I am interested and game.

Thanks, Un, I agree about the interesting zones of inquiry. 'Social science' in general, as with your example of psychology, seems necessarily limited by an inescapable circularity. If a market is rational, for instance, then all the players in it would theoretically know the theory of the rational market, and adjust accordingly. (My first degree back in prehistory was Economics) This seems to be an occasional cause of machine-led panics in markets.

I've been reading and thinking lately about placebos, because they are at the cusp of medical science where the most physicalist of scientists has to consider the role of 'belief' and 'expectations'. In these areas 'science' could expand its realm by expanding its attempt to understand the first person position. After all, testimony is perfectly reasonably evidence (indeed I sometimes think even facts are only testimony, just very well-supported). Varela in 'The Embodied Mind' made an impassioned plea for scientists to open themselves up to first-person narrative, but it seems to have fallen on stony ground so far.

And then the David Deutsch stuff advocated by Tom intrigued me lately, because one of its rationales was built up from 'decision theory', which I've tended to regard as pseudo-scientific game-playing, claiming as it does to be able to second-guess rational choice, but which I perhaps ought to have taken more seriously. (I don't mean the Deutsch stuff depends on this, it's just one line of support for it) Ah me, so much to misunderstand, so little time.

Welcome, Maw :)

The usual move - trying to suggest the "scientist" is somehow deficient in spirit, unable to enjoy life like a regular person.

The tropes of Romanticism are perfectly familiar. The issue is getting folk like yourself to actually question the grounds of such beliefs.

But of course rejecting analysis absolves one of the need to ever respond to a demand for actual intelligibility. Catch 22, or the escape via mystical paradox. — apokrisis

It seems to me you think I'm attacking you when I'm not. You're a believer in metaphysical naturalism, and your naturalism is of an unusually complex and non-reductive kind. I'm not denigrating that at all. I'm not a believer in metaphysical naturalism, though, so I disagree with your saying 'At the core of philosophy is the assumption that nature is intelligible.' I think my kind of (analytic) philosophy will inquire into what we mean by 'nature', not take it as the core concept whose intelligibility we are inquiring into. But this is metaphysics, and metaphysics is an area in which all is speculation and belief.

I'm a strong supporter, in the old Landru terms, of methodological naturalism. I'm questioning whether that method has the tools to understand ethics, the arts, politics and spirituality in a philosophical manner, a manner that expresses love of wisdom. I'm nevertheless interested enough in the analytic method of philosophy to be back at Uni studying it in what is very nearly my old age. It has its limits, is all I was saying in this thread: and I think its limits are exemplified in there being a limit to whether the multiplication of sciences - db's original proposal in the op - and the supposed gradual self-slaughter of philosophy as these sciences replace it, are really on the right mental tracks.

In my life-experience many scientists are artistic morons, and many are much more artistically informed than is the average arty-fart about science. My debate is about linguistic tools and methods, not people. (If you think Schoenberg is about the tropes of Romanticism I'm game to disagree with you: I'd argue that that's where he began but he ended in a totally different intellectual place: but that belongs on another thread and probably in another forum)

this higher-order dimensionality resides in nothing less than human behaviour itself, rather than language as such (or rather, one should say that language just is this holistic phenomenon involving both words and behaviour) — StreetlightX

Talk is in a sense more complex than writing. Writing can convey more and more complex ideas but talk is in itself like Bateson's play but with the variables that are operational greatly multiplied. David Lewis's 'score-keeping' is an example of a concept for how we might sustain, in his example, a septuple of variables in any given conversational language-game. They might be matters like mutual power, relative emotional states, relative knowledge of the matter in question, how many people are in the game, how many dialects are being used, what different interlocutors' intentions are, mutual understanding of body-language, how the environment interacts with the spoken word, the institutional setting, and so forth.

I think there might be a confusion in the op between 'dimensions' and 'complexity'. As apo says, less might mean more, depending on what the beings want to communicate or to have communicated to them, since one can build great complexity from binary beginnings regardless of whether one thinks of the resulting constructs in 'dimensions'.

I imagine other beings who exploit the entire range of music as communication for instance: the complexity a symphony can convey is mind-boggling.

It might be useful to consider the standard tropes by which continentalism operates. — apokrisis

My remark about Continentals was brief and light-hearted, though with a serious intent: that some of them have found a philosophical language in which to talk about the arts, in a way which analytics have not. I stand by that. I think the rest of your riff against 'continentalism' is about something else that I don't feel this thread is concerned with, so I'm not going to respond to.

I would be glad to know how a naturalist approach might enable philosophy to deal with subjects for which the scientific method seems to me wide of the mark like aesthetics, ethics, politics and meta-science.

Thus being a "scientist" involves great epistemic humility. It means understanding the limits of knowledge and developing a method of inquiry accordingly. — apokrisis

It may involve inward humility. The scientistic approach, however, sometimes involves outward epistemic arrogance and rather large claims to 'know' . Fair enough with a range including dna, testable or verifiable physics and their ilk. But db's question is about philosophy doing itself out of a job by accreting more and more sciences. I'm claiming there are limits beyond which the language of scientific discourse just doesn't provide illumination, and indeed provokes obscurantism. I am thinking say of 'possible worlds' applied to literature or 'objectivity' applied to ethics, for instance. I am thinking say of speculative physics which tries to claim the same mantle of truth as experimental physics. 'The limits of knowledge' are not something to be decided by scientists alone. I just came here from listening to some (bracing !) Schoenberg: there is a kind of knowledge, for example, in the way those notes are constructed and sung played. Perhaps there is in the spirituality Wayfarer is interested in too, or in love between people.

In this eliminativist approach, which is naturalistic and scientistic, nothing is inherently impossible to study scientifically.. — darthbarracuda

Thanks db, I am interested in this too, though from a different point of view: why it is that so much analytic philosophy seems to me, a latecomer to philosophy, as if it aspires to be a philosophy of science, rather than philosophy proper.

One can also have a non-eliminativist view that scientific method can be applied to anything. The question is, what will the outcomes tell us? Is the discourse that issues from applying such methods to 'data' somehow a complete account? Or is there a remainder on which science is necessarily silent?

There seem to me many areas of human life in which scientific discourse would always remain incomplete, and sometimes feels impoverished when it tries to address them. The arts; ethics; politics; spirituality; the deeper meaning of what science has to take for granted - all these seem to me to have their own discourses which are poorly susceptible to scientising.

At the core of philosophy is the assumption that nature is intelligible — apokrisis

At the core of my philosophy is intelligibility, but while I admire your complex and subtle understanding of 'nature', which is far from eliminativist, it still seems to me to want to encompass areas of human life and talk which are beyond 'nature'.

Some of this relates to the 'I' and 'you', the encounters between people and what they involve. As an old arty-fart and writer/amateur singer/musician, I don't think a scientific approach has much of interest to say about many of these encounters. The science of jokes, for instance, would be a poor guide to the skill of joke-telling, and to the nature of jokes and comedy. But a philosophical inquiry might well be more fruitful. (I once tried to incorporate jokes Freud uses in 'Jokes and...Unconscious' in a play and discovered how hard it was to migrate his theory into humorous practice :) )

As a general example, analytic philosophy about aesthetics often seems risible to me, trying to utilise pseudo-scientific or quasi-logical concepts to describe facets of human life that need a different broader faculty of understanding. In what way can a scientising philosophy march on into these areas? Say what you like about those Continentals, but quite a few of them know how to talk about poetry and symphonies.

I confess to finding this thread depressing. Even if the science might be wrong (MU), the majority of scientists think they've got it right, and it seems to me wisest to take the precautionary view rather than the optimistic one instead of endlessly re-debating the science. Even if there are positives to climate change (Tom, Question, others), there are many negatives, and it would surely be wise to address them: the point of policy debate is mostly to mitigate problems, not to celebrate good news.

Some of this stuff seems like clever-sounding argument for the sake of argument. The question for policy-makers is, in our locality, or in concert with others in other localities, what would the wise thing to do be?

The problems of increased flooding, for example, aren't going to go away and aren't going to be addressed by the kindest of entrepreneurs as part of the market system, unless their factory is going under. Investment in changed infrastructure is required, which will have to be funded by taxation or charity. My own locality has been badly hit by repeated flooding in recent years; and on a global scale, countries like Bangladesh and major cities worldwide face likely devastation unless we prepare for worst case scenarios, having revised downwards the criteria for worst-case scenarios (where I live we've had once-in-100-years floods, by criteria proposed in 2000, five times since 2000). In some cases there are no reasonable preventative measures and we just have to work out how to be resilient, but even that costs public money: rehousing, refitting housing, and so forth.

I've been thinking about the meaning of Wittgenstein's 'Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.'

(There is an essay online by Cecilia Rofena from a book 'Wittgenstein and Plato' which expressly links their notions of the divine, you can find bits of it in Google books. She argues that the added word 'something' in the English translation has a wrong implication which isn't in the German.)

To me Witt is writing about what I think of not as supernatural but as 'extra-natural'. Our ordinary use of language, and the scientific enterprise, both assume a 'natural' world. This is the world of facts as he would have put it at the time of his writing the Tractatus.

But section 6.4 of the Tractatus outlines what such language - and science - cannot talk about. Having spent most of his book on the world that is the case, does this make sense of the world? No. (No wonder Russell was shocked at what his pupil came up with) 'The sense of the world must lie outside the world.' (6.41) 'It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)' (6.421) Of course, he does very occasionally put ethics into words all the same :)

So I suggest he talking about what we would currently call a different discourse or level of discourse. These are things of which it's difficult to speak, because our language is ill-suited to such matters. Ethical behaviour has effects but...

'If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts--not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak, wax and wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.' (6.43)

I think there is an unresolved contradiction here. The word 'only' is odd. For earlier in the Tractatus of course the limits of my language are the limits of my world. So to alter those limits is to alter something profound. And indeed this seems implied in 'altogether different world'. But there isn't then a clear link between good exercise of the will and happiness, or bad and unhappiness. Some debate is heavily abbreviated here.

I don't mean Witt wasn't in some way religious. He was particularly drawn to Kierkegaard and debated what Kierkegaard implied for him. But most of the time religious concern wasn't - back to the op - what for him his own philosophy was about.

Perhaps we should hesitate before being so sure we can divide beliefs between the natural and supernatural. Are they alternatives? Or might they belong to different discourses? I am reading Wittgensteins notes on Culture and Value. Page 3, from 1929: 'What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.'

"Happy" is an irritating word, so you can keep it. — Thorongil

Here's to a eudaimonic new year.

Happy New Year!

It's a shame Sanders didn't push on, hard to know what would have happened with him in the mix.

The mystical experience of oneness, which is sometimes interpreted as an experience of god, and which comes about when subject/object perception abruptly ceases while some sort of experiencing continues, is certainly not confined to any single religious tradition or practice. — Sunstone, post: 5012843, member: 499

The analytic in me would like to suggest that there is no way of knowing whether the variety of experiences encompassed under this single description really can be grouped together. They are generally grouped together by people who believe there is a profound meaning in 'the mystical experience of oneness' as they interpret it.

Personally I've experienced something like that, and I regard it as an illusion. Pluralism can be spiritual too. I enjoy the pluralism of sciences or of multi-deity religions, the multitude of nature and of works of art and humanity. I am distrustful of One God One Truth, and it strikes me that some science-as-the-ultimate believers are as guilty of a univocal view as monotheists: that there's a single theory of everything behind the plurality we seemingly experience.

When you realize and don't shy away from the fact that what Ralph believes depends solely on what's present in Ralph's mind on a particular occasion, attempts to parse it in some uniform way simply seem silly. — Terrapin Station

One odd thing about 'Ralph believes there is a spy' is that the primary propositional attitude is that of the unnamed maker of the sentence, and yet this anonymous sentence-maker is generally ignored in all these ravellings and unravellings of purported logical form. When I read 'Ralph believes there is a spy' my first question is about the credibility of the writer-about-Ralph, not of Ralph.

I agree, TS, this stuff feels eventually like Castles In The Air, a way of sounding as if we understand logically what we don't. But it's useful in talking with machines, for formal language is all the pesky critters understand.

..what is present in the individual's mind is the proper context of the utterance — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree, and would only add, that what is present in the interlocutor's mind is also part of the context. To whom is this addressed and why?

Here's something less amusing, but more pertinent than Hanover's reply:

Why gut instinct will decide the most irrational referendum yet — Banno

Oddly enough, although in the New Scientist, that was rather a 'gut instinct' article, strong on experts, short on detailed evidence.

I did vote Brexit and was shocked that so many 'liberals' were shocked by the vote. It made clear to me that there was a consensus among Cameron-Tories, Liberals and Blairite Labourites that they still haven't come to terms with. Instead they keep puzzling over the supposed 'irrationality' of the majority that in this instance was against them.

One likely odd outcome for the UK of course is that we will have more black immigrants and less white ones, since we will no longer favour Europeans. It was a strange myth that the European Union, by keeping out most people from anywhere but Europe, was somehow 'liberal' about immigration. Nevertheless there's an obvious danger that rhetoric can become fact, that the anti-immigrant talk of racists - which has undoubtedly stirred up racism in the short term - will have longer-lasting effects.

Meanwhile across the pond the best the U.S. system could do was pitch a tired-looking machine politician against a maverick neo-Fascist. I don't feel (pace Hanover's comments) as an outsider that I'm a loser in Clinton losing - but the U.S.'s tentacles reach all over the globe and we are stuck with the results. I live rather near a U.S.-run 'early warning' station here in northern England, so we are something of a helpless American outpost if the maverick Kingfish presses any unexpected buttons.

None of this is post-truth though. It's much easier to ascertain 'the truth' of events now than it was in the establishment-controlled 60's of my youth, but that doesn't mean anyone wants to know it. Political discourse is gruesome, overwhelmingly a child of public relations - the interwoven worlds of political parties, ad agencies and banks and large business spin their key fictions. But this is not a shift. Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders' was published in the 1950's and its findings still seem valid to me. Truth is a casualty of the discovery that people respond better to the right kind of lie.

I spent three hours with an art installation called Another Place, by Anthony Gormley, in Liverpool yesterday afternoon — Punshhh

Hey I was in Liverpool too :) Perhaps we passed and didn't know each other for who we are.

I went to the Liverpool Tate and saw Tracey Emin's bed, which I like, and some prints of William Blake's. This is one, 'The night of Enitharmon's Joy'. I think these, and Gormley's 'installation', communicate something to me that is novel to me, arranging materials in a way that communicate this novel something, and through them the world makes more sense to me.

Blake: The night of Enitharmon's Joy

All of the things you name are perceived by your senses and then interpreted by your brain which inherently makes them subjective, hence failing as answers to the question. — hunterkf5732

Your question was about 'access'. I have access to these things and then make a judgment; I recognise them as other to me, things I could not have invented because I am not clever enough, or because they seem to me irredeemably other. If you think you invented a succession of lines of Shakespeare, then go ahead and invent some more lines of poetry and you will make your fortune. If you think your mother is a figment of your imagination, then how do you come to be here? How were you born and raised?

There is a time for awe in one's life, and the achievements of others, including one's mother and great artists, are something to be awed by. Or so it seems to me.

Actually your old friend Nagel is sometimes 'accused' or credited with a belief in some sort of neutral monism. Have a look at the Stanford entry.

I agree with Tom, there's a revival of interest in neutral monism. I think the variant by a man called John Heil is interesting, but I just happen to have been reading him because he's interested in Mind. His view is certainly neutral monism of a kind, where fundamentals are neither mental nor physical but abstractions. Ordinary objects on his view are 'only modes', that is, 'local thickenings of space-time'. Here's a quote from a book from the Noughties:

Nowadays we prefer to think of the material world as a collection of elementary particles, or fields, or perhaps a single field, a single space–time manifold. On any of these views, macroscopic material objects will consist of arrangements of the ultimate constituents or, if you prefer the idea that the world is a single unified space–time manifold, a way this manifold is. This turns macroscopic objects into modes. — Heil

Could you name something we have access to, which is not subjective? — hunterkf5732

I 'have access to' the works of Shakespeare, Picasso and J S Bach. These were not works by me, they are all by a far greater mind than mine. For me humility begets anti-solipsism. Were you Cindy Sherman taking pictures of herself? George Eliot creating the fictional world of Middlemarch? Joni Mitchell writing songs in her prime? Your mother when she first contradicted you?

Humans making patterns for other humans to enjoy, be enthralled by, take intellectual pleasure in.

I'm unconvinced that for artists to be motivated by money somehow taints what they do. There is much dreadful art produced from the most pure and spiritual of motives, and much excellent art produced by people making a buck.

I too have suffered from bouts of depression, and have many friends who have too. I'm mostly glad when people try to help, at least in retrospect, even when their understanding of me is poor. There's nothing wrong with kindness. If you can't handle a little misplaced kindness directed towards you, then it's time you learnt.

For me it's the ability to function autonomously that counts. If someone can do that, mild kindness is the best service one can offer them. But if someone isn't functioning independently, the kindness can get more pushy. Well, that's the way i deal with it. There aren't rules.

You mentioned China and freedom. We in the West probably picture faceless and countless drones milling about doing their boring routines, never feeling highs or lows or much of anything. But even this image is most likely derived from advertising and movies. — 0 thru 9

There are quite a lot of Chinese people in the UK these days. They seem pretty cheerful and self-assured to me. Maybe they feel history is on their side :)

There has to be a good reason for why we ought to continue living — darthbarracuda

Well, I think this is where you part company with the existentialist point of view. Or certainly my interpretation of it, which is a bit shop-worn :) There aren't 'irrational reasons' or 'good reasons' in certain areas of knowledge/self-reflection, on this Kierkegaard - Heidegger - Sartre view. To adopt an analytic phrase from Sellars, you asking for something to be in 'the space of reasons' when I'm saying it doesn't inhabit that space. There neither is nor isn't a reason to go on living. There neither is nor isn't a reason to take the existential leap. There's a choice and there will be consequences, mostly unknown and unknowable. 'Reasons' belong over there, in the space where science, logic and mathematics happen. (Just as, for instance, I'm reading Witt's 'Culture and Value' and he would argue the same about 'ethics', that reasons aren't part of the grammar of ethics)

I'm not familiar with Foucault. Does he talk about self-oppression? — Mongrel

It's a while since I've read him, since I'm in an analytic phase..Foucault would begin with power, as a relation (indeed it's interesting that your op leaps from mutuality to slavery without saying 'power' or 'status'). Then power is (historically situated and ) distributed through social relations, not just through institutions but in the smallest and most intimate areas of our.lives . We exert or accede to power in many small ways which are part of the structure of discipline, including ways in which we discipline ourselves, feel guilt and contrition. It's extremely hard at any historical moment to 'step outside' such disciplinary structures for we are embodied within them. The 'self' is a performing thing that is subject to discipline great and small but also tries to create their own life, aesthetically. Hope that makes sense and doesn't offend any Foucault fans!

I'd not encountered it before, thanks Jorn.

The guy has a web page here : https://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/

And there is a book published last year: https://www.amazon.com/Pretense-Pathology-Philosophical-Fictionalism-Applications/dp/1107028272

The ESP seems to me just a version of a common-sense principle that we apply in everyday life. Suppose we are predicting whether it will rain this afternoon. We look at local factors and ignore irrelevant or remote factors. — Andrew M

Well, to invoke 'common sense' seems quite a weird thing to do,in the context of many worlds and the quantum universe. Some of the anti-many-worlds view is based on 'common sense', and advocates of many worlds give such common sense, when they disagree with it, short shrift. See earlier in this thread.

Obviously these things aren't however, deal-breakers in any way. This is another, like the David Wallace, attempt to derive the Born rule from what you call 'the ontology of QM'. (I see that the very enterprise of 'wanting to derive' is a disputed idea among the critics of many-worlds)

The maths still works, whatever words we bracket it within.

Does Sartre find any way of overcoming the absurd, irrational character of life? His characters certainly seem to understand it. — darthbarracuda

I don't think there is a means of such 'overcoming', if you embrace the view, for you commit to the priority, as it were, of the absurd..

The Sartreian leap into freedom, as I interpret it, involves accepting the absurd irrational character of life, as you put it. This is liable to give you the nausea of the novel's title, an existential despondency; it's only by the existential leap of choice, of decision, however absurd, that one makes oneself, and thereby makes one's contribution to making the world.

As I now understand its roots better, this is a kind of interpretation of Kierkegaard without God (faith is absurd and irrational), mingled with phenomenology that descends to Sartre from Husserl and Heidegger. So in the terms of Sartre's later big work, the immediate that we encounter is Being, and the 'we' are the 'Néant', consciousness being nothingness. Authenticity involves acting freely; inauthenticity involves recognising rationally the constraints upon your actions, yet doing nothing about them.

As a footnote, Derrida over-interpreted a phrase of Kierkegaard's: 'L’Instant de la Décision est une Folie'. There's a nice essay by a man called Bennington about the multiple misunderstandings caused by translation from one language to another. Derrida definitely took the quote to mean that the moment of any decision is madness, and I confess, I still find that an attractive view: however much we rationally deliberate, the final choice isn't necessarily in the space of reasons at all.

Bennington does comprehensively show, however, that Kierkegaard's meaning was about 'folly' or foolishness not 'madness', a conclusion which has its own ramifications.

Anyway, I've just read through Carroll's blog post on his and Seben's derivation and it makes sense to me. — Andrew M

The Carroll / Seben derivation does seem to hinge on just a different purported version of 'rationality' to Wallace's derivation via decision theory, and an equally disputable one:

ESP: The credence one should assign to being any one of several observers having identical experiences is independent of features of the environment that aren’t affecting the observers. — Carroll

I appreciate this is the simple version of the supposed principle (Epistemic Separability Principle). It does seem open to pretty obvious objections. I wouldn't bet the house on 'credence' just as I wouldn't bet it on the definitions of rationality in decision theory. For instance, how can one know what is and isn't 'affecting' the observers? The supposed derivation certainly comes in for criticism from various quarters. I'm just expressing sceptical doubt, not disagreement, here.

Well, even someone saying 'Is everything futile?' has its own self-refuting consequence, when it causes you to bring it to the debating table, doesn't it?

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance — darthbarracuda

This Sartre quote lies around on the Internet out of context. I don't think it means what, isolated, it appears to say. Perhaps it reinforces what you're saying, in the end, but the point of it in its context seems to me to argue that 'rationality' is quite beside the point. To quote 'instincts to survive' is to hang on to rationality. Whereas Sartre is in a descending line from Kierkegaard that living is absurd.

The character Roqeuntin is suffering from nausea, or rather, Nausea. He is obsessed by the odd existence of things about him. Here he is lying among trees.

...at any instant I expected to see the tree-trunks shrivel like weary wands, crumple up, fall on the ground in a soft, folded, black heap. They did not want to exist, only they could not help themselves. So they quietly minded their own business; the sap rose up slowly through the structure, half reluctant, and the roots sank slowly into the earth . But at each instant they seemed on the verge of leaving everything there and obliterating themselves. Tired and old, they kept on existing, against the grain, simply because they were too weak to die, because death could only come to them from the outside: strains of music alone can proudly carry their own death within themselves like an internal necessity: only they don't exist. Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. But the images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. — Sartre

Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon: to me that's what Sartre himself is trying to assert, through his character Roquentin, beyond the inner debate with reason and chance.

Experientially it feels right to me that the whole is at least other than the sum of the parts. If you ever make music you will recognise this. I sing in a choir and the collective feeling when things go right is of a different order from when one is singing individually, or from the notion of a bunch of individuals who happen to be singing with each other. People who play instruments tell me the same.

The other ontological issue can come up even in 'realism'. (To generalise a point Wayfarer is making) Are for instance abstractions in biology 'reducible' to chemistry or physics? Is 'the economy' reducible to some set of naturalistic terms? Or are there - as I would see it - different levels of abstraction appropriate to different forms of analysis, without the supposed component parts being in some way 'superior' or 'more fundamental'?

What is an example of an existing object which is anything and simple, not compound? — jkop

Actually in that section of the Metaphysics Aristotle argues that the abstract has an essential unity: 'all things which have no matter are without qualification essentially unities.' Things with matter are however inescapably matter/form.

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus writes:

The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
If I wrote a book "The world as I found it", I should also have therein to report on my body and say which members obey my will and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: that is to say, of it alone in this book mention could not be made. — TLP 5.631

'Swing low sweet chariot' is well-known as a song sung by escaping slaves, but this is an elegant lyric supposedly devsed by Harriet Tubman to guide escapees along the 'underground railroad': (sung version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw6N_eTZP2U)

When the Sun comes back
And the first quail calls
Follow the Drinking Gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the Drinking Gourd

The riverbank makes a very good road.
The dead trees will show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot, travelling on,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.

The river ends between two hills
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
There’s another river on the other side
Follow the Drinking Gourd.

When the great big river meets the little river
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting for to carry to freedom
If you follow the Drinking Gourd.

A human society is different from that. The idea of slavery causes revolts and revolutions. I'm trying to find the beginning of that. Is it something that's done to us? Or is it something we're all collectively creating? — Mongrel

Enter Foucault, stage left. Each of us is complicit in the framework of power we find ourselves in, indeed I oppress myself, I self-censor, I apologise when I don't need to, I accede when I could have asserted. This does seem to me something in us - each of us spends years accepting parental / institutional authority, before each of us breaks out in our own way, with all sorts of residual obedience to habit / instruction / people.

Not that I'm disagreeing with BC. There are elaborate skeins of structures in which we are entangled and to which we often acquiesce. Systems that elaborate.

Sure, it is hard to talk about. We don't knowingly encounter superpositions in everyday life, so QM is counterintuitive. But that doesn't mean that we should abandon ordinary language and realism. That's the crucial philosophical issue. Mathematical models help us to correct our intuitions and find the language we need to better reflect the world we find ourselves in. — Andrew M

On this we can (partly) agree, and thanks for the correction regarding probability amplitude; we are at the outer limit of my ability to talk maths/physics here, but I still hope that it doesn't require postgrad work in the subjects to debate the philosophical issues. I think my version of 'realism' is different from yours but I understand what you're saying. I'm sceptical that we can know 'what nature is really like', which is why I keep asking for the agnostic option in science: what is the minimum ontological commitment involved in such and such a proposition? It feels as if people of a scientific bent sometimes drift from the minimum to a greater 'metaphysical' realism that is to my mind just a metaphysical claim, not something that's necessary to agree on the proposition in question.

How do they affect each other? — tom

In what way is that relevant to what I was saying to AndrewM? I was making an epistemic/ontological distinction, not arguing about what hypothetical entities do or don't do.

I'm referring back to my previous post, which was in turn referring to Kent's chapter in a multi-author book (including Wallace) called 'Many Worlds?: Everett, Quantum Theory, and Reality' (2010). The summary I mentioned in my post also includes this para, which refers to the proposition of his own you mention which he embeds in the critique of other people's approaches:

This article reviews some ingenious and interesting recent attempts in this direction by Wallace, Greaves– Myrvold and others, and explains why they don't work. An account of one‐world randomness, which appears scientifically satisfactory, and has no many‐worlds analogue, is proposed. A fundamental obstacle to confirming many‐worlds theories is illustrated by considering some toy many‐worlds models. These models show that branch weights can exist without having any role in either rational decision‐making or theory confirmation, and also that the latter two roles are logically separate. — Kent

I'm afraid the detail of the arguments is impossible to summarise in a short space.

This matters. If states in a quantum superposition were merely probabilistic, with only one state being real as with a coin flip, then they could not constructively or destructively interfere with each other to produce interference patterns. That is why all of those states must be real. — Andrew M

That is an interesting paragraph as it encapsulates to me the philosophy-of-science debate going back and forth here. Mathematically states in a quantum superposition are probabilistic. 'Merely' is a matter of taste. A measurement occurs, the outcomes are mathematically understood.

You quote Duhem in arguing that putting things merely mathematically like that is not 'an explanation', but Duhem is long dead and there are new sorts of empiricists about who might happily use the word 'explain' about mathematical models. I think here it's realists who are also being rigid about what an explanation must involve; it can be a circular demand, in that if one isn't some sort of realist then what is one explaining? I do think that's a fruitless side-alley.

The realist in turn only feels ok if like you they can point to what is 'real' (albeit hypothetical in that it's unobservable) in order to apply something like ordinary language to what happens in the maths. It *is* hard to talk about. I've a friend who's doing some physics which assumes entanglement in order to try and model what happens in PET scans, for instance. In explaining it to a layperson like me he juggles between talking as if it's all real and then adding, 'or at least that's what the maths says'. I don't see that in remaining agnostic about 'the real' in such cases I'm somehow being anti-scientific, or failing to understand something. I am just a wary sceptic.