That’s me, but I think of it as being a VirgoYankeeBabyboomer.
With respect to testing……..
…….Einstein had to wait, what, 35 years? For experimental tests of his theories. Pretty hard to test for time dilation at 10mph, I must say.
Anyway, I really don’t care about the testing; I can’t even hardly understand what’s being tested for.
If coherent sense is made of everything, does everything include that for which no question has yet been asked?
By the same token, given the disparity in scientific problems you’ve listed, and the proposed single solution for them all, implies a hidden commonality far beyond current knowledge. Which just might be the answer: we’re simply not equipped to access some empirical givens. Or we’ve foisted them upon ourselves in order to get around a roadblock. Perhaps the more parsimonious answer to why there’s no experimental methodology for your system?
But as I said, I’m here for the metaphysics, the system of correct thinking, which foreshadows whatever experimental methodology there may be, and indeed, makes it possible.
The shape of a lamp post grows larger in your visual field when you walk towards it because of the shrinking distance, not cognition.
Unlike dualism or idealism, Searle’s realism includes both the material and the mental features of the world. Both are ontologically irreducible (experiences have a subjective mode of existing, and brain activity has an objective mode of existing). Both are equally real.
Both are also causally reducible. Experiences are causally reducible to brain activity under conditions (e.g. of observation) that satisfy the experiences. The humidity of steam or solidity of ice are causally reducible to the behavior of water molecules in different temperatures.
(1) It occurs to me — and maybe you will agree — that genuine first principles are not something we invent. It’s more like we make the first principles we already enact explicit.
(2) If we expect science to progress, this would seem to imply that your kind of metaphysics would be perishable, a mortal creature of its time.
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It’s plausible that genuinely first principles will continue to be blended with science as it progresses. A metaphysical vision of the world can be updated.
I think you and I clash on the social relevance of metaphysics. Of course the average or distinctive “vision” of the world enacted by a community matters, but such visions are already active. They are political and religious visions.
An abstemious positivist might say that “metaphysics” is the quasi-religion or quasi-politics of the rare theoretical personality. Metaphysics is rationalized religion. It’s what happens to social hope when the lawyers get their hands on it. An emphatically discursive case is made for it. Instead of faith in a God who is pre-rational or trans-rational, we get a proof of God’s existence. If “God” isn’t simply “mathematics,” the proper “theology” is at least a quasi-mathematics.
Infidels are “irrational.” They may be “really nice people,” but they are lesser beings without the light of intellect. A good heart, the right feelings, won’t cut it. “God” or “System” is appropriated as knowledge. This “gnosis” is conspicuously “dry.”
Now your system isn’t terribly theological. In content, it’s not obviously theological at all. But there is a presumption that it will preserve the world against “pluralism” or “pomo” or some kind of ideological-conceptual degeneration. If people clean up their explicit theoretical beliefs, the rest will fall into place. Because the problem is the lack of a genuine theoretical authority or foundation. Basically people need a “religion” (an orienting holistic vision of the world) that is “rational” and “scientific.” Which is basically to say a “metaphysics.”
I don’t object to the attempt. We serve as foils for one another. But I just don’t think people are like that. They get their “concrete metaphysics” from religion and politics. They generally don’t worry much about leaning on ambiguous myths and metaphors. It’s not clear to me that they should. Indeed, I see “pure reason” in a “purified conceptuality” as itself a myth, an “anemic” myth, the myth of something beyond myth. I use “myth” here to mean something like orienting narratives. People say they “believe” these narratives, but I would look for the effect of these narratives in their conduct as a whole.
Theoretical life is a world of talking heads. A person is just a bundle of claims that ought to be coherent and grounded in what the other talking heads mostly agree are “first principles.” The metaphysician approaches human existence as a theoretical puzzle. Others must also “actually need” a solution to this or that puzzle.
What I like about thinkers like Gadamer is their appreciation of art as a potent if ambiguous and risky revelation of the world.
Be that as it may, the passage I was responding to is straightforwardly reductionist:
But the point of the ‘three coins’ example is that while there are only three material objects there is a fourth item, the triangle. But that is only an illustration of the principle which is that cognition generates and proceeds in terms of meaningful wholes (‘gestalts’).And they are not reducible to their material constituents.
And for that matter the car engine also cannot be accounted for only in terms of its material constituents. It also comprises design, engineering and material science that cannot themselves be reduced to its molecular constituents. Unlike Searle’s strictly ‘bottom up’ ontology these elements are ‘top down’, imposed on the material by an external agent.
I am not proposing the kind of ‘property dualism’ that Searle has in his sights.
No. It doesn’t even include most of the questions that have been asked. It must cover the basic structure of reality, both metaphysically and scientifically. A coherent big picture, not a perfect representation of everything that can ever exist. A lot of things will remain unknown forever, or inescapably subjective.
Actually I think that is an illusion. If we consider Kuhn’s arguments in TSoSR, then just before a big paradigm shift, the situation looks at its most hopeless. That is the point where the old paradigm is seriously breaking down, and the new paradigm is “forming in the cracks of the old one”, but nobody has yet managed to put all the clues together in order for the new paradigm to start emerging. In other words, I believe that “hidden commonality” is within grasp, but that it requires a major gestalt shift for human minds to actually see it.
That is a kind of pessimism I cannot stand. It is giving up. I see no reason to believe the cosmos is fundamentally unintelligible (to humans), and consider the abandonment of the search for coherence to be as unwelcome as the theological answer (which also amounts to giving up – why should we be able to understand the mind and works of God?)
Yes, I think we need a shared metaphysics and/or epistemology. Preferably both, in which case they need to be integrated. 2PC comes with an integrated epistemology called The New Epistemic Deal.
Your post above just looks to me like a bog-standard defence of postmodern epistemic anarchy. And yes I consider that to be the depths of intellectual and spiritual degeneration, because it fails to take Truth seriously, and Truth is my religion. Literally, at the age of 17 I invented my own religion, and ran naked into the sea at midnight on a deserted beach in Cyprus, and ritually baptised myself. I have three commandments:
(1) Seek truth at all times.
(2) Speak truth at all times. Never lie to, or intentionally mislead, others. Defend truth from all attempts to deny, distort or obscure it.
(3) Never lie to yourself. These are the worst kind of lies.
I have stuck to that ever since, and this has led to a lifetime of conflict with postmodernists (and their political offspring). It is also why, when my physicalist worldview collapsed aged 33, I chose to quit a software engineering career to study philosophy. And it is why I am here now, having this discussion with you.
I think humans need a shared philosophical foundational, at least with respect to the importance of truth. I believe that everything else that matters should follow from that. Conversely, I believe that if we do not take truth seriously, we will never be able to fix any of our systemic problems. If we aren’t willing to face the truth about what the problems actually are, how could we ever hope to find solutions which actually work?
It isn’t and never was unwelcomed at all; it is irrational, in that reason itself will not allow the human intellect as a whole, to rest.
Old school metaphysics.
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It isn’t giving up, it’s recognizing boundaries, the first and foremost being, we’re never going to know everything, which is ground for preparation for not knowing some things.
Old school……..yaddayaddayadda.
If no one’s put the clues together for the emergence of a new metaphysical paradigm, on what possible grounds should it ever be supposed there is going to be one?
I find it annoying that the hue and cry for the new is merely from lack of sufficient understanding of the old.
That argument would work on pretty much every person on this planet except myself. I have put the clues together. The reason nobody else has is because you need two sets of two things accepted together.
(1) Brains are both necessary and insufficient for consciousness. The physicalists reject insufficiency and the idealists and panpsychists reject necessity. Very few people are willing to accept both.
(2) The correct interpretation of QM requires a synthesis of MWI and CCC – the two existing interpretations which both deny any physical collapse mechanism, but have always been considered incompatible. MWI appeals to physicalists and determinists, CCC appeals to mystics (and dualists). Nobody has even proposed this until I did earlier this year, and not many people have been able to understand it since then.
I think that thought experiment is a bit misleading. The three things can only have that position by being spatially fixed, and the fixation is the table which they are on. So the table needs to be counted as an object.
This is an important feature of our attempts to separate things from their context, and claim to be looking solely at the things only, in a sort of context-free environment. I believe that this becomes very important in quantum physics when they attempt to separate particles, and they have to deal with things like electromagnetic fields, and gravity all over the place which must be blocked out. It’s probably why Geoff Dann says the void is not really a void, we cannot create a real void.
So I see this in a slightly different way. The fourth item identified, the pattern, or the meaningful whole is already dependent on an ‘unnoticed’ background, or global context, the table here, and the gravity which holds the items fast to the table, etc.. Therefore the “cognition generates” the “terms of meaningful wholes” to account for what is unnoticed, the unknown global context. The cognition generated meaningful whole is a sort of fiction, an imaginary ideal, “the triangle”, which serves as a placeholder for all the unnoticed and unknown global context, which in this case is the table and gravity which are essential to producing the triangular pattern.
This principle is very much related to the criticism I am preparing for Geoff. He places far too much emphasis on the wavefunction, and its collapse. But the wavefunction is just this type of thing, a sort of fiction, an imaginary ideal, which serves as a placeholder for all the unnoticed an unknown global context.
That is wide open to debate. And it should be abundantly obvious at this point that the debate will not be settled by considering the Measurement Problem in isolation. This is the most fundmental unanswered question about the nature of reality, and its answer should and will have consequences far beyond physics.
I agree, but I think you overstate yourself a little? My (our) best guess is that “Brains are both necessary and insufficient for consciousness”, but I know of no evidence or other confirmation of our shared opinion…
The same goes for “THE correct interpretation” of QM.
Excuse me if you feel I’m being pernickety, but I like to be clear and up-front in my use of language, in a place like this forum. Clarity means more to me than to most others, perhaps?
Fair enough. The interesting thing about this pair is that large numbers of people are willing to defend each of them, but very few are willing to accept both, even though there is no reason why both of them cannot be true at the same time. To me this captures the underlying problem in a nutshell: not many people willing to think about the whole picture, because it is much more comfortable choosing the fragments that appeal to you.
This is why Nagel is my favourite philosopher. He’s the exact opposite – he will stop at nothing to identify exactly why we cannot assemble a whole picture, and he doesn’t care who he upsets along the way.
I call it the Embodiment Threshold. Stated as simply as possible, at the exact point MWI says our mind splits and we make different decisions in diverging timelines (one where we choose to marry Alice, another where we choose to marry Bob), the ET says the wavefunction is forced to collapse because minds are indivisible.
More technically, an informational self-model which spans quantum branches, models the future with the self in it as an entity which persists over time, and can make non-computable value judgements as to which future it would prefer to manifest, cannot split. A meaningful decision requires that the options not chosen do not manifest.
This is an alternative to Henry Stapp’s dualistic re-interpretation of von Neumann’s interpretation. VN never said “consciousness causes the collapse”. He just said consciousness is the only sensible candidate for where an otherwise infinite chain of physical observers can end. In 2PC, consciousness, free will and wavefunction collapse are three different names for the same process: the phase transition which selects a singular classical reality from the non-local quantum possibilities. It’s a sort of quantum process metaphysics (without God).
In fairness to all, you seem to be complaining that few acknowledge your/our two assumptions, but you write as though they are rather more than just guesses? For in the end, all of our opinions on this matter are, I believe () naught but that: opinions.
It is my experience that few are willing to follow logic to its proper conclusion: if there is no conclusive evidence (or other justification), then logic mandates that we must not give our opinions any more credence than guesses deserve. Hyperbole is a sort of logical fallacy, in this sense, I think?
I think both of them are more than guesses. Neuroscience has well and truly nailed the “easy problems”. We have an enormous amount of detailed knowledge as to what brains contribute to our conscious experience, to the extent that a kind of consciousness which doesn’t require any of that information is impossible to imagine. How could you have a consciousness which doesn’t have a perspective? So for me, science has proved that brains are necessary for consciousness, provided “consciousness” is defined in terms of our own animal experiences. And how else could we define it? This is why I can’t accept Kastrup’s position – it depends on an abuse of the concept “consciousness” to the extent that it can mean almost anything (rather like physicalism).
But solving the easy problems cannot touch the hard problem, because that problem is logical/conceptual, not empirical. So logic forces us to conclude that brains are insufficient – physicalism can never bridge the explanatory gap.
Your reply explains why you believe collapse must happen (it must happen in order to preserve the singularity of the self and the reality of free will), but you don’t say how it happens. There’s no dynamic mechanism to interrupt the evolution of the wave equation. Logical preference is not a physical cause. The “logical necessity” for a single outcome exists only if one presupposes that only one outcome can exist, which is exactly what needs to be proven – i.e. the account assumes the conclusion (that minds cannot split) rather than deriving it from physical laws.
Whitehead solves the combination problem through “prehension” – i.e. individual “actual occasions” physically and mentally grasp data from their past and integrate it into a novel unity. So a “mind” in Whitehead’s ontology is not a substance – it is a “society” of serially ordered occasions. There is no metaphysical law in Whitehead’s ontology to prevent this society from branching. If the physical brain enters a superposition, Whitehead’s ontology suggests the “society” of occasions would bifurcate into two distinct serial lines, each inheriting from the past but diverging in the present – i.e. the “split” is not a logical contradiction. It is a natural process of becoming in Whitehead’s ontology.
Yes, causally reductionist. Effects have causes, therefore reducible. Ontologically, however, an experience exists only for the one who has it. That’s not something that could be reduced to something else. Nor are molecules reducible to things that have social modes of existing (e.g. money).
The three coins in your example can be categorized in as many ways we like. Some famous polish logician would say that the three coins are in fact seven.
I didn’t set out to modify Whitehead’s system, and when I described it as “quantum process metaphysics” I meant it in the most general sense.
Your reply explains why you believe collapse must happen (it must happen in order to preserve the singularity of the self and the reality of free will), but you don’t say how it happens. There’s no dynamic mechanism to interrupt the evolution of the wave equation. Logical preference is not a physical cause. The “logical necessity” for a single outcome exists only if one presupposes that only one outcome can exist, which is exactly what needs to be proven – i.e. the account assumes the conclusion (that minds cannot split) rather than deriving it from physical laws.
You can’t derive this from physical laws, because it is not a physical law. It operates at a deeper level than the laws of physics. I suspect it will always remain metaphysical. The Embodiment Threshold as I have defined it is a custom-built puzzle piece created to fill a hole in a combined physics-metaphysics model of reality. This model begins with a new interpretation of QM - a sequential synthesis of MWI and von Neumann. I had got to the point where much of the rest of the model was in place, but I only had a placeholder for the collapse mechanism. The best options anybody else has come up with are Orch-OR and Stapp’s version of the Quantum Zeno Effect as a free will mechanism. But these don’t work. Stapp’s system is dualistic, treats consciousness as stuff which pokes the physical world, and doesn’t integrate with cosmology. And microtubules aren’t brain-specific. I needed a property of brain which makes brains both uniquely capable of supporting consciousness and uniquely capable of collapsing wavefunctions. Then I came across somebody-else’s idea of an information-based collapse trigger linked to the commitment to a specific future. His mechanism didn’t work either, but I realised that I should have been looking for an information-only collapse trigger (and selection mechanism) all along. QM is fundamentally about information, and my own ontology is neutral monist.
The situation is a bit like evolution and genetics. Darwin knew he needed something which passed on traits, and sometimes mutations, but he didn’t know what it was. I needed something that does what the Embodiment Threshold does, and it is my own best guess as to what fits in that hole. The explanatory power of the model as a whole comes from the way it intersects with all the other problems, not because I have any way of proving the specific details of the ET. The same goes for Competition-Resolved Collapse | Two-Phase Cosmology, which ensures reality doesn’t fragment (solves Wigner’s friend problem) and Extended Competition-Resolved Collapse | Two-Phase Cosmology, which provides a further layer of constraint based on meaning, which solves the problems Jung and Pauli worked on for 30 years. They are best guesses, based on the way reality actually appears to us, and what is required to make the whole system coherent.
) naught but that: opinions.