Oddly, you seem happy with what this "uneducated metaphysical speculation" - ie: physics - has to says about perpetual motion machines, but not what it then has to say about dissipative structures. — apokrisis
Try to keep up with the educated view. — apokrisis
But pay attention. He was talking about the boundless. He was characterising a naked potentiality that is logically all that would remain after all constraint was removed. So now creation becomes constraints-based, not construction-based. It starts with formal and final cause, not material and efficient cause. — apokrisis
It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about creation. We don't start with some uncreated stuff - the material required to construct. We start with the structural limitation of the unformed and the undirected. We begin with the process of reining in possibility itself so as to start to have a material world that expresses the intelligibility of form and finality in its existence. — apokrisis
Sure, construction quickly follows. Indeed, some form of constructive material activity is going to have to be there pretty much from the start. History has to begin by freedoms being physically disposed of in a fashion that makes the past materially concrete. — apokrisis
I’m not relying on the principle, just explaining why multiverse thinking gets associated with it. — apokrisis
So the only constraint left is the non-constraint of the anthropic principle - the quite reasonable conclusion that if every alternative exists, then we live in one of those where we could arise as observers. — apokrisis
My view also. Although the argument I'm pursuing is not about losing religion per se, but losing a vital metaphysical insight that had become associated with it. But then I know that many people will reject it because it is associated with religion; hence, 'reactive atheism'. — Wayfarer
That "unbridled everythingness" would seem to be, for you, the genesis state prior to the existence of anything. — Janus
Can we say that state exists, or subsists, eternally (since it is atemporal and aspatial)? Insofar as it is prior to any temporal or spatial existence it is utterly indeterminate and indeterminable; and it follows that we cannot say anything about it at all. — Janus
what I don't get is what's wrong with "it just happened". — Pseudonym
So how are we assessing it as unlikely that it should have happened that exact way it did? — Pseudonym
We aren’t being reserved for some other more grand purpose as Wayfarer wants to suggest. — apokrisis
If it is a rational insight then you should be able to say what it is and argue for it. — Janus
If it is a poetic insight, a so-called "mystical' insight, then it is based in feeling, not rational thought, — Janus
What you mean by 'rational' is actually closer to being 'scientifically or empirically demonstrable', isn't it? — Wayfarer
In any case, the argument from the reality of intellectual objects is a rational argument with a long pedigree. The fact that you don't accept it doesn't amount to a refutation. — Wayfarer
No, I actually think both internalism and externalism are wrongheaded. — Janus
If it is neither internalism nor externalism, what is it? — apokrisis
I think you would benefit form reading some Whitehead. — Janus
Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its understanding of where those desires lead―an age that claims mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole absurd or unintelligible. ...
The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the essential correlation between reason and story, and the essential convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty.
to valorize a kind of anthropocentric internalism — Janus
Hey you're sounding like SLX :-) — Wayfarer
As it happens I am awaiting Amazon delivery of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition James Matthew Wilson. — Wayfarer
I would go for a kind of "flat' ontology, where there is no absolute distinction between inner and outer, higher and lower. That's why I often argue with you that we are not exhaustively socially constructed, because to say that is to valorize a kind of anthropocentric internalism that denies that our experience is in the world, or the world and mediated by the world. — Janus
And so you burble on and on.... — apokrisis
So I am certainly not denying the world. Pansemiosis is an attempt to explain the world in the exact same terms we would explain ourselves. — apokrisis
...actually an even flatter ontology than what I would recommend, because I do not think we can be exhaustively understood in the same way as the rest of the world. — Janus
Also, as i see it, to explain ourselves in the same terms we explain the world is not internalism, but if anything would be more of an externalism, if not an ultimate denial of the whole distinction, since the sign relation is not understood to begin with humans as far as I understand. — Janus
You are still setting this up dualistically. It is the inside vs the outside. The observer vs the observables. — apokrisis
So internalism certainly starts with the epistemological argument - we are trapped inside our own heads making models of a world. — apokrisis
I think this is much more of a dualistic setup than what I was proposing. — Janus
You are happy to be sort of dualistic, but not arch-dualistic. — apokrisis
For example can the "unbridled everythingness" exist or subsist prior to the crisp somethingness of spatio-temporal existence? Does the latter emerge from the former or are they co-dependent, co-emergent? — Janus
I actually haven't stated any metaphysical commitments of my own, or even that I have any metaphysical commitments. — Janus
Because science is purportedly in the business of finding reasons. — Wayfarer
The positing of chance as cause doesn't seem to me to amount to either an hypothesis or a metaphysical principle. — Wayfarer
The argument in the book I mentioned is there are a very small number - 6 - of natural relationships and ratios inherent in the nature of the Cosmos that have a very specific value, which, were they different in some minute degree, would entail that matter would not form at all. But if you view the Universe as a grand simulation, something which can be mathematically modelled, then these parameters seem very specifically set for such an outcome. — Wayfarer
I don't think it is. I think most scientists consider themselves in the business of making testable theories. It's in the business of predicting, not explaining. I'm no expert, but my limited understanding of the methods in quantum physics (where currently one has to include an element of chance, so I'm lead to believe), is to simply include that chance mathematically. Scientists are trying to eliminate that chance element, I suppose, in order to make the theory more accurately predictive, but until that point, the 'scientific' theory simply includes probability and everyone's quite happy that they are still doing 'science'. Prediction is far more useful than reasons. — Pseudonym
If anything, the very deterministic nature of science leads even the most causal thinker to conclude that if we keep asking "why?", we must obviously arrive at either an infinite task or the answer "just because". So any scientists who did think that they were one day going to arrive at the ultimate reason why would be deluded indeed. — Pseudonym
Firstly, a minor correction, it's not chance as cause, chance can't cause something, it's an expression of the lack of determinism. — Pseudonym
This recent paper on quantum mechanics should clarify the matter for you. Science is about explanation. — tom
I appreciate the links. You seem, as in a lot of your posts, to be confusing "David Deutch says..." with "it is the case that...". All I read in the paper you've provided is Deutch (with far more humility than you're citing him with) saying things like "I present an account of...", and "in this view...". Absolutely no where does he say "This is the way things are and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong". So no, I don't accept your contention that science is about explanation on the basis of a single paper in which the author himself admits that he is only presenting "an" account not "the" account. — Pseudonym
Any computer program can be correctly and accurately described as a collection of bytes, but it doesn't matter. — Pattern-chaser
It can't... — tom
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