Tell me. It not being mathematical is also great because it challenges something like MUH. And there's no falsification test for the random/determined issue either. — noAxioms

Well, unless you can show me a mathematical model that can predict (deterministically or not) choices, I don't think you have shown that everything can be described mathematically.

Roger Penrose for instance has argued that our reasoning isn't algorithmic. Certainly, this goes against the 'computable universe hypothesis', according to which all phenomena are computable.

In any case, it is quite speculative to say that everything can be described mathematically.

Which is why BiV, superdeterminism, and say Boltzmann Brains all need to be kept in mind, but are not in any way theories, lacking any evidence whatsoever. — noAxioms

Yes. Interestingly, I made a similar objection to the 'block universe', where all events past, present and future have the same ontological status. If we can be so wrong in our experience, how can empirical knowledge (which is needed to falsify/verify scientific theories) be trusted?

So some societies operate, but such societies are quite capable of rendering such judgement using deterministic methods. And yes, I think morals are relative to a specific society. A person by himself cannot be immoral except perhaps to his own arbitrary standards. — noAxioms

I think that it depends on how one understands morality. If one understand it simply as a social contract, then sure. But if one adopts a kind of 'virtue ethics', then, one can be moral or immoral even when alone.

An you do have the opportunity to act otherwise. Brains were evolved to make better choices, which wouldn't work at all if there were to choices available. Determinism shouldn't be confused with compulsion as it often is in these discussions. — noAxioms

How so? Yes, you can argue that a human that is compelled to act in a certain way isn't 'acting properly'. But if all actions are determined by the initial conditions and deterministic laws, how can we say that we have an opportunity to 'act otherwise'? And if we do not have it, how can we attribute responsibility to someone in a non-trivial way (a 'trivial way' would be something like: the 'lightning' is responsible for the destruction of the tree)?

I don't think there's any relevance at all, so the question is moot to me. — noAxioms

Yes, probabilism is no better. We need something else.

Honestly, I do not find that convincing at all.

If our actions are truly deterministic and we could not have acted otherwise, the only way I can think about 'ethics' is being exactly like medicine. So, we act wrongly and we are held accountable and get punished in order to 'get well' later on. I guess that upo to a certain point I agree. In fact, I am ok with the classical 'virtue ethics' where good act are good because they fulfill our nature. So, in a sense, yes, I agree to treat ethics in a medicinal way. But, as always with analogies, we also have to avoid to take them too far. When we do wrong it is not that we were coerced by internal or external constraints to act in that way. We are influenced by those constraints, but there is a 'window' of freedom that we can't ignore and that 'window' is what makes 'accountability', 'culpability', 'moral responsability' meaningful.
So, yeah, I guess that my view is that compatibilism gets something right but can't tell the whole story.

Also, if we were not free, I even doubt we could consider ourselves as distinct beings from the 'rest of the universe'.

Such blatant refusals to discuss the topic, only indicate that you know that you are wrong so you will not approach the issue. Why twist the facts of physics to support your metaphysics? If the facts don't fit, then you need to change the metaphysics or else dispute the facts. — Metaphysician Undercover

With all due respect you made some controversial claims here:

So, we have to consider the reality of every aspect of a "physical system", to see how successful we can really be. I believe that the reality of entropy demonstrates that no physical system actually evolves in a completely deterministic way. That aspect of the activity of a physical system, which escapes determinability is known as "entropy". Therefore "purely physical systems" refers to an impossibility, if that implies completely deterministic evolution.. — Metaphysician Undercover

Conservation laws do not hold, to the contrary, they are always violated. This is the nature of entropy, that part of reality which is in violation of conservation. It's a loss which we just write off, and work around. — Metaphysician Undercover

The second principle of thermodynamics tells us that entropy increases in a closed system. The first principle of thermodynamics states that the total energy is conserved. No physicist I know of have ever made the claim you make here, i.e. that the increase of entropy entails a violation of the law of conservation of energy. So, in my view, you are in the position to give a justification of what you are saying here. Unless you prove your claim (you can also link to a scientific paper if you want), it is reasonable to think that you are wrong here.

A "weak"*1 scientific interpretation of evolution from simple to complex is specifically formulated to avoid any metaphysical (teleological or theological) implications. But a "strong"*2 interpretation directly addresses the philosophical implications that are meaningful to systematic & cosmological thinkers*3. Likewise a "weak" interpretation of the Anthropic Principle*4 can avoid dealing with Meaning by looking only at isolated facts. Both "weak" models are reductionist, while the "strong" models are holistic. The Strong models don't shy away from generalizing the evidence (facts). Instead, they look at the whole system in order to satisfy philosophical "curiosity" about Why such appearances of design should & could occur in a random mechanical process. :smile: — Gnomon

Yes. In other words the problem for the physicalist is: can we explain the 'strong emergence' of life and mind in purely physical terms given that reductionism seems to fail?

So far as I can see, and I may be wrong, many, if not most, philosophers are compatibilists and are trying to cash that out by re-conceptualizing the problem. To put is another way, the approach is that both traditional free will and traditional determinism are interpretations of the world. If they jointly produce absurdity, we need to think of both differently. Have a look at Wikipedia - Determinism — Ludwig V

Yes, that's a possible solution. But still, it seems to me that compatibilists simply do not address the problem. If we cannot act differently, how can we be held accountable?
The reason why we do not attribute guilt to those who are considered 'not guilty' by reason of insanity it is because we do not think they have been able to act otherwise. Their mental state was too compromised.

Unless someone gives a solution to this problem, I am afraid that, despite its popularity, I can't accept compatibilism.

Antony Valentini — boundless

@noAxioms, if you are interested in this 'variant' of dBB, there is this lecture by Valentini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYZV9crCZM8 that I watched years ago.

Here, among other things, he suggests that his version of dBB can make different predictions with respect to standard QM. In fact, IIRC he suggests that these deviations might be observed in the early stages of the universe. Interestingly, if that happens it would be possible to send faster than light signals.

My comments on mind (in)dependence were mainly to illustrate that what it means is not as obvious as many would think. — Wayfarer

Agreed. Unfortunately, however this is also because there is a tendency to use the same words with different meanings. But this isn't a problem only for philosophers. Think about how much the term 'observer' varies among the various interpretations of QM.

Bell didn’t prove anything. At the time, the required experimental apparatus and know-how didn’t exist. He worked out what needed to be proven, but the actual proof had to wait for those guys that won the Nobel (well after Bell had died). — Wayfarer

Well, Bell proved mathematically that no 'local realistic' theory can make the same predictions of QM (outside some problematic loopholes like superdeterminism). In itself it is a powerful result. Of course, the 'experimental proofs' came later. The first experiments however were made in the 80s and Bell was still alive.

Nice article BTW.

Realism neglects the role of the mind in this process. It takes the world as given, without considering the role the mind plays in its construction. That is the context in which the idea of mind dependence or independence is meaningful. — Wayfarer

Right. Honestly, part of the problems in these discussions is that 'realism' is often assumed to be the position that there is something that exists even in the absence of our minds. This of course gives an incredible amount of 'realisms'. Physicalism is a type of realism. But also theism is. But even epistemic idealism is a form of 'realism' becuase it doesn't say that reality is only minds and mental contents.

'Realism' is, however, also an epistemic position. It claims that there is a reality different from minds and mental contents that can be known by mind as it is. Of course, even with this definition realism covers a lot of positions. But with this definition realism excludes an epistemic idealism or a skeptical position where nothing outside minds and mental contents, representations etc can be known and also an ontological idealism where there is nothing outside minds and mental contents ('weaker' forms of ontological idealism, which claims that fundamental reality is mental but do not deny the existence and the knowability of something different from minds and mental contents however are in fact forms of realism).

In order to prove 'realism' in this sense one should be able to identify what can, with certainty, be said to be different from minds and mental contents (including representations). That is, one should be able to distinguish 'what pertains to reality as it appears to us' and 'what pertains to reality as it is itself'. Contrary to appearances, when one considers the regulating role that the mind has in ordering our experience it becomes quite hard to just do that.

Classical (Newtonian) physics is not deterministic, and if they thought so 1.2 centuries ago, they didn't think it through. Norton's dome is a wonderful example, but that was published only a couple decades ago. — noAxioms

What? Interesting, wow. Anyway, I don't think that at that time people thought that it wasn't deterministic. Even chaotic systems are deterministic despite the appearances.

We're not so certain, but can you even think of an alternative? One alternative is that the system isn't closed, but non-closed systems have always failed to be either deterministic or random. — noAxioms

I can think of an alternative but I can't formulate it mathematically and I can't think of how to make a scientific test that can be used to falsify the idea.

Yes. Empirical data cannot be trusted, and that's why it's not an interpretation of evidence, but rather a denial of it, similar to BiV. Yes, superdeterminism can be locally real. It's a loophole. Still is even under the new improved 'proof' 3 years ago. — noAxioms

Agreed. If emprical data can't be trusted, what even is the point to do science?

That's the line, yes, and its a crock. FW is only needed for moral responsibility to something not part of the deterministic structure, such as an objective moral code. But I've seen only human social rules, hardly objective at all. — noAxioms

We generally do not held accountable people if they could not act otherwise (e.g. for instance, one might be regarded as 'not guilty' due to reason of insanity - the assumption here is that the transgress didn't have the capacity to act otherwise). If determinism were true, the same would be true for all. I guess that one can think that punishments could have some utilitarian sense but I can't make sense of talking about of moral responsability.

The alternatives are randomness and not-closed system. The former doesn't yield external moral responsibility either (as you point out), so the latter is required, in which case the system is simply larger, and we're back to determinism or randomness again. — noAxioms

Right, if closed systems are either deterministic or probabilistic nothing really changes. I think that it is a questionable assumption but I respect it. After all, there are good reasons to regard it as true so it's not irrational. I do believe, however, that a more 'complete' picture that gives the due importance to ethics suggests that such an assumption might not be valid. Or at least that there are heavier consequences than what it is generally assumed.

That does not absolve you of responsibility (to something within the closed system) for your choice. This has been fact for billions of years. You are responsible to eat. Punishment is death. Nothing unfair about that. — noAxioms

In a sense, yes, I agree death by starvation is a sort of punishment for death. But if one that dies of starvation didn't have the possibility to act otherwise can we held that person accountable?

Not much. They're not particularly social. My point was that moths find utility in, if not randomness, at least unpredictbility. Utilization of randomness has nothing to do with morals. — noAxioms

Ok.

My, but we're digressing, no? — noAxioms

Yes, sorry for that. But I don't treat different areas of culture as separated from each other. Scientific knowledge isn't something that has no effect on ethics and vice versa. Both are quite important and if they contradict each other there is something amiss in one or the other. From a practical point of view, I would say that ethics is even more important. So, I don't think that we should ignore the fact that some of its constitutive assumptions seem to be in tension with what science tell us.

But yes, it is off-topic.

I don't know enough about QM to comment about wave functions being anything but nonlocal. I mean, they're supposed to describe a system, or at least what's known about a system. The latter suggests that the real wave function is different than the one we measure. It being a system means that it's nonlocal since systems are not all in one place. That it sort of describes a state implies a state at a moment in time, but a nonlocal moment in time is not really defined sans frame. So we really need a unified theory to speak the same language about both theories. — noAxioms

In the 'wave function as a law' model the laws are simply descriptive. There is no 'pilot wave' that guides them, no causal agent for their motion. That's why I said it is a kinematic model. Both the Bohm-Hiley and the Valentini-Bell variants do have a dynamics. In the first, there is a 'quantum potential' that depends only on the form of the wavefunction (that's why in later years Bohm thought that it is a kind of 'informatiuon pool' and the particles have some kind of ability to decode information) that act on the particles with a 'force' which in turn causes an acceleration - all is described as in classical physics with second-order time derivatives. The other 'realist' model doesn't use the quantum potential. It is also a model that uses only first derivatives of positions and, according to Valentini, it is a very big difference with respect to classical mechanics.
Still, both models treat the wavefunction as a causal agent. This isn't true for the 'wave function as a law' model. While the latter is better than superdeterminism, it is still curious that one wants to make a CFD model without a dynamics.

This is a bit of a distraction. However, let me say that I think that most philosophers do actually decide to live with the dissonance. Perhaps they actually prefer the argument and would be disappointed if they couldn't have it. — Ludwig V

Ok, but I think that 'truth' is not contradictory. Philosophers seek truth and I would assume that there is a way to reconcile these things. If determinism and probabilism can't give a reasonable account of moral responsability it is quite a deep problem.

Suppose you started with recognizing two facts. First, we sometimes act freely. Second that the world appears to be deterministic. The only problem is to develop an account of those two facts that recognizes both. Doing that will require rejecting the concepts that are taken for granted in formulating the problem. For example, free will is defined in opposition to determinism, so we need to get rid of that concept. It doesn't make any sense anyway. Determinism, on the other hand, is treated as if it was true. But if it is true, it is empirically true, and I don't see how we can possibly know that, so we need to think that through again. — Ludwig V

Not sure about your point here. Are you saying that we can still 'believe' in free will even if all empirical evidence goes against it because, even if there is no free will, we can't be certain of it?
To me that would be self-deception.

Also, perhaps different model of justice are adequate in different cases. So, in certain cases, using a 'restorative' process is the best choice but in some other cases it might not the best way (either for the victim or the offender).

The Materialist explanation for the evolutionary emergence of animated & motivated matter is based on random accidents : that if you roll the dice often enough, strings of order will be found within a random process*1. But they tend to avoid the term "Emergence", because for some thinkers it suggests that the emergence was pre-destined, presumably by God. And that's a scientific no-no. So, instead of "emergence", they may call Life a fortuitous "accident". — Gnomon

Well, I think that 'emergence' in fact doesn't have 'theological' or even 'teleological' connotations for most people. One example I made is how 'pressure' of a gas 'emerges' from the properties of the particles it is composed of. Yes, for the reductionist version of physicalism life is an 'accident'. Still, it is curious that in a reductionist model something like 'life' would eventually happen.

However, another perspective on Abiogenesis*2 is that the Cosmos is inherently self-organizing. And that notion implies or assumes a creative goal-oriented process, and ultimately Teleology. My personal Enformationism*3 thesis is an attempt to provide a non-religious philosophical answer to the mystery of Life & Mind emerging from the random roiling of atoms. But if you prefer a "theory" from a famous & credentialed philosopher, check-out A.N. Whitehead's book Process and Reality*4. :smile: — Gnomon

Well, that's a possibility. But it assumes that the cosmos is a sort of living being itself. IMO it is not a form of physicalism.

The alternative on offer to retribution is not natural justice, but restorative justice. — Banno

Honestly, I don't know how much this changes things.
I already said in my post that 'punishment' is one goal of justice and not the only goal. In Christianity, furthermore, for the blessed it is assumed that there is an eternity of beatitude that will, among other things, heal them for the harms that eventual crimes did to them. Furthermore, I believe that Christians generally accept that the activity of justice should aim to protect the victims and to the repentance of the offenders, when this is possible. In fact, i also said that I think that in certain cases punishments (both in the form of an active punishment and of a passive 'let the transgressor experience the bad consequences of what he have done') can be educative.

It is undeniable however that even restorative justice involves punishment for the offenders. So, really, I am not sure what your point is. Also, I have my doubt that it actually works in some cases like, say, sexual offenses, murder and so on. In an extreme case, I am not sure how it works in the case of, say, genocide. But even in the case of, say, sexual abuse I am not sure that involving the victim or someone close to the victim is the 'right way' to go - the victim might be traumatized and to protect the victim perhaps the best way is to avoid to trigger the memories of the trauma. In the extreme case of genocide I am not sure how this model of justice would work.
In order, however, to avoid to be misinterpreted here, I think that, yes, restorative justice, in some cases, can be a better form of justice.

Let's however assume, for the sake of discussion, that restorative justice is the best possible model of justice and let's say that for the victims, their loved ones and so on are perfectly ok to adopt the restorative model. In any case, it clearly involves a punishment of the offender. But I have some questions here I wish you could give your opinion. What if the offender is unrepentant for the crime? What if the offender deosn't cooperate with the activities intended for the programme? What if there are cases where, in fact, the best way to induce repentance in the offender is a more 'traditional' way of justice?

Does asking that help nail down a mind-independent reality? Perhaps the answer to that question does. — noAxioms

Yes. Because if intelligibility is due to the 'representation' of the cognitive faculties of the mind, then anything intelligible can be a 'mind-independent' reality.

Maybe there are, but they'd still have to conform to the theory. — noAxioms

Before early 20th century it seemed uncontroversial that everything is deterministic. Then, QM happened and experts debate. Why do we have to be so certain that, in the future, we will find out that physical laws allow that some events are neither probabilistic nor deterministic?

Newton is not wrong, and it is all still taught in schools. But it is a simplification, and requires more exactness at larger scales. — noAxioms

Yes. It might be that both deterministic and probabilistic models are a simplification or, better, they are valid in a determinate context.

What does the rest of the world say? How does that acronym convert to metric? — noAxioms

I meant that I am aware that my views here are unconventional. But I do not find the arguments that they are wrong persuasive. And I certainly understand people who think that determinism and probabilism are the only allowed possibilities. I disagree. But fine.

Unsure of the difference. A local interpretation asserts neither nonlocal correlation nor interaction. — noAxioms

According to superdeterminism, there are correlations that 'trick us' in believing that either 'realism' (CFD) or 'locality' is wrong. But superdeterminists argue they are mere coincidences.

Isn't that kind of what Copenhagen does? — noAxioms

Yes, right! I mean why not embrace Copenhagen if one is content with a purely kinematical model?

Well, plenty of folks want to assert free will because it sounds like a good thing to have, and apparently it is a requirement for some religions to work, which makes it their problem, not mine. If I'm designing a general device to make the best choices, giving it free will would probably be a bad thing to do. Imagine trying to cross the street. — noAxioms

Well, if all my actions are deterministic, it is quite controversial to attribute to myself moral responsibility. After all, I literally could not have behaved otherwise.
Probabilistic choices are no better. Yes, I could have acted otherwise but, again, how can I be blamed if, ultimately, my choices are a result of a blind mix of deterministic and probabilistic mechanism?

To make sense of moral responsibility, you need to impute to moral agents some deliberative power and a sense of right and wrong.

Of course, ethics is something external to physics. But I would like that my 'worldview' is something coherent, a stable unit. It is difficult to 'believe' to have free will half of the time becuase I have to assume it to have a coherent concept of moral responsibility and in the other half 'believe' that I have no free will. Cognitive dissonance is quite a risk.

How about a moth? Moths fly about in unpredictable ways, making them harder to catch, and thus more fit. That's a benefit over deterministic (or at least predictable) behavior. Maybe moths are the ones with free will. — noAxioms

Would you consider moths as moral agents?

What does that mean? I only know 'entangled'. Is there a difference between locally entangled and nonlocally? Anyway, I presume the marbles to be entangled, in superposition of blue/red. You'll measure one of each, but until then, they're not any particular color. The marbles are far apart. — noAxioms

Yeah, sorry I mean 'entangled' in a way to produce nonlocal correlations.

Well, my only comment here is that this sounds a lot like your prior quote about time being entanglement, and space as well, all this being a sort of solution to the different ways relativity and QM treat time. — noAxioms

Well, Rovelli proposed that in reconciling GR with relativity, the spacetime of relativity gets quantized because it is the gravitational field and like other fields become quantized. However, 'time' as a measure of change remains. Same goes for space, if it is interpreted as a relation between things.

So, perhaps uniting GR and QM resolves the 'tension' between the apparent denial of the 'flow of time' and our experience.

I just picked this bit out. What is a nonlocal law of motion? Example?

I do appreciate links since you've already sent me down several new pages I've not heard of before. Always good to read new things. — noAxioms

It is good to hear that, thanks. The model I had in mind is described in this paper: "Reality and the Role of the Wavefunction in Quantum Theory" by Sheldon Goldstein and Nino Zanghì. It is an interpretation of the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation (dBB) where there is no mention of a quantum potential that 'guides' the particles in a non-local way as Bohm and Hiley believed (and was the concept that inspired Bohm to have more speculative ideas like the 'implicate order', 'active information' and so on that also have been adopted by Hiley) and the somewhat more 'restrained' but still different versions of dBB by people like John Bell and Antony Valentini, who treat the wavefunction as a physically real field that guides the particle but make no mention of the quantum potential. Anyway, according to the variant in the linked paper, the wavefunction should be thought as a 'law of motion', a sort of kinematic law that, however, is explicitly nonlocal. There is no explanation of why particles move in they way they move. They just move that way. The only advantage with respect to a 'Copenaghen-like' view is that here you can easily visualize 'what happens'. But there is absolutely no explanation of why particles behave the way they behave.

Dangerous. I don't think you'd be fit if you had that realization. Part of it would be the realization of the lack of need to be fit. — noAxioms

I believe that our life is, among other things, a learning process where we can learn to become more and more rational. It would be quite weird to me that, ultimately, deceiving myself is something that is good for me. Perhaps, however, it is too dangerous to 'take a step too far' or 'learn things before due time' etc.

Which is why I said 'only one value', because yes, otherwise it's something like MWI, which is back to full determinism, and you wanted an example of block randomness. — noAxioms

I need to reflect on this. I still can't make sense of a probabilistic block. Perhaps I have a wrong idea of what a block should be.

↪boundless To answer that, we would have to pin down exactly what kind of being Jesus is. Is he God? Part of some trinity? The son of God? The son of mad? What, exactly, is he? — RogueAI

Yes, right, perhaps in order to answer that one might have an understanding of what a given model of the incarnation entails. I prefer that Christians give their responses to your question here. I am not, in fact, sure that my previous post was an adequate response.

Note that historically there have been controversies about how to understand the incarnation among Christians. And, honestly, I have not study that controversies in the same way I studied about other matters. So, I prefer that someone else answers to your question - hopefully some that does have a sufficient konwledge of these matters.

Similarly, the holistic process we call "Life" emerges from a convergence of natural laws & causal energy & material substrates that, working together, motivate inorganic matter to grow, reproduce, and continue to succeed in staving off entropy. — Gnomon

Sorry I missed your post. Anyway, assuming that what you are saying here is right, we should ask ourselves to explain how it can be right. Life has goal-oriented behavior, how does that 'emerge' from something that doesn't have anything like that. And assuming that in some ways it can, can we give a theoretical explanation for that?

If there were some kind of 'latent intentionality' in the inanimate or even in the universe as a whole, it can be perhaps the emergence of living beings with goal-oriented behavior might more be easy to understand. If, however, there is such a thing, do we still have a 'physicalism'?

If it can be detected, it is usable. If you are proposing a type of energy which cannot be detected, then that's not really energy, is it? Energy, by definition is the capacity to do work. The idea that there is such a thing as energy which is not usable energy is just contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps 'unusable' is a wrong way to call it. 'Uncontrollable' would be better. You can't make a perfect thermal machine because some energy is dispersed as heat and that heat can't be recovered and used again as work.

In any case, the fact that the first principle of thermodynamics tells us that energy is conserved would suggest that the conservation of energy in a closed system doesn't contradict the second law, that is entropy increases in a closed system. It is quite difficult that all physicists got that wrong for centuries.

I slighty edited my comment. Anyway, one might say that he experienced the suffering of sacrifice as a human can. Did Jesus have certainty that he was to be raised from the dead? Honestly, I don't know.

In any case, Jesus died and then resurrected. This would probably mean that he fully experienced death as humans do. Also, perhaps when he experienced abandonment he didn't have the expecation that such a state would end someday. Does this change anything for you?

In any case, I would like to hear what Christians have to say on this.

Not quite. A soldier throwing himself on a grenade to save his comrades is heroic. A soldier with a ring of immortality jumping on grenades and in front of enemy bullets isn't doing anything heroic. — RogueAI

Well, one can point out that Jesus felt the experience of abandonment ( "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?", Mk 15:34) at the cross and at he experienced agony at the Getshemani as also the Catechism says:

612 The cup of the New Covenant, which Jesus anticipated when he offered himself at the Last Supper, is afterwards accepted by him from his Father's hands in his agony in the garden at Gethsemani,434 making himself "obedient unto death". Jesus prays: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. . ."435 Thus he expresses the horror that death represented for his human nature. Like ours, his human nature is destined for eternal life; but unlike ours, it is perfectly exempt from sin, the cause of death.436 Above all, his human nature has been assumed by the divine person of the "Author of life", the "Living One".437 By accepting in his human will that the Father's will be done, he accepts his death as redemptive, for "he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree."438

I believe that you are approaching the issue in a somewhat rigid manner.

'Retributive' punishment when "one gets the deserved punishment" and/or a 'punishment' that consists of "experiencing the natural consequences of one's choices" aren't mutually exclusive with the possibility that said punishment can also have other functions. In fact, sometimes it is the experience of experiencing the 'bad consequences' of one's actions that can be an occasion for 'repentance', education, positive transformation etc. Also note that the 'retributive' punishment and the 'punishment as a natural consequence of one's attitude' in some cases can be the same thing. For instance, if a man steals from another an amount of money, we might say that the thief deserves, as a punishment, to give back to the first man what he has stolen. Of course, for the thief it is not a 'pleasant experience' and, in fact, it is obvious to me that it is the natural consequence of his action. A loving parent, if some other attemps have failed, can let his child to experience bad consequences of his or her choice. Now, if these 'bad consequences' are 'natural', one might say it they are 'deserved'. And, again, such experiences can be educative.

Of course, in the case of hell, most Christians believe that that the state of damnation is irreversible and entails a punishment (of some kind) that is without end. IIRC, there are different explanations for such a state that, also, do not involve hatred, revenge etc on God's part. For instance, some say that humans can commit sins of infinite magnitude that deserve an infinite punishment because no finite punishment is adequate for intinitely grave sins. Others say that the problem is that the problem is that the damned are incorregible: their state of damnation is not irreversible becuase God doesn't want them to escape but because they reached the point that it is simply impossible for them to convert*. The second one seems consistent with what the Catechism teaches about hell and, in fact, I believe that it is also consistent with what Pope Benedict said in his book 'Eschatology' (see the section about hell here). As I said before, one can even reconcile the two views: by committing sins one damages oneself and, perhaps, it is possible that infinitely grave sins might damage oneself in an irreversible way, at least if one dies without repenting from them (see the section of the Cathechism on venial and mortal sin).
*One might ask why 'repentance' is necessary if God loves us. But IMO this can be understood even in human terms. A true communion of love between two persons has to be bidirectional. For instance, if a husband ceases to love his wife but the bond of love between them is broken even if the wife never ceased to love him. The bond can be restored if the husband sincerely repents and begins to love again his wife. In a similar way, if the damned can't repent, they can't be in a communion of love with God.

Personally, however, I don't find the argument that damnation must be irreversible compelling. But I do find that some truths.

The message, I believe, is quite powerful and immensely influential. Consider how influential it is in our concept of 'heroism', i.e. self-sacrifice to save others and Christianity says that God incarnate did that. Also, its message is also quite original, as philosopher Simone Weil remarked: "The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it." (Gravity and Grace). The fact that God himself incarnated an participated in the human condition, in suffering and mortality (in fact even in violent death) is certainly a strong message.

Note also that I think that the resurrection is even more central than the death on the cross. That is, by his self-sacrifice Jesus defeated death and that is the source of the Christian hope for eternal life or, in other words, the fact that God participated in humanity is the reason why humans can hope that death will be defeated and to attain eternal life in communion with God.

The whole message is quite powerful. That's the reason I believe, after all, Christianity survived...

Look into Plato's "tripartite soul". — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, I was familar with the concept but admittedly I never tried to apply it to understand how to solve the interaction problem. I'll try to reflect on this.

Actually, every experiment done demonstrates that energy is not conserved. The loss is known as entropy. This is why we cannot have one hundred percent efficiency, or a perpetual motion machine, So contrary to what you say, conservation laws have been disproved repeatedly in experiments. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, what isn't conserved is usable energy, not total energy. The second law of thermodynamics is quite depressing in fact. It says that not only we can't 'generate' energy but also that we will never be able to use the total energy there is. Some of it will inevitably fall outside our control.

The Universe is a hierarchy of constraints. But note that constraints are more a passive than an active thing. It is like putting a fence around a flock of sheep. The fence is just there, but by its presence the sheep are more limited in their free action

So the basic symmetries of Nature – the Noether symmetries that create the conservation laws – act like boundaries on freedoms. Spacetime is a container that expresses Poincare symmetry. It says only certain kinds of local zero-point fluctuations are possible. All others are prevented. — apokrisis

Well, good point. And, in fact, if they were 'active', then, it would be like saying that there is a 'World Soul' or that the universe is a living being. If that were the case, it would not be a physicalist model, anymore.

So, the only viable route for a physicalist to explain life and mind in physicalist terms seems to be what you are proposing here. A non-reductionist kind of physicalism where global constraints are properties of the wholes which allow, when the right conditions are met, the arising of life.

I am not convinced that this strategy works and fully explains the arising of life and mind due to the fact I am not convinced that these passive 'allowances' have enough explanatory powers. For instance, I can't imagine a mathematical model that explain the arising of 'life' as a particular state. But I can't say that it is impossible.

Certainly, even if it is correct, one might still ask why these allowances were there in the first place. Of course, there might be no 'because'...

(Slighty edited for clarification)

Totally doesn't follow from what he writes. Not impressed. All that follows is that nothing thought of goes un-thought of, a trivial tautology. — noAxioms

His point seems to me that there are limits to our 'imagination' and our conceptual models. Our minds is not a passive 'recorder' of 'what is outside of us'. In fact, they actively try to interpret things according to their own categories. So, it's not obvious that 'the world we see' isn't a representation. And, in fact, the same goes for unpercieved objects.

I cannot agree. 1) An apple is typically presented as mind-independent, but it is intelligible. 2) (Caution: new word coming) The thing in question could be entirely intelligible, but lacking anything in any way experiencing, imagining, or knowing about it, it merely fails to go itelligiblated. — noAxioms

The question you should be asking is: why is the apple intelligible?

You mean independently, one not supervening on the other? Yea, then there'd be no precedence between those two. — noAxioms

They might depend on a common 'source', for example, or maybe they are aspects of the same thing. In both cases, the mental would not 'supervene' on the 'physical'.

Those seem to be the only valid alternative in QM. Even the consiousness-causes-collapse interpretation doesn't have mind doing anything deliberately. There's not control to it. All the interpretations exhibit phenomenal randomness. — noAxioms

Yes. Before QM, all physical theories were deterministic. With QM, we found out an apparent probabilism, the status of which is of course controversial. Assuming that such a probabilism is 'real', why can't we think that there are other possibilities besides determinism and probabilism?

Then we're wrong, being insufficiently informed. — noAxioms

In a sense, yes. But I would not even call newtonian mechanics 'wrong' tout court. Our physical theories give us incredibly precise predictions. They have to be at least partially right.

Those correlations might be widely separated, but never is there superluminal cause-effect. Thus is is considered a local thing, but not an interpretation. — noAxioms

Yes, I know. I just find bizzarre that a 'scientific realist' would prefer to say that there are 'unexplained nonlocal correlations' than saying that, perhaps, instead there are nonlocal interactions of some sorts. If we renounce to find an 'explanation' of those correlations, why not simply take an epistemic interpretation of QM?

No it doesn't. Time is experienced normally for all observers in both views. Under presentism, you simply abruptly cease to exist at the event horizon. The experience under eternalism is of being inside, also with time phenomenally flowing as normal. — noAxioms

Interesting, thanks. Not sure, however, how this address my point about relationalism.

Maybe you're not the person to ask then, as I'm also not. — noAxioms

Well, for the purposes of our discussion let us ignore that part.

We all have that impression, but as said, I give little weight to that evidence. — noAxioms

Yes, I know. And I am not in a position to tell you that you are being 'unreasonable' here. In fact, I find your motivations quite valid. I was just saying why I find that a problem.

I find my actions deterministic in the short run, but very probabilistic as the initial state is moved further away. So sure, given a deer crossing in front of my car, my reaction would likely be the same every time. On a longer scale, it is not determined in the year 1950 that i will choose vanilla today since it isn't even determined that i will exist. Under MWI for instance, fully deterministic, I both choose and don't choose vanilla, but under the same MWI, almost all branches (from one second ago) have me swerving (nearly) identically for the deer. — noAxioms

Ok, I get that. Also, despite saying what I said, I also recognize that perhaps we are less free than we naively think we are. But I still can't renounce that I have a 'little spot' of freedom that allows my choices to be neither fully determined nor probabilistic. YMMV.

There is dualism, which is something other. But immediate impression isn't good evidence for that one since the determinism and probabilism both also yield that same impression. — noAxioms

Good point. Perhaps, it is me that I should explain how my 'impression' isn't compatible with determinism and probabilism.

Don't understand this. This marble is red, that one is blue. How is that not distinguishing objects, and what the heck does lack of locality have to do with that? — noAxioms

If the two marbles, however, are in some way 'nonlocally entangled', you can't treat them as two separate objects but perhaps as two parts of an undivided whole. In fact, what is common between, say, most readings of de Broglie-Bohm interpretation* and Neumaier's thermal interpretation is that entangled systems do form an undivided wholeness. Perhaps this also means that two different 'objects' can occupy the same position (or limited region of space).

*There is also a 'Humean' reading of that interpretation that denies that there is a real interaction between entangled particles and/or they form an undivided whole. For that reading it 'just happens' that particles follow a nonlocal law of motion. Just as with the superdeterminists, I don't get these realists that do not seek an explanation...if you are interested, I'll link some sources.

It has immense pragmatic utility to be so deceived. Evolution would definitely select for it. — noAxioms

Fair enough. But I find the thing curious. I can accept that a limitation of our knowledge might be useful. But (self-)deception? I find it curious, but I admit that this doesn't refute your point, of course.

Granted. A torrid universe is a possibility for instance. Finite stuff, but no edge. I think a torrid universe requires a preferred orientation for the spatial axes. I wonder if one can get around that. — noAxioms

Right!

My investigation makes us fundamentally irrational, but with rational tool at our disposal. This is kind of optimal. If the rational part was at the core, we'd not be fit.
So for instance, I am, at my core, a presentist, and I act on that belief all the time. The rational tool is off to the side, and instead of being used to rationalize the beliefs of the core part, it ignores it and tries to figure things out on its own. But it's never in charge. It cannot be. — noAxioms

I respect this. But my view is that 'being rational' is a full realization of our own nature. So, for me, it is more difficult to accept what you say here. Perhaps, however, it isn't impossible. And, also, I have different reasons to say that unrelated to the topic of the discussion.

Suppose physics says that the next state is the square root of the prior state (9). Determinism might say subsequent state is 3, but randomness says it could be 3 or -3. Either value in the block is not a violation of the physics, but if there can only be one answer, it can't be both. It can be there, so eternalism isn't violated, but it can't be predicted from the state 9. — noAxioms

Well, I don't understand how it isn't violated except if both values actualize, i.e. a MWI-like scenario (not of the modified type I imagined before)

They don't make predictions at all. If they did, only one would be true. Hence falsifiability. — noAxioms

Yes.

Catholics believe humans are born cursed. — frank

Well, the Catholics have a document where you find the current 'offical' teachings, that is the Catechism. Now, of course, I don't believe that all Catholics follow the Catechism in every respect, but it is clearly the document which I would refer to if I were to describe the Catholic teaching.

For instance, this statement isn't a correct description of what the Church officially teaches now. In the relevant section of the Catechism, we find that:

405 Although it is proper to each individual,295 original sin does not have the character of a personal fault in any of Adam's descendants. It is a deprivation of original holiness and justice, but human nature has not been totally corrupted: it is wounded in the natural powers proper to it, subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death, and inclined to sin - an inclination to evil that is called concupiscence". Baptism, by imparting the life of Christ's grace, erases original sin and turns a man back towards God, but the consequences for nature, weakened and inclined to evil, persist in man and summon him to spiritual battle.

And, also, the Catechism says that 'hell' is the consequence of 'mortal sin' (see e.g. paragraphs 1033, 1037), not the original sin. This doesn't mean that historically Catholics never said that original sin alone is enough for damnation. But nowadays the Catholic church doesn't teach that. So, at least your statement should be nuanced.

Note that I am not a Catholic BTW. But I believe that before making general sweeping statements it's better to read at least 'official' sources, if there are any (see also the link to the section of the Catechism that deals with Jesus' sacrifice, which doesn't seem to contain anything like the view that you attributed to 'Catholics' in the OP).

I also plan to read this, which I only skimmed: "Feminine-Maternal Images of the Spirit in Early Syriac Tradition" (the link directly goes to a pdf). Near the end the author mentions that (p.17-18):

As mentioned earlier, although the use of feminine gender images for the
Spirit underwent a change in Syriac literature after 400 c.e., these earlier pneumatological intuitions continued into the later period. Syriac mystical authors also
employed a maternal imagery of the Spirit and tried to relate it to the life-giving
function of the Spirit. For example, John of Dalyatha, writing in eighth-century East Syria, calls the Spirit “mother” (...) and “begetter” (...).[63] For
him, in the new world of redemption wrought by the new covenant of Christ, the
Holy Spirit is the begetter of Christians.

[63] Addressing God, John of Dalyatha writes in his Letter 51, 11: “You are also the Father of the
rational beings arisen from your Spirit. This one [the Spirit] is called ‘the Generator’, in the
feminine, because he engendered all to this world so that they too might engender children in
our world. But he is ‘Générateur’ (Yhwt Y) nYd )dwl Y)when he engenders in the world
living rational beings who will not engender any more. He is the ‘Generator’ as well because he
nourishes his children and thanks to her they are increased.” Text in La Collection des Lettres
de Jean de Dalyatha [The Collected Letters of John of Dalyatha], ed. Robert Beulay, Patrologia
Orientalis 39 (Turnhout, Belgique: Brepols, 1978,) 478–479. Brock, “Come, Compassionate
Mother,” 255 remarks that Dalyatha uses the word )tdl Y (mother; one who brings forth;
begets or generates) rather than ()M)) (mother). Thus, it shows that even when a masculine
gender is applied to the Holy Spirit, the function of the Holy Spirit is compared to that of a
mother and the Spirit is called a “begetter” ()dwl Y). In fact, we can see that the mystics of
all time compared the love of the Spirit to that of a mother. St. Catherine of Sienna (d. 1380),
for example, in her Dialogue 141, writes that the Holy Spirit is like a mother to the one who
abandons himself to the providence of God. She writes: “Such a soul has the Holy Spirit as a
mother who nurses her at the breast of divine charity.” Text in Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue,
trans. Suzann Noffke, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1980), 292. St. John
of the Cross (d. 1591) in The Dark Night (Book 1:2), compares the grace of God to a loving mother
who regenerates the soul: “God nurtures and caresses the soul . . . like a loving mother. . . . The
grace of God acts just as a loving mother by reengendering in the soul new enthusiasm and
fervor in the service of God.” Text in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, tran. Kiernan
Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1979),
298.

↪boundless The premise here is that the aim of justice is punishment. Why should we accept that? — Banno

One aim is certainly punishment. In fact, it seems to me essential to any concept of justice that it aims at reward the just, protect the oppressed etc but also to punish adequately the unjust. Of course, we can debate about the nature and the characteristics of punishment and what does it mean 'adequate'. But as a general principle it just makes sense. Also, it is quite a common idea found in basically most or all cultures, so I don't think it is particularly controversial.

Of course, perhaps the nature of the 'punishment' is related to the nature of 'sin'. And, even if we remain in the Gospels, we find different analogies for 'sin'. For instance, sometimes it is compared to a debt, as in the Lord's Prayer (Matthew 6:9-15). Other times, we are told that sin is like an illness or something that make us ill and in need for a physician (Luke 5:31-32). Also, it is compared to something that enslaves us (John 8:34). So, there are different analogies for the concept of 'sin' and, therefore, we have to reconcile them in some way.

The 'debt' analogy certainly supports a 'retributive' punishment. As financial debt requires repayment (in some form or in some ways), justice requires recompense of sins. This doesn't necessarily imply that God is wrathful in giving the punishment. In my previous post, I compared God to a just judge that sentences to a just punishment the criminal. In doing so, we should not conclude that the judge seeks revenge. In fact, maybe we can even imagine that the judge is, say, the 'loving father' of my first example who still loves the son but, being also just, sentences the 'son' to the just punishment. Possibly this happens after the judge offers mercy to the criminal but, of course, the criminal should cooperate in some way and make amends - if the criminal, refuses, it is obvious to me that it is simply 'just' that he has to experience the full sentence.

The 'sickness' analogy is also interesting. Here, instead, sin is something that makes us ill. We are in need of a physician. A medicine is offered but I can imagine that if we refuse it, we have to experience the suffering that is the natural consequence of the illness itself (and of our choice of rejecting the medicine). Again, the fact that we experience the 'punishment' given by suffering that is due to the illness. Clearly, we can't blame the physician who tried to help the patient that refused to take the medicine and, as a consequence, experience the pain.

Also, the 'slavery' analogy is similar. We are offered a chance to be free. But, again, if we refuse we remain stuck in the condition of slavery. IIRC, in the roman empire a 'manumission fee' had to be paid in order to free slaves. So, the 'ransom' analogy we find in e.g. Mark 10:45 for the action of the Jesus might refer to just this.

Another real life example is addiction. The problem with addiction is that the addict refuses to get help, often even if he knows that it is for his good. As time passes, it is more difficult to get cured from the addiction. Again, the suffering the addict experiences is not due to the revenge of someone. It is simply due to the fact that the addiction itself 'ruined' him and this ruin was also a consequence of his refusal to 'renounce' to the addiction itself by getting help and sticking with the necessary therapy.

As you can probably see, there is no need to literally believe that God seeks 'revenge'. It seems to me quite natural to think that one of the aims of justice is precisely to punish the unjust (at least, if the unjust doesn't repent, make amends and so on). Certainly, the fact that one of the aims of justice is also punishment (and there are different ways to understand 'punishment' here) doesn't imply the 'penal substition' model of atonement. It is perhaps a defensible interpretation but certainly not the only one.

Also, the 'official' Catholic view of Jesus' sacrifice doesn't seem to be the 'penal substitution'. See the relavant section of the Catechism.


As a parellel, consider the Buddhist doctrine of karma (which means 'action'). Also in that case, you find the idea that bad deeds deserve some kind of punishment as a consequence. But, interesting the actions that cause 'bad consequences'/'punishments' are called 'akusala karma', which means something like 'unwholesome action', which also suggests something a notion of illness.

You might interested in this study by the syriac scholar Sebastian Brock:"The Holy Spirit as Feminine in Early Syriac literature"

I didn't actually deny that. I said it was an unsound conclusion. I do not accept it, nor do I deny it. I just think that it is an assumption which has not been adequately justified to be able to make that judgement. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I disagree, but I think I understand your view better now.

After death, we may be united with God, forever. — Metaphysician Undercover

OK. But that future state would be a type of 'life', right?

The interaction problem was long ago solved by Plato who proposed a third aspect as a medium of interaction. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. Could you give me a reference, please?

Likewise, conservation laws are ideals which do not actually represent the reality of physical interactions, which are less than perfect with respect to conservation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, this is a big claim. Conservation laws have been repeteadly confirmed in experiments. Of course, I can conceive that they might be wrong, but I have good reason that they are correct or at least point to some kind of constant order.

Regarding entropy, it's not the same thing. As @Dfpolis said, entropy has more to do with our ignorance.

Sorry. I didn't see how that discussion actually applied to what I'm asking. Mind independent existence shouldn't be confined only to things that have a certain relationship to a potential mind (intelligibility). — noAxioms

No worries. As I said, it didn't help that I used terms like observer and perspective in a rather liberal way. Regarding this point you are making now about intelligibility I see you but if there are non-intelligible things, can we know them?

As explored in my reply with Ludwig V above, perhaps the unicorn is a poor example, but it is difficult (contradictory?) to identify something that has no experience associated with it. — noAxioms

And here you raise a good point, indeed. Can we really think about things that are outside our 'experience'? Read what philosopher Michel Bitbol said:

As soon as you think about something that is
independent of thought, this something is no longer independent of thought! As soon
as you try to imagine something that is independent of experience, you have an
experience of it – not necessarily the sensory experience of it, but some sort of
experience (imagination, concept, idea, etc.). The natural conclusion of this little
thought experiment is that there is nothing completely independent of experience. But
this creeping, all-pervasive presence of experience is the huge unnoticed fact of our
lives. Nobody seems to care about it. Few people seem to realize that even the
wildest speculations about what the universe was like during the first milliseconds
after the Big Bang are still experiences. Most scientists rather argue that the Big Bang
occurred as an event long before human beings existed in the universe. They can
claim that, of course, but only from within the standpoint of their own present
experience...
Ironically, then, omnipresence of experience is tantamount to its absence.
Experience is obvious; it is everywhere at this very moment. There is nothing apart
from experience. Even when you think of past moments in which you do not
remember having had any experience, this is still an experience, a present experience
of thinking about them. But this background immediate experience goes unnoticed
because there is nothing with which to contrast it.
This was well understood by Ludwig Wittgenstein, probably the most clearheaded
philosopher of the twentieth century. One of my favourite quotes of
Wittgenstein’s is this one: ‘[Conscious experience] is not a something, but not a
nothing either!’

(Michel Bitbol https://www.academia.edu/24657293/IT_IS_NEVER_KNOWN_BUT_IS_THE_KNOWER_CONSCIOUSNESS_AND_THE_BLIND_SPOT_OF_SCIENCE_")

If we answer to this that, indeed, we can know something 'mind-independent' we have to assume that what is 'mind-independent' is conveniently intelligible, at least in part. If we answer in the negative, at least a transcendental idealism seems inexcapable. Note that even with the first answer we have to explain intelligibility.

I have existence supervening on mind, so that's pretty explicitly mind dependence. That hierarchy is a proposal, not something elevated to 'belief'. It seems to work pretty well though. — noAxioms

Ok, I see. What about a dual-aspect view though? If the mental and the physical arise both from math, perhaps neither mind nor the physical has a precedence.

It kind of is if it utilizes classically deterministic primitives, and I've never seen a biological primitive that leverages randomness. All the parts seem to have evolved to leverage repeatability, sort of like how transistors do despite using quantum effects. Sure, it involves a lot more chemistry than does a computer, so in that sense, it's not the same. It doesn't implement an instruction set, but a computer need not do that either. I have designed a few computers with no instructions and no clock ticks. — noAxioms

It seems that you assume here that the only possible alternative are either determinism or probabilism. But what if our knowledge of 'the world' is limited and, in fact, the regularities of nature make room from something else?

Superdeterminism is supposed to be local — noAxioms

Yeah, but ironically even it needs the existence of wildly nonlocal unexplained correlations that some how 'trick us' in believing that 'local realism' is false. One might, however, ask the superdeterminist how these correlations were there in the first place.

Yes, local realism has been falsified. Here, realism has somewhat a different meaning that what the realists mean by the word. — noAxioms

Yes, but there is a resemblance. In physics, the lack of realism means that physical quantities have no definite values unless they are measured (take your favorite interpretation of what a 'measurement' is, it's not relevant for what I am saying now). In philosophy, 'realism' strictly speaking not only means that there is a 'mind-independent reality' but also that it is knowable. Kant's transcendental idealism is not a 'realism' in this strict sense because it posit an unknowable 'mind-independent reality'. The resemblance here is that both claim there is always something 'definite'.
So, while I agree that that 'local realism' in physics is not really a metaphysical category, it seems to me that some metahphysical models - even 'anti-realist' in the philosophical sense - have been excluded. For instance, Schopenhauer's version of transcendental idealism was proven wrong.

There is a way to falsify presentism: Just jump into a large black hole. Presentism says it is impossible to be inside one since the interior never happens. No point in doing so of course, but you'll know for sure during what short time you have left to live. — noAxioms

Here I use relationism to defend presentism. Since there is no 'view from nowhere', when I jump into a black hole for me time stops. For you, it doesn't. So a global presentism is certainly refuted, but perhaps a local one?

What's the point of MWI if not to point out that all potentialities (valid solutions to the wave function) occur? Some do and some don't? That seems to make far less sense, a reintroduction of dice rolling for no purpose. — noAxioms

Well, the merit of such a 'MWI' would be to reintroduce a version of 'potentiality'. Also, if the world isn't deterministic, it makes clear that "things could have been otherwise". Of course, I don't think that such a MWI alone would be able to explain QM's results. But maybe it can be integrated in some ways.

Wasn't the question though. The question was, do you have an opinion about it? What's the most mind-independent thing you can describe, something as unlike an apple as you can get? Does describing it disqualify it? I'm still not clear where you stand with unicorns, or a better example than unicorns. — noAxioms

Funny thing is that, dependending on the context, I'll answer in different ways. In general, I believe that we can't know if there is something mind-independent. However, that there is some mind-independent reality is the most plausible asumption we can make. I would perhaps say that, in general, living beings are what is certainly mind-independent, they can't be understood as parts of any 'representation' of our cognitive faculties.

Also, I should add, however, that in a deeper sense, perhaps, nothing is 'mind independent'. As I mentioned before, I lean towards some of forms of 'ontological idealism' and theism, some forms of mind as fundamental. But such a 'mind' is not our own.

Sorry, I know it isn't clear.

One does not present evidence of a negative. One provides a counterexample to falsify it. — noAxioms

Well, for instance, I have the 'impression' that my actions are neither deterministic nor probabilistic. And that impression is quite strong for me. So, I consider that immediate impression as evidence that, perhaps, there is something other than determinism or probabilism. Prove me wrong.

Example: It evolves naturally in one and by chance in many others. — noAxioms

Or maybe they are different 'versions' or aspects of the same object.

You should have grouped the parentheses from the right, yielding a much larger number. Anyway, that number is the distance, in meters, between a certain pair of stars, given 1) an infinite universe, and 2) counterfactuals, the latter of which is dubious. Still, a distance between potential stars then. — noAxioms

Well, right, but if the universe is not infinite, then, you can conceive a natural number that hasn't a 'referent'. Note that even for a simple structure as natural numbers, then, it's difficult to find a 'physical support'. You already need an infinite universe!

Probably, but out experience is physical, the same regardless of frame chosen to describe it. This is sort of like the twin paradox, illustrating that while time dilation is a coordinate effect (frame dependent), differential aging (noting the different ages of twins at reunion) is physical: the same difference regardless of frame choice. — noAxioms

While I can't concede you that 'experience is physical' you make a good point here.

Why can't we spatially separate them? — noAxioms

I meant to write something like: "if local realism is wrong, is there a non-arbitrary way of distinguishing objects? If so how?"

Disagree. Change is typically defined as difference in state over time, and eternalism is not incompatible with that. The illusion of time flow is a gift of evolution, allowing beings to predict the immediate future and be far more fit that something that can't. — noAxioms

But from our experience of change, we get the a very convincing impression that the present alone is real and the future and the past aren't. Eternalism says that past, present and future are equally real. So, it is interesting that, if eternalism is right, we are favoured by a very deep self-deception.

Trust it. Just because it isn't rational doesn't mean that it isn't essential for fitness. — noAxioms

Yes, but note that if experience goes so wrong and it is the starting point of science even science itself has shaky grounds so to speak.

Science actually doesn't render much of an opinion, but rational logic does. Humans are by nature not rational. It takes effort to ignore the biases. — noAxioms

We are potentially truly rational beings. We can be rational but very often we either can't or choose not to be.

This sounds like MWI until the part of about partial actualization. Not sure what it is with that. MWI is a very deterministic interpretation, but with the partial actualization bit thrown in, it ceases to be. — noAxioms

Yes, I know. And I don't see it as a problem.

Disagree, per the examples I gave. Presentism vs eternalism is merely an ontological difference. If one is possible without determinism, then so is the other. — noAxioms

Honestly, I do not get how non-deterministic models are compatible with eternalism. I'll reflect on what you have wrote.

Having said that, and having floated the idea that ontology is a mental designation, it would seem to follow that presentism and eternalism are the same thing, just interpreted differently, an abstract different choice without any truth behind it. I hadn't realized that until now. — noAxioms

Well, I'm not sure how this doesn't imply something like either a form of idealism or a radical skepticism. The only possible way I can think of that they can both be 'true' is that they give good predictions and are useful.

They're life forms, so of course not. But they're bloody close to full automatons. Super close to what a herd of identically manufactured robots would be like, which admittedly aren't designed to work together. Maybe nanobots, which are. — noAxioms

Again, I believe that we have to agree to disagree here. Based on how experience my choices, I am open to the possibility that also ants might not have an 'algorithmic mind'. So, while robots can emulate the ants' behavior (becuase they are programmed to do so), I question that they would be the same.

To use a probably not very good analogy, it is like to compare a portrait of a human being to the human being. It well represents some features of the human being but certainly they aren't the same.

Reality is an interpretation of empirical data. That's what I'm calling an interpretation here. People interpret that data differently, so there's all these different opinions of what is real. If being real is no more than an ideal (a mental designation), then there's no truth to the matter. — noAxioms

...Unless, there is something that goes 'beyond' the representations that gives an independent criterion on the 'truthfulness' of the representations.

It wasn't a named quality back then. Nothing with the language to name it. So was it what we now call a thermostat? It's not like it was this funny isolated object, separate from what it controlled. It was spread out, integrated throughout what needed to have its temperature regulated. — noAxioms

By quality I meant 'what makes a thermostat, a thermostat'. If I negate the mind-independence of that, there is no mind-independent thermostat. Note that a 'thermostat' is dependent on the existence of the 'temperature'. But is 'temperature' a property of things outside our conceptual categories or is a concept we introduced to make sense of our experience?

So strong emergence becomes the emergence of a new level of topological organisation that imposes itself on the materiality that underpins it, and thus allows itself to be that which it is. Some globally persistent new state of order. — apokrisis

If I were to make a physicalist model of the emergence of life, I would think as a sort of 'phase transition', where we have the formation of 'systems', which as you say, are wholes that constrain and influence the 'behavior' of their parts.

So, you go from a situation where the wholes (except the universe) are reducible to a situation where there are structures which are not reducible and the 'world' becomes truly 'divided' into systems which are undivided wholes which are able to give global constraints on their parts and have a relative autonomy from what is 'outside'. But in order to explain such a transition in a model, you need to say that, in some sense, such a transition is a potentiality that, once the right conditions are met, becomes actual.

If such a potentiality is not to be found in the parts of these systems, then the alternative I can think of is that it is to be found in the order of the 'cosmos'. In this case, the emergence of life is a potentiality enfolded in the regularities of the whole universe which remains implicit until the right conditions are met.

I don't think that assigning a property to the 'whole' - indeed, the whole universe - is something alien to physics. In fact, the conservation laws can be thought as being properties of 'isolated systems', rather than a (weakly) emergent features of their parts.

Of course, I have no idea of how such a 'potentiality' could be 'expressed' in a theory. I don't know if it is even possible. But I would say that if the cosmos itself is a whole that can constrain the behavior of its parts, then it is more understandable how at least some features which we associate with life can 'emerge' or, perhaps, it's better to say 'actualized'. Does this make sense to you?

We disagree then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes!

I don't. And, I don't think anyone can. But I don't pretend. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ok, I see, thanks. When I remarked about the 'refinements' I meant that IMO the arising of life is still partly unexplained. So, I sort of agree here.

Do you think that you apprehend inconsistency in what I wrote? If so, please point it out to me so I can address it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, it seemed to me that you said that scientific theories are good for explaining the past but you also denied that there is a time 'before' the arising of life.

It still looks like death to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting. Why? I mean, I can understand having misgivings about a static state as being 'life' but a 'dynamic state' can be regarded as life. What do you find objectionable here? I think that it is also a pretty universal theme that the 'multiplicity' of goals we have in our life here is a detriment.

As you'll see from my reply to apokrisis, I believe in reduction, but not in physicalism. I believe that reduction is what ultimately demonstrates the necessity of dualism, which I believe in. The modern trend for physicalists is to turn away from reductionism, because it cannot succeed without dualism. At the base of material existence is the immaterial, as cause. So I think that this turning away from reductionism, is a mistake. The physicalists cannot bear the consequences, the necessity of dualism which reduction leads to, so instead of facing that reality, they retreat to a new form of physicalism, which, as it is physicalism, is equally mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

I see. To be honest, I am torn. On the one hand, I am inclined to agree with you here. Given the success of reductionism, it is reasonable to think that the 'physical' is reductionist. I am not sure, however, if the 'physical' is necessarily reductionist.

I do agree with you that reductionism fails with life and mind and this is a big issue that physicalists have to face.

As I said before, I am not myself a physicalist. Dualism has its own advantages but it's not without problems. For instance, how can we explain the mind-body interactions if the mind and body are different substances? Would such an interaction 'respect', say, the conservation laws that seem to always hold?

Not really. I’ve heard his name here and there on the forum, but I don’t really know what his beliefs were. — T Clark

Ok, I think you would find his thoughts germane.

Are speed, distance, time, and force abstract ideas? Do they exist? How about goals, purposes, and intentions? — T Clark

I have a very clear experience of having goals, purposes, and intentions. Perhaps, I am deceving myself but I would take my immediate experience as a strong evidence for that.

Regarding forces, well, our understanding of them changed dramatically over the centuries. Clearly, one can't hold the Newtonian model of forces literally nowadays. That concept of force is without a doubt useful, but it doesn't seem a faithful description of something real.

Regarding distance, speed, time well, I would say we have to be carefule here. Our experience of change is as real as our experience of having goals, I would say or even more immediate. Notice however that perhaps 'time' in physics isn't necessarily the same thing of that. Honestly, however, it is difficult for me to imagine a physics 'without time'. How could one even think of a 'dynamics'?

Distances is a different business. In the newtonian model, space is absolute and distances are also absolute. But perhaps distances are more like relations between things. So, I guess this doesn't mean that are 'abstract ideas' but, still, it doesn't seem obvious to me what is the right way to understand them.

Anyway, in general, I think that it is difficult to pin down the 'right interpretation' of what physical quantities really are.

I don’t think there’s any serious debate among scientists. Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate. — T Clark

Well, perhaps many scientists are simply uninterested in these topics. But, again, if you think of, say, relativity reflecting on what distances are have been fundamental for development of science.

That makes condemnation to Hell a little more horrifying. God has no feelings about it one way or the other. — frank

In one model of damnation, hell is not a consequence of God's wrath. God loves all but can't force people to accept that love. Hell is seen as the natural consequence of the sinner's rejection of that love.

As a human analogy, consider the case of a father that loves his son who decided to join a criminal gang. The father tries as best as he can to convince his son to abandon his ways. Out of his pride, however, the son rejects his father's love and, in fact, resents him. This despite the fact that, after all, the son is actually acting for his own detriment. As time passes, we can imagine that the son gradually becomes more and more entrenched in his ways and it becomes more and more difficult for him to change his ways - not because he is not offered the possibility to change his ways but it is because as time passes, the son becomes more and more entrenched in his evil ways.

In another model of damnation, hell is simply the 'just punishment' that a sinner deserves. Such a punishment is not made out of revenge. In this case, mercy from that punishment is offered from God but the sinner rejects that offer and, then, he suffers the just punishment.

An analogy here would be the following one. Consider a man that made a crime and he is offered the chance of have his penalty significantly reduced if he sincerely repents and cooperate with justice and law enforcement. This man, however, refuses to just do that and he is sentenced to his own penalty. Again, it's not that the judge sentences the criminal out of revenge but, simply, he gives him the right punishment.

Note that the two models here do not view punishment as due to revenge, hatred or indifference from God's part and perhaps they can be reconciled with one another.

For me also. There's no better way to understand what you believe than to bump up against something you don't believe. — T Clark

:up: Also, note that I am also conscious that sometimes I use terms in an idiosyncratic way. I try to avoid that as much as possible, but our discussion helped me to be more carefult about that.

For what it's worth, I don't call myself a physicalist, although you might. I call myself a pragmatist. — T Clark

No. From this discussion alone I would not have concluded that you are a physicalist or not. Furthermore, IIRC you also made some posts in the past about Taoism from which I would have said that your view isn't physicalist, i.e. a view that ultimate reality is physical. Taoism seems to assert that there is an ultimate reality that transcends conceptual categories.

[BTW, as an aside I don't know if you are familiar with David Bohm's philosophical views (starting from his 1957 book "Causality and Chance" onward). I believe that, perhaps, it's the closest you can get to Taoism among modern physicists.]

That said, it is also true that is some cases it is even difficult to classify metaphysical views in neat categories.

I doubt Feynman thought "he ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic." That's certainly not what he wrote in that quote you included. — T Clark

I quoted Feynman because he says that the conservation of energy is an 'abstract idea', which IMO implies that he also viewed that energy itself is an 'abstract idea', i.e. a concept that is useful to us but not necessarily something that 'represents' something external.
At the same time, you also find some presentations of the concept that give the idea that energy is actually a 'thing', especially when you hear someone explain how matter and spacetime affect each other in GR.

Until quite recently, it was perhaps quite reasonable to interpret 'mass' as 'quantity of matter'. But with the mass-energy equivalence even mass becomes quite elusive and is now regarded as a synonym of energy. It's also true that some now interpret the mass-energy equivalence in a way that, more or less, suggests that energy is a measure of the quantity of matter.

In any case, I believe that the precise ontological status of physical quantities like 'mass', 'energy', 'momentum', 'electric charge' etc is still a matter of debate among scientists and philosophers.

This is a great response. Wayfarer, @Metaphysician Undercover, @boundless, and I will all be able to say "See, Apokrisis agrees with me." — T Clark

Well, I also agree that @apokrisis made a good post but honestly, I need to re-read it. Many things are above my paygrade in that post. So, before commenting I need some time.

I notice nobody has really addressed the core question of this topic. — noAxioms

Not sure why you said that, after, for instance, the discussion we had about intelligibility and the 'perspectives'.

the question of this topic is not about the moon, but about the unicorn. If the unicorn exists, why? If it doesn't, why? Most say it doesn't, due to lack of empirical evidence, but if empirical evidence is a mind-dependent criteria. Sans mind, there is no empirical evidence to be considered. — noAxioms

Well, it is a rather difficult point, right? If our empirical knowledge was a perfect knowledge of 'reality' we would be certain that unicorns exist or do not exist. Our knowledge, however, is certainly limited even for a direct realist. On the other hand, a direct realist might say that, in principle, we could know that. But, again, their opponents would however raise the issue: "how can you be certain that the way 'physical reality' appears to you isn't filtered with your own cognitive faculties?". As I said, I believe that we arrive an antinomy here. On the other hand, you was pretty explicit that at the fundamental level of your hierachy we have mathematics and mind is after the physical. Ho can you claim that?

Perhaps, but then arguably neither does your brain. It's the process that does the understanding, not the hardware. For instance, if a human was to be simulated down to the neurochemical level (molecular level is probably unnecessary), then the person simulated would know what it's like to feel pain, but neither the computer, program, or programmers would in any way know this. — noAxioms

Well, denying that we can't understand meaning goes against the immediate evidence. It is a phenomenological given. It's hard to deny that and I would not unless I have a very strong reason for doing so. You also assume that the simulated brain is enough to have sentience. Even within a physicalist model, however, I would question that. What if, instead, that brain needs to be in a body which, in turn, needs to be in an environment and so on...?
Also, I believe that there is no consensus that our mind is algorithmical. So, before saying this, you would also make a case that our mind is, indeed, like a computer.

Hard to use 'intent' in the context of ants, but it can be done. — noAxioms

Agreed. Unfortunately, we do not have enough words to avoid ambiguity. Ants do not move and behave as stones do. They do not 'intend' as we do, either, but they certainly have goal-directed actions.

'Intelligible' is a relation, not a property, so X might be intelligible to Y, but not to Z. — noAxioms

Here I disagree. While, it can be the case that X is intelligible for Y and not to Z, I would say that this is due to the limitations of the agents. I believe that something is either intelligible, or not.

My opinion: mind independence has no requirement of intelligibility, but 'reality' does since it seems to be a mental designation. So I agree with your statement. — noAxioms

Well, you agree for different reasons, however. Not sure why you seem to label 'reality' what I would call a 'representation' or an 'interpretation' of reality.

Do the qualities of 'being a chair' and 'being a thermostat' exist independently of our minds'? I don't think so. — noAxioms

Agree with that. — noAxioms

Good! To me this means that those qualities are part of our representation/interpretation and not of the mind-independent 'reality'. I also happen to have a difficult time to say the precise 'cut-off' where we can safely say "this quality is, indeed, something that is outside of our representation. It is indeed mind-independent". Hence the antinomy.

Not by that name anyway. There have been thermostats long before humans came around and made some more. But that name is under 2 centuries old, and a human-made mechanical device serving that function is only around 4 centuries old. — noAxioms

How can a thermostat be there long before humans came around if the quality of 'being a thermostat' is mind-dependent?

There you go. What's the difference between calling something magic by another word (immaterial mind say), and just calling it 'yet undiscovered physics'. The latter phrasing encourages further investigation, but the former seems to discourage it, declaring it a matter of faith and a violation of that faith to investigate further. Hence no effort is made to find where/how that immaterial mind manages to produce material effects. — noAxioms

Ok, I would say I agree with this. But, in general, I would say "yet undiscovered phenomena" rather than "physics", but I am okay with that.

Of course. No metaphysical interpretation is falsifiable. The ones that are are not valid interpretations. — noAxioms

Yes. I believe that certain classes of metaphysical interpretations are falsifiable, but not broad categories like 'idealism' or 'naturalism'. For instance, a 'local realist naturalism' has been falsified by Bell's experiement (BTW, I believe that even superdeterminism is actually a form of nonlocality...).

Yes, as I tried to point out with my dark matter example. If something new comes along, the magic it used to be becomes natural, and naturalism is by definition safe. But it isn't a specific interpretation in itself since naturalism doesn't specify the full list of natural laws. — noAxioms

Yup!

Agree. There is for instance no 'state of the entire universe', only a state relative to say some event. MWI is quite similar except it does away with the relation business and goes whole hog on the absolute universe, a thing with the property of being real. Since there's nothing relative to which any state might be, there's no states, just a giant list of possible solutions to the universal wave function. It's still that one structure. One can extend MWI to include different possible states of an even more universal wave function, including different values for all the universal constants, but MWI itself seems confined to just this one set of values for those constants. — noAxioms

Right! BTW, as time passes, I am growing more sympathetic with MWI and MWI-like models if interpreted as describing potentialities. I believe, however, that the mistake of these models is to assume that all potentialities actualize, i.e. a belief that whatever can happen, will happen.

(Some time ago, I read that there is even a version of MWI where the universal wavefunctions never branches. Rather, there are simply parallel 'worlds' which evolve deterministically and independently from each other and the branching is merely an illusion due to a lack of knowledge of the existence of the other 'worlds'.)

What actually IS mind independent is super difficult to glean since it's a mind doing it. "Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.” -- Heisenberg — noAxioms

Right! This is in fact a point I was making with my reference to the 'antinomy'. To be honest, I think that you do realize that there is an antinomy but at the same time you are reluctant to accept the consequences of that. Your notion of 'reality' is quite similar to the notion of 'empirical reality', 'representation' and so on that you find in d'Espagnat view of 'empirical and veiled reality', transcendental/epistemic idealism and also some versions of ontological idealism and realism.
I accept the presence of the antinomy and I think that this implies that we simply can't be certain about what is 'mind-independent'. In contrast to what transcendental/epistemic idealists would say, however, I think that it is reasonable to say that we can have some knowledge of the 'independent reality' but we can't prove it.

Our understanding of it certainly is conceptual, but I have no trouble accepting that the mathematics in itself is not. — noAxioms

A little like my concept of the moon and the moon in itself, but that relation is quite different since I have a mutual measurement relation with the moon and it doesn't work that way with 3. — noAxioms

Interesting, thanks. Oddly enough, I would even say something similar about my view of math. Even if 3 is conceptual, this doesn't mean that we understand it completely.

Tegmarks MUH book spends a lot of pages doing that, but in short, if there is nothing doesn't see to follow mathematical law, then the proposal is valid.
There's problems with this. There are a lot of mathematical objects which include me in it, exactly as I am with no experiential difference, and yet the object containing me like that is so very different than the one we model. That is a super big problem with the view, that needs to be addressed. — noAxioms

Two points here. Regarding the first sentence, I believe that you have not presented sufficient evidence to say that.
Regarding what you say later, I might agree. It seems that the same 'object' can be found in different mathematical structures. If MUH was right, this would imply that the 'object' exists. But how can we make sense of the fact that the same object exists in different structures? In a sense, to me this shows that math perhaps isn't enough to explain 'things'.

That sounds like the 'fire breathing' spoken of. Not necessary. 2 and 2 add up to 4 despite lack of instantiation by any mechanism actually performing that calculation. Similarly, a more complex mathematical entity (say the initial state of the universal wave function) yields me despite lack of real-ness. — noAxioms

I guess that I would repeat what I said before. Interesting, but I don't find convincing.

Agree. That the universe is mathematical does not in any way imply that we can fully understand the mathematics, or far worse, understand something complex in terms of tiny primities, which is like trying to understand Mario Kart in terms of electron motion through silicon. — noAxioms

I agree. Also, mathematical structures are holistic. Take the natural numbers. The set of natural numbers can't be reduced to its components. Rather you define the set and then you discover the relations between the numbers. Of course, I am not denying that we perhaps constructed and learn the set of natural numbers by starting from concrete examples. But at a certain point the set is to be seen as an undivided whole and it contains things that do not have a 'referent' in nature. For instance I am not sure that the number ((10000000000^100000000000000)^100000000000000)^100000000000000 is instantiated in our universe, despite being finite.

Yea, that sign makes it not quite the same thing, eh? Both aspects of the same 'object', but different properties in that direction. — noAxioms

Oddly enough, time and space are present only if you specify the reference frame. If not, you have only the spacetime and its intervals. So, I am not even sure that they are aspects of spacetime and not, say, arbitrary way of carving it.

One does not travel through spacetime. Travel is something done through space. It's an interpretation, a mental convenience. Reference frames are definitely abstractions. — noAxioms

And yet are space and time are quite 'real', right? They are a phenomenological given, immediate features of our experience. Is there a relation between reference frames and our experience?

Intuitive maybe, but it's been demonstrated to be quite wrong. There is no valid locally real interpretation, and Einstein seems to argue for one.

He should have been around when Bell did his thing. He'd have to choose since the stance you describe is invalid. Locality or realism. Can't have cake and eat it too. — noAxioms

Yup! BTW, what I find powerful of Bell's theorem and the experiments that confirmed it is that some metaphysical views of reality have since been refuted.

One, however, might feel the plight of Einstein and ask: "Well, then, how can we 'carve' the world into distinct objects if we can't spatially sperate them??" And voilà we discovered that the problem is very deep and there is no consensus about this even among experts.

But there is no evidence one way or another, except eternalism is the simpler model, but then the simplest quantum models also don't mesh well with one's intuitions. So instead of needing more evidence (there isn't any to start with), you need to justify the more complicated model. — noAxioms

The problem with rejecting our 'intuitions' is when these intuitions are immediate aspects of our experience. The flow of time is probably the strongest example. If eternalism is right, change is merely illusory. But if our experience is so wrong about something 'obvious' like that, how can I trust it? Science, after all, is empirical. If our experience gets something basic like that so wrong, how can even trust science?

Quite right. If it's true, our experience of it is a lucky guess since the view makes not empirical difference. — noAxioms

Right! And the mystery goes deeper! If the alternative to eternalism is a presentism that, in fact, does even justify the very reason we went in search for a presentism...

boundless: Right! But without determinism, I can't see how a block universe is untenable. — noAxioms

Of course, I meant 'tenable' not 'untenable'

It's a kind of determinism, but not what's usually meant by the term. A block model with randomness just means that a subsequent state does not necessarily follow from some prior state. An atom might decay or might not. Bohm says that there are hidden variables that determine if it will or not. MWI says it both decays and doesn't. There is no state evolution at all under RQM since it's all hindsight, but RQM is not considered deterministic. Most of the rest are not. In a block context, that might mean that there's randomness in state evolution, but the history is all there. It's dice rolls, but equivalently all in the past so to speak. — noAxioms

Not sure if I understood. If the state truly evolves, you can't have a block universe. Unless you mean that potentialites are what is described by 'eternalism'.

In fact, this is quite close to how I see it. As potentialities, all 'histories' are 'there' and eternalism is right for them. They have a weird 'virtual' existence, so to speak. They aren't 'nothing' but they aren't properly 'something'. Not all potentialities actualize. What is actual is what is truly 'real'.

No, at least not the kind of determinism that QM is talking about. I actually listed 6 kinds of determinism, and block universe was only one of them, but the one the name talks about is a different kind. — noAxioms

My point was that you need to have determinism in order to have eternalism. If 'the flow of time' is illusory, in order to have consistency, you need to assume determinism. If determinism is false then the future isn't inevitable.

Yes, talking about that, and what it did was generalize an absolutist interpretation (LET) of physics. LET is the special case like SR, only applicable to zero energy situation. Schmelzer finally extended that interpretation to include gravity.

My reference is just the paper. Most of what I asserted about it comes from the abstract. Not like I read the rest of it. But it supports presentism far better, and it can be falsified similar to the way one falsifies the afterlife. Can't publish the results. — noAxioms

Ok, thanks for the clarification!

However, and this is something that I picked up from one of the sources I mentioned earlier, organisms try to persist - they try to keep existing. Inorganic matter has no analogy for that. — Wayfarer

Right!

Many decades ago, I had the set of six books by Swami Vivekananda on yoga philosophy. Vivekananda's concept of 'involution preceding evolution' is an aspect of his philosophical framework that bridges Eastern spiritual thought with Western scientific ideas. In this understanding, involution refers to the process by which consciousness becomes increasingly involved in or identified with matter, transitioning from subtle to gross manifestations. This is essentially the descent of consciousness into material form.
... — Wayfarer

Interesting, thanks. It seems more or less what Bohm said even if, I believe, the starting point was the opposite (however, I don't believe that Bohm's view were physicalist...).

Anyway, I believe that you can build a physicalist model that incorporates principles like potentiality, actuality and so on. I believe that some reject them because they believe they imply something transcendent, idealism or whatever. But it isn't necessarily the case.


I am not a physicalist myself but I respect physicalist models that are not reductionistic. I even believe that, once reductionism is abandoned, even a physicalist can make sense of many things associated with 'spirituality'.

I do have those reasons, and I mentioned some, the failure of science where the current theories reach their limits. These are issues like dark matter and dark energy in physics, and the need to assume random mutations and abiogenesis in biology. As I said, what these failings indicate is not that we need to extend conventional theories further, but that the theories need to be replaced with something fundamentally different, a paradigm shift. Therefore the current concept of "the universe" is a false concept. — Metaphysician Undercover

... And I don't beleive that questioning those things you mentioned is enough to abandon the concept of the 'universe' as a totality. Dark matter and dark energy give us testable predictions. We might not have a good understanding of them but this doesn't mean that we won't in the future. Abiogenesis is the consensual view among the scientific community. Unfortunately, I have not a training in biology so I'm not sure if there are valid alternatives. I believe that there is perhaps something missing in our current understanding of biological evolution. But evolutionary theory had an incredible success and it can't be denied. I believe that there are rooms for 'refinements', so to speak. In fact, I believe that problems occur when one wants to insist on a reductionist reading of evolution.

Anyway, if you believe that our understanding of the history before the arising of life is wrong, what do you think happened? How do you explain the arising of life?

That is the whole point. Evidence indicates that something does transcend what is known as "the universe", and what can be known scientifically. That is why the need for metaphysics is very real, and why physicalism must be rejected. Observation based knowledge is severely handicapped in its ability to apprehend the totality of temporal reality. All observations are of things past, and the future cannot be observed in any way whatsoever. This means that observation based knowledge, empirical sciences, are only accurate toward understanding half of reality, the past, while the future lies entirely beyond scientific apprehension. We can predict what will come to pass, based on observations of the past, but this in no way indicates that we understand the nature of what is in the future. — Metaphysician Undercover

How do your points here about the past square with what you said before with respect to our understanding of cosmology, biology etc?

In any case, I would agree that our understanding of 'reality' is limited and, also, that the reductionist 'paradigm' doesn't help.
At the end of one of my previous posts I mentioned a quote by physicist and philosopher David Bohm: “It may indeed be said that life is enfoldes in the totality and that, even when it is not manifest, it is somehow 'implicit' in what we generally call a situation in which there is no life." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, chapter 7, p. 246). Now, if life is understood as an implicit potentiality within the intelligible order of the cosmos - and not something to be understood in terms of the properties of the particles that 'make up' living beings - I believe that a physicalist model of life is possible. I believe that reductionism is wrong but reductionism is not the only possibility for a physicalist.

Of course, this might not be true. But unless there are convincing arguments that show that the 'potentiality for life' (or consciousness) requires a transcendent cause non-reductionist physicalist models aren't excluded, that is models where the 'fundamental reality' is the whole. After all, even, say, a star might be understood in a 'reductionist' way but, at the same time, according to our present cosmological model, the very coming into existence of a star is possible because the universe has evolved in a certain way.

Admittedly, what I am saying here is sketchy at best. But, again, all theories start as sketchy ideas.

I think death is what is implied by that statement of Augustine, where he says "rest in You". — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't want to derail the thread to a discussion about theology but I just note that, apparently, 'death' wasn't what Augustine had in mind given that he was a Christian. Of course, you might say that, perhaps, if 'heaven' is a static state perhaps it is equivalent of death. I am not sure about that but I do think that it is an interesting point.
On the other hand, I believe that St. Gregory of Nyssa had a quite dynamic understanding of the state of the blessed (which he called 'epektasis'), where the participation of the blessed in the communion with God will forever increase. In a sense, this means that the desire for the Good will never be satisfied. But at the same time, the blessed do not fall away from the communion because they know that they can't find ultimate peace, happiness and so on anything except God. In a sense, however, I would say that even in this dynamic model the blessed yearning for the good is satisfied in the sense that they stopped to seek elsewhere the source of their happiness. Would you agree at least with this?

No the mass is not given by "the mass of the interactions", it is given by the force. This is the basis of the energy-mass equivalence. And "force" is an extremely difficult concept to grasp, especially if we remove the mass required for momentum, to conceive of a force without any mass, to allow that the energy-mass equivalence represents something real. If the energy-mass equivalence is real, then there must be a force, called "energy", without any mass. This force would turn out to be nothing but the passing of time itself. Since the principles of physics don't allow us to conceive of a force without some sort of momentum, in application the photon must be assigned some mass, to account for its momentum, this is "relativistic mass". — Metaphysician Undercover

Force and interaction are synonyms in physics. And nowadays fundamental interactions are understood in terms of exchange of particles. The best known example is the photon which is the mediator of the electro-magnetic interaction. The photon has energy, therefore it has mass via the mass-energy equivalence. It does not have 'rest mass' (or 'rest energy') because it travels at light speed. But a photon has a quantity of energy.
I am pretty sure that the mass of the nucleons is understood as due to the masses of the quarks and, also, of the masses of the mediators of the forces between them.

As I noted, you and I are just too far apart on this. — T Clark

Fair enough. Nevertheless, it has been an interesting discussion for me.

We've been through this. The physicalism you seem to be talking about is the reductionism you and I both reject. — T Clark

Yes! I think that reductionist versions of physicalism have serious problems. But this isn't the case for non-reductionist versions. After, 'physicalism' can be a very broad category.

For example, at the end of my previous post I mentioned David Bohm. I don't think that he was a physicalist but I do believe that his ideas of 'implicate order' and 'explicate order' are not incompatible with physicalism per se, only with its reductionist variants.

Mass is energy. Energy is mass. Your conception of what is real and what is not doesn't make much sense to me. — T Clark

Well, the ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic, I believe. For instance, this is how the famous physicist Richard Feynman introduced the concept in his Lectures:

In this chapter, we begin our more detailed study of the different aspects of physics, having finished our description of things in general. To illustrate the ideas and the kind of reasoning that might be used in theoretical physics, we shall now examine one of the most basic laws of physics, the conservation of energy.

There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing all natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law—it is exact so far as we know. The law is called the conservation of energy. It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. (Something like the bishop on a red square, and after a number of moves—details unknown—it is still on some red square. It is a law of this nature.) Since it is an abstract idea, we shall illustrate the meaning of it by an analogy.

I believe that our concept 'mass-energy' either corresponds or represent a property that physical systems have and which can be measured. I don't think it is a 'thing' or anything substantial. I'm not sure what you are taking issue with.
The points I was making do not rely on a particular ontological position about 'mass-energy', 'momentum' etc. If they are simply 'abstract ideas', as Feynman put it, nothing really changes.

In the same way, when Aristotle speaks of telos, he’s not always invoking a designer’s intention or a conscious goal. He’s pointing to the formative structure of things — the way they unfold, and what they tend toward in their becoming. The acorn doesn’t “intend” to be an oak tree, but neither is its development just accident and brute cause. — Wayfarer

I believe that this is a key insight here.

I wonder, however, that perhaps we can even think of an even more general notion of 'goal-directed action' or final cause. Before continuining with my post, I'll now make a distinction between 'laws of nature' and 'order of nature'. 'Laws of nature' are our theoretical descriptions of the regularities of phenomena. 'Order of nature' is, instead, the order that we might assume there is in nature as an explanation of the regularities themselves. I don't think we can 'prove' that this order exist but it seems a reasonable hypothesis to assume there is.

I believe that if one assumes the existence of such an 'order' there are interesting consequences here. Of course, we must assume that the 'laws of nature' allow the existence of life. We and other living beings exist, so we should infer that a supposed 'theory of everything' should not contradict this. But if the 'laws' reflect an 'order' and if we assume that such an order is intelligible, we have to assume that life has always been a potentiality in this order. If this is true, we can't really understand that 'order' without understanding life.

All analogies have a limited value but the analogy of the acorn seed and the oak is relevant here. When the right conditions are met, from an acorn seed an oak can arise and develop. In the same way, when the right conditions are met, living beings come into existence. If there was not a potentiality, however, the arising of life would not be intelligible and if we assume that nature is intelligible, this would imply that the arising of life would be simply impossible.

Of course, the reductionist might argue this alone doesn't prove much. For instance, he might argue that life might be a 'potentiality' in analogous way that we might say that 'pressure of a gas' is a potentiality. But 'pressure of a gas' is a property that can be fully comprehended by examining the properties of the particles that compose the gas. I honestly have never found a convincing argument that shows that life and consciousness can be understood in a similar way as 'temperature', 'pressure' and so on 'emerge' from the properties of the constituents of an inanimate object. The issue is contentious.

But, of course, even if it were right that life and consciousness do not 'emerge' in the same ways that pressure, temperature etc do, not even in this case we should conclude that they do not emerge. I believe that here the Aristotelian concepts of 'potentiality' and 'act' help. If life and cosnciousness can't be understood by solely pointing to the properties of the physical constituents of a living and/or conscious being, then, perhaps, the 'potentiality' might be understood as a property of the intelligible order of nature or the universe itself, i.e. the whole that 'contains' both the beings and their parts. So, perhaps, we can't fully understand life and consciousness without understanding the intelligible order of the cosmos itself.

Notice that even for the non-living things, we can understand their 'behavior' in reductionist and holistic terms. The pressure of a gas can be understood as arising - 'emerging' - from the properties of its constituents. But it can also be understood as a potentiality of the intelligible order of the universe. We can understand the behavior of a gas with reference to the laws of nature. Another example might be the evolution of the universe described in cosmology. We do have a model of how the universe* evolved, how the expansion, the decrease of temperature and so on allowed the formations of stars, galaxies and so on. These features can be understood in terms of the properties of their parts but also as features that emerged from the evolution of the cosmos. The same goes, perhaps, for life and consciousness. It seems unlikely, though, that this 'emergence' of life and consciousness can be understood in reductionist terms.

If life and consciousness can't be understood in reductionistic terms, then, reductionism is not a good way to understand things. This doesn't exclude all forms of physicalism, just the reductionist/mechanicist ones. Also the question "why there is the potentiality for the 'emergence' of life and consciousness in the first place?" remains. Perhaps, there is a transcendent reason for that potentiality. But I don't think that it can be 'proven'. But if reductionism is false and a non-reductionist phyiscalism were right, then I believe that 'telos', 'potentiality', 'act' should be considered something that pertains the order of the cosmos.

I hope to respond to the rest later.

*Edit: I think it's important to note that here I am saying that when we talk about the evolution of the universe, we talk about the universe as a whole. What is fundamental in the description is the whole, not the parts. Ultimately, features like stars, galaxies and so on 'emerge' because the universe evolved in such a way. This doesn't negate the fact that we can understand the properties of, say, a star in a 'reductionist' manner. But what I am suggesting is that reductionist picture is not the whole story. In fact, what is fundamental in the description is the whole cosmos, not the 'particles' or the 'parts' present in it. Perhaps, this 'holistic' description might help us to understand how life emerged. So, maybe, a physicalism that takes the whole cosmos as the fundamental reality can explain life. But such a physicalism is quite different from the reductionist/mechanicistic one. To summarize: ultimately, life arose because the universe evolved in a certain way and in that evolution at a certain point the conditions necessary for the arising of life were met. At that point, the potentiality for life, enfolded in the 'order' of nature, actualized.
Edit 2(final): a beatiful quote from the physicist-philosopher David Bohm summarizes what I was saying, I believe: “It may indeed be said that life is enfoldes in the totality and that, even when it is not manifest, it is somehow 'implicit' in what we generally call a situation in which there is no life." (Wholeness and the Implicate Order, chapter 7, p. 246)

It might be easier for you to say this, but that is a matter of avoiding the point. Instead of acknowledging that the concept which we know as "the universe" is a false concept, you are accepting it as true, and proceeding from that premise. Of course it's easier that way, because you have your starting point already laid out for you. However the falsity of it misleads you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps. But I still don't have enough reasons to say that 'the universe' is a false concept. Ironically, I believe that, despite the 'reductionist' reputation that physics has, perhaps a more parsimonious reading of our physical theories is that the 'whole universe' is actually the most fundamental entity (if there is something transcendent of it, it can't be known scientifically).

Actually, these "laws" you refer to are the product of human knowledge. Human beings have created these laws in their efforts to describe activities observed. — Metaphysician Undercover

In a sense, I agree. But we can create them because we undeniably observe regularities in natural phenomena. Of course, we cn be wrong that this intelligible order we observe really exists but I would say it is more reasonable to say that than the reverse.

Why would you conclude this, it makes no sense to me. To begin with, "God" is not defined as "the good". The good is what a human beings seeks, and we do not necessarily seek God. Further, if one does seek God, it is impossible for a human being to know God in an absolute way, so that person would always be seeking to be closer to God, never reaching the fulfillment you refer to. — Metaphysician Undercover

How so? In all (or at least most) theistic religions and philosophies, it is assumed that God is what fulfills our deepest yearning. As St. Augustine said at the beginning of the Confessions "our hearts are restless until they rest in You [God]". It is natural to say that God is also the highest Good - or even Goodness itself, it that is true.
I don't think that 'being fulfilled' implies that activity stops. It just means that the will stops seeking fulfillment outside God. This doesn't imply that the will can't seek to deepen its participation in God's goodness. Perhaps we are using the word 'fulfillment' in different ways. To me it means that the will doesn't seek anymore satisfaction outside God. But this doesn't imply that the will can't deepen its participation in the communion with God. Same goes for knowledge: knowledge can be deepened but the mind doesn't seek knowledge outside God once it is in communion (or union depending on the theistic model).

But this method only works to an extent. If you divide a hadron into quarks and gluons, the hadron has a lot more mass than the sum of its parts. This is a feature described by the energy mass equivalence. The mass is a product of force, the strong force. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with that. In this case, the mass of nucleons isn't just the sum of the masses of its components but it is also given by the mass of the interactions.

This BTW shows that in contemporary physics that mass can't be interpreted as a measure of the quantity of matter. In fact, I would even say that mass is an abstract property no more real than energy.

It’s exactly the same. This is not a scientific way of speaking, it’s statistics. This is how statisticians talk about distributions of data points. — T Clark

Ok, but then I question if there is a meaningful distinction between strong and weak emergence.

You and I have a different understanding of what the words “reductionism” and “emergence” mean and how the processes they designate work. I’m not going to change my understanding and I don’t think you are either. There’s probably no reason for us to continue this part of the discussion. — T Clark

Probably. I would say that we have a similar understanding, however. But certainly this part of the discussion can go too much off topic. In brief, I would say that I believe that perhaps a better reading of physical theories is that what is fundamental is actually the whole universe, i.e. it is an ontological precedence over its parts.

Another point is that, perhaps, in order to have an acceptable explanation of life and consciousness, physicalism needs at least to be 'expanded' or corrected in some ways.