Do you mean how does causality as imagined by physics relate to causality as imagined by logic? Do they share the same root or are they antithetic?
Is it perhaps like the difference (and connection) between the truths of algebra and geometry? We inquire after entailment as a formal relation. And there is the physical view that is essentially geometric as spacetime rather matters or the algebraic view where even geometry can apparently be reduced beyond spacetime ... but then that little tussle re-emerges again when we move up the next level of abstraction, as in topological order?
So when it comes to this tricky relation between physics and logic, I am arguing that a model of causality is the ultimate target. And in reducing reality to causality, one could go "too far" in the reductionism. Spacetime and its material content as a geometry of relations become too much to sacrifice in the attempt to continue on towards the atomistic abstractions of Boolean logic.
Mechanics can only be taken so far before it becomes an unphysical nonsense?
Reply to Shawn Maybe logic describes physics in some ways, but I don't know if physics "describes" logic. Probably only as an application/example of it?
I don't know but can physics be undertaken without the logical axioms
Well, without some presumption of coherence, at least. If the aim of physics is to produce a coherent account of how physical things are, then it presupposes coherence, and hence logic.
Reply to Shawn If physics could describe logic, then could an alternate universe with different physics describe a different logical order? It would seem that logic would be the same, no matter what kinds of physics are in play.
If the aim of physics is to produce a coherent account of how physical things are, then it presupposes coherence, and hence logic.
:up: Sounds appropriate.
Count Timothy von IcarusJuly 28, 2024 at 23:49#9211300 likes
That's a pretty broad question. There is a fairly popular related view in physics today called "pancomputationalism." Per this view, the universe might be profitably seen as a "quantum computer that computes itself" (as a cellular automata lattice).
People have used this sort of idea to create computational and communications based theories of causation, which are pretty neat. Past states of a system end up entailing future states (or a range of them). This seems right in line with the idea of cosmic Logos in some respects. It's also a version of causation that seems to deal with some of Hume's "challenges."
However, it's worthwhile to recall that when steam engines were the new hot technology physicists also wanted to think of the universe as "one giant engine/machine." Now, this conception actually did tell us a lot, but it wasn't perfect. The same is probably true here. For one, if the universe is a "computer" in this way it cannot have true continua, and yet empirical evidence is inconclusive on the question of if the universe is ultimately discrete/finitist. If it wasn't discrete, it might still be "computation-like," but it wouldn't be computation because it would involve infinite decimal values.
The ability of ZX Calculus to construct QM is interesting here but I haven't really looked into it.
Logic is just how to talk with some sort of consistency.
And thus with some sort of differentiation.
So that is indeed the kind of holism that both physics and logic represent. The dialectic of global integration and local differentiation. The universals and their particulars. The laws and their initial conditions. :up:
Count Timothy von IcarusJuly 29, 2024 at 00:16#9211440 likes
I suppose that, per most forms of physicalism, physics does have to describe human logic in a certain sense. Can it do it? That's an interesting question.
Do you mean how does causality as imagined by physics relate to causality as imagined by logic? Do they share the same root or are they antithetic?
Yes, you nailed it. I think this is the fundamental thesis upon which this thread is about.
I don't really have much to say myself at the moment. Just one question, regarding which, where do you think mathematics stands in relation to what you said?
Deductive logic does not produce anything not in the assumptions.
Except that without such logic one will not be able to draw inferences, and this will limit their knowledge. The question of how the conclusion relates to the premises is age-old, but the fact remains that one person can draw valid inferences and another cannot, even when they have access to the same set of evidence. The difference between the two is that one possesses the art of logic and the other does not. To understand why logic was invented in the first place is to understand this.
Today logic has been reduced by some to pure formalisms, divorced from the art of reasoning well, but historically speaking this is a very recent phenomenon.
...It is also worth noting that the study of the logic of logic is still logic. Godel's proofs provide us with conclusions and theorems that we were previously ignorant of. We can say that his theorems were already present before he proved them, but they simply would not have been known without Godel's proficiency in logic. It would be odd to claim that there is no significant difference between an entailment that is known and an entailment that is unknown.
If you look at model theory, you can see on the one side a collection of rules, i.e. the axioms of a theory, and on the other side, a possibly even chaotic collection of facts (or "truths"), i.e. a model.
On the one hand, a model interprets the theory if none of its facts, no matter how chaotic, violates the theory's rules. On the other hand, a theory has a particular model if every statement provable from that theory is true in that model. Not all facts need to be provable from the theory.
Logic operates on the side of the theory. Physics operates on the side of the model.
Physics is a collection of facts in which science has observed stubborn patterns. These physical patterns are often confused for a theory, but they are not.
Physics as a model, i.e. a collection of facts, may very well interpret an otherwise unknown theory, i.e. some collection of rules (and not just stubborn patterns).
If this unknown theory of physics can be expressed in the language of first-order logic, then that would be the link between physics and logic.
We suspect that this link between physics and logic must somehow exists.
However, without actually formulating a legitimate theory for physics, we can never be sure.
I don't really have much to say myself at the moment. Just one question, regarding which, where do you think mathematics stands in relation to what you said?
Well I sort of said that geometry/topology is where they look to come the closest. Hence why Peirces existential graphs and Spencer-Browns laws of form are so appealing to some of us. Much less so category theory even it it does actively strive to lay claim to physics.
And there is the physical view that is essentially geometric as spacetime rather matters or the algebraic view where even geometry can apparently be reduced beyond spacetime ... but then that little tussle re-emerges again when we move up the next level of abstraction, as in topological order?
Classically after studying the Trivium (of grammar, logic, and rhetoric), one would study the Quadrivium:
The quadrivium was the upper division of medieval educational provision in the liberal arts, which comprised arithmetic (number in the abstract), geometry (number in space), music (number in time), and astronomy (number in space and time).
Astronomy, the study of number in space and time, is more or less what we now think of as physics.
So that suggests it all comes back to "number", even for what where then the liberal arts (a way to squeeze things past the eagle eye of the Church?).
Then grammar, logic and rhetoric concern themselves with the syntax of number rather than the semantics.
So numbers carry sense both as general variables and as particular facts. Or better yet, measurements.
I would agree with all this. The point of an education is to lift us above the socio-cultural constraints of an oral world order socially constructed in words to a technocratic or rational world order. And that is socially constructed in numbers as signs that connect semantics and syntax into some pragmatic business of utterances and locutions.
So that would make the maths more clearly the handmaiden to the physics? Physics employs numbers in both the syntactic and semantic sense as the scientific generality of a variable, as the particularity of a measurement.
That could be too harsh if it is recognised that logic is larger than just propositional calculus. Logic as a triadic system of inference becomes the common root of thought under Peirce. It injects the same pragmatism into the practice of philosophy too.
As in....
Many 19th-century logicians (for example, John S. Mill, George Boole, John Venn and William Stanley Jevons) took the range of logic to include deductive as well as inductive logic.
As appears from the classification, the remarkable novelty of Peirces logical critics is that it embraces three essentially distinct though not entirely unrelated types of inferences: deduction, induction, and abduction.
Initially, Peirce had conceived deductive logic as the logic of mathematics, and inductive and abductive logic as the logic of science. Later in his life, however, he saw these as three different stages of inquiry rather than different kinds of inference employed in different areas of scientific inquiry.
No. Physics (provisionally) explains 'the regularities of nature' and logic (exactly) describes 'the entailments of regularities as such'. The latter is, imo so to speak, the syntax of the former (i.e. physics discursively presupposes logic). Why? Perhaps because ... nature, which includes constitutes h. sapiens' intelligence, is a dynamic process evolving within (thermal?) constraints from initial conditions ur-regularities.
The point of an education is to lift us above the socio-cultural constraints of an oral world order socially constructed in words to a technocratic or rational world order.
An academic education rather teaches the fine points of sophistry, suitable for bamboozling the masses.
Since employers like CNN and Harvard can only employ that many mouthpieces, a training in sophistry increasingly leads to unemployment. Even the Chinese Communist Party says that it is fully staffed now, leaving every year millions of new graduates without a suitable job.
I would agree with all this. The point of an education is to lift us above the socio-cultural constraints of an oral world order socially constructed in words to a technocratic or rational world order. And that is socially constructed in numbers as signs that connect semantics and syntax into some pragmatic business of utterances and locutions.
Yes, but one must begin with communication in the Trivium: Grammar (understanding language), Logic (the ability to analyze thought, and to progress in thinking), and Rhetoric (the ability to use grammar and logic in the service of persuasion). One must understand "social constructions" before moving beyond them.
But that is the syntax, or the rules of argument construction and transmission. The geometry of relations to complement the algebra of the relatables.
It is that, but I think the philologists would object if we were to reduce language to a social construction, or if we were to reduce it to the matter for argument or science. Language is all these things, but it is other things, too.
As appears from the classification, the remarkable novelty of Peirces logical critics is that it embraces three essentially distinct though not entirely unrelated types of inferences: deduction, induction, and abduction.
This is interesting. So too for Aristotle and many Aristotelians, the division between deductive and inductive logic is not so clear-cut.
The rules of chess encompass all the possible games of chess without themselves being one, and a game can provide examples of the rules in action, without being them.
Logic operates on the side of the theory. Physics operates on the side of the model.
That would be one way physics on the one side, could explain logic on the other. But then explanations themselves are theories, so how could physics itself describe anything - logic does the talking.
Logic might more easily describe physics.
Or is the question more:
Does physics entail logic?
Are the pieces of logic physical things - brain functions?
That would require a usable theory of physical reality, which we don't have. We just have a collection of stubborn patterns.
You cannot logically recombine these stubborn patterns and hope that such syllogism will always predict a true fact in the physical universe. If it works anyway, you are just lucky, because this practice is actually unsupported. That is why you always have to test again.
One of those possibly pseudo-questions which may be sophistry; but, in your opinion do you think physics describes logic?
You need logic before you can study physics. As was said already. (This incidentally is a cogent argument against physicalism as logic is used to construct physics, but not vice versa.)
I think there's a fascinating connection between Galileo's 'book of nature is written in mathematics' and the ability of modern mathematical physics to model and predict hitherto unknown natural processes. Through quantification, which comprises the ability to capture the measurable attributes of objects and forces, we are able to apply abstract mathematical methods, which often produce startingly novel results (per Eugene Wigner's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.)
That would require a usable theory of physical reality, which we don't have. We just have a collection of stubbor
Isn't a lot of what you write based on the fact that science doesn't explain science, mathematics doesn't explain maths, and so on? I mean, physical principles, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, and related mathematical techniques including calculus have been deployed to enormous effect across a huge range of applications. But Newton's laws don't explain why F=MA - nor do they need to. Can't we get by without knowing that?Isn't it sufficient to know how they work and how to apply them?
Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Godels theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent or incomplete. The theories we have so far are both inconsistent and incomplete.
Physics is a collection of stubborn patterns that can be observed in the physical universe and not a theory in the mathematical sense.
Reply to apokrisis
The equivalent of a theorem would rather be a single stubborn pattern (which they confusingly often call a theory in physics).
It is an entire collection of such stubborn patterns that would be the counterpart of a theory in mathematical logic, on the condition that these patterns sufficiently hang together in one way or another.
But then again, they also have lots of separate theories in physics, each covering some other area of the field. They are meant to be complementary bodies of knowledge. In mathematical logic, different theories are alternatives to each other.
The term means something else in science versus in mathematical logic. Even in general mathematics, the term often just means some body of knowledge, just like in science, and which does not necessarily satisfy the definition of the term in mathematical logic.
It is an entire collection of such stubborn patterns that would be the counterpart of a theory in mathematical logic, on the condition that these patterns sufficiently hang together in one way or another.
I can't take this too seriously. Have you studied much fundamental physics? Especially with quantum field theory and particle physics, the tendency has been just to apply the mathematical patterns and marvel how they force nature onto these stubborn outcomes.
The maths is "unreasonably effective". Somehow or other, nature keeps jamming itself into the arrangements described by permutation symmetries and matrix mechanics. You might need the Higgs field to force the SU(2) electroweak sector to crack diagonally into SU(2)xU(1), but because something had to do the job physically, the Higgs could be the fictional beast with its own SU(2) structure that could "eat" three of the electroweak's degrees of freedom, so allowing the U(1) photon to burst free.
It is a crazy tale of science being forced into a wild speculation. And yet tellingly as this was the mindset that particle physics had learnt to adopt from painful experience three groups came up with the same solution all at the same time, making the distribution of the Nobel prize uncomfortably contentious.
So there we have physics reaching the point where the maths constructs the patterns, and if the patterns are possible, nature must wriggle about until it has discovered a strange machinery to achieve the goal of fitting the forms preordained.
The Big Bang could have been halted at many points in its hot unfolding. But with every phase change, it kept on track to become as mathematically self-simplified as possible.
Inflation seems needed to have prevented an immediate gravitational collapse. The Higgs transition looks to have then stabilised the vacuum when inflation broke and dumped its energy into a lot of reheated particles. Even then particle physics was doomed as all the matter was going to be consumed by all the antimatter eventually. But another completely different kind of mechanism the strong force with its SU(3) confinement came into play, wrapping up quarks into proton balls and so allow a new game based on electron~proton electrodynamics to take over from matter~antimatter annihilation.
In just the first few minutes of the Big Bang, the physics had tumbled down a hierarchy of algebraic geometry permutation symmetries to become stable enough to now last "forever". It was composed of particles with no further possibility to decay, in a vacuum properly secured.
I would agree that the fact that this worked believing that nature must find its way into mathematical-strength patterns has itself become rather an issue for the practice of physics. Now we are flooded by every kind of maths-first theorising like string theory and a hundred more. A lot of speculative crap has followed as I don't think the way that the maths and physics have connected in symmetry terms is a trick that is properly understood.
This is why I mention topological order as the actual root that connects. And here physics has its own kind of lead in its condensed matter models and such-like. These are now becoming quite influential on mathematics. Ricci curvature and other thermodynamical flow models have proven some pretty big results.
And isn't that the healthy outcome? Some kind of mutual connection between maths and physics as cultures of inquiry? No need to make it a contest between logical rigour vs experimental validity. We have to come at nature from both these directions to grasp its truth.
And isn't that the healthy outcome? Some kind of mutual connection between maths and physics as cultures of inquiry? No need to make it a contest between logical rigour vs experimental validity. We have to come at nature from both these directions to grasp its truth.
No matter how well physics manages to study a plethora of stubborn physical patterns, it hasn't reached the stage at which mathematical logic can consider it to be a legitimate "theory".
The physical universe is one big model, i.e. a vast collection of facts. Where is its single theory? Every statement that is provable from this theory needs to be a true fact in the physical universe. Furthermore, not one single fact in the physical universe may contradict this theory.
Then, and only then, physics will be a legitimate "theory" in accordance with the definition in mathematical logic.
No matter how well physics manages to study a plethora of stubborn physical patterns, it hasn't reached the stage at which mathematical logic can consider it to be a legitimate "theory".
Says who apart from you? Can you cite some source for this opinion? And why would maths be a judge of how physics proceeds anyway.
I just point out there is a relationship which you appear to be overlooking. And from a physicists point of view, the way mathematicians carry on can look equally wasteful of smart young minds. Chasing patterns that arent even useful.
The Yang-Mills mass gap may be a good example of whether mathematical purity matters to anyone but mathematicians. Is it actually important for some physical reason?
A theory of everything (TOE), final theory, ultimate theory, unified field theory or master theory is a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all aspects of the universe.[1]:?6? Finding a theory of everything is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.[2][3]
Stephen Hawking no longer believed that the ToE is an attainable goal:
Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind.
Why physicists are rethinking the route to a theory of everything
Physicists search for a theory that explains all reality in one framework appeared to have stalled. But now they are reinvigorating the hunt by exploring a wild landscape of abstract geometry.
Thats how physicists feel about the theory of everything, a putative final framework that would explain all reality in one fell swoop. This is the ultimate goal for physics, with Stephen Hawking once memorably writing that to find it would be to know the mind of God.
They do not say it explicitly, but to me it is obvious that what they want from the ToE, is a "theory" that satisfies the requirements of the definition for the term in mathematical logic. Otherwise, there will be barely any improvement to the current situation, as characterized by Hawking:
Thus a physical theory is self referencing, like in Godels theorem. One might therefore expect it to be either inconsistent or incomplete. The theories we have so far are both inconsistent and incomplete.
They do not say it explicitly, but to me it is obvious that what they want from the ToE, is a "theory" that satisfies the requirements of the definition for the term in mathematical logic.
It depends on your metaphysics if an exact quantum gravity theory is needed instead of an effective one. It you believe that emergence rules, that topological order is now king, then effective is all you expect.
That was the point I just argued in recounting the way the physics keeps jamming itself into the contortions of gauge invariance to ensure the rolling weight of the Big Bang continued long enough to have become interesting to those such as us.
One of those possibly pseudo-questions which may be sophistry; but, in your opinion do you think physics describes logic?
No. In fact, one might say that the opposite is true. As Hume said, there is no 'proof' of, say, physical causality, we cannot be certain of it. On the other hand, it seems that any physical theory must be logically consistent. Logic is, I think, transcendental (i.e. a necessary precondition to any explanation) as the early Wittgenstein said.
Also, there is no conclusive evidence that physical laws are not contingent.
I disagree. Science can exist even if such a theory is impossible. It isn't essential to science IMO, so it cannot be its 'ultimate' goal.
Physicists are currently siting on two stubborn patterns that are incompatible: quantum mechanics and gravity.
These two stubborn patterns "do not play nice with each other" and "dictate separate and contradictory rules for the cosmos" and "are mathematically incompatible" and "cannot explain things by applying them in separation". (quotes below)
So, physicists want a "grand unified" pattern instead. Physicists seem to view this effort as essential.
Such grand unified scheme may still not be a theory as defined in mathematical logic, but if this new stubborn pattern manages to remove existing inconsistencies, then chances are that it will be that too.
Wrangling the final (and, surprisingly enough, weakest) force, gravity, is a much harder task: Electromagnetism, as well as the strong and weak forces, can be shown to fundamentally follow the strange-but-calculable quantum rules. Yet gravity is, at present, best described by Einsteins general theory of relativity, which concerns the universe at larger scales. These two frameworks do not play nice with each other; quantum mechanics and relativity effectively dictate separate and contradictory rules for the cosmos.
We need a theory of quantum gravity because general relativity and the standard model are mathematically incompatible. So far, this is a purely theoretical problem because with the experiments that we can currently do, we do not need to use quantum gravity. In all presently possible experiments, we either measure quantum effects, but then the particle masses are so small that we cannot measure their gravitational pull. Or we can observe the gravitational pull of some objects, but then they do not have quantum behavior. So, at the moment we do not need quantum gravity to actually describe any observation.
During its early phase our cosmos was a world with extremely high energy enclosed in an extremely small domain of space. There was the very active interaction of particles and radiation in a highly curved spacetime. These phenomena cannot be explained by applying the theory of relativity and quantum field theory in separation. We need a unified theory, a theory of quantum gravity. Such theory does not exist up to now.
But why would that justify thinking physics should "describe logic"?
Yea, I guess I'm using to describe and to express to mean the same thing. Maybe it's more that if you've seen the expression, the description has been conveyed to you? Like if you see a model of the earth's electromagnetic dynamo, you're seeing the principles involved in making the model expressed, so you're also receiving a description of those principles. Or you could pull a description out of the expression. Is that not true?
Accounting uses math, does the study of accountancy "describe math"?
Math originally came from accounting, believe it or not. The number zero came from a Babylonian device that was kind of like an abacus. Writing down the configuration on the abacus is where a symbol for zero came from. Zero's place in the human mind was cemented by practical issues surrounding trade. Math as an abstract domain comes from the invention of non-commodity money. Wherever the use of money spread, a tendency to think in mathematical abstraction followed.
One of those possibly pseudo-questions which may be sophistry; but, in your opinion do you think physics describes logic?
Not sure what this could mean, but maybe one can give it meaning. For example, I had a computer which can display a simple valid argument using traditional symbolism, say modus ponens. Could we not describe the physics behind the computers expression of this argument. If so, could we not do the same with a human?
I was not expecting this reply. I thank you for humbling me.
Still, just because one field of study uses another field of study doesn't mean the first field always "describes" the second field, does it? Accounting and math notwithstanding.
Still, just because one field of study uses another field of study doesn't mean the first field always "describes" the second field, does it?
I guess not. But if a field is bound to logic, it will be a demonstration of logic, won't it? Couldn't describing and demonstrating both be kinds of showing?
Math originally came from accounting, believe it or not
Well, here is what ChatGPT has to say:
Mathematics and accounting are deeply intertwined, but mathematics did not originally come from accounting. Instead, mathematics has a much broader and older origin that spans various domains.
Heres a brief overview of how these fields are related:
Early Mathematics: The origins of mathematics date back to ancient civilizations such as the Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks. Early mathematics involved basic counting, measurements, and arithmetic. These practices were crucial for various practical activities like agriculture, trade, and construction.
Accounting Origins: The practice of accounting, especially systematic bookkeeping, has roots in ancient civilizations as well. For instance, the Sumerians developed one of the earliest known accounting systems around 3000 BCE, which involved recording transactions on clay tablets. Accounting was essential for managing resources, trade, and taxation.
Development of Mathematics: Mathematics evolved from these practical needs into a more abstract and systematic study. Ancient Greeks, such as Pythagoras, Euclid, and Archimedes, made significant contributions to mathematics that went beyond mere accounting and measurements, exploring geometry, number theory, and more.
Interconnection: As mathematics developed, it increasingly influenced and was influenced by accounting practices. For example, the development of algebra and calculus provided tools for more sophisticated financial analysis and modeling.
In summary, while accounting and mathematics are closely related and have influenced each other, mathematics as a discipline predates accounting and encompasses a much broader range of study than accounting alone.
Physicists are currently siting on two stubborn patterns that are incompatible: quantum mechanics and gravity.
But they arise within the beauty of this larger pattern. Okuns cube of theories. As outlined here .
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530
And is maths itself organised in any grand cube of theories? Is everything slotted together under some grand unifying project like category theory or the Langlands program?
On this issue, you seem just interested in being contentious rather than insightful.
And is maths itself organised in any grand cube of theories? Is everything slotted together under some grand unifying project like category theory or the Langlands program?
Mathematics has a massive foundational crisis with insurmountable issues.
The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus or Shelter Structure (Ukrainian: ??'??? "???????") is a massive steel and concrete structure covering the nuclear reactor number 4 building of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The sarcophagus resides inside the New Safe Confinement structure.
My hobby would be to compare it to the open-air molten cores of the six Fukushima reactors and try to find similarities.
Secondly, I don't trust a tool until I understand its limitations. That is why you have to crash test it thoroughly.
That is why I find the foundational crisis in mathematics an exhilarating subject. I try to devour all the literature. [I]Show me something else that goes wrong! Is it that bad?[/I]
[I]"Mathematics proper"[/I] is fiendishly boring in comparison.
Thirdly, most programmers hate bugs. I love them. They always called me for those, because I was apparently the only one who liked working on them. There is nothing more fun than a complete mess.
Last but not least, the foundational crisis in mathematics says a lot about the universe itself, which is itself obviously also a complete mess. The metaphysical implications of the crisis are utmost fascinating.
I don't like beautiful theories. They are boring. I don't trust smooth talkers. If it is too good to be true, then it undoubtedly is.
It's not an issue with mathematics as it may seem. It's an issue with the very notion of possibility theory in systems, such as physics which quite possibly determines states in nature.
People have used this sort of idea to create computational and communications based theories of causation, which are pretty neat. Past states of a system end up entailing future states (or a range of them). This seems right in line with the idea of cosmic Logos in some respects. It's also a version of causation that seems to deal with some of Hume's "challenges."
I think your right about this. You seem updated with the right semantic model in mind.
So, physicists want a "grand unified" pattern instead. Physicists seem to view this effort as essential.
My point was simply that I think 'Physics' as a discipline has still a 'raison d'etre' if 'a theory of everything' is impossible to achieve. I myself worked briefly in condensed matter physics, a branch of physics that is quite independent to the search of a 'theory of everything'. To some physicists might be essential, maybe even famous ones, but this does not mean that physics becomes vain if a 'theory of everything' is impossible. There still much to be discovered about physical phenomena that can be 'modeled' with current theories.
Do you mean how does causality as imagined by physics relate to causality as imagined by logic? Do they share the same root or are they antithetic?
I am once again focusing on this as the thesis of this thread. If one were to know the antithetic nature of what apokrisis said then it might be deduced on such gestaltism to see the bounds and limits of physics and logical determinism.
If physics is to be descriptive of logic, then, a "cause" would be defined by how the system of laws governing physics works, and from there to deduce what logic would be required to explain those laws in terms of decidability in logical space.
My point was simply that I think 'Physics' as a discipline has still a 'raison d'etre' if 'a theory of everything' is impossible to achieve. I myself worked briefly in condensed matter physics, a branch of physics that is quite independent to the search of a 'theory of everything'. To some physicists might be essential, maybe even famous ones, but this does not mean that physics becomes vain if a 'theory of everything' is impossible. There still much to be discovered about physical phenomena that can be 'modeled' with current theories.
Indeed, physics has its merits. I don't think anybody denies that. I was just pointing out what some of its problems are, and how these problems relate to mathematical logic.
Indeed, physics has its merits. I don't think anybody denies that. I was just pointing out what some of its problems are, and how these problems relate to mathematical logic.
Is this chicken or egg? Physics came first in a non-anthropological manner. QED?
You can study/employ/use logic without physics. But the viceversa is not true. You can't do physics without logic. That's why I said that logic is transcendental with respect to physics: it is a necessary precondition for physics. And same, I think, is true for science in general.
I cannot conceive doing physics without employing logic. Not even experimental physics: after all, experimental protocols seem to be based in a procedure that follows logical laws.
On the other hand, I can study/do/discuss logic without any reference to physics. Same goes for mathematics, actually.
Yes, well may I ask whether there are things that cannot be modeled in a computer?
I'm also trying to understand your argument about logic being transcendental. Do you mean to say logic is foundational to every state of change within a system, as logic seems necessary to produce change or "cause and effect" between objects that may have a relation as defined by physical laws through logic or the transcendental logic you mention.
Yes, well may I ask whether there are things that cannot be modeled in a computer?
Well, I don't know. I think that, say, some discoveries in physics could not be made by a computer (say e.g. Newton's discovery of gravitation)
But I am not sure why you think that it would show that if that is the case then physics would have a precedence over logic. After all, computer operations too follow logical principles.
I'm also trying to understand your argument about logic being transcendental. Do you mean to say logic is foundational to every state of change within a system, as logic seems necessary to produce change or "cause and effect" between objects that may have a relation as defined by physical laws through logic or the transcendental logic you mention.
By saying 'x is transcendental for y' I mean that 'x' is a necessary prerequiste for 'y'. It's roughly like saying that a 'functioning visual system' (x) is 'transcendental' to 'seeing colors' ( y).
Anyway, what I meant is that logic is employed in any activity in physics, both theoretical and experimental.
Using your example, any causal explanation of physical phenomena must be formulated in a way that employs logical principles (this seems true even if Hume was actually right in his skepticism about causation. Causal explanation relie on logic, even those that are not valid).
But I am not sure why you think that it would show that if that is the case then physics would have a precedence over logic. After all, computer operations too follow logical principles.
Sure, I would like to highlight your uncertainty as stemming from not knowing how logical space can exist. Is it true in how I'm framing the ambiguity?
Additionally, as @apokrisis main question, is there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics? I'm only saying this as it might seem interesting given logical positivists believed in a correspondence theory of language and truth through logic...
Sure, I would like to highlight your uncertainty as stemming from not knowing how logical space can exist. Is it true in how I'm framing the ambiguity?
No, as I said I don't understand why it is relevant to the debate about physics and logic, i.e. I see the two issues as separate, but I might be wrong.
there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics?
IMO, all explanations relie on logical principles. But even, say, the basic concept of 'prediction' is based on logical reasoning:
"If [some kind of theoretical statements are valid] then [ I should observe such and such in a lab]"
So, I cannot see how physics can be considered as foundational to logic (or math) when the former cannot exist, in my opinion, without the latter. Note that even if all our physical theories, explanations etc were wrong their structure has logic as a prerequisite. Explanations and predictions are based on logic.
Also, logical argumentation cannot be based on physical phenomena and their regularities. Why? Because, there is no guarantee that physical phenomena and their regularities are not contingent and if they were contingent, then logical argumentation would not be compelling.
Unless one shows that regularities in phenomena are not contingent physics cannot be foundational for logic and mathematics IMO.
I am sorry but I really don't understand what are you getting at.
To me logic is a discipline that aims at understanding the criteria according to which an explanation, argumentation, theory etc is coherent.
Physical theories, conjectures, protocols, predictions, explanations etc should be coherent.
Even, say, a false explanation must be coherent in order to be considered 'false'. In fact, in order to be a true 'explanation' must be coherent.
And I believe that the criteria according to which an explanation is deemed 'coherent' cannot be based on something that is or might be contingent.
If physics is to be descriptive of logic, then, a "cause" would be defined by how the system of laws governing physics works, and from there to deduce what logic would be required to explain those laws in terms of decidability in logical space.
This might be a starting point, I think, on which we can work.
IMO, the problem I see here is that when you try to describe the laws you might infer from your observations, you already use logic and mathematics (to make them coherent and give quantitative predictions). So, I guess I can say that in order to 'ground' logic in physics, you are already assuming that logic is fundamental.
What do you think about this last paragraph? Do you think I am wrong in detecting a circuarity here? If so, why?
And I believe that the criteria according to which an explanation is deemed 'coherent' cannot be based on something that is or might be contingent.
I don't think we can have the cake and eat it too here. The way things seem is that the very notion of possibility within a system of physical laws gives rise to a logic that is modal. Modality might be a better term than contingent...
IMO, the problem I see here is that when you try to describe the laws you might infer from your observations, you already use logic and mathematics (to make them coherent and give quantitative predictions). So, I guess I can say that in order to 'ground' logic in physics, you are already assuming that logic is fundamental.
What do you think about this last paragraph? Do you think I am wrong in detecting a circuarity here? If so, why?
It would be interesting to approach your question from the perspective of a counterfactual. What would a physics look like that could not be apprehended by any form of inferential or abductive reasoning? I don't think such questions are coherent, and there seems to be plenty of evidence attesting that everything in physics can be modeled. If it is indeed true that human logic can apprehend physics in a model or what have you (I think the right term, nowadays, is a "simulation"), then the circularity dissipates.
The only question that seemingly would remain as I see it, is whether logic is this medium by which physics and even mathematics subsists on...
By the way, I might add, I believe modal logic is capable of a ad hoc proof of the necessity of formally consistent and hypothetically complete formal systems in logic if physics describes logic. Even at a deeper level, truth itself, seemingly subsists on such an assumption.
Additionally, as apokrisis main question, is there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics?
Another line to take on the question is to note how both logical entailment and physical causality share a presumption about global closure. A grounding as in conservation laws or Noether symmetry.
Personally I look at most of what has been said in this thread in terms of computability. I'm not a simulation theorist and don't believe in it given complexity class issues arising once one would try and model in expspace and exptime.
Furthermore, regarding my previous post, it seems possible that there could be some things one can have in causality (think synchronicity or Bell's inequality locality and non-locality) that can't simply be modeled.
Furthermore, regarding my previous post, it seems possible that there could be some things one can have in causality (think synchronicity or Bell's inequality locality and non-locality) that can't simply be modeled.
That's another line of attack. To what degree can we tolerate a physics that is illogical or a logic that is unphysical?
The two have to hang together in some deep way or they both risk becoming abstract nonsense.
How could truth be possible without a formally consistent and complete system to render it as such?
Particular truths must be constrained by general truths. Particular worlds must be constrained by general worlds. This is the common structure of both a scientific and a mathematical approach to the business of metaphysical inquiry. As Peirce made especially clear.
Do you think, as possibly quite interesting ponderance, that if physics can be modeled in a direct correspondence between logic (a computer) and the world, then would that mean by entailment that certain features if not the entirety of the model proves (quite literally proof of simulation in logical space, that the system of logic utilized by the model itself) that it is actually a formally complete and consistent system contra Gödel?
Reply to Shawn No I think computation is quite misguided in that direction. And what logic are we talking about? Boolean, Turing machine, floating point simulation, python? Just some kind of digitalism in general? The questioned would have to be sharpened.
You could think about where maths and physics do come close as an effort to simulate reality. QCD lattice models of the inside of a proton. What is achieved and what is glossed over might inform such a debate. But probably not.
I know digital physics is one of those popular topics. But I dont believe that is what information - as it applies as the notion of physical degrees of freedom or entopy bits - has anything to do with computational logic.
Holography is about dimensional constraint - extracting bits from wholes. Computation is about constructing patterns from bits.
Logic is mechanistic about relations, so I don't see the need to type-token issues. I also don't think logic has properties ascribed to these relations, again it's possible to do so as they do such things in computer games. Yet, to talk again in terms of complexity class I don't think we could do the things nature or any mechanistic conception of nature as science would we want or hope to do.
Again, I am not a simulation proponent but am only interested in logic being descriptive of physics.
I don't think we can have the cake and eat it too here. The way things seem is that the very notion of possibility within a system of physical laws gives rise to a logic that is modal. Modality might be a better term than contingent...
I disagree. By 'contingent' I mean something that might to cease to exist/be valid. If physical laws are something contingent and they at some point change, the criteria by which we consider an explanation 'coherent' change, if we take them as the foundation of logic. I don't think that is acceptable.
It would be interesting to approach your question from the perspective of a counterfactual. What would a physics look like that could not be apprehended by any form of inferential or abductive reasoning? I don't think such questions are coherent, and there seems to be plenty of evidence attesting that everything in physics can be modeled. If it is indeed true that human logic can apprehend physics in a model or what have you (I think the right term, nowadays, is a "simulation"), then the circularity dissipates.
Maybe physical theories, models etc cannot give us a picture of the 'physical world' but only useful tools to make predictions. If that is the case, it might be said that they work 'as if' they are a correct 'description'.
Consider, for instance, these two phrases:
"The sun moves from east to west and I predict that it reaches its maximum height at noon"
"When the bat hits the ball, (edit: it produces a force that) will cause an acceleration on the ball"
The first phrase is coherent, in many situations we can use it 'as if' it's correct, but it is nevertheless wrong if we take it literally: we know that the sun's movement is merely apparent. But for most practical situations I can certainly live 'as if' it's correct. I can take it seriously but not literally.
The second one is also coherent, for most practical purposes valid and yet we know that it cannot be taken as literally true.
You seem to assume that physical reality can be literally 'mapped' in a conceptual model, i.e. it has a structure that can be literally 'translated' in a conceptual framework. I guess that if we assume that this is true then maybe we might think that logic has a 'physical basis' (although then one might ask why this is so... but this is another story for another time).
On the other hand, physical theories might be able to work even if they cannot give a faithful picture of physical reality. But if this is true, then logic isn't really grounded in physics: the conceptual map is imputed by us and is not 'forced' by physical reality.
If a simulation were so accurate that it would be impossible to distinguish it from 'reality', it could be still possible that such a simulation would be correct for all practical purposes and not a literal picture of reality.
In brief, I think that your reasoning is based on a hidden assumption, i.e. that it is possible to build a conceptual 'map' of reality that is a literal picture of it.
By 'contingent' I mean something that might to cease to exist/be valid. If physical laws are something contingent and they at some point change, the criteria by which we consider an explanation 'coherent' change, if we take them as the foundation of logic. I don't think that is acceptable.
I'd like to point out that I view the very notion of having possibility within a system can only mean in terms of modal logic the necessity of determined states which are truth apt regarding causality.
You seem to assume that physical reality can be literally 'mapped' in a conceptual model, i.e. it has a structure that can be literally 'translated' in a conceptual framework. I guess that if we assume that this is true then maybe we might think that logic has a 'physical basis' (although then one might ask why this is so... but this is another story for another time).
I hope this thread can go in such a direction. It seems plausible that the logic of causality can only be defined materially and temporarily.
I disagree. By 'contingent' I mean something that might to cease to exist/be valid. If physical laws are something contingent and they at some point change, the criteria by which we consider an explanation 'coherent' change, if we take them as the foundation of logic. I don't think that is acceptable.
I'd like to address this again given that my previous response was just conjecture. What I want to point out is the ability for a system to change. This change is dictated by causality. To understand causality we have to regard nature as a unitary system evolving through time. So, with this said, what do you think "possibility" might mean?
I'd like to point out that I view the very notion of having possibility within a system can only mean in terms of modal logic the necessity of determined states which are truth apt regarding causality.
What do you thank that is the 'ground' of modal logic?
I hope this thread can go in such a direction. It seems plausible that the logic of causality can only be defined materially and temporarily.
Let's concede that is indeed the case.
It seems to me that, according to you, we should infer logical principles by observing physical phenomena, which we assume that have regularities which can be 'translated faithfully' in a conceptual map.
Let's assume that it is indeed possible, in principle, to infer logical principles in this way.
But what does gaurantee us that, indeed, our inference is correct? On what grounds can we be sure that our inference is correct?
We cannot say 'further observations' because, after all, the problem remains the same.
So we now have two assumptions: (1) physical phenomena have regularities that can be 'faithfully translated' to conceptual maps/schemes and (2) we can know logical principles because we can have valid inferences based on observations made on the said physical phenomena
These two assumptions might be considered reasonable but... we have introduced the concept of 'inference', which is a type of logical operation which we actually want to ground in physical observations. This suggests to me that it is best to assume that logic is primitive.
I'd like to address this again given that my previous response was just conjecture. What I want to point out is the ability for a system to change. This change is dictated by causality. To understand causality we have to regard nature as a unitary system evolving through time. So, with this said, what do you think "possibility" might mean?
It seems to me that, according to you, we should infer logical principles by observing physical phenomena, which we assume that have regularities which can be 'translated faithfully' in a conceptual map.
Let's assume that it is indeed possible, in principle, to infer logical principles in this way.
But what does gaurantee us that, indeed, our inference is correct? On what grounds can we be sure that our inference is correct?
The concept is so vaguely understandable only based on the way we perceive change itself. I don't really have an answer as to these deep "why" questions about what makes change possible.
I'd like to address this again given that my previous response was just conjecture. What I want to point out is the ability for a system to change. This change is dictated by causality. To understand causality we have to regard nature as a unitary system evolving through time. So, with this said, what do you think "possibility" might mean?
Well, I admit that I have some difficulties to answer to your question. First of all, I wasn't assuming that change is necessarily due to causality. Second, I was merely saying that we simply do not know if 'laws of nature' are contingent or not.
Anyway, I might define 'possibility' as a 'one state' in a collection of other possible state that 'something' might have.
So, a 'contingent entity' might be taken to mean that such an 'entity' can be either 'exist' or 'do not exist'.
The concept is so vaguely understandable only based on the way we perceive change itself. I don't really have an answer as to these deep "why" questions about what makes change possible.
Well, I think that if we want to 'ground' logic then such answers must in some ways be answered.
I was trying to point out that 'grounding' logic on something else only seems to lead to some assumptions which are themselves 'ungrounded' and that, in fact, I think even stating those assumptions requires logic.
Physics cannot describe logic: the latter is presupposed for the former. E.g., to describe the physical relations of things, one must first presuppose that whatever is described is true and not also false.
Why not ground logic in its practical consequences? Like science.
Because, e.g. in order to establish if something is useful you need to have criteria to establish that it is useful, i.e. coherent with the concept of 'useful'.
Because, e.g. in order to establish if something is useful you need to have criteria to establish that it is useful, i.e. coherent with the concept of 'useful'.
What else leaves us satisfied but that something works. It achieves some goal. It is consistent with our aims.
So sure there is a circularity here. But we know how to approach that. Is it impossible to say anything about what we find to be useful about a logic as opposed to a logic that we think of as patently useless?
We routinely apply this constraint to physics. What makes it impossible in logics? Especially given as we do it routinely. To the point that we think we know what has practical bite and what is verging on abstract nonsense.
Empirical facts are measurements. So epistemic facts really. Numbers on dials ready to get fed into formulas.
Physics might not be that physical, just as logic aint that unphysical when you get down to it. It is a bit of a social construction to claim that logic is some free choice abstract from reality, or indeed an inhabitant of Platonia.
I think that they do have something in common. In order to formulate the concept of 'causality', I think you need entailment as a prerequisite.
And vice versa. Did logic not arise from causal reasoning about nature? The concept of atomic actions? The concept of transformations but also closure?
How could both logic and physics be idealised in the language of number - of equations and variables, of operations and values - unless they are both birthed from the same deep concept? Global constraints coupled to local degrees of freedom. The dialectical intersection of necessity and chance.
Reply to boundless Perhaps a sharper way to put it. If logic is meant to structure our thoughts and causality to structure the world, why should they not correspond in this way. Why not the pragmatic constraint that optimises the value of both?
The definition of pragmatic is found in the limit of inquiry. When further refinement is agreed to be pointless. A difference that would make no difference.
Every hates effective theory. But what if that is just the nature of both physics and logic? As we discover in our own good time.
What else leaves us satisfied but that something works. It achieves some goal. It is consistent with our aims.
I think I understand what you mean, but IMO logic is prior than understanding that. In fact, some kind of intuition of logical principles might be innate. Maybe even animals.
Of course I am speculating here. But I think no matter one tries to define logic with respect to something else, one encounters difficulties, circularities and so on.
We routinely apply this constraint to physics. What makes it impossible in logics? Especially given as we do it routinely. To the point that we think we know what has practical bite and what is verging on abstract nonsense.
In a sense, I think I agree. After all, if logic was useless nobody would employ it. But, on the other hand, even understanding the concept of 'usefulness' relies on understanding logic. What do you think?
Physics might not be that physical, just as logic aint that unphysical when you get down to it. It is a bit of a social construction to claim that logic is some free choice abstract from reality, or indeed an inhabitant of Platonia.
Not sure what you are getting at here. I don't think that saying that logic is 'primitive', 'a groundless ground' so to speak, requires a platonic view (although, maybe, it can be used as an argument in favor for such a view... but again, I don't think that if one accept that logic is not grounded in anything, then one is forced to accept a platonic view).
Ironically, what I am saying is IMO consistent with a pragmatical view of logic, given that there is no compelling evidence for a view or another of the 'ontology' of logic. Keeping it groundless, primitive, allows us to use it without relying on a theory of a supposed ontological 'ground' of logic.
?boundless Perhaps a sharper way to put it. If logic is meant to structure our thoughts and causality to structure the world, why should they not correspond in this way. Why not the pragmatic constraint that optimises the value of both?
Let's say that, indeed, logical principles are a 'reflection' of an intelligible structure of the world. How could one 'prove' this view?
If one cannot prove this view, is this view really more pragmatically significant than other philosophical positions about the 'ontology' of logic (or the position that building an ontology of logic is impossible)?
Let's say one is a platonist. Does platonism limit the activity of logic more than other views?
The definition of pragmatic is found in the limit of inquiry. When further refinement is agreed to be pointless. A difference that would make no difference.
Every hates effective theory. But what if that is just the nature of both physics and logic? As we discover in our own good time.
Ok. But in order to accept a view or another, it might be needed to be shown that such a view is better than others (or a skeptical approach on the issue).
I use the 'might' here because, after all, it may not be the only criterion to choose a view over another.
In fact, some kind of intuition of logical principles might be innate. Maybe even animals.
Yep. Animals can induce or form associations. They can tell the difference between one, two three and many. But deduction, like the counting, or learning grammatical structure, is something no other animal but humans can turn into a fluid skill. So we can make something of that. The mindset behind logical and physical accounts of the world has some neuroantomical basis. We evolved this basic habit of thought that is recursive. We find it easy to think in a nested hierarchical fashion. A calculus of distinctions.
We likely evolved this first over a million years of tool making/using, and then this was further solidified by the development of articulate speech. We needed to think in terms of sequences of construction. Hold a rock and chip it into a desired form. Face the world and turn it into a who did what to whom narration.
So there is a pragmatic ground to how we might think reality is optimally decoded. A grammatical instinct. A semiotic system of rules and words, relations and relata, syntax and semantics. A habit of mind that proved itself by its sturdy usefulness over a million years. Even though it was not about the world but about our being able to impose ourself in a mechanical fashion - action sequences leading to desired results - on our world.
Thus there is a ground. But it is neither something of the world or even of our minds. It is a propositional attitude that arose from a semiotic modelling relation with the world. It is neither a pure realism or a pure idealism. It is something that cognitively worked. A tool using hominid could structure its world with a hierarchical order. A grammatical sapiens could impose a further level of still more consciously-distancing narrative structure,
We see then the ancient world where causality continued to have a human-centric narrativism, The animistic and magical thinking where the landscape is alive with spirits and powers. Even at the time of the Hesiod, the Greeks were equally comfortable with causal explanations that the gods did it as some more naturalistic account of why a storm blew up or sickness took a child.
Then we get to Anaximander and the first systematic naturalism. We have dialectical reasoning that develops into a variety of causal accounts such as hylomorphism and atomism. We have geometry and arithmetic becoming formalised by the constraints - the closure - of proofs.
What was a logic and causality of narration becomes a logic and causality founded in number rather than words. And this in turn becomes dialectically divided as science and maths. The grammar of physical nature and the grammar of pure ideas.
So yes, logic and causality seem to speak from different spheres today. And we are as comfortable with that as those of the Hesiod era were comfortable mixing the registers of mythical and animistic accounts with more physical and naturalistic accounts.
It seems to work that there is structured speech about the real physics of the world and the true or valid arguments of the mind.
And yet dig down. It all starts and ends in the pragmatism of the semiotic modelling relation we have with the world. What works - and thus what we believe in - is our ability to impose an imagined structuring order on our lived reality.
The foundation of logical and causal thinking is this uneasy thing that is neither properly a realism or an idealism. It is instead a system for constructing dialectical structure - nested hierarchies or recursive pattern - that can fashion the world into ways that conform with our desires.
We use models of logic/causality to constrain nature mechanically. It started with tool-making, then society-making, then civilisation and technology making.
And we are left uneasy - some even claim a foundational crisis - as it is all kind of both weirdly intuitive yet also neither clearly of the world or of the mind.
But, on the other hand, even understanding the concept of 'usefulness' relies on understanding logic. What do you think?
Self-referentiality is not an issue for a self-organising system. Circularity creates problems. Hierarchies fix them. The disjunction of the dyad becomes the conjunction of the triad.
Let's say that, indeed, logical principles are a 'reflection' of an intelligible structure of the world. How could one 'prove' this view?
I am taking the Peircean approach here. Truth is what a rational process of inquiry arrives at in the limit.
We hazard a guess, take the risk of assuming a belief, and then discover the pragmatic consequences of doing that. We systematically doubt what we have assumed until we reach a point that further doubt has become useless. Moot. A difference that no longer could make a difference in practice.
Proof seems a really big thing. But it is only important to the deductive phase of Peirces three stages in the development of a state of reasonable belief.
We start with the abductive guess. An idea about an explanation. Then we apply a process of deduction that is rigorous in terms of being closed for entailment. We break down our intuition into a set of specific logical expectations. This formal encoding of a proposition - if A, then B, or however we might phrase it - proposes a consequence we can then measure in terms of what actually follows. We can inductively confirm the proposition to the degree that it isnt being contradicted.
But in order to accept a view or another, it might be needed to be shown that such a view is better than others (or a skeptical approach on the issue).
If the semiotic modelling relation has been working for life and mind since its biological beginning, and a semiosis founded in number is merely the latest instantiation of this natural story, then that would be a pretty grounded tale I would have thought.
One that is neither stranded in realism or idealism but founded in a lived relation that humans have with their world.
One that is neither stranded in realism or idealism but founded in a lived relation that humans have with their world.
There's a rather awkward neologism I've heard several times of late, 'transjective - transcending the distinction between subjective and objective, or referring to a property not of the subject or the environment but a relatedness co-created between them.' I wonder if that is what you have in mind, and whether it also describes applied mathematics? (I assume it's a word of recent origin, wiktionary's earliest usage dates only to 2009.)
Many thanks for the informative and very interesting response. To be fair, I am not really familar with biosemiosis and Peirce's philosophy. So, I am sorry if some of my questions are 'trivial'.
Thus there is a ground. But it is neither something of the world or even of our minds. It is a propositional attitude that arose from a semiotic modelling relation with the world. It is neither a pure realism or a pure idealism. It is something that cognitively worked. A tool using hominid could structure its world with a hierarchical order. A grammatical sapiens could impose a further level of still more consciously-distancing narrative structure,
Let's take a broad definition of 'ontological idealism' and a somewhat restricted one of 'ontological realism', here (I think that you are using here). Let's say that 'ontological idealism' means that fundamental reality is mental and every other kind of 'realities' are dependent on that ultimate reality. On the other hand, 'ontological realism' as the view that there is an ultimate reality, which is of a non-mental kind and minds ontologically depend on it.
Now, I think that it can be argued, like I think you do, that all living organisms (and maybe even some of their components and non-living things like viruses) do have a 'semiotic modelling' of the world, as you say. But it this is true, then at least some aspect of their 'being' can be rightly said to be 'mental' (a very, very primitive kind of 'mentality', not a truly sentient one...).
In your view, is 'mentality' there in all 'levels' of 'physical reality' or does it emerge at some point? Or are you endorsing a form of 'panpsychism', where mentality is 'there' at the fundamental level of 'reality' (as one aspect of it)?
I ask you this because, unless your view is a sort of 'panpsychism' it should be called 'realism' as defined above. Of course, this is not a problem 'in itself', so to speak, but it is a problem if this kind of 'realism' assumes intelligibility. If intelligibility is assumed, then such an assumption remains an arbitrary feature of the 'world-view' because the 'emergent minds' are not in a position to know if their claim of intelligibility is sound or is mistaken. On the other end, if your view is 'panpsychist', then this problem does not really arise because intelligibility is an intrinsic feature of the world so to speak.
We hazard a guess, take the risk of assuming a belief, and then discover the pragmatic consequences of doing that. We systematically doubt what we have assumed until we reach a point that further doubt has become useless. Moot. A difference that no longer could make a difference in practice.
At which point does a belief, though, acquire the status of 'knowledge'?
For instance, we both agreeded in the other thread that newtonian mechanics is best understood as an useful 'fictional model' that give us the possibility to make predicitions, applications and so on. We know e.g. that a 'realistic' interpretation of 'newtonian force' as a physical entity is inappropriate.
But for a long time, an ontological interpretation of newtonian physics seemed to be supported by experiments.
Of course, we can guess, assume a belief, we can even speak of knowledge in some sense, but it's not certainty. Empirical knowledge doesn't seem to be able to give us certainty. Yet, logical necessity seems to demand it.
I am not saying that your view is wrong but IMO grounding logic in an uncertain knowledge doesn't seem a real 'grounding'. Logic reamains 'groundless' or at best 'grounded' as are empirical sciences. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but seems to IMO contrast the 'necessity' of logic. But maybe it's not an important point. IMO it is but I can understand why you do not think it is.
Neither I believe that, say, platonism grounds logic. It proposes a ground, tries to give a justification of logic. But that's not enough.
If the semiotic modelling relation has been working for life and mind since its biological beginning, and a semiosis founded in number is merely the latest instantiation of this natural story, then that would be a pretty grounded tale I would have thought.
If 'semiotic modelling' - I am wrong to call it 'mentation'? - has only been working since a certain point of this universe history, doesn't it lead us to an emergentist view?
BTW, are you familiar to the late Bohm views on 'active information'. I think that you would find them akin to yours.
Of course, we can guess, assume a belief, we can even speak of knowledge in some sense, but it's not certainty. Empirical knowledge doesn't seem to be able to give us certainty. Yet, logical necessity seems to demand it.
I want to stress that what I am saying is more like a skeptical position. I am suspending my belief on what the ground, if any, of logic (and mathematics) is. Why? Because I think we can't be certain of any view about this.
There's a rather awkward neologism I've heard several times of late, 'transjective
Thanks for the pointer to John?Vervaeke. If you skim this review article, you can see he talks about all the same stuff as me. Modelling relations, anticipatory models, enactive cognition. So sits pretty squarely in what has now become the mainstream paradigm of cognitive science.
Vervaeke coins a few of his own terms. All academics have to brand themselves as adding something to the debate.
If I were criticising, I would say he would do better if he could root his general cognitive story in the nitty gritty of the brain's functional anatomy. Close the gap between the psychology and the neurology.
But generally his published papers are coming from the same place.
you can see he talks about all the same stuff as me. Modelling relations, anticipatory models, enactive cognition. So sits pretty squarely in what has now become the mainstream paradigm of cognitive science.
Very much. His main claim to fame was a lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. He's pretty wide-ranging but tries to stay within the bounds of cognitive science.
Let's say that 'ontological idealism' means that fundamental reality is mental and every other kind of 'realities' are dependent on that ultimate reality.
No. I was making an argument completely in a realist register there. No "mind stuff" or "qualia" at all. Our cognition has a physically real structure (or physically realised structure), just as the world has a physical structure too. And the semiotic point is that the cognitive structure is an embodied modelling relation which has the general purpose of regulating an organism's extended environment.
What we "experience" is not a re-presentation of reality, nor some epiphenomenal illusion, but a semiotic Umwelt. Which is what it feels like to be in the flow of living a life from a self-ish point of view.
This is a structuralist metaphysics that stands opposed to the usual materialist story. And it is thus according to semiotic theory an irreducibly triadic story, not the usual tale of some fundamental or monistic "stuff".
The triadic relation is the fundamental reality. And while it is easy to talk in a phenomenological register about the mind as being its own separate realm of experience or qualia, we know even from neuroscience that there is no structured experience without our brains being in interaction with an already structured world.
In a sensory deprivation chamber, we soon loose any normal sense of being in a body, and even being in a normal flow of thought. Just to see the world in a stable fashion, we need to jitter our eyeballs and keep "surprising" the photoreceptors with the fact that the boring backdrop that was there an instant ago is still there and remains ignorable right now.
So my argument starts from an enactive cognition perspective. There is a brain in a modelling relation with a world, and so already we are talking about the reality of a functional, physically-embodied, process.
After that, in talking about our intellectual modelling of causality and logic, we can assign each to its "realm" in the fashion of the good old Cartesian mind~world divide. This is the conventional socially-constructed way of looking at things which of course was the basis for how humans even added self-awareness, "freewill", complex feelings, and all the rest as sociocultural habits of cognition.
Breaking things into mind and world is physically incorrect (a cognitive neuroscientist would say), but it is also the cultural convention which turns a smart ape into a self-actualising human being.
Sorry, that is a lot of complexity. But it goes to the stress I lay on there being not just a triadic semiotic modelling relation in play, but with the physical reality of life and mind, this dynamic plays out at four key levels of semiotic mechanism genes, neurons, words and numbers. So in terms of causality vs entailment, I was making a case of how this applies semiotically at the level of human sociocultural organisation once it has become a talk at the level of "pure abstraction" a symbolism of number systems.
I ask you this because, unless your view is a sort of 'panpsychism' it should be called 'realism' as defined above.
After my explanation, you can see I am definitely neither arguing for a monistic, nor dyadic, version of panpsychism. But also I am not arguing for a conventional realism.
I wasn't trying to argue a general case at all, just saying something about how after the ancient Greek "mathematical turn" logic and causality became their own divergent academic domains. That can be simply described as scholarly convenience. It could be construed as causality speaking to the experiment-restricted physics and entailment speaking to the Platonically soaring maths.
However if you want the full Peircean semiotic position, that says we know life and mind to be biosemiotic. That is just everyday psychology and biology now. It is grounded in biophysics and gives us a consistent account of the structure of human relations with the world through all its four levels of semiotic mechanism.
Controversially on PF, that means all of the humanities fall under the domain of biosemiosis as a general science of meaningful thought and behaviour.
And then also speculatively and controversially, one can go with Peirce and wonder about pansemiosis as a metaphysics of reality in general. The same triadic relational structure could account for the deep causality of the Cosmos as a whole. The Big Bang Universe becomes Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness". The emergence of hierarchical or topological order from out of a "quantum foam".
You say you did condensed matter physics? Dissipative structure can be seen as this pansemiotic thesis now being realised in physicalist theory.
Peirce's position was that what works as a structure of phenomenology the givenness of our experience should work as the structure of logic as the refined product of how we find ourselves thinking and feeling and reasoning. So the first step is from our psychology to our logic.
Then the second step is finding that the world beyond is also structured by the logic that we found in our minds. It too has a causality that is a process of reason or at least triadically structured in some meaningful way.
Of course Peirce didn't know about genes and so had no concrete model of how there could be an actual machinery of semiosis. So that meant he got a little woo in treating mind and cosmos as being a little too literally the same. But the Universe, as a dissipative structure, lacks an encoding machinery. We only kind of imagine that as the case in now talking about holographic spacetime boundaries and suchlike. A useful metaphor with calculable consequences.
Biosemiosis has since come along to make that difference clear. And that also sparked the conversation about pansemiosis as now being covered by dissipative structure theory.
So it is all a concrete realist project. But one that hopes to ground the sciences of life and mind in the sciences of physics and chemistry, with now an "epistemic cut" to glue the two sides of the divide, and so get rid of the tired old "Cartesian gap".
This is why I take my pragmatist approach in this thread. Logic and causality are both modelling constructs so come from the same place human matheo-semiosis. They are taken to speak to a Cartesian divided reality, but we should expect them to be pragmatically related by the triadicism of the semiotic modeling relation.
If one seems to deal in entropic relations, the other in informational relations, then well, this is just what a biosemiotician would expect. A biosemiotic story is all about how this division is actually necessary to get to the next thing of its fruitful interaction which is the "living and mindful" point.
I am not saying that your view is wrong but IMO grounding logic in an uncertain knowledge doesn't seem a real 'grounding'.
Isn't this like being nervous of riding a bicycle as its obviously unstable and only going to get more dangerous the faster you pedal?
A tripod is a firmer base than a single point of contact, no? So just think of how soundly based pragmatism seems when compared to the instability of the folk flipping between whether maths is a free construction or a Platonic truth. Trying to balance the pencil on it tip and wondering why it always falls.
Or another metaphor, calling for a grounding does the very opposite as we find with the "tower of turtles" infinite regress. If we try to find solid ground, it immediately drops endlessly away.
The triadic hierarchical approach instead grounds in the pragmatism of the dialectic. The middle ground is that which is bounded both looking up and looking down.
Looking down, the middle ground dissolves into a blur of smallness. A random jitter of events that just smooths over into one kind of continuum. And likewise, looking up and any differences swell until just one "difference" so completely fills our vision, like the sky, that it becomes a global continuum to match the local one.
So our middle ground is secured by the closure of being the meat in a sandwich of complementary limits. Or in the parlance of cosmology, a de Sitter conformal universe. A global container specified by general relativity with a local contents specified by quantum field theory.
So your instinct is to demand a reduction to a single monistic ground. The Peircean counter-argument is that reality is a hierarchical structure of relations, and that makes it irreducibly triadic.
Reality doesn't come stacked up on an infinite tower of turtles. It instead is a structure of relations that exists by growing in de Sitter fashion. It expands and cools, doubles and halves, in geometric fashion until as far as any middle-grounders living at the classical scale of medium-sized dry goods knows any quantum small and hotness dissolves into a lower bound blur, while any relativistic difference smooths over into the large and coldness of a cosmic event horizon. The de Sitter Heat Death void as it becomes at the effective end of time. The ultimate largeness that stretches way past the edges of our merely middle ground scale of view.
If 'semiotic modelling' - I am wrong to call it 'mentation'? - has only been working since a certain point of this universe history, doesn't it lead us to an emergentist view?
Again, there are two conversations. The first is that life and mind are now explained by the causality/logic of biosemiosis. It is a conventional view in the relevant sciences. We can talk about its mineral beginnings in warm ocean floor sea vents where you had a natural starting point of alkaline vent mixing with acid ocean and setting up a proton gradient across thin vent walls suitably laced with the chemical "enzymes" to start producing complex amino acid crud.
The second is pansemiosis just dissipative structure before informational mechanism started getting its hands on it. So that covers everything out to the Big Bang as the foundational dissipative event. A hylomorphic mix of its energy potential or quantum indeterminism and the symmetry structures that Platonically lay in wait to shape it topological transformations.
Wow, thank you very much for the response, again. I am sorry if I do not answer in a comprehensive way which is also because admidettly I don't know enough or reflected enough* in the past about various topics you addressed . I think that your view may have many merits and I think it points to the 'right direction': I think that it might be right explanation of the emergence of life but I am not sure about consciousness as such - by this I mean a consistent 'first-person perspective' (I think that the 'first' and 'third' person perspecive are complementary and one cannot be reduced to the other...but I treat this as a working hypothesis, so to speak)
Sort of the same. Everyone is feeling the same elephant once they get fed up enough with reductionism.
:up:
Anyway, I cited Bohm because he noted that his own interpretation of QM, depsite being realist or even physicalist, treated the (universal) wave-function/quantum pontential as a unique field that has no source and its 'influence' mathematically does not depend on the magnitude of the field but rather on its form. This, especially in the 80's, lead him to think that this 'field' is actually a 'pool of information' available to everything. So, according to him, even the most simple physical objects have a 'mental aspect' so to speak, a very very rudimental ability to 'read' information and meaning, so to speak. Note that the 'very very rudimental ability' in Bohm's is present even in the most basic level of physical reality, so no concept of 'emergence' is needed! Based on what I understood of your position, it seems that you agree with him.
While I am not sure that it can explain consciousness, I do think that it can explain the emergence of life. On the other hand, conventional physicalism is reductionistic, matter is seen as inert.
So, according to him, even the most simple physical objects have a 'mental aspect' so to speak, a very very rudimental ability to 'read' information and meaning, so to speak
Yep. Once you are stuck with the Cartesian metaphysical division into a mind stuff vs a world stuff, then this kind of wooly Panpsychism is where you must logically end up. It is built into the premises. You cant think your way beyond the casual trap you have prepared for yourself.
Semiosis or systems thinking is just different. The world is divided at best into an entropic process and an informational process. You have a material world of dissipative structure organised by its emergent topological order. And you have a semiotic world of organisms in an enactive modelling relation with that material world, organised by its Umwelt that is what you would call a first person point of view of a third person version of the world.
Our mind is the model of the world as it would be from the point of view as it would be with us acting in it. The modelling relation is anticipatory. When you turn your head, you know it is you that is turning and not the world that is spinning, because your motor commands are fed into your sensory experience in a way to subtract your voluntary motion from your sense of what is happening out there in the world.
A first person vs third person contrast is what must arise for the modeling of the world to even function. This is the enactive or embodied argument. This is the trick that is generic to any notion of sentience or intelligent in an organism. Does it subtract its own actions in a way that makes objective the state of the world as it is sensed beyond. This is the basic semiotic algorithm that defines an organism with some kind of mind, some level of mentality.
Now one can speak of the physical world as if it is particles reading information. There are versions of pansemiosis where physics is treated as particles in a sign relation with their world as well.
But this is as best metaphoric. Not much maths in it. And really not an explanation in any theoretical sense. More a comforting fairy tale. A way not to be reductionist. A placeholder for a better worked out holist account.
However as I argued, biosemiosis now clears up the life and mind side of the equation, leaving the dissipative structure and topological order side much more plainly seen. The new holistic view of fundamental physics. The cosmological view that has to be fundamental as after all, it is all about dissipative structure if reality is that trajectory from a Big Bang to a Heat Death.
And this new semiotic view of reality is mathematically grounded in a statistical mechanics. We actually have a connection between semiosis as modelling and semiosis as dissipation as information theory is reciprocally related to entropy theory. Entropy is missing information. Information is absent entropy.
So both same yet different in a complementary or dichotomistic fashion. Physics puts all the information that specifies a physical system into its holographic boundary. Organisms then do the opposite thing of bringing all its self-regulating information inside its own boundaries as the information it encodes or remembers. Some collection of entropy controlling habits or routines.
Fristons Bayesian Brain now takes this to the point where the predictive world modelling is expressed in dissipative structure terms and as the differential equations of a new Bayesian mechanics. The semiotic approach has become mathematically formalised as a theory both in terms of life/mind and also - in the de Sitter holographic view - in cosmology.
And why this isnt widely understood is baffling. It can only be that dyadic Cartesianism still rules the cultural imagination at large. Along with the monisms of realism and idealism as the two ways to reduce what the Cartesian divide has left separated and competing for our social affiliation.
Meanwhile on the other historical track is the holistic metaphysical tradition that saw some kind of triadic relation as being foundational. The threeness that is a dialectical unity of opposites or the substantial being arising out of the hylomorphic pincer movement of material potential and necessitating form.
This way of thought became Peircean semiotics, systems science, hierarchy theory and far from equilbrium thermodynamics. It has gained its mathematical expressions. Yet it is still on the outside looking in as far as the limits of the cultural imagination goes.
It aint reflected in our popular notions of causality or logic. It indeed rouses great hostility from defenders of the Cartesian divide, too absorbed in their own ritualistic battles of idealist vs realists and not wanting to start all over having to learn a perspective that is both entirely new and also irreducibly complex. :smile:
physically real structure (or physically realised structure),
An important distinction. My observation is that biosemiotics is not strictly physicalist in orientation, based as it is on the principles of signs and intepretation, and that it's part of a wider movement away from physicalism in science generally, also apparent in physics itself. We have discussed many times previously the question as to the nature of information, meaning and mathematical objects and whether they can be described as physical. But conventions around what does and doesn't constitute scientifically-respectable discourse is also a factor in that conversation. How to think about mind, in particular.
I have some thoughts on the subject of the relationship between physics, logic and mathematics. Despite the drawbacks of the 'Cartesian division', I had the idea that the mathematization of the quantifiable attributes of natural objects nevertheless enabled enormous breakthroughs in the physical sciences. And that is because it enables the application of mathematical reasoning to physics (and much else besides). As is well-known, that has given rise to many astounding discoveries on the basis of maths (such as Diracs' discovery of anti-matter particles.) As to why this is so effective, that seems to be the source of some bafflement - Wigner's famous article on the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' contains 12 instances of the word 'miracle'. But on the semiotic and enactivist view, it's really not so baffling, as the structure of experience is in some fundamental respect also the structure of 'the world'. That at least is the way I've been thinking about it.
As to why this is so effective, that seems to be the source of some bafflement
Well yes. Until you start to understand the physics of dissipative structure and topological order. The physics of symmetry breaking and emergence. Then it is maths of that type which is what is effective, for perfectly natural and unbaffling reasons.
It is all about the holistic constraints that form can impose on matter. Poincaré symmetry imposes its structure on what can even be the case as a relativist spacetime manifold. Gauge symmetry - the Lie algebra story - then does the same thing to produce the particle physics of quantum field theory.
So it is only maths of a particular type. A maths that speaks to the mathematical necessity of topological emergence. There are only certain geometries that Nature could even arrive at as it shakes itself down into its fundamental patterns.
Wigner and Dirac were leaders in just going with that kind of maths even before they could really understand how far it would lead.
It was crazy effective. But not actually baffling anymore.
But on the semiotic and enactivist view, it's really not so baffling, as the structure of experience is in some fundamental respect also the structure of 'the world'.
But pansemiosis is not biosemiosis as I have been at pains to explain. So really, Poincaré and Lie algebra have little application to the way organisms are self-organised. The maths that is crazy effective there is Bayesian probability perhaps. The maths of predictive modelling. Or the maths of hierarchy theory if we want a more general metaphysical frame that does show some deeper unity between the physics of dissipative structure and the biosemiotics of the modeling relation.
It was crazy effective. But not actually baffling anymore.
What Wigner found baffling was not that maths was so effective, but why it was. And also the way mathematics developed in one context proved effective in totally different contexts and in completely unexpected ways. Whence the conscilience between mind, world and mathematics? He doesnt offer an answer to that question but it does suggest to me that the cosmos is more mind- than machine-like.
Reply to Wayfarer But since then the surprise is how the physics has pushed the maths.
But over the past 30 years a new type of interaction has taken place, probably unique, in which physicists, exploring their new and still speculative theories,have stumbled across a whole range of mathematical discoveries. These are derived by physical intuition and heuristic arguments, which are beyond the reach, as yet, of mathematical rigour, but which have withstood the tests of time and alternative methods. There is great intellectual excitement in these mutual exchanges.
The impact of these discoveries on mathematics has been profound and widespread. Areas of mathematics such as topology and algebraic geometry, which lie at the heart of pure mathematics and appear very distant from the physics frontier, have been dramatically affected. The meaning of all this is unclear and one may be tempted to invert Wigner's comment and marvel at the unreasonable effectiveness of physics in mathematics.
it does suggest to me that the cosmos is more mind- than machine-like.
Remember then that biosemiosis is in fact a surprising story of how machine like is the basis of life and mind. Semiosis is about how informational switches regulate entropic flows. And this is what we find right at the base level of biology where metabolism is no longer the cellular bag of chemical reactions it was in the 1970s. It is now a tale of nanoscale machinery.
On the particular point of why, think of it this way. Maths progresses as an inquiry by abstracting away constraints. The physical world develops as the series of topological phase transitions characterising the Big Bang by emergently adding new forms of constraint.
So they are the inverse of each other. What physics adds, maths subtracts. This is why each informs the other at a deep level if folk are willing to talk across their academic divides.
Which is essentially what could be said about causality and entailment. There is a reason why we should seek the common root so as to understand the whole in better fashion.
But boundary policing is a favourite human pastime. If folk find a synergy between domains is possible, this is not just surprising but verging on the unreasonable. :grin:
Remember then that biosemiosis is in fact a surprising story of how machine like is the basis of life and mind. Semiosis is about how informational switches regulate entropic flows.
You say that but Im inherently distrustful of mechanistic metaphors past a certain point. I can see how the analogy works but I cant see how it accommodates the fact of intentionality at a deep level. Apropos of which, one of the books that turned up in my research today was The phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology, Hans Jonas. It was published in, I think, the sixties but Im instinctively drawn to it. Do you know it?
Reply to apokrisis I will review it but the over-arching question is teleological. (I guess the micro tubules referred to in that video are the same as those that Penrose and Hameroff refer to in their Orch OR theory?)
I don't think there is any difference between logical consistency and existence, so logic describes the whole reality. Physics describes the part of reality we live in. Mathematics, with its foundation in set theory, is an elaboration of logic.
Yep. Once you are stuck with the Cartesian metaphysical division into a mind stuff vs a world stuff, then this kind of wooly Panpsychism is where you must logically end up. It is built into the premises. You cant think your way beyond the casual trap you have prepared for yourself.
I sort of agree about panpsychism but I do not see as a necessary implication.
A first person vs third person contrast is what must arise for the modeling of the world to even function. This is the enactive or embodied argument. This is the trick that is generic to any notion of sentience or intelligent in an organism. Does it subtract its own actions in a way that makes objective the state of the world as it is sensed beyond. This is the basic semiotic algorithm that defines an organism with some kind of mind, some level of mentality.
I see. As the complexity of an organism rises, the more that organism can differentiate itself from its environment. In this view of things, self-awareness is so to speak, the pinnacle of this complexity. A cell has a very rudimentary 'notion' of a distinction between itself and its environment.
I think that in the simplest living organisms we can also see a sort of 'finalism' in their actions. After all, even a cell operates toward the goal of preservation of itself and, above all, of the species (with reproduction). Of course, it is not conscious but nevertheless there is a sort of 'finalism' in biological organisms that is not found in 'non-living' natural things. Same goes for a 'basic awareness' (for a lack of a better word) of being 'something distinct' from its environment.
I personally am not sure that there is only a 'quantitative' distinction between us and the simplest living organisms. There is IMO a qualitative difference... but let's not digress here.
However as I argued, biosemiosis now clears up the life and mind side of the equation, leaving the dissipative structure and topological order side much more plainly seen. The new holistic view of fundamental physics. The cosmological view that has to be fundamental as after all, it is all about dissipative structure if reality is that trajectory from a Big Bang to a Heat Death.
I think that 'holism' was actually present even in Newtonian mechanics. For instance, one can 'derive' the conservation of momentum of an isolated system from newtonian laws of dynamics. But such a derivation is best seen IMO as pragmatic. On the other hand, if one sees the 'conservation law' as a property of the whole isolated system the newtonian laws make much more sense. So it's not surprising to see that, gradually, holism becomes even more important in contemporary physics (I mean Noether's theorem, spontaneous symmetry breaking etc are holistic concepts after all). IMO, contemporary physics seems to suggest that the 'building blocks of the universe' are not ontologically primitive. On the other hand, imo it suggests more the reverse (albeit not in a conclusive way).
Fristons Bayesian Brain now takes this to the point where the predictive world modelling is expressed in dissipative structure terms and as the differential equations of a new Bayesian mechanics. The semiotic approach has become mathematically formalised as a theory both in terms of life/mind and also - in the de Sitter holographic view - in cosmology.
Ok, thanks for the reference. I'll look.
Anyway, I wanted to ask you some questions, if you do not mind.
The way I see it, as I said, living organisms, even the most basic ones, seem 'aware' of that they are distinct to their environment, that they are a 'whole', so to speak. Is there a 'global law' (spontaneous symmetry breaking) that describes the emergence of these 'individuals'?
Do you think that our mind is algorithmic? If not, how 'machine-like' entities can 'give rise' to a non-algorithmic mind shall have an explanation. I think that our mind are not algorithmic but I don't think that I can make a rationally compelling argument of this point.
Do you think that a 'proto-proto-awareness' of sorts is there in anything else besides living organisms and biomolecules?
Anyway, while I see the 'machinery' of it. I also see that all those 'mechanical operations' are done in virtue of a 'larger goal' of the whole organism, so to speak. I am not sure there is no 'finality' here, as I would expect in a machine.
Also, even if all of this is machine-like, their 'programming' seem spontaneous. Why such a programming is there in the first place?
The way I see it, as I said, living organisms, even the most basic ones, seem 'aware' of that they are distinct to their environment, that they are a 'whole', so to speak. Is there a 'global law' (spontaneous symmetry breaking) that describes the emergence of these 'individuals'?
The best law would be Pattees notion of the epistemic cut. It sets the divide down at the atomistic level of when a molecule becomes a message. It roots things in the logic of a mechanical switch that regulates an entropy flow for some organismic purpose.
Do you think that our mind is algorithmic? If not, how 'machine-like' entities can 'give rise' to a non-algorithmic mind shall have an explanation. I think that our mind are not algorithmic but I don't think that I can make a rationally compelling argument of this point.
Well it is algorithmic looking down at the neural circuit level. You have processing units like cortical columns. And then it is algorithmic looking at the socially constructed level where we are imposing some kind of rational and grammatical order on our thought patterns, especially when we are civilised and have internalised a whole variety of cultural rules and procedures. As in how to behave as a driver or at a formal banquet.
What is not actually algorithmic about any of this is that all the computation is about the end outcome of regulating some self-constructing entropy flow. We are turning matter into bodies. And that is not something you associate with computers. That is what makes us organisms and them machines. Or rather our tools, as computers only have use for us when they are woven into our general entropy regulation projects.
So being algorithmic or mechanical is a tricky issue. If we turn a natural river into a system of canals, irrigation ditches and water wheels, is that algorithmic?
It isnt purely organic. But it does display the finality we expect from organismic purpose. The landscape has been shaped by a desire. And this was possible to the degree that an algorithmic form could be imposed in terms of a logic of entailment or a causality based on a mechanics of form.
A complex system of switches was imposed on the river. And that served a holistic entropy-harnessing purpose. This is the self-organising and self-sustaining kind of state of affairs that we would recognise as being organismic. It speaks to the presence of life and mind.
Do you think that a 'proto-proto-awareness' of sorts is there in anything else besides living organisms and biomolecules?
The mistake here is to speak of awareness as a stuff rather than a process. An inherent property of mentation rather than a relational structure that is semiotic. Mind as simply what it is like to be in a regulating modelling relation with the world.
The best law would be Pattees notion of the epistemic cut. It sets the divide down at the atomistic level of when a molecule becomes a message. It roots things in the logic of a mechanical switch that regulates an entropy flow for some organismic purpose.
What is not actually algorithmic about any of this is that all the computation is about the end outcome of regulating some self-constructing entropy flow. We are turning matter into bodies. And that is not something you associate with computers. That is what makes us organisms and them machines. Or rather our tools, as computers only have use for us when they are woven into our general entropy regulation projects.
Ok, I see. That's more or less what was I getting at. I can understand that some or even most biological activity is alghoritmic/machine-like (like the one in the video you showed). But at some point, when life 'appeared' something changed, so to speak, where some composite physical objects began to 'operate' as you say as '(living) bodies' (or even like viruses or some complex single biomolecules), i.e. undivided wholes whose 'higher level' 'aims' determine (at least to some extent) the operation of their parts (I hope that the word 'aim' is not misleading here, I am not suggesting that, say, a bacterium has a conscious 'purpose').
And IMO that 'something' is crucial. How these kinds of 'proto-intentionalities' appeared in the first places?
Maybe your reference addresses this question, so I'll read!
A complex system of switches was imposed on the river. And that served a holistic entropy-harnessing purpose. This is the self-organising and self-sustaining kind of state of affairs that we would recognise as being organismic. It speaks to the presence of life and mind.
Exactly. While the whole operation might be simulated/repeated by a computer, I do not think it can be done by it in the first place (I guess that one might say it can happen with an extremely low probability... but the same can be said that it is possible to a computer to write the 'Lord of the Rings'...)
The mistake here is to speak of awareness as a stuff rather than a process. An inherent property of mentation rather than a relational structure that is semiotic. Mind as simply what it is like to be in a regulating modelling relation with the world.
However, I don't think that it is by itself enough. If the appearance of that 'relational structure' is still unexplained as an emergent feature, then IMO it doesn't change much. I am not saying that you are wrong or anything, but I think that seeing mind (especially self-consciousness) as a relation structure/process is not enough to 'prove' physicalism so to speak.
I am not suggesting that, say, a bacterium has a conscious 'purpose').
And IMO that 'something' is crucial. How these kinds of 'proto-intentionalities' appeared in the first places?
Even an enzyme is proto-intentional. A kinesin or any other molecular motor is proto-intentional. They exist to make things happen in preferred directions.
And intentionality is baked in at every level of structure. A worm has a mouth and sense organs at one end, an anus at the other. Its body plan is set up to plough through the dirt, eating as it goes.
You dont have to look hard to see functionality in biology. It is there over all scales.
but I think that seeing mind (especially self-consciousness) as a relation structure/process is not enough to 'prove' physicalism so to speak.
As long as you talk about mind, consciousness, mentation, etc, you are already speaking in an idealist register. All those assumptions about res cogitans, about a mental stuff, about ineffable qualia, float along with you.
Semiotics tries to move us along to a more physically rooted view of life and mind as an informational structure/entropic process - the modelling relation. A kind of dualism if you like. But unmystical as it is closed for causality under its triadic connection.
One view fits traditional cultural practice. The other is grounded in science. You get to pick your side.
Even an enzyme is proto-intentional. A kinesin or any other molecular motor is proto-intentional. They exist to make things happen in preferred directions.
...
I wasn't denying that. I was just asking how does this 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place.
I am not sure if its appearance is enough to explain self-consciousness but explaining that appearance would be an impressive move.
Btw, I read Pattee's article. Quite interesting, yes, but I do not have found the explanation of how the epistemic cut and/or the 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place. In other words, I think the article explains where it appears, how it behaves but I didn't see an explanation of how it appeared in the first place (but maybe I misunderstood...).
Semiotics tries to move us along to a more physically rooted view of life and mind as an informational structure/entropic process - the modelling relation. A kind of dualism if you like. But unmystical as it is closed for causality under its triadic connection.
Ok, I do respect that, even if it will be found that this approach won't explain everything about life and mind. I think that it has lead and will lead to many good insights.
A kinesin or any other molecular motor is proto-intentional.
But here, are you imputing intentionality, which is the specific attribute of organisms, to 'switches' and 'motors'? So that even despite your rejection of physicalist reductionism, you're still employing a reductionist model. You're denying or flattening out the distinction between the mineral and organic domains by imputing intentionality to chemistry.
I mentioned The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas. I doubt it's on your radar as he was a student of Heidegger with a background in hermenuetics and contintental philosophy (died 1993). Jonas' philosophy describes metabolism as the most basic form of lifes intentionality. He argues that through metabolic processes, even the simplest organisms maintain their form and identity by continuously interacting with their environment, with this interaction directed towards the goal of sustaining life. Jonas posits that living organisms have a form of perception and response that, while not conscious, is nevertheless intentional. For example, a plant growing towards light exhibits a form of directed, goal-oriented behavior. His philosophy is teleological, meaning he believes that all living beings have inherent goals or purposes. He extends this notion to even the simplest organisms, which act in ways that reflect basic survival goals. Jonass existential interpretation of biology suggests that life itself is an expression of a kind of intentionality, arguing that the very nature of being alive involves striving, goal-directed processes, and a fundamental interaction with the environment.
Semiotics tries to move us along to a more physically rooted view of life and mind as an informational structure/entropic process - the modelling relation
In contrast, what I've gleaned from your posts is that life is treated as a model, which is driven by thermodynamic energy, towards an ultimate end of the minimization of energy. It is a comprehensive framework but lacking from an existential perspective. It is 'life seen from the outside', as it were. Philosophy, and existentialism in particular, is concerned with the living of life, rather than its objective description - the controlling of it and the modelling of it. Philosophy as distinct from science.
But here, are you imputing intentionality, which is the specific attribute of organisms, to 'switches' and 'motors'?
Switches and motors are only produced because they serve a purpose. Same with the enzymes and kinesins.
An actual light switch doesn't seem proto-intentional as clearly the lighting circuit, and the national power grid it is connected to, don't turn themselves on and off, let alone self-construct themselves as an entropic project of nature.
But enzymes and kinesins are functional little critters. They are embedded in the self-interested metabolic economy of an organism. It matters if they are "off or on". They only get built or degraded, deployed or withdrawn, to the degree they serve the purpose of the organism as a whole.
So that even despite your rejection of physicalist reductionism, you're still employing a reductionist model. You're denying or flattening out the distinction between the mineral and organic domains by imputing intentionality to chemistry.
You have forgotten Pattee's epistemic cut and so have lost your bearings in this argument.
For example, a plant growing towards light exhibits a form of directed, goal-oriented behavior. His philosophy is teleological, meaning he believes that all living beings have inherent goals or purposes.
Yep, that is all well and good. But then what is the mechanism? What mediates between the modelling and the world? Is this where he starts waving his hands?
In contrast, what I've gleaned from your posts is that life is treated as a model,
You mean life embodies Rosen's modelling relation, or Peirce's semiosis? There is an epistemic cut that both separates and then connects in a fashion that allows an organism to build itself while degrading the world.
But it is only when we start to see life from the outside that we can start claiming to see life from the inside as well. If we can claim to stand outside its materiality, that is the modelling presumption the Umwelt that places us inside what we call "the realm of the mind".
And this dialectical claim only arises in humans once they have reached a linguistic and numeric level of semiosis. We become self-conscious as that has become the new structure of our world model.
We are now mostly unconsciously being shaped by our existence as socially constructed beings. The parts of the larger whole that is the human social organism doing its self-making entropic thing.
And to function as the individual parts of this new greater whole, we have to be objective about the fact of our own sentient existence so as to be able to place ourselves within the larger socialised subjective state that is our collective cultural Umwelt.
As subjects, we objectivise ourselves so as to function as the machinery of entropifying switches that becomes the epistemic cut upon which the collective consciousness of a tribe or civilisation becomes founded.
Philosophy, and existentialism in particular, is concerned with the living of life, rather than its objective description
There you go. As an individual, you go to school and get suitably programmed for the function that society has in mind. Told who you "really are" and how you "ought to think and behave". So as to best serve the larger system that is now in charge of the entropy project in a way that appears to transcend the usual evolutionary and environmental limits.
Your complicity with "existentialism" is bringing about the opposite of what you imagine. You are objectivising yourself so as to fit the larger requirements of your society.
Or worse yet, learning just how to be a bad fit. Ending up both living in that society and feeling unhappy and confused about how its all panning out. :razz:
How we understand "accident" is not as simple as you suggest.
No, it's more like a handy kind of gap-filler, which can be assigned roles in many different contexts.
Regarding the 'epistemic cut', I noticed this passage from Howard Pattee in The Information Philosopher site:
[quote=Howard Pattee;https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/]A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis.
I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subjects Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement a symbol and what is being measured a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.[/quote]
So - how does 'the conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature' support the idea that this is a physical theory? It seems to me that by acknowledging the separation of observer and observed, the 'epistemic cut' actually re-affirms an ontological difference between the physical and biological which is also noted by Jonas above. (There's a dismissive reference at the end of the article to the convergence of the 'epistemic cut' with Heisenberg's philosophy of physics, but this is all far from settled as you well know.)
So if I were to argue that living organisms in whatever form they take, amount to the emergence of intentionality, I don't think I would be saying anything at variance with the passage quoted above.
So - how does 'the conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature' support the idea that this is a physical theory?
Sure. That is why we biologists have always said biology is bigger than physics. It is large enough to also include semiosis as the new science of meaning.
Pattee himself then puts his finger on how it is a mechanics of information processing switches, levers, ratchets, latches that physically gives effect to his epistemic cut. With that, the missing connection is made. Physics gets drawn up into the mothership of pansemiotics.
So if I were to argue that living organisms in whatever form they take, amount to the emergence of intentionality, I don't think I would be saying anything at variance with the passage quoted above.
I dunno. Pansemiosis is keen to extent intentionality to even the physical sphere as "tendency". That covers the Second Law's extremely general imperative of "thou shalt organise to entropify" as the global tendency of Nature.
Stan Salthe pushed this hard. Pattee himself was rather diffident in these conversations, being ironically more of a hardline physicalist within the biosemiotic camp. Salthe was a full-on Peircean internalist.
Reply to apokrisis But I think you lean towards a physicalist interpretation of the inherent ambiguity implicit in the epistemic cut, so as to avoid the suggestion of being non-scientific or being tarred with the brush of philosophical idealism. And as a science of meaning, semiotics is not nearly so reducible to predictive formulae as are those of physics. The range of meanings able to be embodied in and communicated by both DNA and by languages is boundless :-)
But I think you lean towards a physicalist interpretation of the inherent ambiguity implicit in the epistemic cut, so as to avoid the suggestion of being non-scientific or being tarred with the brush of philosophical idealism.
Why would I care if pragmatism is my judge in these matters? It ain't me who is all caught up in this particular culture war.
And as a science of meaning, semiotics is not nearly so reducible to predictive formulae as are those of physics.
Did I mention Friston's Bayesian Brain? Did I mention Hoffman's Ratchet?
The science has been moving along at quite a clip. The genetic code wasn't even cracked when I was born. Now we have 3D animations of armies of molecular machines at work, harvesting entropy to rebuild bodies.
I'm not sure what more could be expected in terms of astoundingly swift progress.
I distinguish Nature from the World. I also distinguish development from evolution.
Development is progressive change and can be modeled as part of Nature, using a specification hierarchy. I have proposed a canonical developmental trajectory of dissipative structures with the stages defined thermodynamically and informationally.
I consider some thermodynamic aspects of the Big Bang, leading to a proposal for reviving final cause. This model imposes a hylozooic kind of interpretation upon Nature, as all emergent features at higher levels would have been vaguely and episodically present primitively in the lower integrative levels, and were stabilized materially with the developmental emergence of new levels.
The specification hierarchys form is that of a tree, with its trunk in its lowest level, and so this hierarchy is appropriate for modeling an expanding system like the Universe. It is consistent with this model of differentiation during Big Bang development to view emerging branch tips as having been entrained by multiple finalities because of the top-down integration of the various levels of organization by the higher levels.
Salthe is then accused of being too materialistic by other more idealist contributors. So you can see a range of opinion exists. Horace Fairlamb, for instance, still sees wiggle room for the emergence of mind as "true novelty".
Why cant it have appeared by accident? In the usual evolutionary fashion.
Well, I put it badly. I meant that the 'appearance' of 'proto-intentionality' must have been a possibility and the possibility of such an appearance must be IMO to be accounted for in order to have an explanation.
We see a lot of behaviors in living organism (and near-living 'organisms' like viruses) that simply are completely different from what one see in 'non-living things'. This of course doesn't deny the 'radomness' that is present in evolution.
So I guess that my question can be formulated as: how can we explain the possibility of the appearance of the 'behaviors' seen in living organism if before that those kind are simply not present?
the 'appearance' of 'proto-intentionality' must have been a possibility
Sure. The field of abiogenesis has plenty of suggestions on the matter. In general, one looks for a dissipative chemistry that could become colonised by some of the organic gunk it produces that proves able to function as a primitive information capturing code.
If for example a thermal vent is already producing organic molecules via minerals like greigite - rich in the same iron sulphur clusters that became woven into enzymatic reaction paths - then already there is a lot of the structure in place to get life going.
So it is not in principle a puzzle. It is putting together some particular evolutionary story that becomes the difficulty, not having a Time Machine.
Heres a typical article on that - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrothermal-vents-and-the-origins-of-life/3007088.article
Ok, I now read your link. I think I am understanding better also your position.
The assumption here is that there is a sort of law/principle that treats the transition between 'non-life' and 'life', abiogenesis, as a sort of phase transition - i.e. a 'regularity' that, in principle, can allow us to build a predective model that predicts under which conditions life can arise. I think that it is reasonable. But of course, the details are not clear and only a theoretical approach might not be able to construct such a model.
Do you believe that such a model could be expressed as a mathematical theory, like in theoretical physics?
Also: are there some books that you would suggest to explore this topic?
BTW, thanks for the discussion, it has been very productive and insightful!
Comments (153)
Is it perhaps like the difference (and connection) between the truths of algebra and geometry? We inquire after entailment as a formal relation. And there is the physical view that is essentially geometric as spacetime rather matters or the algebraic view where even geometry can apparently be reduced beyond spacetime ... but then that little tussle re-emerges again when we move up the next level of abstraction, as in topological order?
So when it comes to this tricky relation between physics and logic, I am arguing that a model of causality is the ultimate target. And in reducing reality to causality, one could go "too far" in the reductionism. Spacetime and its material content as a geometry of relations become too much to sacrifice in the attempt to continue on towards the atomistic abstractions of Boolean logic.
Mechanics can only be taken so far before it becomes an unphysical nonsense?
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, without some presumption of coherence, at least. If the aim of physics is to produce a coherent account of how physical things are, then it presupposes coherence, and hence logic.
:up: Sounds appropriate.
People have used this sort of idea to create computational and communications based theories of causation, which are pretty neat. Past states of a system end up entailing future states (or a range of them). This seems right in line with the idea of cosmic Logos in some respects. It's also a version of causation that seems to deal with some of Hume's "challenges."
However, it's worthwhile to recall that when steam engines were the new hot technology physicists also wanted to think of the universe as "one giant engine/machine." Now, this conception actually did tell us a lot, but it wasn't perfect. The same is probably true here. For one, if the universe is a "computer" in this way it cannot have true continua, and yet empirical evidence is inconclusive on the question of if the universe is ultimately discrete/finitist. If it wasn't discrete, it might still be "computation-like," but it wouldn't be computation because it would involve infinite decimal values.
The ability of ZX Calculus to construct QM is interesting here but I haven't really looked into it.
No.
And we may want to work towards OPs that are more than a single sentence long.
And thus with some sort of differentiation.
So that is indeed the kind of holism that both physics and logic represent. The dialectic of global integration and local differentiation. The universals and their particulars. The laws and their initial conditions. :up:
Or is it how to draw new conclusions from what is currently known?
Inductive, abductive, and dialectic "logics" are quite different, and quite contentious.
Yep. So not at all a dogmatic slumber then. :up:
Yes, you nailed it. I think this is the fundamental thesis upon which this thread is about.
I don't really have much to say myself at the moment. Just one question, regarding which, where do you think mathematics stands in relation to what you said?
Except that without such logic one will not be able to draw inferences, and this will limit their knowledge. The question of how the conclusion relates to the premises is age-old, but the fact remains that one person can draw valid inferences and another cannot, even when they have access to the same set of evidence. The difference between the two is that one possesses the art of logic and the other does not. To understand why logic was invented in the first place is to understand this.
Today logic has been reduced by some to pure formalisms, divorced from the art of reasoning well, but historically speaking this is a very recent phenomenon.
...It is also worth noting that the study of the logic of logic is still logic. Godel's proofs provide us with conclusions and theorems that we were previously ignorant of. We can say that his theorems were already present before he proved them, but they simply would not have been known without Godel's proficiency in logic. It would be odd to claim that there is no significant difference between an entailment that is known and an entailment that is unknown.
On the one hand, a model interprets the theory if none of its facts, no matter how chaotic, violates the theory's rules. On the other hand, a theory has a particular model if every statement provable from that theory is true in that model. Not all facts need to be provable from the theory.
Logic operates on the side of the theory. Physics operates on the side of the model.
Physics is a collection of facts in which science has observed stubborn patterns. These physical patterns are often confused for a theory, but they are not.
Physics as a model, i.e. a collection of facts, may very well interpret an otherwise unknown theory, i.e. some collection of rules (and not just stubborn patterns).
If this unknown theory of physics can be expressed in the language of first-order logic, then that would be the link between physics and logic.
We suspect that this link between physics and logic must somehow exists.
However, without actually formulating a legitimate theory for physics, we can never be sure.
Well I sort of said that geometry/topology is where they look to come the closest. Hence why Peirces existential graphs and Spencer-Browns laws of form are so appealing to some of us. Much less so category theory even it it does actively strive to lay claim to physics.
Classically after studying the Trivium (of grammar, logic, and rhetoric), one would study the Quadrivium:
Quoting Quadrivium | Wikipedia
Astronomy, the study of number in space and time, is more or less what we now think of as physics.
What could that possibly be?
So that suggests it all comes back to "number", even for what where then the liberal arts (a way to squeeze things past the eagle eye of the Church?).
Then grammar, logic and rhetoric concern themselves with the syntax of number rather than the semantics.
So numbers carry sense both as general variables and as particular facts. Or better yet, measurements.
I would agree with all this. The point of an education is to lift us above the socio-cultural constraints of an oral world order socially constructed in words to a technocratic or rational world order. And that is socially constructed in numbers as signs that connect semantics and syntax into some pragmatic business of utterances and locutions.
So that would make the maths more clearly the handmaiden to the physics? Physics employs numbers in both the syntactic and semantic sense as the scientific generality of a variable, as the particularity of a measurement.
That could be too harsh if it is recognised that logic is larger than just propositional calculus. Logic as a triadic system of inference becomes the common root of thought under Peirce. It injects the same pragmatism into the practice of philosophy too.
As in....
No. Physics (provisionally) explains 'the regularities of nature' and logic (exactly) describes 'the entailments of regularities as such'. The latter is, imo so to speak, the syntax of the former (i.e. physics discursively presupposes logic). Why? Perhaps because ... nature, which includes constitutes h. sapiens' intelligence, is a dynamic process evolving within (thermal?) constraints from initial conditions ur-regularities.
:up:
An academic education rather teaches the fine points of sophistry, suitable for bamboozling the masses.
Since employers like CNN and Harvard can only employ that many mouthpieces, a training in sophistry increasingly leads to unemployment. Even the Chinese Communist Party says that it is fully staffed now, leaving every year millions of new graduates without a suitable job.
For the Quadrivium, but not for the Trivium. The Trivium pertains to communication, generally speaking.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, but one must begin with communication in the Trivium: Grammar (understanding language), Logic (the ability to analyze thought, and to progress in thinking), and Rhetoric (the ability to use grammar and logic in the service of persuasion). One must understand "social constructions" before moving beyond them.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems like a good way of putting it.
That is only half the deal though. These days you must have also fudged some data. :razz:
But that is the syntax, or the rules of argument construction and transmission. The geometry of relations to complement the algebra of the relatables.
I don't really know. I'm just as confused as you are.
Hegel may have made some sense with dialectical materialism as you alluded to.
It is that, but I think the philologists would object if we were to reduce language to a social construction, or if we were to reduce it to the matter for argument or science. Language is all these things, but it is other things, too.
This is interesting. So too for Aristotle and many Aristotelians, the division between deductive and inductive logic is not so clear-cut.
Ooh, burn! :fire:
I hope not literally. :fear:
The complexity of the world is actually quite scary.
But I am doing the opposite. Social construction is what language allowed. (The paleoanthropology of language evolution is one of my special areas.)
Quoting Leontiskos
Two sides of the same coin. Deduce the particulars. Induce the generalities.
The wrath of the mighty will soon be upon you. First cutting and then magnanimous. As the godly always are. :wink:
I'm dubious concerning the use of "cause" in physics, let alone logic. Others hereabouts use "logic" quite broadly, but I am disinclined to follow.
So again, logic is a way of setting things out, while physics is something that can be set out.
If you like, "physics describes logic" is ill-formed.
And that ought be an end to it, it will not be.
Ah, good. I see what you were saying, now.
Quoting apokrisis
Yep.
:up: :up:
Quoting Tarskian
That would be one way physics on the one side, could explain logic on the other. But then explanations themselves are theories, so how could physics itself describe anything - logic does the talking.
Logic might more easily describe physics.
Or is the question more:
Does physics entail logic?
Are the pieces of logic physical things - brain functions?
That would require a usable theory of physical reality, which we don't have. We just have a collection of stubborn patterns.
You cannot logically recombine these stubborn patterns and hope that such syllogism will always predict a true fact in the physical universe. If it works anyway, you are just lucky, because this practice is actually unsupported. That is why you always have to test again.
You need logic before you can study physics. As was said already. (This incidentally is a cogent argument against physicalism as logic is used to construct physics, but not vice versa.)
Quoting Fire Ologist
I think there's a fascinating connection between Galileo's 'book of nature is written in mathematics' and the ability of modern mathematical physics to model and predict hitherto unknown natural processes. Through quantification, which comprises the ability to capture the measurable attributes of objects and forces, we are able to apply abstract mathematical methods, which often produce startingly novel results (per Eugene Wigner's The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.)
Quoting Tarskian
Isn't a lot of what you write based on the fact that science doesn't explain science, mathematics doesn't explain maths, and so on? I mean, physical principles, such as Newton's Laws of Motion, and related mathematical techniques including calculus have been deployed to enormous effect across a huge range of applications. But Newton's laws don't explain why F=MA - nor do they need to. Can't we get by without knowing that?Isn't it sufficient to know how they work and how to apply them?
It was more about the fact that physics does not have one thing that is considered a legitimate "theory" in mathematics.
Stephen Hawking expressed the problem as following:
Physics is a collection of stubborn patterns that can be observed in the physical universe and not a theory in the mathematical sense.
The equivalent of a theorem would rather be a single stubborn pattern (which they confusingly often call a theory in physics).
It is an entire collection of such stubborn patterns that would be the counterpart of a theory in mathematical logic, on the condition that these patterns sufficiently hang together in one way or another.
But then again, they also have lots of separate theories in physics, each covering some other area of the field. They are meant to be complementary bodies of knowledge. In mathematical logic, different theories are alternatives to each other.
The term means something else in science versus in mathematical logic. Even in general mathematics, the term often just means some body of knowledge, just like in science, and which does not necessarily satisfy the definition of the term in mathematical logic.
I can't take this too seriously. Have you studied much fundamental physics? Especially with quantum field theory and particle physics, the tendency has been just to apply the mathematical patterns and marvel how they force nature onto these stubborn outcomes.
The maths is "unreasonably effective". Somehow or other, nature keeps jamming itself into the arrangements described by permutation symmetries and matrix mechanics. You might need the Higgs field to force the SU(2) electroweak sector to crack diagonally into SU(2)xU(1), but because something had to do the job physically, the Higgs could be the fictional beast with its own SU(2) structure that could "eat" three of the electroweak's degrees of freedom, so allowing the U(1) photon to burst free.
It is a crazy tale of science being forced into a wild speculation. And yet tellingly as this was the mindset that particle physics had learnt to adopt from painful experience three groups came up with the same solution all at the same time, making the distribution of the Nobel prize uncomfortably contentious.
So there we have physics reaching the point where the maths constructs the patterns, and if the patterns are possible, nature must wriggle about until it has discovered a strange machinery to achieve the goal of fitting the forms preordained.
The Big Bang could have been halted at many points in its hot unfolding. But with every phase change, it kept on track to become as mathematically self-simplified as possible.
Inflation seems needed to have prevented an immediate gravitational collapse. The Higgs transition looks to have then stabilised the vacuum when inflation broke and dumped its energy into a lot of reheated particles. Even then particle physics was doomed as all the matter was going to be consumed by all the antimatter eventually. But another completely different kind of mechanism the strong force with its SU(3) confinement came into play, wrapping up quarks into proton balls and so allow a new game based on electron~proton electrodynamics to take over from matter~antimatter annihilation.
In just the first few minutes of the Big Bang, the physics had tumbled down a hierarchy of algebraic geometry permutation symmetries to become stable enough to now last "forever". It was composed of particles with no further possibility to decay, in a vacuum properly secured.
I would agree that the fact that this worked believing that nature must find its way into mathematical-strength patterns has itself become rather an issue for the practice of physics. Now we are flooded by every kind of maths-first theorising like string theory and a hundred more. A lot of speculative crap has followed as I don't think the way that the maths and physics have connected in symmetry terms is a trick that is properly understood.
This is why I mention topological order as the actual root that connects. And here physics has its own kind of lead in its condensed matter models and such-like. These are now becoming quite influential on mathematics. Ricci curvature and other thermodynamical flow models have proven some pretty big results.
And isn't that the healthy outcome? Some kind of mutual connection between maths and physics as cultures of inquiry? No need to make it a contest between logical rigour vs experimental validity. We have to come at nature from both these directions to grasp its truth.
No matter how well physics manages to study a plethora of stubborn physical patterns, it hasn't reached the stage at which mathematical logic can consider it to be a legitimate "theory".
The physical universe is one big model, i.e. a vast collection of facts. Where is its single theory? Every statement that is provable from this theory needs to be a true fact in the physical universe. Furthermore, not one single fact in the physical universe may contradict this theory.
Then, and only then, physics will be a legitimate "theory" in accordance with the definition in mathematical logic.
Says who apart from you? Can you cite some source for this opinion? And why would maths be a judge of how physics proceeds anyway.
I just point out there is a relationship which you appear to be overlooking. And from a physicists point of view, the way mathematicians carry on can look equally wasteful of smart young minds. Chasing patterns that arent even useful.
The Yang-Mills mass gap may be a good example of whether mathematical purity matters to anyone but mathematicians. Is it actually important for some physical reason?
Quoting Tarskian
These are sweeping statements. But are they more than your own personal opinion?
It is actually the ultimate goal of science:
Stephen Hawking no longer believed that the ToE is an attainable goal:
Quoting apokrisis
It is physicists themselves who want a ToE. Mathematicians don't care, actually:
They do not say it explicitly, but to me it is obvious that what they want from the ToE, is a "theory" that satisfies the requirements of the definition for the term in mathematical logic. Otherwise, there will be barely any improvement to the current situation, as characterized by Hawking:
Quoting apokrisis
I may express it in my own words but the underlying ideas are actually not that original.
It depends on your metaphysics if an exact quantum gravity theory is needed instead of an effective one. It you believe that emergence rules, that topological order is now king, then effective is all you expect.
That was the point I just argued in recounting the way the physics keeps jamming itself into the contortions of gauge invariance to ensure the rolling weight of the Big Bang continued long enough to have become interesting to those such as us.
I disagree. Science can exist even if such a theory is impossible. It isn't essential to science IMO, so it cannot be its 'ultimate' goal.
Quoting Shawn
No. In fact, one might say that the opposite is true. As Hume said, there is no 'proof' of, say, physical causality, we cannot be certain of it. On the other hand, it seems that any physical theory must be logically consistent. Logic is, I think, transcendental (i.e. a necessary precondition to any explanation) as the early Wittgenstein said.
Also, there is no conclusive evidence that physical laws are not contingent.
Physicists are currently siting on two stubborn patterns that are incompatible: quantum mechanics and gravity.
These two stubborn patterns "do not play nice with each other" and "dictate separate and contradictory rules for the cosmos" and "are mathematically incompatible" and "cannot explain things by applying them in separation". (quotes below)
So, physicists want a "grand unified" pattern instead. Physicists seem to view this effort as essential.
Such grand unified scheme may still not be a theory as defined in mathematical logic, but if this new stubborn pattern manages to remove existing inconsistencies, then chances are that it will be that too.
Yes. Since physicists insist on using logic, the whole of physics is an expression of logic.
But why would that justify thinking physics should "describe logic"?
Accounting uses math, does the study of accountancy "describe math"?
Yea, I guess I'm using to describe and to express to mean the same thing. Maybe it's more that if you've seen the expression, the description has been conveyed to you? Like if you see a model of the earth's electromagnetic dynamo, you're seeing the principles involved in making the model expressed, so you're also receiving a description of those principles. Or you could pull a description out of the expression. Is that not true?
Quoting flannel jesus
Math originally came from accounting, believe it or not. The number zero came from a Babylonian device that was kind of like an abacus. Writing down the configuration on the abacus is where a symbol for zero came from. Zero's place in the human mind was cemented by practical issues surrounding trade. Math as an abstract domain comes from the invention of non-commodity money. Wherever the use of money spread, a tendency to think in mathematical abstraction followed.
Sorry, favorite topic. :grimace:
Not sure what this could mean, but maybe one can give it meaning. For example, I had a computer which can display a simple valid argument using traditional symbolism, say modus ponens. Could we not describe the physics behind the computers expression of this argument. If so, could we not do the same with a human?
I was not expecting this reply. I thank you for humbling me.
Still, just because one field of study uses another field of study doesn't mean the first field always "describes" the second field, does it? Accounting and math notwithstanding.
I guess not. But if a field is bound to logic, it will be a demonstration of logic, won't it? Couldn't describing and demonstrating both be kinds of showing?
Quoting flannel jesus
Didn't mean to!
Well, here is what ChatGPT has to say:
Nothingness was abhorrent ? Geometry? Don't know and don't care. :cool:
But they arise within the beauty of this larger pattern. Okuns cube of theories. As outlined here .
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530
And is maths itself organised in any grand cube of theories? Is everything slotted together under some grand unifying project like category theory or the Langlands program?
On this issue, you seem just interested in being contentious rather than insightful.
Yea.
Mathematics has a massive foundational crisis with insurmountable issues.
So you shit on both sides of this divide? What intellectually does meet with your full approval?
First of all, I am fascinated by disaster tourism. I would like to take a tour of Chernobyl reactor number four.
My hobby would be to compare it to the open-air molten cores of the six Fukushima reactors and try to find similarities.
Secondly, I don't trust a tool until I understand its limitations. That is why you have to crash test it thoroughly.
That is why I find the foundational crisis in mathematics an exhilarating subject. I try to devour all the literature. [I]Show me something else that goes wrong! Is it that bad?[/I]
[I]"Mathematics proper"[/I] is fiendishly boring in comparison.
Thirdly, most programmers hate bugs. I love them. They always called me for those, because I was apparently the only one who liked working on them. There is nothing more fun than a complete mess.
Last but not least, the foundational crisis in mathematics says a lot about the universe itself, which is itself obviously also a complete mess. The metaphysical implications of the crisis are utmost fascinating.
I don't like beautiful theories. They are boring. I don't trust smooth talkers. If it is too good to be true, then it undoubtedly is.
It's not an issue with mathematics as it may seem. It's an issue with the very notion of possibility theory in systems, such as physics which quite possibly determines states in nature.
Cheers
I think your right about this. You seem updated with the right semantic model in mind.
That explains a lot ;-)
Quoting Tarskian
Well, it's good someone is interested. :roll:
Thoughts?
My point was simply that I think 'Physics' as a discipline has still a 'raison d'etre' if 'a theory of everything' is impossible to achieve. I myself worked briefly in condensed matter physics, a branch of physics that is quite independent to the search of a 'theory of everything'. To some physicists might be essential, maybe even famous ones, but this does not mean that physics becomes vain if a 'theory of everything' is impossible. There still much to be discovered about physical phenomena that can be 'modeled' with current theories.
I am once again focusing on this as the thesis of this thread. If one were to know the antithetic nature of what apokrisis said then it might be deduced on such gestaltism to see the bounds and limits of physics and logical determinism.
If physics is to be descriptive of logic, then, a "cause" would be defined by how the system of laws governing physics works, and from there to deduce what logic would be required to explain those laws in terms of decidability in logical space.
Indeed, physics has its merits. I don't think anybody denies that. I was just pointing out what some of its problems are, and how these problems relate to mathematical logic.
Then what is a model to you? Wittgenstein called it a picture of reality, no?
Ok, I see. Thanks for the clarification.
All you might achieve is a preferred logic for doing physics.
Is this chicken or egg? Physics came first in a non-anthropological manner. QED?
You can study/employ/use logic without physics. But the viceversa is not true. You can't do physics without logic. That's why I said that logic is transcendental with respect to physics: it is a necessary precondition for physics. And same, I think, is true for science in general.
What makes you believe that is true?
I cannot conceive doing physics without employing logic. Not even experimental physics: after all, experimental protocols seem to be based in a procedure that follows logical laws.
On the other hand, I can study/do/discuss logic without any reference to physics. Same goes for mathematics, actually.
Yes, well may I ask whether there are things that cannot be modeled in a computer?
I'm also trying to understand your argument about logic being transcendental. Do you mean to say logic is foundational to every state of change within a system, as logic seems necessary to produce change or "cause and effect" between objects that may have a relation as defined by physical laws through logic or the transcendental logic you mention.
Well, I don't know. I think that, say, some discoveries in physics could not be made by a computer (say e.g. Newton's discovery of gravitation)
But I am not sure why you think that it would show that if that is the case then physics would have a precedence over logic. After all, computer operations too follow logical principles.
Quoting Shawn
By saying 'x is transcendental for y' I mean that 'x' is a necessary prerequiste for 'y'. It's roughly like saying that a 'functioning visual system' (x) is 'transcendental' to 'seeing colors' ( y).
Anyway, what I meant is that logic is employed in any activity in physics, both theoretical and experimental.
Using your example, any causal explanation of physical phenomena must be formulated in a way that employs logical principles (this seems true even if Hume was actually right in his skepticism about causation. Causal explanation relie on logic, even those that are not valid).
Sure, I would like to highlight your uncertainty as stemming from not knowing how logical space can exist. Is it true in how I'm framing the ambiguity?
Additionally, as @apokrisis main question, is there anything standing in the way of a direct relationship between logic and physics? I'm only saying this as it might seem interesting given logical positivists believed in a correspondence theory of language and truth through logic...
No, as I said I don't understand why it is relevant to the debate about physics and logic, i.e. I see the two issues as separate, but I might be wrong.
Quoting Shawn
IMO, all explanations relie on logical principles. But even, say, the basic concept of 'prediction' is based on logical reasoning:
"If [some kind of theoretical statements are valid] then [ I should observe such and such in a lab]"
So, I cannot see how physics can be considered as foundational to logic (or math) when the former cannot exist, in my opinion, without the latter. Note that even if all our physical theories, explanations etc were wrong their structure has logic as a prerequisite. Explanations and predictions are based on logic.
Also, logical argumentation cannot be based on physical phenomena and their regularities. Why? Because, there is no guarantee that physical phenomena and their regularities are not contingent and if they were contingent, then logical argumentation would not be compelling.
Unless one shows that regularities in phenomena are not contingent physics cannot be foundational for logic and mathematics IMO.
Logic doesn't have that kind of dimensionality, but physics does. Are there any further conclusions based on this that can be said?
I am sorry but I really don't understand what are you getting at.
To me logic is a discipline that aims at understanding the criteria according to which an explanation, argumentation, theory etc is coherent.
Physical theories, conjectures, protocols, predictions, explanations etc should be coherent.
Even, say, a false explanation must be coherent in order to be considered 'false'. In fact, in order to be a true 'explanation' must be coherent.
And I believe that the criteria according to which an explanation is deemed 'coherent' cannot be based on something that is or might be contingent.
To another poster you said earlier:
Quoting Shawn
This might be a starting point, I think, on which we can work.
IMO, the problem I see here is that when you try to describe the laws you might infer from your observations, you already use logic and mathematics (to make them coherent and give quantitative predictions). So, I guess I can say that in order to 'ground' logic in physics, you are already assuming that logic is fundamental.
What do you think about this last paragraph? Do you think I am wrong in detecting a circuarity here? If so, why?
I don't think we can have the cake and eat it too here. The way things seem is that the very notion of possibility within a system of physical laws gives rise to a logic that is modal. Modality might be a better term than contingent...
Quoting boundless
It would be interesting to approach your question from the perspective of a counterfactual. What would a physics look like that could not be apprehended by any form of inferential or abductive reasoning? I don't think such questions are coherent, and there seems to be plenty of evidence attesting that everything in physics can be modeled. If it is indeed true that human logic can apprehend physics in a model or what have you (I think the right term, nowadays, is a "simulation"), then the circularity dissipates.
The only question that seemingly would remain as I see it, is whether logic is this medium by which physics and even mathematics subsists on...
Another line to take on the question is to note how both logical entailment and physical causality share a presumption about global closure. A grounding as in conservation laws or Noether symmetry.
Just one is closed for energy, the other truth.
Personally I look at most of what has been said in this thread in terms of computability. I'm not a simulation theorist and don't believe in it given complexity class issues arising once one would try and model in expspace and exptime.
But remember Beckensteins bound? Even information theory has achieved the entropic closure which seals its deal.
That's another line of attack. To what degree can we tolerate a physics that is illogical or a logic that is unphysical?
The two have to hang together in some deep way or they both risk becoming abstract nonsense.
And there is a lot of that about, hey? :razz:
Sure, take it from this point of view. How could truth be possible without a formally consistent and complete system to render it as such?
Particular truths must be constrained by general truths. Particular worlds must be constrained by general worlds. This is the common structure of both a scientific and a mathematical approach to the business of metaphysical inquiry. As Peirce made especially clear.
Do you think, as possibly quite interesting ponderance, that if physics can be modeled in a direct correspondence between logic (a computer) and the world, then would that mean by entailment that certain features if not the entirety of the model proves (quite literally proof of simulation in logical space, that the system of logic utilized by the model itself) that it is actually a formally complete and consistent system contra Gödel?
You could think about where maths and physics do come close as an effort to simulate reality. QCD lattice models of the inside of a proton. What is achieved and what is glossed over might inform such a debate. But probably not.
I know digital physics is one of those popular topics. But I dont believe that is what information - as it applies as the notion of physical degrees of freedom or entopy bits - has anything to do with computational logic.
Holography is about dimensional constraint - extracting bits from wholes. Computation is about constructing patterns from bits.
Logic is mechanistic about relations, so I don't see the need to type-token issues. I also don't think logic has properties ascribed to these relations, again it's possible to do so as they do such things in computer games. Yet, to talk again in terms of complexity class I don't think we could do the things nature or any mechanistic conception of nature as science would we want or hope to do.
Again, I am not a simulation proponent but am only interested in logic being descriptive of physics.
I disagree. By 'contingent' I mean something that might to cease to exist/be valid. If physical laws are something contingent and they at some point change, the criteria by which we consider an explanation 'coherent' change, if we take them as the foundation of logic. I don't think that is acceptable.
Quoting Shawn
Maybe physical theories, models etc cannot give us a picture of the 'physical world' but only useful tools to make predictions. If that is the case, it might be said that they work 'as if' they are a correct 'description'.
Consider, for instance, these two phrases:
"The sun moves from east to west and I predict that it reaches its maximum height at noon"
"When the bat hits the ball, (edit: it produces a force that) will cause an acceleration on the ball"
The first phrase is coherent, in many situations we can use it 'as if' it's correct, but it is nevertheless wrong if we take it literally: we know that the sun's movement is merely apparent. But for most practical situations I can certainly live 'as if' it's correct. I can take it seriously but not literally.
The second one is also coherent, for most practical purposes valid and yet we know that it cannot be taken as literally true.
You seem to assume that physical reality can be literally 'mapped' in a conceptual model, i.e. it has a structure that can be literally 'translated' in a conceptual framework. I guess that if we assume that this is true then maybe we might think that logic has a 'physical basis' (although then one might ask why this is so... but this is another story for another time).
On the other hand, physical theories might be able to work even if they cannot give a faithful picture of physical reality. But if this is true, then logic isn't really grounded in physics: the conceptual map is imputed by us and is not 'forced' by physical reality.
If a simulation were so accurate that it would be impossible to distinguish it from 'reality', it could be still possible that such a simulation would be correct for all practical purposes and not a literal picture of reality.
In brief, I think that your reasoning is based on a hidden assumption, i.e. that it is possible to build a conceptual 'map' of reality that is a literal picture of it.
I'd like to point out that I view the very notion of having possibility within a system can only mean in terms of modal logic the necessity of determined states which are truth apt regarding causality.
Quoting boundless
I hope this thread can go in such a direction. It seems plausible that the logic of causality can only be defined materially and temporarily.
I'd like to address this again given that my previous response was just conjecture. What I want to point out is the ability for a system to change. This change is dictated by causality. To understand causality we have to regard nature as a unitary system evolving through time. So, with this said, what do you think "possibility" might mean?
What do you thank that is the 'ground' of modal logic?
IMO: logic has no ground at all.
Quoting Shawn
Let's concede that is indeed the case.
It seems to me that, according to you, we should infer logical principles by observing physical phenomena, which we assume that have regularities which can be 'translated faithfully' in a conceptual map.
Let's assume that it is indeed possible, in principle, to infer logical principles in this way.
But what does gaurantee us that, indeed, our inference is correct? On what grounds can we be sure that our inference is correct?
We cannot say 'further observations' because, after all, the problem remains the same.
So we now have two assumptions: (1) physical phenomena have regularities that can be 'faithfully translated' to conceptual maps/schemes and (2) we can know logical principles because we can have valid inferences based on observations made on the said physical phenomena
These two assumptions might be considered reasonable but... we have introduced the concept of 'inference', which is a type of logical operation which we actually want to ground in physical observations. This suggests to me that it is best to assume that logic is primitive.
Quoting Shawn
I'll respond to this later!
The concept is so vaguely understandable only based on the way we perceive change itself. I don't really have an answer as to these deep "why" questions about what makes change possible.
Modal logic is supposedly grounded by processism. I think that's the best answer I can give.
Well, I admit that I have some difficulties to answer to your question. First of all, I wasn't assuming that change is necessarily due to causality. Second, I was merely saying that we simply do not know if 'laws of nature' are contingent or not.
Anyway, I might define 'possibility' as a 'one state' in a collection of other possible state that 'something' might have.
So, a 'contingent entity' might be taken to mean that such an 'entity' can be either 'exist' or 'do not exist'.
Quoting Shawn
Well, I think that if we want to 'ground' logic then such answers must in some ways be answered.
I was trying to point out that 'grounding' logic on something else only seems to lead to some assumptions which are themselves 'ungrounded' and that, in fact, I think even stating those assumptions requires logic.
Quoting Shawn
Ok. Maybe you are right, but I think that even modal logic doesn't need such a 'grounding'
Physics cannot describe logic: the latter is presupposed for the former. E.g., to describe the physical relations of things, one must first presuppose that whatever is described is true and not also false.
Why not ground logic in its practical consequences? Like science.
That way entailment and causality might start to look like they have something in common.
Because, e.g. in order to establish if something is useful you need to have criteria to establish that it is useful, i.e. coherent with the concept of 'useful'.
Also, practical consequences are empirical facts.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that they do have something in common. In order to formulate the concept of 'causality', I think you need entailment as a prerequisite.
Quoting boundless
What else leaves us satisfied but that something works. It achieves some goal. It is consistent with our aims.
So sure there is a circularity here. But we know how to approach that. Is it impossible to say anything about what we find to be useful about a logic as opposed to a logic that we think of as patently useless?
We routinely apply this constraint to physics. What makes it impossible in logics? Especially given as we do it routinely. To the point that we think we know what has practical bite and what is verging on abstract nonsense.
Quoting boundless
Empirical facts are measurements. So epistemic facts really. Numbers on dials ready to get fed into formulas.
Physics might not be that physical, just as logic aint that unphysical when you get down to it. It is a bit of a social construction to claim that logic is some free choice abstract from reality, or indeed an inhabitant of Platonia.
Quoting boundless
And vice versa. Did logic not arise from causal reasoning about nature? The concept of atomic actions? The concept of transformations but also closure?
How could both logic and physics be idealised in the language of number - of equations and variables, of operations and values - unless they are both birthed from the same deep concept? Global constraints coupled to local degrees of freedom. The dialectical intersection of necessity and chance.
Or structures and morphisms if you must. :wink:
The definition of pragmatic is found in the limit of inquiry. When further refinement is agreed to be pointless. A difference that would make no difference.
Every hates effective theory. But what if that is just the nature of both physics and logic? As we discover in our own good time.
I think I understand what you mean, but IMO logic is prior than understanding that. In fact, some kind of intuition of logical principles might be innate. Maybe even animals.
Of course I am speculating here. But I think no matter one tries to define logic with respect to something else, one encounters difficulties, circularities and so on.
Quoting apokrisis
In a sense, I think I agree. After all, if logic was useless nobody would employ it. But, on the other hand, even understanding the concept of 'usefulness' relies on understanding logic. What do you think?
Quoting apokrisis
Not sure what you are getting at here. I don't think that saying that logic is 'primitive', 'a groundless ground' so to speak, requires a platonic view (although, maybe, it can be used as an argument in favor for such a view... but again, I don't think that if one accept that logic is not grounded in anything, then one is forced to accept a platonic view).
Ironically, what I am saying is IMO consistent with a pragmatical view of logic, given that there is no compelling evidence for a view or another of the 'ontology' of logic. Keeping it groundless, primitive, allows us to use it without relying on a theory of a supposed ontological 'ground' of logic.
Quoting apokrisis
Let's say that, indeed, logical principles are a 'reflection' of an intelligible structure of the world. How could one 'prove' this view?
If one cannot prove this view, is this view really more pragmatically significant than other philosophical positions about the 'ontology' of logic (or the position that building an ontology of logic is impossible)?
Let's say one is a platonist. Does platonism limit the activity of logic more than other views?
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I think I agree.
Quoting apokrisis
Ok. But in order to accept a view or another, it might be needed to be shown that such a view is better than others (or a skeptical approach on the issue).
I use the 'might' here because, after all, it may not be the only criterion to choose a view over another.
Yep. Animals can induce or form associations. They can tell the difference between one, two three and many. But deduction, like the counting, or learning grammatical structure, is something no other animal but humans can turn into a fluid skill. So we can make something of that. The mindset behind logical and physical accounts of the world has some neuroantomical basis. We evolved this basic habit of thought that is recursive. We find it easy to think in a nested hierarchical fashion. A calculus of distinctions.
We likely evolved this first over a million years of tool making/using, and then this was further solidified by the development of articulate speech. We needed to think in terms of sequences of construction. Hold a rock and chip it into a desired form. Face the world and turn it into a who did what to whom narration.
So there is a pragmatic ground to how we might think reality is optimally decoded. A grammatical instinct. A semiotic system of rules and words, relations and relata, syntax and semantics. A habit of mind that proved itself by its sturdy usefulness over a million years. Even though it was not about the world but about our being able to impose ourself in a mechanical fashion - action sequences leading to desired results - on our world.
Thus there is a ground. But it is neither something of the world or even of our minds. It is a propositional attitude that arose from a semiotic modelling relation with the world. It is neither a pure realism or a pure idealism. It is something that cognitively worked. A tool using hominid could structure its world with a hierarchical order. A grammatical sapiens could impose a further level of still more consciously-distancing narrative structure,
We see then the ancient world where causality continued to have a human-centric narrativism, The animistic and magical thinking where the landscape is alive with spirits and powers. Even at the time of the Hesiod, the Greeks were equally comfortable with causal explanations that the gods did it as some more naturalistic account of why a storm blew up or sickness took a child.
Then we get to Anaximander and the first systematic naturalism. We have dialectical reasoning that develops into a variety of causal accounts such as hylomorphism and atomism. We have geometry and arithmetic becoming formalised by the constraints - the closure - of proofs.
What was a logic and causality of narration becomes a logic and causality founded in number rather than words. And this in turn becomes dialectically divided as science and maths. The grammar of physical nature and the grammar of pure ideas.
So yes, logic and causality seem to speak from different spheres today. And we are as comfortable with that as those of the Hesiod era were comfortable mixing the registers of mythical and animistic accounts with more physical and naturalistic accounts.
It seems to work that there is structured speech about the real physics of the world and the true or valid arguments of the mind.
And yet dig down. It all starts and ends in the pragmatism of the semiotic modelling relation we have with the world. What works - and thus what we believe in - is our ability to impose an imagined structuring order on our lived reality.
The foundation of logical and causal thinking is this uneasy thing that is neither properly a realism or an idealism. It is instead a system for constructing dialectical structure - nested hierarchies or recursive pattern - that can fashion the world into ways that conform with our desires.
We use models of logic/causality to constrain nature mechanically. It started with tool-making, then society-making, then civilisation and technology making.
And we are left uneasy - some even claim a foundational crisis - as it is all kind of both weirdly intuitive yet also neither clearly of the world or of the mind.
Quoting boundless
Self-referentiality is not an issue for a self-organising system. Circularity creates problems. Hierarchies fix them. The disjunction of the dyad becomes the conjunction of the triad.
Quoting boundless
I am taking the Peircean approach here. Truth is what a rational process of inquiry arrives at in the limit.
We hazard a guess, take the risk of assuming a belief, and then discover the pragmatic consequences of doing that. We systematically doubt what we have assumed until we reach a point that further doubt has become useless. Moot. A difference that no longer could make a difference in practice.
Proof seems a really big thing. But it is only important to the deductive phase of Peirces three stages in the development of a state of reasonable belief.
We start with the abductive guess. An idea about an explanation. Then we apply a process of deduction that is rigorous in terms of being closed for entailment. We break down our intuition into a set of specific logical expectations. This formal encoding of a proposition - if A, then B, or however we might phrase it - proposes a consequence we can then measure in terms of what actually follows. We can inductively confirm the proposition to the degree that it isnt being contradicted.
Quoting boundless
If the semiotic modelling relation has been working for life and mind since its biological beginning, and a semiosis founded in number is merely the latest instantiation of this natural story, then that would be a pretty grounded tale I would have thought.
One that is neither stranded in realism or idealism but founded in a lived relation that humans have with their world.
There's a rather awkward neologism I've heard several times of late, 'transjective - transcending the distinction between subjective and objective, or referring to a property not of the subject or the environment but a relatedness co-created between them.' I wonder if that is what you have in mind, and whether it also describes applied mathematics? (I assume it's a word of recent origin, wiktionary's earliest usage dates only to 2009.)
Many thanks for the informative and very interesting response. To be fair, I am not really familar with biosemiosis and Peirce's philosophy. So, I am sorry if some of my questions are 'trivial'.
Quoting apokrisis
Let's take a broad definition of 'ontological idealism' and a somewhat restricted one of 'ontological realism', here (I think that you are using here). Let's say that 'ontological idealism' means that fundamental reality is mental and every other kind of 'realities' are dependent on that ultimate reality. On the other hand, 'ontological realism' as the view that there is an ultimate reality, which is of a non-mental kind and minds ontologically depend on it.
Now, I think that it can be argued, like I think you do, that all living organisms (and maybe even some of their components and non-living things like viruses) do have a 'semiotic modelling' of the world, as you say. But it this is true, then at least some aspect of their 'being' can be rightly said to be 'mental' (a very, very primitive kind of 'mentality', not a truly sentient one...).
In your view, is 'mentality' there in all 'levels' of 'physical reality' or does it emerge at some point? Or are you endorsing a form of 'panpsychism', where mentality is 'there' at the fundamental level of 'reality' (as one aspect of it)?
I ask you this because, unless your view is a sort of 'panpsychism' it should be called 'realism' as defined above. Of course, this is not a problem 'in itself', so to speak, but it is a problem if this kind of 'realism' assumes intelligibility. If intelligibility is assumed, then such an assumption remains an arbitrary feature of the 'world-view' because the 'emergent minds' are not in a position to know if their claim of intelligibility is sound or is mistaken. On the other end, if your view is 'panpsychist', then this problem does not really arise because intelligibility is an intrinsic feature of the world so to speak.
Quoting apokrisis
At which point does a belief, though, acquire the status of 'knowledge'?
For instance, we both agreeded in the other thread that newtonian mechanics is best understood as an useful 'fictional model' that give us the possibility to make predicitions, applications and so on. We know e.g. that a 'realistic' interpretation of 'newtonian force' as a physical entity is inappropriate.
But for a long time, an ontological interpretation of newtonian physics seemed to be supported by experiments.
Of course, we can guess, assume a belief, we can even speak of knowledge in some sense, but it's not certainty. Empirical knowledge doesn't seem to be able to give us certainty. Yet, logical necessity seems to demand it.
I am not saying that your view is wrong but IMO grounding logic in an uncertain knowledge doesn't seem a real 'grounding'. Logic reamains 'groundless' or at best 'grounded' as are empirical sciences. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but seems to IMO contrast the 'necessity' of logic. But maybe it's not an important point. IMO it is but I can understand why you do not think it is.
Neither I believe that, say, platonism grounds logic. It proposes a ground, tries to give a justification of logic. But that's not enough.
Quoting apokrisis
If 'semiotic modelling' - I am wrong to call it 'mentation'? - has only been working since a certain point of this universe history, doesn't it lead us to an emergentist view?
BTW, are you familiar to the late Bohm views on 'active information'. I think that you would find them akin to yours.
I want to stress that what I am saying is more like a skeptical position. I am suspending my belief on what the ground, if any, of logic (and mathematics) is. Why? Because I think we can't be certain of any view about this.
Thanks for the pointer to John?Vervaeke. If you skim this review article, you can see he talks about all the same stuff as me. Modelling relations, anticipatory models, enactive cognition. So sits pretty squarely in what has now become the mainstream paradigm of cognitive science.
Vervaeke coins a few of his own terms. All academics have to brand themselves as adding something to the debate.
If I were criticising, I would say he would do better if he could root his general cognitive story in the nitty gritty of the brain's functional anatomy. Close the gap between the psychology and the neurology.
But generally his published papers are coming from the same place.
Very much. His main claim to fame was a lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. He's pretty wide-ranging but tries to stay within the bounds of cognitive science.
No. I was making an argument completely in a realist register there. No "mind stuff" or "qualia" at all. Our cognition has a physically real structure (or physically realised structure), just as the world has a physical structure too. And the semiotic point is that the cognitive structure is an embodied modelling relation which has the general purpose of regulating an organism's extended environment.
What we "experience" is not a re-presentation of reality, nor some epiphenomenal illusion, but a semiotic Umwelt. Which is what it feels like to be in the flow of living a life from a self-ish point of view.
This is a structuralist metaphysics that stands opposed to the usual materialist story. And it is thus according to semiotic theory an irreducibly triadic story, not the usual tale of some fundamental or monistic "stuff".
The triadic relation is the fundamental reality. And while it is easy to talk in a phenomenological register about the mind as being its own separate realm of experience or qualia, we know even from neuroscience that there is no structured experience without our brains being in interaction with an already structured world.
In a sensory deprivation chamber, we soon loose any normal sense of being in a body, and even being in a normal flow of thought. Just to see the world in a stable fashion, we need to jitter our eyeballs and keep "surprising" the photoreceptors with the fact that the boring backdrop that was there an instant ago is still there and remains ignorable right now.
So my argument starts from an enactive cognition perspective. There is a brain in a modelling relation with a world, and so already we are talking about the reality of a functional, physically-embodied, process.
After that, in talking about our intellectual modelling of causality and logic, we can assign each to its "realm" in the fashion of the good old Cartesian mind~world divide. This is the conventional socially-constructed way of looking at things which of course was the basis for how humans even added self-awareness, "freewill", complex feelings, and all the rest as sociocultural habits of cognition.
Breaking things into mind and world is physically incorrect (a cognitive neuroscientist would say), but it is also the cultural convention which turns a smart ape into a self-actualising human being.
Sorry, that is a lot of complexity. But it goes to the stress I lay on there being not just a triadic semiotic modelling relation in play, but with the physical reality of life and mind, this dynamic plays out at four key levels of semiotic mechanism genes, neurons, words and numbers. So in terms of causality vs entailment, I was making a case of how this applies semiotically at the level of human sociocultural organisation once it has become a talk at the level of "pure abstraction" a symbolism of number systems.
Quoting boundless
After my explanation, you can see I am definitely neither arguing for a monistic, nor dyadic, version of panpsychism. But also I am not arguing for a conventional realism.
I wasn't trying to argue a general case at all, just saying something about how after the ancient Greek "mathematical turn" logic and causality became their own divergent academic domains. That can be simply described as scholarly convenience. It could be construed as causality speaking to the experiment-restricted physics and entailment speaking to the Platonically soaring maths.
However if you want the full Peircean semiotic position, that says we know life and mind to be biosemiotic. That is just everyday psychology and biology now. It is grounded in biophysics and gives us a consistent account of the structure of human relations with the world through all its four levels of semiotic mechanism.
Controversially on PF, that means all of the humanities fall under the domain of biosemiosis as a general science of meaningful thought and behaviour.
And then also speculatively and controversially, one can go with Peirce and wonder about pansemiosis as a metaphysics of reality in general. The same triadic relational structure could account for the deep causality of the Cosmos as a whole. The Big Bang Universe becomes Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness". The emergence of hierarchical or topological order from out of a "quantum foam".
You say you did condensed matter physics? Dissipative structure can be seen as this pansemiotic thesis now being realised in physicalist theory.
Peirce's position was that what works as a structure of phenomenology the givenness of our experience should work as the structure of logic as the refined product of how we find ourselves thinking and feeling and reasoning. So the first step is from our psychology to our logic.
Then the second step is finding that the world beyond is also structured by the logic that we found in our minds. It too has a causality that is a process of reason or at least triadically structured in some meaningful way.
Of course Peirce didn't know about genes and so had no concrete model of how there could be an actual machinery of semiosis. So that meant he got a little woo in treating mind and cosmos as being a little too literally the same. But the Universe, as a dissipative structure, lacks an encoding machinery. We only kind of imagine that as the case in now talking about holographic spacetime boundaries and suchlike. A useful metaphor with calculable consequences.
Biosemiosis has since come along to make that difference clear. And that also sparked the conversation about pansemiosis as now being covered by dissipative structure theory.
So it is all a concrete realist project. But one that hopes to ground the sciences of life and mind in the sciences of physics and chemistry, with now an "epistemic cut" to glue the two sides of the divide, and so get rid of the tired old "Cartesian gap".
This is why I take my pragmatist approach in this thread. Logic and causality are both modelling constructs so come from the same place human matheo-semiosis. They are taken to speak to a Cartesian divided reality, but we should expect them to be pragmatically related by the triadicism of the semiotic modeling relation.
If one seems to deal in entropic relations, the other in informational relations, then well, this is just what a biosemiotician would expect. A biosemiotic story is all about how this division is actually necessary to get to the next thing of its fruitful interaction which is the "living and mindful" point.
Quoting boundless
Isn't this like being nervous of riding a bicycle as its obviously unstable and only going to get more dangerous the faster you pedal?
A tripod is a firmer base than a single point of contact, no? So just think of how soundly based pragmatism seems when compared to the instability of the folk flipping between whether maths is a free construction or a Platonic truth. Trying to balance the pencil on it tip and wondering why it always falls.
Or another metaphor, calling for a grounding does the very opposite as we find with the "tower of turtles" infinite regress. If we try to find solid ground, it immediately drops endlessly away.
The triadic hierarchical approach instead grounds in the pragmatism of the dialectic. The middle ground is that which is bounded both looking up and looking down.
Looking down, the middle ground dissolves into a blur of smallness. A random jitter of events that just smooths over into one kind of continuum. And likewise, looking up and any differences swell until just one "difference" so completely fills our vision, like the sky, that it becomes a global continuum to match the local one.
So our middle ground is secured by the closure of being the meat in a sandwich of complementary limits. Or in the parlance of cosmology, a de Sitter conformal universe. A global container specified by general relativity with a local contents specified by quantum field theory.
So your instinct is to demand a reduction to a single monistic ground. The Peircean counter-argument is that reality is a hierarchical structure of relations, and that makes it irreducibly triadic.
Reality doesn't come stacked up on an infinite tower of turtles. It instead is a structure of relations that exists by growing in de Sitter fashion. It expands and cools, doubles and halves, in geometric fashion until as far as any middle-grounders living at the classical scale of medium-sized dry goods knows any quantum small and hotness dissolves into a lower bound blur, while any relativistic difference smooths over into the large and coldness of a cosmic event horizon. The de Sitter Heat Death void as it becomes at the effective end of time. The ultimate largeness that stretches way past the edges of our merely middle ground scale of view.
Quoting boundless
Again, there are two conversations. The first is that life and mind are now explained by the causality/logic of biosemiosis. It is a conventional view in the relevant sciences. We can talk about its mineral beginnings in warm ocean floor sea vents where you had a natural starting point of alkaline vent mixing with acid ocean and setting up a proton gradient across thin vent walls suitably laced with the chemical "enzymes" to start producing complex amino acid crud.
The second is pansemiosis just dissipative structure before informational mechanism started getting its hands on it. So that covers everything out to the Big Bang as the foundational dissipative event. A hylomorphic mix of its energy potential or quantum indeterminism and the symmetry structures that Platonically lay in wait to shape it topological transformations.
Quoting boundless
Sort of the same. Everyone is feeling the same elephant once they get fed up enough with reductionism.
Quoting apokrisis
:up:
Anyway, I cited Bohm because he noted that his own interpretation of QM, depsite being realist or even physicalist, treated the (universal) wave-function/quantum pontential as a unique field that has no source and its 'influence' mathematically does not depend on the magnitude of the field but rather on its form. This, especially in the 80's, lead him to think that this 'field' is actually a 'pool of information' available to everything. So, according to him, even the most simple physical objects have a 'mental aspect' so to speak, a very very rudimental ability to 'read' information and meaning, so to speak. Note that the 'very very rudimental ability' in Bohm's is present even in the most basic level of physical reality, so no concept of 'emergence' is needed! Based on what I understood of your position, it seems that you agree with him.
While I am not sure that it can explain consciousness, I do think that it can explain the emergence of life. On the other hand, conventional physicalism is reductionistic, matter is seen as inert.
Yep. Once you are stuck with the Cartesian metaphysical division into a mind stuff vs a world stuff, then this kind of wooly Panpsychism is where you must logically end up. It is built into the premises. You cant think your way beyond the casual trap you have prepared for yourself.
Semiosis or systems thinking is just different. The world is divided at best into an entropic process and an informational process. You have a material world of dissipative structure organised by its emergent topological order. And you have a semiotic world of organisms in an enactive modelling relation with that material world, organised by its Umwelt that is what you would call a first person point of view of a third person version of the world.
Our mind is the model of the world as it would be from the point of view as it would be with us acting in it. The modelling relation is anticipatory. When you turn your head, you know it is you that is turning and not the world that is spinning, because your motor commands are fed into your sensory experience in a way to subtract your voluntary motion from your sense of what is happening out there in the world.
A first person vs third person contrast is what must arise for the modeling of the world to even function. This is the enactive or embodied argument. This is the trick that is generic to any notion of sentience or intelligent in an organism. Does it subtract its own actions in a way that makes objective the state of the world as it is sensed beyond. This is the basic semiotic algorithm that defines an organism with some kind of mind, some level of mentality.
Now one can speak of the physical world as if it is particles reading information. There are versions of pansemiosis where physics is treated as particles in a sign relation with their world as well.
But this is as best metaphoric. Not much maths in it. And really not an explanation in any theoretical sense. More a comforting fairy tale. A way not to be reductionist. A placeholder for a better worked out holist account.
However as I argued, biosemiosis now clears up the life and mind side of the equation, leaving the dissipative structure and topological order side much more plainly seen. The new holistic view of fundamental physics. The cosmological view that has to be fundamental as after all, it is all about dissipative structure if reality is that trajectory from a Big Bang to a Heat Death.
And this new semiotic view of reality is mathematically grounded in a statistical mechanics. We actually have a connection between semiosis as modelling and semiosis as dissipation as information theory is reciprocally related to entropy theory. Entropy is missing information. Information is absent entropy.
So both same yet different in a complementary or dichotomistic fashion. Physics puts all the information that specifies a physical system into its holographic boundary. Organisms then do the opposite thing of bringing all its self-regulating information inside its own boundaries as the information it encodes or remembers. Some collection of entropy controlling habits or routines.
Fristons Bayesian Brain now takes this to the point where the predictive world modelling is expressed in dissipative structure terms and as the differential equations of a new Bayesian mechanics. The semiotic approach has become mathematically formalised as a theory both in terms of life/mind and also - in the de Sitter holographic view - in cosmology.
And why this isnt widely understood is baffling. It can only be that dyadic Cartesianism still rules the cultural imagination at large. Along with the monisms of realism and idealism as the two ways to reduce what the Cartesian divide has left separated and competing for our social affiliation.
Meanwhile on the other historical track is the holistic metaphysical tradition that saw some kind of triadic relation as being foundational. The threeness that is a dialectical unity of opposites or the substantial being arising out of the hylomorphic pincer movement of material potential and necessitating form.
This way of thought became Peircean semiotics, systems science, hierarchy theory and far from equilbrium thermodynamics. It has gained its mathematical expressions. Yet it is still on the outside looking in as far as the limits of the cultural imagination goes.
It aint reflected in our popular notions of causality or logic. It indeed rouses great hostility from defenders of the Cartesian divide, too absorbed in their own ritualistic battles of idealist vs realists and not wanting to start all over having to learn a perspective that is both entirely new and also irreducibly complex. :smile:
An important distinction. My observation is that biosemiotics is not strictly physicalist in orientation, based as it is on the principles of signs and intepretation, and that it's part of a wider movement away from physicalism in science generally, also apparent in physics itself. We have discussed many times previously the question as to the nature of information, meaning and mathematical objects and whether they can be described as physical. But conventions around what does and doesn't constitute scientifically-respectable discourse is also a factor in that conversation. How to think about mind, in particular.
I have some thoughts on the subject of the relationship between physics, logic and mathematics. Despite the drawbacks of the 'Cartesian division', I had the idea that the mathematization of the quantifiable attributes of natural objects nevertheless enabled enormous breakthroughs in the physical sciences. And that is because it enables the application of mathematical reasoning to physics (and much else besides). As is well-known, that has given rise to many astounding discoveries on the basis of maths (such as Diracs' discovery of anti-matter particles.) As to why this is so effective, that seems to be the source of some bafflement - Wigner's famous article on the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics' contains 12 instances of the word 'miracle'. But on the semiotic and enactivist view, it's really not so baffling, as the structure of experience is in some fundamental respect also the structure of 'the world'. That at least is the way I've been thinking about it.
Well yes. Until you start to understand the physics of dissipative structure and topological order. The physics of symmetry breaking and emergence. Then it is maths of that type which is what is effective, for perfectly natural and unbaffling reasons.
It is all about the holistic constraints that form can impose on matter. Poincaré symmetry imposes its structure on what can even be the case as a relativist spacetime manifold. Gauge symmetry - the Lie algebra story - then does the same thing to produce the particle physics of quantum field theory.
So it is only maths of a particular type. A maths that speaks to the mathematical necessity of topological emergence. There are only certain geometries that Nature could even arrive at as it shakes itself down into its fundamental patterns.
Wigner and Dirac were leaders in just going with that kind of maths even before they could really understand how far it would lead.
It was crazy effective. But not actually baffling anymore.
Quoting Wayfarer
But pansemiosis is not biosemiosis as I have been at pains to explain. So really, Poincaré and Lie algebra have little application to the way organisms are self-organised. The maths that is crazy effective there is Bayesian probability perhaps. The maths of predictive modelling. Or the maths of hierarchy theory if we want a more general metaphysical frame that does show some deeper unity between the physics of dissipative structure and the biosemiotics of the modeling relation.
What Wigner found baffling was not that maths was so effective, but why it was. And also the way mathematics developed in one context proved effective in totally different contexts and in completely unexpected ways. Whence the conscilience between mind, world and mathematics? He doesnt offer an answer to that question but it does suggest to me that the cosmos is more mind- than machine-like.
Remember then that biosemiosis is in fact a surprising story of how machine like is the basis of life and mind. Semiosis is about how informational switches regulate entropic flows. And this is what we find right at the base level of biology where metabolism is no longer the cellular bag of chemical reactions it was in the 1970s. It is now a tale of nanoscale machinery.
On the particular point of why, think of it this way. Maths progresses as an inquiry by abstracting away constraints. The physical world develops as the series of topological phase transitions characterising the Big Bang by emergently adding new forms of constraint.
So they are the inverse of each other. What physics adds, maths subtracts. This is why each informs the other at a deep level if folk are willing to talk across their academic divides.
Which is essentially what could be said about causality and entailment. There is a reason why we should seek the common root so as to understand the whole in better fashion.
But boundary policing is a favourite human pastime. If folk find a synergy between domains is possible, this is not just surprising but verging on the unreasonable. :grin:
You say that but Im inherently distrustful of mechanistic metaphors past a certain point. I can see how the analogy works but I cant see how it accommodates the fact of intentionality at a deep level. Apropos of which, one of the books that turned up in my research today was The phenomenon of life: toward a philosophical biology, Hans Jonas. It was published in, I think, the sixties but Im instinctively drawn to it. Do you know it?
Did you watch the video? A swarm of little machines? Surely that must give you pause. But if your distrust isnt swayed by evidence .
Give us a break.
I don't think there is any difference between logical consistency and existence, so logic describes the whole reality. Physics describes the part of reality we live in. Mathematics, with its foundation in set theory, is an elaboration of logic.
I sort of agree about panpsychism but I do not see as a necessary implication.
Quoting apokrisis
I see. As the complexity of an organism rises, the more that organism can differentiate itself from its environment. In this view of things, self-awareness is so to speak, the pinnacle of this complexity. A cell has a very rudimentary 'notion' of a distinction between itself and its environment.
I think that in the simplest living organisms we can also see a sort of 'finalism' in their actions. After all, even a cell operates toward the goal of preservation of itself and, above all, of the species (with reproduction). Of course, it is not conscious but nevertheless there is a sort of 'finalism' in biological organisms that is not found in 'non-living' natural things. Same goes for a 'basic awareness' (for a lack of a better word) of being 'something distinct' from its environment.
I personally am not sure that there is only a 'quantitative' distinction between us and the simplest living organisms. There is IMO a qualitative difference... but let's not digress here.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that 'holism' was actually present even in Newtonian mechanics. For instance, one can 'derive' the conservation of momentum of an isolated system from newtonian laws of dynamics. But such a derivation is best seen IMO as pragmatic. On the other hand, if one sees the 'conservation law' as a property of the whole isolated system the newtonian laws make much more sense. So it's not surprising to see that, gradually, holism becomes even more important in contemporary physics (I mean Noether's theorem, spontaneous symmetry breaking etc are holistic concepts after all). IMO, contemporary physics seems to suggest that the 'building blocks of the universe' are not ontologically primitive. On the other hand, imo it suggests more the reverse (albeit not in a conclusive way).
Quoting apokrisis
Ok, thanks for the reference. I'll look.
Anyway, I wanted to ask you some questions, if you do not mind.
Very nice video, indeed!
Anyway, while I see the 'machinery' of it. I also see that all those 'mechanical operations' are done in virtue of a 'larger goal' of the whole organism, so to speak. I am not sure there is no 'finality' here, as I would expect in a machine.
Also, even if all of this is machine-like, their 'programming' seem spontaneous. Why such a programming is there in the first place?
The best law would be Pattees notion of the epistemic cut. It sets the divide down at the atomistic level of when a molecule becomes a message. It roots things in the logic of a mechanical switch that regulates an entropy flow for some organismic purpose.
https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html
Quoting boundless
Well it is algorithmic looking down at the neural circuit level. You have processing units like cortical columns. And then it is algorithmic looking at the socially constructed level where we are imposing some kind of rational and grammatical order on our thought patterns, especially when we are civilised and have internalised a whole variety of cultural rules and procedures. As in how to behave as a driver or at a formal banquet.
What is not actually algorithmic about any of this is that all the computation is about the end outcome of regulating some self-constructing entropy flow. We are turning matter into bodies. And that is not something you associate with computers. That is what makes us organisms and them machines. Or rather our tools, as computers only have use for us when they are woven into our general entropy regulation projects.
So being algorithmic or mechanical is a tricky issue. If we turn a natural river into a system of canals, irrigation ditches and water wheels, is that algorithmic?
It isnt purely organic. But it does display the finality we expect from organismic purpose. The landscape has been shaped by a desire. And this was possible to the degree that an algorithmic form could be imposed in terms of a logic of entailment or a causality based on a mechanics of form.
A complex system of switches was imposed on the river. And that served a holistic entropy-harnessing purpose. This is the self-organising and self-sustaining kind of state of affairs that we would recognise as being organismic. It speaks to the presence of life and mind.
Quoting boundless
The mistake here is to speak of awareness as a stuff rather than a process. An inherent property of mentation rather than a relational structure that is semiotic. Mind as simply what it is like to be in a regulating modelling relation with the world.
Thanks for the reference! Will read!
Quoting apokrisis
Ok, I see. That's more or less what was I getting at. I can understand that some or even most biological activity is alghoritmic/machine-like (like the one in the video you showed). But at some point, when life 'appeared' something changed, so to speak, where some composite physical objects began to 'operate' as you say as '(living) bodies' (or even like viruses or some complex single biomolecules), i.e. undivided wholes whose 'higher level' 'aims' determine (at least to some extent) the operation of their parts (I hope that the word 'aim' is not misleading here, I am not suggesting that, say, a bacterium has a conscious 'purpose').
And IMO that 'something' is crucial. How these kinds of 'proto-intentionalities' appeared in the first places?
Maybe your reference addresses this question, so I'll read!
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly. While the whole operation might be simulated/repeated by a computer, I do not think it can be done by it in the first place (I guess that one might say it can happen with an extremely low probability... but the same can be said that it is possible to a computer to write the 'Lord of the Rings'...)
Quoting apokrisis
However, I don't think that it is by itself enough. If the appearance of that 'relational structure' is still unexplained as an emergent feature, then IMO it doesn't change much. I am not saying that you are wrong or anything, but I think that seeing mind (especially self-consciousness) as a relation structure/process is not enough to 'prove' physicalism so to speak.
Even an enzyme is proto-intentional. A kinesin or any other molecular motor is proto-intentional. They exist to make things happen in preferred directions.
And intentionality is baked in at every level of structure. A worm has a mouth and sense organs at one end, an anus at the other. Its body plan is set up to plough through the dirt, eating as it goes.
You dont have to look hard to see functionality in biology. It is there over all scales.
Quoting boundless
As long as you talk about mind, consciousness, mentation, etc, you are already speaking in an idealist register. All those assumptions about res cogitans, about a mental stuff, about ineffable qualia, float along with you.
Semiotics tries to move us along to a more physically rooted view of life and mind as an informational structure/entropic process - the modelling relation. A kind of dualism if you like. But unmystical as it is closed for causality under its triadic connection.
One view fits traditional cultural practice. The other is grounded in science. You get to pick your side.
I wasn't denying that. I was just asking how does this 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place.
I am not sure if its appearance is enough to explain self-consciousness but explaining that appearance would be an impressive move.
Btw, I read Pattee's article. Quite interesting, yes, but I do not have found the explanation of how the epistemic cut and/or the 'proto-intentionality' appear in the first place. In other words, I think the article explains where it appears, how it behaves but I didn't see an explanation of how it appeared in the first place (but maybe I misunderstood...).
Quoting apokrisis
Ok, I do respect that, even if it will be found that this approach won't explain everything about life and mind. I think that it has lead and will lead to many good insights.
Why cant it have appeared by accident? In the usual evolutionary fashion.
Quoting apokrisis
But here, are you imputing intentionality, which is the specific attribute of organisms, to 'switches' and 'motors'? So that even despite your rejection of physicalist reductionism, you're still employing a reductionist model. You're denying or flattening out the distinction between the mineral and organic domains by imputing intentionality to chemistry.
I mentioned The Phenomenon of Life, Hans Jonas. I doubt it's on your radar as he was a student of Heidegger with a background in hermenuetics and contintental philosophy (died 1993). Jonas' philosophy describes metabolism as the most basic form of lifes intentionality. He argues that through metabolic processes, even the simplest organisms maintain their form and identity by continuously interacting with their environment, with this interaction directed towards the goal of sustaining life. Jonas posits that living organisms have a form of perception and response that, while not conscious, is nevertheless intentional. For example, a plant growing towards light exhibits a form of directed, goal-oriented behavior. His philosophy is teleological, meaning he believes that all living beings have inherent goals or purposes. He extends this notion to even the simplest organisms, which act in ways that reflect basic survival goals. Jonass existential interpretation of biology suggests that life itself is an expression of a kind of intentionality, arguing that the very nature of being alive involves striving, goal-directed processes, and a fundamental interaction with the environment.
Quoting apokrisis
In contrast, what I've gleaned from your posts is that life is treated as a model, which is driven by thermodynamic energy, towards an ultimate end of the minimization of energy. It is a comprehensive framework but lacking from an existential perspective. It is 'life seen from the outside', as it were. Philosophy, and existentialism in particular, is concerned with the living of life, rather than its objective description - the controlling of it and the modelling of it. Philosophy as distinct from science.
Or no particular reason. It wasn't prevented. A fluctuation was possible.
How we understand "accident" is not as simple as you suggest.
Quoting Wayfarer
Switches and motors are only produced because they serve a purpose. Same with the enzymes and kinesins.
An actual light switch doesn't seem proto-intentional as clearly the lighting circuit, and the national power grid it is connected to, don't turn themselves on and off, let alone self-construct themselves as an entropic project of nature.
But enzymes and kinesins are functional little critters. They are embedded in the self-interested metabolic economy of an organism. It matters if they are "off or on". They only get built or degraded, deployed or withdrawn, to the degree they serve the purpose of the organism as a whole.
Quoting Wayfarer
You have forgotten Pattee's epistemic cut and so have lost your bearings in this argument.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yep, that is all well and good. But then what is the mechanism? What mediates between the modelling and the world? Is this where he starts waving his hands?
Quoting Wayfarer
You mean life embodies Rosen's modelling relation, or Peirce's semiosis? There is an epistemic cut that both separates and then connects in a fashion that allows an organism to build itself while degrading the world.
Quoting Wayfarer
But it is only when we start to see life from the outside that we can start claiming to see life from the inside as well. If we can claim to stand outside its materiality, that is the modelling presumption the Umwelt that places us inside what we call "the realm of the mind".
And this dialectical claim only arises in humans once they have reached a linguistic and numeric level of semiosis. We become self-conscious as that has become the new structure of our world model.
We are now mostly unconsciously being shaped by our existence as socially constructed beings. The parts of the larger whole that is the human social organism doing its self-making entropic thing.
And to function as the individual parts of this new greater whole, we have to be objective about the fact of our own sentient existence so as to be able to place ourselves within the larger socialised subjective state that is our collective cultural Umwelt.
As subjects, we objectivise ourselves so as to function as the machinery of entropifying switches that becomes the epistemic cut upon which the collective consciousness of a tribe or civilisation becomes founded.
Quoting Wayfarer
There you go. As an individual, you go to school and get suitably programmed for the function that society has in mind. Told who you "really are" and how you "ought to think and behave". So as to best serve the larger system that is now in charge of the entropy project in a way that appears to transcend the usual evolutionary and environmental limits.
Your complicity with "existentialism" is bringing about the opposite of what you imagine. You are objectivising yourself so as to fit the larger requirements of your society.
Or worse yet, learning just how to be a bad fit. Ending up both living in that society and feeling unhappy and confused about how its all panning out. :razz:
No, it's more like a handy kind of gap-filler, which can be assigned roles in many different contexts.
Regarding the 'epistemic cut', I noticed this passage from Howard Pattee in The Information Philosopher site:
[quote=Howard Pattee;https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/pattee/]A description requires a symbol system or a language. Functionally, description and construction correspond to the biologists distinction between the genotype and phenotype. My biosemiotic view is that self-replication is also the origin of semiosis.
I have made the case over many years (e.g., Pattee, 1969,1982, 2001, 2015) that self-replication provides the threshold level of complication where the clear existence of a self or a subject gives functional concepts such as symbol, interpreter, autonomous agent, memory, control, teleology, and intentionality empirically decidable meanings. The conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature
Self-replication requires an epistemic cut between self and non-self, and between subject and object.
Self-replication requires a distinction between the self that is replicated and the non-self that is not replicated. The self is an individual subject that lives in an environment that is often called objective, but which is more accurately viewed biosemiotically as the subjects Umwelt or world image. This epistemic cut is also required by the semiotic distinction between the interpreter and what is interpreted, like a sign or a symbol. In physics this is the distinction between the result of a measurement a symbol and what is being measured a material object.
I call this the symbol-matter problem, but this is just a narrower case of the classic 2500-year-old epistemic problem of what our world image actually tells us about what we call the real world.[/quote]
So - how does 'the conceptual problem for physics is that none of these concepts enter into physical theories of inanimate nature' support the idea that this is a physical theory? It seems to me that by acknowledging the separation of observer and observed, the 'epistemic cut' actually re-affirms an ontological difference between the physical and biological which is also noted by Jonas above. (There's a dismissive reference at the end of the article to the convergence of the 'epistemic cut' with Heisenberg's philosophy of physics, but this is all far from settled as you well know.)
So if I were to argue that living organisms in whatever form they take, amount to the emergence of intentionality, I don't think I would be saying anything at variance with the passage quoted above.
Sure. That is why we biologists have always said biology is bigger than physics. It is large enough to also include semiosis as the new science of meaning.
Pattee himself then puts his finger on how it is a mechanics of information processing switches, levers, ratchets, latches that physically gives effect to his epistemic cut. With that, the missing connection is made. Physics gets drawn up into the mothership of pansemiotics.
Quoting Wayfarer
I dunno. Pansemiosis is keen to extent intentionality to even the physical sphere as "tendency". That covers the Second Law's extremely general imperative of "thou shalt organise to entropify" as the global tendency of Nature.
Stan Salthe pushed this hard. Pattee himself was rather diffident in these conversations, being ironically more of a hardline physicalist within the biosemiotic camp. Salthe was a full-on Peircean internalist.
Why would I care if pragmatism is my judge in these matters? It ain't me who is all caught up in this particular culture war.
Quoting Wayfarer
Did I mention Friston's Bayesian Brain? Did I mention Hoffman's Ratchet?
The science has been moving along at quite a clip. The genetic code wasn't even cracked when I was born. Now we have 3D animations of armies of molecular machines at work, harvesting entropy to rebuild bodies.
I'm not sure what more could be expected in terms of astoundingly swift progress.
Here is Salthe's summary of his contribution....
Salthe is then accused of being too materialistic by other more idealist contributors. So you can see a range of opinion exists. Horace Fairlamb, for instance, still sees wiggle room for the emergence of mind as "true novelty".
So pick from it what suits your taste.
Well, I put it badly. I meant that the 'appearance' of 'proto-intentionality' must have been a possibility and the possibility of such an appearance must be IMO to be accounted for in order to have an explanation.
We see a lot of behaviors in living organism (and near-living 'organisms' like viruses) that simply are completely different from what one see in 'non-living things'. This of course doesn't deny the 'radomness' that is present in evolution.
So I guess that my question can be formulated as: how can we explain the possibility of the appearance of the 'behaviors' seen in living organism if before that those kind are simply not present?
Sure. The field of abiogenesis has plenty of suggestions on the matter. In general, one looks for a dissipative chemistry that could become colonised by some of the organic gunk it produces that proves able to function as a primitive information capturing code.
If for example a thermal vent is already producing organic molecules via minerals like greigite - rich in the same iron sulphur clusters that became woven into enzymatic reaction paths - then already there is a lot of the structure in place to get life going.
So it is not in principle a puzzle. It is putting together some particular evolutionary story that becomes the difficulty, not having a Time Machine.
Heres a typical article on that - https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/hydrothermal-vents-and-the-origins-of-life/3007088.article
Thanks! I'll read the link before answering.
Ok, I now read your link. I think I am understanding better also your position.
The assumption here is that there is a sort of law/principle that treats the transition between 'non-life' and 'life', abiogenesis, as a sort of phase transition - i.e. a 'regularity' that, in principle, can allow us to build a predective model that predicts under which conditions life can arise. I think that it is reasonable. But of course, the details are not clear and only a theoretical approach might not be able to construct such a model.
Do you believe that such a model could be expressed as a mathematical theory, like in theoretical physics?
Also: are there some books that you would suggest to explore this topic?
BTW, thanks for the discussion, it has been very productive and insightful!
Nick Lanes The Vital Question is excellent. And Peter Hoffmans Lifes Ratchet.
Lane has lots of YouTube talks on his book.
Eric Smith is great - https://youtu.be/0cwvj0XBKlE?si=X8ksxZNJjOLdjlj5
Loren Williams talks on the evolution of the ribosome - https://youtu.be/AF0VmMvE1yI?si=msA7LgpLvKx6AfYn
The area has got interesting in just the past decade as a flood of new techniques are cracking open the questions.