On the purpose of metaphysics, historically and today

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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This question is directly connected to the 25 year collaboration between Jung and Pauli, both of whom assumed that the answer was yes. They both believed in a deeper reality from which both consciousness and the material world emerged, and both assumed that this world contained some kind of primordial value and meaning. For Jung this was archetypes, whereas Pauli believed specific concepts (such as the number 4) had fixed meanings. This work led only round in circles.

In 2PC the answer is no. There is no value or meaning in Phase 1 (the Pythagorean Ensemble). All meaning and value is created by consciousness itself. The appearance of meaning coming from a deeper level of reality (e.g. synchronicity) is actually the result of people’s own belief systems constraining which outcomes are possible. Archetypes are effectively real for Jungians precisely because they believe in them (they “authorise” them as a valid symbolic language).

“Sacred Structure” was part of my working title when I published the PDF. I changed it for the book because I didn’t want to scare cosmologists off. It is a direct reference to the fact that, in order to make the model work structurally, I have to accept both Pythagoreanism (literally “sacred structure”) and “Atman=Brahman” as structural claims. The latter is the foundational claim which is common to all forms of mysticism. And it is directly related to “best possible world” because the 2PC implies that the more spiritually developed a person is, the more influence their valuations have over which outcome manifests. The purpose of spirituality is not rewards in the afterlife, but greater influence and responsibility while alive. That’s why synchronicities are linked to personal/spiritual development – they are signposts, guiding people towards deeper participation in the unfolding of reality. Extended CRC is a theoretical description of what so-called “paranormal phenomena” actually are, and what their purpose is.

It can’t. The implication is that the worst possible world cannot manifest, so even if bad things are happening then that’s the best that consciousness could manage.

I’d rank the Problem of Evil as the biggest problem in theology. Certainly it is the primary reason why I cannot believe in an intelligent, interventionist creator-designer God. If there is one supermind choosing the best possible world then how could the world end up in such an unbelievable mess? And I am not just talking about obscenities like the Albigensian Crusade, but the ongoing collapse of civilisation as we know it due to climate change and ecological collapse. How is this compatible with any idea of a best possible world? The answer is that the underlying problems are the result of deeply ingrained human animal behaviours. Evolution created us to survive, not to behave in a morally acceptable manner. We’re naturally greedy, dishonest and thoroughly self-centred. We far prefer comfortable lies to uncomfortable truths. And our cultural responses are slow and inadequate: we learn our lessons the hard way.

Most of the above reply isn’t really 2PC-specific at all though. None of it is new. Much of it was already known when the big religions were originated, but the traditional religious solutions have frequently created at least as many problems as they solved.

The best theological response to the Problem of Evil was always that God granted humans free will, because a world where humans have free will is better than a world where God orchestrates everything to be perfect. Metaphysical freedom is what allows us to create meaning. That freedom is so valuable, it is even worth the terrible price that is paid when humans use that freedom to choose bad outcomes.

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OK, this helps me to understand why this discussion has been so difficult. I automatically assume that anybody I am talking to actually accepts QM as the most successful physics theory ever, and you do not. 2PC is a new interpretation of QM, so it is hardly surprising you are rejecting it. You reject all interpretations of QM, and want to see it replaced with something else.

Do you have any idea what it might be replaced with?

Yes, but this is very old news. You’ve already rejected QM, and now you are rejecting Relativity, and you are doing so based on exactly the argument which led to the problems Einstein’s theories solved. For a long time people did assume that EM radiation must be waves moving within a substance. Einstein showed why this idea was wrong.

However, Einstein’s solution was itself incomplete. What’s missing from Relativity is an explanation of what the “now” is. There is no present moment. There’s also no explanation of why reality is relativistic in the first place. The position I am defending changes both of those things. 2PC says space-time is not ontologically real.

OK. For me philosophical debate is about trying to find what the fundamental disagreement is about, and I think we have now found it. I have never previously encountered anybody who is seriously trying to turn the clock back to 19th century physics. I mean…we could talk about the black body radiation problem and the birth of QM, but I suspect the discussion won’t go very far.

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If QM looks at the world as a whole, and human beings as a living biological agent existing in the world, making analogies, metaphors, abstractions, reasoning on the world with linguistic expressions and understandings, then it will be a successful subject like other sciences.

However, if QM looks and talks about atoms, particles, electrons, heat and waves, then it will not be able to achieve in contributing to understanding of reality of the world or human existence. It will just be a part of physics or mechanics with the superstitious claims.

It is because the world always has been, and appears to us as the complete existence, not as particles or atoms.

The same goes with humans. Humans born in complete bodies, and grow and evolve to be more capable and complex beings in the whole body. Humans can never function or exist in parts or bits or as lumps of atoms or particles.

Only death turns humans into particles. Living humans exist all in the complete shape and form of the full complete biological bodies, which is the subject of art, love, intelligence and the whole living activities.

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so you would expect God to appear and clean up the mess humans have made? And that he can’t or doesn’t is an indictment? But then yu did say above you see God as a kind of super-director in which case it might be what you would expect.

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That version of God wasn’t invented by me. It was the one presented to me by Christians when I was a child, and the one believed in by many Abrahamic theists. It is the simplistic version of an Abrahamic god, but for many people religion is simplistic. You aren’t supposed to ask difficult questions.

Until I was 33 my own belief system was also rather simplistic, but Dawkins-style simplistic rather than theistic. That was before I understood the logical hole in physicalism (the Hard Problem) and discovered Robert Anton Wilson. After that point things became a lot more complicated, which is why I quit software engineering to study philosophy and cognitive science. These days I avoid the simplistic Christians vs atheists debates. If somebody mentions God then I just ask them to define what they mean by that, which usually sends the debate towards more constructive territory.

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I’ll say something about my background. Born early 50’s so a Boomer, came of age in the 60s so influenced by 60’s counter-culture and popular Eastern mysticism. Never much noticed Robert Anton Wilson although I was influenced a bit by Leary (I had Politics of Ecstacy although it hasn’t aged well.) Other sources were Alan Watts , D T Suzuki and Krishnamurti (I went through an intense Krishnamurti phase in young adulthood.)

I actually discovered internet forums because of an article about Terry Eagleton’s scathing review of The God Delusiion in the London Review of Books, called Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching, published 2006 (although I don’t think I read it until a couple of years later). Eagleton is no religious apologist, he’s a Marxist intellectual and general gadfly. He wrote:

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

After that I read The God Delusion, which I disagreed with heartily. Not because I was Christian — I’m a cultural Christian but am devotionally Buddhist (Jodo Shinsu). My objection was more philosophical as I was and am generally hostile to philosophical and scientific materialism, and I thought Dawkins philosophically inept (for some time I curated a collection of reviews of TGD, which were on the whole pretty scathing.) So I joined the Richard Dawkins forum to thrash it out. A veritable riot of anti-religious vituperation! After that I joined several other forums before what became this one.

I will sometimes say, I believe in God, but not in a God or the God. I believe it’s altogether mistaken to entertain ‘concepts of God’. Certainly I think a lot of what is said about God or ‘in God’s name’ even by self-professed Christians is grotesquely mistaken. This includes any idea of God as a kind of cosmic theatre director pulling strings behind the scenes. It’s an anthropomorphic projection but also the only kind of depiction that Dawkins seemed to think counted. As Eagleton says, ‘it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.’ I believe that the source of existence is not something that exists. That is what transcendent means, in the sense understood in Neoplatonic philosophy. Beyond the coming-and-going of existence (but also within it, transcendent yet immanent. See God does not Exist, Pierre Whalon.)

So, no, I can’t ‘define what I mean’ very clearly at all. At best, I hope what I believe shows up, in what I do and how I behave.

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Did you have the same name? It is a long time ago now, and I can’t remember everybody, but perhaps that rings a bell. I was UndercoverElephant. That forum was set up by Dawkins’ right-hand man Josh Timonen. He chose two people as initial moderators, but both of them faired badly in debates with me and then used their power to silence me. Josh then contacted me to say he thought I was the person with the best grasp of both sides of the argument, and that he need to select an admin and leave. I accepted the job, he disappeared, and I was left in charge of Dawkins’ forum. This was 6 months after I had gone through a public transformation from arch-atheist to ranting mystic while posting on James Randi’s JREF forum. I remained admin of that forum, with zero oversight from above, for about a year, before I’d had enough of all the bitching and plotting to get rid of me, and left. After that the one-dimensional “skeptic” trolls took over, and eventually they started attacking Dawkins himself and he pulled the plug on it.

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Hah! Small world. No, I don’t recall my username, it was a long time ago now. I didn’t stick around too long on that forum, I found it too argumentative. Joined another, which still exists somewhere - but this one, and it’s various predecessors, have been my online abode since then.

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I think you still miss my point. It’s honestly only a simple one. No hidden traps, or the like. :wink:

Science offers us a “coherent model of” APPARENT “reality”. It does it very well, too, but then, that’s precisely what we developed science for…

But when we start to consider if ‘reality’ could be a simulation, or something similar, then science has no means to help us. Without evidence, science cannot function. And so we turn to philosophy, the parent discipline, for help. Specifically, to metaphysics.

So yes, of course “we need both”, because each helps us with issues that the other cannot easily deal with. But in the case of a specific problem, we might well need one, and not the other.

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I don’t know why you think I missed your point. I responded by pointing out that QM does NOT describe the reality which is apparent to us. That’s why it causes so many philosophical-conceptual problems.

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No, that wasn’t my intended meaning. “Apparent” reality is the ‘reality’ that is apparent to our senses, and to our sense-extensions: telescopes, electron microscopes, etc. It is the only ‘reality’ available for study by science, using scientific methods and techniques.

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And are we surprised by this? I don’t think we should be. The aspects of QM that you describe are outside of scientific tools and methods. Science has nothing to work with there.

Let’s not misunderstand: this is not an attack on science, whose many successes are known to us all. It’s just that science, like all tools, is not suited to every problem.

Just as you wouldn’t use a hosepipe to mend your TV, when a 'scope or a logic analyser are more approriate to that need. :wink:

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I think the reason is that QM is not “science”, in the sense that I am using the term. As you say, QM, or some aspects of it, take us well outside the bailiwick of conventional science.

For science to address these issues, it needs to roll back its own development, and rejoin its parent, philosophy. For science became what it is by focussing on one class of problems, and nothing else. Philosophy is a Swiss-army knife, which we took, and turned into a stiletto: science. I.e. philosophy is a jack-of-all-trades; science is the master of one trade only, but it does it VERY well.

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The problem is physicalism, compounded by the overly simplistic response of the anti-physicalist opposition, most of which tries to leap from the hard problem of consciousness straight to idealism or panpsychism, both of which are incompatible with neuroscience. The result is a stalemate. Both sides are unwilling to settle for anything less than a complete win, which means the truth, which occupies a spot in no-mans-land between the trenches, doesn’t stand a chance.

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Fair enough. :+1: I have often found that different perspectives are helpful; the more, the better. And so I am often confused when some people advocate one perspective — one, and only one — to apply to any particular problem.

Even if different perspectives seem to contradict one another, there is still much to be learnt. In this case, perhaps a contradiction might indicate a problem more basic/fundamental than we first thought…?

And so the “stalemate” is not so much a problem, as a prompt to think more deeply, and maybe widely too. IMO! :sweat_smile:

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Why I think the Hubble Tension and Dark Matter are philosophical problems
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Many physicists make do with what Mermin called the “shut up and calculate” approach.

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That worked for the first half century after QM was discovered, but the questions refused to go away. Now, in QM’s centenary, we have 12+ different interpretations, so “the Measurement Problem” has become the brute fact that we’ve got 12 different metaphysical versions of quantum mechanics and none of them commands a consensus. It follows that the correct interpretation (assuming there is one) needs to be a bit of a humdinger. There has to be a reason why it has been missed for a century.

My suggestion is that physics and cosmology start in the wrong place. Instead of trying to conjure a cosmos out of nothing (which is impossible), we need to start with infinite possibility and then explain how the cosmos and timeline we find ourselves was selected to become an actuality. This turns out to be much easier than one might initially suppose, because quantum mechanics is basically a theory of exactly that. The result is a synthesis of MWI and von Neumann which anybody could have thought of since 1955 but nobody has until now. MWI was true until brains evolve, and the wavefunction is collapsed by an informational self making meaningful choices about which future it would prefer to end up in.

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The math works perfectly fine without any of these 12+ versions. The proliferation of interpretations isn’t a failure of QM, but a reflection of our own cognitive need for a coherent story. We often confuse our inability to accept ignorance with a need for a ‘deeper’ explanation, leading to a lot of metaphysical storytelling that the data doesn’t actually demand.

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301

But that isn’t enough, because the maths is incomplete. That has been known since 1932, when John von Neumann was forced to remove the state reduction (collapse event) from the maths, because he had no way of modelling it.

Science isn’t just an engineering tool. Scientific discoveries have non-scientific implications, especially for philosophy.

I did not say it was a failure of QM. But we do need a coherent story. The current situation is not sustainable. Physicalism is on life support and postmodernism is dead. We are overdue a big paradigm shift.

Why should we accept ignorance?

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Case in point is that after Rutherford discovered the nucleus physicists reached for the familiar – a model based on classical celestial mechanics. Problems abounded, but still they stood their ground, with Sommerfeld even desperately appealing to Kepler’s laws to account for the fine structure. It wasn’t until the Ritz combination principle forced Heisenberg to abandon the classical approach in favor of a positivist approach (being the good Machian that he was) that everything fell into place.

The hard truth is that our brains evolved for survival on the savannah, not for understanding the quantum realm. We are hardwired for classical physics. To insist on a ‘classical position’ for an electron isn’t being thorough – it’s being biologically arrogant. Accepting that space and position lose their meaning at that scale wasn’t admitting defeat – it was the moment we finally stopped confusing our human metaphors with reality. Not willful ignorance but humility.

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303

Einstein did not show that this idea is wrong. The vast majority of people on earth, including physicists, believe that electromagnetic energy transmits as waves. This is not surprising, because the empirical evidence is obvious and abundant. Have you ever heard of “radio waves”?

What Einstein did was develop a convenient ‘work around’ for the problem of his day, which was to identify the aether and determine its relationship to massive objects. The ‘work around’ does not show that EM radiation does not propagate as waves. He developed a way to ignore the problem of the aether, and get on with measurements. However, this ignorance produced the incoherence of wave/particle duality, and all the problems of QM.

So, did you read the logical argument? Do you agree that it is illogical to think that electromagnetic waves do not have a medium (aether)? Or do you still believe that Einstein showed that electromagnetic energy does not transmit as waves, and you deny the second premise as false? If that were the case though, there would be no need for “wave” in wave/particle duality? And what about all those radio waves we use every day, how would explain that feature of reality?