• Is the real world fair and just?
    I generally don't like the idea of teleology in terms of purpose. — Apustimelogist

    That's fine. In line with those articles, the shift is to understand finality in terms of global constraints, not as some kind of futurised effective cause.

    Cause must come before the effect, never the effect before the cause, right?

    But as a systems science proponent, I work with the expanded causality that started with Aristotle's four causes analysis. A system is a hierarchical structure of relations where global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees then act – in their generalised statistical fashion – to (re)build the world-system that gave rise to them.

    So global constraints are the embodied version of Aristotle's formal and final cause. And local degrees of freedom are the embodied version of his effective and material causes.

    Good old "cause and effect" is just how all this complexity looks at an average scale of observation, such as would exist in our own world as we imagine it to "really be" – a place of medium-sized dry goods.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    I guess what I'm getting at then is, what would be a justification for an ethical decision? If we said something like, "We are entropic beings with global constraints and local degrees of freedom", that would be some sort of category error, no?

    So, looping back to the OP, what would be an ethical stance and what would be its justification towards resource management? What should we do?     — schopenhauer1

    Well given that I say this is all about the correctness of the dialectical view – the fact that nature organises itself as a local~global balancing act – then the answer should pop out of that presumption for me.

    So I then ask, what is "justification" in that scalefree local~global sense? We always will have two poles, two equally justificatory alternatives, that orient our resulting argument. We can justify in terms of rights, or in terms of responsibilities. In terms of a natural inclination towards competition, or towards cooperation. And so on and so forth.

    Individuals and communities. Cohesion and differentiation. Constraints and freedoms. Always some balance of justifications – a balance that can be struck as vagueness has been excluded by living in a dichotomised world. If we pretend the world is black and white, that is how we can then go on to discriminate all its possible shades of gray.

    A map is no use if your roads and landscape are indistinctly marked out as two shades of near-identical gray. You want a map that asserts boldy, here is the ocean and here is where it falls of the cliff into the realm of monsters and dragons. Black lines on white pages.

    So justification is always to be organised as this call for a negotiation. "I was travelling over the speed limit, m'lud. But not excessively. It was broad daylight and the road empty. etc." Rules need interpreting. Circumstances can be extenuating. That is to say, our actual justice system is set up on a systems' principle of laws as not the exceptionless judgement of a god but as constraints – general behavioural guidelines - that then allow some discretion in terms of an individual's degrees of freedom.

    The guilty can plead passion, inattention, good character, reformed intentions, and any other spur of the moment shit to lessen the coming blow.

    So the question in the modern era – given the same justice would now have to be extended to all the people of the planet, and perhaps all it sentient life as well – is what would that look like as a pragmatic intention?

    And the usual two choices are possible, along with the third thing of all the balances that they would stand as the measuring poles to.

    We could really go overboard and attempt to imagine a future where the whole planet is saved in some pristine sense where all ecosytsems return to as they were, at least in 1800. But we also end up with folk continuing to have as many babies, or houses as big, cars as fast, as has been the historic trend ever since then.

    One can see the impracticalities of that. But hey, we start at the ultimate dream why not? And work our way back towards what might be the practical.

    Does our utopia have to be so large that it includes the planet itself? Or even the bacterial scale of life which in fact dominates it? Well most will probably say no. We just don't want to flush ourselves down the toilet of history. But if we are gone, well practically speaking, who cares?

    God may judge. But He was only ever a social fiction used to constrain human behaviour at a tribal or community scale of moral organisation. We were mature and responsible adults by the time we decided to drive the ecosystem over the edge of the cliff.

    And do we owe some ought to the larger world that is the physical Cosmos. The Great Heat Sink in the sky? Well now you are taking the conversation in a really silly direction. If I don't exist, the Cosmos can go screw itself. It never cared for me in any discernible way. Why would I feel a duty of care to it? Or even a sentimental attachment like I might for the ecosystem of the 1800s? I can't stand in the dock accused of messing up "God's creation" like some kid throwing a house party while the parents were out of town.

    Even as a collective moral economy – the planetary civilisation imagined by the Enlightenment – there is no ultimate feedback loop where we humans could destroy the Cosmos in any meaningful sense. The only judgement being passed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics is "did those little shits entropify".

    On a finite planet of finite energy and resources, we do have a choice of doing that slowly for a long time, or very quickly all at once. That is a completely free choice from the Cosmic point of view.

    But then what use is having a free choice if we are not even claiming that possibility? The Second Law sets up the large scale flow. We get to harvest that with our ingenuity. It is then up to us to ensure we have a morality that scales – a system of social justification that adapts to the change that change itself produces.

    If you want to focus on resource management, it is a little late in the day of course. Harsh rationing or fewer mouths seem the general dichotomy that composes the immediate future. Given green tech became instead a politically-engineered exercise in corporate greenwashing.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    That is to say, the morality is equivalent to the terrain. The physics surrounding it, the map. You are stuck in mapland. — schopenhauer1

    You assert this. But I don't see the substantiation by way of an argument.

    It is plainly wrong that we are stuck in any map if the map is what we are always involved in writing.

    Would you follow Google Maps off the edge of a cliff rather than believe your own eyes about the washed out road ahead? And if it were made easy, would you feel a social responsibility to rewrite that tiny bit of Google Maps to alert other road users in your immediate vicinity?

    So physics is our map of reality at its broadest possible level. It is a map of the most cosmic scale constraints that frame our minute to minute existence. One might want to fly off the top of the building, but that free choice is a little constrained if we haven't yet evolved wings. Or at least have a jet pack attached to our backs and it is fully fuelled up for our little adventure.

    I'm not sure how much more pointing out the bleeding obvious I have in me. I set out an OP in a reasonably developed fashion. This rehashing of old points is very stale.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    That question is not answered by physics. — Banno

    Bang on. It is answered by our dialectically-structured interaction with "the physics".

    It just helps not to talk like a lumpen realist about the physics and a fluffy idealist about the moral dilemmas. Biosemiosis helps us get our global metaphysics right.

    All life and mind is an ecology living off an entropic bounty. Always has been and always will. And that could be the case because "is" and "ought" exists as a two-way feedback relationship that couples the organism to its environment in a pragmatic loop.

    Any other way of looking at it is a few lifetimes out of date. There are moral philosophy attitudes we can no longer afford to espouse. In today's world, it counts for wilful blindness.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    The underlying principle is "entropic heat death", and we are just staving it off on various short or shorter timescales. — schopenhauer1

    That would be the negative framing. The positive one is that as physical creatures, we live off the negentropy we harvest as the free gift of the Cosmic entropy flow. The sun shines, plants grow. Hydrocarbon deposits are laid down by decaying ancient forests and ocean plankton and hundreds of millions of years later, workers turn up with fracking rigs to power proud nations.

    Everything we love and value comes from harvesting nature’s bounty and spending that negentropy wisely. :razz:

    However, is this not descriptive and not prescriptive? — schopenhauer1

    Here we go. Morality locked into its old is/ought shibboleth.

    A natural philosophy understanding of nature emphasises that global constraints and local degrees of freedom are what go together to constitute the holism of an evolutionary system. At the level of humans as a social organism, that cashes out as the organising dynamic of competition-cooperation. Our actions must achieve a world where there is a global cohesion and yet also a local differentiation.

    Over all scales of our lives. Even nation states are meant to be a state of order where a planetary level of competition-cooperation is laid out in an institutional fashion. Nations have rights and responsibilities under international treaties. They can wage wars, but meant to follow the rules.

    So it just is the case that everywhere, at every level, we organise in this win-win way where individual striving is set within a collective justice and morality.

    The mistake humans make is believing that including the larger natural system that is our environment is a nice optional choice that good-hearted folk might choose to bleat about, but really that is not a central concern of debates over our moral choices. When it comes to the environment and ecosystem, well that is - as you say - merely a great big heat sink of no intrinsic value.

    Not what is happening, but what ought to happen. — schopenhauer1

    So you have set up the situation as I describe. A demand that society is set up according to some institutionalised understanding about rights and responsibilities. Justice becomes about a proper balance of interests. An algorithm of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” might help defuse this “your car vs their fishing” real world dilemma.

    I’m sure those involved would love you to arrive as a third party to sit them all down, talk it through this way and see if some new general understanding comes to rule such incidents in the future. Or you could tell them to fight it out and see which one right now is the stronger or more determined.

    There are always “free choices” to make. But natural order arises from just making some damn choice in terms of whether the approach you try is competition or cooperation. Do you seek short term advantage or long term understanding? It is not always clear which is “right”. Which you “ought” to do.

    But what matters from an evolutionary systems point of view is that you frame your choices with a crisp dialectical counterfactuality. You don’t fluff about vaguely, sort of looking imploringly at the blocking anglers and hoping for the best. You choose a path and live by the consequences.

    The way it works - as an organism seeking its adaptive balance to its world - is you always should be able to see clearly the two oughts of any social situation. To compete or to collaborate. And most every social situation is already institutionalised to make the balancing of the two imperatives an unthinking habit.

    On the tennis court, if I hit a ball on the line it is in. That is the rule we all agreed. If my opponent pretends to see it out, I probably oughtn’t pull out a gun and shoot him dead. But that is still an option. It answers to the short term of one line call. However I might want to pause to consider the way it would interrupt the flow of the rest of the game, or even my entire day.

    Now your point is that our moral dilemmas are always of the most immediate kind. The fate of the planet does not hang on every line call or traffic obstruction. Thermodynamics seems as remote from morality as you can imagine.

    But humans have blown up their world in just 200 years. It all went exponential starting around 1800. And even then, not really until 1850. Thermodynamics was a remote issue for society even in my own childhood. But the planet has gone from 3 billion people to 8b since then.

    I think it is time cosy notions - like an is/ought separation of powers - are consigned to the dustbin of academia. The house is burning down around us and folk are looking about in dazed moral confusion. Doing a bit of green tinkering and a lot of hand wringing. Ineffectually looking at those anglers with slightly imploring, yet also insisting eyes. As there’s more of them than you. But maybe if you waved your gun…
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I think that a distinction can be made between 'intrinsic' and 'relational' properties. — boundless

    So like gauge invariance vs Poincaré invariance? Constrain spacetime to a manifold of points and it still has degrees of freedom in that the points may spin rather than sit still. They may be vector and chiral rather than scalar. Quantum spin arises as an intrinsic property and the rest of particle physics follows.

    What relativity doesn’t forbid becomes what QFT exploits.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    So you can't demonstrate it? — Apustimelogist

    You mean experimentally? - https://www.nature.com/articles/nphys3343

    As a bone of contention? - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-023-04251-x

    Set out your objections.
  • Perception
    ↪Leontiskos
    This then may be a useful primer as well. A more recent attempt at the historical context.

    Predictive processing is an ambitious theory in cognitive and computational neuroscience. Its central thesis is that brains self-organize around the imperative to minimize a certain kind of error: the mismatch between internally generated, model-based predictions of their sensory inputs and the externally generated sensory inputs themselves (Clark 2016; Friston 2009, 2010; Hohwy 2013). Clark (2015) has recently suggested that this overarching theory of neural function has the resources to put an ecumenical end to what he calls the “representation wars” of recent cognitive science. Specifically, he argues that it implies an understanding of internal representation that can accommodate important insights from the enactivist tradition without renouncing the theory’s representational credentials.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6566209/
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well I don't see any connection whatsoever. — Apustimelogist

    That would be consistent with your rejection of quantum temporal entanglement I guess.
  • Perception
    ↪Leontiskos
    I'll give it some thought. No primer comes to mind as such. I speak from being engaged in this debate since the 1980s. So thousands of papers, many conversations. Some hard won wisdom I hope.

    Howard Pattee would be my usual go to. Not the simple argument but the exact argument...

    The illusion of autonomous symbol systems

    There is a real conceptual roadblock here. In our normal everyday use of languages the very concept of a "physics of symbols" is completely foreign. We have come to think of symbol systems as having no relation to physical laws. This apparent independence of symbols and physical laws is a characteristic of all highly evolved languages, whether natural or formal. They have evolved so far from the origin of life and the genetic symbol systems that the practice and study of semiotics does not appear to have any necessary relation whatsoever to physical laws. As Hoffmeyer and Emmeche (1991) emphasize, it is generally accepted that, "No natural law restricts the possibility-space of a written (or spoken) text.," or in Kull's (1998) words: "Semiotic interactions do not take place of physical necessity." Adding to this illusion of strict autonomy of symbolic expression is the modern acceptance of abstract symbols in science as the "hard core of objectivity" mentioned by Weyl. This isolation of symbols is what Rosen (1987) has called a "syntacticalization" of our models of the world, and also an example of what Emmeche (1994) has described as a cultural trend of "postmodern science" in which material forms have undergone a "derealization".

    Another excellent example is our most popular artificial assembly of non-integrable constraints, the programmable computer. A memory-stored programmable computer is an extreme case of total symbolic control by explicit non-integrable hardware (reading, writing, and switching constraints) such that its computational trajectory determined by the program is unambiguous, and at the same time independent of physical laws (except laws maintaining the forces of normal structural constraints that do not enter the dynamics, a non-specific energy potential to drive the computer from one constrained state to another, and a thermal sink). For the user, the computer function can be operationally described as a physics-free machine, or alternatively as a symbolically controlled, rule-based (syntactic) machine. Its behavior is usually interpreted as manipulating meaningful symbols, but that is another issue. The computer is a prime example of how the apparently physics-free function or manipulation of memory-based discrete symbol systems can easily give the illusion of strict isolation from physical dynamics.

    This illusion of isolation of symbols from matter can also arise from the apparent arbitrariness of the epistemic cut. It is the essential function of a symbol to "stand for" something - its referent - that is, by definition, on the other side of the cut. This necessary distinction that appears to isolate symbol systems from the physical laws governing matter and energy allows us to imagine geometric and mathematical structures, as well as physical structures and even life itself, as abstract relations and Platonic forms.

    I believe, this is the conceptual basis of Cartesian mind-matter dualism. This apparent isolation of symbolic expression from physics is born of an epistemic necessity, but ontologically it is still an illusion. In other words, making a clear distinction is not the same as isolation from all relations. We clearly separate the genotype from the phenotype, but we certainly do not think of them as isolated or independent of each other. These necessary non-integrable equations of constraint that bridge the epistemic cut and thereby allow for memory, measurement, and control are on the same formal footing as the physical equations of motion. They are called non-integrable precisely because they cannot be solved or integrated independently of the law-based dynamics. Consequently, the idea that we could usefully study life without regard to the natural physical requirements that allow effective symbolic control is to miss the essential problem of life: how symbolic structures control dynamics.

    https://casci.binghamton.edu/publications/pattee/pattee.html
  • Does physics describe logic?
    ↪Tarskian
    OK.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    Mathematics has a massive foundational crisis with insurmountable issues. — Tarskian

    So you shit on both sides of this divide? What intellectually does meet with your full approval?
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I don't have the background to understand what you are saying or hinting at here. — Janus

    No worries. It just goes to the larger Peircean project which argues that reality as the thing in itself would have to have this Darwinian logic. And that this connects to the position I expressed as the answer to the OP.

    For reductive science, the principle of least action is both a necessary axiom – a universal principle and not just a law – but also something to be a little embarrassed about because of its teleological overtones. The very idea that is and ought could be connected in this finalistic fashion!

    But for a larger holistic view of science, as the Big Bang demands, the action of least principle becomes itself a matter in want of a decent explanation.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Right, and this is just what I've been saying except I don't think the fact that we must acknowledge that there is a reality beyond our perceptual and conceptual capacities is without significance, since it is a fact about the human condition. — Janus

    Better yet, we can subtract the human from the epistemic equation as best we can. That is, apply the scientific method, or Peirce's logical arc of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Arrive at the view that represents the limits of inquiry for a community of rational thought. Act as if it were the Comos that is contemplating its own Being.

    This underscores the limits of human knowledge and reinforces the idea that our understanding is always shaped by the conditions of our cognition, making any direct knowledge of the "thing in itself". — Wayfarer

    So once the direct route is accepted as forbidden to us, then what becomes the best indirect route? That is what pragmatism is about. We can subtract the psychological individual from the equation and make it about a dispassionate community of reason.

    Social cognition based on the scientific method.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    "The world as it is" is for us just an idea — Janus

    Sure. Let’s not confuse epistemology and ontology once more. It would be handy to have some kind of highlighter button to mark the switch in register.

    "Optimization algorithm" is still an anthropomorphic notion, so perhaps we could rule that out? — Janus

    This is an ontological commitment we might make as part of an evolutionary metaphysics. Such as Big Bang cosmology.

    The reason inflation seems a must at the start of the Universe is eliminate all other geometries except the very flattest. The Goldilocks balance of being not too positively or negatively curved but instead “just right” as that which can then dump its energy into particles and continue on its way, expanding and cooling as infinitum.

    One can’t believe in physics without going along with its least action principle. Optimisation of dialectical balances just is the reality physics describes.
  • Perception
    like when a banana turns green to yellow as the chlorophyll breaks down. — NOS4A2

    I wonder how we see yellow when the retina has three kinds of photoreceptor cone and none are tuned to yellow as their frequency?
  • Books, what for, exactly?
    ↪tim wood
    Books here I take as the construction of an interior world of increasing semiotic abstraction. And that can run counter to life’s other enterprise of living in the day to day real world.

    One could substitute a mobile phone here as the modern complaint. Too much texting instead of too much reading. But the fixity of books is at least a sign of the intent to communicate ideas of matching endurance.

    So we have a real life dilemma. We have created a world where we expect people to have abstractly structured thoughts. And yet there is also the other thing of the daily routine. The question becomes not which extreme is correct but pragmatically can they be balanced?

    I say yes. But this has to be realised early enough in life for life to be built around it. And to be balanced, both sides of this modern educated life must feed back to support each other.

    One can earn a living by being a professional abstracter, but then might ought to go part time to look after the house and kids. One can spend hours of the day reading, but then also ought spend as many hours exercising and socialising to keep the old brain cells in peak condition.

    So identifying the possible positive feedback loops between wife and books - how each might be arranged to complement the other - is what you would call the win-win.

    It things are arranged as a negative feedback loop, life ain’t going to be so hot. :wink:
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    ↪Banno
    "Bob, bob, bobbing along, joyfully singing its song"
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well, in line with what I said, we don't know what they are. — Janus

    So there are the known unknowns and then the unknown unknowns which we can believe surely also must exist? That kind of thing?

    Whether or not you acknowledge that determines your basic orientation towards life. — Janus

    For me, it would is a matter for empirical inquiry. As in how far does one really get by employing tunnel vision?

    The dog that didn't bark could be the clue. The world as it "is" might exist as an optimisation algorithm such as we find at the base of all physics – the least action principle. The "ought" that eliminated all the other worlds that felt they too might have been possible if we hadn't outcompeted them in the race to be the case.

    The irony is that someone like Wayfarer who doesn't want to acknowledge that many things have happened, are happening and will happen that we can never know about, nonetheless believes that sages can "directly" know "what is really going on". — Janus

    But does he clearly believe either side of the proposition at any time? There are those who assert and won't explain. There are those who don't understand. Then there is this other thing of seeming to agree and then slipping back across the boundary towards the other side. A foot in both camps.

    There are many ways that arguments are never won on PF. :wink:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Do you think the Santa Fe Institute is a bunch of amateurs? — Gnomon

    No. It gathered a good bunch of people to drill into self-organising complexity in the broad sense. But then over-generalised that dynamicist view at the expense of the further thing which biosemiotics is focused on. Dynamics regulated by information. Systems with the added thing of an encoding memory. The genes to control a metabolism, the neurons to control an environment, the words to control a society, the numbers to control a world.

    So a rookie blunder right there to the degree Santa Fe folk hyped up the dynamical half of the equation when it comes to the story of life and mind as it exists as a local exercise in informational modelling in a dynamically-unwinding, entropy-driven, world.

    This paper might be useful to you here – The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    How is deciding what we ought do algorithmic? — Banno

    As the OP said. Dialectically. As a rationalising balance of the competition~cooperation dynamic by which all natural systems – from ecologies to societies – self-organise.

    So singalong now .... "flush me one more time baby!"
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Is there one you think is the correct path, — schopenhauer1

    I hoped the world would wake up and change. But that moment was already missed in the 1990s if not the 1970s. So Model B is the world as it is likely to be.

    And what I argued is that this would look like a deglobalising pluralism. Everyone will locally be inventing whatever way of life seems to work across the scale at which they can hope to construct some fabric of social and economic relations.

    So to address the planet at a global ethical scale, we might all have agreed on one common political slogan that could be implemented as a win-win proposal across all of humanity. Then accepting this hope will fail - and might always have been impossible - now is a good time for thought to turn to other options.

    If everyone will wind up having to relocalise, then doing that in Sudan is going to be different from doing that in Switzerland or Tasmania. Time to look around your immediate community and see how well it is prepared to make the best of the situation it will likely find itself in.

    For the US, does it need to take alway people’s guns or is having those guns the stabilising political choice? Should Elon Musk be stopped in his tracks right now for his silly diversionary stunts or does everyone want to join in scaling his Mars colony so US citizens of even more modest incomes have a new planet to escape too.

    I may joke, but really, we need to be aware that the geoengineering response is a live possibility. Why wouldn’t a rich nation try to fix climate change by tinkering with the world’s weather patterns when things get desperate. What ethical ought is going to apply even if they shift the rains off their more vulnerable neighbours.

    As banjo’s comments show, moral philosophy has surprisingly little to say about a future that is outside its regular scope of operations. It is locked into the Enlightenment humanisation project as it’s moralising ought.

    One should not kick puppies. Fact! But it is also a fact that my neighbours next door when I was a child had fat little puppies delivered for the weekend barbecue. In a deglobalising world, we will be faced with this human variety again.

    So I simply argue for a better understanding of how human societies do pragmatically self-organise according to ethical algorithms. We can’t just desire any future as our collective “is”. Nature falls into its stubborn patterns for perfectly comprehensible and predictable reasons.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    ↪Banno
    Bye bye. :grin:
  • Does physics describe logic?
    Physicists are currently siting on two stubborn patterns that are incompatible: quantum mechanics and gravity. — Tarskian

    But they arise within the beauty of this larger pattern. Okun’s cube of theories. As outlined here….
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530

    And is maths itself organised in any grand cube of theories? Is everything slotted together under some grand unifying project like category theory or the Langland’s program?

    On this issue, you seem just interested in being contentious rather than insightful.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Time now to agree that the question of what we ought do remains unaddressed. — Banno

    By you.

    Are you sure you’re feeling quite well this morning? You seem to be in some kind of psychic crisis.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    ↪Banno
    Yep and what? If you want to strut about here, answer the OP. What do you propose as the dialectical ethical algorithm that could scale so as to make the best of our possible future?

    If you have no thoughts on this, wobble off.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    There are limits on our choices, sure, obviously. But our choices are not fixed. We have options. — Banno

    We have options. The OP says that. Time now to give your answer on the option that scales.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    That is, to aim to set out transformations such that an observation made in one frame of reference will be true, of that frame of reference, in any other frame of reference. — Banno

    Hence all things being constrained by Poincaré invariance. Or stepping back further to a thermalising perspective, de Sitter invariance.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    If the future is fixed as you suggest, there is no point to this thread, or any discourse about what to do. It will happen regardless. — Banno

    I said the future is pragmatically constrained. I really don’t understand how you keep failing to understand what is simply obvious.

    What should Tasmania do when the climate refugee boats come hunting as an unsustainable flux with uncertain intentions? Ought it extend the humanitarian hand or thank goodness if had prepared its counter fleet of sea drones?

    The future is open. The question becomes how we can expect the predictable state of the world to reshape our social values at a fundamental level.

    The OP indeed was premised on exploring two quite distinct futures so as to elicit sharper thought on how these things work.

    If you can’t even figure out how this argument has been set out, there is no place here for your belligerent presence.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Notice again that understanding what is the case does not tell us what you ought do about it. — Banno

    And also that the real issue is what can be done about it. Which returns us to the “is” rather neatly. Our range of views on the oughts is pragmatically constrained by what could be the collectively scaled choice. The futurised “is” of the situation.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    In a sense, I get that it can be seen as a disappointing view — boundless

    But we can have a theory of reference frames can’t we? We continue on as we see with holography, de Sitter metrics, or twistor space. We can have general arguments that pick out 3-space as special as the only dimensionality that has the same number of rotational degrees of freedom as translational ones.

    There may always be questions but they also can be new ones.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    They do not say it explicitly, but to me it is obvious that what they want from the ToE, is a "theory" that satisfies the requirements of the definition for the term in mathematical logic. — Tarskian

    It depends on your metaphysics if an exact quantum gravity theory is needed instead of an effective one. It you believe that emergence rules, that topological order is now king, then effective is all you expect.

    That was the point I just argued in recounting the way the physics keeps jamming itself into the contortions of gauge invariance to ensure the rolling weight of the Big Bang continued long enough to have become interesting to those such as us.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Decoherence gives the definiteness of the observed outcome but is not enough to explain the uniqueness of the outcome. — boundless

    Doesn’t the same problem crop up in a relativistic context such as the simultaneity issue? No absolute reference frame and yet that can still be approached in the limit.

    Events certainly happen in spacetime. But fixing them precisely is a problem for both the quantum and relativistic view. Which in turn leads us to a contextual view of things becoming counterfactually definite as a classical logic would seem to demand. It is enough that our uncertainty is tightly constrained.

    I favor epistemic interpretations like QBism. I think that it is impossible to make a literal interpretation of the 'orthodox' quantum formalism that makes 'fully' sense, so to speak. — boundless

    Yes. It is perfectly acceptable to me to go full Copenhagen and say all we can know is the numbers we read off dials. If a proper ontic interpretation isn’t available, quantum physics still works as instrumentalism. Copenhagen remains the sensible backstop epistemic position.

    I am a Pragmatist after all.

    I have a hunch that you might find interesting the Thermal interpretation by Arnold Neumaier. — boundless

    Yeah. Heard quite a bit from him on Physics Forum some years back. But I can’t remember whether I was agreeing or disagreeing with him at the time. I will have to check that reference. :up:
  • Does physics describe logic?
    No matter how well physics manages to study a plethora of stubborn physical patterns, it hasn't reached the stage at which mathematical logic can consider it to be a legitimate "theory". — Tarskian

    Says who apart from you? Can you cite some source for this opinion? And why would maths be a judge of how physics proceeds anyway.

    I just point out there is a relationship which you appear to be overlooking. And from a physicist’s point of view, the way mathematicians carry on can look equally wasteful of smart young minds. Chasing patterns that aren’t even useful.

    The Yang-Mills mass gap may be a good example of whether mathematical purity matters to anyone but mathematicians. Is it actually important for some physical reason?

    Then, and only then, physics will be a legitimate "theory" in accordance with the definition in mathematical logic. — Tarskian

    These are sweeping statements. But are they more than your own personal opinion?
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    But still I don't understand how 'classicality' 'comes to be' in your view. — boundless

    Classicality comes to be in the limit. So reality never arrives at that ideal conception we have of it, but through decoherence, it approaches a classical state for all practical purposes. We can apply that brand of physics and logic to it.

    Decoherence IMO can only remove interference, not superposition, hence the cat is still, if we take the quantum formalism literally, awake and asleep at the same time. — boundless

    But the cat is a hot body in a warm place. It went into the box decohered and not coherent. It wasn't converted to a Bose condensate. It remained always in a "thermalised to classicality state".

    Now if you supercool and properly isolate some system of entangled particles or coherent light, then it goes into the box and remains coherent until the box is opened – or rather, rudely probed by a thermalising measuring device. That is when the quantum description becomes a more appropriate theoretical account.

    Spontaneous collapse theories - (Edit: or maybe some version of MWI) - IMO seem to me the most compatible to your views. — boundless

    MWI is the kind of nonsense to be avoided. Spontaneous collapse fails if you demand that reality actually be classical rather than just decohered towards its concrete limit. Zeilinger's information principle captures some aspects nicely.

    To be honest, I set the interpretation aside these last few years to let the dust settle. Youngsters like Emily Adlam are coming along and making more sense.

    But as I say, biophysics puts it all in a new light. Something has been missing. It seems obvious to me that this is it.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    It is an entire collection of such stubborn patterns that would be the counterpart of a theory in mathematical logic, on the condition that these patterns sufficiently hang together in one way or another. — Tarskian

    I can't take this too seriously. Have you studied much fundamental physics? Especially with quantum field theory and particle physics, the tendency has been just to apply the mathematical patterns and marvel how they force nature onto these stubborn outcomes.

    The maths is "unreasonably effective". Somehow or other, nature keeps jamming itself into the arrangements described by permutation symmetries and matrix mechanics. You might need the Higgs field to force the SU(2) electroweak sector to crack diagonally into SU(2)xU(1), but because something had to do the job physically, the Higgs could be the fictional beast with its own SU(2) structure that could "eat" three of the electroweak's degrees of freedom, so allowing the U(1) photon to burst free.

    It is a crazy tale of science being forced into a wild speculation. And yet tellingly – as this was the mindset that particle physics had learnt to adopt from painful experience – three groups came up with the same solution all at the same time, making the distribution of the Nobel prize uncomfortably contentious.

    So there we have physics reaching the point where the maths constructs the patterns, and if the patterns are possible, nature must wriggle about until it has discovered a strange machinery to achieve the goal of fitting the forms preordained.

    The Big Bang could have been halted at many points in its hot unfolding. But with every phase change, it kept on track to become as mathematically self-simplified as possible.

    Inflation seems needed to have prevented an immediate gravitational collapse. The Higgs transition looks to have then stabilised the vacuum when inflation broke and dumped its energy into a lot of reheated particles. Even then particle physics was doomed as all the matter was going to be consumed by all the antimatter eventually. But another completely different kind of mechanism – the strong force with its SU(3) confinement – came into play, wrapping up quarks into proton balls and so allow a new game based on electron~proton electrodynamics to take over from matter~antimatter annihilation.

    In just the first few minutes of the Big Bang, the physics had tumbled down a hierarchy of algebraic geometry – permutation symmetries – to become stable enough to now last "forever". It was composed of particles with no further possibility to decay, in a vacuum properly secured.

    I would agree that the fact that this worked – believing that nature must find its way into mathematical-strength patterns – has itself become rather an issue for the practice of physics. Now we are flooded by every kind of maths-first theorising like string theory and a hundred more. A lot of speculative crap has followed as I don't think the way that the maths and physics have connected in symmetry terms is a trick that is properly understood.

    This is why I mention topological order as the actual root that connects. And here physics has its own kind of lead in its condensed matter models and such-like. These are now becoming quite influential on mathematics. Ricci curvature and other thermodynamical flow models have proven some pretty big results.

    And isn't that the healthy outcome? Some kind of mutual connection between maths and physics as cultures of inquiry? No need to make it a contest between logical rigour vs experimental validity. We have to come at nature from both these directions to grasp its truth.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Much of what I've read so far is on the contribution of Kant to Uexküll vision of the 'umwelt' but I'm still going.... — Wayfarer

    But note the comment that Uexküll creatively re-interpreted Kant's transcendental idealism so as to make it more biologically realistic. Idealism had to be pulled back from the ledge Kant had left it on. The cognitive model was the part of the story that was stressed.

    All reality is subjective appearance. — Wayfarer

    The paper nicely makes clear that Uexküll was making the modelling relations point – the story shared by other biologists like Rosen and Pattee. An organism forms its own bubble of psychology – an internal informational economy that balances expectation and surprise. A sense of self arises to the degree this model achieves control over the world.

    A newborn even has to discover it owns its hands and feet. The pole it starts from is neither subjective nor objective. It is just a vagueness. A blooming buzzing confusion. But very quickly a pragmatic connection to reality is formed. A strong sense of self emerges to stand opposed to an equally strong sense of living in a world, with even other such minds.

    In all this, there is no real metaphysical tension between mind and reality. It is just all about developing an epistemic structure. An organism develops a habit of predicting its environment so as to minimise its surprise. In this way, it can impose its "will" on the world. The world can come to be seen as an extension of its own desires.

    You can then say this means all we experience is the limits of our own mentality. The thing in itself is left out of the equation. And science makes a big mistake in seeming to claim otherwise. But while science often does seem to claim this, along with the lumpen realists, science just as much understands in great detail the way it is all a self-interested cognitive construct that we dwell in as our personal space. That other semiotic view has always been there and has grown stronger in recent years.

    So there is epistemic idealism and ontic idealism. And epistemic idealism is easy to defend. That is the way cognitive psychology has been trending again.

    You can see this enactive turn now casually cited as a paradigm shift. As in this random Nature paper I was reading:

    The past couple of decades in the cognitive sciences have brought about profound changes in our understanding of the mind. Once mainly characterized in purely abstract computational terms of rule-based symbol manipulation, it is nowadays widely emphasized that our mind is embodied in a living organism as well as extended into our concrete technological and social environment. Perceptual experience is no longer seen as resulting from passive information processing, but as “enacted” via regulation of sensorimotor loops and active exploration of the environment.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03672
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I wonder why. — Banno

    I don't make shit up like you just did. Wonder a bit more about the why of that.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    Physics is a collection of stubborn patterns that can be observed in the physical universe and not a theory theorem in the mathematical sense. — Tarskian
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Pretty much silentism. — Banno

    So maybe your confusion is that we all ought to be silent in your presence? If you say very little, that is already quite enough for everyone concerned.

    Perhaps @Wayfarer could take you on a Zen retreat? All parties would be satisfied by that solution!
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