I find it interesting that this comes out of an electrical engineering background because I had always thought there were some neat similarities between Hegel's Logic (a similar sort of project) and Claude Shannon's Mathematical Theory of Information (coming from electrical engineering).

A code with just a single undifferentiated signal carries no information. We can conceive of this as a single 1 observed/received an infinite number of times, or an infinite series of 1s. They both convey the same information, which is no information. There is no variance, all observations are identical and thus contentless.

Thus, pure undifferentiated signal, like Hegel's pure immediacy, pure undifferentiated being, collapses into nothing. Being and non-being are opposites and yet pure being collapses into nothing.

But this nothing is not empty, we have all being contained here, just devoid of determinateness. So this is like a sound wave on an oscilloscope. It's not the absence of a wave, but rather a wave of infinite frequency and amplitude. As we approach the limit of frequency, the peaks and troughs get closer and closer together, until eventually they are in the same place, cancelling each other out. This is a silence, but one that is pregnant.

The move to difference is what gives us more. From reading 1, over and over, to the combination of 1 and 0. Or as Hegel has it, being sublates nothing and we get the world of becoming, where being is constantly passing away into nothingness.

Oh, and vis-á-vis the "what is logic?" thread, this also explains why the world is intelligible. Life could only arise in an ordered world and consciousness can only fathom a world with a certain type of order. So of course, whenever we observe the world it collapses into just the sort of world that fits with our "laws of thought." That is, in this case, the causal arrow can go from "mind + rules of thought" to "how the world is," rather than the other way.

If I've done proofs via induction using addition, doesn't this show that I've taken addition all the way to the infinite in the past?

That or I smugly pull out a crumpled sheet of paper from my pocket with the Peano Axioms written on them. I inform the skeptic that, as a good positivist, I only preform arithmetic by starting from this sheet and working up from there. "Show me how it is possible to derive quusing from these axioms and I will accept your proposition."

Still, I get the point. Defining systems only in terms of past use seems to miss something.

Some of this can be supported by research, and probably some of it can't yet, but it's the overall story I lean toward these days. The inferences that we think of as 'belief formation' aren't really much like any sort of formal logic, so there's no such process that would be isomorphic to some logical structure of nature.

What do you think of computational theory of mind? I'm not totally sold on it, but it remains the most popular theory of how consciousness emerges (Integrated Information Theory is fairly similar too).

If these theses are mostly true, then logic absolutely can be used to describe all our beliefs and how we come to them, since these theories take mind to be a product of computation. It's simply that forming such a complete description of how said computation works is very difficult because parallel processing is harder to follow and because we're talking about quadrillions of operations per second (at lower end estimates).

Even single-cell organisms can display behavior we might as well call 'rational' in avoiding danger and seeking nutrients. But they don't deal in reasons and persuasion and counter-arguments and counter-examples and all that stuff that logic is useful for.

If computation is symbolic manipulation based on logical rules then it seems like simple organisms use computation all time time. But I get your point. It squares with views that computation only occurs in virtue of a human observers recognizing a process as such. E.g., "Chat GPT doesn't "compute," computing is just a label we project on to what the machines running the program are doing."

This particular example I find puzzling because the same thing can be said about all our concepts. For example, "burning" is a human concept and label we attach to a class of phenomena. All incidences of combustion are actually different events, but we don't tend to say "wood doesn't really burn." I suppose the difference here is supposed to be that computation necessarily requires intentionality, but I've never been convinced about why this should be the case. My phone seems to compute.

I find the "computation requires intentionality," view less convincing because I haven't seen one that can define how sentient an observer needs to be before they can "view computation," nor one that explains why mental constructs should be causally disconnected from the rest of the world. Presumably, under intentional versions of computation, when my cat is looking at my computer, it doesn't see something that is computing. Likewise, when my son plays with my phone, he doesn't understand that it is computing, so for him it isn't computing. But how well does he have to understand the process before he is projecting computation onto the phenomena? This is not a way we tend to think about other processes such as combustion or acceleration. "Reading" might be analogous though: does a ribosome "read" DNA? Does a license plate scanner "read" license plates?

In biology, the idea that simple organisms compute is fairly mainstream. If a bacteria computes, then there is a sense in which logic, or a very similar sort of thing, plays a role in organisms that we tend to think lack intentionality and social organization, at least in any way that is qualitatively like our own.

But in biology and biosemiotics there is often a move to cut off the definition of "computation," at the domain of life. Cells compute, self-replicating silicone crystals do not. Digital computers might compute, but only in virtue of their having been designed by living things.

The problem here is that the definition of life is squishy, and this doesn't seem that much less arbitrary than saying computation and logical manipulation only occur in organisms that are "sentient and social enough."

Plus, paired with findings that give rise to the popularity of computational theory of mind, the view of computation as something that only occurs in sentient consciousness starts to get a little wonky. Presumably, I am computing if I am not a math wiz and have to consciously think about the steps involved in summing some list of figures. But then am I not computing if the entire process happens unconsciously and I just know the outcome by glancing at the symbols? Do I compute when I consciously try to read French, but acomputationally experience when the meanings of English words fly into my awareness with no conscious effort? If unconconcious computation is possible within a human, it seems harder to justify it not existing outside the mind. But then knowing the answer to 3+7, 2+2, etc. doesn't seem to require anything conscious or intentional on our part.

While I absolutely agree with your example being a sort of special case, I think it is special for different reasons. It is a case where we can say "given A, B, C, D... Z," where that gives us a fully enumerated set of rules, the game works like "this." But that's because we are taking the rules as axiomatic, infallible to change or challenge regardless of changing states of affairs in the world.

Since, in any deduction, the information in the conclusion must be in the premises, these sorts of special cases amount to cases where: "given X is true, x must be true."

But of course some Chess rules do vairy by locale, the 3/6 rule, the hand-piece move, etc., because Chess is an actual game in the world.

Since Chess has had its rules radically changed over the centuries, I don't think it's impossible that they'll keep changing, but the game will still be Chess, just like basketball will still be basketball if they ever add the four point line they have tested.

We can be fallible about Chess because people might play differently in different areas. This happens all the time with Monopoly, which I feel like everyone plays slightly different. When I was a kid we used to play Chess in school, but we had it so you could capture the king if someone neglected to move out of check. I told them this wasn't legal, but no one liked victory by checkmate because it made games last too long. So local Chess there involved capturing the king (which Chess used to allow anyhow).

USCF actually does have slightly different rules than FIDE, and FIDE has found itself forced to do moratoriums on changing the rules of Chess as recently as the 80s and rules do still change, although these tend to be not very important for low level players. FIDE actually tried and gave up on developing a universal set of rules that wouldn't vary by region and interpretation of translations of their rules.

Division by zero flipping from being infinite to undefined, while still remaining infinite in some use cases and coding languages is another such a example where the formalism seems rigid until it isn't.

Sure, but I'm not sure what that has to do with the homuncular elements of indirect realism, i.e., the conception that we experience the world by "watching, hearing, etc." representations and thinking about them. Of course we have an experience of an overarching mind. Then again, a lot of evidence suggests this "unified whole," is a lot less unified than we suppose, the result of cognitive blind spots. This idea has been around in philosophy for a while too: Hume's "bundle of sensations," Nietzsche's "congress of souls," Buddhist anattā, Blind Brain Theory, and is built off experiments with split brained individuals, blindsight, etc.

The second side of arguments against indirect realism argue that they simply throw up a false dichotomy between experience nature. Nature is "out there," while representation is "in here," and representation is directly accessible. It's the old Kantian dualism, perhaps now framed as only an epistemic dualism. But where is the delineating line here? Does representation start at the retina? But photoreceptors do their thing the same way even if they have been removed from the animal they are a part of or are grown in isolation.

So the renewed view on direct realism mostly is about whether the indirect part of indirect realism is actually useful for understanding sensory systems at all. While at the same time there is the question "in what way does it make sense to attempt to separate things in this way in the first place."

What Hegel is saying in the quotes is that, the very idea that "here is my image of the tree, and out there is the tree in itself," is a moment, a representation, that occurs within consciousness, for consciousness. There is no such divide outside consciousness. If you look at mechanistic accounts of neuroscience for instance, you're seeing the same causal processes and information flowing in the same ways "inside" and "outside." That the brain is "doing information processing," is completely unexceptional in the information theoretic conceptions of physics, and neither is the essentially relational nature of the interactions; these principles show up everywhere.

Actually, it's not making the mistake, so much as pointing out the mistake. I think the same can be said with the other passages I mentioned (although of course to really verify that would mean going back and looking at them in context.) I agree with every word in your cited text, but then it does capture the critical Kantian point. (I also note how thoroughly the phrase 'the view from nowhere' has become part of the lexicon, thanks to Thomas Nagel, I think.)

Makes sense to me. Context is tricky in that way.

So when you say 'there is no reason to think that objectivity is actually equivalent with truth', then you're articulating the critical attitude, not the attitude of those for whom there is no criterion of truth other than objectivity - that being the naive realist!

Well this is the other tricky part. The direct realist is not necessarily the naive realist. My biggest gripe with many versions of indirect realism is that they seem to assume that "we" exist, sitting somewhere inside our heads, to view images created by some sort of unconscious "representation creation apparatus." But cognitive science doesn't favor such a homuncular explanation; there is no "consciousness center" that has all sensory information flowing to it. Rather, there is a lot of parallel processing and interconnectedness at every step of perception. Moreover, what we're consciously aware of depends heavily on what we're paying attention too, so the elements of incoming sensory data that gets "represented to" consciousness varies quite a bit. This makes it seem more like we are the representation more than being something that observes it.

And I can see an argument for a more direct form of realism that says that, while of course one doesn't think without a mind of see without eyes, what we experience is nature, of which we are a part. Indirect realism then draws a false distinction between representation and the "I" that experiences the representation on the one hand, and the mind and nature on the other.

Plus, if things exist through their interactions with other things, relationally, then our knowledge of a thing is part of its being (and ours).

As Big Heg puts it:

Suppose we call knowledge the notion, and the essence or truth “being” or the object, then the examination consists in seeing whether the notion corresponds with the object. But if we call the inner nature of the object, or what it is in itself, the notion, and, on the other side, understand by object the notion qua object, i.e. the way the notion is for an other, then the examination consists in our seeing whether the object corresponds to its own notion. It is clear, of course, that both of these processes are the same. The essential fact, however, to be borne in mind throughout the whole inquiry is that both these moments, notion and object, “being for another” and “being in itself”, themselves fall within that knowledge which we are examining...

But not only in this respect, that notion and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are ready to hand in consciousness itself, is any addition of ours superfluous, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing these two and of making an examination in the strict sense of the term; so that in this respect, too, since consciousness tests and examines itself, all we are left to do is simply and solely to look on. For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what to it is true, and consciousness of its knowledge of that truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, it is itself their comparison; it is the same consciousness that decides and knows whether its knowledge of the object corresponds with this object or not. The object, it is true, appears only to be in such wise for consciousness as consciousness knows it. Consciousness does not seem able to get, so to say, behind it as it is, not for consciousness, but in itself, and consequently seems also unable to test knowledge by it. But just because consciousness has, in general, knowledge of an object, there is already present the distinction that the inherent nature, what the object is in itself, is one thing to consciousness, while knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination turns. Should both, when thus compared, not correspond, consciousness seems bound to alter its knowledge, in order to make it fit the object. But in the alteration of the knowledge, the object itself also, in point of fact, is altered; for the knowledge which existed was essentially a knowledge of the object; with change in the knowledge, the object also becomes different, since it belonged essentially to this knowledge.

Or as Harris puts it more readably:

The truth of absolute cognition is rather that "experience" is actual and objective, while the unchangeable absolute object is the concept of subjective rationality; and since it is absolute and unchangeable this truth of absolute cognition enforces itself in the obstinately inverted concept that natural consciousness has of its cognition, by continually driving it to despair, and so to the experience of self-inversion. Only when the identity of the actual and the rational is fully grasped--only when we finally see that "experience" is objective and the "object" is our subjective concept--only then will the concept of truth as experience, and experience as truth, finally comprehend itself.


Thus the seemingly insoluble difficulty created by the fact that consciousness cannot "get behind the object as it is for consciousness" and test its knowledge of the object by the standard of "how the object is in itself" is a pseudo-problem created by our looking at things the wrong way round. Knowledge of the object is "for us" another moment.

If you say in the latter statement that there can be many formalisms mapping on the same rules, then formalism is distinct from rules. And surely, by formalism, you could mean to refer to the logic rules as you also stated. But were this the case the following claim of yours “1. Logic is a set of formal systems; it is defined by the formalism” would equate to “1. Logic is a set of logic rules; it is defined by the logic rules” which sounds, if not tautological yet, very little informative.

Sure, it's tautological. That was the position of Russell and the Vienna Circle. Moreover, by this view, all of mathematics is itself tautological. This is logic as defined as: "the study of certain mathematical properties of artificial, formal languages. It is concerned with such languages as the first or second order predicate calculus, modal logics, the lambda calculus, categorial grammars, and so forth. The mathematical properties of these languages are studied in such subdisciplines of logic as proof theory or model theory."

(quote from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#DiffConcLogi)

The rules define what the system is. And per deflationary theories of truth, that tend to go along with this sort of view, truth is itself simply something defined in terms of such systems. That is, truth is "neither metaphysically substantive nor explanatory. For example, according to deflationary accounts, to say that ‘snow is white’ is true, or that it is true that snow is white, is in some sense strongly equivalent to saying simply that snow is white, and this, according to the deflationary approach, is all that can be said significantly about the truth of ‘snow is white."

E.g., many axiomatic theories of truth: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/

The most austere versions of "logic as formalism" seem to deny any direct relation to thought or metaphysics. Many versions aren't quite so austere, but the general idea is that logic is about abstract systems, not thought and certainly not the world or metaphysics.Logic might inform our metaphysics, but our metaphysics (or philosophy of mind) should not inform our consideration of logic.

(After being very impressed by the North Holland Handbook of the Philosophy of Complex Systems I was excited to grab their book on the Philosophy of Logic, but it seemed to hew fairly close to these sorts of views throughout the submissions, which was the impetus for this thread.)

To me it’s more clear to simply say that formalism is the symbolic codification of logic rules as opposed to the natural language codification of such rules.

This seems right to me. What I wanted to get at with description 1 is the conception above.

Independently from the merits of Tarski’s semantic theory of truth for formal systems, if the price for it is to relativize the notion of truth to a given (object) language, my problem with it is: what does “if and only if” in the T-condition mean? If the be-conditional requires the notion of “True” to be understood as a logic operator, but the notion of true can not be applied at the same language level in which the bi-conditional is expressed, then what does that bi-conditional even mean? Besides asserting p (in the most basic object language and since it’s a language it can offer just representations of facts not facts themselves) doesn’t mean that p is true.

Right. Or what does it mean to "describe things" at all in a language we are pretending is completely divorced from anything else in reality? At a certain point, when you get into very deflationary views, you're no longer describing "things." All you can say is that "a system can produce descriptions."

All I can say at this point is that if your naturalist assumptions play a role in your understanding of logic, then they deserve to be addressed as well.

Sure, and I can totally see how my concerns might be irrelevant for people who are less concerned with naturalism. But most philosophers are naturalists, so it doesn't seem too outlandish.

What you may be tempted to say instead is that if there are representational tools that can successfully represent the world, then the world must be such that our representational tools can succeed in representing it. But this claim does very much sound like claiming that we can represent the world that we can represent, doesn’t it?

It sounds similar; I don't think it's identical. First, if we posit that any intelligibility we find in the world is hallucinatory, something we project onto a world that lacks it, I don't see how this doesn't slide into the territory of radical skepticism. The steps to get us to "how do you know cause and effect exist? Maybe your mind creates all such relationships," seem like they should also get us to "why do you think other minds exist?" Or "why should we think an external world exists outside of our perceptions?" Afterall, don't we suppose that others have minds because of how those minds seem to effect their behaviors?

The fact that animism is pretty much universal in early human cultures (e.g., "the river floods because it wants to"), and that children tend to provide intentional explanations for natural phenomena ("the clouds came because the sky is sad") seems to show we can "hallucinate" other minds to some degree. But if we think all of the intelligibility we find in the world is simply projected, then I'm not sure how solipsism isn't a problem.

Most philosophers are naturalists though, and most think the natural sciences are one of the best sources of information we have about how the world is though. And if we accept we are formed by natural selection, then it is prima facie unreasonable to think how we "make the world intelligible" has nothing to do with how the world is.

Second, what is the point of positing aspects of reality that we cannot ever, even in principle, experience? To be sure, people have experiences all the time that they say they cannot put into words. That makes perfect sense; we do more than just use language. But aspects of reality we can never know? They are like Penrose's invisible fire breathing dragon who is flying around our heads and not interacting with anything. We can imagine an infinity of such entities. But as long as they are, in principle, forever unobservable, their being or not being seems identical. When we move to the existence of that which cannot even be thought it seems even weirder. It's the inverse of radical skepticism, instead of seeing a way to doubt everything, now we can posit anything (so long as we can never know of it).

Logic rules allow us to infer some conclusions from some premises. Such rules ensure that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is true. And that’s possible because from premises to conclusions we are manipulating our own representations so that, semantically speaking, there is no more truth in the conclusion than there is in the premises, there is no more information in the conclusion than there is in the premises. The mapping to the world can be done by the premises. But logic would work even without any such mapping. E.g. Premise 1: squares are triangles; Premise 2: triangles are circles; Conclusion: squares are circles.

This gets to the "Scandal of Deduction." If in all valid deductive arguments all information in the conclusion is contained in the premises, what exactly is the point of deduction? It tells us nothing. So why does deduction seem so useful? Why can't we memorize Euclid's axioms and then immediately solve every relevant geometry problem we come across?

This is probably the best example I know of where thinking of logic as completely abstract runs into problems. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to figure out some sort of formal solution to the Scandal, because the idea is that any solution has to lie within the scope of the abstract systems themselves.

I don't think this works. Floridi and D'Agostino put a lot of work into their conception of virtual information, trying to figure out how it is that at least some inference rules introduce new information in an analysis. But it seems like such a project is doomed. As both they and Hintikka agree, Aristotelian syllogisms only deal with surface information, information explicit in the premises. The problem is that we can still find this type of analysis informative, just as we can not know the answers to very simple arithmetic problems until we pull out a pencil and start computing.

Naturalist approaches have no problem here. We don't see things and immediately know what they entail because thought is a complex process involving a ton of physical interactions, all of which occur over time-- simple as that.

It’s not the world that satisfies such rules, but our representations of the world. While we can represent and logically process representations of state of affairs that do not map into reality and do not correspond to facts, are there real states of affairs that we can not represent ? But how can we answer such question without possibly representing such state of affairs? What are we picking with the notion “state of affairs“ for whatever goes beyond our means of representation (so including the notion of "state of affairs" itself)?

Not everything can be put into words. I'm not sure if it makes sense to posit things that can be known in any way though.

Anyhow, would you agree that the world has an influence on how we represent it? This is the logic behind using mathematical patterns to contact extra terrestrials. If the representations of intelligent life forms aren't the result of bidirectional influence, then of course this won't work of course. But then if nature doesn't shape our representations than I don't get why even members of the same species should understand each other.

I have real trouble accepting this, but then, it is Wittgenstein, so who am I to question it?

I don't think Wittgenstein would have thought this was a good reason to accept what he said. In any event plenty of other philosophers with at least as much cachet would say he is simply wrong about this. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein is trying to reframe questions, think outside the box, and so solve issues the generations of great minds ended up banging their heads against. I think it's fair not to expect that he succeeds in all respects.

I myself have often appealed to the ‘illusion that the so-called laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena’ in arguing against scientific realism but this response taken as a whole seems unreasonably sceptical to me.

The idea of the "laws of nature" having causal efficacy does seem open to critique. As Cartwright points out, Newton's "immutable" laws fall apart when we add three or more bodies or imperfect spheres, meaning they are clearly only approximations. Paul Davies among others has offered pretty solid arguments against thinking of "the laws of physics," as Platonic statutes that causally interact with the world.

But this doesn't torpedo scientific realism because we can also think of such "laws" as merely describing the way things interact due to properties that are essential to them. That is, the causal nature of such laws areintrinsic to reality as a whole, or to parts of that whole, rather than laws being something outside nature that guides nature (the extrinsic view popularized by Newton, which Hume was critiquing).

For example, "water is H2O is an a posteriori analytical truth. It is true by definition, but we had to discover it empirically. Water, by this view, will behave like water whenever it interacts with "stuff" like the "stuff" of our world because of what water is due to its intrinsic properties. Just like how 2 is an even number by virtue of what 2 is. So here, the laws are just mathematical descriptions of the standardized properties of being that are internal to being qua being. What might be surprising here is that:

A. Such properties are intelligible to us and so readily describable in mathematics and logical formalisms.

B. That such properties exist at all. After all, we can well imagine a random universe (although we would only exist by chance in one). A random universe is certainly mathematically describable, but we don't see a random universe. We see a universe that always seems to move according to principles. And moreover, the principles exhibit a certain type of fractal recurrence such that disciplines such as chaos theory and complexity studies can identify general principles at work in extremely diverse systems, such as how fireflies decide to blink, hurricane formation, how the heart generates a beat, how earthquakes form, etc.

https://www.oxfordphilsoc.org/Weekend/2003/2_EileenWalker.pdf

It seems to me that Wittgenstein’s argument is similar to Hume’s in denying the necessity of inductive logic. I suppose it’s something to do with the fact that causality - a causing b - is neither deductively true nor directly observable. But isn’t this where ‘Kant’s answer to Hume’ is supposed to apply i.e. causality as being a necessary condition of reason?

Yes, and Leibnitz had the Principle of Sufficient Reason before Kant. Denying PSR gets very dicey vis-a-vis the cosmological argument because it opens opponents up to John Edwards' argument that: "if things can just start existing that didn't exist at any prior state, why don't things start to exist all the time." And moreover, with the intrinsic view: "if things don't initially occur due to any reason, why should they have one set of properties and not another." I don't shake up my water bottle and expect it to become a nice Scotch for instance, or expect that second moon wil pop into existence in the sky some night.

I think Wittgenstein and Hume have a massive pragmatic hurdle. If cause isn't real and induction is invalid, why the hell does it work so damn well? It certainly seems like logical models and mathematics correspond to how the world works.

But really, my views on Wittgenstein are mixed. Genius insights, and a great warning about the problems that come with attempting to theorize, especially theorizing about philosophy like it is the natural sciences. But at the same time, the self-described "purist" reading of Wittgenstein (per Rorty's label) ends up trying to use language to explain everything in the very way Wittgenstein warns against in the same book.

I think where it seems wrong to me is that it presumes that because causation only pertains to the phenomenal sphere, then it says nothing about ‘the world in itself or its meaning’. I think that’s an unreasonable inference. But I’m interested in what others have to say about it.

:up: Right, if you believe we are the products of natural selection, then claiming we only see cause because we construct it is a half answer. Ok, then why would we evolve to see cause? Why is it so useful? Why do animals seem to have a basic logical and causal sense? If we are natural, why did nature shape us to hallucinate causation from whole cloth? Why shouldn't we expect vision is the same way, that what we see has no correspondence with the world as it really is? Down this road seems to lie solipsism.

This is my problem with the linguistic turn, it seems to think that because you can't pin language down with a formalism that this entails that it isn't underpinned by nature in a way that is intelligible. This inclination is helped along by some findings in linguistics, namely Chomsky's universal grammar, but I think Chomsky is simply wrong here in terms of the causal origins of such rule-like behaviors.

Maybe this gets us too far afield, but its sort of like how all stem cells from an early fetus can become any type of cell. Tissues only differentiate, organs only develop, because of a complex feedback cycle between cells with the same DNA. It's all epigenetic, not hard coded at all. Kids don't learn language if they don't get exposed to it. We, as fully formed humans, are closer to chimps or even horses then a clump of our fetal cells, given they develop in a different environment, because that clump can be grown into nothing but a giant group of liver cells given the right signals. Hell, scientists can even turn animal stem cells into new synthetic creatures with little in common with the animals they share 100% of their DNA with. Point being that language is probably nothing suis generis, but natural like anything else, and so subject to the same causal principles.



:up: Plus, how do creatures like ourselves develop in a world without stability? It doesn't seem they can, we'd only have various types of "Boltzmann Minds." Our world is stable, and it has a certain type of stability, and that type of stability appears to be what gives rise to us and our languages. So, that's where I see an opening for a base level of "logic" that is posterior to our subjective logic, but perhaps it requires a different name so as to not to confuse the two.

But there appears to be morphisms between the two types of "logic." E.g., Leibnitz comes up with the Principle of Sufficient Reason because of the type of world he experienced and the type of animal that world made him to be. The fact that we understand necessity at all seems to imply something about us and about the world. If you explain necessity to a toddler, you're probably going to use empirical examples. Indeed, I'd argue we understand the abstract from the empirical sort of necessity found in cause, that abstract necessity is posterior to knowledge of causal necessity. E.g. "if you don't eat your dinner, it will necessarily get cold (because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics).

Of course, the argument that taxation is theft isn't really that different from the anarchist argument that property is theft. If we are idealists and accept both arguments, then property taxes are kind of a wash no?

I mean, the CIA probably has given at least some sort of minor support to most of these movements but that hardly means it's decisive or even moved the needle. It's like Russia's whopping $117,000 in shitty anti-Clinton ad buys in 2016 (which they paid for in roubles, lol, that'd be like 200 million roubles now too, their currency is tanking hard). Ok, so they did it, but it probably did fuck all. (Whereas the DNC email hack was actually effective.)

I don't think it necessities omnipotence for knowledge. For example, the Dude in the Big Lebowski knows "he's had a hard day and he fucking hates the Eagles man." He can't be wrong about this because his knowing he hates the Eagles necessitates that it is the case that he hates the Eagles.

Likewise, I know necessarily true things about whether certain chess moves are legal without being omnipotent.

However, it does seem to cut us off from making knowledge claims about many things in the world we seem to know about.

Does this not contradict Heisenberg Uncertainty and it's approach to measuring the quantum cloud of possible locations of elementary particles?

Entropy is about the number of possible states given some set of macrostate observations. Jeynes argued that in key ways entropy was necessarily subjective, although not arbitrary.

The uncertainty principle doesn't come into the view from nowhere because it's "how do things exist outside of our knowledge of them," i.e. when we aren't measuring them. Of course, different theories in quantum foundations paint very different pictures to the answer to this question, or deny the question even makes sense.

I was speaking solely to those theories that are deterministic, Bohmian mechanics, MWI, etc. In theories with ontological quantum indeterminacy there are perhaps multiple possible microstates, depending on the interactions going on, but I don't think they'd synch up to Boltzmann's measure. IDK, I'm no expert on the intersection between statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics.

I think the realist response to this would be that our perceptions map to the world, that there are morphisms between them and the world. If the world is intelligible and rule-governed then the way in which our sense data comes to us is also intelligible and rule governed. We may not perceive those rules, but we can learn them through tools like the methods of science.

The world seems to be intelligible and behave in a rule-like way, so, barring radical skepticism, it seems fair for us to roll with the idea that studying nature can tell us about how we, as natural beings, come to experience the world. Presumably, our sensations do not spring up acausally, we aren't solipsists, and so there must be morphisms between the set of all our sensations and the states of affairs in the world (and this explains why different minds can agree about facts).

Obviously, our senses are quite fallible. When we stick a stick in water in looks bent, when we draw shapes on a 2D piece of paper a certain way they look three dimensional, etc. However, this doesn't mean we are forced into relativism. We don't think ships actually shrink as they sail further away from us; our friends and family don't cease to exist when we are separated. The entire project of cognitive science is to understand the causal processes at work in our perceptions, while evolutionary biology strives to tell us how we ended up with the sensory systems we have. Together, these paint a picture of how our senses map to the world, a picture verified via many ingenious experiments, the application of statistical techniques, etc.

The rational, the underlying rules that guide nature, the intelligible part of the world, this is our bridge between subject and object. Both subject and object are part of a larger whole governed by general principles.

The weakness I see with some of those quotes is that the seem to fall into the trap of thinking that objectivity = truth. That is, the truth of the world must be what it "looks like" when no one is watching, the view from nowhere/everywhere." It is a mistake to conflate this view with realism writ large. There is no reason to think that objectivity is actually equivalent with truth, nor a prerequisite for attaining it. For example, you can know that "I feel tired," is true without any need to seek an objective frame.

The view from nowhere just seems impossible. "What does an apple look like when it is unseen?" sounds more like a Zen koan then a legitimate question.

Re objectivity:

If we conceive of conceptual structuring as a universal feature of the mind, then there is no threat to objectivity, because questions of objectivity simply cannot arise. Sense organs and the brain do not just register the world. Our minds structure our experience and our thought in fundamental ways. To think that this in itself could compromise objectivity is to imagine that we could think without brains, see without eyes. To the extent to which this is Kant’s point about our perceiving the world only as phenomenal (as it is structured by our minds) and not as it is in itself (as it is in its unstructured form), then this is just to say that we cannot think without minds any more than we can see without eyes. Unmediated perception (and thought) is not objective perception: it is not perception at all...

So that we are not misled into simply associating objectivity and truth, it is worth highlighting one very important difference between them. Whereas truth is absolute and does not come in degrees, objectivity only comes in degrees. The idea of absolute objectivity is a misconception, encouraged by thinking of it as a view from nowhere. If there is no view from nowhere, there is no limiting case where, having progressively become more and more objective, a theory can finally attain absolute objectivity. Objectivity does not become like truth in the limiting case. Indeed, some of the deepest and most persistent problems for understanding objectivity arise when one tries to make it absolute, or at least inadvertently thinks of it in absolutist terms.

What we are seeking to do in imposing standards of objectivity in our judgements in modern science is to identify and separate the informative and the uninformative, with a view to producing reliable results. Objectivity is more mundane than ‘the search for truth’, and it is in its very mundaneness, by contrast with the ‘search for truth’, that its value lies.

Objectivity - A Very Brief Introduction

Basically: "I cannot step outside my mind to compare a thought in it with something outside it," is making the mistake of thinking that objectivity becomes equivalent to truth at the limit. This is an attack on the view from nowhere, not realism.

History is a great example of the falsity of this proposition. Is the truth of World War II something that is best expressed by stripping down the experiences of all those involved to only the elements that can be seen from anywhere? By no means. Personal experiences are all we have access to. They are part of nature and thus part of the truth. "I am unhappy," can be a true statement. The relativist errs by thinking only such radically subjective claims can be true while the positivists erred by thinking only the most objective statements, those boiled down into abstractions, could be true.

It is metaphorical in the sense that it anthropomorphizes the process of natural selection as if it were an agent following rules of logic, and the case of computers is similar.

Does rule following entail intentionality? That's an interesting idea; it would seem to indicate a tie in between the external world and conceptions of subjectivity at a fairly basic level. For instance, ribosomes seem to be "rule following." They "transcribe," and have all sorts of mechanisms for "proof-reading." But while they are part of life, it doesn't seem like they should be conscious.

But the gap between intentional rule following and natural rule-like behavior seems like it would be tough to delineate. How complex does an organism need to be before rule-like behavior is supplanted by intentionality? How might intentional rule following evolve from rule-like mechanism? When does the human fetus or infant transition between these modes?

Interestingly, some behaviors we engage in unconsciously in a rule like way, but at will we can also lend them intentionality. For example, normally we are unaware of our breath, but we can "take control" of it. But the way the heart beats is more an unconscious sort of rule-like behavior. We can do intentional things to slow our heart rate, but we can't "hold our heartbeat" like we hold our breath; consciousness is cut off from stopping the heart, even though the brain could theoretically achieve this through signaling.

It may be worth noting that the causative rules we use for computation are not the same as logic

Interesting, I'm not familiar with the term "causative rules." I always thought the current definition of computation was defined by mathematical logic, and that this is why infinite alphabets and infinite strings aren't allowed for Church-Turing computation, but I also haven't explored that history all the way to the foundations of the idea.

but (for example) philosophers seem convinced that material implication is at best a poor approximation of actual implication, and yet computers "make due" with material implication. Of course there has also been an interesting reciprocal causality between computers and the field of logic, such that it is more difficult to separate the two now than it was in the past.

Exactly! I feel like this is a big reason for the "Scandal of Deduction," the finding that deductive reasoning shouldn't be informative because all the information in any conclusion must be contained in the premises of a deductively valid argument. To my mind, the entire Scandal is simply the result of confusing abstract, timeless entailment and the type of entailments we see in causality. If you think of our understanding things, or a computer's producing an output given some inputs, in causal terms, then it makes total sense that all the implications of some set of premises or messages aren't clear to us immediately. Thinking through implications requires time, information processing, neurons firing. We don't have any thoughts in "no time at all." Any implications we understand, we understand through time, not as eternal relations.

Hintikka and Floridi's responses to this (surface vs depth information, or virtual information) are super technical and complex and I think this obscures the fallacy right in front of our eyes, which is mistaking our (Platonic) abstractions for causal reality. Theories that reach for explanations in computational complexity miss that really simple arithmetic is also such that we don't know the answers until we do the computations. And they can't explain fallacies, why sometimes, even with simple surface-level syllogisms, we can think information is in our premises that isn't really there, e.g. affirming the consequent.

But, if we think nature comes prior to the human, and that it shapes the human, then its the causal rule following that seems more fundamental.

Light a fire.
Stare intensely into the flames it while thinking really, really hard. Full mind sprint.
Continue until you collapse or achieve the Gnosis. :cool:

It seems to me that if there is a coherent view from nowhere/God's eye view, and the universe is deterministic, then entropy doesn't really exist. There isn't a "range of possible microstates," in reality, there is just the one microstate that currently exists. Entropy only makes sense relationally, or in the context of indeterminacy at some level of reality.

The same is true for information entropy. Given the God's eye view, for any message (or observation made) there aren't multiple possible outcomes for variables, there are just the exact outcomes that are received/observed.

I posted a thread on stackexchange about the relationship of logic and causation. It turns out they’re different topics. Logic is the relationship between propositions whereas physical causation involves many factors. You can find the discussion here. The very first response notes that the ‘because’ of logical necessity is not the same as the ‘because’ of causation. And a lot hangs on this distinction, it turns out.

Excellent point. Causation and logic are different areas of philosophy, for sure. That logic and causation are completely different things I think is open to question.

Where do most people turn for their best, most fundamental theories on physical causation? (And does it even make sense to talk of non-physical causation?) They go to physics. And in modern physics, the idea that the universe is computable, and behaves like a computer is extremely popular (Landauer, Lloyd, Deutsch, Davies, Tegmark, etc.).

But then what is computation, how is it defined? Partly in terms of logical operators, stepwise symbolic manipulations that occur according to rules such that prior states of some system entail the system's future states (or entail either a range of states in quantum indeterminacy or, in a multiverse, many existing states). This is how Leibnitz saw computation in his pronouncement that one day all disagreements could be settled through such symbolic manipulations-- "let us calculate!"

You can't separate the definitions of computable functions and computation from logic, and it increasingly seems hard to separate computation, or a process that is computation-like (perhaps involving real numbers?) from physics. But then this makes logic deeply intertwined in how we understand cause, and moreover, what we think cause actually is, sans our experience of it.

We see cause coming together with logic from another angle with categorical quantum mechanics and quantum logic as well.

So, IMO, the separation of the philosophy of causation and logic has more to do with the history of philosophy than the two being fully unrelated concepts. But this is exactly what frustrates me in the literature. There is a move to treat logic as divorced from reality to make it manageable, but then logic is used by other disciplines to justify statements about reality.

Well, at some point you have to make the connection in the other direction. As natural creatures, the products of natural selection, there should be some explanation of where our sense of logic comes from and why we can use it to describe causality so well, and why we can use it to create science and technology. Why does the use of logic and computation allow us to manipulate reality so well if logic is just disembodied systems without relevance to the world? Why would we, and other animals, show evidence of having a "logic sense?" If the connection between logic and cause is merely our construction, there should still be an explanation as to why we construct things in such a way.

Another point is, apropos of the other thread on Schopenhauer - his ‘fourfold root of sufficient reason’ also differentiates between the logic of being knowing (which approximates to what we are calling logic) and the logic of becoming (which approximates to physical causation.)

There is a similar move in Hegel's Greater Logic with the objective logic, although it's not clear that the logic of being is contained to just the objective logic. The problem with Hegel's insights is that they are hard to formalize and are grounded in speculation, observing bare thought without presupposition (at least as best he could). In this sense, it's not backed up by the type of evidential support or argument that modern philosophy is particularly comfortable with, at least not analytical philosophy.

I personally am very drawn to your (3) - that there is a logic in order of things, as the Greek intuition has it. I think the issue with that is that it seems to contravene the naturalist assumption of there being no telos. But also notice that related to this concern, the whole concept of ‘natural law’ is nowadays called into question. See for example There are no laws of Physics. I *think* this mirrors a confusion, but I’ll leave it there for now.

Great point! But do we need a mind for telos? This is a huge problem in the sciences. Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature (which I'm still in) looks at just this issue and the diagnostic section of the book, which looks at the ways in which homunculi crawl their way into even eliminitivist theories is pretty spot on.

Obviously, there is something like a "logic" to the way our world progresses because we believe that past states dictate future states. We don't think the universe just popped into existence 10 seconds ago. We don't hop off our beds in the morning and fear we will fall through the floor; there are seeming entailments between before and after. There is not randomness, there is order. All of science relies on this fact. If experimental results gave us no reason to suppose we have learned something about how the world would act in the future than the entire argument against telos from scientific findings crumbles along with the rest of the scientific edifice.

The move against "laws of nature" always seemed more to me about thinking that regularities in the way the world works in due to an intrinsic set of properties (i.e., Kirpke's response to Hume re induction) That is, things do what they do, or the world progresses like it does, because of its traits, not because of any external Platonic laws that guide interactions. That makes perfect sense to me, but the move to intrinsic properties doesn't fix the problem of why the properties are such that they are intelligible and state progression is orderly and can be described with computable laws so well.

I think you didn't clarify much what you mean by "formalism". As a starter, I take "formalism" to be broadly speaking the symbolic codification of a set of logic rules. If there are one or many sets of logic rules, this is a distinct issue.

"Formalism" to me is required to standardize a given set of rules and remove ambiguities of ordinary language for certain syntactic terms (e.g. we can attributing different meanings to “to be“, “if…,then…”, “not”, “or” or “all” in logic).

Fair point; I worry about making my OPs too long and sometimes gloss over some areas. I agree with your definition. By formalism I mean "the rules" not merely their particular expression, or to borrow a term from information theory, the "encoding." There can be many formalisms that map on to the same rules.

Said that, I find the expression "one true logic" nonsensical. One may be willing to count "logic" by counting the number of "set of ‘logic’ rules" we want to distinguish (for example in geometry different set of postulates can different geometries the same can go for logic see e.g. non-classical logic). But there is no way for me to make sense of “true” as applied to “logic” since the notion of “truth” is built in the “logic” rules themselves, in other words the meaning of “truth” is determined by “logic rules” too. One might be tempted to see “logic rules” as a description of how things are, but that’s a categoric confusion to me: “logic rules“ are rules, not description of facts. To me.

Good points, and we have the problem, per Tarski, of being able to define truth from within a system. But my understanding of the search for the "one true logic" was that the pioneers of post-Aristotelian logic were looking for something that would be both a rigorous system and which would reflect facts perfectly. From the 19th century view, where it looked like all the world would soon be explainable in a rigorous way, this makes sense. They hadn't run into undecidability, the entscheidungsproblem, incompleteness, undefinability, etc. yet.

However, I feel like the response to the aforementioned list might have been to throw the baby out with the bath water, since we've now disembodied logic in a sort of neo-Platonism. This is my problem with "game" theories of language as well. Maybe I'm just too much of a close-minded naturalist, but I tend to think that rules exist out in the world, in minds that are natural themselves, and that the rules must thus have natural causes.

In any event, I've seen more recent appeals to a "logic of being" that work off the idea of systems whose rules change over time, evolving based on meta-principles, essentially being paraconsistent and allowing for dialetheism. The details went over my head though.

Broadly speaking yes, if you mean by "logic of cause" the set of semantic rules that govern the notion of “cause”. However, more strictly speaking, "logic" refers to rules governing synthatic terms (like propositional operators, quantifiers, modal operators, etc.)

Right, but generally in the sciences we think that if a formal system very closely (or ideally, perfectly) describes something in the world, and if it allows us to make good (or ideally, perfect) predictions, this is because the formalism corresponds to something in the world. We don't think our language is magic, that it is sorcery that causes the world to correspond to it (else why all the failed formalisms, right?). But we also don't think our systems can have no connection to the world, because then science isn't about the world at all, its about language and formalisms. Except it also seems to tie to our experiences and have huge pragmatic value, so that doesn't seem right.

Of course, we can justify the sciences on pragmatic grounds, but it feels worthwhile to ask "why is it pragmatically valuable?" Presumably, because our formalisms, e.g. Newton's laws, the Schrodinger equation, etc. correspond to external reality in some way. But then if logical rules correspond to reality, it seems reality has some rules.

Formalism helps us discriminate better different ways allowing us to meaningfully speak of things according to various sets of “logic” rules.

Right, but then the question is: why do some formalisms work for meaningfully speaking of things better than others? And why is it that breaking our inference rules, committing logical fallacies, computing incorrectly, etc. all cause our models to fail at predicting what we see in the world? If there is no mapping between the formalism and the world, then using inappropriate inferences, bungling our computations-- these shouldn't necessarily be a problem for predicting nature. They are just violations of a game we invented.

What does one mean by “being sufficiently rational”? To me, appeal to “rationality” is nothing other than an appeal to the set of rules thatmust be satisfied in order to make things intelligible to somebody. And this may certainly include logic rules, too.

If something needs to satisfy certain rules to be intelligible, and we think the world is intelligible (sort of a prerequisite of the scientific project), then doesn't that mean the world must, in at least many key respects, satisfy such rules too?

3. Logic refers to rules that make the world intelligible to us.

I'm most interested in this one. If this is the case, are there rules out in nature that shaped us such that we need said rules to make the world intelligible to us? That is, why would natural selection endow us with such a need if such rules only exist in our minds? This is what I find most puzzling and hard to wrap my mind around; it's hard to know what a satisfactory answer to the puzzle looks like.

I'd like to buy into pancomputationalist physics as much as I used to because that seems to explain things well, but the bloom is off the rose for me.

IDK, I feel like getting assaulted or killed by a party of raiding tribesmen and being shot by some state security service is an equally bad outcome, equally limiting one's freedom. However, with modern states, your risk of dying from homicide is orders of magnitude lower. Existent hunter gatherers have a greater share of their people dying in conflict than Europe did from 1914-1945. This is not even the most violent period in Europe's civilized history either. The Thirty Years War killed about 2 1/2 times more of the German population than both World Wars combined. The Huguenot War in France killed 14 times the share of the population that the First World War did. The bloodiest day in British military history is probably the start of the Somme, but it might be surpassed by the Battle of Townton. But even if we go with the revised lower figures for Townton, the British population at that point was a tiny fraction of the size and it had no large empire to draw on for manpower. In that one day, about 1-2% of the male population hacked and slashed each other to death.

Nor was treatment of prisoners better when states were less developed. At least today, nations make pains to hide their atrocities. Even the Nazis made such efforts. But in antiquity public torture was a norm, and in early antiquity, "because we want your stuff and to take slaves," was considered a legitimate declared casus belli.

Many European states have a homicide rate around 1-2 per 100,000. Now, you aren't free to do what you want if someone kills you. If you're 1-2,000 times more likely to be killed, that seems like a constriction on freedom. Nor are you free to read all the great works of world literature and philosophy unless there is a library, an internet connection, or you are very, very rich (and thus likely taking other's freedom). That sort of positive freedom sure seems important.

That's probably fair. But it seems like there is a sort of general principle, perhaps one of necessity or one of "sufficient reason," that undergirds the other. I'd say "Logos" would be a good term, but it has mystical connotations too.

Believe it or not neighbors can deliberate with one another without the need of any state authority and men can design and build infrastructure without being a state employee. In fact, the state more often than not contracts out these duties to private entities.

Most infrastructure projects are examples of natural monopolies. You're not going to build two parallel power grids, two sets of roads, two sets of sewer systems, etc. Without government, who stops the monopolist from charging whatever is best for them for electricity, gas, etc? There are reasons that government heavily regulates or runs certain types of industry, natural monopoly is the primary one.

As for collective action, there is nothing collective about state activity. I’ve never once been consulted about roads or bandits. Have you? These sorts of decisions are never collective, but are invariably decided by a cabal of politicians, officials, and their bagmen.

Yes. Roads and crime are both covered by local government. It's very easy to get meetings with city councilors in most places I've lived, you can just call their cell phones. The last city I lived in had a roads committee that has public speakout time scheduled at monthly meetings, and people came to speak about roads, normally getting their private ways converted, almost every full city council meeting. The police force had bi-weekly neighborhood meetings on crime. I still get annoying texts about them.

The Feds mostly are in the business of simply giving funds to state and local governments to spend, and public input is part of the planning process for any major road project I've seen.

And no wonder people cannot band together to fix a simple road; they have been taught their whole lives that people cannot, nor should not do so. No wonder people cannot band together to help the poor in their community, or fix potholes, because they’ve been taught their whole lives that they do not need to bother, that we can let some politicians and officials take our money and they will handle it for us.

Have you ever driven in a developing country? Roads aren't well funded there. They didn't grow up with the government "babying" them by always taking care of the roads. And yet... the roads remain shit.

I do not believe that any significant proportion of human beings will turn into bandits and murderers as soon as they find themselves free to do so. I’ve met enough people to conclude otherwise

Well, as opposed to your anecdotal "I think most people are nice," I would just point out that the estimated murder rate for humans in hunter gatherer societies is around 2,000 per 100,000. This is over 10 times higher than the most violent countries on Earth today. It's higher than many war zones; the equivalent of America seeing 6.6 million murders in a year. In such a societies, 1 in every 5 human males who make it to adulthood will die in combat of some sort.

This isn't suprising. It's about the murder rate we see in similar species and synchs up with data on extant hunter gatherers. Chimpanzees also have wars. Studies of hunter gather societies that made it into the 20th century found that raids, mass murder, rape, and slavery/thralldom were essentially endemic. Forensic anthropology converges on similar figures.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19758

Oxford, a well off area with a high number of priests had a homicide rate of 110 per 100,000 in the 1340s, several times worse than the worst American cities today.

Essentially, as you go back in time homicide rates are massively higher than today. State development and state monopoly on force is the primary factor indicated in this shift.

So, if people killed each other in massive numbers before civilization, why would they agree to get along without any enforcement mechanisms today. Seems like a wild supposition. Who is even going to sign any sort of long term contract if there is no court to make people live up to their contracts?

You see freedom as only "lack of limits on my behavior." This is naive. There is also "the freedom to have safe roads," the "freedom to have safe drinking water," the "freedom to be educated." If you only think of freedom in terms of negative freedom, no one telling you what you can't do, then of course the state is monstrous. But this is to ignore the actual context we live in.


We live in a world of trade offs. Conscription takes away men's freedom. But in the context of the American Civil War, conscription was necessary to end slavery. Given the losses the Confederacy was able to bear, about 1/5th of Southern males killed, the only path to victory for the Union was large scale conscription. You can see the same thing in plenty of other cases.

No charity has ever offered universal education; only the state has done this. Companies don't keep drinking water safe out of the goodness of their hearts. On the contrary, firms appear to pollute as much as they can without the state stopping them. Now if you grow up drinking water suffused with lead and are now cognitively impaired, are you "free to become a doctor?" No. You can't pass the exams because of brain damage from heavy metal exposure. But if I, a factory owner up the street, am free to do as I please, I might very well dump lead into your water.

I am incredulous than anyone actually thinks firms won't pollute without the state punishing them for it.

And subjective idealism was never popular.

The absurd presumption is that we are obliged to choose between two defunct cannons.

Yup, that was my point.

Not only eminent domain, but civil forfeiture, taxation, tariffs, subsidies, minimum wages, welfare, regulation, and so on. Wherever the state takes from some persons what belongs to them and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong, there you have plunder, and that is the nature of the business of your lord.

A lord holds their power by birth or through conquest. I don't recall the last time I saw local officials conquering more than a free lunch platter. If we're going to define "any one exercising state power" as a "lord" then sure, we're in feudalism. But only trivially, and only because we've decided to define "government exists" as "feudalism."

That a law like the 5th amendment and courts make the process of theft more difficult for the state, none of that, nor your authority on project management, negate the intents and efforts to take what isn't theirs and give to whom it does not belong. The courts are still beholden to the same laws as devised by the state, and eminent domain or some version thereof is present in every liberal democracy. In Canada it is "expropriation". In Australia it is "compulsory acquisition". These words do not mean nothing.

Right, because a state face trade-offs. Does the state spend twice as much on a road, taxing everyone else more because you won't part with your land at the market appraised value, or do they force you to sell? Do they let a private dam fail and wash out people's homes because the owner doesn't want to repair it and won't let the state intervene, or do they tell the owner "tough shit, you can't let people's homes get washed away."

One person's land use affects another's.

If you like to fish and "lay claim" to part of a river, and I build a factory on the same river and then fill the river with toxic sludge, killing off all your fish, who arbitrates between us? If you build yourself a nice quiet country retreat and I open up a punk rock venue next door and have massive keg fueled ragers until 5 AM every weeknight, who arbitrates between us?

Absolute freedom is a contradiction. A world without states isn't a world of freedom because anyone who can take anything from someone else is free to do so. Being free means being free to deprive others of their freedom. Lay claim to all the land you want, say "this is mine," what does it change if a bunch of armed men decide your stuff is theirs and you work for them now? It matters not one bit. Hence, people accepting the state, because the state increases freedom.

The lord who is lord by virtue of force isn't free either. They can't stop being a lord who is ready and able to use force to get their way. The second they do, someone will replace them-- they will no longer be lord. And so, they are constrained by such a system as well.

Likewise, good luck keeping roads working or solving a host of other collective action problems without the state. You have streets in extremely rich neighborhoods in the Boston area, all multi-million-dollar properties, where the road has basically ceased to exist because it is a private way and no one a can agree on pooling their money to repave it. The person in front wants to pay less because "they use less of the road," the person in the back wants everyone to split the cost, and of course, they all want to state to step in and take over the road and have the taxpayer pay.

But, certainly having an interstate highway system offers a type of freedom. Currently, I could hop in my car and drive from here to Alaska on quality roads, with nary a fear of highway men, nor any fear of price gouging on gas in remote areas. No, "oh, so sorry, the closest other gas station is 90 miles away. I see you are on empty. That will be $45 a gallon." That's a certain type of freedom, and it's not one you get without the state.

So, of course, no one is entirely free in any respect, the state is a constraint, but it also enables freedom. You can grab a piece of paper and draw any shape you'd like, but if you draw a triangle, you're no longer free to have drawn a square. If you eat your cake, you can't save it. There is no absolute freedom. But relatively, the state helps with freedom, and relatively, I'd much rather be a citizen in Canada today than a serf in 1000s Provance.

I would also say that the claim that there is private ownership is a myth, used as it is to disguise the reality that we have hardly left the state of serfdom. To purchase some means of production, like land for instance, one cannot just go out and stake an area for private use and claim jurisdiction. It's only "private" if the state allows it to be, which isn't saying much because they can come and take it any time they want.

The words of someone who has never dealt with managing a project that actually involves using eminent domain. The DoD has a family farm literally in the middle of a bombing range and has spent millions of dollars working around it due to an ongoing court battle over the land. The state can't just seize any land they want in liberal democracies. The state loses eminent domain cases all the time. Taxpayer projects often go 10-20% or more over budget because the state can't get the optimal land required for some public good.

I'd also ask, if, to have "real private property," we need to be able to walk out onto land and "stake a claim to it," what exactly stops anyone else from staking a claim to your land? Where are you going where someone else can't claim that their ancestors owned your land at some point? Isn't it a problem that all the arrable land on Earth has been staked for centuries?

Also, when was the last time the state came by and seized you or any family member's car or stripped you of your clothing so they could take it? Have you ever come home to see that the state had seized your house? When the state does seize property, is there a recourse for it? Something like saying, a court and a jury?

Military protections only seen paltry if you haven't been in a war. Go ask any farmers in Ukraine whose land is on the front line how well their property rights are doing lol. Property rights mean nothing if one side has rights and the other has artillery. No military, no property rights. I am not aware of any pacifist nations ever surviving without the backing of some larger military power that can enforce a peace.

"What is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?"

"Pilate crucify him! Crucify him! Remember Caesar, you'll be demoted, you'll be deported, crucify him!"

---

Sorry, the question always makes me think of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Per the question we have a few main options:

Correspondence - a proposition is true if it corresponds to the world. There is some sort of "truthmaker" that makes a statement true. E.g., "Theseus is standing," is true just in case there is a entity called Theseus and he is indeed standing.

Coherence - Truth is the explanation that best fits with all our other beliefs. That is, a proposition adequately explains phenomena and makes sense with everything else we know. Propositions are true when they cohere with our view of the world.

Axiomatic - finding an absolute truth is likely impossible. Truth has to do with propositions, something grasped with thought, often with language. Something is true just in a case it accords with the fundamental axioms we hold to be true. These tend to go along with a deflationary account of truth, where truth is not a property of being, relating to propositions as real abstract entities, but are linguistic or thought phenomena. Truth then relates to our beliefs and their formalization. For something to be absolutely true under this definition requires that there be essential axioms of being; I am not sure this makes sense to posit.

Pragmatism - truth is the end of inquiry. Truth is when the facts of some state of affairs have been so fully explained that we have no need to ask further questions. This doesn't mean we might not have questions in the future based on some later observations, but for now we are content. We can use the pragmatist view in concert with correspondence, axiomatic, and coherence definitions.

I do not totally buy into a deflationary account of truth. However, I do think our epistemology must necessarily be fallibilist (we may always be mistaken, even seemingly secure truths may look different when seen from another light) and circular (we must base our knowledge claims on other knowledge claims, there is no way to build an absolute foundation for knowledge).

I agree with Hegel that "the truth is the whole." There are many ways to explain my car. How it came to be, what it does, what it is for, etc. We could go into the history of the automobile, the natural history of the materials that make up my car, the personal history that led to me owning it. A mechanic, an engineer, a chemist, and a physicist could all give different true answers explaining how my car works. At some point, I won't have time for more information, and pragmatism wins out. No answer will be complete. For example, we can't create an accurate phase space map of my car showing where every last "fundamental" bit might be and what it is doing, and even if we made such a map, no human being has the cognitive capacities to truly fathom all that it says.

But I also think our pragmatic truths evolve through history based on an underlying truth. Does this imply a world of true noumena underlying appearances? I don't think so. This artificially truncates being into subject and object. Rather, truth is built from the ground up in the world. It progresses with our understanding.

Truth is in incoherent concept without the possibility of falsity, so it can not lie behind subjectivity, only above it, as a dialectical fusion of subjectivity and the nature from which it springs.

And we really have to remember that the most successful version of socialism has been with social-democracy, which is still quite alive an kicking in the Western World. Social Democrats have ruled many Western countries and are and inherent part of Western democracy just as are conservatives.

Agreed. The best examples of socialism are those where it sublated/subsumed liberal democracy and the best examples of liberal democracy are those where it sublated socialism. It's a sort of hybrid vigor.

Even Christianity has had this with it's Crusades, which really is a bizarre feat to pull out from the teachings of Jesus Christ, and all those time people wanted to build "The New Jerusalem".

Right, lol. It's the sort of "reverse Tower of Babel," bringing heaven down to Earth, that Dostoevsky burns the socialists on in the Grand Inquisitor.

The argument that seems salient to ↪vanzhandz's OP is that if one can say nothing about the mooted "base reality", then it is irrelevant to our conversations.

Alternately, if we do talk about this "base reality", then it's not the case that we can say nothing about it.

Right, but that's the very point of disagreement re the noumena generally.

Kant obviously doesn't say "nothing," about the world of bare noumena, he has a very elaborate explanation of it. It's not incoherent. Arguably though, it has become "useless," over time. It ends up not doing any lifting in explaining the world, doesn't appear to be falsifiable, appears to be based on dogma, etc., all the critiques that have been around since he published the First Critique, but which have been more fully explored over time.

I tend to agree with Rorty's critique that "meaningless," and "nonsense," were never good terms for the attack on pre and post Kantian metaphysics vis-á-vis late Wittgenstein's conception of meaning. "Useless," might be appropriate, although even though Rorty recommends this substitute he clearly doesn't think such metaphysics were totally "useless" either, rather, they outgrew their usefulness for philosophy as a whole.

↪schopenhauer1 Other minds have always been a problem for idealists.

And minds in general have always been a problem for materialists.

Trouble is, it’s so unclear what idealism is.

Yes, but this isn't remotely unique to idealism. Physicalism also has an extremely hard time with defining itself, and now that supervenience has fallen out of favor due to seemingly intractable problems, it seems physicalism is most often defined as "scientific realism." The problem here is that it's unclear that science can or should answer questions about ontology, nor is it at all clear that science writ large has anything like a coherent majority opinion ontology, nor that this ontology would qualify as what is generally meant by "physicalism." Hemple's Dilemma seems to be getting more acute, not less. Last I checked, physics has 10+ competing highly metaphysical theories about what physical stuff is, none with majority support within physics itself.

But yes, idealism has difficulty in avoiding solipsism, as I’ve explained previously. It usually needs God’s help.

I don't see this in the history of idealism at all. Maybe if you assume all idealism = subjective idealism. But why should we assume that what is meant by idealism is its most unpopular variant? This is like attacking physicalism on the grounds that physicalism must mean reductive corpuscular materialism, and then pointing out that that ontology has major problems and has thus been dumped.

Idealism has been moribund since the end of the century before last, and of little more than historical interest. That it is so popular in this forum is a peculiarity of the forum.

You can find idealism, panpsychism, dualism, all over the place if you know what to look for. It's easy to mistake respect for naturalism and scientific inquiry with respect for physicalism as a distinct ontology. If anything, I think the mess in defining either of the two terms denotes a serious problem with both isms. They may have outgrown their usefulness.

It's worth noting that by Schopenhauer, and even more so after, people began to take Kant's noumena in a very weird direction. In the world of theophany, psychoanalysis, Jung, seances, elan vital, etc. trances and mystical experiences, like those induced by hypnosis, the techniques of Franz Mesmer, became gateways to access the pure noumena of the "spirit realm." The noumenous became coidentical with the numinous and pneumenous for many.

Before the current New Age tradition there was a weird epoch where German idealism, particularly Kant and Hegel, got transformed into a sort of older New Age religion. A lot of this centered around life, spirit, etc. being suis generis forces, something that was allowed by contemporary conceptions of physics, with its mysterious forces that acted at a distance. QM and relativity killed off this whole line of thought, but it's come back in modified forms.

I wouldn't put Schopenhauer into the same "New Age" box, but I think his philosophy helps the move in that direction.

I'm somewhat skeptical of the massive figures thrown around as the "death toll," for Marxism. Russia has massive famines under the Tsars shortly before the advent of the Soviet Union. Russia was a backwards nation before WWI began and took the largest number of losses in that war. Then the Russian Civil War that followed was 3-5 times more deadly than the Great War. It left Russia in an absolute shambles.

Not that this cuts against all the ample evidence that some famines in the USSR were essentially intentional, wielded as tools of genocide by Stalin. It's simply that there is little reason to think a Democratic government or market economy would have avoided famines either. Indeed, food scarcity was a major issue when the Bolsheviks overthrew the democratic regime. Famines did also end in the former Russian empire under communism, following the Second World War. The same is true for China.

China is an even less obvious case. China was in a brutal civil war from 1911 through 1950. The scale of the war is such that it is normally covered as multiple wars, the Warlord Era broken out from the KMT and CCP struggles and the Japanese invasion, but by itself it might be the deadliest war in human history.

China was incredibly impoverished in 1950. It was still fighting civil wars as it fought the US in Korea, and would be fighting insurgencies into the 60s when it fought the Soviets. China's population growth has basically stagnated since 1791, a century and a half of little growth due to extremely high infant mortality, waves of famine, and brutal warfare. By Mao's death, China's population had more than doubled, China had held its own in wars against the USA and USSR, and the PRC was one of a handful of nations with space launch capabilities, nuclear weapons, and hydrogen bombs, which it made domestically ahead of many "great powers."

This is not to ignore Mao's atrocious peacetime leadership, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, but to point out that the base case was likely one with as much death, perhaps more due to instability. If the KMT had won, famine, massive corruption, and misrule would definitely be a part of China's post war history. It's statistically dubious to talk about "55 million," excess deaths in China at a time when its population was skyrocketing after a long period of stagnation. It seems like it's enough to simply document that Mao knew enough to understand what his policies were doing and kept doing them anyhow.

Plus, if the deaths in these war racked previously totalitarian nations is indicative of the socialism as a whole then British rule over massive famines and the mass death of the Partition might as well be an "effect of capitalism." Did capitalism save India from famines? Did it save Ireland? Even with a surge in migration, Ireland's population is still significantly lower today than it was in the mid-19th century, when it collapsed as the British exported food during an apocalyptic famine because it fetched a higher price on the continent. We'd also have to add in the slave trade, the genocide of native tribes across the Americas, the particularly atrocious conditions of slaves on Haiti, etc. to the results of market liberalism.

Point being, Russia and China are bad examples because they were absolute basket cases before communism and in many ways improved despite communism, while it's unclear that any system could have avoided their problems.

Global inequality has been falling since the 90s and has fallen at a faster rate since 2019. But at the same time, the share of wealth held by the top 1% has also been steadily increasing. Both phenomena seem set to continue.

Although, I do wonder if the shift of population growth towards Sub-Saharan Africa might effect this trend in the long term. We will soon be in a world where the population is falling almost everywhere else; over 50% of human beings under age 18 are expected to live in SSA by 2100. I haven't heard as much about this as I'd expect.

Mathematically, it easier for the very poor to see huge 50-200% surges in annual earnings, as this can amount to all of $3-6 a day. Thus, looking at % growth rates in earnings can be fairly misleading.

In any event, measures of capitalism's effect on global inequality tend to ignore migration. Neo-liberalism was a main motivator behind the liberalization of immigration across the developed world. Migration has allowed millions of people from poorer nations to move to wealthier ones, dramatically boosting their earnings. The money they send home is not insignificant either. Remittances dwarf all foreign aid; people send a LOT of money back when they migrate away.

Capitalism can at least be cheered for this. Such migration has made inequality greater in wealthy nations and tended to hurt the living standards of the poor there, but it's been very beneficial for people from less wealthy nations. This is not a policy socialists embraced with open arms. Into the 1990s the left, particularly labor unions, paid a lot of attention to this; it's just that the "culture war" tended to place migrants and traditional socialists more and more on the "same team" over the 2000s. So, if capitalism is to blame for "exporting" its lower class as nations became more wealthy, it is as least also fair to praise it for motivating the opening of migration opportunities.

Of course, now we have a weird sort of blow back effect where high rates of migration are making people less willing to support socialist wealth redistribution, so who knows how that will all end up. It seems like sort of a positive feedback loop in favor of less socialism. Meanwhile, the process raises national inequality but lowers global inequality.

Terrance Deacon's Incomplete Nature tries to incorporate intentionality as well, although from a different angle. He focuses on how absence can be causally efficacious, e.g. hemoglobin is constrained by the absent oxygen it has to be able to bind, but also easily let go of. But his argument from where intentionality comes from is more based in thermodynamics. I haven't finished the book yet though.

Barad's thesis, if I'm understanding it right, seems closer to pansemiosis? I

And Hoffman has a similar attempt to ground intentionally with his Conscious Realism. He posits agents as fundemental and has a toy universe model for how we might be able to build up physics and natural selection starting from agents with a menu of choices.

These are all necessary efforts since there are clear problems with the current dominant paradigms, but the variety of ways in which intentionality is "put back into the world," is a bit dizzying. I've read a lot of theses like these, and they often resort to creating their own new terms, e.g. Deacon's "ententional," etc., which makes them even harder to compare.

My guess is that these ideas will keep sloshing around until one can actually make unique predictions through its formalism that are then verified. New paradigms always start off in this sort of muddy, difficult, philosophical work. Whether they can replace existing structures seems to depend on if they can predict outcomes in novel ways.

While these authors are quite right that there is institutional bias against their ideas, I also think that one of the barriers to their acceptance is the surfeit of different theories bouncing around. What is to set one above the others?

It has occured to me that this might indicate another problem with trying to explain intentionality. It might not come from one sort of thing. Intentionality might be sort of like natural selection, where there are good arguments to be made for group, individual, gene, and functional selection. Are we best off looking only at genes, largely ignoring challenges to the Central Dogma, or should we look at evolution in terms of high level "core algorithms," like "lighter than air flight," and "shelter construction?"

Or, since all different levels of explanation have merit, should we be looking for something that occurs through a sort of fractal recurrence, where the same pattern is generated in ever larger, more complex ways through similar principles? E.g., selection occurs on multiple levels, intentionality emerges not only from from the relational nature of the most basic physical interactions, but also through a series of similar, larger scale recurrences of that same general pattern? This would explain why we can have many different theories that all seem to work to some degree, but which operate on many different levels. Such a view might also open up the path to explaining how and why consciousness develops the way it has historically.

But conceptualizing and formalizing such theories is a bear. I start to wonder if maybe we are running into a limit on our understanding set by our own cognitive capabilities, our inability to consider multi-level parallel processes acting as a set of blinders.

One essential criticism about Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” is that we have no idea about what “to be” or “to exist” means. The same applies to our conversation as a proof that the world exists, which is almost the same argumentation adopted by Descartes: it cannot be proof of the existence on the world, because we have no idea of what “existence” means.

Right, this is where Hegel starts in the Logic. We are to drop all presuppositions and start with what thought minimally is, sheer immediacy, indeterminate being, and see what pops up, if anything, from there.

It's a fascinating project. But holy shit is it hard to get through it.It manages to be denser than the Phenomenology while also being like 1,000 pages long.

I think you have it backwards. We don’t understand language through experience de, we understand experience through language.

Fair enough; I won't deny it seems to go both ways. But it seems like experience is historically prior. Animals had experiences before hominids were around to produce language as such. Babies presumably experience things before they grasp language. A stroke can wipe out our ability to fathom language, but we don't think that by doing so it has caused experience to cease to exist. And so, there should be a logic as to why the things that come before have resulted in what comes after, even if only contingently.

This is perhaps contra Wittgenstein's one mention of animal communications in PI 25.

It is sometimes said that animals do not talk because they lack the mental capacity. And this means: "they do not think, and that is why they do not talk." But—they simply do not talk. Or to put it better: they do not use language—if we except the most primitive forms of language.—Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.

There is a sense in which this is quite right, language is central to the human experience, and also a way in which it seems off, in that language doesn't seem like it should have sprung fully formed like Athena from Zeus's head. In that way, it is not "as much a part of our natural history as eating or drinking," for in both the lifespan of the individual and the genus eating and drinking come first. They are prerequisites in both the long and short term. A man who stops drinking will soon cease to speak, "dead men tell no tales."

Thinkers in physics (Karen Barad), biology(Stuart Kauffman, Lynn Margolis), the social sciences and philosophy extend Witt’s work on human discourse to the non-human world in order to show that reciprocal interaction within a field or configuration applies not just to human discourse but to the biological and physical worlds in themselves.

Right, and I think this extension makes sense, regardless of the original intent. Forget the linguistic turn, go all in on a "interactive," "informational," or "relational" turn! It's actually the lack of extension where I think things get dicey. To quote Tim Williamson re whether we should focus on thought like Kant wanted, or focus on language as Wittgenstein seemed to think: "perhaps one cannot reflect on thought or talk about reality without reflecting on reality itself...What there is determines what there is for us to mean." That is, "use" doesn't develop ex nihilo, so there is a wider net to cast. Language and thought can't be absolute barriers to meaningfully discussing being if their form is dependent on the logic of being itself.

Or, to sum up: I find Wittgenstein spot on in arguing against trying to find "an external perspective," through which to view language. I find the "therapeutic Wittgensteinians," go to far is asserting something like "any view about the relation between language and non-language is bound to be nonsense." I can't really decide what the man himself actually thought.

Made me think of Donald Hoffman's reframing of the "construction view."

Precisely which causal architecture for integrating information is the smell of pine? No answer has been offered and none ever will: these proposals set themselves an impossible task by assuming that objects in spacetime exist when not observed and have causal powers. This assumption works admirably within the interface. It utterly fails to transcend the interface: it cannot explain how conscious experiences might arise from physical systems such as embodied brains.

Suppose that I am an agent—a conscious agent—who perceives, decides, and acts. Suppose that my experiences of objects in spacetime are just an interface that guides my actions in an objective world—a world that does not consist of objects in spacetime. Then the question becomes: What is that world? What shall we place in that box labeled WORLD?

Let’s grant, provisionally, that we have conscious experiences, that we are fallible and inconsistent in our beliefs about them, and that their nature and properties are legitimate subjects of scientific study. Let’s also grant that our experiences, some of which we are consciously aware of and many of which we are not, inform our decisions and actions; again, taking these as ideas to be refined and revised by scientific study. Let us grant, in short, that we are conscious agents that perceive, decide, and act.


Then the question remains: What is the objective world?

Could conscious experiences bubble out of a computer simulation? Some scientists and philosophers think so, but no scientific theory can explain how. Simulations run afoul of the hard problem of consciousness: if we assume that the world is a simulation, then the genesis of conscious experiences remains a mystery.


--

We can convey an experience by a mere expression. This is data compression of impressive proportions. How much information is wrapped up in an experience, say, of love? It’s hard to say. Our species has explored love through countless songs and poems and, apparently, failed to fathom its depths: each new generation feels compelled to explore further, to forge ahead with new lyrics and tunes. And yet, despite its unplumbed complexity, love is conveyed with a glance. This economy of expression is possible because my universe of experience, and my perceptual interface, overlaps yours.

There are, of course, differences. The visual experiences of the colorblind differ from the rich world of colors that most of us relish. The emotional experiences of a sociopath differ from ours in a way perhaps inconceivable to us, even in our darkest moments. But often the overlap is substantial, and grants us genuine, if but partial, access to the conscious world of another person, a world that would otherwise lie hidden—behind an icon of their body in our interface.

And then this part gets at:
But then what about the other animals, whose cognitive umwelts are (mostly) hidden from us?

When we shift our gaze from humans to a bonobo or a chimpanzee, we find that the icon of each tells us far less about the conscious world that hides behind it. We share with these primates 99 percent of our DNA, but far less, it would seem, of our conscious worlds. It took the brilliance and persistence of Jane Goodall to look beyond the icon of a chimp and glimpse inside its conscious world. 15

But as we shift our gaze again, from a chimp to a cat, then to a mouse, an ant, a bacterium, virus, rock, molecule, atom, and quark, each successive icon that appears in our interface tells us less and less about the efflorescence of consciousness behind the icon—again, “behind” in the same sense that a file lies “behind” its desktop icon. With an ant, our icon reveals so little that even Goodall could not, we suspect, probe its conscious world. With a bacterium, the poverty of our icon makes us suspect that there is, in fact, no such conscious world. With rocks, molecules, atoms, and quarks, our suspicion turns to near certainty. It is no wonder that we find physicalism, with its roots in an unconscious ground, so plausible.

We have been taken in. We have mistaken the limits of our interface for an insight into reality. We have finite capacities of perception and memory. But we are embedded in an infinite network of conscious agents whose complexity exceeds our finite capacities. So our interface must ignore all but a sliver of this complexity. For that sliver, it must deploy its capacities judiciously—more detail here, less there, next to nothing elsewhere. Hence our decline of insight as we shift our gaze from human to ant to quark. Our decline of insight should not be mistaken for an insight into decline—a progressive poverty inherent in objective reality. The decline is in our interface, in our perceptions. But we externalize it; we pin it on reality. Then we erect, from this erroneous reification, an ontology of physicalism.

Conscious realism pins the decline where it belongs—on our interface, not on an unconscious objective reality. Although each successive icon, in the sequence from human through ant to quark, offers a dimmer view of the conscious world that lies behind, this does not entail that consciousness itself is on a dimmer switch. The face I see in a mirror, being an icon, is not itself conscious. But behind that icon flourishes, I know firsthand, a living world of conscious experiences. Likewise, the stone I see in a riverbed, being an icon, is not conscious nor inhabited by consciousness.

---

Conscious realism contends, to the contrary, that no physical object is conscious. If I see a rock, then that rock is part of my conscious experience, but the rock itself is not conscious. When I see my friend Chris, I experience an icon that I create, but that icon itself is not conscious. My Chris-icon opens a small portal into the rich world of conscious agents; a smiling icon, for instance, suggests a happy agent. When I see a rock, I also interact with conscious agents, but my rock-icon offers no insight, no portal, into their experiences.

So conscious realism reframes the AI question: Can we engineer our interface to open new portals into the realm of conscious agents? A hodgepodge of transistors affords no insight into that realm. But can transistors be assembled and programmed into an AI that opens a new portal into that realm? For what it’s worth, I think so. I think that AI can open new portals into consciousness, just as microscopes and telescopes open new vistas within our interface.

Right, and I'm inclined to agree with you that this might not be a good way to think of things at all. But this is certainly a way in which people often tend to think about things. For Plato, the universal represents a higher truth, and a similar theory can be traced back to Memphite Theology prior to Plato. The noumenal, being qua being, the "view from nowhere," also supposes a reality that is causally and ontologically prior to the world of experience.

My point would simply be that the ubiquity of philosophies that focus on the difference between the world of experience and the world of ultimate reality from which experience springs, might tell us something about ourselves, even if we think that view is ultimately misguided. Such views aren't merely products of Western philosophy. You see it in the doctrine of Maya in Shankara, in Lao Tzu, etc.

This parallels a simpler ubiquity in human behavior. When we are confused about what we are experiencing, we use our senses to "cross check" one another. When a stick appears to be bent by water, we stick our hand in to find out the "truth of the matter." When we can't tell if a flower is a real flower or an artful fake, we bring it to our nose. When an optical illusion is particularly effective at creating a sense of depth where there is none, we check by touching it.

My hunch is that this is why our perceptions of different types of sensation remain so incredibly distinct. We don't have the problem of mistaking touch for sound or sound for sight. Synesthesia exists, but it is mild; I have never heard of people completely unable to disambiguate their senses. Synesthesia also appears to confer a lot of benefits, but a loss of ability to "cross-check" between the senses might explain why it remains uncommon.

Since our sensory systems are prone to all sorts of "errors" independently, we have an inborn tendency to bring in other resources to get to the bottom of apparent discrepancies in the world. It's not hard to see how this ties into natural selection and survival advantage. And hence, we seem attuned to create of a model of the world that is "out there," and which is distinct from our experience of it. I can't think of any primitive cultures that espouse idealism; early myth tends to focus on an external world being created from thing things of everyday experience, man from mud and dust, etc.

So, per your quote from Hegel, yes I think there is an element of fear here. There is a fear that if one equates experience with being they shall fail to account for sensory illusions and meet with disaster. There are costs to fleeing from sticks that one mistakes for venomous snakes and even greater costs for mistaking venomous snakes for sticks. Our capacity for attempting to distinguish between sensation, incoming signal, and the actuality of the source of said signal, seems to be extremely basic, biologically primitive. That is, at a basic, unconscious, primitive level, we already see functional cross-checks going on in how the visual cortex areas process data from the optic nerve.

To my mind, this explains why reactions against subjective idealism are so often reflexive, knee jerk. There is also a theory that, because humans are social animals, we come equipped with an ability to simulate how the world and our own actions appear to other people. This too suggests an objective world that stands "over there."

But I don't think this dooms a flat ontology, it just makes it hard to explain. Here is one of the better efforts:

In §24 of the Encyclopedia Logic [Hegel] claims that “logic coincides with metaphysics, with the science of things grasped in thoughts” (EL 56/81), and in the introduction to the Logic he maintains that “the objective logic . . . takes the place . . . of former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construction of the world in terms of thoughts alone” (SL 63/1: 61). Hegel also emphasizes the metaphysical character of the Logic by asserting that its subject matter is the logos, “the reason of that which is”: “it is least of all the logos which should be left outside the science of logic” (SL 39/1: 30)…

Hegel does not claim that ontological structures are known in the Logic precisely as they occur in nature. The Logic conceives such structures in abstraction from space, time, and matter first of all, and the Philosophy of Nature then examines how such structures manifest themselves in space and time. Hegel’s claim that conceptual and syllogistic form is to be found in nature (or in “all things”) should not therefore be taken to blur the distinction between the Logic and the Philosophy of Nature. What that claim does make clear, however, is that for Hegel “concept” and “syllogism” are forms inhering in what there is and are not just forms in terms of which we think; they are ontological and not merely logical structures.


---

Hegel’s arguments in support of the claim that thought understands not just the objects of our experience but being itself can be regarded as forming his own Transcendental Deduction....

There are two intimately related arguments at the heart of Hegel’s Transcendental Deduction. After Kant’s critical turn, Hegel maintains, the logician is no longer justified in taking for granted any rules, laws, or concepts of thought (SL 43/1: 35). Indeed, the logician cannot take for granted anything at all about thought except thought’s own simple being. In the science of logic, therefore, we may begin from nothing more determinate than the sheer being of thought itself—thought as sheer being.

...The principal difference between Descartes and Hegel, of course, is that for Hegel the process of suspending all that thought has previously taken for granted about itself leaves us not with the recognition that I am but with the indeterminate thought of thought itself as sheer being.

Hegel’s second argument is equally simple but starts from the idea of “being” rather than from thought. If we are to be thoroughly self-critical, we cannot initially assume that being is anything beyond the being of which thought is minimally aware. We may not assume that being stands over against thought or eludes thought but must take being to be the sheer immediacy of which thought is minimally aware—because that is all that the self-critical suspension of our presuppositions about being and thought leaves us with. A thoroughly selfcritical philosopher has no choice, therefore, but to equate being with what is thought and understood. Any other conception of being—in particular, one that regards being as possibly or necessarily transcending thought—is simply not warranted by the bare idea of being as the “sheer-immediacy-of-which-thoughtis-minimally-aware” from which we must begin.

First, we are aware of being for no other reason than that we think; thought is thus the “condition” of our awareness of being. This is Hegel’s quasi-Kantian principle. Second, thought is minimally the awareness or intuition of being itself. This is Hegel’s quasiSpinozan principle. These two principles dovetail in the single principle that the structure of being is the structure of the thought of being and cause Hegel to collapse ontology and logic into the new science of ontological logic. 31

Hegel acknowledges that there is a difference between thought and being: being is what it is in its own right and is not there only for conscious thought. Moreover, as we learn in the course of the Logic, being does, after all, turn out to constitute a realm of objects (“over there” and all around us). Hegel insists, however, that we may not begin by assuming that being is quite separate from thought.

Houlgate - The Opening of Hegel’s Logic From Being to Infinity pp. 116 & 129-130

Actually, there is some pretty interesting parallels between Floridi's information theory based maximally portable ontology and Hegel's objective logic, despite the fact that they come from pretty different places, but I have not yet put together my thoughts on that.

Is the rampant humanism disturbing ? Is such humanism created here or merely unveiled? I think I'm just making the rationalism that was always central explicit. I grant that embracing it gives it a different feel.

Maybe. From the dawn of philosophy through Kant's noumena, we see a strong tendency to posit a distinction between the word we live in and something more real, and naive realism itself posits an external world that is distinct from us. I think we possess an inborn tendency to use our senses to cross check each other, to avoid illusion. We also have inborn tendency to posit such externalities as there is some selection advantage in "taking these things seriously."

I'm confused, how is:

After Wittgenstein, the standard response is that there is nothing you can say about this "base reality". The corollary, that it therefore drops out of any discussion; it is irrelevant.

So back to plain ordinary reality, socks and hands and cups and kettles.

Not related to the idea of an inaccessible base reality? My points were:

A. This response isn't really "standard." Plenty of people though Wittgenstein was simply wrong about his critique of metaphysics and it has continued trucking along since.

B. I am sympathetic to part of what is going on in PI, but not Wittgenstein's arguments against metaphysics, the area of philosophy that deals with critiques of a "inaccessible base reality."

In any event, if you have some radically different view on what Wittgenstein is saying about metaphysics it wouldn't shock me because views of PI have differed quite a bit. It is not a work that is exactly clearly written.

But to give a concrete example of what I'm talking about:

For an example of such ill effects, consider someone interested in the privacy of sensations who asks the following question, and who struggles to find any satisfactory answer: ‘Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether I feel pain?’ On Wittgenstein’s view, if we attend to the way in which sentences like ‘I feel pain’ are actually used, then this will appear akin to someone grappling with the gibberish: ‘Why can nobody else know with the certainty I do whether ouch!?’ Philosophy can be used to show that there is no real problem here.

IMO, this PI has a bad habit of throwing out gibberish that it hurts to read and then deciding that, because the gibberish is gibberish, the topic at hand must be. IMO, why sensation is private has a perfectly good if incomplete answer that is fairly mainstream. If we accept that the nervous system is deeply involved in the production of sensation, then the fact that our nervous systems are causally separated from each other in a way that makes them fairly discrete, i.e. human individuals as a sort of "natural kind," explains this fine. No need to claim an area of inquiry stretching back thousands of years has all been gibberish.

And, we can talk about the twins born merged at the head, how the one able to speak claimed he could "feel the thoughts of his brother," disorders such as multiple personality disorder, or the ways in which more social, hive animals interact, suggest that observer's ability to simulate or sense another's sensations exists on a gradient as well. In any event, new information from the empirical sciences offers clarification.

Language is natural; it's like socks and hands and kettles and cups in this respect. It has a causal history like all other natural entities, and it can be empirically studied.In this respect, the "paradox" laid out in PI 201 doesn't seem like a paradox. It seems like looking for underlying general principal of meaning in the wrong place, while also making language out to be suis generis. But you could just as well widen PIs argument to all communications and to animals, and I think doing so shows the cracks in the formalist-type approach to understanding meaning.

In particular, Wittgenstein went to some length to point out that language is embedded in out activities, and certainly not "too distinct, too cut off from the rest of experience"

Sure, and that's the part of PI I like best, but this is decidedly not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the way this interpretation of language is then used to criticize metaphysics as an endevour and make large scale metaphilosophical claims.

Example:

(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are."——That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.

PI 114

One might also give the name "philosophy" to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.

PI 126

The results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language. These
bumps make us see the value of the discovery.

PI 116


Or, to answer Wittgenstein's rhetorical question: "When philosophers use a word—"knowledge", "being","object", "I", "proposition", "name"—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? - Yes, all the time. People talk metaphysics and philosophy all the time, even if they never read any philosophy. Esoterica and ontological musings are about as old as the oldest bits of writing we have, they're in no way extra-ordinary.

The question "What is a word really?" is analogous to "What is a piece in chess?"

It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically 'that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible to think suchand-such'—whatever that may mean. (The conception of thought as a gaseous medium.) And we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. And this description gets its light, that is to say its purpose, from the philosophical problems. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in despite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

And he might well have agreed with you that it is impossible to avoid metaphysics, being what is shown rather than just said.

I'm not sure I get your meaning here. I have always taken lines like "what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use," as describing what the enlightened philosopher in agreement with Wittgenstein does to undo the harm wrought by the metaphysicians, doing bad philosophy.

I didn't mean to suggest it is majority opinion. I meant to suggest it is a not unpopular opinion in the scientific community and in philosophy, and that such claims are the type of metaphysics the Investigations seems to advocate against.



Right, but I think Wittgenstein (both versions) has a fundamentally flawed conception of language. Ordinary language is clearly flawed, whereas the later Wittgenstein makes too much of the distinction between language and other elements of experience. We understand language through experience, and have the innate ability to develop linguistic skills due to the same selection effects that shape the rest of our biology. Language isn't unique, nor is there a discrete "language system," as such in the brain. Even specialized areas like Borca and Wernicke's areas work through anatomy that is common to non-hominids.

So, IDK, I'm no Wittenstein specialist, and his style leads to multiple readings anyhow, but it seems to me like he, and those who followed him in the "linguistic turn," make the mistake of making language too distinct, too cut off from the rest of experience. This is roughly analogous to the way in which Kant cuts experience off from reality. Both views hazard against metaphysics because we either aren't in a place to use language to describe it, or we lack experience of what metaphysics takes to be the object of its study.

To my mind, these critiques have two problems:
1. It's actually impossible to avoid doing metaphysics in many areas of inquiry, so such a move is simply impractical.
2. Both moves, which are themselves critical, seem based on assertions that are not taken up critically. For Kant, the offending presupposition is that thought must necessarily be a relation between the mind and external objects, but this can't be assumed. For Wittgenstein's successors*, it is that, because meaning can be understood in terms of use, language is use. But this appears to be an artificial truncation of what language does. Language serves uses, but sometimes our meaning is obviously a reference to the external world we share (whatever the nature of this world).

My take would be, why posit the existence of things we are separated from in the first place? We are in the world and of the world. We don't need a bridge to get to the "things in themselves," or a proper language to speak of them, we need to give up the idea entirely. Likewise, for language, there can be things that are "indescribable," but this in no way entails that all phenomena are as such.

*Wittgenstein doesn't go as far with this idea as many who have followed him. He is equivocal in PI when he introduces "meaning as use (43).

But I'm largely split on the later Wittenstein. I think his warning against undue theorizing is a good one. Philosophy of language is a great example of an area where inquiry has been muddled by attempts to reduce language to "just this one thing," for the sake of theorizing. But I also see the value in theorizing in, and in systematicity, if one avoids missing the forest for the trees.

I think Wittgenstein is right that "philosophy can be therapy," but I don't agree that "good philosophy must only try to be therapy." Plus, metaphysics can be its own sort of therapy in that, at the very least, it shows the myriad ways in which thought can comprehend the world, which itself is therapeutic treatment against dogmatism. Moreover, good metaphysics gets at that sense of "wonder" at being that Aristotle describes so well. This is itself, good therapy.

If so, then there are standing waves.

Or there is just the mathematical description of them. There is this amusing passage in "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized," for example:

What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? That is a question that we refuse to answer. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesn’t amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The ‘world-structure’ just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories. (158)

The book is interesting to me in that it seems to be an extreme case of trying to exorcise thought and any knower from knowledge, a project I don't think can ever be successful, not least because no one can actually think of natural phenomena in purely mathematical terms.

So you would build another, somewhat larger bottle

Sure, why not? And when that gets too small, you build another, larger bottle, or break down the walls between two other bottles. What else are we to do if we don't agree with the conclusion that calling the walls of the bottle a "pseudo problem," will somehow teleport us outside the bottle? If it seems more like refusing to fly and then claiming the problem is solved because we've stopped hitting walls? And if it's bottles all the way down, why posit anything outside of the bottles to begin with?

Wittgenstein's critique of how philosophy errs by trying to mimic the sciences does have merit. However, what is a scientific paradigm if not another metaphysical bottle? They certainly result in pseudo problems that can only be seen as such when another paradigm comes along. And yet, it seems we need paradigms to do science. And yet, we still make progress towards understanding the world, which suggests that the pseudo-problem problem may itself be another pseudo problem (the "pseudo-problem pseudo problem" if you will)

In the same way, my biggest problem with Wittgenstein's critique is that it seems to over generalize about the ways in which philosophy itself over generalizes.

This brings me to the second way that I think HW’s metaphilosophy overgeneralizes. According to HW, philosophy is purely descriptive; it should “leave the world as it is” — only describe how we think and talk, and stop at that.

I think philosophy can play a more radical role. Return to our fly. Wittgenstein was not the first to compare the philosopher to one, nor the most famous. That award goes to Socrates, who claimed that the role of the philosopher was to act as a gadfly to the state. This is a very different metaphor. Leaving the world as it is isn’t what gadflies do. They bite. As I see it, so can philosophers: they not only describe how we think, they get us to change our way of thinking — and sometimes our ways of acting. Philosophy is not just descriptive: it is normative.

I agree with Lynch. Indeed, philosophy plays a normative role in science itself, e.g. the problem of defining science itself.

As he points out, philosophers traditionally assumed that truth has a single nature — something all true statements share. Some said that all truths correspond to reality, others that all truths are useful, or are rationally coherent, and so on. Each one of these views falls short. Not every truth is useful, nor does every truth — think of the fundamental truths of morality or mathematics — clearly correspond to an objective reality. In HW’s eyes, we got ourselves into this mess by ignoring the real function of the concept, which isn’t to pick out some deep property all and only true statements share, but to allow linguistic shortcuts. And that is all there is to it: seeing that there is no “nature” to truth is the way out of the fly bottle...

First, just because we can’t reductively (“scientifically”) define something doesn’t mean we can’t say something illuminating about it. Go back to HW’s account of truth. He assumes that there is either a single nature of truth (and we can reductively define it) or that truth has no nature at all. But why think these are the only two choices?

https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/of-flies-and-philosophers-wittgenstein-and-philosophy/