially shaken by us.
In my interpretation of Kant, the agent is incorporated into the phenomena though the means of the pure a priori intuitions of space and time. These are necessary conditions for the existence of phenomena. The exact status of any 'object' might be somewhat ambiguous, because there is a distinction between the object as phenomenal, and the thing in itself.
Quoting Possibility
"Interrelating events" is the terminology of process philosophy. What Whitehead demonstrated with his process philosophy is that this perspective runs into a very real problem with the issue of how events are related to one another. To begin with, the division of reality into distinct events is somewhat problematic, because the divisions are to a degree arbitrary. But if there is real distinctions, then "an event" takes the place of an object, as a distinct entity, but such assumed "occasions" require relational principles for their existential reality and presentation as phenomena. So Whitehead uses the concepts of prehension, and concrescence to explain relations between events.
The relevant point here is that if reality is broken down into events, then the need for relations between events, to produce a model of continuity as we experience in phenomena, causes the positing of subjective principles (agential activities of creation) to account for the reality of these relations. The result is a panpsychism, because these subjective principles are a requirement for reality as we experience it.
The issue I believe, is that the "event" incorporates space and time into its conception as necessary preconditions for its reality. So, while Kant places space and time as intuitions proper to the human agent, here space and time are already presumed as inherent within the fabric of the universe, as necessary conditions for the fundament feature, the event. Now space and time are external to the human agent, but external agential concepts are now required to explain the reality of phenomenal appearances. This is why Whitehead ultimately turned to God, having no other way to account for the existence of the panpsychic elements which he found necessary to posit, in order to hold his reality together, in the unified form which we experience..
Quoting Possibility
As I said, I think that the passive/active distinction is necessary in order to understand causation, and this is necessary in order to understand temporal reality. Without this, two distinct events cannot be ordered in time, because it is necessary to understand how one acts one the other, to produce a causal understanding, and therefore a temporal order. Without this distinction, events would be interacting, but there would be no way to order them temporally without determining what part of which event is causing what part of the other event. There is just interaction, and this provides no information for temporal order therefore a deficient understanding of reality..
Quoting Possibility
Can you explain to me in clear and unambiguous terms, just what "intra-action" means?
Kant does not include the human, experiencing agent, within the phenomenon - which is also a necessary condition for the existence of phenomena. This is an important distinction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im beginning to wonder if your avoidance of quantum mechanical aspects of this discussion is deliberate ?
If you look at Whiteheads philosophy in terms of relational quantum mechanics, its not so problematic. First of all, there is no division of reality into distinct events - this is a misunderstanding of the structure of spacetime. If youve ever watched the interaction of ocean waves, you might have some understanding as to why this notion of distinct events is the wrong way to even begin to explain the relational structure of four-dimensional reality.
As I said before, its a paradigm shift, not a matter of simply replacing objects with events. The result is not panpsychism - its post-humanist performativity. Matter is agentive - not in the sense of feeling, but rather mattering as differentiating: and which differences come to matter, matter in the iterative production of different differences. Events are intra-actions of intra-actions of intra-actions, and the differences produced are what matters.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Intra as opposed to inter action implies that the action happens within, rather than between.
But its Barad neologism, so Ill let them explain it:
Distinct does not mean discrete.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is why I recommended Rovelli. Its not a deficient understanding of reality at all - its just not a global, externally imposed order. Its a local, internal one. And there is no aspect of reality that is entirely passive.
Phenomena are a product of the human experiencing agent. Therefore the human agent is implied necessarily by "phenomenon", and "human agent" is included within the concept of "phenomenon".
Quoting Possibility
Of course it's deliberate. I am a philosopher, not a physicist. I am here to discuss philosophy not physics.
Quoting Possibility
Your analogy of waves does not work. Wave action in water is a feature of particles, water molecules. So wave activity assumes objects, entities, as fundamental, the particles which produce the wave motion. Since you are talking about events as fundamental, rather than objects such as water molecules or other particles, then you need some principles whereby you can talk about "events", in the plural, rather than all of reality as one event. Sure, it's fine to say that distinct events are not real, but then you are being hypocritical when you talk about waves and other distinct distinct events.
Quoting Possibility
As I explained in my last post, this way of looking at things blurs the reality of temporal priority, leaving causation, and therefore a large part of reality as unintelligible. Consider the following "the notion of intra-action recognises that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action".
What is being criticized by Barad here, is the notion of distinct entities interacting. This would imply that the entities preexist the activities which are described as interactions. So Barad replaces interaction with intra-action, and says that "intra-action" is responsible for, or the cause of existence of the entities. But where does that leave "intra-action"? It cannot be an activity which involves the mentioned entities, because it is prior to them, as the cause of their existence. So what kind of activity is this? It cannot be within the objects, because it's prior to the objects' very existence. Therefore it must be activity of some other sort, which is the cause of the existence of the entities.
Quoting Possibility
I agree that the idea of "global, externally imposed order" is not sufficient. However, I believe that the "local internal one" as described, is also deficient. I agree with many of the principles here, but there is a difficulty with language, and also a difficulty with the concept of space-time.
The existing concept of space does not allow that there is anything internal to a non-dimensional point. and this is what denies the reality of the concept of a local, internally imposed order. By our current spatial-temporal conceptions, all activity must be within space-time. This is because time is conceived of as logically posterior to space, it is the fourth dimension, and time is required for activity. So all activity is represented as spatial activity because time, which is essential to activity, follows from spatial existence.
What is required in order to understand any proposed "internal order", is to allow that time is prior to space, as the zeroth dimension, because this allows for temporal activity which is non-spatial, as prior to spatial activity. Then we can conceive of activity within the non-dimensional point.
This is evidence that Rovelli's perspective is backward, and leaves a vast part of reality as unintelligible. Instead of putting time as prior to space, in which case there could be activity prior to spatial activity, and this activity could be understood as the cause of spatial activity, Rovelli uses the traditional conception of space-time, which puts space as prior to time. This leaves the origin of spatial existence as fundamentally unintelligible. This paragraph is completely contradictory, because "the absence of time" (which is the origin, the beginning) is described as disorderly "quantum events" happening without a timeline . But any event requires time, that's what "an event" is, temporal extension. So this whole paragraph is self-contradicting, and demonstrates the problem with the common metaphysical proposition, that time emerges.
Instead, we need to position time as prior to space, as the zeroth dimension, so that there is true activity within the non-dimensional, (what is known traditionally as the immaterial), then the emergence of space and its attributes, material objects, can become intelligible.
Again, this is more evidence that the perspective is mistaken. Without the time variable we cannot understand the cause of the world. And without this our understanding of the world is incomplete.
Philosophy without any understanding of the physical world can only be an exercise in making meaning about symbols and things that have no basis in the world (Barad). I believe that your current understanding of the logical structure of reality is flawed. Im trying to help clear out the Newtonian assumptions that continue to distort this philosophical discussion. And I need to present quantum mechanics based evidence in order to do that, otherwise were going to continue to talk past each other. Im not a physicist either - I cant do the math, but I can grasp the importance of an accurate logical structure to any discussion of philosophy.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What do you mean by pre-exist? Do you mean outside of time? What is being criticised is the notion of distinct entities pre-existing their material-discursive involvement in reality. Intra-actions are causal but non-deterministic - the entities only ever exist as such within intra-actions. The assumption that potential and actual must exist as temporally ordered notions is false.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that there is a difficulty with language. Naming time as the fourth dimension is not a sequential ordering. My own understanding of physics suggests that spacetime emerged through differentiation or diffraction, rather than as a geometric rendering. That is, in a 4-3-2-1 progression. But if you refuse to discuss physics, then Im at a loss as to how to present evidence of this.
What I mean by pre-exist is to exist before, prior in time. So, for instance, two objects can exist without interacting if there is the required spatial-temporal separation between them. These objects would pre-exist any interaction which later developed. Common conceptions of "interaction" assume that objects pre-exist their interactions, in this way. That's expressed by Newton's laws. The first law makes a claim about the existence of an object which is not interacting, then the other laws bring in interaction. So non-interacting is assumed as the pre-existing condition.
Barad suggests that objects "emerge" from intra-action, therefore intra-action is the cause of existence of an object. This claim requires a description of intra-action, which could replace Newton's first law. The problem which I explained in the last post, is that you provide no description of intra-action, just an incoherent mention of quantum events in the "absence of time", by Rovelli.
To restate the problem in a different way, "intra-action" as described by Barad, suggests activity which is prior in time to the objects which are engaged in the activity. This is why it is not "interactivity", it is proposed as some sort of activity from which the objects which are described by Newton's laws, come into existence (emerge). The exact problem is that the passage of time is understood and measured relative to the physical objects which are supposed to come into existence through intra-activity, and whose interactions are understood by Newton's laws. Therefore this proposed activity is incoherent because there is no time in which it takes place. The Newtonian movements of physical objects, in conjubction with the boundary, or limit of electromagnetism are the principles by which time is understood and measured, so prior to physical objects there is not time.
Now, if intra-action is proposed as an activity which is prior to, as cause of , the existence of physical objects, then we have np principles to understand this causal force, this supposed type of activity, because it is a type of activity which is outside of time, by our current conceptions of time, hence Rovelli's description of "the absence of time" as "a boundless and disorderly network of quantum events". What Rovelli means, is exactly as I say above, prior to the existence of physical objects there is an absence of time (by the precepts of our current conception of time) and this renders all activity, or events as unintelligible, "boundless and disorderly".
Clearly, what this indicates is that our current conception of time is inadequate for understanding this realm of activity which has been dubbed as "intra-action". It leaves this activity as appearing to be occurring in the absence of time, activity from which time emerges along with physical objects, therefore the activity appears as boundless and disorderly, completely unintelligible to us as "activity", activity being something we understand as occurring within time.
Quoting Possibility
It is in a way, a sequential ordering, because it makes time an attribute of space. So conceptually, time follows from space as space is logically prior to time. That is why time is understood as an attribute of space, and space cannot be understood as an attribute of time, by the conventional conception of space-time.
Quoting Possibility
I have no idea what you mean by "a 4-3-2-1 progression" but if you explain, I will pay attention.
Youre still trying to describe objects from some external perspective, a passive observer of two objects not interacting. But there is no outside. Newtons first law makes a claim about the existence of an object that is assumed to not be interacting, but there are, in fact, measurement interactions going on. This pertains to the OPs notion of entangled embodied subjectivity. With this first law, one must measure or at least observe the object at multiple points in spacetime. And Plancks constant places a lower bound on how small the disturbance caused by these measurement interactions can be. Therefore, if were honest, each measurement of the object is necessarily an intra-action involving an observer or measurement apparatus in a localised yet never isolated spacetime.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The passage of time is understood and measured relative not to supposedly measurement-independent objects, but as the change or difference between the measurement/observation of objects - that is, how one intra-action relates to another. This is not Newtons object-in-time assumed as a pre-existing individual entity with inherent boundaries and properties. Barads object-in-its-becoming is never separate from the activity through which it emerges. An intra-action is not prior to, but rather constitutive of, the existence of its physical objects. As I explained before, you are either involved in the intra-action (measuring the passage of time as change in the object), or you are viewing the quantum mechanical system, the spacetime intra-action, from within another intra-action in spacetime (understanding time as a variable value, relative to the internal configuration of the system).
Even Newton himself said: Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without relation to anything external. What he was referring to here is the idea of time as an underlying variable in the order of the world. He assumed it was purely logical, but Einstein has demonstrated that its qualitative and dynamic as well: time is a variable aspect of spacetime.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it is inadequate. We need to recognise that activity occurs within spacetime - how one activity relates to another. And quantum mechanics shows us that when we look for the fundamental objects of the world, we find only localised interrelational activity - with the looking necessarily included in that. Not prior to, but constitutive of, the physical existence, (ie. particular boundaries and properties), of objects.
At the fundamental level, the world is a collection of events not ordered in time. These events manifest relations between physical variables that are, a priori, on the same level. Each part of the world interacts with a small part of all the variables, the value of which determines the state of the world with regard to that particular subsystem.
Rovelli also acknowledges the inadequacy of our grammar - similar to the inadequacy of up and down once it became undeniable that the earth was round. We are struggling to adapt our language and our intuition to a new discovery: the fact that past and future do not have a universal meaning. Instead, they have a meaning which changes between here and there. Thats all there is to it. (Rovelli)
Our experience of time still rings true - it just exists as such within a particular subsystem of local intra-activity or spacetime, rather than being assumed as a universal linear conception.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Time is not an attribute of space - both time and space are attributes of spacetime. When youre speaking of time here, youre referring to a linear conception of time. Yet time is localised not just in space, but in spacetime. There is no evidence that space is prior to time, and plenty of evidence that events in nature occur without first being attributed to boundaried and propertied objects.
As a logical sequence these numbered dimensions correspond to how WE construct our representations of space and time - not how spacetime exists, or even how we come to distinguish dimensions as such. We assume theyre constructs: that reality began in a single point of matter, and logically builds the dimensionality of space around it in one, two and then three dimensions, like drawing a cube. And then time begins ?
Consider, alternatively, that dimensionality is purely relational - that reality as a singular absolute diffracts into relational possibility with a logical-qualitative-dynamic relational symmetry of variable values, through which the universe emerges as spacetime intra-action, differentiating into localised variable events in spacetime, then volume/space, then size/distance and then matter. This is what I mean by a 4-3-2-1 progression: differentiating four-dimensional reality - the variable intra-activity within which space, volume and objects are differentiated. This, at least, is consistent with what is undeniable in quantum mechanics, challenging the assumption that space is logically prior to time rather than simply represented or rendered that way.
But it is my logical-qualitative-dynamic relational symmetry of variable values that is a somewhat speculative ontological structure. This is just how it makes sense to me, because while I intuitively agree with quantum field theory and relational quantum mechanics, the maths of it is almost entirely lost on me. For me, its a fifth dimension of variable value structures, referring to probabilistic (potential) internal configurations of local spacetime systems. Quantum mechanics presents these configurations as mathematical equations (dynamic-logical structures), the mind presents them to the bodys physical systems (and vice versa) as affect (dynamic-qualitative structures). In the same way that DNA renders a 4D plan as an incomplete 3D structure.
I think that Newton's claim is supposed to state something independent of measurement. It is what is supposed to be given, without any measurement. To verify, or to apply this law would require measurements, but the law is supposed to represent what is the case regardless of whether the object is measured. That's why It's taken as a given.
Quoting Possibility
You still have not provided me with a good explanation as to what "intra-action" means, so why can't we just call the measurement process Interaction?
Quoting Possibility
I don't think that this is the case. The independent existence of the objects, which provide the basis for the measurement of time is taken for granted, as a given, like I explained is the case with Newton's first law. So it does not matter if it's the earth and sun, quartz crystal, or cesium atoms which provide the basis for measurement, they are all objects whose spatial presence is taken for granted.
And again, I do not see the need for "intra-action" here. Why not just describe the measurement of time as an interaction between the human beings doing the measurement, and the object (sun, quartz crystal, cesium atom) which is being used to provide the temporal stability.
Quoting Possibility
But these objects which we use for the measurement of time are Newtonian objects. I don't think that this can be denied. It is the stability of mass, in its temporal extension (inertia), which gives us the capacity to measure time. I don't think we can pretend that it is anything other than this.
Quoting Possibility
This appears self-contradicting to me. If the object emerges from the activity then the activity is necessarily prior to the object. That's what "emerges" means.
Quoting Possibility
I disagree. As I explained, we need to understand activity as prior to space. And since activity requires time, time must be prior to space as well. And, since the concept of "spacetime" does not allow for this conception, it must be dismissed as inadequate.
Quoting Possibility
As I explained, this is incoherent. "An event" is itself necessarily ordered in time, that's what "an event" is. It's incoherent to speak of events which are not ordered in time.
Quoting Possibility
This, that time is an attribute of "spacetime" is what I am saying is the problem. Time must be prior to space, in order to understand the reality of "events" (which are necessarily temporally ordered) which are not "propertied to objects" (consequentially not propertied to space which is the property of objects). So in other words, we need to conceive of time as prior to objects and space, in order to allow for the reality of events which occur without any objects or space, and the current conception of spacetime does not provide for this. It doesn't provide for this because the passing of time is understood, and measurable, only in relation to the movement of objects in space.
Quoting Possibility
I really think that you need to consider that "spacetime" is a faulty concept in the way that it limits time to the constraints of objects moving in space. Once you recognize that spacetime is a faulty concept, you'll see that there is no such thing as "how spacetime exists", because there is no such thing as "spacetime". This word just represents a misunderstanding.
Define good. It may seem pedantic to insist on intra-action, but for me its about being honest, acknowledging the involvement and variability of all aspects of the measurement setup in the process. The measurement process is an internal configuration, not an activity occurring between individual, pre-existing entities - despite what Newton assumes to be the case.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You cannot tell time from the spatial presence of a quartz crystal. Each of these three objects provides a different set of values as its relative temporal stability, and where the quartz crystal and caesium electron differ from the sun is that there is no human being doing the measurement at the level of the object. Once the timepiece is set up, we ignore the fact that we have created elaborate conditions for a particular, stable and recurring temporal measurement. These properties are not inherent in the object, but in the entire measurement setup. Alter one part of this apparatus, and the measurement changes. The warmth of the human wrist is responsible for up to half a second clock drift per day on a quartz timepiece, by altering the oscillation frequency of the crystal.
We call these measurements of time by ignoring the variability inherent within the measurement process, including the variability of the very object being used to provide temporal stability.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But it does allow for it. Spacetime fuses the three dimensions of space and one of time, not into a 3+1 structure, but into a four-dimensional continuum. Its no longer time and space, but simply four mathematical dimensions, without priority. So there is no set or assumed configuration of dimensional structure in spacetime, and thats the point. How this spacetime is configured determines which value is measured first in any interaction (eg. position or momentum), which also determines the state of the object measured. The momentum of a caesium electron is more important to a measurement of time than its spatial position - and we cannot measure both simultaneously. So we prioritise momentum, and this object materialises as an event, with no inertia to speak of. And theres certainly no inertia in the caesium atom itself, emitted in a vapour or in freefall (fountain).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Except that mass is not really as stable or inert as it appears. Look closer, and youll find activity. The capacity to measure time with a caesium electron is dependent on measuring momentum regardless of its position (as above). Yet the macroscopic state of an atomic clock presents as apparent inertia, with one particular variable having the characteristics of time.
A macroscopic state (which ignores the details) chooses a particular variable that has some characteristics of time. (Rovelli)
So we can only say that it is apparent inertia (ie. our ignorance) which gives us the capacity to measure time in a macroscopic state.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
To emerge means to become apparent or visible - there is no temporal order or actual separation implied. It is entirely possible for the emergence, the object, and the activity to BE or even become simultaneously.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not incoherent at all. Think partial ordering, filiation. We speak about generations as events in time, but there is no point in time where one generation ends and another begins for everyone - only between two family members. An event, by definition, is something that occurs in time - has temporality - but that doesnt mean all events fit into some universal linear order. It seems nice and logical, but doesnt correspond to reality.
The explanation of intra-action provided for me, by you from Barad, was incoherent by self-contradiction, as I explained. If agents emerge from their "intra-action" then the intra-action must be prior to, and cause the existence of the agents. This leaves the problem of what is acting in the intra-action. Barad called it "their" intra-action, but the activity cannot be "theirs" because it is prior to their existence.
What you describe here is nothing but interaction between the people measuring and the thing being measured, and is not representative of what Barad was referring to in the quote you produced for me. So I am beginning to think that your understanding of "intra-action" is not the same as Barad's
Quoting Possibility
I don't see you point. Even with the atomic clock, someone still has to read the clock, just like someone has to read the sun, in order that the passage of time is actually measured. There is no such difference as you claim. The parts of the clock must be precisely arranged in order that it can properly "keep time", but so must the sun and the earth be "precisely arranged" in order to keep time. But the "keeping of time" is not really done by the precisely arranged parts, it is done by the person who observes them.
Quoting Possibility
All you are saying is that measurements of time are inevitably imprecise. You and I agree here, and it appears that the reason for this imprecision is that the stability of the object, is not as perfect or ideal as we assume it to be. We ought to take this as an indication that Newton's first law, which takes the stability of the object for granted is fundamentally flawed. Therefore, "the variability inherent within the measurement process" is a feature of the principles , the theory, being applied in the measurement process. There is a model of the world, a representation, or map, the Newtonian representation which assumes as a fundamental principle the stability of an object, but this model is fundamentally flawed. However, our measurements of time are based in the Newtonian representation.
Quoting Possibility
Any sort of "dimensional continuum" is problematic from the outset. From what it means to be continuous, a continuum cannot have distinct dimensions. So the dimensions of space are arbitrary to begin with. And that this dimensional model cannot adequately represent space is indicated by the irrational nature of pi and of the square root of two. It appears like it might require an infinite number of spatial dimensions to properly represent space as dimensional, but this would be equally problematic. Making time another dimension just magnifies the failures of the dimensional model.
Quoting Possibility
This is exactly why the dimensional representation fails. It is completely arbitrary, therefore it is based on nothing real. It is not based in, or does not start in any real aspects of space or time. And of course, space and time must have very real properties as quantum physics demonstrates. So this type of dimensional representation is not based in anything real, and does not capture the real nature of space and time.
Quoting Possibility
Momentum is a Newtonian principle, tied up with mass and inertia. This is why our measurements of time are based in Newtonian physics, which assumes the continuous existence of the massive object, as per the first law.
Quoting Possibility
This cannot be true. "To become" implies a coming into being, which is a temporal order of not being then being. If the object emerges from the activity, as described by Barad, then there is activity temporally prior to the being of the object, as it becomes during the activity.
Quoting Possibility
A generality is not an event, which is a particular. When you refer to "generations" here, you are not referring to events, but to a generalized notion of "a generation". When we speak of the relations between family members we speak of events.
Quoting Possibility
No, your use of "generations" as if "generation X" is an event, is what does not correspond with reality. This is very similar to the issue above with four dimensional spacetime. It's a useful principle, but its usefulness is derived from the fact that it may be arbitrarily applied, and this is what means that it does not correspond with reality.
First of all, you are reading more into what I describe than what is here. Read it again. There is nothing in what Ive written that deviates from Barads explanation - except that my word choice has maybe opened the door for you to insert your own assumptions. Unless you somehow missed my use of not in what I described ?
Where do you get this assumption that an emergence must exist prior to what emerges? Why does there need to be a what is acting? And dont say because Newton said so - lets not try to flog that dead horse again. Quantum mechanics has proven over and over again that objects emerge through (not from) activity, with boundaries and properties that are materially relative to that activity. I would say that what exists prior to intra-action is a variability of values in potentiality - but thats really only one possible way to describe it.
Barad calls it their intra-action because everything that they become within that intra-action is involved in the activity, and nothing else. There is no creator, no first cause, no external forces. Materialisation is an intra-action - an internal configuration - of variable values, from potentiality to actuality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The difference is between internal and external arrangement. Someone is observing the changing position of the sun relative to themselves. But in the case of the clock, someone is not observing the position of the quartz crystal relative to themselves. We cannot observe the change that keeps time. We can only read changes in the apparatuses: the original frequency is amplified to generate an electric pulse which is digitally counted. To say that we are the only ones keeping time is hubris: denying agency to this internal material arrangement of the timepiece.
When we keep time with the quartz clock we are part of a cascade of internal configurations - within phenomena - that necessarily involve all of the precisely arranged parts, in a clock body, keeping time for us through various prostheses. And we are materially entangled with these internal arrangements - the digital count reading the electric pulse reading the amplifier reading the vibrating crystal - whenever we read the time as marks on the clock face. And each of these measurement events is not ordered in time but roughly simultaneous and NOT identical.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, we agree here - EXCEPT that it is not necessarily our measurements of time, but the material-discursive practice by which we describe this measurement, that is based in the flawed Newtonian representation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im not trying to represent space here. Spacetime is a mathematical structure of non-commutative relations. Any continuum is just a continuous series of variability, the logical structure of which is that the extremes are vastly different from each other. A one-dimensional or linear continuum is a single variation that continues in a series. This, for me, can only be time, as no other variable can logically exist - without relation to another variable - as anything other than variability itself, which is time for us.
A two-dimensional continuum is a variable plane - but not necessarily a geometrical one. Its just describing a relation between two variables. And now either of those variables could exist as time, or distance, or direction, or energy, etc. And the universe begins to take shape, as it were.
Its not that dimensions are arbitrary, but that values seem to be. Dimensions are a method of describing the non-commutative quality of relations between certain values in reality.
FWIW, I have found that the logical structure of reality as a multi-dimensional continuum (a qualitative relational structure between variabilities) maxes out at just six dimensions. At that point, it is pure relation. Which is to say that if absolutely everything matters, then nothing does.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In quantum physics, real properties are measurable, as variable values. Dimensionality describes the non-commutative quality of their relational structure - that some measurement values are not interchangeable, like position and momentum. It is the only model that does capture the nature of reality in this sense. It is the values that are arbitrary - measuring/observing a different variable produces a different configuration - like measuring the frequency of electron spin instead of quartz crystal oscillations. Youre still measuring the same dimensional quality: time.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Momentum is tied to mass and velocity, not inertia. This is post-Einstein physics - basic stuff, really. Forget Newton - his assumptions regarding inertia are fundamentally wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Read what you wrote. You are arguing that an activity of not being must precede the being of an object. Time prior to space.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Are you saying that no event can occur within another event? That a music festival, in which a number of acts perform, is not an event because it contains events within it? And a single instrument being played during one of those acts is or is not an event? And a chord being struck? I want to be clear on what youre arguing here
Look what your quote from Barad said though:
Notice that the distinct agencies are said to emerge through "their" intra-action. This is what is incoherent. "Emerge" means to come into being. So if the agencies emerge trough this activity, the activity must precede the agencies in time. But "their" intra-action implies that the intra-action is a property of the agencies which emerge. Therefore the sentence quoted implies that the activities which are the properties of the agencies precedes the existence of the agencies. How is this logically possible, that a thing's actions precede the existence of the thing?
You say "The measurement process is an internal configuration, not an activity occurring between individual, pre-existing entities", but I have no idea what this means. If it's not "internal" to pre-existing entities, then what's it internal to? It appears to me, that instead of facing Barad's incoherency you try to obscure the meaning by saying that the intra-action is "internal" without indicating a type of thing which it is internal to.
Quoting Possibility
"Emerge" means to become, to come into being. And becoming implies a cause, therefore something from which the emerging thing emerges from, whether or not you use the term "from" or "through". You can insist that something can come into being without a cause if you like, but that's just the unacceptable notion of something coming from nothing.
Quoting Possibility
This is your obscure notion again, of "internal configurations". Now you say that the configuration is internal to phenomena. "Phenomena" is just a generalization, a universal, a conception. So now, if we are talking about an internal arrangement of parts, we are talking about a logical arrangement, a conceptual structure, conceptual parts arranged by a logical priority. We are not talking about an arrangement of physical parts. "Phenomena" refers to what appears to the senses, and we sense the external of things, not the internally arranged parts. We use logic to model internal arrangements, but then this is not what is actually internal to the phenomena, if "phenomena" is supposed to represent real physical events or objects, but a logically produced model of the "internal" of such.
Quoting Possibility
There is no universe here beginning to take shape, because you have only presented ideals, a two dimensional plane. There is no substance here, nor is there any activity here because there is nothing to be active, no agency. All you have is two ideal dimensions, and nothing taking any shape whatsoever, just the basis for a conceptual model.
Quoting Possibility
Exactly. That's what I am arguing for, time must be understood as prior to space if our intention is to understand the nature of reality.
Quoting Possibility
What I am saying is that "a music festival" refers to something general, a universal, a concept or ideal, and therefore not any particular real event. Likewise for "a generation". To refer to an event, we need to specify a particular music event, or a particular family relation.
This has nothing to do with "events within", it's a matter of the difference between talking about a general idea (a concept or universal), and a particular event. You agreed that any particular event must have a temporal order. Then you went on to say that it is not necessary that all events have a temporal order.
To judge the truth or falsity of this, we must determine what "all events" refers to. Your example, "a generation", indicates that it refers to a generalization, a universal, and not anything real in the physical universe, just an ideal. But I do not think that this is what you had in mind. I think you want "all events" to refer to a compilation of all real physical events, rather than to a concept or ideal. If so, then aren't you just treating all real physical events as a single event, and therefore this particular event must follow the rule that all events have a temporal order?
And if you are treating the compilation of all real physical events as something other than a single particular event, then you need to explain what type of a thing this is, which you are referring to, and how it is possible that all events could exist together as something other than an event. Normally, when we talk about a bunch of events existing together as a single unit, we are just speaking about a bigger event, as your example of music festivals shows. And in the same way that the small event (a chord being struck), has a temporal order, the big event (the specified music event itself) must also have a temporal order, as all events have a temporal order.
The agencies are differentiating, not distinct. Distinct implies separation, which Barad is very careful NOT to imply. There is a lot of Newtonian assumption built into our use of language, and youre displaying it here. Agency is not a thing, but activity. Agencies emerge through differentiating, which is intra-action. Just as the particular striking of a chord emerges though a particular song performance, emerging through a particular set emerging through a particular music festival. These are not things but events. So were not talking about properties of things, but involvement in events. You can assume that a song existed prior to the festival, but we both agree that were talking about particular events, not generalities. Were talking about a particular performance - one that did not exist, with these boundaries and properties, until it was actually happening.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im not trying to obscure anything. I cant force a paradigm shift on you, but we are not talking about things at all. Language convention leads you to assume that agency, intra-action or event in a position of noun means they are individual, pre-existing things or entities. But were talking about events within events within events. As Barad says, it matters whether you are talking about an event from inside (in which you are necessarily involved), or from outside (where the event is internally configured, and treated quantum mechanically).
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What I said was that each event has a temporal structure, which can appear linear from within it. When you perceive a particular event from outside it, however, it has to include the other three dimensions, and so is structurally similar to spacetime, which it seems you assume to be something external to or other than the physical universe. I am saying there is no external perspective of reality - the dimensional perspective here is of an internal configuration to the event, and this is where quantum mechanics comes in. Because if we are observing the internal structure of an event, then we are necessarily involved, and if we are outside, then its internal configuration is unobservable, and must be treated quantum mechanically (ie. like spacetime).
A paradigm shift is required here that inverts our understanding of reality from the traditional one in which we assume that objects precede activity. Without this inversion, we will always assume duality. Because we understand that thinking precedes thought.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree with your last statement here, and I think this is important. QM demonstrates that time is prior to space. So why do you keep bringing Newton into the discussion and insisting on substance by way of things? Are you suggesting that objects exist prior to space? That time is not activity? Or that activity is not agency? This is what baffles me about your approach.
-
Im starting to work out where we seem to be talking across purposes. So I want to go right back to your first comment on this thread in order to try and clarify, before I run out of steam on this discussion:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I agree that my reality can only ever be internally structured, but I disagree that I am an impenetrable fortress. Rather, I am an event, a spacetime structure of particular and ongoing internal reconfiguration, entangled with all of reality in our mutual becoming, with which I collaborate to enact an agential cut with every intra-action, every material-discursive practice, marking boundaries and properties that, despite my best intentions, are continually changing. When we invert our understanding of reality from space/objects as prior to time/activity, to time/activity prior to space/objects, then disembodiment is not a question of spatial extension to a body, but of arbitrarily differentiating the body from being.
Again, you are hiding (obscuring) the issue through ambiguity and sloppy use of terms. "Agency" refers to the actions of an agent. So this part of what you say: " Agency is not a thing, but activity" is true. But this part of what you say: "So were not talking about properties of things" is false. The term used, "agency", implies necessarily that the activity referred to is the property of a thing an agent. That there are distinct agents (as distinct entities) is the only way that Barad has the capacity to speak of distinct "agencies". Otherwise we just have a whole bunch of activity, and no capacity to speak of distinct agencies within this activity.
If we respect this difference, then a number of problems become evident. First, any intra-action activity which is prior to the emergence of agents, cannot be called agency, and it then becomes fundamentally unintelligible. It is activity without anything which is active, because there is no agent, like motion without anything which is moving. This is a fundamental issue with our understanding of electromagnetic energy. Without the ether which is required to understand the waves of electromagnetism, there are waves without a substance which is undergoing the wave activity. Failure to identify the ether has rendered electromagnetic waves as unintelligible to us, motion without anything moving.
Another problem is the issue of how distinct agents could emerge. We have first, activity without any distinct agents. This is a sort of random activity which is fundamentally unintelligible because it is designated as having no agents, nothing which the activity is a property of. Then, from this emerges activity which can be attributed to distinct agents. This is a significant change of category for the proposed type of activity, "intra-action", and we need to account for how such a change could occur.
That is why "intra-action" is really a very misleading sort of proposal. It classes both these very different forms of activity, the unintelligible activity of action without any thing acting, together with intelligible activity, agency, as if the difference between these two is insignificant. In reality, it becomes fundamentally incoherent to try and conceptualize action without an agent suddenly becoming the action of an agent because we need to know where the agent popped from.
Quoting Possibility
The problem is that "agency" implies an agent which is active, that is how the word is commonly used. Therefore the use of this word, if what is meant is activity without an agent, is a deceptive usage. And if we look at the idea of activity without an agent which is active, then we have an unintelligible proposal. So we ought to conclude that Barad uses the term "agency", or "agencies", intentional, to obscure the fact that what is being proposed is fundamentally unintelligible.
An event without anything involved in that event is unintelligible. And event within event, within event, within event, etc., produces an infinite regress with no substance to the world. This is the very same problem as if we say that matter is infinitely divisible. Each piece of matter can be divided to smaller pieces, infinitely, and the world has no substance.
Quoting Possibility
If you place yourself, as the subject, within the universe, then you are the agent. "The universe" is a creation of your senses, perception, and mind. The only way to get an "internal configuration" is to understand your own mind and perceptual apparatus, as to how phenomena, and concepts are created by your mind. Otherwise, you look at the universe as something external to your mind.
To be blunt, it is impossible to observe the internal configuration of an event, unless that event is internal to your own body. That's simply the way that sense observation works, any time we make sense observations we observe from the outside inward, and it is impossible to observe the internal configuration. Therefore your portrayal of quantum mechanics as observing the internal configuration of events, is misguided, and simply wrong.
Quoting Possibility
"Space" ought to be understood as the property of objects, I think you mentioned this already. That is how the concept has been developed. We produced a concept of space for the purpose of measuring and understanding the properties of objects, so our "space" is fundamentally derived from and therefore refers to the property of objects. Objects are logically prior to space.
This means that we need to go further than space to ground, or substantiate, the existence of objects. Traditionally this was done through concept of "matter". The Aristotelian concept of matter has matter as described in terms of "potential", which is basically possibility. So matter is the potential for change, but this potential itself needs to be grounded in something substantial, and in the Aristotelian conception, this is time. Therefore matter is represented as that which does not change through the passage of time (represented now by conservation laws, mass or energy). This is represented by Newton's first law, which even today maintains its position as the basic premise of physics. This implies that the fundamental grounding, or the fundamental substance of the universe is temporal in nature. The problem is that Newton's first law does not adequately apprehend the nature of temporal extension.
Quoting Possibility
Consider that "impenetrable fortress" refers to the outside, and nothing crosses the external boundary. Things relating to each other externally through space, is how we model things, but try for a minute to imagine all real relations as through the inside. At each moment of passing time, everything comes from the inside, moving in an outward direction (as indicated by the concept of spatial expansion). So all true relations are through the inside, in the upward direction of time, because change must be initiated prior to the material effects being instantiated at the present moment. This means that all real events, as being causal, actually occur in the inside of space, while the outward expression is just the effect of the true internal event. I used to think of the passing of time as a process which involves the inverting of space. At each moment when time passes, spatial existence inverts from inside to outside.
Even in more abstract mathematics this is true. For example, when one describes a way to measure "distances" between finite contours in the complex plane, one begins the construction of a "metric space" for these objects.
Agency: action or intervention producing a particular effect (from Medieval Latin agent-, doing).
This definition does not imply (necessarily or otherwise) that agency is a property of a thing or agent - you are making one of those Newtonian assumptions again. And again, not distinct, but differentiating agencies. Because we DO just have a whole bunch of activity. The capacity to speak of differentiating agencies within activity is still there - we just need to shed some institutionalised assumptions.
But it seems you are so taken with beliefs in representationalism and human exceptionalism that you refuse to accept this. The notion that humanity is not so central and immovable, and that the conventions surrounding grammatical structure are insufficient to represent reality, seem too terrifying to contemplate. But just like the work of Darwin and Copernicus before him, the evidence in quantum mechanics is irrefutable. So we must accept it, and do our best to embrace the information and move forward, rather than try to bracket it out.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Electromagnetic waves are not unintelligible - theyre just incompatible with representationalism. Without this and other Newtonian assumptions, there is simply no need for any of these acrobatics. The notion of an ether is just trying to allay fears: an attempt to describe electromagnetic energy without abandoning representationalism.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A couple of important points. First of all, you ARE within the universe, always - and not necessarily as the subject, let alone the agent. There is no outside to the universe. [s]This is the irrefutable fact of quantum mechanics.[/s]
But of course, we use language to describe the universe, and it is this description that is a creation of our senses, perception and mind. And in that description, we prefer to configure ourselves as either an independent external observer or as subject/agent. So we participate in the becoming of the world accordingly, enacting exclusions through material-discursive practices, with little to no regard for what we exclude from mattering. Because we assume that we are the only active beings (until we need to absolve ourselves of responsibility).
I want to be clear that I am not arguing that the universe is internal OR external to the mind, but that it is BOTH - and that the boundary you consider to be impenetrable is just one more agential cut we participate in enacting. This is not an activity we accomplish alone as agent, but is necessarily an ongoing collaboration of material agency in the world, of which we are a part.
Secondly, I didnt say quantum mechanics observes the internal configuration of events - I specifically said this is unobservable. The observations we make from inside an event enable us to perceive an internal configuration - one that necessarily incudes us. Quantum mechanics understands that specific events have specific internal configurations, but that certain measurement events follow an internal logical pattern or structure. With this understanding, we can calculate predictions for our participation in specific events, based on these patterns, by enacting certain measurements as intra-action.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
An object at rest remains at rest, and an object in motion remains in motion at constant speed and in a straight line unless acted on by an unbalanced force.
What Newtons first law fails to apprehend is that the nature of time, as the substantial ground of matter, is agency. Matter is a perceived relative stability amidst that agency, and Newtons first law is a description of that perception which brackets out the inherent variability of that ground.
This need to ground or substantiate reality is a condition of affect. To accurately substantiate reality, we must recognise not just that we unavoidably affect reality, but that we are unavoidably affected by it, to some extent. Always.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I used to think of existence as consisting of three different dimensional structures: the external universe, my constructed conceptual reality, and a biochemical construction of affect in the brain/body that enables interaction between the two. These days, I find it is all one reality, because I recognise time as more than just a linear structure. So I do follow what youre describing here. I just think your understanding of time is based on a limited perspective, which forces you to accept a dualism. That everything comes from the inside, moving in an outward direction is an arbitrary description of causality based on a limited perception of time. But time and causality are not the same.
When you say that change must be initiated prior to the material effects being instantiated at the present moment, youre referring to an internal configuration of the instantiated change. What is occurring in the inside of space is simply your ongoing constructed prediction - a configuration of activity based on the information available. One that is structured more sufficiently (in terms of homeostasis) than accurately.
The thing is that our conceptual reality (inner space) is not restricted to three dimensions, or even four. It is not grounded in temporality, but in pure relation, differentiating into logical, qualitative and dynamic potential. Of course, for it to be accurate and applicable, it must adhere to the logical, qualitative and dynamic structure of the outside. We need to regularly test our models, and keep them open to adjustment and correction. So it cannot be an impenetrable fortress, except that we often strive to make it appear so.
How's that? Just curious. :chin:
:yikes: Ok, Ill admit that its a matter of interpretation. Lets strike that emotional outburst from the argument, and put it down to frustration
I entered this discussion in response to the question of whether its even possible to avoid dualism. But Ive waded in well past my comfortable depth (and I appreciate the lifeline). I continue to stand by my argument that treating time quantum mechanically is an important step in eliminating dualism. But I will endeavour to be more careful in making claims about QM.
No problem. But, could you summerize what you are saying here about time?
It has nothing to do with Newton, but Barad clearly was talking about "distinct agencies" which emerge through intra-action. So even by your definition we have the problem I mentioned of a multitude of particular agencies coming into being, from a general sort of "agency". The general sort is unintelligible as motion without anything which is moving is incoherent. And so this sort of ontology ought not be accepted, because its basic presumptions, or premises, renders the coming into being of things, objects, as unintelligible. That is the recurring problem of all sorts of materialism in general.
I do not understand why you are so obsessed with defending this position, to the point that you incessantly deny the problems which I point to.
Quoting Possibility
You cannot circumvent the fact that your own personal mind is central, and immovable from any sort of ontology which you might believe in, or propose to others. Pretending otherwise, is self-deception, and then your proposals are attempts at deceiving others.
Yes, our current, conventional grammatical structure is insufficient to represent reality, but this is simply a reflection of a fundamental lack of understanding. Human grammatical structures evolve with human understanding, so grammatical insufficiencies are not paramount to misunderstanding, they can be overcome. Grammatical problems can be resolved in the evolution of understanding.
This underscores the need for clear and precise definitions in ontology, and demonstrates why yours and Barad's use of ambiguity in terms like "intra-action", and "agencies", is misleading, and conducive to misunderstanding. You obscure the unintelligibility and incoherency of your ontology with ambiguity, then produce definitions as required, but the definition is insufficient to account for the complete scope of the usage. This means that any usage outside the provided definition, is equivocation.
What quantum mechanics ought to indicate to you, is that we do not have the principles required for understanding the complete nature of reality. If we must accept the evidence of quantum mechanics, then we must accept this, that the theories by which we approach the foundations of the universe are faulty.
Quoting Possibility
That a wave only occurs in a medium, is not a "Newtonian assumption", it is simply the way that we understand the occurrence of waves. You are the one insisting that we need to talk "physics". Do you understand the physics of waves? Electromagnetic waves are unintelligible within the precepts of any theory which denies the reality of an ether, because waves without a substance, through which the waves propagate, is an incoherent notion.
Quoting Possibility
Any true account of time requires dualism because of the substantial difference between past and future. All forms of monism display a gross misunderstanding of time.
Quoting Possibility
It is not "prediction" that I am talking about here, it is what is actually happening, as time is passing. Something must determine, or cause what will be, in existence, at each passing moment in time, because the future consists of possibilities. That, something which determines what will be, at each moment in passing time, is what I refer to as what is "occurring in the inside of space". Newton's first law simply takes for granted that the way things have been, continuously in the past, will continue to be the way that they are in the future, unless there is a force which causes things to change. But the nature of free will, and the reality of future possibilities, indicates that any existent thing could change or be changed at any moment of passing time. This tells us that the temporal continuity of existence expressed by Newton's first law is in no way necessary. Yes, things occur the way described, but this is not necessary. This is why Newton himself stated that his first law depended on the Will of God.
When we apprehend the reality, that each and every aspect of material existence could be discontinued at any moment of passing time, we are forced to conclude that the entirety of material existence must be recreated, reconstituted, at each moment of passing time. When we consider where this act occurs, this act which recreates the existence of each material thing, at each moment of passing time, it can only be the inside, or internal part of space.
Quoting Possibility
This is what I am arguing is the mistake. That the conceptual reality of inner space is not grounded in temporality is a mistake. Since what happens in inner space is activity, and activity occurs in time, then to make this "dynamic potential" logically coherent, it must be grounded in temporality. Any dynamic which is not temporal is incoherent and unintelligible. This is why I argue that time must be understood as logically prior to space. Traditional conceptions of space are of "outer space", three dimensional conceptions. "Inner space" cannot be understood through such traditional conceptions of space, because whatever this "inner space" is, it is substantially different from outer space. However, what the two have in common is activity, and what is required for all activity is time. Therefore the means for understanding the proper relationship between inner space and outer space is to understand the nature of time, it's what they both share. So, the activities of inner space are properties of time, and the activities of outer space are properties of time, and the two are related to each other by that subject, time.
Quoting Possibility
Again, this is what I argue is a mistake. The goal of eliminating dualism is misguided, because it is dualism which gives us the principles which are best suited toward understanding the true nature of time. What quantum mechanics shows us is that the discipline of physics approaches the foundations of the universe with faulty principles, which render the universe as unintelligible. The appearance of unintelligibility is the consequence of faulty principles. This means that all the primary principles must be reassessed and analyzed for mistake. Dualism provides very good direction for how we ought to understand time.
Im defending the position because its the only one (so far) that enables me to consolidate all the information and understanding that I have, without ignoring, isolating or excluding. The problems that you point to are the result of limitations that our perspective, language and assumptions impose on reality. If were talking about ontology, we need to get past all that - including intelligibility. I understand this makes it difficult to do philosophy in the traditional or formal sense, because we have to allow for a certain amount of ambiguity. But I consider forums such as these to be opportunities for a community of inquiry approach to philosophy.
If theres one thing I learned from a qualitative understanding of quantum physics, its that dismissing ambiguity, uncertainty or incoherence puts limitations on the information we have access to, before we even begin. That doesnt mean we necessarily have to use that information, but we do need to be honest about choosing to bracket it out intentionally. And when we dont have sufficient access to information, we shouldnt make assumptions based on our limited perspective, on conventions or traditions. What we can do instead is look for relations and patterns of logic, quality and energy in the ambiguous, uncertain and incoherent information that we do have access to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Agency is not motion - youre swapping out terms in order to imply the necessity of a pre-existing object. But there is no such necessity. The apparent incoherence of activity without any thing to act comes down to grammatical conventions, nothing more. We both agree that time is logically prior to space. I would say that it necessarily follows from this that time is materially prior to space (ie. activity is materially prior to objects). But you dont seem to agree with this, and your sole argument is that it is unintelligible or incoherent. Which is to say that we must think of time as prior to space, but for some reason that you put down to an obscure and speculative function of time, this logic is necessarily inverted in the outside world and yet Im the one whose apparently incoherent
You keep using unintelligible to describe something that I understand but you dont. You dismiss it as such not because it is inherently unintelligible, but because it appears to be so in your perspective. Do you think perhaps the fact that you cant manage to make sense of it may be due to the way you are processing it? Might there be a possible interpretation youre dismissing/ignoring/excluding based on assumptions, convention or tradition that prevents you from recognising the information as valid? Or are you that certain as to the perfection of your own intellect, that if you cant understand it, then it cannot possibly be understood? Im not saying that everyone should be able to understand it the way that Ive set it out, but Im also not going to apply reductionist methodology that dismisses information on the grounds that it doesnt follow grammatical convention.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I recognise that my perspective is limited, but that doesnt mean my mind must be central to any proposed ontology, any more than the fact that Im on earth means this planet must be central to the solar system. The same logical process can be employed - at a different qualitative level - to propose an ontology where my mind is understood as de-centred and variable, just as any other structure or system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is not the grammatical structure itself but the conventions surrounding it that are insufficient. For instance, the assumption that a verb is necessarily attributed to the subject as agency, which is denied to the object, is inaccurate in relation to what we understand about reality and the structure of events. We can still structure the sentence in the same way, but we cannot assume that this attribution of agency is necessarily what it means, and to insist on this configuration of dynamics in an event for the sake of intelligibility is to endorse a variety of material-discursive practices that perpetuate ignorance, isolation and exclusion. This is as much about the reality of that cascade of events within a musical performance or telling time by a caesium clock as it is about cultural theory.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The key is not the reductive precision of definitions. Ambiguity and the potential for misunderstanding is a natural consequence of our limited perspective. Reduction only limits our capacity to understand by prioritising certainty over accuracy. Im not saying that your usage is outside of the definition I offered, but rather that it is a reduction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What quantum mechanics indicates is that understanding the complete nature of reality will take more than the principles of physics. We must accept that the theories are incomplete. Lets not throw out the baby
I get that the classical explanation of waves is disturbance through a medium. But look up the Michelson & Morley experiment - there is no ether. So rather than dismiss electromagnetic waves as an anomaly, it makes sense to rethink the classical explanation. It is, after just an explanation.
But why would you assume that reality, or some aspects of reality are unintelligible? That seems to be a counterproductive, self-defeating assumption. The philosophical mindset is the desire to know, and this means everything. Even if it's beyond the scope of one person, we work toward the collective knowledge. If there is something which I cannot understand, I ought not assume that it is inherently unintelligible, but that it is inherently intelligible, and I just currently have not the means to understand it. Then we keep working toward understanding it. If we assume that it is inherently unintelligible, then we give up on trying to understand it.
Quoting Possibility
I'm not saying that we should dismiss the ambiguity, uncertainty, and incoherence, I'm saying that we should look at it for what it is, and that is evidence that the theories which give us this are faulty. So it's not the ambiguity, uncertainty, and incoherence that we ought to dismiss, we ought to give this high regard, as evidence that the theories which produce it ought to be dismissed. That's the thing, our knowledge is only as good as the theories we apply, and when such defects enter our knowledge it's because the theories we apply are faulty.
Quoting Possibility
I'm sorry Possibility, but I will not accept this. Not only motion, but the idea of any instance of activity, without anything acting is incoherent. This is due to the categorical distinction between a universal, type, and a particular. Any type of activity, running, jumping, etc., can be described and understood through a description of the type. The description of the type does not imply any particular object involved in the activity, and this is a concept, a universal. But if we assume a particular instance of any named type of activity, there must be something involved in that activity, or else there is no particular instance being referred to, and all you are talking about is the universal conception. To say that a particular instance of activity does not require something which is active, because the universal conception does not require a particular which is active, is to make a category mistake.
You can write this off as "grammatical conventions, nothing more", but that's all logic is, grammatical conventions and nothing more. So you can insist on accepting illogical and incoherent principles, because logic is only grammatical conventions and nothing more, but what's the point to that?
Quoting Possibility
I'd say it's incoherent, because matter without objects is incoherent. Matter is that which has mass, and occupies space, and that is what defines a physical object. Having mass, and occupying space, (i.e. being matter), yet not being an object, is incoherent. So your use of "materially prior" is incoherent to me, as if there is matter which is prior to objects. But this is incoherent for the reasons above. Being a particular instance of matter, and being a physical object are one and the same thing.
Quoting Possibility
No, it is "inherently unintelligible" as described above. The only way to make it intelligible is to start redefining terms, as you did with "agency". Now "you'll have to redefine "matter", and so on and so forth, until you have a conceptua structure which is completely inconsistent with convention, and any cross referencing would constitute equivocation. What's the point? You\d just be making up a fantasy reality which is completely distinct from grammatical conventions, i.e. logic.
The idea of a particular instance of activity, without anything which is active, is inherently unintelligible. This would be nothing but a universal, a type of activity, and not a particular instance at all. What makes it a particular instance is the particular material which is active. You might insist that it is just a type, a universal conception, and not a particular instance which you are talking about, but then it's just a fantasy in your mind, and nothing real at all.
Quoting Possibility
Yes, I'm quite certain that there cannot be any particular instances of activity without anything which is acting, or active. If you really think that activity without anything acting is a coherent idea, then explain to me what would this activity consist of. What would be the substance here? And, that "it doesn't follow grammatical convention" is very good grounds for rejection, as explained above.
Quoting Possibility
The solar system is not comparable to ontology. We can model, or represent all sorts of supposedly independent things, like the solar system, but ontology does not have as its purpose, to model or represent any independent thing.
Quoting Possibility
I do not understand what you're trying to say here. Of course we can talk about verbs, and the meaning of them, "run", "jump", etc., without implying that any particular thing or object is carrying out that activity. That is not the issue, because in this case we are talking about the conception, what it means. But if we refer to a particular instance of such an activity occurring in the physical world, then we necessarily imply that there is something engaged in that activity. Would you be talking about an instance of running, or jumping, in which there is nothing running or jumping? That's incoherent, right?
Or, are you proposing a special type of activity, in which there is nothing which is active. If so, then you ought to be able to describe this type of activity, conceptualize it. Please explain to me what this proposed type of activity is like, and how it occurs, this type of activity in which nothing is active. Can you explain what is going on when this activity occurs, without talking about something being active?
Quoting Possibility
Ever read read Plato's Theaetetus? There is no baby there, only flatulence.
Quoting Possibility
I already have. What these experiments demonstrated is that the relationship between the ether and material objects which was assumed, that they are distinct materials or substances, was a faulty assumption. It does not prove that there is no ether, just that the hypothesis of how the ether exists was incorrect.
I have trouble with this also. But in a social, let's say feminist setting, intra-acting amongst participants can and does produce "objects" - movements - and the flux of cause and effect is cloudy.
As to the notion that time pre-exists space, that's a metaphysical stance and as such cannot promulgate conclusions about the physical world without absurdities like intra-action.
The metaphysical foundation I prefer is that, at each instant, spacetime is created. Bergson, in The Creative Mind, speaks of an instant of hesitation before Nature moves on, and it has been suggested that the collapse of the wave function marks the next step in the creation of spacetime. In a sense the wave function collapse is Bergson's instant. So there is indeed a block universe, only behind us and not in front.
This makes Schrödinger's equation a predictor of the future in a wider sense than originally thought. I have misgivings about this, however, in that it reifies mathematics beyond my comfort zone.
Well, I can give it a go
Time is not a linear extension - this is how time appears to us because we are perceiving events from the inside - we are involved. For an accurate understanding of an event from the outside - that is, without being involved in it - we cannot assume that it has the same configuration (ie. of measurement-independent objects in space, interacting according to a linear temporal order) as it does when we are involved.
So, while it isnt possible for us to get outside of time, with the help of quantum physics we can at least understand the logic of times relational structure enough to recognise its objective irreducibility, and the relativity of how we generally perceive time.
What Im positing is that the paradigm shift suggested by Rovelli - to consider time as a chaotic series of interrelating events - enables us to seek some kind of structure in this chaos. If reality doesnt necessarily have a spatial or temporal order, then what kind of order does it have? How can we make sense of these interrelations, without ignoring their objective irreducibility?
Im saying that each event (including ourselves and time) is most accurately understood (rather than described) by employing the model of a quantum mechanical system (spacetime), consisting of four qualitative dimensions (irreducible structural relations) of variable values, one of which corresponds to a classical sense of temporal order. Barad suggests that approaching our participation in reality this way prompts us to intra-act more responsibly and with accountability in material-discursive practices that enact boundaries and exclusions, recognising collaboration as more important than attributing/denying agency to subjects/objects in order to make intelligible statements about reality.
So Im suggesting the possibility of a synthesis between materialism and idealism, enabling us to avoid a dualistic ontology. And it starts with inverting our common understanding of reality as objects preceding activity, and the whole traditional assumption that time as the fourth dimension is necessarily an extension of space.
Despite institutional conventions, philosophy is about wisdom, which is not to know in the sense of to describe, but to understand in the sense of being able to act correctly. Intelligibility - in the sense you are using it here - is about being able to describe this knowledge (using language) and be understood with sufficient certainty. So were clearly striving for different goals here. But it should be clear that understanding reality is not the same as understanding how reality is described.
I do think that reality in a complete sense IS unintelligible - this is not an assumption - but that doesnt prevent us from striving to understand reality in order to act correctly, even if we cannot reduce that correct action to a definitive statement about reality that is true always and everywhere, ie. objective, logical. I think we need to accept the inherent ambiguity and variability of reality, and incorporate this into our use of language, if we are to make any objective statements about reality - rather than try to shoehorn (reduce) reality to conform to conventional language use and definitions.
Quantum mechanics has shown what can be achieved when we put aside the goal of intelligibility, and focus instead on developing precise and accurate intra-action. Theres no reason why we cant apply this perspective to all our intra-actions.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I did NOT redefine agency - I took that definition straight from Google (source: Oxford Languages). Can I be clear that I am not redefining any of these terms - I am only pointing out the variability inherent in their definitions, etymology and usage. And the relation between logic and reality is not bound by grammatical convention. The fact that quantum physics makes exceptionally accurate use of a logical structure which defies grammatical conventions should prompt us to rethink these conventions in light of reality, not the other way around.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A photon is a particular instance of activity, but what is active here? Its not a universal, not a type - it IS real, and yet it still has no mass. So what does this activity consist of? Energy without substance. A particle of light. A packet of electromagnetic radiation. Its a pattern of activity without anything which is acting. So is doesnt follow grammatical convention alone grounds to reject the existence of a photon?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, thats not what I said (but to be fair, what I was supposed to say was cosmology rather than solar system). What I did say was that the logical process is comparable, but the qualitative structure was different. And I said nothing about representation, nor any independent thing.
I think for Barad philosophy, and science as well, first delineate the contours of what matters by enacting an apparatus( configuration of practices of intra-action with the world). Then, within those configurations descriptions and distinctions of intelligibility can be made ( true-false, relevant, irrelevant, etc). A particular logical grammar of propositional truth would constitute only one narrow form of intelligibility, that used by humans in a particular historical era within certain cultural domains. In its wider form, intelligibility is not limited to humans.
If reality as a whole is not intelligible it is only because reality is a becoming. To make an aspect of the world intelligible is to participate in this becoming.
Thank you for providing additional information about your ideas. Spacetime at quantum levels seems to involve non-commutative algebras and appears to be highly technical. I have enough trouble with spacetime in relativity theory, so I will pass on this. For Bohr, position and momentum of quantum particles simply do not exist before measurements. They come into existence upon the act of "observation". Extrapolating this into the larger world gives rise to intra-action I suppose. But, is this extension from one realm to another warranted?
I was using intelligibility in the narrow form that it has been presented to me here, and employed to dismiss quantum mechanics. But you and I at least are in agreement here. I keep getting accused of making up broader definitions, as using ambiguity to obscure .
It is highly technical, but its really just that the relativity of time is in fact a relativity of all four dimensional variables - their non-commutative properties are simply the irreducible quality of dimensionality. What Bohr is saying about measurement is that any properties of reality are, at minimum, a relation between two pairs of non-commutative variable values, one of which, for us, acts as time. So we dont need to assume space or objects - we only need to recognise one of those values as time, and one of those pairs as our involvement - our entangled embodied subjectivity.
But I dont agree with the notion of extension from one realm to another. If you invert this dimensionality as starting with time, then distance, then momentum and then position (which is the paradigm shift required), its not so much extension as differentiation. And when we talk about mathematics in relation to reality, we are naturally approaching it from a fifth-dimensional perspective: configuring reality according to relations between variable values, undifferentiated as time, distance, etc. So in my understanding, its not a separate realm at all.
By created, as a so-called collapse of the wave function, it seems youre referring to an instant of differentiation - and yes, I agree that there is a spacetime structure to every instant, and that structure exists in a necessary and non-linear (multi-dimensional) variable relation with every other instant.
I get your misgivings about the reification of mathematics - the way I see it, logic is just one aspect of the real block universe. There is also quality (the variable values or ideas themselves) and dynamics (energy, affect).
Movements are categorically distinct from objects, and one cannot be reduced to the other. They are fundamentally incompatible in nature. Aristotle demonstrated this very well. We often talk about a type of movement as a concept, as if this concept is an object. But that would be a Platonic object which is categorically distinct from a material object.
Quoting jgill
The absurdity is actually the product of the currently accepted notion of time, and the conceptual structure which envelops it. The problem is in the way that the concept of time is tied to the concept of change. Conventionally, logical priority is given to physical change, such that time is a property of change. But physical change requires that there is something which changes. This is what I'm talking about with the incoherency of the idea of activity without something that is active.
So if we start talking about activity, or change, without anything which is active or changing, we cross into incoherency. However, the nature of material existence indicates to us that there must be a cause of material existence, and this cause must be active. Therefore we must conclude that there is activity which is prior to material existence as cause of it.
In classical metaphysics, this activity which is prior to material existence is immaterial Forms, and this got adopted into Christian theology as a representation of God. And since the concept of time is tied to material change, then God as an active immaterial Form and cause of material activity, must be outside time, i.e., eternal. The problem is with the conventional conception of time, which ties time to material change. or activity. This renders all activity which is prior to material objects, as unintelligible, being outside of time.
So the mistake is the tying of time to material change. This is what produces the absurdities. To conceive of time as prior to space, and material existence, frees us from these absurdities, providing us with the means for understanding the cause of material existence in a coherent, logical way.
Quoting Possibility
Your definition though, did not solve the problem, which is how there could be activity without anything which is active, and how material objects could emerge from this activity. Dualism has already provided a systematic resolution to these problems thousands of years ago. The activity which is prior to material objects is the activity of immaterial Forms, and how material objects emerge from this activity is through an act of will (traditionally, God's will).
You ought to see, that if you just relinquish your bias against dualism, you will readily understand that classical dualism provides a far more comprehensible, intelligible, and coherent approach to this problem than quantum physics does.
Your approach is to simply deny that there is anything active, in this activity which is prior to material existence. But this renders that proposed activity as entirely unintelligible. The way of classical metaphysics is to recognize this sort of activity, which is prior to the activity of material objects, as the activity of immaterial Forms. And, as "forms" their essence is intelligibility. Therefore this activity is necessarily intelligible.
You seem to hold as a goal, the intent of reducing these two, material forms and immaterial forms, to one another, such that there would be no difference between them. This would support your bias against dualism. But then you are left with this fundamental activity, from which material objects emerge, which is completely unintelligible, because you insist that this is activity with nothing which is active. Perhaps, when you apprehend the unintelligibility of the idea, of activity with nothing which is active, you will be inclined to relinquish your bias against dualism, and accept that what is active in this activity which is prior to the emergence of material objects, is something immaterial.
Quoting Possibility
The photon, as a particular instance of activity, is an incoherent concept. That's what quantum mechanics demonstrates to us. The "photon" is two completely incompatible forms of energy at the very same time, energy transmitted as wave action, and energy transmitted as a moving particle. Further the photon always has the property of "uncertainty". This is the reality of the quantum physics, and you seem to truly believe that it provides a better approach to the foundations of the universe, than dualism does, although dualism has been well thought out, to avoid such problems.
Quoting Possibility
A photon is not a packet of light. Light can be clearly observed as wave action, refraction, interference etc.. There are many different applications which make use of electromagnetic waves, and although they can be packaged they do not naturally exist as packets. Waves do not move as packets. And, there is very clearly something which is acting in the case of waves, some substance. Waves are the activity of a substance. You simply deny volumes of observational data to claim that electromagnetic radiation is activity without anything acting. This denial of the evidence plunges you into a fantasy world of incoherency.
I accept that one can describe or configure this activity as being a property of something immaterial, but I see it as an unnecessary contrivance to perpetuate dualism. I also acknowledge that many quantum physicists do prefer this configuration - not because its easier to do quantum physics, but because it fits with conventions in material-cultural practices.
Having said that, what quantum physics demonstrates is that activity does not require materiality in the sense of a qualitative three-dimensionality. It only requires two non-commutative variable values, in a measurement relation (ie. one of them corresponding to time), to be intelligible as real activity. But because quantum physicists then describe this as activity, grammatical conventions dictate that something (NOT the activity itself), is what is active. This leads to a chicken-and-egg style dilemma.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im not denying that anything is active in activity, just any separate thing. Activity is inherently active. Im denying this reliance on grammatical conventions for intelligibility. Your preaching here on the traditions of dualism borders on the religious, and Im just not buying it. The original notion of Form was just reducing activity to a proper noun, in order to talk about its variable qualities. But lets look again at definitions:
Form[i](noun): 1. the visible shape or configuration of something.
2. a particular way in which a thing exists or appears.[/i]
Form is this same notion of configuration, a particular way in which something exists. And this apparent distinction between material and immaterial Form is not a binary, but an agential cut enacted between three- and four-dimensional configurations.
I dont have a bias against dualism - I have a preference for an elegantly accurate understanding of reality. Dualism doesnt cut it.
When I think of non-commutative algebras I think of matrix algebras and non-commutativity of multiplication. When you speak of two pairs that takes me to linear fractional transformations, 2X2 matrices, so that time might be one entry and space three. But that isn't what is going on here. Perhaps one pair is [math]\left( t,t+\Delta t \right)[/math]. The other pair - our entangled embodied subjectivity - is just plain weird. I don't know what to make of your comments, but I appreciate you making them.
We are fundamentally in agreement then. But, when you say, "activity does not require materiality in the sense of a qualitative three-dimensionality", I say that this activity is immaterial. And when you talk about what "grammatical conventions" dictate, I say that this is what "logic" dictates.
So why hold the penchant for anti-dualism? It seems to me, like dualism is very consistent with what quantum mechanics demonstrates. In fact, it appears like one has to intentionally use ambiguity and obscurity with terms like "intra-action" to hide the fact that what quantum mechanics demonstrates is that the nature of reality is very consistent with what dualism dictates. There is the activity of material things, and there is also activity which does not require materiality, therefore it is immaterial. Doesn't that sound like dualism to you?
Quoting Possibility
Again, your reliance on "dimensional" models is misleading you. The activity which you say "does not require materiality in the sense of a qualitative three-dimensionality", cannot be "an agential cut enacted between three- and four-dimensional configurations", because this agency must be non-dimension, i.e. immaterial.
This is the ambiguity I am speaking of. You consistently argue for the reality of the immaterial, yet your anti-dualism bias (and I believe I am correct to call it that), inclines you to use obscure and ambiguous terms such as "intra-action", in an attempt to hide the obvious fact that what you are arguing for is in reality a material/immaterial dualism.
Quoting Possibility
This is why classical dualism provides a much better platform for an approach toward the understanding of reality than does the discipline of modern physics. What physicists are starting to notice is the primacy of time. This means that our understanding of reality is only as good as our understanding of time. The problem is that the temporal conventions employed by modern physics, from the continuity of Newton's first law, to Einsteinian relativity, are simply incorrect. On the other hand, traditional metaphysics provides the required principles for a true understanding of time. These principles begin with an apprehension of the substantial difference between past and future, which as I said already, renders Newton's first law without any necessity. And this duality of substance is what necessitates dualism as the true starting point toward an understanding of reality.
Quoting Possibility
I'm sorry that dualism doesn't seem to be capable of satisfying your desire for elegancy. I hope you will consider swapping the desire for elegancy with the need for truth. Then we may happily converse about the nature of time, but only after you put aside all those beautiful symmetries which are proper to the faulty temporal conventions.
Which do you think provides the road to truth, the grammatical conventions which we know as logic, or the temporal conventions by which we practise the manipulation of temporal objects?
The main difference is that you believe any understanding of reality must conform to grammatical conventions (which is a reduction of logic), whereas I believe any grammatical convention should adjust to accommodate a rational understanding of reality that may fall outside of its existing framework, if it is to remain accurately relevant. Regardless of how we describe it, I think this is fundamentally what we are dealing with.
A couple of points to clear up here. Firstly, there is a difference of configuration between not requiring materiality and being immaterial. The former acknowledges a variability in the configuration of activity/being, while the latter offers only one configuration - enacting an agential cut that excludes activity sans three-dimensionality from mattering.
I did place materiality in scare quotes deliberately because I disagree with the narrowness of its parameters as requiring three-dimensionality. I recognise that youre uncomfortable with me broadening definitions to their qualitative notions, but it enables me to talk about the same idea accurately across different dimensional systems of logic. And I would argue that the term materiality refers to a more variable quality of mattering: as being relevant or significant. This can pertain to 3D objects, 4D events or 5D values.
Secondly, grammatical conventions are a particular form or configuration of logic - but not the notion of logic itself, which dictates only methodical rationality, not a particular system. Again, you are participating in a material-discursive practice, distinguishing grammatical forms of logic from alternative rational systems of understanding, such as mathematics and physics.
I want be clear at this point in saying that Im not trying to convince you to discard grammatical forms of logic in favour of quantum physics - only to recognise the limitations of idealising one form or system over another. Your argument is that the findings of quantum physics - as a combination of mathematics and physics - is incompatible with our grammatical forms of logic, therefore we must abandon these findings. My argument is that the findings are sound, and are compatible with a broader understanding of grammatical forms.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What quantum mechanics demonstrates is that materiality extends beyond the activity of material things. Subatomic particles which lack a fundamental three-dimensional inertia are still relevant and significant (ie. material) to the study of motion, mass, acceleration and force. In quantum mechanics, activity is activity, and the distinction between material and immaterial at this level is irrelevant. So no, it doesnt sound like dualism at all.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Okay, youre making great leaps of assumption here. Not requiring three-dimensionality is NOT the same as non-dimensional. Subatomic particles lack a fundamental three-dimensional inertia. At least one of their dimensional measurements is in a constant state of flux, but this doesnt render them non-dimensional, only not fundamentally three-dimensional. They can be configured as relevant/significant (material) in a four-dimensional (active) system, but in a three-dimensional (inert) structure they are considered immaterial.
The reason I use a dimensional structure is because it retains an overall sense of logic and rationality as we move between limited systems or conventions of logic: ie. grammar, mathematics, physics. There are basic structural principles that apply to relational perspective in measuring, describing and constructing any level of dimensionality across all three systems, so I can keep straight this sense of entangled embodied subjectivity: I am never entirely outside of reality, but always involved somehow, and my relational perspective is highly variable. Without this grounding, its tempting to assume certainty and objectivity.
Language can obscure the fact that youve gone from talking about material forms to immaterial forms without necessarily understanding the qualitative and dynamic relational structure between them, let alone the change in your own relational perspective that enables you to do this. In this sense dualism is a cop-out: theyre just different things is putting up a wall of ignorance and then refusing to do the work of understanding what that difference is.
Quantum physics at least recognises the limitations of classical physics as a system of logic, and intra-acts with mathematics to refine and adjust both systems for a more accurate and comprehensive logical framework. Grammatical conventions need to be in the mix, but for them to effectively intra-act we need to accept their fundamental variability and limitations. It seems youre not prepared to do this.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is pure sophistry. It is not just elegance that Im after, but elegant accuracy. Dualism is clunky and ignorant at best - its most glaring ambiguity lies in the absence of a logical, qualitative and dynamic relational structure between material and ideal Forms.
Grammatical conventions have logical form but are not logic in the ideal sense. Accuracy in practise is more indicative of truth than words systematically arranged. And the accuracy in our practise of quantum mechanics makes it very clear that the remaining fault in temporal conventions is in our grammatical logic, not the physics or maths.
Yes, "understanding" requires consistency with grammatical conventions. And obviously, we cannot change reality to conform to our conventions, therefore the conventions must conform to reality. You and I are in complete agreement to this point.
Where we disagree is as to which conventions correspond with reality, and which do not. I believe that classical conventions of dualism correspond, and are adequate to form a solid foundation for an understanding of reality. I also believe that numerous modern conventions, of physics and mathematics, such as the dimensional representation of spacetime, and some axioms of set theory, do not correspond, and ought to be rejected. You seem to believe the opposite.
Quoting Possibility
I think that this is a gross misunderstanding. "Immaterial" does not imply inactive. I think this Idea comes from a modern day misunderstanding of Plato, in which "Platonism" is represented as comprised of the assumption of eternal, inert, passive Ideas, which cannot interact with the material word according to the "interaction problem". In reality though, this is Pythagorean Idealism, which Plato demonstrated has very serious problems. Since Plato's method of dialectics is very difficult to interpret, many modern interpreters do not see beyond Plato's exposé of Pythagorean Idealism to see that Plato was demonstrating the problems with it, mot supporting it, and pointing the direction toward resolving these problems.
So in reality, Plato offered us a solution to the "interaction problem", which involved demonstrating the lack of correspondence with reality of the the theory of participation which provided the support for Pythagorean Idealism. The central problem was that the theory of participation, represents "Ideas" as passive things which material objects partake of. So for example, as described in "The Symposium", a beautiful thing is beautiful because it partakes in the Idea of Beauty. Notice that the immaterial Idea is passive, and the material object actively "partakes". Plato revealed that this is a problem for Idealism, and went on to demonstrate with "the good" (understood by Aristotle as "final cause") that ideas must be active, causal.
Aristotle's metaphysics, with the so-called "cosmological argument" firmly refutes Pythagorean Idealism. He shows that all human ideas require the human mind for actual existence. If any human ideas have any sort of reality prior to being actualized by the human mind, this would be solely as potential. Then he excludes "potential" from the category of "eternal", by showing that anything eternal must be actual. This procedure shows that it is impossible that human ideas have eternal existence, effectively refuting Pythagorean Idealism. However it also shows that it is necessary to conclude actual Forms ("form" having the category of actual, or active) which are prior to material ("matter" having the category of passive potential) forms. In Christian theology, these independent Forms, whose existence is demonstrated as logically necessary by the cosmological argument, are proper to the divine realm of God and the angels. Substance dualism is necessary to support what you might call "an agential cut" between the actual Forms (substance) of the divine realm. which are causally responsible for the activities of independent material things, and the actual forms (substance) of the living human mind, which are causally responsible for the activities of the living human beings.
Quoting Possibility
All you are doing here is continuing to obscure the problems of your conventions, with ambiguity. The non-three-dimensional particles you speak of are understood as having an effect ("relevant/significant") in a four-dimensional model, but they clearly cannot be shown to have a position, location, or place, in such a model, so we cannot say that this model shows them to have any actual existence. This is the type of activity we've been discussing, the "four-dimensional (active) system" model is only capable of showing that there is some type of activity which is unintelligible from the precepts of that model. That is why there is a wave/particle duality, quantum uncertainty, and all the other logical problems with this type of representation of subatomic particles. What is observed is the effect of this activity, but the activity itself, as the immaterial cause of those effects cannot be observed. Theologists are very well acquainted with this principle, as God, being immaterial, is understood through His effects, the presence of material existence, rather than through direct observations of Him.
The proposed "subatomic particles" are not particles at all because they cannot be represented as having spatial location, and so are much better (more honestly) represented as immaterial activities (Forms) which have a causal influence within the four-dimensional model.
The proposed "four-dimensional (active) system" is fundamentally deceptive because it reverses the true role of time. This is what I've been trying to tell you, but you refuse to acknowledge that this is the case. The base principles are all three-dimensional geometry, arcs, circles, spheres, triangles, planes etc.. and time is layered on top, as a further spatial feature. This does not allow that time can be properly represented as prior to, and therefore independent from space.
Quoting Possibility
Actually, what you are demonstrating is that you prefer the conventions of mathematics over the conventions grammar. We can say that grammar and mathematics are both forms of logic. And, I can show you how there is inconsistency between these two forms of logic, especially at the most fundamental level, the law of identity. In the logic of grammar, the law of identity states that a thing is the same as itself. Two things may be according to some stated parameter, or quality, equal to each other, but two things cannot be "the same", because only one thing can be the same as itself. Being the same is a very special sort of equality which a thing can only have with itself. In the logic of mathematics however, two equal things can be said to be the same object.
Therefore, there is great inconsistency between the logic of grammar and the logic of mathematics. You choose the logic of mathematics, most likely because it has proven itself to be very useful. So your choice is most likely guided by a form of pragmaticism. I choose the logic of grammar because it has been directed by dialectics which is aimed at aimed at correspondence with reality, truth. And the logic of grammar has proven itself to be very useful in this way. So my choice is guided by a desire for truth.
Quoting Possibility
No, the findings of quantum mechanics may not be said to be sound, because what the findings show is that a large portion of reality is unintelligible, but this has not been proven. And your attempt to show that there may be intelligibility produced by a "broader understanding of grammatical forms" I have adequately demonstrated, is nothing other than an obscuring of this unintelligibility produced by quantum mechanics, behind ambiguity. That is sophistry
In reality, what good grammatical form (clear definitions and adherence to fundamental principles) shows, is that the reason why quantum mechanics leaves a large portion of reality as unintelligible is that the logic being employed is faulty.
Quoting Possibility
Again, you continue to demonstrate the incoherency of your supposed "broader understanding of grammatical forms". "Materiality" is defined by material, and "material" is defined by matter. And "matter" by common definition, and conventional understanding is defined by the physical presence of material things. Now you propose a "matter", in the form of "a materiality", which "extends beyond material things".
By this proposal there is absolutely nothing to constrain the concept of "matter", because it could be extended to any sort of fictional idea. If the concept of "matter" is not grounded in, or substantiated by, the real existence of material things, then we allow that "matter" and consequently "materiality" may refer to any fantasy or fictitious thing. This is why Aristotle, who first defined "matter" and expressed all the limitations under which the concept was to be understood, explicitly denied the possibility of matter which extends beyond the existence of material things.
I believe it is important to recognize that "matter" is a concept. The concept was produced to assist us in understanding the existence of physical bodies. Matter, as a concept was intended to represent a property of such bodies, a property which all bodies have in common. But if we move, as you propose, and make matter something which extends further than its original concept, something other than a property of physical bodies, then we invalidate the entire concept. All the things which were said about "matter", as a property of physical bodies lose their necessity as truths, because "matter" is now something else. And there is no principle which would allow that matter can maintain its status as a property of physical bodies, and also extend beyond physical bodies. So the entire conception is undermined.
We have a very similar problem when we allow that inertia extends beyond mass. The concept of "inertia" was produced as a property of mass. Now if we allow that there is inertia which is not associated with mass we undermine the concept. Of course the argument would be that the concept of "inertia" would be grounded in something else, just like the concept of "matter" above (which extends beyond material things) would be grounded in something else, but that's not really true. The proposal to allow such changes is just carried out in an effort to make the mathematics work. Therefore there is no real grounding, just an effort to make the equations work out.
So what is really the case, is that when the grammatical logic is strictly adhered to, the mathematics which uses a different and less rigorous form of logic does not produce the desired results. The easiest solution is to compromise the grammatical logic. But this of course undermines the conceptual structure and the rigor of the grammatical logic
Quoting Possibility
Grammatical conventions must be variable, that I agree with. However the process (discipline) whereby these conventions are questioned, dialectics, is completely different from the process whereby mathematical axioms are question. The former is the philosophical quest for truth, and the latter is the pragmatic quest for usefulness. The two are not incompatible, but compatibility requires a hierarchy of purpose, or intent. The pragmatic quest for usefulness must be guided by the philosophical quest for truth. In other words, the purpose or usefulness must be the quest for truth, or else there can be no compatibility.
Therefore grammatical conventions, which are variable under the auspices of dialectics and the quest for truth, must take priority over the conventions of mathematics and physics which are variable according to pragmatic inclinations. When grammatical logic is altered under the direction of good dialectics seeking truth, this can be known as the evolution of language. But when grammatical logic is altered under the direction of mathematicians and physicists who seek to support the usefulness of their own discipline, we can call this a corruption of grammatical logic.
Quoting Possibility
Again, this statement indicates a gross misunderstanding of dualism, which I addressed above.
Quoting Possibility
I really do not know what you mean by "'logic' in the ideal sense". But I think what I wrote above ought to go a long way toward dispelling this myth, that "our practise of quantum mechanics makes it very clear that the remaining fault in temporal conventions is in our grammatical logic, not the physics or maths." It's very clear that what is the case, is that physics and mathematics, in their submission to a usefulness which has been corrupted away from the desire for truth, have succumbed to a severely compromised grammatical logic. Yes, the fault is evident in the grammatical logic, because the inclinations of mathematics and speculative physics have produced the need to compromise the grammatical logic. But this is exactly why we need to go back to the good solid principles of dualism to sort out that mess.
Understanding reality is not about adequacy, but accuracy. The bible can be considered adequate to form a solid foundation for an understanding of reality, too. Fundamentalists argue that modern findings of physics and mathematics, which do not correspond with an understanding that is necessarily limited by their classical conventions, ought to be rejected.
Im not calling for anyone to reject conventions. I dont believe deliberate ignorance is the answer to understanding reality. What I believe is that our understanding should include a broader understanding of classical conventions, at what level of awareness they are effective, at what point they limit our accuracy, and why.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
First of all, I didnt say that immaterial implies inactive. I said it implies that the activity in question doesnt matter. What youre arguing is that the only way this kind of activity can matter is if it actually matters to living human minds FIRST. Quantum mechanics refutes this, and so does neuroscience.
Aristotles understanding of the relation between actual and potential is distorted and limited by certain assumptions. The first assumption is that categories, with their determinate boundaries and properties, divide up reality with mutually exclusive accuracy. So, according to Aristotle, a particular event cannot be both potential and actual. Yet a particular (human or divine) being can, and the only distinction is an attribution of agency. Which brings me to the next assumption: that agency is an attribute of beings but not events. So, the potential of any event is assumed to be divine, unless it is in the affected interests of humans to attribute agency to particular beings. And grammatical conventions enable humans to enact this agential cut between divine and human according to localised affect, rather than logic.
What is missing from Aristotles metaphysics is scientific rigour. He relies on the apparent logic of language use alone to support his claims, without taking into account empirical evidence or mathematical logic. And because grammatical logic is created by humans and for humans, the only conclusion that can be made from it is that the human mind is logically necessary. Well, duh. But that has nothing to do with reality. It is circular reasoning at its finest.
In reality, I would argue that there is no distinction necessary between ideas as human or divine. The differentiation is one of perspective - human minds have a variable (active) structure of potential embodiment that limits individual capacity to perceive and actualise ideas in a way that impacts homeostasis. The divine mind has no such limitations in the variability of its potential structure (internal configuration). Human potential is therefore a localised reduction of possibility (divine potential), not an isolated category of actual forms or substance. And neither do actual Forms matter independently, except that we say they must in order for us to talk about them.
Premises:
- there exists a series of events
- the series of events exists as caused and not as uncaused(necessary)
- there must exist the necessary being that is the cause of all contingent being
Conclusion:
- there must exist the necessary being that is the cause of the whole series of beings
Theres no reason to change event to being here. This is based purely on grammatical logic, created by humans for humans - we cannot speak of activity without attributing it to a being who acts, and is therefore actual as well as having potential, or agency.
P3: there must exist a necessary event/activity that is the cause of all contingent events.
Conclusion: there must exist a necessary event/activity that is the cause of the whole series of events.
But that necessary event need not have become fully actual prior to all other events in the series. It only needs to have begun. In which case said necessary event - the universe itself - is being, and even now, still in the process of becoming. So there is no reason for the universe in its becoming to be denied agency, except that this affects us in a way that impacts our homeostasis.
But while we cannot individually actualise this idea, we can relate to, strive to understand and even perceive the logic, quality and energy/affect of its potential structure in the same way that we can perceive God: by acknowledging our embodied limitations and the possibility of increasing awareness of, connection and collaboration with all other aspects of the event/being in its becoming. Not by assuming it is already fully actual somewhere else.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And this is why an understanding of dimensional principles (not geometric elements) is important. I didnt say that sub-atomic particles could be shown in a four-dimensional system, and Im not talking about dimensional models. An n dimensional model shows n-1 dimensional entities, and requires an n+1 dimensional system for intelligibility (significance).
I do agree that subatomic particles are more honestly described as activities. But I disagree as to their immateriality, on account of their causal influence within a four-dimensional system. And while I agree that time is logically prior to space, I disagree that it is therefore independent, on account of Einsteins gravitational field.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, of course - if Aristotle defined a term (in Greek), then it must be the true meaning of the idea! :chin:
I see no logical reason why the idea of materiality must be so constrained. It could possibly refer to any fantasy or fictitious idea. But it doesnt. Lets look again at the dictionary definitions:
Matter (noun): 1. physical substance in general, as distinct from mind and spirit; (in physics) that which occupies space and possesses rest mass, especially as distinct from energy.
2. a subject or situation under consideration.
(verb): 1. be important or significant.
I would say that matter is not so much a concept as the human conceptualisation of an idea. In reference to things, matter is physical substance, but also mental substance. But in reference to activity, to matter is to be important or significant. You cant just ignore these additional aspects of the conceptualisation of matter. And you cant declare them different substances without an understanding of how they relate.
As for inertia, this refers to a phenomenon - a tendency to do nothing or remain unchanged. Not an actual Form, but an apparent observation. Mass doesnt really have inertia, it only appears to. Look closer
Understanding is not about grounding concepts in just one logical system - that just gives an illusion of certainty, like religion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of mathematical logic, and the pot calling the kettle black. Good dialectics seeking truth is just seeking to support the usefulness of their own discipline. Surely you see this? Compatibility does not require a higher purpose, only a broader understanding of each discipline. All three disciplines seek truth in their own way, and none is more significant than the others. To declare otherwise is to put your faith in a narrow ideology, to blindly follow doctrine. I honestly thought you were more intelligent than than, and Im a little disappointed at all this pontificating. What is truth if it isnt useful?
OK, I see how you want to define "matter". You define it as the verb in the definitions above, "to be important or significant". Do you agree, that "importance and significance" implies a judgement of value? Importance and significance only have meaning in relation to something which is valuable.
Quoting Possibility
So I cannot understand what you are trying to say here. What "matters" is what is important or significant, and this is only judged in relation to human minds. Why do you believe that quantum mechanics refutes this? Does it demonstrate importance and significance in relation to values which are non-human? What are you saying?
Quoting Possibility
This is another bad misrepresentation. Categories are not mutually exclusive in the existence of real things, like dichotomies are. That is the whole point of using categories rather than dichotomies, to allow for the overlapping of concepts, which would not be allowed by dichotomous divisions. So in Aristotle's hylomorphism, physical objects consist of both matter (potential), and form (actual). In fact, a particular is by definition both. Yes, "potential" is distinct, as a separate category from "actual", so that one is not the other, but the categories don't serve to divide up reality, they serve to divide up the conceptual structure for the purpose of better understanding reality.
For example, we might have the categories of sight and sound, and we could divide up a conceptual structure accordingly. But this is not to divide up reality, as the same thing might be both seen and heard, though the property which is heard is distinct from the property seen, according to that conceptual structure. it is a tool to help us understand reality, but if you think that it is actually dividing up reality, that is a misunderstanding.
Quoting Possibility
I do not know what you might mean by "fully actual" here. If an event has "begun", it is active, therefore actual. To suggest that there is a time when the event is partially active, yet not fully active is incoherent. Take the concept of "acceleration" for example. Suppose something is assumed to be at rest, it is not active. At some point in time it begins to move, accelerate. At that point, it is fully active, though it hasn't reached its top speed. We do not say that it is nof fully active, or not fully actual. As soon as it has motion it is active, actual, and it make no sense to say that it is partially actual, but not fully actual.
So I really don't know what you're trying to say here. If the supposed event is not occurring, not actual, then it requires a cause to become actual. That cause itself must be actual, and the cause is prior to the actuality of the event which is the effect. So if the universe is that event, then there must be something actual which is prior to it as the cause of its actuality. We cannot simply say that the potential for the universe was prior to the universe, because that pure potential could not act to cause the universe, so there must have been something more than just the potential, there must have been something actual. There must be something actual which was prior to the universe.
Time cannot be reduced to gravitation, that is a misconception.
And this is also a misconception, because a field must itself be a property of something. So we cannot truthfully say "this something can also be just the field", because fields are always known to be the property of something which creates the field, therefore to assume "just the field" is in violation of physical evidence and inductive reasoning.
Quoting Possibility
Yes understanding is about having one logical system, because that is what produces consistency and coherency. To have multiple different conceptual systems which are unrelated allows for contradiction and incoherency, and this is misunderstanding. The only way to eradicate contradiction, incoherency, and misunderstanding is to have one overall system within which all the parts are coherent. To have parts out side one system, which are incoherent to that system, but are allowed to be maintained because they are coherent within a different system, is a symptom of misunderstanding.
To put this into your perspective, the perspective of "matter", or "what matters", what is required is a hierarchy of values. What is important or significant is determined relative to something valued. But when two competing values produce contradiction, or inconsistency in what is important, or not important, then we must appeal to a higher value to make the judgement as to whether the thing is important or not.
Quoting Possibility
Not at all, truth is sought for the sake of knowing the truth, not for some usefulness. That is why philosophy is known as being useless. Surely you must see this?
Quoting Possibility
This is clearly not true, as explained above. There is very clear evidence of a difference between various disciplines as to what is important, what matters. When it is the case that what is important to one discipline is not important to another discipline, there is incompatibility. The "broader understanding" which you refer to is just a higher purpose, a higher value, which can arbitrate the incompatibility.
Quoting Possibility
To seek the truth is not to "blindly follow doctrine", in fact it is the very opposite of that.
Importance and significance implies value, yes - but be careful not to assume that all value is judged by human minds, or according to a single system of logic. And no, importance and significance (value) can be meaningful simply in relation to other values.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Why must importance and significance only be judged in relation to human minds? Because we say so? What gives humans that authority? The difference here between language and quantum mechanics - as the authority by which we determine importance or significance - is accuracy that goes beyond human limitations of perception.
When value is recognised as a variable (as in mathematical logic), it is freed from the affected judgement of human minds (that assume they are logical), and perceived only in potential relation to other variables. This enables us to structure a logic of potential relation that is not limited by human sensibility (eg. homeostasis). Of course, its only useful if we can apply it in an embodied intra-action with the world. This is where scientific method is needed, to test and refine this relational structure that enables us to make increasingly accurate predictions about how humans can intra-act.
What has been routinely ignored in this scientific progress is the fact that humans are NOT logical creatures. The involvement of mathematics in science prior to quantum mechanics has downplayed how much our intra-actions are profoundly affected by our sensible limitations, and vice versa. With each new technology we appear more invincible, more unaffected, more rationally-minded. But were really just more ignorant, isolating and excluding.
Quantum mechanics demonstrates that humans dont have infinite access to energy, qualitative attention or time. And we are not passive, independent and logical observers of reality, but rather involved and affected participants in each intra-action, lately in an increasingly minor role. So when we describe science in terms of what we can do and how we can change the world, we need to be more responsible and accountable to the broader meaningfulness of agency and materiality that enable us to predict and actualise accurate intra-action with reality beyond our sensible limitations. We need to include non-human matter in discussions about agency, importance and significance. Or we will continue to undermine our homeostasis, by ignoring our interdependence in collaboration.
This requires a new logical framework, most noticeably in the area of grammatical logic. But this is not a matter of quantum mechanics dictating changes to grammatical logic, but rather bringing discursive practices into the intra-active process, acknowledging their significance as inseparable from the material practices of doing science. Because I think grammatical logic, properly understood and configured, is actually the key to our sustainable future.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is an important area to clear up, because Im talking about events here, not physical objects. So, does Aristotle acknowledge a particular event as both potential and actual, without breaking it down into physical objects? Consider that a hurricane consists of both actual and potential matter, as well as actual and potential form. How we understand the conceptual structure of reality affects how we intra-act in material-discursive practices. Dividing it up into categories is only part of understanding it. In what way does potential relate to actual? If you have to keep referring to a living human mind or a divine being to make the system work, then you have a self-shaped gap in your understanding. Humans are not necessary beings.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You keep trying to explain events in terms of objects, but its not the same structure. Active and actual have different qualitative structures for an event and for an object. Try to explain acceleration without reference to an object. Try to describe an entire acceleration event. You cannot use your current understanding of grammatical logic to describe the event - you are forced to change your perspective. But do you even notice that youve changed perspective? Do you recognise that you are describing an instantiated observation of the event, when Ive asked for a description of the actual event? How can you describe acceleration by simply describing an object at the point it begins to move? How is this describing actual acceleration?
Hes not reducing time to gravitation, hes describing the mathematical variable of Newtonian time as the gravitational field. Theres a difference.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No, fields have been previously assumed to be the property of something, but evidence from quantum experiments has brought this assumption into question. Your first clue should have been your appeal of always known to be. You have to remember that were talking about relational structures of significant variables as active (not actual) entities in a four-dimensional system.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Values dont exist in a single hierarchy, anymore than all events exist on a linear timeline. This is reductionism, and is a fault of mathematical logic that ignores the sensibility of dimensional reality. When two competing values produce a contradiction in what is important or not important, then we must first consider that we may be oversimplifying the relational structure of the two values in question, as an aspect of four-dimensional reality.
Reduction to a single logical system is broader than this, but its still a reduction. Ignoring information on the grounds of unintelligibility is still ignorance. Inconsistency and incoherence are symptomatic of misunderstanding, but the solution is not to eradicate information, but to consider the possibility that the system itself is inadequate, and that a broader relational framework is required (with some adjustment to configuration of the three systems) that would enable them to co-exist.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How can you be so certain you know the truth of reality, if you cannot use it? Philosophy is the love of wisdom - wisdom being knowledge of correct action, not simply knowledge.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Not a higher value, but a broader relational framework, in which to understand the perception of incompatibility.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And yet you automatically exclude what doesnt adhere to the doctrine of grammatical logic, despite being consistent across the logical structures of both mathematics and science. That sounds like blindly following doctrine to me.
Accuracy is a necessary aspect of truth, as is rationality and sensibility. Intelligibility may be rational and sensible, but can make no claims to accuracy. And grammatical logic is just one form of intelligibility (and English one kind of grammatical logic), as defined by human conceptualisation of ideas, under the assumption of independent and pre-determined boundaries and properties.
By the same token, mathematics aims for accuracy and rationality, but can make no claims to sensibility. And scientific methodology aims for accuracy and sensibility, but without mathematics would have no claim to rationality. Im not arguing for physics and maths, per se, but for the collaborative efforts they have made towards a more accurate truth as a common focus, despite the lack of mathematical interest in (and resistance to) a broader sensibility, and the lack of modern scientific interest in (and resistance to) a broader rationality.
What Im calling for is the same collaborative open-mindedness and desire for truth from those who place their faith in rational sensibility. But all Im getting is fearful, circular reasoning, as if Im rejecting the foundations of your truth. If those foundations are at risk from a critique on accuracy, then they were never really truth to begin with.
I definitely agree that value is not necessarily judged according to one system of logic, that's why values are commonly said to be subjective. But what else, other than human beings, do you think is capable of making value judgements? Would this be some other animals? I can agree that animals, maybe even plants, are capable of doing something which we might call making value judgements. Is this what you had in mind?
Quoting Possibility
Human minds are the type of thing which makes value judgements. We know that from experience. It is possible that other types of things. like animals and plants have a sort of mind which could make a value judgement. Is this what you are suggesting?
Quoting Possibility
No, recognizing a value as a variable does not free it from the judgement of a human mind, because a human mind is making that judgement to recognize it as a variable.
I agree in principle with much of what you say following this, but I have difficulty with this:
Quoting Possibility
I don't understand how you can talk about non-human matter, importance or significance without referencing God. Suppose some other creatures, plants and animals are capable of making value judgements (this would be a requirement if we are going to talk about what is important to them, they would have to be able to make such a judgement, because we cannot decide for them what is important to them, just like I cannot decide for you what is important to you). Don't you see that there would be so many contradictions between the various creatures, concerning what is important? Creatures eat other creatures. How do you propose that we could ever sort out this massive mess of conflicting matters (things of importance) without referencing some sort overlord judge, like God? Clearly us human beings are not capable of making such decisions and judgements, because what is important to me already conflicts with what is important to you. So each of us is going to insist "I am the one to decide what is important".
Quoting Possibility
But above, you argued for separate values, by recognizing values as variable. How can you argue the two opposing sides of the coin, variable values which are separable (above), and now, values which are inseparable form other values. What makes a value non-variable is its relations with other values. These relations set or fix the value within a concept. If there was such a thing as a separate, variable value, it would just be free floating, not attached to any other value to set its worth as "x value", therefore it would actually have no value at all.
Quoting Possibility
Sorry, I cannot decipher what you are trying to say here. As far as I know, a hurricane does not make value judgements, so we cannot say that a hurricane consists of matter, by your definition. There is nothing which is inherently important to the hurricane itself, because the hurricane makes no such judgements, there is only what a person, or persons might say is important to the hurricane, but this is a completely different matter. It is an importance which people impose on another, and that is what produces contradiction, and conflict, such attempts at forcing one's values on others.
Quoting Possibility
It is you who has chosen to define "matter" as importance or significance, and this is what requires reference to a mind which makes a value judgement. I had a different way of defining matter, which did not require referencing a mind which makes value judgements in order to understand the concept of "matter". Mine is the traditional concept of "matter", adopted by the sciences. The problem you refer to here is a problem with your ontology, your proposed definition of "matter", not mine.
Quoting Possibility
Like I've told you, and explained why to you, a number of times already, a particular "event", or "activity", without something which is active, is incoherent as a category mistake. You claim otherwise, but have provided nothing to back up your bald assertions. You simply continue to deny the obvious.
Quoting Possibility
Actually, quantum mechanics has provided absolutely no evidence of fields which are not the property of something. What is the case is that the failure of quantum mechanics in its ability to provide an understanding of reality, has made people speculate about the possibility of such fields. That's merely speculation which is unsupported by science.
Quoting Possibility
I know, this is obvious, and it's the reason why there is contradiction and conflict. The goal is a single hierarchy to dispel conflict and contradiction, but it is clearly not the case within the world we live in.
Quoting Possibility
We are seeking the truth, not claiming to know it. As philosophers we apprehend that the truth about reality is a long way off, but that does not stop us from heading in that direction. It's a march down a long road, which provides nothing useful to us who are doing the marching.
Quoting Possibility
Contradiction is a repugnancy, and repugnancy is not determined by grammatical logic, but intuition. So it's a matter of adhering to intuition, not a matter of adhering to grammatical logic. But naturally grammatical logic is intuitive. as grammatical logic is derived from intuition.
Mathematics and science are both so full of contradictions its pathetic. So your claim of "being consistent across the logical structures of both mathematics and science", is nonsense because the various different logical structures of mathematics are not consistent with each other, nor are the various different logical structures of science.
.
To judge is simply to form an opinion about importance, worth, significance, usefulness, etc - to configure a relation of potential to a particular perception of meaning configured as purpose or intentionality. Value can only be judged subjectively. But a value judgement is not value as an objective structure of reality. Its much more complex than this narrowly perceived relation configured as a linear hierarchy or sliding scale.
To understand value, we need to take into account the capacity of non-human materiality to contribute to a broader perception of meaning. The oscillation frequency of an electron in a caesium atom matters to us reading an atomic clock, but does this matter if no-one is telling the time? And isnt the number we attribute to this frequency just a value judgement - a measurement derived from our collaboration with the materiality of the clock components in telling time? The notion that meaning and value are structures exclusive to the human mind is symptomatic of grammatical conventions falling behind in understanding our broader relationality with the world.
I recognise that this can be confusing and disorienting without being able to rely on the conventions of grammatical logic as a foundation. But thats no reason to go back and hide behind ignorance. Not if truth is what were genuinely seeking. The logical system of grammar is still there - we just need to broaden our understanding of the conceptual structures that make up the system. Agential subjects, attributed actions and fundamentally inert objects are no longer sufficient structural elements with which to construct this broader understanding of reality.
The first paradigm shift recognises the elements of reality as consisting of interrelating events rather than objects and their attributable properties. Agency is recognised as a property of the system itself, and these so-called subjects, actions and objects are all fundamentally active elements, their apparent properties a purposeful configuration of the particular intra-action, within which we should recognise ourselves as necessarily involved.
A subsequent paradigm shift recognises the elements of reality as consisting of variable values, each with a logical, qualitative and dynamic relationality for meaningful intra-action. Beyond this is pure relational possibility, without distinction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We understand that from human experience, which is not to say that we know objectively. A mind is not required to respond to the variability of value, only to render it as a judgement, an opinion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Recognising a value as a variable is not judgement. Judgement assigns a particular number (hierarchical value) to that variable, ie. measurement.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We can reference God if youd like, but I would argue that God is not an actual being who makes value judgements, but is the pure, undifferentiated source of logical, qualitative and dynamic relationality, with which all judgements are but a localised (limited) intra-action of perceived meaning. Value judgement - the assumption that WE determine meaning, purpose and agency in the world according to our constructed language conventions (logos) - is the original sin. One can only correctly judge (assign a comprehensive value to) an event once it is complete, and we have all the information. So who is anyone to assign value judgement, when we ourselves are still becoming in relation to it all, and rely so much on collaboration with other materiality (ie. technology) for the comparatively little information we can access at any one time?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im hoping what I wrote above has clarified this a bit better for you. Mathematical logic agentially separates value into intra-acting variables (algebra) for the purpose of understanding the structure of relations between them. The value of x is not non-existent, only indeterminate (variable) without a logical structure of relations.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Does a hurricane respond to the variability of values? A hurricanes potential relies on certain variables (barometric pressure, temperatures, etc) to stay within a certain range of values. As those variables change, its form and matter change, and its potential shifts. So we understand that what is important to the hurricane are some variables and not others - regardless of how it might be perceived in terms of value. The hurricane therefore has its own value structure, limited though it may be. Assigning a numerical hierarchy doesnt change how the hurricane perceives those variables, only how we describe it to ourselves in an attempt to understand the relational structure that exists between the variables, regardless of hurricane or human.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Then how can you be sure youre on the right road, or even heading in the right direction?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That feeling of repugnance is intuition telling you theres something amiss, but there's no determining from affect alone whether whats amiss is in what youre describing or the system youre using to describe it. And you can only critique the system from outside it. So what are you afraid of?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So why cling to the goal? Why not try to understand the complexity as it exists?
OK, I will admit that it is possible to say that a value is not itself a value judgement. We can say that it is the result, or consequence of a value judgement. And, this is a necessary relation, a value does not exist independently of a value judgement, it is dependent on a value judgement, as only being capable of being produced by a value judgement. We can say, this is what a value is, what is produced from that type of judgement.
Also, please note that a value judgement, is an activity, an event. But a value, if we allow it separate existence, as something created by such a judgement, is now static, an object, because it has been separated from the agent, and the activity which created it. This is why we can say that a value is dependent on that agency, and is not properly independent from it.
Quoting Possibility
In this paragraph you describe value structures as being dependent on the human mind, then you conclude by saying that this is a " falling behind in understanding". But there is no other way to understand values, except as being dependent on minds, so how can this understanding be a" falling behind", rather than a moving forward. In reality, to deny that values are dependent on value judgements, which are dependent on minds, is what ought to be called a falling behind in understanding.
Quoting Possibility
All systems are artificial. We have mechanical systems, logical systems, as well as representative systems such as models. But all types of systems are fundamentally artificial, therefore agency in the sense of an intentional action of an intentional being, is required for the creation of any system. So agency is prior to a system, as cause of it, and any form of agency which inheres within the system is distinct from the type of agency which acts as a cause of the system. Now we have a very obvious need for dualism, to account for these two very distinct types of agency.
Quoting Possibility
All you are saying here is that a mind is required for the existence of the value, as a value. That is exactly what I am arguing.
Quoting Possibility
If God does not make value judgements, then we cannot reference God as the source of values independent from human minds. Therefore we ought to accept what the inductive reasoning and evidence shows us, that there are no independent values. All values are dependent on minds of the type that are human minds.
Quoting Possibility
This is very obviously a misunderstanding. Those particular values which are called "variables" are not important to the hurricane itself, but are important to the human understanding of the hurricane. The human beings are modeling the storm as a "system" and these are the variables which are important to them in their understanding of the storm. They are not important to the storm itself, because the storm has no intention, purpose, and doesn't care about anything whatsoever.
Quoting Possibility
As I said, intuition. And, very often I am on the wrong track, that's the problem with intuition, it's not super reliable. However, the open mind which is a necessary aspect of seeking the truth allows a person to readily change one's mind, as the need arises. That's the Socratic position of not knowing, the lack of certitude provides for an open mind.
Quoting Possibility
I don't follow this. The whole point of dualism is to allow for this position, that the thing being described, and the system describing it, are distinct. You reject dualism, but now you use a premise which requires dualism, "you can only critique the system from outside it", to make your argument. Without dualism, there is no such thing as outside the system, so the describing would be done with the same system which is being described. I believe this is why you seem to have a hard time with the category separation between the representation and the thing represented resulting in the category mistake I've pointed to. An activity, as a type, a description, or a model, does not require a particular thing which is active, because any specific activity is a type, a universal. But a particular activity, meaning a particular instance of activity, always involves something which is active.
.Quoting Possibility
Contradictions are impossible to understand. When they arise, we must respect the fact that the method being used, which creates contradiction, is faulty, rather than trying endlessly to understand what is impossible to understand.
I agree that a value judgement is an activity, an event. But Im not talking about a particular value created by such a judgement - a measurement. That is a position in a hierarchical (linear) relation to our momentary involvement in that event. It is not an object. What Im referring to is qualitative or potential value as variability, not a value as a reductionist relation to intra-action.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
What Im saying is we assume that value structures are dependent on the human mind, but this is a misunderstanding. The number is a measurement, a momentary intra-action with value, not value itself. It is the human mind that consists of ongoing value judgement - ongoing relationality to the inherent variability of potential/value.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Lets look at another definition:
System (noun): [i]1. a set of things working together as parts of a mechanism or an interconnecting network; a complex whole.
2. a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.[/i]
The only requirements for a system are complexity and relationality. Any system description must include a degree of artificiality (human involvement), but that doesnt make artifice fundamental to the system itself. That just means there is no way to describe the entire system, so that description always occurs from within. As Bohr says, We are part of that nature that we seek to understand.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Stop trying to anthropomorphise the hurricane. Regardless of our models, a hurricane would not exist without certain intra-acting variables (not particular values), which also determine its duration, movement, intensity, etc. Whether or not anyone cares or understands, these variable aspects of reality are important and significant to the hurricane in its becoming.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Im saying that the system of grammatical logic is incomplete as a structure of reality. Im pretty sure that you and I both agree here. Its why dualism seems to be your only solution. There is the human mind governed by grammatical logic, and some external system of reality it cannot accurately represent.
But dualism as an ontology is a cop-out in this respect. Its a refusal to posit and seek to understand a broader relational framework in which two systems can intra-act. It simply stops there and declares two distinct systems. And yet these systems are not independent, not mutually exclusive - they co-exist in a relational framework. But youre limited by outdated grammatical conventions, that keep you from understanding it.
Im suggesting that you consider the possibility that this logical system dictated by grammatical conventions exists in a broader relational framework which includes those aspects of mathematical and scientific findings that appear to contradict within the narrow framework of grammatical logic. Consider the possibility that youre on the wrong track, if it must stop at dualism.
Do you not agree that a "value" is the worth, desirability, or usefulness of a thing? And that this is the product of a judgement? If a particular thing has a "variable" value, then the thing has a different worth, desirability or usefulness depending on its context of existence relative to the mind that makes the judgement. How could a thing possibly have a variable value unless its value is a feature of its relationship with the mind which determines its value?
Quoting Possibility
I really cannot see how you are proposing to separate the value from the judgement, in order to support you claim that it is incorrect, or a misunderstanding, to say that value structures are mind-dependent.
What you appear to be saying, is that the number produced by a measurement, is the result of an interaction between a mind, and a value, such that both the value and the mind pre-exist the judgement. When the mind and the value come into relationship with one another, the mind measures, or makes a judgement, and the result is a number. The number represents the value, but the value maintains its independent status. So numbers are not values, they are representations of values.
In order for me to understand what you are proposing, I'm going to replace "number" which is a quantitative representation of value, with "good", which is qualitative. So we have goods which exist independently of the minds which apprehend them, as independent values. I like to call these goods "objects", instead of values (but maybe you don't like this), and I reserve "value" as the result of the judgement which the mind makes concerning the independent thing, which is considered as the "good" here. But I'll consider that the independent thing, the good itself, is a value, as you propose, and allow that the mind simply makes a representation of the real value, which exists independently.
Now, let's consider the matter of "variability". From my perspective, I would say that the variability of a value is a product of the relationship between the thing being valued, and the mind which values it. Differences in this relationship are responsible for the variability of the value. Variability is a product of the process of evaluation. But your proposal does not allow this. The value is independent from the mind which evaluates, so variability must inhere within the value itself.
How do you propose that a mind could ever determine the true representation of a value if the truth is that the value itself is variable? Any determination, or representation of a value, made by a mind, could be proven to be false, because the value itself, being represented, is intrinsically variable. Therefore no representation could be the true representation, or else contradicting representations could be true. If your proposal represents the truth about the way that values exist, then it would be absolutely impossible to determine the true representation of the value, because the value itself would be inherently variable, and any representation of it, produced by a mind, would be equally true and false.
On the other hand, the way that I look at values, "value" being the result of the relationship between a thing, object, and a mind, we can readily account for variability as a result of differences within this relationship. There can be a truth about the thing, the object, and variability is just a product of differences in the variety of possible relationships between mind and object.
Accordingly, your proposal excludes the possibility of truth concerning 'that which is independent', while the way that I look at 'that which is independent' allows for the possibility of truth. This is why I say that philosophers, metaphysicians, who are seeking truth, must necessarily reject proposals such as yours, because they render truth as impossible, and they ought to proceed in a direction such as what is outlined here by me, because this direction leaves truth as possible.
Quoting Possibility
Not quite, #1 assumes a "working together" as a "complex whole". This implies cooperation in relation to a purpose. And this means that such a "system" is created by intention. Also, #2 expresses intention toward getting something done. Therefore both #1 and #2 express more than complexity and relationality, but also purpose and intent. That is why I say that all systems are artificial, it's simply within the nature of what "a system" is, by any conventional definition.
Quoting Possibility
This clearly exemplifies the philosophically repugnant and unintelligibility of you perspective, as explained above. You position "values" as within the thing itself (the hurricane in this example), and therefore the variability of the values is also within the thing itself, rendering the truth about the thing as impossible to determine because the values themselves are indeterminate. Why did the hurricane make a last minute change which was not predicted? Because there was an amplified number of quantum fluctuations of value, which are actually impossible to predict, and this made it decide to do that.
Quoting Possibility
This is what is derived from your perspective, "some external system of reality it cannot accurately represent", because you place variability as inherent within that external "system". The human mind cannot possibly represent the external system of reality in a truthful way, because variability inheres within the independent reality, as contradicting properties within the thing itself. My perspective, on the other hand allows that the human mind can accurately represent the external reality because variability is a result of the relationship between the mind and the thing, it just has not yet developed that representation. Understanding this relationship, and properly representing it as a feature of our representations of reality allows for accurate representation.
Quoting Possibility
the idea of two systems intra-acting is completely useless as an approach to understanding the truth about natural reality. This is because the division of nature into separate systems would be completely arbitrary so the relations between systems would not represent any true relations between true things, but arbitrary boundaries imposed for various purposes, just like "model-dependent reality". This is evident in your hurricane example. We could model a high pressure area as "a system", and a low pressure area as "a system", or two low pressure areas as "two systems", and map these distinct systems with boundaries. However, any such boundaries are completely artificial, and arbitrary, and are not truthfully representative of the true nature of the atmospheric processes.
Quoting Possibility
I have very often, in the past considered the possibility that I am on the wrong track, and I continue to do so today. That is why I consider your posts very seriously, as I said, an open mind is a requirement for the seeking of truth. However, I have discussed this type of metaphysics already at this forum, and the deficiencies of the approach are becoming more and more apparent. Therefore this discussion with you serves more to strengthen my opinion rather than to change my mind. It's becoming more and more apparent to me, that the reason why mathematical and scientific findings seem to contradict the narrow framework of grammatical logic (the very few true principles I've found to cling to), from which I approach, is because the logic of these fields of discipline is severely compromised.
This seems a step beyond metaphysics in vagueness and incomprehensibility. Perhaps a link would help. :chin: