Again, you are talking about practical (useful) Science, instead of theoretical (reasonable) Philosophy. Except that the notion of "constants" is a generalization & abstraction from specific & concrete instances of physical changes. Likewise, the notions of Unity and Absolute are never observed in the real world, but inferred from multiple instances. — Gnomon

So it seems I am both not talking about philosophy yet talking about philosophy in your book?

Ought one consider where logic sits in all this at this point?

To repeat, I wouldn't put it that way but instead "the future will most likely resemble the past, because the future has, as far as we know, always resembled the past". — Janus

I prefer the past constrains the future. It has already eliminated a huge range of possibilities. That is what makes the future so predictable. But also leaves it full of contingency.

If I ate the cake this morning, I can be sure I won’t be eating this evening. Not will anyone else. But if I didn’t do so, I could eat it at any future moment. Unless someone else beats me to it. That sort of thing.

Such mock humility. :up:

Bayes doesn’t eliminate the guesswork, it formalises it. We still need to choose priors, and those priors depend on the very same customs, habits, and shared practices that Hume, Wittgenstein, and Davidson were talking about. — Banno

But then these "customs, habits, and shared practices" are what are left vague. Half-baked. Contingencies treated as obligations.

So I prefer the Bayesianism that is properly biosemiotic. A story about life and mind and why it exists in the way it does within world that is the way it is.

So sure, there is this layer of sociology mediating between the neurobiology and the metaophysical levels of human semiosis. We are socially-constructed by language in a fashion that equips us to create a social level of organismic purpose and function.

Yet that sociology just likes to leave so much out. It doesn't want to root itself in physics – the thermodynamic imperative that entrains its structure. It doesn't want to believe in the metaphysics that might draw that essential connection to its attention.

Sociology wants its own little world which is closed off and free just to be itself. Some agreeable collection of priors in the form of "customs, habits, and shared practices". Humans doing their human thing in a pluralist, civilised and non-totalising fashion. The world as it should be for the incurable romantic.

Here you frame my approach as "surely a little too much work; a risk to the easy life of cosy presuppositions that the 'philosopher' would choose to socially-construct". And I agree. Yet also I enjoy the work.

The “hierarchy of priors” you describe isn’t an algorithmic miracle — it’s the social, linguistic, and biological history of our talk about causes. — Banno

Yep. That was my point. Same algorithm repeated at different levels of topological order.

And if sociology is the cosy talk level that self-confirms our status as civilised humans, then that is why I emphasise the need to switch things up to an investigation of causality itself. Not just merely a bit of loose chatter that describes things that have been said rather than targets an explanation of the phenomenon.

You just pointed to a mathematical view of induction as a Bayesian calculus. I then pointed to the issue left hanging – the how and the why of the priors. You say that is just sociology. I say descriptively that may be so, but I says we want to cash that out at the mathematical level too. Which is what for instance the Bayesian Brain approach to life and mind is trying to do. The self arising inside the loop as a hierarchy of priors, a hierarchy of Peircean habits of interpretance.

Rationality isn’t something we add on top of experience, but what emerges from doing what we do - talking, testing, correcting, and learning together. In that sense, Bayesianism is one more way of describing Hume’s “custom and habit,” not a transcendence of it. — Banno

Well I've just argued the case for "nope". Yet again.

Of course you will protest that you employ logic too in your armchair approach. But there is a big difference between learning to count and do a little algebra and learning to think in terms of the mathematical architecture that stands behind symmetries and their breaking.

This is the reason Peirce stressed his approach was architectonic. The holism of a systems approach. The logic that gives you the irreducible triad of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.

So yes, rationality can evolve from a linguistic level to a mathematical level. From a social syntax that aims to tell us "who did what to whom" – the subject-verb-object structure appropriate for coordinating the behaviour of a band of chatty hominid foragers – to a logical and abstract syntax that can organise a metaphysical story of hierarchies composed of their global constraints and their local freedoms.

The way a Cosmos itself self-organises. And the way life and mind could arise within that cosmos by stumbling on the self-making power of biosemiosis.

So of course you will again object to the grandeur of this vision. Wittgenstein fell flat on his face, along with Whitehead and other heroes of the logical atomic age, by trying to be a totaliser. If those dudes couldn't do it, we should as just stop trying.

And yet Peirce had already whipped up a robust logic of reality. And systems science was chipping away in the background. Science and maths really began to catch up after WW2. A theory of complexity could become the new research goal.

Much more is happening every year than you seem to even imagine. You just have to have the itch to get out an explore.

Had anyone mentioned this?…

I was pretty dismissive before. But this demonstrates the dangers of the Tech Bros “move fast and break things” approach to AI.

Perhaps we all can reach some agreement that Bayesian calculus of one sort or another is a rational response to Hume's problem? — Banno

Sure. The problem that remains is do we aim to eliminate every wrong hypothesis or magically leap to the only correct one? This appears to be how you are framing things.

And clearly, neither is computationally efficient. But Bayesianism is more efficient if there are general priors to rapidly constrain the search space to discover some particular best answer.

It is like the old game of animal, vegetable, mineral. A dichotomising algorithm that can eliminate half the possibilities at each turn will zip through the alternatives at exponential speed.

So the problem is finding the needle in the haystack. But then you can divide the stack in half and stick it through a metal detector. Pretty quick, you arrive at your destination.

Thus we are being asked to believe in some false dilemma. Abduction doesn’t have to discover the needle in one inspired leap, nor sift the stack forever. Being organised as a hierarchy of dichotomising constraint gets the job done. And we get to shortcut the process still further by a smart choice of priors. We can already launch into the search from some “paradigm” that reduces the search space in a generally reliable fashion.

Bayesianism reduces the abductive arc of reason to an algorithm. Something a neural network could do. Once it has been suitably trained on some pragmatic task and formed a hierarchy of weighted priors. And it has some way of learning from its errors.

That is a closing of the loop as a maximisation of self-information via the minimisation of entropic surprise. The rational process that results in a stable sense of self within its generally ignorable world.

So Bayesianism sounds the opposite of abduction. One laboriously eliminates all hypotheses but one. The other supposedly leaps to just the one and ignores all the others.

However, in reality, pragmatism results in a hierarchical organisation of knowledge habits that can parse the world efficiently with built in priors. And also had the feedback loop that is the flip to attentional processing. Pausing to stop and think. Coming to a halt at surprise or error. Learning what needs to learnt to rewrite the hierarchy of priors and move on.

So it is not simply the fact of a Bayesian algorithm. It is the ability to grow an organised hierarchy of priors in a scalefree way. Bayesianism applied over every scale of the challenge that is being a thinking organism within a world that is itself becoming increasingly transformed by that thinking which is taking place. The world as the organism wishes to “improve” it.

We can move on from the nineteenth century. — Banno

Welcome to the 1960s? Anglophone logic choppers wake up to realise something or other might be slightly amiss. They begin shift in their armchairs and chat among themselves quietly.

Hume didn't have a conception of the Duhem-Quine thesis, of course, so took "vivid impressions" as incontrovertible. I don;t see that we could maintain such a thing nowadays. — Banno

And so it continues. Appear to be defending representationalism and then slide away into enactivism. Never stick to an argument so as to slither around and leave a little chorus of lost ducklings in your wake.

Thank goodness AI can clarify what was at stake. Banjo never will...

Charles Sanders Peirce challenged David Hume's skepticism about induction by reconceiving the purpose of inductive reasoning and framing it as a self-correcting process of inquiry. He argued that Hume's critique was based on a flawed, static view of induction, failing to grasp its long-term, statistical nature within a community of scientific investigators.

Hume's problem can be summarized by two points:

Inductive reasoning is not grounded in deductive logic; it is a "probabilistic leap of faith".

We cannot rationally justify the belief that the future will resemble the past.

Peirce's objections to Hume's skepticism include:

The long-run statistical justification of induction: For Peirce, the validity of induction does not rest on guaranteeing a single conclusion. Instead, it is justified by its statistical reliability over the long run. The scientific process, as a collective and ongoing endeavor, employs induction to correct its errors over time.

A "psychological" vs. "real" doubt: Peirce argued that Hume's skepticism relied on a "paper doubt," an artificial pretense of questioning everything. In contrast, Peirce's philosophy of pragmatism asserted that genuine doubt is triggered by genuine surprise or a disruption of a settled habit of belief. Since scientists have no genuine doubt that inductive reasoning produces valuable results, they are justified in continuing to use it.

Rejection of the search for absolute certainty: Peirce accepted that induction does not provide certain knowledge, but he argued that this is not its goal. The purpose of inquiry is not to reach absolute certainty, but rather to fix belief and approach the truth over time. He saw the rationalist search for absolute certainty through deduction as a futile dream.

The distinction between abduction, deduction, and induction: Peirce refined the traditional view of induction by splitting it into two distinct parts: abduction (generating hypotheses) and inductive confirmation (testing those hypotheses). For Peirce, induction is not a standalone method but part of a three-step cycle of scientific reasoning.

In summary, Peirce’s pragmatic perspective reframed the problem of induction. Instead of seeking a rational justification for why a single inductive inference should be trusted, he focused on the practical and statistical reliability of the inductive process as a whole. This process is used by a community of inquirers to progressively refine their beliefs over time, even if absolute certainty remains elusive.

Hah. Half your cites are people I knew and discussed their approaches with.

A model endures if it can be shown that it creates a system that actually possesses consciousness. — Wolfgang

This is where you already blew up your credibility.

It would be best to ask an organism whether it actually uses algorithms. — Wolfgang

You mean like, hey little cell, are you organised by a genetic code?

Hey little brain, are you organised by a neural code?

Hey little human, are you organised by both those and also now a linguistic code?

And then even – with suitable scientific and technological training – by the further level of world modelling that is a mathematical code?

So "consciousness" is a sloppy term for glossing over all four of these levels of semiosis that can pragmatically inform us what life and mind "are". Organisms don't "generate" states of awareness. They enact the various levels of the semiotic modelling relation that define being an organism in the world.

An approach that Friston almost wryly captures in talking about an organism maximising its self-information through the minimisation of its surprisal.

Consciousness, such as it is, boils down to a capacity to effectively ignore the world – as that world has already been predicted in terms of how it is flowing in the direction wanted.

So you are making the classic representationalist mistake of consciousness being some kind of veridical display. A glowing state of reality understanding.

You don't yet get what an enactive and embodied view of cognition would be about. Let alone the still deeper thing understood by the biologist – that all this semiotic action has to be harnessed to job of dissipating thermal gradients.

So brains are evolved as ways to predict the world – a world as a model of it would be if it has an "us" as its regulating centre. The more we don't have to pay attention to the world, the more we can simply emit learnt habits, the more we feel like a "self" that is doing just that. We hardly have to snap a finger and the world meets our expectations.

We want to lift a cup of hot tea to our lips and no thought at all appears required – although that was not something we could have said at the age of two or three. If instead we wobble and splash the tea, or smash the china rim clumsily into our teeth, then this error of prediction will be so surprising we will want to look around for someone or something else that can take the blame. Our sense of self will be that strong in terms of our Bayesian priors.

At least at the sociocultural level of semiosis where self-awareness itself arises as a model of the modeller in the act of reality modelling.

And again, you entirely miss the point about Friston. He being the cite who has made the most progress. At least in terms of turning the idea of the semiotic modelling relation that defines an organism into something that looks like an authentic branch of physical mechanics. Boiled down into a differential equation that a physicist would understand as a maximally generalised algorithm they could hope to do something with.

Like not "generating consciousness". Just understanding how life and mind do appear in Nature as an algorithmic habit seeking to insert itself into the entropic flows of the world.

So your demand for the “objective and best” inference has just been dropped?

It was never what was being claimed by Peirce in his critique of Humean induction?

Of course you won’t discuss this further. There is too much for you to learn before you could.

So an inference to the best explanation is actually an inference to any explanation? — Banno

It is the one that reveals itself in making quick progress. It has that balance between being causally general and empirically verifiable. One can already see how consequences can be deduced and predictions verified.

Any old guess could be a starting point. The null hypothesis indeed would be the gold standard. There is no actual effect as there is no cause. Whatever you think you are seeing, that is an accident. A spurious correlation.

But then a best guess is any guess coherent enough to get the inquiry started. The one to ride until something better comes along. If the guess Is properly constrained by the null hypothesis, then you can call yourself a scientist.

Still wrong. The maths of entropy/information elevates the level of abstraction to the point that contact can be made between the two sides of the equation. The fact that organisms are anticipatory models of their worlds and that these models are then examples of semiotic dissipative structures.

Consciousness exists because it serves the laws of thermodynamics. Or to put it in less substantial terms, biosemiosis exists as anticipatory modelling pays for its existence by being able to add novel dissipative structure to the entropic flow of the world.

The Bayesian algorithm describes how an organism in fact maintains a dynamical balance in this regard. At heart, life is the creation of a structured entropy flow. And the minimisation of surprisal is what keeps the organism humming along in stable fashion while also being perched right on the edge of the instability it is creating.

A mitochondrian is dealing with chemical forces that could simply blow it up at any moment. But it keeps its own genes close at hand to minimise the possibility of that.

Likewise the rock climber could fall at any minute. But hopefully keeps their wits about them at all times.

If you want to talk about theories of consciousness, it is best to start with those who understand it from the point of view of natural organic structure rather than information processing metaphors or tales about dualistic substance.

You don’t seem to understand Friston. And you seem to understand consciousness as a substance to be accounted for rather than as a process to be deflated. These two misunderstandings would be related.

What is consciousness more generally is the question you should have in mind. What is it in a sense that could be extended not just to neurobiology but biology - a scientific theory of both life and mind. And indeed sociology.

If you think of consciousness as a stuff to be explained - a fundamental essence - then you are already off track. We learnt that from considering life to have been a stuff, a vital essence, rather than an entropic physical process based on semiosis or the modelling relation that organisms have with their worlds.

But as I have laboriously set out, I move from the metaphysics of cause to the physics of cause. Or at least each informs the other, as it did with Aristotle. So that would be why the facts of quantum physics and relativity would inform any systems view of causality in the modern world. To fail to take account of them would be odd if one is serious about metaphysics and actually knowing things.

if philosophy simply means critical thought, then sure. Why not.

But history would suggest that ideologies are better evolved than invented.

Can you explain a little about that in relation to Hume's scepticism? — JuanZu

Sure. So semiosis speaks to pragmatic reality modelling at four levels. The construction of a model of the world as it is with “us” acting in it.

Even the genes are doing that in terms of making and maintaining a body and the metabolism that sustains it. The immune system, digestive system, hormone system, and all the other body systems are run by intelligence. A model of a self in its world. A set of habits of interpretance.

The Humean issue is framed at the level of science rather than sociology. It is about mathematico-logical semiosis rather than linguistic. Numbers rather than words.

It is not really a sociological issue, or even an neurobiological issue, although all levels of semiosis obviously rely on each other in hierarchical fashion. Genes have to do their job well to sustain a body that has the complexity for neurobiology to then add its level of difference. What use is a clever brain until it is in a body with free hands, for example. Or in a body that really needs extra intelligence to model the social world of a social animal.

So any semiotic relation with the world has some version of causation ain’t correlation. Yet history says evolution has gotten very good at this modelling business. Brains can figure out their environments in practice. If we want to understand the wherefores of epistemology, just see how nature does it.

Humans developed language as a new level of coding and reality modelling. We became socially constructed as members of a tribe, existing in a landscape with an ancestral history. An oral memory and a narrated sense of being selves in world alive with social intricacies.

A new level of semiosis that saw sapiens sweep the Neanderthals aside and colonise the planet. An oral lifestyle that was powered by foraging. One not too concerned with Humean worries about narrations just being narrations. One indeed quite unconcerned as the world seemed animistic - itself part of the collective subjectivity. The trees and the winds all shared our socialised state of mind.

So scepticism is something new that arises when we get to a still higher level of semiosis where the abstract and the concrete creep into the conversation. The idea of objective truth and how it might be secured. The two things we can be certain about because we have a logic to frame the structures that are our general abstractions and a number system to count the concrete particulars or name the material particulars.

Hume voiced a concern that spoke to the transition from a linguistic and sociological level of semiosis to this new rational and scientific level of semiosis. It became important that we were now having to draw a clear line between the subjectivity of our social selves in an oral world and our rational selves in a world demanding objectivity in terms of causal theories and concrete measurements. A strange new world of equations and variables.

Hume became important because he marked this historic crossing point. But once we got used to how this new level of world modelling operated, it soon became a familiar pragmatic habit and Hume’s worries a moment consigned to the history books.

We are now instead at a moment in epistemological theory where we can look back and see that semiosis - this modelling relation - is so general that it is even the basic theory of life and mind itself.

Friston’s Bayesian Brain and free energy principle even dare to put it into a differential equation itself. If your interest truly is in epistemology, it is now testable scientifically theory. Almost to the point of self-caricature.

And if you are still piddling around with Feyerabend, Wittgenstein and Davidson (who he?), then that’s so 1960s. Way behind the times.

What do you think philosophy could do in this situation? — Astorre

I think if you can see social structure as the expression of natural forces, then you will better understand the reality you must contend with. But then if that is your approach to philosophy, you probably would not go into philosophy in the first place. You would get into systems science. A more practical level to try to make change. :grin:

Major players are willing to calmly provoke, incite, and wage wars to advance their interests. We see how global powers, under the guise of good intentions, shape public opinion, support their preferred forces, and push for protests or suppression. And no side is "absolutely righteous." — Astorre

But is this a surprise? I suppose you could point to the level of public pretence we have got used to in international affairs. Trump might have changed norms there. Back to naked mercantilism and colonialism.

However also, face does matter for nations. The pretence needs to be in place just to feel good about yourself even at national level. Trump after all really seems to care about a Nobel peace prize.

So what is the question here? It just seems natural to me that every nation would spin its own self-centred narrative about events in the larger world. And also that information war to influence the internal perceptions of other nations has been going on ever since it became practical as an objective. As in the BBC world service and the ability to bounce radio broadcasts around the world.

for Existence has no opposite — PoeticUniverse

What about persistence?

I prefer persistence to existence as it speaks to reality as a process of coming into formed being rather than some existence that just has a stolid and unexplained material presence.

How's that? — Banno

All very linguistic. Meanwhile semiotics generalises this to the level of all the codes that are the basis of our interpretative habits. Genetic, neural, linguistic and logical.

An example where the lie was found out and the social order collapsed as a result would be the USSR. — Leontiskos

The USSR collapsed not because it was too Marxist but because the vigour and paranoia of the liberal west out-competed it. The USSR functioned reasonably well and at least achieved the main aim of clambering aboard the rapidly industrialising world. But it was fundamentally inefficient rather than fundamentally a lie.

I would argue that one cannot believe something and not believe something at the same time. Or that it will at least lead to problems. — Leontiskos

That is why we have ambiguity. Logic demands that we don't. But then that is why Peirce had add vagueness to logic. That to which the PNC does not apply.

Between absolute belief and absolute disbelief. I would say in practice that is where we all should sit. Even if the counterfactual grammar of logic doesn't like it.

When I speak of those who are "doctrinally earnest" I am thinking of Locke, or of the Founders of liberal regimes in 1776 or 1789. — Leontiskos

Well it's true. I never met them. :grin:

He is relying on the research of Frans de Waal. — Leontiskos

I've studied all this. His Chimpanzee Politics was one of my own go-to cites. Then he also wrote Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape. So even in a species split by a river, we have two contrasting examples of what dominance~submission looks like. Just a difference between open bush and denser forest has its ecological impact on the social politics that emerge as the optimising fit.

Dominance~submission may be the natural dynamic. But it plays out with all the variety of its many different settings.

So the dynamic has the simplicity of a dichotomy. And then also the variety of the one principle that can emerge as the balancing act that suits every occasion.

But I want to ask why you see this as "the seed of a liberal order"? What is the signification of "liberal" in that sentence? Are you saying that social narrative is key to human success, and liberalism promotes social narrative? Or perhaps that liberalism promotes the proper kinds of social narrative? — Leontiskos

Liberal democracy clearly promotes discussion about the socially constructed nature of society. That is the liberating thought. Hey guys, we invented this system. And if it seems shit, we can therefore invent something better.

Okay, and what does the favored form of "neutrality" balance? What are we to be neutral with respect to? — Leontiskos

By neutral, I mean in the dynamical systems sense of being critically poised. Ready to go vigourously in opposing directions as the need demands. So we have to have some central state from which to depart in counterfactual directions.

Neutrality is not a state of passivity. It is the most extreme form of potency as you can swing either way with equal vigour. Which is what makes you choice of direction always something with significance and meaning.

A passively neutral person is a very dull fellow. An actively neutral person is centred and yet always ready to act strongly in either direction. Be your friend, be your enemy. Act as the occasion appears to demand and then switch positions just as fast if something changes.

So neutrality at the level of an egalatarian social democracy is about promoting equal opportunity for all, but then also allowing everyone to suffer or enjoy the consequences of their own actions. Make their own mistakes and learn from them.

Within then socially agreed limits. A social safety net below and a tax and justice system above. A liberal society would aim to mobilise its citizens as active participants of that society, yet still impose a constraining balance on the overall outcomes. Winning and losing is fine. Just so long as it is kept within pragmatically useful bounds.

So now I am wondering if we agree that the fictions should be made transparent? Or are you just saying that now that the fictions are being laid bare we have an opportunity to recalibrate our direction? — Leontiskos

Well you seem to be calling social constructions fictions. So I can go along with that. They are community narratives. And they did start out as mythologies. But then even stories of ancestral spirits were fairly accurate oral records keeping a useful structure of belief alive.

So in my view, fiction and truth is already – under pragmatism – a line that is blurred. That is why semiotics speaks of experience as an Umwelt. Our models of the world have to be the model of a world that also includes the central thing of our self in the thick of it. We are socially constructed. And that is what we are socially constructing.

Once you get this level of self-awareness of what we individually are, then true and false becomes a little beside the fact as a logicist judgement.

Worrying about that is what leads to the existentialist crisis. It cripples many people. Wondering whether they are ever managing to express their true inner selves in a world where they only encountering others wearing the same social masks.

How can one be true to oneself in a world where the shared project of social-construction is what one must actively participate in?

Well my argument is that "liberalism" is the promise of that kind of world. Or rather pragmatism.

Liberalism of course wound up including a huge dollop of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment project. Every thesis needs its antithesis and so hope for some kind of resolving synthesis.

But what goes wrong is not setting up the social machinery to resolve a social systems necessary internal contradictions. Liberalism wound up polarised by reason and emotion, science and faith, and all the rest. At the level of ideology, it remained Cartesian. It had to respect the Church as the household in which science grew up in.

In a truly pragmatic country, reason and emotion would be balanced in the way that they are in neurobiology. Cognition assessing the situation. Physiology priming for action in the best direction. From the poise of a centred self, the strong and purposeful choices that can get made. But which don't characterise the self as being just whatever was some choice at some time.

You can have political parties divided by left and right. Liberal and conservative. Working class and managerial class. But then the system as a whole is free to pick and choose how it acts from this range of options. Identities aren't tied to particular solutions. Everyone can see that pragmatism is what is winning in the general long run. Life doesn't feel broken at the social level, and thus at the individual level.

Things are not so clear cut as they might seem. — Banno

Or instead, the subjective basis of our cognitive projects is stating the bleeding obvious. We can move swiftly on to the how and the why when it comes to digging ourselves out of this mire.

We are no longer animals as we now reason at a collective social level. But then beyond that everyday manufacturing of consent, we can even transcend "sociology" by cultivating the habits of pragmatic inquiry.

Anglo logicism was of course another story of an early enthusiasm for logic chopping and reductionist metaphysics way over-shooting the mark. It needed a Jesus figure in a flawed Wittgenstein who first sinned and then repented. Sort of was working his way back to pragmatism, but in confused bits and scraps, such was the horror of being caught out again by a totalising enterprise.

Peirce – in the paper I just cited – set off on the right foot as he began his logical investigations at the level of neurobiology. The new psychological research of his day on how nervous systems form their habits of interpretance. This just was starting from the right place as evolution invented thinking of any kind first.

If we are talking about the practical way that most people arrive at beliefs, then I think the best work on the subject is John Henry Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, where he develops his "illative sense" among other things. — Leontiskos

Thanks for the pointer. Newman and Peirce were saying much the same thing. Peirce developed it more broadly as the mathematical logic – introducing his sign of illation – that then justified his pragmatic approach to truth.

There is Peirce's On the Algebra of Logic as one reference.

But then I also really like Kauffmann's teasing paper, The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce.

It seems to me that it actually means putting one's own non-conspiracy narrative at risk. Starting from the belief that the narrative is obviously wrong, is adopting a stance from which it is impossible to do this. — Ludwig V

Exactly.

One should also consider whether constructing and presenting an argument may be an ill-advised approach, because it puts the "conspirator" on the defensive, which makes it more difficult for them to recognize the weaknesses and implausibility of their theory. — Ludwig V

Or unfortunately, any argument won't "compute" as there is not that kind of disciplined structure in the heads of those you might want to argue it out with.

And in general, society is built more on folk not asking the probing questions. Of themselves, let alone others. Religion, culture, politics and economics all want to place their own limits on rational inquiry. There is much that must be taken simply on faith and belief for society to continue to function smoothly in some customary fashion.

Sometimes, the best policy is not to engage, but to change the subject. — Ludwig V

Which is why forums like PF would have value. There are now so many triggering subjects out there in the general population that it is nice to have the kind of unguarded and non-defensive discussions we have seen in threads such as this.

I jest of course! :smile:

20th century Cosmology traced the path of measurable finite causes, energy exchanges, back to a mathematical Singularity. — Gnomon

In fact what Penrose showed was that all the useful structure of fundamental of physics would break down if you pushed it to an actual zero point. And what instead saves it is that all of that physics rather neatly converges on the unit 1 that is the Planck point. The point at which the three fundamental constants of nature - c, G and h - become unified and have the one absolute value.

So extrapolating linearly to zero fails. But extrapolating non-linearly to 1 gives you a “first cause” that is an irreducible triadic relation. The dichotomy of h and G, scaled by c as its inverting connection.

The general mistake that is being made is thinking that h and G need to be reduced even further. That two must be made one. Relativity has to be expressed as a quantum field theory where gravitons exist as themselves free fluctuations of the quantum foam.

If you have two fundamental theories, then one has to be made the more fundamental and so allow the other to be derived from it.

But that is not how dichotomies work. They come as reciprocating pairs. They are unit 1 composites and not unit 0 fundamentality. Existence begins at a level that is already a relation in action, not when nothing becomes a first something.

But he's made errors in his analysis: errors we can identify by presenting my own IBE. This could entail identifying additional facts, debunking falsehoods he accepts (through another IBE), identifying implausible background assumptions he's making. This would be MY subjective IBE, but if I've done it correctly, I expect it would persuade any rational person to drop their belief in this conspiracy. — Relativist

But my argument is to point out that this is no longer abduction but the full Peircean reasoning cycle - and so the one that hopes to arrive at the most objective possible answer, given that nothing can be absolutely known and just placed safely enough beyond reasonable doubt.

So if someone has a sketchy conspiratorial IBE, then your offering of further deductive consequences and their checkable facts is what ought to expose the conspiracy and give inductive confirmation for your own preferred interpretation.

However do we expect people to be so rational that they can indeed change their “beliefs” when confronted by a more organised causal narrative?

Conspiracy theorists are usually invested in some shared community narrative, as in the establishment always lies and so - IBE - must have good reasons for all the cover-ups we see. And the fairly objective truth is that governments and corporations and the elite do routinely lie - even though it may be for good intentions or because it makes their lives simpler.

So if you want to argue a counter-narrative, it has to engage with the conspirator’s structure of belief on what may be its own well-structured level. A third party might find your IBE to be an argument from political naivety even if your family member’s IBE is the more sloppily developed and unlikely for what seem like commonsense reasons.

So yes. IBE is how we always have to get the game going. If catshit is found on the carpet, we will jump to the obvious conclusion. The cat did it rather than the CIA or little green men.

But abduction is simply the first step of a properly rational response. To check it out in scientific fashion, we need the pincer movement of constructing a theory - a complete causal model - and then tying that to the inductive confirmation. Adding sufficient correlation to our story about a causation.

Circling back to Hume, this shows that “only correlations” is the feature and not the bug of pragmatic reasoning. It is not the problem that is defeating our hopes of truth and making “everything sociology” as our dopey PoMo teaching assistant would have it. Instead, it is the business of making measurements in a way that could even secure the causal model we have deduced.

Measuring the world is an art. Peirce well knew this given that his paid job was setting measurement standards for what became the US National Bureau of Standards.

What can count as a fact is its own kettle of fish. So even correlations are epistemically subjective. On the same level as our causal theories.

Some fool might claim it an objective fact that Australia's highest mountain is Mount Kosciuszko, standing at 2,228 meters above sea level. But who determines even the level of the sea when that is always changing by even meters. And bits are always crumbling off mountains.

So correlations are only as good as the theoretical presumptions being built into the constructions of the facts as in fact some set of logical counterfactuals.

We build the measuring instrument. It is essentially a switch. The switch either flipped or it didn’t and now we have our reading. A number on a dial. We can plug that into our probabilistic model and add a sigma confidence interval to properly secure its status as a correlative fact. It can be deemed as true for all practical purposes.

So Hume is always being trotted out. But that is simply a useful point to kick off the tutorial. Most of us have heard it all many times before. Only the teaching assistant seems to never learn from the regular rehearsal of the same old arguments.

I didn't start the conversation about me. — Banno

:lol: :lol: :lol:

Awhile back there was a wild thread where Banno chastised his wayward students, insinuating that the deplorables were forcing him into private message conversations. — Leontiskos

Yes. The advantage of PF over the more focused private chats one might have with one's peers is that it is so wide open and the challenges come from all directions. That's what I like. Having to fend off all possible viewpoints. The uncontrolled element is the greatest part of the appeal.

But to come on PF and find someone fussing about like a prim substitute teacher, trying to make a class of larrikins stick to the kind of syllabus that would have been acceptable to a 1960s Oxbridge don, is a major irritation.

Your engaging in yet an another conversation about me instead of about my arguments is gratifying. It implies you have no were left to go. — Banno

Oh and that is the other annoying thing. Everything truly has to be about him in egocentric fashion. He really is gratified as even being scorned is still being noticed.

And as you say, show us the argument. Earn the respect. Take your chances along with the rest of us.

And is the "medium" you speak of conspiratorial thinking, or something else? — Leontiskos

I just suggested watching Owens on Charlie Kirk for two reasons. The first is as a polished example of the new media. Tucker Carlson and Fox News in general turned conspiracy theory into a powerfully profitable and self-sustaining industry. Now you have huge money going into self-organising YouTube communities where the viewers get to be part of the reporting team.

Everyone is tied into a tight circle where the skill at discovering conspiracies improves for all. You are not just passively viewing Fox and its weirdos. You are being drawn into the industry in an active way.

The other thing is then how there is so much information to keep the story going. Every event has so much cell phone footage from so many angles, or citizens sleuths running around interviewing each other, immediately finding all the strange coincidences that are going to be there to be found. With so many involved on the ground, there are swiftly any number of dots for a conspiracy theory to join.

I think that's part of the reason why he got so quiet after seeing his own theories debunked by his own authorities. — Leontiskos

Even months ago, AI gave a lot of shit answers. Good only for a laugh. But now it is becoming very useful for self factchecking.

Of course, you then have to be in the habit of self factchecking. :smile:

Banno feels like he is here to run the cosy introductory philosophy tutorials of his fond memory. That would be why he treats us like confused first year students having to retread the well worn paths of ancient debates. We are allowed to speak, but as tutor, he gets to steer and gently reveal our neophyte errors of thought. We should be warmly appreciative of his condescension. And learn to stick closely to areas where he has already prepared the answers.

Note --- I interpret First Cause to be logically & necessarily eternal & intentional Essence instead of temporal & accidental Substance. — Gnomon

I am arguing against any strong notion of first cause.

Take the example of spontaneous symmetry breaking. A pencil balanced on its point. A ball resting perfectly still on the peak of a dome.

These are states of perfect potentiality that are also critically unstable. Poised and inevitably about to be broken. The pencil will fall. The ball will roll down. The direction is random, but the outcome is certain.

And what is the cause of the fall or the roll? Absolutely anything. The smallest vibration or the least random knock from some air molecule. The first cause must exist. But also it could have been anything. So nothing was very special about it.

That would be the standard physical example of the kind causal situation I am talking about. What comes first is just the poised tension of a potential so general that absolutely any fluctuation could send it down the hill towards its inevitable destiny.

Then appreciate how this relates to what I'm saying about IBEs. My explanation is "better". — Relativist

Sure. And I was talking about how it would be better. What “best” might mean.

I don't know much about her, so I checked Wikipedia. — Relativist

I mentioned her as an example of conspiracy theory going mainstream in a more potent fashion.

In fact MMA is much safer than boxing. — Colo Millz

Yep. I said boxing was in fact the deadlier. :up:

I don't agree with this first one, namely that all societies must construct some such transcendent fiction, but if it were true then the society would no longer function once the "cat is out of the bag" and the fiction is known to be a fiction, — Leontiskos

Where is the evidence for this in history? Which religion or even political structure because it was discovered to be a fiction? The Catholic Church lives on. Marxism too.

The reason is that truth can be transcendent even after the facts seem to have abandoned it. So God might not be real. But if society is better organised under His name, then I could live with that.

Anglicanism seems to have gone with that. The Brits also preserved the romance of having a monarchy. The nobility of running an imperial empire as a colonial trade network. In a lot of ways, the UK brand of liberalism thrived as it relied on this quite adaptive mix of transcendent authority. The US by contrast always felt officious and ill at ease with itself. Never actually a land of those feeling much freedom.

So God can be a fiction. The King can be a fiction. A Commonwealth can be a fiction. Everyone can see that and still find it a more useful truth if it binds everyone to a shared sense of social order.

The fiction isn’t the problem. The issue is whether the fiction can evolve in productive fashion.

So on this theory I gather that we could not return to an outdated uber-narrative which has now been debunked, given that it no longer possesses the necessary plausibility to function. Does the neutrality of the liberal state still possess the necessary plausibility to function? — Leontiskos

But how close did we ever get to implementing that neutrality? We certainly seemed to be doing well for a time in my experience of living in various social democracies of colonial stamp.

But then the US took over the world reins. The pragmatic fictions of the Brits were turned into the properly fictions ones of the Yanks. Bush invading Iraq as it had brought down the Twin Towers and needed the salvation of democracy and freedom. Or life as it is meant to be lived under big business and evangelicalism.

liberalism professes the lie of neutrality with a doctrinal earnestness. — Leontiskos

I’ve sat with those in high office and their aims are far more pragmatic. Thatcher might have been more of the doctrinal stripe. Or she might just have had a middle class distaste of working class power and a matching love of the aristocratic elite.

But I’ve seen more interest in how to implement properly neutral public policy than doctrinal fervour. At least by choosing to live in a country as near the ideal as it could be in the world as it has become.

First, I would note that Jordan Peterson is constantly talking about group dynamics through the perspective of primatologists who debunked the idea that "gang boss" dominance (tyrannical social ordering) is common among primates. I don't recall the details… — Leontiskos

Yep. I have studied the details. I know the differences and also the similarities between bonobos and chimps. I wouldn’t leap to citing Peterson as my source. But RIchard Wrangham I recently mention in this light.

If that's right and even primates can manage to avoid "local gang boss" hierarchies, then I don't see why ideational humans would need special help from fictional narratives. — Leontiskos

Read why Richard Wrangham calls us the self-domesticating ape.

That is, they attempt to provide rational grounds for avoiding tyrannical social orderings instead of resorting to a fictional narrative. Does that route seem unpromising to you for some reason? — Leontiskos

Nope. I thought that reason would always triumph. That is the way I was brought up. But then I studied the socially constructed nature of reason. And then its modern politically and economically constructed nature.

Again I would cite Fukuyama as his three volumes on comparative world political structure is what really brings the message home.

The problem for liberalism is when it justifies itself under the old rubric of the good, the true, the beautiful, the almighty. The fiction is being rubbed in your face. One is being asked to worship at the base of a flag and recite an oath of obedience. Literal submission to a flapping bit of cloth.

I would gag at that. I prefer a country where no one really knows the national anthem and can’t even be sure whether the flag is their own or their neighbours,

My idea of liberal transcendent principle is pragmatism. A bit like Buddhism in being what you practice rather than what you preach. But an ideal worth the effort.

There are other dynasties that far surpass liberalism, including Islam, China, Rome, and perhaps Christianity if it is separable from liberalism.

Presumably you are claiming that liberalism sits atop the mountain at this point in history, therefore it has won — Leontiskos

If have to defend some transcendent principle, it would be pragmatism rather than liberalism - social or economic.

Liberalism has only won in the sense that it scales. It has outpaced the others in terms of growth in being stripped down to take risks and gamble on what burning a planet’s worth of resources can deliver.

So sure, other dynasties have their successes, especially to the degree they tended towards pragmatism and found ways to counter autocracy and corruption.

But liberalism was what lit a rocket under the world. And surely I am as big of critic of that as much as you. I never said might makes right. I’ve always said healthy balance is what we should seek. Unrestrained growth without a matching sense of direction doesn’t sound like a viable plan to me.

The really interesting point with Islam is that it explicitly presented propagation/scaling as an argument for its own legitimacy, and the more territory it conquered, the more often it adverted to this argument. This form of "pragmatism" is common among many ancient dynasties. — Leontiskos

So the Islamic caliphate ambition puts it among the sophisticates of world order. Along with Putin”s Greater Russia and China’s end to its 100 years of humiliation?

I don’t think judging civilisations on sophistication is a great metric. Nor even on a metric of its global extent at the expense of its local diversity.

Growth is good. But then so is equality. So judgement ought to be about the ability of a political system to balance its own natural contradictions. We can line them all up and judge them just on that.

Specifically, I think it would be easy to argue that it is not true that liberalism is theoretically or historically superior to other social orderings; and I don't know that a dominance-submission problem exists such that it needs to be answered with fictional narratives. — Leontiskos

I stick to what I said. But perhaps what I say is clearer now?

Dominance-submission was an evolutionary problem for social organisation as it doesn’t scale. Homo sapiens took off just as the most successful foragers on the planet as they evolved the level of grammatical language to narratise the landscape they lived in. Turn the world into a place of ancestral history and custom. The land became organised over a vastly greater sense of space and time. It became possible to imagine life as an extended network of fighting and trading, raiding and sharing. Competing and cooperating.

The Neanderthals lived in small isolated bands. Sapiens rolled over the landscape in a sudden wave of social narrative. They wave swept across everywhere until it laid claim to the planet as its ancestral heritage. A place to be organised by war and trade. The seed of liberal order. An order that was good to the degree it could negotiate the internal contradictions that so powerfully drove it.

The argument from someone like yourself is apparently that liberalism is superior precisely because of its values, and at that point it could be argued that the fictional neutrality could be dropped given the wide recognition of the legitimacy of liberal values. — Leontiskos

But neutrality is about a balance. One that needs the always larger view that can encompass the necessary contradictions. And so to be “humanity”, we need to socially construct that transcendent point of view. That is what the collective narrative has always been about.

Pragmatism just exposes the mechanics of how this is done in a post-foraging and post-agrarian world. We can appreciate the mechanism in its own rational terms. It the fictions are transparent, then at least they can be critiqued.

Given your rudeness and ridicule, why should I respond to your posts? Your worldview strikes me as sophistic bullshit. — Banno

I realise you would prefer a public fluffing and then you might graciously dole out your little morsels of Davidsonian wisdom mixed in with exciting news about what you have planned for lunch.

But sorry that ain’t happening. I’m here for the contest of ideas. Not to play your popularity competition. The good old days of like buttons and bragging about the inordinate length of your threads.

If you want my respect, it has to be earnt, Show up with an argument. And make it interesting. Give that a try.

That'd be more a "how" than a "why". — Banno

Yep, one can’t avoid dichotomising. But it is the unifying that separates the reductionists from the holists.

How and why don’t have to be a dilemma - two disconnected monisms. Anomalous monisms indeed. They can instead be the two limits of inquiry. As in the material and formal causes of substantial being. Aristotle’s hylomorphism.

How always needs a why, and why always needs a how. So no dilemma. Just the opposing bounds on inquiry that we then bring back together to account for the whole. :up:

Hence Melina Tsapos' conspiracy definition dilemma. — Banno

Reductionism is always caught on the horns of a dilemma. Just as for PoMo, everything is mired in self-refuting paradox.

There is a reason why the unity of opposites is the more reasonable totalising framework when it comes to a metaphysical ground for our habits of mind.

I gave my family member's reasoning, and mind. Don't you agree mine is more reasonable? — Relativist

Of course. But I was discussing conspiracy theorising in general. As in the sociologic context of what can count as legitimate belief.

In the modern world, is your anti-conspiratorial stance still the legitimate thing? Can the truth even be secured without accepting a dash of conspiratorial doubt given the fact that even the well intentioned have reason to gloss over or edit the facts as they might exist.

If correlation ain’t causation, well what if even correlation ain’t much of a fact either. Even description can’t ground truth.

All this arises from my point that truth is a pincer movement. We can make objective measurements, but even these become subjective facts. So pragmatism requires we also do equal work on the causal explanation side. We must have grounded logic - that pesky all-encompassing theory of everything.

The best we can do is play the two sides of this dichotomy off against each other. Conspiracy theories show how the facts are always irreducible ambiguous. We can’t rely absolutely on them. But where conspiracy theory falls down is often on some grounding holism of causal logic.

We could ask if the world really works in a way where it is reasonable that Charlie Kirk was popped at close range with some kind of special bullet fired by Azov regiment agents on the behest of Israeli forces, with Tyler Robinson set up as the patsy with AI doctored footage of him clambering of a rooftop, etc?

Anything is possible. So the burden shifts to what - by logical constraint - remains credible.

We can pretend life is a science project or learn to assess situations in more pragmatic fashion. A skill becoming more necessary everyday it seems.

But again my point is how even for conspiracy theories, it cuts both ways. We are in a new media era where there is vastly more individual capacity to data mine and fact check. We can find out what is real about public events to a degree that we couldn’t before. That should be a good thing. And couple that power to a general rationality - an ability to step back with a world view that asks, well what are the odds - then conspiracy thinking could morph into something valuable. Producing needed social change.

I’m not giving Candace Owen high marks as yet. I just think this is a very interesting space. Especially if AI could be a neutral judge on the balance of the odds. The media has always evolved. But the pace of that is now really fast. And theories of truth need to keep up to date.

Regularities are a brute fact, perhaps. — Ludwig V

Or rather, there is a pragmatic need to be able distinguish the contingent from the necessary. The differences that make a difference from the differences that don’t.

Neurocognition tells us how we are organised to sift the world into the facts we must attend to and the facts we can safely ignore.

Facts ain’t any kind of facts until they have been properly dichotomised along those semiotic lines.

So one example would be the shift from the popularity of WWF and WWE to the popularity of MMA. — Leontiskos

Yep. Another resonating point. Especially as before Trump was on The Apprentice, he was part of WWE.

I used to like old school boxing but find modern MMA unwatchable. One claimed to showcase the skill, the other only the brutality. Though boxing was the deadlier sport in fact.

Games of dominance and submission. That is the genetic legacy that civilisation must build over. And to which civilisation can swiftly return. As again Trump is showing.

Boxing presented us the civilised and dignified face. Wrestling was the watered down, dress up version suited to kid’s TV. Now there is cage fighting - the old bare knuckle brawl - gone mainstream.

And Trump running the hegemonic power as a planetary dominance and submission reality show.

he popularity distribution will be a bell curve between non-conspiratorial material and excessively conspiratorial material. The sweet spot must still mind the further extreme, and truth or plausibility is one of the central variables governing that sweet spot. — Leontiskos

I completely agree. That is why I focus on Candace Owens as a particular case in point. The medium is evolving fast. It is too easy to dismiss it for its history on the fringes and its WWE levels of believability.

But when you introduce magnifiers like YouTube or AI it's hard to know whether the pendulum will swing in the same manner it has in the past, or if a new dynamic will emerge. — Leontiskos

My suggestion is that the media may evolve but it always becomes what power must capture and control. And that exists in tension with the power of the people to resist.

So the printing press at first liberated people power - taking back the written world from the social elite. Then it became the tool of class factions and eventually the liberal order, such as it was.

How is the internet likely to fare in that regard? How do things go as even social media crashes into the new AI paradigm.

That is why I now toy with AI as the instant fact checker on PF opinion. It is interesting to introduce a neutral referee into this little social game of dominance and submission. To understand where things might go, one must experiment with the new forms. :razz: