You are right, that we could potentially find laws which produce more accurate description of the universe at larger scales. Albeit not focused on living organisms, the second law of thermodynamics is of the variety. Indeed, we haven't found behavior which escapes the constraints of the local physical laws in isolated interactions, but the second law provides probabilistic description extending beyond them, and is time asymmetric, thus it is not expressible through time symmetric laws. It is believed to be dependent on the initial conditions of the cosmos, whose description is irreducible.Only insofar as 'natural law' is concieved in a very narrow and physicalist way. Physical reductionism of course wishes to reduce everything to physics - that's what it means! - but I think the emerging disciplines of biosemiotics, systems theory, environmental sciences, and so on, are not reductionist in that sense, but are still seeking to be naturalistic (e.g. here). — Wayfarer
I don't think that identity is much more then a useful instrument for sentient decision making, trying to obtain sustainable symbiotic relationship, while needing to understand and evaluate the confinement of its agency. Prebiotic chemistry simply does not have the expressiveness of material organization necessary in order to exhibit constant behavioral agency under change.I don't have any expert knowledge of biology, but it would seem to me that without homeostasis, which is one of the key attributes of living organisms, there would be nothing able to be selected. The point seems to be that living things have an ability to maintain identity through change, which is not characteristic of inorganic matter. — Wayfarer
Unfortunately, I have not read the book, but for my part, I would need the following clarification to justify this conclusion. Some hypothetical, even fictional examples, of the simplest artefact-making processes that the author conceives, biological or not, that could be bootstrapped by synthetic means and remain henceforth autonomous in their operation. I would then wonder of some examples of the closest sustainable autonomous chemical processes that are not sophisticated enough to qualify as artefact-making, produced synthetically or naturally occurring, and whether the gap from the latter to the former can conceivably be bridged through mundane physical occurrence. Rinse and repeat, until a process with no natural precursors can be found.What is particularly important, to our purposes, is that the concept of artefact-making explains how it is possible that life evolved from inanimate matter and yet it is fundamentally different from it. The divide between life and matter is real because matter is made of spontaneous objects whereas life is made of manufactured objects.
The chemistry that we refer to usually, that we use for artificial synthetic purposes doesn't act in this way with respect to the main reactants, but I am pretty sure that you could make catalysts produce digital effects depending on their kind and concentration. I presume, what is criticized is the plausibility of rendering such effects with the degree of material sophistication in human beings, using self-catalytic and self-reproducing substances. Again, I understand the skepticism, but the argument using "digitalization" of matter seems indirect to me, using intuitively perceivable quality, instead of some concrete measurable characteristic.Chemical reactions in non-living systems are not controlled by a message … There is nothing in the physico-chemical world that remotely resembles reactions being determined by a sequence and codes between sequences — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri
Have not done is more proper then they cannot do.It was in response to the question of the plausibility of abiogenesis. It seems obvious to many people that abiogenesis must have occured, by process of the elimination of the alternative explanations, that being 'divine creation', which of course naturalism must abjur. But in the absence of such a creative principle or spark as a higher intelligence, then it is incumbent on those proposing such an alternative to demonstrate how it occured on the basis of what is understood as natural laws, but this they cannot do. — Wayfarer
I will again return to the nature of your original inquiry. If you reject naturalism/physicalism to begin with, due to abiogenesis or any other reason, why ask about the arguments behind the physicality of information. At least in terms of our use of information, you might have as well asked why we believe in abiogenesis, or why physicalism. Information basically seems to sidetrack the centerstage of the discussion.So I'm simply challenging a widely-accepted belief, that life somehow bootstraps itself into existence on the basis of physical causes. Which is, after all, what you proposed with your remark about how physical systems 'spawn'. — Wayfarer
Science never can obtain exhaustive hermetic justification. It is methodological and logically consistent evaluation of experience in continuous progress. Beliefs that lie in the zone of our scientific ignorance can consider themselves admitted by science until it broadens its horizons. But the truth is that such admission does not make them validated by science.Insofar as babies are also a kind of spawn, then indeed, science has been unable to replicate that — Wayfarer
I don't believe that natural selection requires invariable homeostasis, at least for its explanation to work technically. It requires sustainability of the entire ecosystem and its internal interactions, which does not only allow for, but also requires coevolution. Identity, just like in our lives, follows a thread of events that remove from the original form and alter it. The maintenance of identity and its ascription to some physical does require some quasi-consistency and interoperation technically, but isn't a matter of homeostatic invariance (as we ourselves transition through many stages in our life cycle), but is more so a matter of necessity and behavioral programming.If they can evolve, then they must be able to maintain homeostasis and identity over time, in which case they must contain biological information. Conversely if they contain no biological information, then they can't evolve, as there is nothing which will maintain continuity through change. — Wayfarer
I then think that you are essentially asking that scientists "make a baby". Maybe they will, maybe they wont, eventually. I was referring to self-replicating organic polymers and explaining how they relate to our exploration of the abiogenetic hypothesis. You want complete answer, but science doesn't work like that. Empirical research is commitment to incremental threading through oceans of ignorance. We don't have the capacity to answer questions on demand, just because they can be raised.And no, I don't believe that science has created an artificial living form de novo. I know they have engineered simple organisms into novel forms, but that's nothing like creating an actual organism from the elements of the periodic table. — Wayfarer
Here, I do actually mean entirely physical, in the matarialistic sense. But note that I claim that pantheism and panpsychism are consistent with scientific empricism, I don't claim that they are necessitated by it. Indeed, I claim that pantheism and panpsychism are logically consistent with methodological naturalism, and compatible with metaphysical naturalism and physicalism. And although thus not actually proven, their admissibility is at least philosophically important, at least to me, because it addresses the primary concerns with physicalism, the issue of hard problem of consciousness (because matter is consciousness itself) and the issue of human genesis (because nature is hermetic in sense that it is divine, not needing creator). This doesn't prove physicalism, materialism, neither pantheism, panpsychism. Only reflects on their internal consistency.When you use the term 'entirely physical', what does that really mean? Does it mean 'explicable in terms of physics'? — Wayfarer
I understand. I have concurred before that intuition/belief is a valid private/personal argument by its very existence. And science does rely on intuitions, which is why their private validity. But science is consistent to employ them, because they have captured (according to science) the necessarily utilitarian outcome of natural selection.The prevailing wisdom since the Enlightenment is typically assumed to originate with and be validated by science. But there are many conflicts within post-Enlightenment philosophy, which its most ardent proponents never seem to be able to perceive due to their underlying assumptions. Fundamentally these problems revolve around the fact-value dichotomy, also known as the is/ought distinction. Another way of framing that is in terms of the distinction between what can be objectively measured and known, and what can be intuited to be so. — Wayfarer
Not sure which particular metaphysical concerns you refer to, but I have stated before, that a variation on the pantheistic or panpsychic theme, in my opinion, can explain mental experiences in a physical world, while maintaining that the world is also entirely physical. In such scheme, the deity is physical and coextent with the entire universe, the mind is entirely physical and represents self-awareness of organized intelligent matter. However, no assumption is made, at least on my part, that such deity is antropomorphically and antropocentrically ethical, benevolent, relatable, or that the mental state is morally transcendent and superior in a fundamental sense to the surrounding nature. This is just a hypothesis, or conjecture if you will. It rests on the mandatory inclusion of external experience in the internal worldview, which I mostly agree with, and is thus compatible with naturalism. But overall, I am possibilian, as long as the hypothesis does not contradict the experience available to me personally.It's an hypothesis based on a metaphysical presupposition, namely, physicalism, that only the physical is real. However I think there are ample grounds for saying that 20th century science has demonstrated that we don't even know what 'the physical' is. That style of thinking grew out of post-Cartesian dualism, which divided 'the world' into the two poles, material and mental. Then scientists and engineers, who couldn't make any sense out of the idea of the mental, tried to dispense with it so as to arrive at the concept of what is only or purely physical. — Wayfarer
But do you challenge the logical and internal consistency of my arguments and their consequence from the presuppositions made. I thought that the framework we agree upon when making the original inquiry was naturalism, because there is no point in raising objections to the claims made by naturalism and denying whatever metaphysical presuppositions it makes at the same time, as long as they are consistent.Not a ghost of a chance :wink: — Wayfarer
I think that the mutual information established between the entangled entities is acquired at the expense of new information theoretic entropy. Entanglement can establish correlation after quantum event which involves randomness in the outcome, which as a side effect severs the entities relations to their past. The entanglement depends on additional non-determinism, which is partially subsumed in the relationship established between the entangled entities. Thus it cannot increase our knowledge about remote configurations of matter, unless we deconstruct them first through randomness, so to speak, which is not the subject here. What physicists say is that entanglement cannot be used to communicate - because communication carries information about the historically conditioned outcome somewhere to somewhere else. Mutual information through quantum entanglement destroys the historical connection in both places.The problem is, it has been shown by quantum physics that entities can be entangled at arbitrarily great distances from each other. — Wayfarer
The hypothesis is indeed not proven. It is the currently best known explanation under naturalism, but one can reject naturalism. If you question the evolutionary hypothesis, which is ok, the problem becomes not how information can be physical in the naturalist framework, but how can information be without evolutionary origin of the central nervous system, or alternatively how can the central nervous system have evolutionary origin. But I am not sure if this was the point of the inquiry. If the critique is that the evolutionary hypothesis is not elaborated precisely yet and thus the appearance of information dissemination faculties is not guaranteed to be explained by it, you are right. It might not be.The physical order doesn't 'spawn' anything. — Wayfarer
I actually am under the impression that abiogenesis is more concentrated around the idea of the first self-replicating polymers, believed to be precursor to the first form of life, and most likely formed at first in fresh water, near steam vents, possibly on the surface of clay minerals, or other catalytic materials, or inside the pores of rocks. The "lightning struck" hypothesis is one of many, and I don't think it garners that much attention as you may think.The idea that life evolved naturally on the primitive Earth suggests that the first cells came into being by spontaneous chemical reactions — Barbieri
Self-replicating polymer chains can exists and evolve without any other signs of life, and this I believe is proven in laboratory conditions, with environmental factors resembling what we believe to have been at the time. These are just natural formation, and did not contain biological information in the sense in which we understand it. They were organic chains more resistant to their surrounding conditions, and more easily formed from the available organic and inorganic materials. Note that this organic chains still did carry informational value about "what works", but not how to be living. A hypothesized precursor to life, the polymers are suggested to have adapted to proto-cell enclosure later, which may have formed by infiltration of the polymers in some naturally occurring vesicles in bodies of water and transmitted between the vesicles through either contact, or through polymer escaping as viroids. That would have provided some kind of natural selection and organic reproduction at first, although we cannot explain how the metabolic cycle appeared, such that the polymers became capable of reproducing not only themselves, but also the cell membrane along with the polymer inside it. There is no known contradiction/refutation of which I am aware, but neither do we have explanation. The polymer may have started to produce various hydrophilic compounds by secondary reactions in the water and thus form micelles in colloidal suspension.The reason is that natural selection, the cornerstone of Darwinian evolution, does not exist in inanimate matter. In the 1950s and 1960s, furthermore, molecular biology uncovered two fundamental components of life — Barbieri
Does the above statement imply that the solipsistic question of other people's experience of the mind is meaningless, or is this categorically different question? Jaynes, as a researcher, may not have had interest in such riddle at all, but does he operate under the premise that inquiries about the metaphysics of the mind are meaningless, or are they simply not in the purview his interests?In his theory, Jaynes goes on to explain consciousness, “the human ability to introspect”. Abandoning the assumption that consciousness is innate, Jaynes explains it instead as a learned behavior that “arises from language, and specifically from metaphor”. — Gus Lamarch
From a brief survey of the topic on Wikipedia. I was surprised that the lateralization of the brain is conjectured to not only encompass creativity and learning, but also the self and others. Very enlightening. Part of the criticism appears to be around the dating of an early literary work, the "Epic of Gigamesh". I wouldn't know either way and I can't judge on that alone. What seemed more justifiably concerning however, was that proliferation and cultural penetration of genetics was very unlikely to happen in just centuries, if I am not misunderstanding the implied timeline. Lactose tolerance/persistence started at about the same time, even earlier, and we are still observing significant amount of intolerant people unevenly distributed around the globe's continents. If this theory is suggesting a new genetic allele, it is either suggesting that it was dominant or that it was highly advantageous, or that not all of us have the ability developed in this regard? If idea was elaborated in terms of graduations, it would allow some people to develop lower IQ for this reason, but if we are talking about one spontaneous mutation, I would expect some non-negligible part of the population would still continue to be unaware of their intents and function like animal species.- Humanity, until the period of the first historical manuscripts, does not present in any form a conception of the understanding of conscience - introspectiveness, which has the capacity to "think about itself -;
- We cannot access and study the habits and psychological functionalities of the ancients in first instance - from 700 BC to 6000 BC - to prove through evidence that they had the mental and conceptual structure that humans post-500 BC, however, there is historical-archeological evidence that strengthens the contrary notion;
- Therefore, the ancient human conscience was not necessarily identical to the current one. — Gus Lamarch
Does that give them some kind of substitute cognitive loop, without explicit self-referentiality, or was it incomparably limiting experience? Just to be clear about the distinguishing cognitive aspect - I surmise that we are talking about lack of acknowledged mental agency, not merely lack of auto-psychological skill. I assume that those people did probably understand involvement in situations, just not involvement in mental judgements, if I interpreted the conjecture correctly.Ancient people in the bicameral state of mind would have experienced the world in a manner that has some similarities to that of a person with schizophrenia. Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or "god" giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question. — Gus Lamarch
Our views differ, in the sense that I do not postulate any new empirical relations. I haven't elaborated much either way, because the point was to defend naturalistically compatible emergence of phenomenological experience. I would concur with you that dynamic systems in nature have attractor points that are more organized then their initial conditions, but I think that this is accepted by contemporary science. As I said, I believe that for the case of the first biological systems, abiogenesis is relying on this idea, when hoping to prove the arrival of organics from pre-biotic chemistry. On the other hand, it is well known that thermodynamic entropy is bound to increase globally. Therefore conditional entropy between systems will increase, and information expressiveness, or order is to be lost. Terrestrial life sustains order, because we still have low entropy energy sources. For biological systems, it is predominantly from solar radiation, and for our technology, it is predominantly fossil fuel and atomic energy.Please feel free to add to the discussion, and please provide a link to your description of consciousness.
In my understanding, self organization = consciousness. Self organization is a god like term, as far as I can see, in that it can fill all of the explanatory gaps traditionally filled by god. — Pop
... — simeonz
Interjecting in again, but I should disagree. The distinction between pantheism/panpsychism and metaphysical idealism, the way I see it, is that that the former conjectures mental state articulated by immutable or quasi-immutable constraints, acting on the relations between its constituents, whereas the latter considers these constraints as just cognitive elaborations of ephemeral experiences. Dualism proposes that the immutable constraints exist objectively and permanently, but are not between the constituents of the mind, but between the constituents of another substance that the mind supervenes. Idealism and pantheism/panpsychism are both substance monism indeed, but their treatment of natural law differs. It is epistemic in essence for the former, and ontological for the latterIf the 2 main monist views are either that :-
a) there is only physical Matter/Energy (Materialism) or
b) there is only Thought (Idealism) which can fashion our imaginings and give a perception of solidity,
then an' information layer' as you describe it, which shapes everything, is either close to the Idealist view, or a full embodiment of the Dualist perspective. — Gary Enfield
I was not familiar with the concept, before you mentioned it, but self-organization theory appears to convey the idea that a system without innate orderliness will attain order by virtue of the constant influence of factors from the environment. Or, as you said, the internal organization will reflect exterior factors. Note that this is recognized by abiogenesists. That is, they recognize that life emerged due to the availability of factors, such as energy and overabundance of carbon and radiation, among others. Certain supporters go even so far as to conjecture that it was inevitable development to produce life, whatever the contingent initial conditions of the chemical substances were, although I am not sure that I would go that far.Everything is information, and everything is self organizing, so everything is self organizing information! This is the underlying element that materialism does not generally recognize.
I imagine impressions like this is what led people like Planck, and Schrodinger, and others to believe that consciousness is fundamental, and Fritjof Capra to state that "the basic unit of cognition is a disturbance in a state." — Pop
Agree with jgill - your posts are very hard to parse. I think it’s worth the effort, but the longer your posts become, the less inclined I am to keep trying. — Wayfarer
I have my philosophy textbook, wikipedia, random articles, Stanford E. P., and this forum. My commitment is rather shallow in this regard. I am authentically curious, but the articulation frequently strikes me much more conjectural and personal then evidential. I usually read hypotheses as a sketch, and gradually piece them together, rather then focus in depth. ( Edit: In principle, the starting points for my ideas are Leibniz and Spinoza, but theirs are theistically or spiritually inclined, whereas mine are rather void in that regard and are predominantly phenomenological.)Now I understand you might have a very different perspective, but I think it would help you a lot to map what you’re saying against some of the literature. Preferably, popular sources, rather than peer-reviewed science journals. Use them to illustrate the point - where you agree with them, and where you disagree. I’m sure you have many such sources. One of the things I really get from this forum is finding out about what others are reading. — Wayfarer
If you would like to elaborate, do you perceive the differences between us as rooted in the technical or the ethical side of things. Is it a matter of innate persuasion, which I have also stated that science is, or experiential conviction? That is, do you consider my proposals too vague, which would be a fair point, or unsound, or ethically inadmissible.We’re clearly on a different wavelength in some respects, but I think your posts and ideas have a lot of potential, hopefully the back-and-forth of this medium will help you sharpen that up a bit. — Wayfarer
You write very well, but for those of us who have limited capacities for reflecting and processing it might help to break apart and separate very lengthy paragraphs, and/or do a bit more summarizing or condensing. — jgill
Well, I haven't. Nothing as noble. My occupation is in the technological sector (software developer).You do have interesting insights. Did you say you worked in the health sector? An MD? Nurse? Just curious. — jgill
We differ here in our perspective, about what is reasonable and unreasonable explanation. Because I admit the hypotheses of panpsychism and pantheism, which are very distinct from dualism in spirit. I also admit dualism, but I always find it the most encumbered with detail of those positions. Not to mention, that it is sometimes linked directly to theism and spirituality, which are nothing bad in principle, but are is extremely loosely implied.The skeptical challenge to the dualist position is: well, you say there is this 'spooky mind-stuff', so where is it? This is where the limitations of the method of objectification need to be made clear. The attributes of the intellect (nous) appear by way of what the mind is able to grasp, in other words, in the operations of reason. They are themselves not an object of scientific analysis, although without the use of reason, scientific analysis could not even start. But as the empiricist instinct is always to proceed in terms of what can be objectively grasped and quantified, then the operations of reason, although assumed by it, are not visible to it. — Wayfarer
@Banno drew my attention to your response, so I would like to suggest that while we discover separate instances of logical relations in objects and situations, and in us, through the intellectual predisposition to operate our decisions effectively under logical premises, this doesn't seem to change the fact that we are persuaded by instinct to extrapolate those cases to universal laws, without some reliable providential certainty. So, instances of logic are evident (empirically or introspectively, which is still a form of observation of nature), and logical laws are taken on faith. I support reason and science, because I believe in them, having observed their predictions so far, but the emphasis here remains on believe.Proofs in mathematics are said to be discovered, as they are logical possibilities that arguably would exist even if no one discovered them. — Janus
If by chance, you mean, improbable event, then this is not what is involved. The hypotheses are not presupposing extraordinary occurrences. That wouldn't methodologically agree with conventional empiricism. If you mean that the we rely on ideas whose historical accuracy cannot be firmly supported, then you are correct. We cannot fight the effects of irreversible erosion of remnant evidence for proto-organics whose active proliferation would not have survived the climactic and ecosystemic changes that have transpired henceforth. Science is forced to speculate, and appeal to reason. There is no internal contradiction in doing that, just methodological hermeticism. The same applies to conjectures in morphogenesis, because soft tissue organism do not fossilize in a manner that confers their organ structure. Some ideas can only be hypothesized. Not because science is in contradiction, but because the effects of time and entropy preclude us from recovering the historical account necessary for inspection of scientific consistency. This forces abiogensis to rely on scientific retrodiction (since this is the only form of prediction we have), fossils, sediments, phylogenetic analysis of organisms, and as a last resort, conclusions by elimination. We also need time. Not to create fiction, but to figure out arguments for or against claims. On the other hand, you might mean that the conditions, as hypothesized, even if true, are very particular to earth. That is arguably true. While this may support a theistic argument, it does not necessarily contradict science and support revelation in the sense of incident miracle. I will explain this as it ties into a discussion trend on this forum.In this matter the proposition ‘results from chance’ is itself self-contradictory. — Wayfarer
The local factors of two spatio-temporal regions may be symmetric or asymmetric. By extrapolation of those conditions to the state of the entire universe, we construct the notions of complete chaos (no redundancies), or complete order (uniform, or vacant state). We ask what demands our case to be situated so particularly between them. It is epistemically reasonable to investigate, but it may be ontologically unintelligible question to ask. There is no guarantee that our understanding, from our limited experience, can be made compatible with the actual ontological perspective. It may be incommensurate with it, so to speak. We could be witnessing all the necessary phenomena that provide the meaning, but since the very meaning is unrelatable to the view and objectives that we have, our human ethics, etc, we may not appreciate it. Even if we were conveyed this meaning in explicit terms that we can interpret, we may still not appreciate it. Hence, complete disorder or order may be extrapolation that we just investigate by epistemic habit and compulsion.But whether they are ‘possible state configurations’, or not, science still presumes an order. F doesn't equal MA only on certain occasions; ‘hey, that cannonball missed, the law wasn’t working today’. And if their 'configurations' couldn't be expressed in maths, then likewise, hard to see how science could get a foothold. — Wayfarer
I was too verbose and conflated when it came to the requirement for "reproduction of the local transition patterns ". I meant that symmetries of the micro-state transitions are necessary for the emergence of predictive systems. Representational morphisms demand it. I wanted to be relativistic as well, so I proposed that spatial structure was causally inferred by independently specified micro-state timeline dynamics. The truth is, that the state should be described in some structure, manifold, such as Minkowski space, whose symmetries have different criteria, but unfortunately, I am not qualified to elaborate them.Your posts are hard work, although they’re worth the effort — Wayfarer
I treated the problem in two parts, but I aimed to argue that abstract conceptual cognition, at least hypothetically, could occur without the presence of some binding agent that conveys the essence of patterns in nature directly to us, making them self-evident. First, I argued that the sophistication of our cerebral structure is sufficient for neurological processes to emergently develop conceptualization. That through the presence of linguistic skill, acquired through genetic propensity for vocal semiotics and learned behavior, along with our complex perceptual system and vast neurological capacity for processing and storage, we can encode associations, such that we can hypothetically account for abstract cognition at the level of synaptic activations.The ‘mechanism’ is not simple at all. The process by which DNA replicates, and the operation of the human brain, are two of the most complex processes known to science. The idea is simple, but I don’t think that supports your point! — Wayfarer
Human experience is integral part of knowledge and should not be neglected. I don't propose that there is universal formula for being correct. But people should not forego their experience. Science and philosophy need to attempt to reconcile, bilaterally.. With justified skepticism on both sides.The question that occurs to me, is whether you see yourself as pursuing philosophy as distinct from science, or whether you think there is no difference and that one subsumes the other. — Wayfarer
The laws of biological and chemical order, may or may not have unifying underlying platonic causes. I honestly could not conjecture either way. Alternatively, nature might just have possible state configurations, with restricted transitions, or predetermined timeline of states, or even (more in tact with relativistic physics) collection of timelines for state components whose spatial ordering arises effectively by virtue of the patterns expressed in the otherwise unordered configuration components. The point is, that configurations don't need relatable logic. Aside from their combinatorial essense, which exposes codetermination in the state configuration, the relationships between the state components don't require abstract meaning. For a system inside this state to actually establish homeostasis or allostasis with the environment, the prerequisites are reproduction of the local transition patterns according to a spatial state ordering that could explain causally the chronology of each component, symmetry of the component transitions (low entropy) and change (abundant energy). Neurological, physical and physiological state can be formed by obeying correspondence with the environment into the predefined constraints on the evolution of the state space.What I'm questioning is the degree to which the designation of these capacities as 'biological' is relevant. Certainly they're relevant or useful for the study of biology but the questions philosophers ask are existential and cannot necessarily be addressed in biological or biomechanical terms. Given all the facts of evolution, existence is still an existential predicament for human beings; that is what philosophy is concerned with. — Wayfarer
I am reading Benecerraf's Mathematical Truth, which was referred to by the Wikipedia article you quoted. I still cannot grasp the entire argument, and the author quotes another paper that pertains to the incompatibility between platonism and rationality specifically, but to the best of my understanding, knowledge according to the text is a synthetic condition, i.e. provoked, and abstractions are analytic, i.e. applied as template. The claim is that the theory cannot be married to our knowledge in some apparent and explained sense, because their character is incompatible.Going back to the article on the indispensability of mathematics, and the problem of mathematical knowledge, why do you think the fact that we have an apparent innate ability to grasp mathematical proofs is said to be 'a challenge to our best epistemic theories'? Why do you think it was felt necessary to provide an alternative account of mathematical knowledge which sidesteps that challenge? What do you think the philosophical issue at stake is here? — Wayfarer
The designation of some amalgamation of diverse kinds of experience and extrapolations is not that surprisingly complex in principle. The appearance of such faculty is astounding, but its operation seems to rely on crudeness itself. The brain is very ample structure, and any token word is probably encoded in a redundant fashion. Thousands of neurons and millions of synapses may be employed for a single concept (or a notion), for making associations with multitudes of sensory experiences and linguistic terms, creating significant semantic backup. So, when I said simply, I meant that the mechanism is simple. Involving human culture concerns being extended and situated in your ecological and social environment. Here, from empiricist perspective, I would consider the idea of social evolution, where experience aggregates collectively and the social dynamics evolve in parallel to the individual. The personal and the social organisms evolve together and interdependently.Consider the implication of the insertion of 'simply' in this sentence. Abstract ideas comprise practically the entire, vast, and diverse body of human culture. — Wayfarer
She would have no chance of grasping the 'concept of prime'. Fast forward 6.9 million years (and some), h. sapiens appears. H. sapiens has some ability to grasp the 'concept of prime'. H. Sapiens was the consequence of huge evolutionary leap, namely, the development of the huge hominid forebrain. But what about 'the concept of prime' has evolved or changed in those millions of years? Answer: nothing. — Wayfarer
So, we agree then that, without obvious internal contradiction, we could have developed innate biological capacity to discern objects in their environment, remember objects, ascertain relations, such as distances, congruence, similarity (using continuous integration of visual and auditory, and tactile cues, present and in memory), and detect simple patterns. So, at least, I hope that we can agree, that whether it is sufficiently elaborated by science or history, according to the empirical account, this is possible?The ability to calculate, to speak, count, imagine, and so on - these evolved, no doubt. — Wayfarer
I cannot fully explain how our brain functions, because we honestly don't have enough data, but it is considered to be broadly allocated for creative and quantitative tasks, so to speak. These features are apparently unevenly distributed between the hemispheres, as was established by tests performed on people where the brain was partially surgically separated to alleviate epilepsy symptoms. Both features are embodied in billions of nodes and trillions of connections. Assuming similar structure to A.I. that synthesizes images, the brain can constantly probe for proto-ideas, trying to make new ones from variations of old ones. Simultaneously, it tries to categorize sensory experience and decompose it into basic factors, which serve as seeding ground for those new concepts to emerge and be reincorporated into the neuronal structure themselves. In other words, the environment provides us with cues, which we then use to boot our own construction of new amalgemations of these features, but in abstract linguistic terms. I say, abstract terms, because even though language also breaks down to some experience or observation pattern, it can decode layers of meaning in stages, whereas literal form associations would limit us to hybridization of direct experience. Features that are more frequently encountered or more frequently used are more likely to be revisited. Therefore, we are bringing up many candidate concepts, which are extrapolations (I speculate, literally, as synaptic input extrapolations) of their linguistically expressed relation to observed patterns, and we either fit them in the scheme of things or discard them quickly from memory. Why do you perceive our ability to generate such candidate ideas of the type 'my experience or observation 1 and similar in structure, my experience or observation 2 and similar in structure, and so forth' as insufficient?But the subject matter of those abilities - how can that be 'explained' in terms of 'evolutionary development'? — Wayfarer
I am left with the impression that this is utilitarian model of knowledge. I propose that only the basis of mathematics, such as predicate logic, induction, probability, are derived by use, and the rest can be extracted by vain observation of nature or articulated on top of other abstractions, without seeking actual non-epistemic benefit from those models. I believe that the work of Riemann in topology originally lacked applications and found most of its practical uses later.Under this assumption, which requires an epistemological shift from empiricism, situativity theorists suggest a model of knowledge and learning that requires thinking on the fly rather than the storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge. In essence, cognition cannot be separated from the context. Instead knowing exists, in situ, inseparable from context, activity, people, culture, and language. Therefore, learning is seen in terms of an individual's increasingly effective performance across situations rather than in terms of an accumulation of knowledge, since what is known is co-determined by the agent and the context. — Wikipedia
I don’t see how any uncertainty in knowing the foundation of truth necessarily makes truth contingent. Again, my Jesus example. The Jesus in my story may not know where his intuitions came from, and may never know (in which case they are unknowable to him or perhaps to any human being); nevertheless, God put those intuitions in him; so they are not just a construct, and not contingent. — Acyutananda
But how would Wittgenstein handle international relations, culture exchange, global politics? In the end, aren't we all one society with internal boundaries?All I'm saying is for moral relativism to be true, the word "morality" in America must mean the same thing as the word "morality" in Iran for instance. Only then can we say morality is relative to culture - the same thing (morality) is culturally determined (in America homosexuality is ok but in Iran it's immoral). If, on the other hand, the word "morality" means different things e.g. in America it might have a meaning associated with equality and in Iran the word maybe associated with the Quran then Americans and Iranians aren't talking about the same thing are they? — TheMadFool
The syntactical or neurological processing of what? An action on someone's part would seem to require some fiat on their part... as if my feeling a surface somehow required my consent. — Banno
Yes. In retrospect, I realize that I got a little carried away from the topic. I got stuck on the issue of the nature of experience. I'll think about whether I can research and contribute something more topical later (edit:...or much later).The rhetorical question I’m posing is, why is mathematical Platonism out of fashion?Why is it that many serious mathematicians and philosophers seek to discredit it, and to explain our ability to mathematise in naturalistic or reductionist terms? It’s really rather a specialised question, and one I am barely qualified to consider, considering how technical many of the arguments are. — Wayfarer
Possibilianism is mostly concerned with theistic claims, but it is essentially attitude open towards the exploration of unproven claims, as long as they are suggested hypothetically.'m not familiar with this term 'possibilian' and I can't find it on the Web. Perhaps you could explain? — Wayfarer
The question about the nature of experience. What explains having experience and hence knowledge. How does it form - does experience emerge from the innate ability of the material substance to be self-cognizant of its configuration (panpsychism, emergent materialism, pantheism), does it emerge by virtue of connection to higher cognitive self (substance dualism), does it emerge as creative fictional introspection (idealistic existential monism), or does it emerge through collaborative enactment (enactvism). Those are some ideas. All of those ideas explain science in different manner and with somewhat different consequences. Some justify the attitude of empiricism completely, and others explain this attitude, but do not justify it.Which 'question' do you mean? What question do you think I'm posing that 'can't be answered without some kind of speculation?' — Wayfarer
Isn't this 'biological reductionism'? That being the effort to 'explain' reasoning and mathematical capacity in terms of purported underlying regulative biological systems? — Wayfarer
The conceptual difficulty here is that science itself relies on the cogency of rational argument to establish any kind of explanatory framework. You can't examine the nature of rational thought from some point outside of it, treating it as an external or objective phenomenon, because any such explanation is already an exercise in rational thought. This point is discussed in some detail in Thomas Nagel's Evolutionary Naturalism & the Fear of Religion. — Wayfarer
I don't think present day philosophy of mind has much going for it, really. It places severe a priori limits on the nature of knowledge. Sure we have much better science and technology but are we superior in wisdom to the ancients? — Wayfarer
The syntactical or neurological processing is undeniably an action. Symbolic inference using a deduction system is an action. Thinking is an action. In that sense, mathematics is alive, not stationary. And formal models are sound with respect to the matching between those evaluations made using rules and the facts of the real world. I got the impression that you consider the subject matter of a model, i.e. its interpretation, to be some action in itself. In other words, I thought that you might suggest that before we formalize stationary physical relations around us, we first discover them in terms of applications, uses, and activities. That without some active involvement on our part, it is insufficient to simply observe physical features in order to derive conceptualization. I was trying to clear out in what precisely sense you meant your remark.I disagree. Each concept has a place in a language game. — Banno
When TheMadFool quoted the numeral, I assume that they meant to emphasize the syntactical nature of the symbolic constant. Not to prompt interpretations that do not conform to the algebraic requirements posed by the axioms of arithmetic.TheMadFool, incidentally, Fool's question was about "2", not 2, so I don't see that emancipate's syntactic answer was improper, nor Isaac' plonk, but moreover @frank's lawnmower is a semantic example. — Banno
I am not sure how you mean it. Human beings, I believe, are capable of classification according to features and of mental homomorphic representations without explicit involvement of applications, just by physical assessment. There is obviously always some action involved, because observation or measurement are usually tied in to some action, but the concept is not always action-oriented. It depends on the concept, and how we mean it.A better way to approach it is to forget about meaning and look to use. Knowing what a number is consists in being able to count, to add, to subtract, to do the things that we do with numbers; not with a definition set out in words. — Banno
The problem is, that you demonstrated that syntax could be abused, not that concepts with strict semantics behind the syntax can be used in innovative ways. Strings can actually be ordered lexicographically, but are something called free monoid, and their ordering is not well-ordering. Natural numers are sigularly generated (by the successor relation) commutative monoids and are well-ordered.So my attempt was successful. — emancipate
Simple materially implied intuitions can become very reliable. When they have been ratified from experience for generations and convention has reached consensus, there aren't a lot of variables left in their definition that provoke further refinement. That is why mathematics focuses on simple pervasive intuitions and builds the rest from them. This is what distinguishes it from physical sciences that are much more susceptible to constant amendment.That is, "intuitions are not objectively 100% reliable." — Acyutananda