Genes can't predict culture.

It's like imagining that you could predict what sort of cultural artifact an intelligent robot would make loosed upon the world from just it's circuit diagram. — Marchesk

I agree. I don't think it's possible. I suppose I am suggesting that the "true" epistemology is pragmatic. A scientific paradigm really earns our trust through prediction and control. I'm no expert, but I don't find it likely that we either have or will have the "whole story." We get more and more effective and convincing stories. Is it possible that we are the result of a blind machine? Yes. Is it ridiculous to be a little skeptical of this paradigm? I don't think so. And yet I don't have some other theory to suggest. I just keep a certain distance from any particular theory, especially when the limits of its ability to predict and control are manifest.

It’s not embodied cognition I wish to avoid - it is ‘neuro-reductionism’. ‘Oh, that’s just your brain’s way of keeping your genomes alive’. Remember, in our world, the human mind is simply a late arrival, on top of the work of the blind watchmaker, a dollop of apparent meaning-making ability atop the robot that's only mission is to progenerate. — Wayfarer

I can empathize with that. It does reduce agency to an illusion. I think the theory would only become undeniable if human behavior could be reliably predicted on a gene-computer. And I mean the computer should print off the next philosophical masterpiece or great work of literature, before it would have otherwise been written. Until we get that kind of concrete prediction, we really just have faith in a paradigm.

But as I've said before, we now go to such extraordinary lengths to avoid even the suggestion, that it distorts our thinking the other way. That is one of the things Thomas Nagel, a professed atheist philosopher, has written some really important analyses of (such as his essays Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, and Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament.) — Wayfarer

You have a point. There is now a bias in the other direction, at least among some. And it's significant that Nagel is an atheist, since he can't be accused of the usual bias. I'll check those out.

Actually there's a huge disconnect here. Many mathematicians (such as Godel and, I think, Penrose, among others) really are Platonists, they believe in the 'reality of number'. But it can't be accommodated within the standard empiricist accounts so is highly unfashionable. I commented on that in this post, I'd like you to read that as I know you're a maths gun! — Wayfarer

Ah, yes. I've read some of Penrose. Also read lots about Godel. As I see it, our ability to conceive of a distinct, ideal unity is at the heart of math. "God created the integers," since we just can think whole numbers. Most math can be built up from that. And then the set, too, is a distinct unity. The same idea in a different flavor. I'll check out your post.

EDIT:
I remember that post. I'm on your side on that one. Meaning (including number) is primary. Only within and from this primary meaning can we hypothesize its emergence. To meaningfully or numerically search for meaning or number is tragicomical.

Plato says that if souls are merely the “harmonies” of the physical parts of the body then those with greater or lesser bodies have greater or lesser souls.
I work with individuals with disabilities and injuries and this argument speaks directly to my daily experiences. If our minds and indenties are based entirely off physical brain functions that people are naturally greater or lesser quality based on the quality or fiction of these structures and their function. A person with greater dendrite density in speech areas with greater verbal abilities is superior to a person lacking this enhanced variance. Even greater are both these typical individuals versus a child with cognitive impairments or an adult with a brain injury or stroke affecting their speech.
People born with lesser cognitive capacity or those who suffer injuries to their brain are inherently lesser human beings if there is no non-physical enduring source of worth.
This is then simmilar to Kant’s argument for God based on the need for justice. It is monsterous to imagine there are people with lesser or greater souls therefore souls must be independent of the body and must endure beyond bodily ills. — MysticMonist

But what if reality is monstrous? IMO, it's hard not to love the intelligent more than the unintelligent, the healthy more the sick, the beautiful more than the ugly. One might decide that life isn't fair. A cynical or critical mind could postulate that philosophers often work to cover up this monstrousness. Ideas of cosmic justice or God can be viewed as "shields" against the otherwise blatant injustice and cruelty of reality.

Parenting comes to mind. Parents try to be fair. They try to create a "little world" for their children, where children are rewarded and punished justly, always for their own good in the context of unconditional love. One could theorize that theodicies are ways that adults try to continue this situation past childhood. One might argue that we dream up immortal souls because it's just too painful to see the little girl die of cancer or the brain-damaged adult float through life as a dependent. Of course we don't want to really die, too.

Obviously this is all up for debate. But some thinkers do engage with monstrous possibilities.

Yes, it is strange. I actually work with lots of math. I think it's great, but I personally wouldn't say it holds the keys to everything. What it does do, for me, is make terribly clear how different philosophy and math really are. When we work in language we have a "fog" of meaning. We are never done figuring out not only what the other person meant but what we ourselves meant.

On the other hand, math, especially the finite/discrete kind in computation, is as cruel and as exact as an eternal machine. Nothing could be less ambiguous or more certain. The philosophy of math is doubtful and foggy compared to the discrete-finite center of math. It is less certain than that which it might want to justify or ground.

In math, a person can get something figured out permanently. In philosophy IMO we are always going back over the past and re-reading it. Nothing is fixed. But I love philosophy for being "fully human" like this, which is why I spend my free time with it --as opposed to doing more math than my job requires.

Logical laws, numbers, and other intellectual functions, are fundamental to our understanding of reality. They are used to create our 'meaning-world'. And that understanding is in some sense all we have; we can't rise above, or get outside, of our understanding, although clearly we can, and do, alter it, enlarge it, amend it, and sometimes even up-end it.

But the reason that numbers, and the like, are 'real but not existent', is because they pertain to the very nature and structure of the understanding itself; they are that by virtue of which we know things. They're not 'out there somewhere', but they're also not simply 'products of the brain'. That's where 'Platonia' is - in the very structure of our understanding. It's not an external reality or a 'ghostly domain' as it is generally misunderstood to be. And this is the reason that numbers are predictive (i.e. 'the uncanny effectiveness of maths in the natural sciences.') Why this is so hard to see, is because it is not apart from or other to us, we can't objectify it. — Wayfarer

I agree, mostly. But when you say that they are not products of our brain, you are perhaps overlooking our apparent groundedness in our body. Somehow consciousness and meaning-making are tied to the brain. So it seems that the same "stuff" that natural science deals with is the raw material for at least the foundation of consciousness. At the same time, this scientific image is itself grounded in and part of the same meaning-making. It's a Mobius strip.

I agree that the objects of Platonia are ironically invisible to the very science that employs them. "Numbers aren't real because we can't measure them." We need concepts to deny the reality of concepts in the first place. What is strange is the emergence of conceptual consciousness. This was/is probably one of the strongest arguments for God. But the problem with "God" as an explanation is that it seems to simply anthropomorphize the mystery. (I'm not saying that you are proposing a God, just acknowledging that the strangeness of consciousness emerging from "matter" is such that one is tempted to understand it as willed or intended by something itself conscious. It is counterintuitive that the higher can emerge from the lower, even if this is in fact the case.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUAF3abGY2M

I'll let the music speak for itself.

To me this gets zero-ness wrong, though. Because it presupposes a potential that includes the potential for zero-ness. It's not the "true zero-ness" IMO that is being worked with there. It presupposes a physical-probabilistic framework. But the "deep" version of "why is there something?" is asking about this or any other basic framework itself. One can always ask why is this particular X the primordial framework?

I dispute that the wonder is something separate - mystical, supernatural, transcendent. — apokrisis

I'm not saying that it is any of those things, or not necessarily. The wonder I have in mind especially is revealed logically, but examining the concept of explanation. Epistemic brute fact is revealed, as I see it, by looking at the nature of reasoning. It postulates necessary relationships between entities and makes deductions from postulated necessary relationships.

So I'm making something like a Kantian point. We are hardwired to assume the uniformity of nature. Hume's problem is unanswered, as far as I see it, but we keep building skyscrapers and getting in airplanes. We don't/can't really doubt the laws of nature, despite their logical groundlessness.

But these laws are also applied between entities. We input initial conditions and output predictions. The "box" works. We trust it for the same reason we trust the laws. We trust what serves us. All of this is great. But applying the "machine" of this kind of thinking to the whole of reality doesn't make sense. From what could reality be deduced? From what initial state? The laws themselves are what we would also want a "cause" for, philosophically. But this is absurd. And this absurdity is what is revealed by thinking all of this through.

Hah. Isn't that just showing how Hegel got it the wrong way round? — apokrisis

My approach (following Peirce) ends up saying that bare contradiction is instead what everything is founded upon. — apokrisis

Hegel is hard to parse, but I think subject = substance is related to "bare contradiction is what everything is founded upon." As I understand it, indeterminate Being "others" and increases its complexity due to internal contradiction until it overcomes all contradiction by knowing itself. So Hegel is just positioned at the end of a historical dialectic that preceded him. He merely describes.

The logical process itself is the ground, not some kind of further "indeterminate substance" - as Apeiron is often understood. — apokrisis

You might be closer to Hegel than you think:

For Hegel, the most important achievement of German idealism, starting with Immanuel Kant and culminating in his own philosophy, was the argument that reality (being) is shaped through and through by thought and is, in a strong sense, identical to thought. Thus ultimately the structures of thought and being, subject and object, are identical. Since for Hegel the underlying structure of all of reality is ultimately rational, logic is not merely about reasoning or argument but rather is also the rational, structural core of all of reality and every dimension of it. — wiki

he states that to ask the existential question "why is there something?" is a fatuous exercise, mainly because there is so much stuff actually existing to wonder at here and now. Maybe that question simply doesn't generate the frissance in his mind that it does with many. — Jake Tarragon

He's not the only scientist to dismiss this question, either. Tyson did so at the end of an otherwise very likable interview. I think they can't help associating it with religion. Any hint of mystery is suspicious. "We must know. We will know. "

Also funny that Dawkins would talk about all the fascinating entities that are here to non-fatously wonder at. As if "why is there something rather than nothing" didn't include every such entity. He can't really mean wonder at the existence of such objects. He must mean wonder at their structure or their way of existing. But the philosopher is amazed that they exist in the first place. The "how" is admittedly a more practical and objective concern, and that's probably why he shifts toward the how.

It would become the nothing of the mind ceasing to exist. — apokrisis

Yes.

And as I say, my metaphysical goal is imagining the least brute fact foundation for a tale of cosmic development. So vagueness understood as "mere fluctuations" is where that line of thought arrives. — apokrisis

Of course I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with that. But you are (seems to be) presupposing the scientific image of reality. That makes sense, since your metaphysics includes this image. Still, you do tend to downplay the "wonder" at existence as such. That's fine. I don't think such wonder is sustainable for mostly practical creatures like ourselves.

But can you relate to this wonder at existence as such? You also didn't respond to my other points. That's fine, but it's not ideal.

I don't think of myself as an idealist. There's a world out there, whether I am here to see it or not. If natural science is our best lens on this world (which is arguably the case), I still don't see how natural science could hope to account for the presence of this world (universe, totality) as a whole, but only link intra-wordly events in time and space.

Yep. Knowledge has to bootstrap itself from axioms. We have to risk making a hypothesis that seems "reasonable". But hey, it seems to work pretty well. — apokrisis

This comes to mind.

With all philosophers it is precisely the “system” which is perishable; and for the simple reason that it springs from an imperishable desire of the human mind — the desire to overcome all contradictions. — Engels

In the academy they manufacture consent with well-placed smirks blown out of proportion by the authority of their offices. The further you get from their towers, the less incentive there is for anyone to revere the chuckles of professors or toe the lines marked out by those pretentious gestures. — Cabbage Farmer

As I see it, the "deep" philosophy transcends mere institutions. For me philosophy is almost the essence of being human. If the academy "hardens" so that it excludes what might criticize it, that's not much of a surprise. Institutions are constituted by exclusion, one might say. It's like the church regulating talk of God.

What else could they be for if not to stamp "genuine" on some philosophy or theology? In theory, for "pure" teaching and learning. But the medium is the message. Grades must be made so that careers can be obtained. It'sbusiness. Inauthentic whatnot is always going to haunt it.

On the bright side, we can and even must "wrestle with the angel" personally. The institutional stamp of approval or the participation of employees of those institutions means about as much as you think it does. The "people" who aren't already wrestling with the angel aren't going to hear what the wise professor has to say. And the people who are truly wrestling with the angel will take the professor as one more wrestler, whose job, admittedly, provides certain advantages and resources.

There is a 'there anyway' world, but the reflexive and uncritical acceptance of its reality signifies the absence of philosophical reflection 1. — Wayfarer

Respectfully, this is tautologous. But, yes, philosophy tries to make sense of the complexity that is "invisible" (because "useless") to the non-philosophical practical mind. These days it seems like much of philosophy tries to properly place the scientific image in the context of life as a whole. For me this scientific image is a "mere" tool that exist within a far more "primordial" whole. The table is not "really" atoms. This is simply one useful way that I can look at it, in the context of ultimately earthbound and mortal purposes. I employ "inhuman" science for very human reasons. Some connect it to their spirituality. The pursuit of objective there-anyway knowledge can function as a primary heroic task. I suppose I'm interested in revealing the here-always-with-us structure of revelation/philosophy itself.

As metaphysics, sketchy is fine. So my interest is in how the concept of a vagueness of unlimited fluctuations could be a proper scientific theory - actually modelled mathematically. That is what would take it forward. — apokrisis

Sure, I agree. I like Popper. Metaphysics is a womb. Ideas aren't born sharp and finished.

Even in dreamless sleep, there is a desultory rumination going on. — apokrisis

Let me use a stronger metaphor then: the world for us before we were conceived. Nonexistence.

The quantum vaccuum seethes with virtual particles. It is not empty nothingness but furious action which complete cancels and so amounts to nothing. — apokrisis

This isn't the philosophical nothing, though. It's a seething chaos. As you say it's not an empty nothingness. But that is to say that it's not a nothingness. There is a here here. Why is there a here here? One could argue that there is always a here here. But why?

I think the mind reaches for reasons as "handles" that it can turn for its benefit. Give me a causal relationship and maybe I can put it to use. But this tendency seems to founder on trying to explain the whole. There is nothing with which it can be put in relationship. IMO metaphysicians tend to dodge this by trying to sneak an object "out" of the whole, from which the whole can be derived. In your case it's a minimal fluctuation. But the whole includes this minimal, original fluctuation. Why was there such a minimal fluctuation? If there was always such a fluctuation, then why?

It’s the belief in the ‘there anyway’ world which persists in the absence of any observer, the vast universe in which, today, we see ourselves as ‘mere blips’. — Wayfarer

I suggest that our own birth and the deaths of others are a big part of our belief in the "there anyway." We seem to arrive in a world after many, many generations have come and gone. We are told of human events that happened thousands of years ago. More vividly, we can see pictures of our parents before they met one another. So belief in others more or less demands a belief in a "there anyway" world.

It was here before us, and we seem to have our foundation in it. It is strange indeed that "mind" has "matter" for a vehicle. Yet "matter" only appears for us through or for our mind.

I suppose many see us as mere blips, but I look up at the stars and see an ocean of stupidity. That's an intentionally perverse way of putting it. What I mean is that the fascinating complexity IMO is concentrated down here. The stars are cute, but I think of them as stupid machines.

What we want is the most efficient and useful image of reality. — apokrisis

Indeed, and this statement above is itself an efficient and useful image of inquiry. Pragmatism, which understands theories as tools, is itself a meta tool-theory.

If you say that it is indirect, or models, all the way down, while at the same time saying, "all we are able to get at is the model", or "all we can do is get at it indirectly", then you are saying that we are actually getting at the truth, as everything is indirect, or just models, then us having models is us having the truth! — Harry Hindu

I think I understand your frustration, but isn't this a problem with philosophy generally? As we try to think our own cognition we inevitably get tangled up. Can we really present any philosophy as a consistent system in a single moment with all of the meanings of each of its terms fixed? I don't think so. Instead we have systems of related maxims. We pull out the one we need for a particular context. No doubt we want these maxims to fit together as much as possible, but that's where efficiency and utility slip back in. A coherent system is economical and runs smoothly.

We definitely have an image of the true world, but it's a transcendental background. So I agree that it's hard if not impossible to make avoid making assertions about the model-independent truth. We have to be modelling something, right? I think we self-consciously fallibly act as if reality was X. Then the modelness of this X is only our consciousness of its fragility and imperfection.

My point is that we are getting at what reality is like (the apple being either ripe or rotten) independent of our goals. It is our goals that simply determine which information is currently relevant, not whether the information is actually accurate or not. Isn't survival the greatest catalyst for seeking knowledge - for being informed about how the world really works and how your body works and how it is all related? To be better informed about the world (how it works, it's current state, etc.) is to be better able to survive in it. — Harry Hindu

You touch on a very interesting point. One of our goals is the goal-independent truth. This seems impossible in its purest manifestation. The scientist is a human who wants to make discoveries. But there is a relative goal-indenpendence. The knowledge sought is re-purposable, durable. So I look at the scientific image of reality that way, as a tool that we have come to value and trust. To sharpen this tool requires a kind of discipline. We don't want "local" goals (bias) to get in the way the grand goal, which is the increase in durable knowledge about what's durable in human experience. We assume the uniformity of nature. We ignore Hume's problem because we are just wired in a way that keeps us from taking it seriously.

So again, this fluctuation - the first expression of a naked propensity - is the very least state of Being that we could possibly imagine. We start with a brute fact that is also the very least kind of brute fact that seems possible. — apokrisis

Thanks. I did have some idea what you meant by minimizing brute fact, though, so my question was somewhat rhetorical. I was pointing out that this apparently leaves that which every bit as contingent as a whole. A richer theory will explain as much as possible, perhaps, by shrinking whatever plays the role of first cause. For instance, Hegel starts with undifferentiated Being, which in its generality is Nothing, and this leads on to the synthesis of Being and Nothing in Becoming.

So a semiotic metaphysics begins with less than nothing - as nothingness is some kind of already definite state, like a world with dimensionality and some absolute absence of content. And while you might say that this vague potentiality or Firstness is still "a something", a brute fact, it is the least kind of somethingness imaginable. — apokrisis

I don't know if that's what some philosophers mean by "nothing." Yes, it's absolute absence of content, but you also mention dimensionality. For my anyway, nothingness is not just empty space. It's what we experience (or do not experience) in dreamless sleep. It's what the world was for us before we are born and presumably after we die.

If I understand you, the smallest fluctuation in [something, I'm not sure] gave rise to all of this. What is "naked potential"? If all of this can be derived from X, then I suppose X will have to be some kind of potential. It sounds like God almost but not quite creating himself ex nihilo. Is what you're describing like the evolution of a personality, fading into differentiated consciousness/world?

For what it's worth, I think the telos is the stronger part of the theory. I'm not especially qualified to judge, but what I find striking is that the order exists only to speed up chaos. The "backflow" emerges from the flow in order to accelerate the flow globally. We help the heat death along. That's grimly beautiful. The beginning is indeed vague. Is this something that is crystal clear in your mind, or is this the sketchier part of the theory you are still working on?

It is a self consistent story about how existence could develop. So of course it may not totally do away with brute fact, but also it minimises the brute factness that normally dominates most folk’s metaphysics. — apokrisis

I like your theory. I don't know that it exactly minimizes brute fact, though. What would this mean, exactly? A good theory arguably increases either our power to change the world or our sense of satisfaction with the world and likely both. Your theory seems to offer that.

But I don't see how making the world more enjoyably intelligible or malleable for human desire reduces the facticity of existence. No matter how complicated, rich, and effective the system is, the system apparently necessarily reveals or describes a contingent world. To be clear, I like this contingency. I also like rich, effective theories. I see no conflict. The more theories/lenses the better, as far as I'm concerned.

What I enjoy about philosophy thus far, as a newcomer, is that the ideas expressed in philisophical texts provoke thought. Even if I do not necessarily agree with certain points, I can at least understand the reasoning behind them. It is an enriching experience to have your ideas and perceptions challenged in such an eloquent fashion. — Jamie

I totally agree. I loved ideas among other things when I was younger. Lots of those other things have lost their charm. But I love ideas as much as ever, if not more. The pleasure of thinking seems to be the most durable of pleasures. It's a passion that I don't believe will ever wear out.

I've also known great friendships, but perhaps my most valuable friendships were "one way." Few living humans can compete conversationally with the great philosophers. They may not hear me, but that's OK. They inspire me to have great conversations with myself --and others who also appreciate and want to emulate these great philosophers. As I see it, we invent ourselves as original philosophers by wrestling with those who came before.

I have a phenomenologically grounded conception of the natural, physical world. To all appearances, minds belong to bodies, and mental activity is an activity of physical things; and what we might call products of mind (including concepts, abstractions, types, words, numbers, possibilities) are products of the physical things that engage in mental activity. To all appearances, it seems the mental emerges from and remains grounded in the physical. — Cabbage Farmer

I generally share this phen. grounded approach. But I think it's fair to add that the physical is also grounded in the mind. The world disappears when we sleep dreamlessly. We might speculate that this inspired the whole problem to begin with. Privately mind grounds matter, but publicly matter grounds mind. We experience the world after the deaths of others but seemingly not after our own.

Is not the statement, " ...we still see red when the wavelength is not "red" ", a statement about reality independent of looking at it - as if you had a "direct" view of reality itself? If you say "no", then you end up discrediting the statement itself. If you say "yes", then you have finally seen the light and would be agreeing with me.

How do you know that the wavelength is not red if you don't have some "direct" knowledge that that is the case? — Harry Hindu

As I understand him, he's comparing the scientific-mathematical aspect of the wave to its sensual aspect. True, what is implied is that the same wave is involved. So the wave itself (as the unity of its aspects) is red. But its mathematical description is not red.

The object-in-itself (perhaps a red apple) is theoretically complicated/questionable but practically almost common sense. It makes sense that our experience of the object is mediated by human nature. Our eye catches reflected photons, etc.

Is the direct realism versus indirect realism debate about anything more than a differing preference for how the same process is described?

That is what I called the subject matter, or content. But since information cannot exist without a physical form, physical form is just as essential as content. The physical form is what makes the information, information, and not something random. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm no Derrida expert, but I recall that he examined the complicated relationship between the materiality and ideality of the sign. This "ideality" is an abstraction. It's hard to imagine thinking without language, though perhaps some kind of thinking is purely spatial. And of course the materiality only exists in contrast to the ideality.

Perhaps it's the case that 'the cosmos' now occupies the place formerly assigned to Deity. 'Cosmos is all there is and ever will be', said Carl Sagan. — Wayfarer

Yes. This is how Rorty reads it, too. We have a tendency to make a priest of the scientist, since he's our seemingly last contact with a non- or trans-human reality. So we have unsophisticated religion on one side with its "object God" and scientism on the other with its own object God. The first is a questionable anthropomorphism and the second is blind machine that accidentally grew eyes (us).

One of the main points of Horkheimer's book is the sense in which the Universe is understood by moderns not to be rational. The supposed 'rational order of the Universe' is, I think, very much associated with mediev — Wayfarer

In this case "rational" seems to mean purposeful as opposed to merely intelligible? I know that apo's particular telos doesn't appeal to you, but perhaps his general metaphysical approach is vaguely compatible with what you have in mind? I'm personally open to a paradigm shift in science, as I think you are. My position doesn't rely on it, but it doesn't threaten my position. For me the given in all of its richness and meaning is primary. A self-justifying experience of "sufficient meaning" is what I mean.

Like you, I can't stand Ayn Rand, but I think if you read any glosses on what she makes of Kant, it becomes obvious that she comically misunderstands him. — Wayfarer

She's a pretty terrible philosopher. I find her fascinating, though. She's one of the strangest "pop" intellectuals that I can think of. What I do still like about her is her understanding of art as a presentation of the ideal. In other words (as others have said) art is fundamentally religious. It expresses ultimate value for sensation and the imagination. That doesn't mean she herself was good at it. But, to be fair, Anthem belongs with the other strong dystopian novels. I never read any of her other fiction works, but I have read some of her essays. I was quite young.

I'm with you on the skilled observation of life. I like a descriptive approach. Yes, arguments have their place. But often it's just a matter of paying attention, noticing something, and pointing it out. In both Taoism and in early Heidegger, for instance, there is the idea of the ready-to-hand. We often meet the things in the world in a non-theoretical sense. We know how the use them. When we use the hammer (a famous example), it "disappears" in our hand as we focus on what we want to do with it. The "how" of its being has little or nothing to do with the usual theory of objects. Similarly, not-doing is the ideal kind of doing. We have mastery when we no longer have to try.

All stated rules are given their sense only by our application of them and not by their syntactical definition, since a stated definition is in itself a rule whose meaning must also be shown by application. — sime

A trivial corollary of this is that the "free will vs determinism" debate is utterly nonsensical. — sime

I agree. I still think it's reasonable to investigate the relationship of what we call information and what we call the physical, but you make an important point.

In math we can get a "formal enough" or syntax-driven dialogue going. We can do information theory objectively enough. But away from math we are dealing with interpretation. We are exploring how concepts are entangled.

Oh, I see. Perhaps you'll agree that physical science is very much a "despiritualized" version of exactly that.

Horkheimer defines true reason as rationality,[4] which can only be fostered in an environment of free, critical thinking. He details the difference between objective, subjective and instrumental reason, and states that we have moved from the former through the center and into the latter (though subjective and instrumental reason are closely connected). Objective reason deals with universal truths that dictate that an action is either right or wrong. It is a concrete concept, and a force in the world that requires specific modes of behavior. The focus in the objective faculty of reason is on the ends, rather than the means. — Wiki

I suppose the danger here is the false prophet of objective reason. Ayn Rand, for instance, understood herself to be precisely the voice of objective reason. The egoism that most find so repellant in her was secondary to her notion of reason as man's only absolute. She was a priestess of Reason.

Of course scientism is also more or less concerned with objective reason. In religious terms, the will or thought of God can play this role. I realize that you have something higher than this in mind, of course. I can definitely relate to something like a participation in Truth or the Forms.

Well I suppose we have more in common than I supposed, even if we have different ways of expressing it. I also strive toward a holistic metaphysics that does justice to our lived experience of "flow."

It is our illuminated reason that guides us towards virtue, not the opinion of the masses. — MysticMonist

Well said.

Probably because of atheism - not yours, in particular, but in the sense of ours being a post-death-of-God culture. That has comprised a gradual dismantling of the idea of there being a universal reason. — Wayfarer

Certainly atheism is related. Or we can reframe the whole atheism/theism distinction in terms of a positioning of God that exists in either case. The atheist is likely a humanist or an individualist (holds something human sacred), and this is just complete incarnation. God is positioned on the continuum as all Christ, with nothing left of him in the sky. Then we have Christ "nailed" or caught in the system of brute fact, the Demiurge's Nature as a brute fact. The Demiurge is just a personification of the "apathy" projected on nature in this case. Then we have theists positioning elsewhere on the continuum, perhaps seeing Christ or some other incarnate figure as somehow sharing divinity with a non-incarnate God. The theist is just the generalized theist who leaves part of his God non-incarnated, one might say. As such, he would be above history. He would not change with the times.

I'll grant that this makes questioning the ultimate reason emotionally easier or even possible. The revelation of brute fact or a Demiurge, metaphorically speaking, may even be desirable for our radical Christian (our atheist). The center of Christian myth itself is the death of an incarnated God. Death and incarnation are linked, and this dying God in the shape of a man, shamefully executed even, is the very icon of this faith. One could argue that atheists (who worship social or individual human being) are the "true Christians," in terms of living that aspect of the myth. "Our God died so that we could be reborn divine."

Is life, of itself, vague and/or ambiguous - impossible to clarify? — TheMadFool

Maybe it's always-still-being-clarified (which would mean impossible to clarify.) And yet certainly some of us become more clear about life with time. We become clear about who we are and want to be, sometimes, but perhaps there's always some fuzziness. To be realistic, we probably have to mention fluctuation. Our visions of who we are and should be and of what the world is and should be "vibrate" from moment to moment, I would think. We are perhaps "liquid," sensual, emotional "computation" that moves toward a relatively stable pattern --if we can manage it and survive long enough.

So, the motivation for rationality is an emotional one - a desire to align nature to our expectations, possibly fear too. — TheMadFool

Yes, I think that value or feeling ultimately drives thought. We do want to be accurate, but it's not hard to think up the emotional significance of this accuracy. If we don't model the world "right," we suffer.

But with the PSR we have the assumption that everything has a ground or a reason. If we are talking about a worldly object, this reason will likely be a scientific law, one that allows us to predict and manipulate this object to our advantage. It makes sense that an animal would evolve to look for a way of predicting and manipulating worldly objects to its advantage. Assuming such prediction or manipulation is possible could be a valuable instinct and/or habit, even if such prediction/manipulation turns out to not always be possible. "Look for a handle." "Look for a relationship with other objects."

Why do you think that? — TheMadFool

Continuing the above in response to this question: with philosophers the "ultimate reason" is often the center of their concern, and it's this ultimate reason that I find impossible in principle. I roughly understand explanation in terms of deducing the event to be explained from a system of necessary relationships and other occurrences linked to the event through these necessary relationships. This works for the physical world and the human world. Objects and people have a "nature" that more or less is this participation in a system of necessary relationships that function as our model of the world. Electrons behave a certain way in certain situations and humans behave a certain way in certain situations, even if this necessity is probabilistic. Are these relationships truly necessary? No. So we are talking about postulated necessities, either scientific theories or some individual's vision of humans are likely to do in various situations, in relation to their words and gestures perhaps.

But the main point is that explanation happens within the system. Roughly speaking, I think that an explanation requires more than one event. If we ask "why is there something rather than nothing?" or "why is the world here?," someone may propose an answer. Call this answer X. This X is instantly part of the world to be explained, for one thing, and is rightfully included in the totality or world that the question wants explained. Or, from another perspective, what stops us from asking after this X? Why was or is this X here? What grounds or causes the X? If nothing grounds or causes the X, then the X is our "brute fact." If the X does have a ground or cause, then we can ask after the ground of this ground. And so on. So we accept brute fact or we ask endlessly.

If we ask endlessly, we don't have a global explanation or answer to the deep why. If we accept a brute fact, we don't pretend to explain and perhaps even argue that such an explanation is impossible.

I'm starting to see where you're coming from. I don't know much about Schelling, but I think he thought that everyone was one in the "absolute." Existence or Being is thinkable as a unity is always "distorted" when it is analyzed or broken up. Every "analysis" is a "lie," one might say, even if such analyses are necessary for practical reasons or justified in terms of theoretical pleasure.

I'm also interested in continuity and its relationship with the discreteness (math, for instance). In case you haven't seen this:

… the conceptual world of mathematics is so foreign to what the intuitive continuum presents to us that the demand for coincidence between the two must be dismissed as absurd. (Weyl 1987, 108)

… the continuity given to us immediately by intuition (in the flow of time and of motion) has yet to be grasped mathematically as a totality of discrete “stages” in accordance with that part of its content which can be conceptualized in an exact way. (Ibid., 24)[14]

The view of a flow consisting of points and, therefore, also dissolving into points turns out to be mistaken: precisely what eludes us is the nature of the continuity, the flowing from point to point; in other words, the secret of how the continually enduring present can continually slip away into the receding past. Each one of us, at every moment, directly experiences the true character of this temporal continuity. But, because of the genuine primitiveness of phenomenal time, we cannot put our experiences into words. So we shall content ourselves with the following description. What I am conscious of is for me both a being-now and, in its essence, something which, with its temporal position, slips away. In this way there arises the persisting factual extent, something ever new which endures and changes in consciousness. (Ibid., 91–92)

By 1919 Weyl had come to embrace Brouwer’s views on the intuitive continuum. Given the idealism that always animated Weyl’s thought, this is not surprising, since Brouwer assigned the thinking subject a central position in the creation of the mathematical world[18].

In his early thinking Brouwer had held that that the continuum is presented to intuition as a whole, and that it is impossible to construct all its points as individuals. But later he radically transformed the concept of “point”, endowing points with sufficient fluidity to enable them to serve as generators of a “true” continuum. This fluidity was achieved by admitting as “points”, not only fully defined discrete numbers such as 1/9, e
e
, and the like—which have, so to speak, already achieved “being”—but also “numbers” which are in a perpetual state of “becoming” in that the entries in their decimal (or dyadic) expansions are the result of free acts of choice by a subject operating throughout an indefinitely extended time. The resulting choice sequences cannot be conceived as finished, completed objects: at any moment only an initial segment is known. Thus Brouwer obtained the mathematical continuum in a manner compatible with his belief in the primordial intuition of time—that is, as an unfinished, in fact unfinishable entity in a perpetual state of growth, a “medium of free development”. In Brouwer’s vision, the mathematical continuum is indeed “constructed”, not, however, by initially shattering, as did Cantor and Dedekind, an intuitive continuum into isolated points, but rather by assembling it from a complex of continually changing overlapping parts. — Weyl

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weyl/#DasKon


On the hand, we need math as a tool, so I think it's justified to use the math that ended up winning that famous metaphysical war. Still, this might make for a nice version of calculus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smooth_infinitesimal_analysis

I spilled coffee on a library copy (the same convenient paperback), so I guess it's mine now.

It strikes me as truly original. I don't entirely "believe" or agree, but the creativity is undeniable. I just ordered Harman's book on Meillassoux, which looks pretty great.

Call it b what you wish, it is all arbitrary with no hard boundary. It is for this reason that any symbolic approach will utterly fail and the search for truth and facts will equally fail. All is in continuous flux and cannot be frozen. You can try but then the infinities and infinitesimals will start popping up all over. — Rich

I like this, Rich. You are a poet or a mystic of the continuous whole. Do you like Parmenides?

How could what is perish? How could it have come to be? For if it came into being, it is not; nor is it if ever it is going to be. Thus coming into being is extinguished, and destruction unknown. (B 8.20–22)

Nor was [it] once, nor will [it] be, since [it] is, now, all together, / One, continuous; for what coming-to-be of it will you seek? / In what way, whence, did [it] grow? Neither from what-is-not shall I allow / You to say or think; for it is not to be said or thought / That [it] is not. And what need could have impelled it to grow / Later or sooner, if it began from nothing? Thus [it] must either be completely or not at all. (B 8.5–11)

[What exists] is now, all at once, one and continuous... Nor is it divisible, since it is all alike; nor is there any more or less of it in one place which might prevent it from holding together, but all is full of what is. (B 8.5–6, 8.22–24)

And it is all one to me / Where I am to begin; for I shall return there again. (B 5) — P

I'm not saying that I agree with you, but I appreciate the charm of the vision as I understand it.

I'm not saying that the hammer lacks any physical properties, only that the being, or the hammer-ness of the hammer, is not its physical properties. Moreover, its being is not some mysterious property added onto it extrinsically. The being of the hammer, as ready to hand equipment, is always already determined by the referential whole (the world). I can give you more examples if you like? The key point, however, is that this kind of being is not a property, as hard as that might be to understand. — bloodninja

You picked out one of the most beautiful ideas in B&T. Really it's just a testament of the book's strength that the idea is hard to communicate. We are trained to think in terms of the present-at-hand, even if we've never read Descartes, for instance. The "scientific image" is the "real" image, even if it is a learned abstraction as opposed to our immersion in the ready-to-hand since childhood.

Actually the mind 'generates' what Husserl called the 'umwelt', the lived-meaning-world, which comprises 'our world'. — Wayfarer

This umwelt is crucial for me. Any linguistic "reductions" of this umvelt occur within this lifeworld or meaningworld. Concepts of the physical and of information have their function and relevance only within our lived world. The conjectures of theologians and physicists alike are encountered by individuals as abstractions, possibly of great value. But any particular abstraction is just one among many that frame this lifeworld conceptually.

We can say that this world is "really" matter or "really" God's plan, but this "really" does not erase the lifeworld it hopes to dominate. I like Husserl & Heidegger for pointing out or unveiling this lifeworld as the basis, background, or horizon for the theoretical mind. One might joke that only a certain kind of hyper-theoretical personality would need such a reminder. But perhaps these lifeworld reducing theories are motivated after all by non-theoretical concern. Such reductions justify transformations of the lifeworld, either personally or politically. They also clarify the grand "meaning" of the life world, which we arguably interpret in terms of fundamental poses. Who should I be? Offering an interpretation-for-all of the shared umwelt is usually an implicit and often enough an explicit answer to this question, however tentative.

Our understanding nature is not the same as nature, regardless of the predictive successes of any science, what is in-itself is not an obtainable point of view, stronger version it cannot even be thought. The world as it is, it could be otherwise. — Cavacava

Have you looked into After Finitude by chance? The author radicalizes this "could be otherwise" while trying to break through to the in-itself (get around Kant).