Really powerful explanatory laws of the sort found in theoretical physics do not state the truth." — Cartwright

Fundamental laws abstract away all initial conditions. They are absolutely general because they carry no history and you get to plug that into the equations as some set of measurements.

Cartwright is making the point that laws are descriptions of constraints. They describe the physical context that impinges on material locales to give them shape as objects or events. And every material locale may have a complex history. The past will have built up a lot of surrounding information in the neighbouring environment which bears causally on what happens next.

A ball will run down a slope. That is a fairly simple example of a set of initial conditions. You could have a law of nature that describes this single situation. The law describes a certain ball, a certain slope, and a certain outcome that must always be seen if the situation is repeated. So the law is absolutely specific, but overloaded with that specificity. It is full of initial conditions descriptions. Physics wants to abstract away everything that is particular about this situation and simply have general laws of motion and gravity - the universal constraints on events - and let you then plug in all the locally special information about some specific history, some specific set of material constraints. Like the locations and characteristics of some ball, some slope.

So every event or object is embedded in a structure of causal relations. The whole thing has a history that individuated it. We then come along and analyse that using our dichotomy of model and measurement. We separate what is going on into general laws or the universe’s most general constraints, and initial conditions, or the universe’s most individual and particular constraints. Some ball and slope is understood as being general in having to be ruled by Newtonian laws, and particular in having their own angles and weights.

However Cartwright is getting carried away in saying the big laws don’t tell truths. That is philosophy of science rhetoric to get her distinctive position noticed.

But then neither is she the first to realise that this is how the “laws of nature” work.

The actual world is the sedimentation of all the symmetry breakings that create some actual state of history. We then need to unwind that context of constraints that impinges to individuate every material locale by making our rather artificial distinction between the most general possible universal rules and the most particular possible locally measured qualities.

The ideal physical theory is an equation that describes a universal symmetry in a state of brokenness - so like, E = mc^2. Then we go measure the particular mass, or energy, to see how it this constraint would relate it.

And to measure the mass of an object or event becomes a further story of constraints. We have to confine or isolate the supposed individual thing somehow. We have to decide when the measurement is accurate enough to give us all the information.

It is constraints all the way down. And measurement becomes an informal art, a matter of judgement and experience we learn to apply to individual cases. The human modeller with his abstracts laws has to re-enter the picture as a constructor or the constraints that fix the initial conditions.

This is where things get tricky in quantum mechanics, nonlinear mechanics, and anything dealing with emergent properties.

Seems we've only tried logic, although I suppose we do have other variants of the usual logic that people have proposed such as paraconsistent logic, relevance logic etc. — hymyíŕeyr

Well yes. Of course in fact logic is not one thing. A variety of approaches have been tried. So there is both something it all seems to boil down towards - the laws of thought as a basis for deductive argument - and also all the less constrained stuff that is a relaxation of that "limit state" absolutism.

Another angle on your justification question is that some logicians - especially CS Peirce and Spencer-Brown - sought to justify formal logic by using graphical arguments.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_graph and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

So set out as geometry, the truths of logic seem less deniable. A picture is worth a thousand words perhaps? :)

If you want to break out of the loop of using formal argument to support formal argumentation, then that is a way to tie logic to "existence" itself. Talking about the necessity of a relation is one thing - a rather abstract thing. But existential graphs show it as a necessity of any world with actual relations.

So the question is, how could we establish justification for the existence of logic and perhaps some of its core elements, such as the concept of truth values? — hymyíŕeyr

The justification is going to be ultimately informal and circular. We make our best guess and find that it seems to work out.

But then also, we do find something stronger. The results appear to have mathematical-strength inevitability. Looking back, it seems that the results can't have wound up different. Retrospectively, the laws of thought must have always been there waiting to be discovered in some Platonic ideal sense.

So logic is like maths in that they are habits of thought that not only work, but seem to be the only habits that could have worked and so were waiting to be found in some objective sense.

While we can thus still doubt the results, we also wind up with the least reason to doubt that we can imagine. Which is a good enough way to proceed.

Are they really or are they just protecting some belief they are attached to? — Janus

So where would that leave you and your true and honest subjective convictions? How could you deny them theirs?

Spinoza said "deus sive natura", "God or nature". I tend to think the same. Perhaps we don't fundamentally agree: but do you at least acknowledge that it is important to love something greater than ourselves? — Janus

Define God. Define love. Definitions will uncover your ontic commitments - to the degree that something definite stands behind the use of the terms.

I wouldn't myself talk about love as if it were something ontically foundation. I simply say that central to flourishing is not hating the world as it naturally is.

Likewise I wouldn't talk about it as being higher - transcendent. Rather I am talking about embracing it as being essentially part of "myself" - immanent. To reject nature - as it actually is - would be misguided.

So I don't think we can agree here. You want to believe an ontology that seems opposite in every important respect.

What really matters is what our experience is to us as it is experienced; what matters is what leads to heightening the felt quality of our lives, not arriving at some cold analysis of what our experience, our lives, are reducible to, or to what we take to be an objective explanation for their possibility. — Janus

I come across people who are passionately convinced about all sorts of things all the time - UFOs, gun ownership, Hollywood bearding conspiracies, you name it. If you think that the subjectivity of unanalysed "feelings" is the answer, and that objective analysis is not about a methodology for arriving at what is honest and truthful, then there is nothing more to discuss.

You argue according to your strength of conviction, I instead believe conviction arises once doubt lies demonstrably exhausted for all practical purposes. There is no common ground if you are to be believed.

Life warts and all is your God; — Janus

Except it is no sort of God. It is Nature. Please call it that. Let's not pretend to agree on what we fundamentally don't.

The infant's world is a world of indeterminate feeling before it is a world of cognition and perception. — Janus

Does the science support that view? For a human newborn, everything is pretty indeterminate in a phenomenological sense. Even to smile takes a few months to develop.

We know in the sense of being familiar with things; that is the basis of knowing. — Janus

Sure. I said that we need to be able to recognise stuff fits to also recognise when it doesn't. And both have a characteristic feel because both result in suitable physical preparatory responses. We can feel ourselves gearing up to approach or avoid, accept or reject, attend or ignore.

And when thinking at a linguistic level, we still have to bounce our thinking off this same basic neurobiology. We consider the idea and react with a match or mismatch response.

This should be obvious from the various meta-cognitive illusions that we might experience, like deja vu. We can feel conviction even when we know there oughtn't be.

Sure, but I don't argue for that. I say that, when it comes to metaphysical views or any viewpoint which cannot be rigorously inter-subjectively corroborated, we choose the ones we find most convincing, and that being convinced is really a matter of feeling. — Janus

But how does that deal with my reply that what we feel is easily manipulated by the way some matter is presented?

Sure, the feeling of being convinced is a genuine thing. We go aha!, all the bits fit. But it is not a reliable thing. Everyone has great insights on drugs or when they are half-asleep, but then the conviction slips away in the cold light of day.

So our brain has evolved to make reliable "gut instinct" judgements about what is familiar, what is suspect. And we continue to apply that to the imagined world we conjure up in our heads through language. Yet there is a large literature on cognitive biases to show how wrong gut instinct can be.

It is a long list - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

The kind of "feeling" I am referring to is the desire for truth and intellectual honesty that enables you to see where you might be indulging in "confirmation bias". — Janus

But that goal of being objective and dispassionate is about as socially constructed as it gets. Believing in it is a product of modern culture, hardly the natural human condition. It is a social habit, a taught method, not a "feeling" that we find deeply buried underneath all the usual self-righteous, self-serving, ways of thought that might be more the human norm.

Why do we keep pointing back to the Ancient Greeks as our philosophical model? Did the Greeks suddenly evolve a neurobiology that set them apart from the Persians or Egyptians in this regard? Or did they accept a method?

The essence of any religion consists in loving God, however that God might be conceived. The experience of that love is the most enriching human experience possible, in my view. — Janus

All I can say is that this means nothing to me. My alternative would be to reply that the most enriching thing would be loving life, warts and all.

Also when I say feeling is fundamental to human experience I mean that it is the calibre and kind of feeling that predominates in a human life that determines the happiness, the overall tenor, of that life — Janus

I don't deny that. As I argue, cognition involves the production of the self along with the world. Our experience of the world is really our experience of ourselves in that world. We feel where the one stops and the other starts.

But I think you are relying on a loose definition of "feeling". Neurobiology tells us that the brain has an "emotional response" to whatever passes through the eye of attention. We react to whatever matters in every way we need to react. And that includes a lot of rapid changes in arousal and physiological set which then - in sensory fashion - feel like something to "us".

As these purposes not actually rooted in nature herself, they can only ever be fabricated or constructed. So what kind of resonance do they have with the cosmos at large? — Wayfarer

It comes back to our different metaphysical pictures of causality.

For me, there is "nothing" until the everythingness, the vagueness, of a potential is constrained. And so that makes "purpose" fundamental. A constraint must, by definition, express some kind of natural wish or tendency. So for reality to have some definite persistent character, there must be a good reason for that state of regulation to be in place.

You instead want to argue that purpose can't be found in the self-organisation of nature. For you, the presence of purposes is thus made a problem.

t's a pity that whenever certain subjects are broached, your attitude becomes so hostile. — Wayfarer

But anyway - please don't interpret this as 'an attack'. It's a been a useful exchange of views as far as I am concerned because it is really obliging me to spell out what I am saying. — Wayfarer

Hostile? You know I don't take it personally. I'm just arguing for my point of view. I don't see you as attacking me either. You are making as strong a case for an argument as you can. And I enjoy your online presence much more than many others because of that. You do stand up for your view with an actual argument. So I might attack your case, but I don't think anything negative about you. :)

Nor Janus, when it comes to that. He also is one of the more reasonable people here.

The point of the quote is that Nirvana is not a 'state of quiescent nothingness' (as to what it is, I don't think it has any analogy in science.) — Wayfarer

Well I quoted what it is not - not differentiated and yet still a state of being. And I would point out how that resembles the Western tradition of a substantial potential that tracks back to Anaximander's Apeiron and gets its thorough logical working out in Peirce's metaphysics of Vagueness.

And now physics itself has concrete models of vacuums being full of virtual particles that become manifest when relativistic constraints are applied. This kind of stuff can be calculated and observed these days.

So I stack up that against whatever woolly non-theory you might propose by way of a metaphysical orientation.

It's about what is effective in an instrumental or utilitarian sense. — Wayfarer

Well if you include social and cultural utility in that pragmatic equation, then yes. And why not?

The Peircean position is that scientific reasoning gives us the answer that a community of inquiry would agree to in the long run, if no needless barriers are put in its way. So the third person perspective is not the objectivity of naive realism. It is the collective view of a set of like-minded inquirers following the three logical steps of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation.

So it is a method rooted in the purposes of those who have a reason to be interested.

And as such, it recognises the essentially socially-constructed nature of human knowledge. Thus it is obviously the right way to go about things if social and cultural utility are the highest intellectual goods. The collective mind collectively constructs itself through an open-ended process of reasoned inquiry.

What the individual thinks, standing alone, drops out of the picture as how could any isolated mind figure anything useful out if the mind itself is a collective social phenomenon?

That is why I say the Romantic model of man - the one that urges us to look inwards to our individual essence to find our transcendent connection to some "higher mind" - is a load of damaging guff. It gets in the way of understanding our true nature. It is a brake on the development of the higher state of socially-constructed consciousness that we need to get to.

So your argument is that Scientism blinds us to the higher issues. And my reply - from a natural philosophy stance - is that a higher self is what we humans have a social and cultural responsibility to invent. Science - being the reasoning method applied in best collective fashion - has to be the basis of any real advance on the very issues which you say matter the most.

'Sutra of neither increase nor decrease' — Wayfarer

So you seem to be mischaracterising the Heat Death?

...a Tathāgata’s dharma body is tranquil because it is a dharma free from duality and a dharma free from differentiation. Śāriputra, a Tathāgata’s dharma body never changes because it is a dharma of no destruction and a dharma of no action.

The Heat Death, as a final eternal state of being, would lack differentiation or duality. There would still be a state of being - a generalised state of "nothingness" that is the equilibration of all particular somethingnesses. But it would have become changeless and featureless. No destruction and no action.

Although to be more accurate, there would be a dim quantum fizzle of black-body radiation - virtual photons with wavelengths the size of the visible universe - being emitted by the cosmic event horizons. Which is about as ethereal a state of being as you could possibly expect from materialistic science. :)

It approaches reality as a problem to be modelled, not as a first-person understanding of life and living. — Wayfarer

OK. You make a sharp distinction between philosophy as a means to know about reality and philosophy as a means to know about the self.

But that hinges on the presumption that we aren't natural phenomena. Your division relies on there being that actual division. And I ask where is the convincing evidence? Once we start to ask the questions in a reasonable fashion, life and mind start to seem much less like supernatural phenomena.

So I take the view that the most reasonable hypothesis is that we are part of nature. Metaphysics can be unified under natural philosophy - which is holism and systems science in modern times.

I am happy for you to make an argument for a supernatural angle on life and mind. But why should I take seriously any theory that is "not even wrong" in being an explanation without observable consequences? What is reasonable about such an epistemology?

But, I maintain, philosophy has a religious aspect. — Wayfarer

I don't exclude religion or anything from either science or philosophy. A scientific approach is the one that doesn't rule out conjecture from the start. It only claims to constrain our belief by the end.

I think a better model is the one that Karen Armstrong created, along the lines of the difference between mythos and logos. The former is the allegorical, the mythological, the symbolic, whereas the latter is the quantifiable, what can be precisely mathematically modeled. — Wayfarer

Which is the one with the relation to the truth of reality, and which one is the construction of cultural identity?

And isn't the semiotic view that the two are related in a pragmatic fashion? We don't actually get to see reality as it is, only how it is useful for us to socially and psychologically construct it. But on the other hand, if there were no reality, then our mythologies would be really pointless.

A nice post. My argument would be that consciousness boils down to there being "a point of view". We model the world in terms some "I" that stands at the centre of this view of things.

And that is what your mirror story helps to bring out. The scientific puzzle is how the whole world could fit inside our heads. Somehow the brain is representing reality as a sensory image or display - a faithful replication duplicating the world as a model or internal simulation. And that sets up the need for a homunculus to witness the model - to take a further point of view on the mental goings-on.

But really, there just is this thing of a brain taking a point of view of the world. And so that is like how we can look into a mirror and see a mysteriously real world beyond the glass. We can bob our head about and even start to peer around the corners to see more of this world.

And what is striking is that the view shows us to be at the centre of this world looking back out. Our point of view is a view with us in it. What we feel psychologically - the feeling of being a self embodied in the world, always taking just one point of view when the world offers any number of possible points of view - becomes a visible fact. We see ourselves now looking back out of a world which contains us in it.

I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings — Janus

The sense of the sublime, the transcendent, the sacred, feelings of reverence, oceanic oneness, divine beauty and so on are all romantic responses. The sense of the ordinary, the mundane, feelings of indifference or neglect, separation, ugliness are its nihilistic counterparts. — Janus

Again, I’m not saying that there is no biology to our feelings. Without neurobiology, there would be nothing to work with at all.

But neurobiologically, feelings are not basic in a sense that they are more fundamental than cognition or perception. The brain works holistically so an emotional response is an act of orientation, a preparation for action, some suitable form of arousal. The valuing is part of processing whatever is happening in the moment in a whole body and ecologically appropriate way.

So what I stress is your social construction of our emotions as an arbiter of cognition. It is not a completely wrong construction. It does feel like something - an aha! - when we make either a significant match or mismatch in cognition. There is a physiological orientation response that is what it is like to feel with sudden conviction that we have definitely got something right, or equally, that we have definitely just been caught out by something that was a surprise.

Yet still, the Romantic model - where our feelings know better and truer than our cognition - is a social construction. It dates back to at least Plato's charioteer analogy - the Greeks having separated off rationality or logos in the first place. Science would construct its own more convincing and evidence-backed view of what is really going on.

So I am responding to your first comment - "I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings."

We know that the brain is pretty reliable when it comes to assessing the threats and opportunities of our environment. Millions of years of evolutionary fine-tuning will do that. But once humans became linguistic and cultural creatures, that biological apparatus got turned towards an assessment of a social world of ideas and attitudes and imaginings. And we know how we can talk ourselves into different view on any issue that will evoke quite opposite evaluations or subjective feelings.

With Trump, you could talk him up as some crazed demon that evokes disgust and aversion and fear. Or you could talk him up as a brave patriot willing to take on the dangerous elite and - just by listening to the way the situation is being socially constructed - start to feel the very opposite as your "trusted, deeply felt, gut reaction".

The same with Duchamp's urinal. Is it the wittiest, cleverest, work of art ever? Or is it a tawdry and mean-spirited joke with zero actual aesthetic merit? You should be able to take either set of words and begin to feel the warm approach or the cold withdrawal that is the dichotomous orientation response which your brain is set up for. It is the cognition that is the basis of the feeling here. The idea that we can bypass the cognition and drill down to discover our true and authentic emotional response to the urinal is a Romantic myth.

So in dealing with the world at an animal level, sure we trust our instinctive feelings. Evolution gives us good reason to take extra fright at anything wriggly and snake-like, or something small, leggy, scampery and spider-like. Just as it gives us good reason to think sugary foods are to be gorged upon anytime we are fortunate enough to encounter them.

But to judge philosophical positions on the basis of "subjective conviction" is obvious bad epistemology. Even if, in the end, feeling something is believable or unbelievable does wind up being a state of neurobiological assessment that includes a state of felt orientation, as that is simply how it works. We need to be left prepared with some clearly dichotomous resolution in terms of our action. We need to make up our minds whether we are approaching or avoiding the idea that is at the current centre of attention.

So I am not denying the reality of subjective emotional assessments. I am saying they are no more fundamentally reliable than the frameworks of cognition which they subserve. It's a package deal. You can feel great conviction - then discover you were completely wrong about the way you were construing the situation.

And then, the idea that subjective conviction is some kind of philosophical bedrock is itself a social construction. It is a way of understanding "feelings" that presumes the human mind can connect with a higher transcendent sphere of meaning. And science finds little evidence in favour of that ontology.

Sure, our neurobiology can be manipulated by mindset to evoke a generalised blissful oceanic feeling flooded with a sense of everything understood or connected with, the self depersonalised and immersed in a reality beyond it. Hell, there are drugs that can do that when you might be feeling shit about life.

But to then claim that evoked mental state is genuine or functional is a social construct. The reality is that we are just playing games with our neurobiological possibilities. And if we truly lose control over such games, that is when you get the messianic personality, the psychotic state, the depersonalised person. We kind of know when the social construction - as happens in an "appropriate way" in a church or art gallery - has become a neurobiological pathology.

As we have discussed many times, physics currently has very large gaps in its accounts of the nature of the Universe. — Wayfarer

But perhaps the bigger gaps lie in just how much science now knows compared to how much the general population understands?

So you keep saying the glass is 99% empty - and you might be judging that from only having seen the top 1% of a glass that is pretty damn full to the brim now.

If we know the history of the Cosmos in incredible detail back to around the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, is there still "a very large gap"?

It is being held together and simultaneously driven apart by some unknown force. — Wayfarer

What are you on about. Dark matter and dark energy are known to be two different things.

And that is a typical attitude in today’s scientific culture. It’s thrown the baby out with the bath water as far as I’m concerned. — Wayfarer

Alternatively, it is the approach that has done the most to dispel the air of mystery that has hung over existence.

I agree that Scientism deserves criticism. But in your constant attacks on that, you risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater yourself. You are rejecting the holistic metaphysics of a systems science approach to reality.

I am not convinced that subjectrive feeling has been shown to be exhaustively socially constructed. — Janus

Good job I'm not arguing for exhaustion then. But any feeling given any kind of name is being socially constructed - even if that name is naming its supposed fundamental unnameability or ineffability. As when we call the Sublime.

And even failing symbolic reference, social construction can make use of indexical or iconic semiosis. It can hang a picture on a wall in a fashion that is meant to be approached via a search after signification.

If R.Mutt signs a urinal and puts it on show in a gallery as the "Fountain", it is pretty obvious that we are suppose to "feel something" - even if it might be so novel to us that we struggle to give it an exact name.

But even when it comes to romanticism; I don't accept that it is socially constructed as opposed to mediated. — Janus

How are the two different? When I say socially constructed, that doesn't mean there is no biological construction going on at a deeper level. Semiosis is the recognition of multiple levels of signification or mediation. It is a holistic approach like that.

So I think you are just trying to turn my position into a straw man when you know it is more complex than that.

Same goes for theism; in its various forms it has been pretty much universally present across cultures; so the argument that it is culturally constructed cannot hold water. — Janus

So if something is found across all cultures, it can't be constructed? How does that work?

If it is across all cultures - and not elsewhere - then surely that shows it is culturally fundamental, not that it is not cultural.

I found it all by myself in my early teens and was immediately transported to a brave new world of feeling. — Janus

Hmm. Immediately hey? Just went from whoah to go in a simple transcendent leap of consciousness with no process of enculturation.

Sounds like some convenient myth-making there.

So, the contradiction you thought you found in what I said was merely apparent. — Janus

You are still relying on the hypothesis that feeling is unanalysable and beyond reasoned communal inquiry. And that isn't a strong position given that we know that so much of our "feelings" to be socially constructed sign relations with pragmatic function.

You just said think about Art. And so you meant, think about Art as it is socially constructed in the modern Romantic condition. Get ready to feel awe, intrigue, momentousness, depth ... the sublime.

Now I agree that in the limit, our private experiences are unanalysable. My position has to be able to handle "the Hard Problem" of ineffable qualia. So in the end, there is some subjective limit to any community effort to objectify and analyse phenomenology.

And my answer there is that objectification runs out of steam where it runs into a lack of observable counterfactuals. So I can motivate a neurological account of hue discrimination up to the point where yellow is explained as a lack of blue, and red by a lack of green, but then if we try to ask why should red have the particular quality of being red, then there is no counterfactual to continue on.

The Hard Problem arises where we can't stand in some objective relation even to our own subjectivity. We can't even imagine a difference in terms of what we might feel or experience. And if we can't do that in terms of ourselves, then a wider communal view - the one that is optimised epistemically as the scientific method - can hardly do it either.

So I have an epistemology that accepts a limit to objectivity, but also identifies that limit clearly in the notion of the counterfactual observable - the possibility of something being other than what it is. And on those grounds, I reject your claim that our "feelings" are unanalysable in some generic fashion. They are in fact pretty damn easy to analyse using psychological science.

You say "what about Art?", as if that should be a conversation-ender. Well no. Art history tells us all about the social construction of Romanticism and its notion of the Sublime.

I never took my kids to church, but I certainly dragged them around enough art galleries to do my part in teaching them to master the appropriate cultural responses, just as my parents did with me. :)

C'mon. You're smart enough to understand the game. Romanticism is the new Theism. It demands that we look inside and find our ineffable essence, that spark of pure aesthetic response which is our soul. The social construction of that state of belief is an open book to any historian of the modern world. It's been analysed to death.

You're arguing from objectrive, or at least intersubjective, empirical investigation whereas Wayfarer is really arguing (despite what he might like to think) from subjective feeling. — Janus

Well exactly. That is what I'm pointing out. I am basing my view on what we can definitely know by way of reasoned inquiry. Wayfarer would be doing something else.

But remember also - in being Peircean - my view does start with phenomenology. It does take subjectivity seriously. So it expects the Cosmos to be "mindlike" in some absolutely general fashion. If human consciousness is a natural phenomenon, then it's presence ought to be discernible even in the organisation of the cosmos itself. This is the speculative metaphysics of pan-semiosis.

So stressing the role of thermodynamics (or rather, infodynamics) is simply accepting that mind and cosmos are actually going have the same fundamental organisational principles.

Wayfarer has to demonise pan-semiosis or infodynamics to keep his own vague theistic paradigm going. He must manage to paint it as being the "other" to his mysticism - that other being Scientism. And so anytime I mention entropy, he pretends that that does not contain also the complementary notion of negentropy. Chaos and order go together. And the long run goal is a heat death equilbrium.

Utter peace, if you like. What comes after a frothy bit of excitement. :)

When it comes to conviction regarding metaphysical or religious matters, I see nothing whatsover wrong with being convinced by my own subjective feelings, in fact when it comes down to it I believe we all inevitably are and should be, but I would never expect another to be convinced by my feeling, or argue that my subjective convictions carry any intersubjective weight. — Janus

Well that is nonsense of course. And by your argument, I don't even now have to give either reasons or evidence for why I should feel that with such subjective conviction.

And given that you say what is private feeling is private feeling - it would carry no weight in terms of one mind speaking to another - I would expect you to withdraw into solipsistic silence on all epistemological matters. You have disqualified yourself from further debate by your own words.

Yet funnily enough, you won't. So I can only point out the inconsistencies I find in the position you claim to hold.

I agree with Lonergan that the basis of objectivity really cannot consist in anything but authentic subjectivity; or as he formualtes it in his transcendental method, being "attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible". — Janus

And so now you circle back to an epistemology based on being reasonable, particular and pragmatic. You arrive at the right answer, even having dismissed the epistemic grounds that I would give for that being the optimally "objective" approach.

we are not simply cosmic flukes or accidental tourists that have been thrown up by the random shuffling of stardust; we have a kin relation to the underlying order (logos) of the Cosmos. — Wayfarer

Well, yes. And what is that underlying order then? Are you denying that physics has found thermodynamics to be fundamental? So wouldn't we then understand ourselves as an expression of that cosmic logos? It should be no surprise to find our intelligence entrained to that most general of all projects?

You would have to argue it the other way round to give the answer you want. You would have to be an idealist who says that the cosmos is an expression of our consciousness. We are causing it to strive to be in our image.

But there is rather less evidence for that version of cosmology.

OK. What difference does it make - cosmically?

But I agreed. How they self actualise - as philosopher or physicist - makes no real difference. So long as a developed nation level of entropy production is in place, how the entropy is spent is a free choice because it is a matter of indifference to Mother Nature. All they have to do is produce a typical Aussie share of degraded resources.

Precisely. Hence those count as free choices. Essentially meaningless as far as Mother Nature is concerned. What matters to Her is that you are living the bounteous lifestyle of one of the planet’s most civilised nations.

Beats the hell out of being a heat sink — Wayfarer

Hmm. If you checked, what would would be your daily kilojoule production?

https://cncf.com.au/carbon-calculator/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIubWR-dzP2QIV0o6PCh3K7gt0EAAYASABEgJNKvD_BwE

Now, it might be that Aristotle was mistaken in this regard, but that is not really the point at issue. — Wayfarer

This is straying from the topic, but it seems a contradiction that Aristotle starts by defining flourishing in terms of self actualisation and building a life through rational action, then you want to make this the final takeaway - that contemplation is an “ethereal” ultimate stage of development.

It might be highly abstract, but that’s different in my book.

This is the 'spiritual' side of philosophy, and I'd say that non-objective side. — mrcoffee

Speaking personally, I’m only interested in philosophy in the sense of the Western tradition of critical thinking. So it is all about de-subjectivising our belief systems, for me.

On the lower levels though, I imagine some codes just replicating more than others. Would control not be metaphorical here? — mrcoffee

Sure. But still, the key point is that life gains organismic autonomy in being able to use information to regulate physics. So the basis of freewill - that is intelligent, selfish and goal directed behaviour - is there right from the ground up. As soon as a molecule becomes a message, we are talking about life being freed from the kind of strict Newtonian determinism that causes all the metaphysical angst about human freewill.

In order to pursue the question, it has to be meaningful, but if you’re sure at the outset that it can’t be, then indeed it will not be. — Wayfarer

Huh? My pragmatic approach is open to revision. All it says is that to be meaningful, it has to make a difference. So if you want to talk about what lies "beyond" our current understanding of nature, you have to speak about something that might make an actual causal difference.

I don't have to make up my mind in advance. Or rather, epistemically my mind is organised to have this open-ended approach to inquiry. So if you can tie some theory to to some evidence, go for it. It is your claim after all.

I do have an objection to the way that biosemiotics claims to incorporate the Aristotelian sense of ‘final purpose’ however. And that is because from the biological perspective, the only purpose can be to survive and pro-create. — Wayfarer

Biology is larger than you allow. Is there no sense in which an eco-system flourishes? Does biology not get the value of a rich community with a nested hierarchical structure and resilience or ascendency?

So you are simply arguing based on a Darwinian caricature of nature red in tooth and claw. It's like you believe the Scientism you are so fond of attacking.

Whereas for Aristotle himself, the final goal of the philosophical quest was something much more ethereal - the philosopher contemplating the eternal Ideas (or something along those lines). — Wayfarer

Hmm. You may be projecting here. Plato or even Pythagoras would make a better target of this particular fantasy. :grin:

I mean, Aristotle is counted as a ‘pagan philosopher’, but it was a different age, and had a very different mentality. — Wayfarer

Yep. Our ideas advance. We ought to bear that fact in mind.

Well great. But then why shouldn't natural philosophy be the default position?

If supernaturalism is not a real theory in that you agree it has no particular form, let alone any particular consequences, how could we reasonably ever believe in some or other version of it? What on earth justifies a belief for which there is neither a theory nor the evidence?

As usual, the only argument you can make is that - in some specified way - current natural theory fails to explain some kind of observable that matters.

That kind of criticism is important. But what did my account of natural teleology leave out exactly?

If there is no big daddy god with his own mysterious purpose in mind, what more is there to the Cosmos than what I've outlined? If you believe it to be the Platonic Good, then put it on the table as a counter-argument.

And the funny thing is that these supernatural alternatives - either the unpatterned bliss of Nirvana or the frozen eternal perfection of Platonia do sound remarkably like a Heat Death cosmology. Is a life without contrast and challenge really ever going to be that exciting or fullfilling?

Half a dozen folk trying to convince me I ought not be certain of what cannot be doubted. — Banno

Yep. People asking you to be reasonable and account for certainty in terms of a pragmatic limit on doubting?

Well fuck that. You are here to preach, not discuss.

Something like Pascal’s Wager (although not quite the same). — Wayfarer

But there's your problem. If it ain't your Heaven and Hell version of a Biblical creator, then which of the umpteen varieties of speculative supernaturalism should I pretend to treat as if it were a real constraint on my everyday life? A Muslim one? An Aztec one? A Satanist one? An Eastern reincarnation one?

And if it winds up being your kind of divinity - one with all the rough edges knocked off to make it some kind of vague and bland feel-good generality - doesn't it also then loose all its bite? It doesn't in fact make a difference. We all wind up in the same place anyway?

So your "good bet" needs some actual fleshing out here.

Depending on whether it's a good bet, or not. — Wayfarer

Is a good bet one that is reasonable, or did you have some other definition of a good bet?

Well, you see, I think this is ultimately a nihilistic attitude, regrettably, and that it comes from limiting the understanding to only what is physical or natural. — Wayfarer

Technically it is not "nihilism" to believe that Nature has intrinsic purpose and that we also have the freedom, indeed responsibility, to construct our own personal meanings within that.

Also, it is isn't an "attitude" if it is simply what reasoned inquiry shows to be the case. It is accepting how things are having asked the question of how things are.

But yes. Rejecting supernatural explanations that have the epistemic status of being "not even wrong" seems a small sacrifice to make in metaphysics.

In terms of purpose, the only biological purpose is survival and reproduction, but the end point - the ‘final cause’, so to speak - is the recovery of thermodynamic equilibrium, which is to all intents non-existence, is it not? — Wayfarer

Sure. We have to pay for our freedoms in terms of the much greater amount of waste heat that we generate.

So we can have our private purposes that seem diametrically opposed to the largest purpose that is the Cosmos's own project - the drive towards the ultimate simplicity and tranquility of its Heat Death. But those private purposes are ultimately entrained to that general Cosmic purpose. And often - as with global warming - we don't even seem to want to oppose that generalised project. We don't really care about the freedoms we can extract from fossil fuels as we don't really seem to have our own private projects that are actually "diametrically opposed" to the general entropic flow.

So sure. We could spend our freedom more wisely by developing a better sense of purpose. We might want to care more about our long-term flourishing. But still, ultimately, we are part of nature and so constrained by what is, in the largest sense, natural.

If we choose to be a boom/bust extinction event, that is still a pretty routine evolutionary choice.

The past constrains the future, but it doesn't absolutely determine the future. So the past leaves the future only relatively determined in terms of its propensities.

Physical models can of course simplify the situation and treat the dynamics of the world as mechanical and time-reversible. But that Newtonian view is known to be an over-simplification both due to the laws of thermodynamics and quantum theory.

If we put all our physical laws together, they tell us the world is a place where the past does constrain the future, but can't absolutely determine the future.

Then when it comes to freewill, there is further science to inform our metaphysics.

Any living and mindful system is a dissipative thermodynamic structure that employs information to regulate dynamics. It uses a symbolic memory and code - like genes, neurons, words - to step back from the world so as to be able to control that world.

So biology depends on an epistemic cut that is the basis of autonomy or "freewill" in the broadest sense. Physics has no direct or deterministic control over what gets written into the memory of a mind. Biology exists as a state of matter because it uses a semiotic mechanism to divorce its essence as completely as possible as it can from the particular "hardware" on which it runs its "computations".

Of course, biology then can only choose to use that power over nature to act in a self-interested fashion - to build and maintain a body, to function and thrive in an environment. But it is completely unmysterious why organisms exhibit autonomy. We know that biology is dynamics + information. We can see exactly where the disconnect between even the relative determinism of the one, and the almost complete lack of determination of the other, takes place.

That folk continue to think Newtonian determinism is some kind of fundamental problem for complex human psychology some 330 years after the Principia is actually amazing.

Here's a basis for an epistemology: Some statements are true. And there are some statements which it is unreasonable to doubt. — Banno

Nah. Still doesn't work.

Can any statement be known to be true as opposed to being asserted as true, or defined as true, or believed and acted upon as if true?

Tell us how a statement can be known to be true.

And then what exactly do you mean to claim by slipping into the objective register when talking about something that is subjective in requiring a subject?

You are trying to avoid any locution which admits that for there to be knowledge, there must be a knower. For there to be belief, a believer. For there to be certainty, someone for whom doubt is at least a possibility. Etc.

So as usual you are trying to resolve the basic epistemic issues by using words in a fashion to talk past them. You simply say the statements are true, ignoring that statements need staters - who then have reasons and beliefs and doubts and all the rest.

In the same fashion you flip=flop between the subjective and objective framing to avoid the obvious epistemic elephants in the room.

That you are in Fremantle guzzling sprats is something certain - from your subjective point of view. As a statement you publicly make, why wouldn't other minds doubt that?

No. When it comes to the public issue, you switch to the objective phrasing. It is simply an objective and mind-independent truth to say "Banno is guzzling sprats in Fremantle" is true IFF Banno is guzzling sprats in Fremantle. Anyone of us could get on a plane and assure ourselves of this recalcitrant fact.

It's comical really. You seem to have started out with a decent philosophical education. Yet at some point you have become convinced by some very silly rhetorical positions on epistemology. Perhaps you love the scandal they cause?

But they do seem to infect all your views - such as when you go on to assert various moral positions as unquestionable and objective truths.

Modern life is so full of ambiguity and subtlety. Yet despite a training in critical thinking, you just want a pre-modern simplicity when it comes to any epistemological discussion.

Curious.

Sure you can play the game of pedant and claim confusion or evil daemon or whatever you like. — Banno

Is it pedantic to say one is reasonably certain, or justifiably certain, but never absolutely certain, or certain without qualification?

On what argument?

Is that pretty certain, absolutely certain, cross your heart and hope to die certain, as certain as you can reasonably be?

Anyway, I’m certain you’re not in Femantle.

Put forward your argument. It’s been years. You still haven’t.

Come on, a cursory glance over my argument will show that's not the case, you're just being disingenuous for effect. — Pseudonym

Im arguing that the only use to which I've ever seen that kind of theory put is to denigrate animals in such a way as to justify their mistreatment. That is the reason why I'm opposed to it. — Pseudonym

Disingenuous? Moi?

So you’ve got nothing but the demand I should share your certainty?

Sounds like the epistemology of a solipsist.

Again you are claiming certainty in regard to your assertion?

Sounds legit.

Yep. You are in a little world all of your own on this one.

So I can’t doubt your statement?

Sounds legit.