I would quibble about the the idea that it's a matter of 'choice' - philosophy or 'metaphysics' always arises, for me anyway, out of the necessity of responding to a problem, where the problem - whatever it is - is immanently defined by the solution which addresses it. — StreetlightX
...even a minimal understanding of QM helps to explain why QM isn't super important at macro scales on the basis on QM itself. You don't need any fancy philosophy here at all. The first point and most important point to note is that QM does in fact apply at all scales.The question is over the effects of QM at macro scales, and it's that effects that are negligible. — StreetlightX
Seems like either I misunderstood you or I misunderstand her. Or both. — T Clark
Likewise, Crowther provides an examples of relative independence between pairs of domains that are both being governed by quantum mechanics. — Pierre-Normand
[Apologies. This is a bit roundabout as an actual response, but I started so I finished...] — apokrisis
That is a roundabout way of getting at the fundamentality of quantum mechanics. QM is a highly general view that includes "everything" by removing every symmetry-breaking and just talking nakedly about the statistics of fluctuations or individuations. It forms a ground zero at the point where indeterminism itself is constrained to produce determinism. — apokrisis
I must give more thought to that too but it rings similar to Bitbol's thesis in his paper Quantum Mechanics as a Generalized Theory of Probabilities. — Pierre-Normand
This 'inability to reconstruct the universe' from first principles is, I think, the exact corollary of understanding reductionism as context-invarience: it means that there is no one-way street, and that explanation (of any phenomenon) needs to be (at least) 'two way' - context matters. — StreetlightX
I read this when you wrote it and thought I understood what you meant. I thought your point was that a situation like QM, which applies at all scales but who's effects are only significant at atomic scales, is not a true example of emergence. — T Clark
"The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a 'constructionist' one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the science, much less to those of societies". (Anderson, "More Is Different"). — StreetlightX
One is that science itself does not - despite popular misconceptions, often spread by philosophically inept scientists themselves - sanction any kind of reductionist metaphysics. — StreetlightX
In fact, the oddest thing about such reductionist programs is that, taken to their logical conclusion, the ability to reconstruct the universe from first principles is idealism in it's most extreme form; they literally 'vacate the world of its content' as it were, giving up empiricism - the very loadstone of science - for ideality. — StreetlightX
To say that everything is just 'atoms in motion' is an incredibly attractive thesis, a powerful-looking, parsimonious 'explanation' for things that absolves one from going out there and doing the hard work. — StreetlightX
But both are idealist claptrap. — StreetlightX
science is so very powerful — StreetlightX
The point is not to reconstruct the universe, it is to see it as it really is. — Caldwell
As Deleuze says, philosophy lives and breathes not on truth, but on the Remarkable, the Interesting, and the Important: categories of sense, of significance. — StreetlightX
It is simplicity bought at the price of simplification, in the most pejorative sense of that word. — StreetlightX
I think the philosophical pursuit of truth is the drive for a single, all-encompassing explanation. — Dominic Osborn
One thing to note is that I've been quite careful to avoid the word 'emergence' when talking about alot of this stuff — StreetlightX
3) Situations where higher levels "emerge" from lower levels in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable. These are what I've always thought of when I think of "complexity." — T Clark
So yes, emergence is a tricky subject as Crowther says. But I am against the idea that it is essentially pluralistic. Let's not leap straight from the one to the many. — apokrisis
Have you read the paper by Noah Moss Brender that StreetlightX linked to recently (Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking, Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic System Theory)? — Pierre-Normand
Yes, I understand that. Crowther doesn't use the word either. She actually says "EFT" in order to avoid that. — T Clark
While the Merleau-Ponty school is headed towards a sense-data view - one that risks takes qualia too seriously as drops of conscious experience. — apokrisis
Massimo Pigliucci has discussed both on his blog) — StreetlightX
It's important to note that this is entirely implausible on any reasonable reading of M-P, who spends page after page in the Phenomenology arguing against such a view. — StreetlightX
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes his position from transcendental idealism by insisting that form does not require a consciousness to constitute it. But in order to distinguish his position from materialism, Merleau-Ponty argues that physical form is a perceptual being, “conceivable only as an object of perception.” (SB, 144) Even if we understand perception as a bodily rather than an intellectual activity, this formulation seems to reinscribe the logic of transcendental idealism at the level of vital behavior, placing us right back in the old antinomies:
https://philpapers.org/archive/MOSSAS-2.pdf
The relation between consciousness and nature is split in two by the appearance of behaviour as a mediating term...
No, that would be theology, not philosophy. Explanation follows the explananda wherever it goes, it does not subordinate it to prior stipulations.
In any case, give me arguments, not aphorisms. The latter are not worth much. — StreetlightX
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