In my systems science/hierarchy theory view, the whole is produced by what it produces. The whole shapes its parts - it contributes the downward-acting constraints. But the parts then construct the whole - they contribute the upward-building material being, the suitably shaped "atomic" components.

So it is a bootstrapping or cybernetic causal model. And if it sounds unlikely, it is at least less unlikely than creatio ex nihilo.

I've come to a similar conclusion, but you've stayed in two paragraphs what had always taken me two pages, so I very much appreciate it.



This is an excellent point. My struggle with this line is that realism vis-á-vis the independent existence of external objects, and the idea of there being such a thing as accessible being-as-itself (i.e., being not altered by the faculties of human thought, Kant's noumenal) is the default of human intuition, and may itself be the result of a cognitive blind spot.

If you look at early human societies, or cultures that existed into the 19th-20th centuries with very low levels of technological development and little to no exposure to modern science, generally what you find is realism. It is a realism with a lot of supernatural elements, but still a fairly familiar world when compared to idealism.

Certainly, this realism has been challenged by advances in philosophy and the sciences alike (e.g., Kant's transcendental or Quine's points on epistemology in philosophy, most notably quantum weirdness, particularly delayed Wigner's Friend experiments in the sciences). Arguably these challenges have already been met after some readjustments. My fear, is that my strong predilection towards realism is actually the result of a cognitive blind spot, not evidence that such realism is actually warranted.

In fact energy isn’t the ground level of physicalist ontology anymore. The modelling has moved on to information-entropy as the dichotomy that best captures the wholeness of reality’s foundations. So a structuralist account is replacing a materialist account.

I am a big fan of information theories, but this might be overselling its adoption in physics. I will admit that I'm not super up to date on recent papers, but it seems like through the late 2010s there were still a lot of people writing off information-based ontologies using either Bell's "information about what?" argument or calling it essentially crypto-logical-positivism (i.e. a way to slip in "only observations exist). I think both these critiques misunderstand the theories at a fundemental level, but they still seem fairly prevalent.

In a phenomenological-hermeneutical jargon, these norms constitute a horizon, a perspective in which we can make anything intelligible to ourselves.

This part of the quote reminds me of Quine's web of belief. For example, that you can get around relativity and keep absolute time and space if you're willing to accept shrinking and growing measurement tools and objects as real facets of the world.

It follows from this "must" that if something cannot be explained it must not exist. It might be argued that even though there are things that cannot be explained now they must still have an explanation that in time can be provided. But this assumes that there are no limits to human knowledge. Such metaphysical privileging should not be accepted on faith.

Hegel's theory is not only about the movement in time, but in place. It is Eurocentric. In addition, our thinking is not simply in terms of forms of thought, but in terms of specific concepts that change. Hegel knew nothing of relativity or quantum mechanics, both of which shape our thinking in ways that they could not have shaped his understanding of reality.

I'm not sure this is really a fair assessment. Hegel was writing before Darwin's theory of evolution, but his theories are certainly applicable to biology as a whole (see: below). Hegel likely wouldn't have had too much of a problem with QM or relativity. His vision of progress towards to Absolute as historical in human history doesn't have to shift that much to incorporate contemporary theories of life, particularly ones centered around biosemiotics (Hegel is a precursor of semiotics to some degree), information, and life as a self organizing far from equilibrium system.

Hegel was a German philosopher who was a major figure in the philosophical movement known as German idealism. In this study I will argue that Hegel’s philosophy has similarity to the self-organization theories of Prigogine and Kauffman, and is therefore an idea in advance of its times.

The development of thought and thing is at the core of Hegel’s work. In The Phenomenology of Mind, he tackles the development of recognition and being, subject and object, and self and other, - from simple to complex forms. In The Science of Logic, Hegel deals with the progress of categories from abstract to concrete, - and pure being to absolute idea. In The Philosophy of Nature, his interest is in how nature evolves through the mechanism of self-organization. Hegel was writing before Darwin proposed the theory of evolution, and his dialectic is aimed at analyzing and describing development in the logical sense. The common feature of these works is their analysis of the fundamental structures by which order is generated..


In Hegel’s view, nature develops logically. Nature itself is a system of self-organization through the random motion of the contingent.

Hegel would like to say that the basis of life is the non-equilibrium self-referential structure. In more modern terminology, we could interpret this as meaning that the first organism emerged from interaction between high polymers.

Kaneko proposes a model of complex systems biology, which I will argue, Hegel was proposing in his metaphysics 200 years ago. Kaneko conceptualizes life as a living system that develops when interaction between the elements in a system is sufficiently strong. Living creatures exhibit flexibility and plasticity through fluctuations in these elements. Complex systems biology uses a dynamical systems approach to explain how living things acquire diversity, stability and spontaneity.

https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings59th/article/view/2658#:~:text=In%20Hegel's%20view%2C%20nature%20develops,%2Dequilibrium%20self%2Dreferential%20structure.

I've seen Hegel get a fair amount of play in cognitive/neuroscience and biology journals recently, and in philosophy of science across fields. My results might be biased because I sought these types of takes out, but I remember reading Incomplete Nature, The Vital Question, and Synch, and sections of What is Real? and Chaos, and thinking, "this sounds very Hegelian." And sure enough, when I looked, people had already published the papers I was thinking of writing, with the benefit of all the context, knowledge, and prestige of actually having done a PhD in the relevant area.

The dialectical is potentially a more holistic model through which to view Kuhn's work on paradigm shifts and scientific revolutions. Shifts tend to arise when contradictions are identified and either the paradigm sublates these or is overturned, but elements of it always survive.

It also might be a better model for analyzing developments in human institutions than natural selection, since extinction isn't a concern in the same way, and neither is competition and cooperation really the same dynamically. Fukuyama's End of History is a good example.

Hegel likely wouldn't have had too much of a problem with QM or relativity. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That may be, but the concepts of QM and relativity are not found in Hegel. Thinking is not Hegel's concepts of thought. Our thinking in terms of these concepts (QM and relativity) were not available to him.

It might be argued that even though there are things that cannot be explained now they must still have an explanation that in time can be provided.

I would argue that there are things that cannot be explained now that will be explained later, but not that everything that cannot be explained now must still have an explanation that in time can be provided. That is simply something we do not know.

His vision of progress towards to Absolute as historical in human history doesn't have to shift that much to incorporate contemporary theories of life, particularly ones centered around biosemiotics (Hegel is a precursor of semiotics to some degree), information, and life as a self organizing far from equilibrium system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Progress toward the Absolute, according to Hegel was completed by Hegel. Whatever new discoveries are found, whatever new understanding that occurs happens within the circle of knowledge becoming self-knowledge. But thinking has content. It is not just the movement of thought thinking itself. What there is, being, is not limited by what has been thought. If there are limits to human thought, that is, if we are not omniscient, then the limits of thought are not the limits of being.

I agree with the notion of self-organization. This is fundamental to my argument in favor of physicalism.

The Principle of Universal Explanation (PE): everything must have some explanation (in terms of something else). — lish

This sounds like the classical philosophical questions: "Does everything has a cause?", "Is there a primary cause to everything?", etc. The word "explanation" however, introduces an ambiguity in the subject of "cause and effect", because it means that the existence of everything may be difficult or even impossible to explain, i.e. conceive or just describe in words. But then, this would not exclude its existence, would it? So, since the case here is not a problem of description, but rather of actual existence, I believe that the word "cause" should be used instead, which makes sense and is very clear: "(the existence of) everything must have a cause". However, this would may be some other "principle", not the present one.*

The Principle of Unexplained Existence (PU): reality in total cannot have an explanation (in terms of anything beyond itself). — lish

What kind of "reality" are you have in mind? There's no such a thing as an absolute, objective reality. In that case, there's nothing to discuss about or anything that will be discussed based on that inexistent "reality" will be idle talk. Except if by "reality" you mean the "physical world" as a lot of people do. In that case, the proposition will become, "The Universe cannot have an explanation".
(BTW, the phrase "in terms of anything beyond itself" has no sense in this context, since "itself" does not consist an "explanation".)

Now, here too, the word "explanation" introduces the same ambiguity as in the first principle.

***

At this point, it there is no much meaning for me to continue, discussing the arguments offered for Rasmussen’s principles. This would unnecessarily burden this post. But I can do it in another post, if I'm aske to ...

I’ve often looked at systems as introducing local constraints on a universal instability - a more creative impetus of structuring information against entropy. Looking at it now, I wouldn’t think either is more accurate than the other. All of this speaks to the interchangeability of the dichotomy. — Possibility

It can be true both that the very ground of being is a radical instability and that nothing systematic exists until that ground has been sufficiently stabilised for the system to become composed by it.

So atomism is a thing. But it is also an emergent thing - the emergent ground that is a secondness solidified within the structuring habits of a state of thirdness.

The intertwined nature of a triadic causality makes it hard to dissect in the usual fashion - where something is the monistic ground and all else becomes emergent.

Metaphysics usually gets hung up on the very first step of the debate - is the ground of being matter or form, physicalism or idealism, etc. The triadic view would see no actual ground of being but instead vague possibility being divided towards its opposing limits.

Any world, conceived of in a general way, must have a local~global, or hierarchical order, where there are parts and wholes, the contents and the container, the material events and the immaterial laws or structuring constraints. And thus any world conceived of in a general way must have a developmental trajectory that gets it from the starting point of an Apeiron or radical undivided vagueness, and see it become as divided against itself as possible as it tends towards its opposing limits on what is possible. At the end of time, a world will achieve its most divided state of existence.

We can see this argument in Anaximander's Apeiron as much as Peirce's pansemiotic cosmology. And we can see it in the actual cosmology of the Big Bang universe - the cosmos that starts in a state of Planckscale quantum foam, an everythingness of barely contained hot fluctuation, and which spreads~cools to become effectively its own thermodynamic heat sink. By the end of time, when the Big Bang arrives at its Heat Death, the initial state of everythingness will have been turned into the most definite and uniform state of a divided nothingness. A container as large as possible with as little content as possible.

So what makes sense of a dichotomy is that it embeds this developmental or process philosophy perspective. The dichotomy starts in the raw possibility that is a tychic vagueness and then unfurls towards is two immanent and logically-reciprocal limits of being.

The end or goal is marked by becoming as stably divided as possible. Further development becomes impossible because the system has reached its equilibrium state where - like an ideal gas - local differences cease to make a global difference.

I've come to a similar conclusion, but you've stayed in two paragraphs what had always taken me two pages, so I very much appreciate it. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

I am a big fan of information theories, but this might be overselling its adoption in physics. I will admit that I'm not super up to date on recent papers, but it seems like through the late 2010s there were still a lot of people writing off information-based ontologies using either Bell's "information about what?" argument or calling it essentially crypto-logical-positivism (i.e. a way to slip in "only observations exist). I think both these critiques misunderstand the theories at a fundemental level, but they still seem fairly prevalent. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is the glass half full or half empty? It seems both obvious that fundamental physics knows it needs to add thermodynamics to a view of nature that has been based on relativity and quantum mechanics, and that this is very much work in progress.

Statistical mechanics was welded on to QM to give us decoherence. In relativity, it has been all about black holes and holographic horizons for a few decades now. Particle physics has been influenced by condensed matter physics and its topological order for much longer.

So sure, there is a lot of nonsense out there where information is spoken of as if it were the new material atoms of nature - some kind of actual matter or primal substance. That is the crackpot end of things.

But when information is understood as degrees of freedom, or the "atoms of form" rather than the new atoms of matter, then this marks a move to a more suitable metaphysics.

Thermodynamics fixes some basic problems for physics by introducing finality in a natural kind of way. And it brings with it new maths that is widely used.

The dichotomy starts in the raw possibility that is a tychic vagueness and then unfurls towards is two immanent and logically-reciprocal limits of being.

The end or goal is marked by becoming as stably divided as possible. — apokrisis

. Sounds like a game the whole family can play But who invented the rules? Can we invent new rules?

But who invented the rules? Can we invent new rules? — Joshs

If we can still find the freedom to imagine things being different, then we haven't arrived at the ultimate goal of the game - Platonic level, mathematical necessity.

So the game is to develop the "rules" to the point they self-evidently exclude all other possibilities. The game is precisely that kind you would call a totalising and univocal game - one that absorbs all plurality and contingency into the eternalised hardness of its irrefutable logical structure.

And it is indeed game over for plurality and contingency when the triadic structuralism of Peirce and systems science comes to include them as part of a larger dialectical logic.

The game is precisely that kind you would call a totalising and univocal game - one that absorbs all plurality and contingency into the eternalised hardness of its irrefutable logical structure.

And it is indeed game over for plurality and contingency when the triadic structuralism of Peirce and systems science comes to include them as part of a larger dialectical logic. — apokrisis

Doesn’t this swallow up and bury the mystery of sense? As in the ‘sense of a meaning’? Isnt the sense of any concept , fact , perception subject to constant contextual shift in its sense? Do we simply reduce sense and its transformations to biological causal processes, or does trying to ground sense in causal mechanisms just keep us trapped within the circle? Is it totalizing finality we need or endlessly rejuvenating creative wonder?

What are the moral implications of this totalizing univocal game? As ethical agents what should we strive for? I assume not just historically contingent, relativistic change?
Are there certain universals we should be guided by in our relations with others?

This part of the quote reminds me of Quine's web of belief. For example, that you can get around relativity and keep absolute time and space if you're willing to accept shrinking and growing measurement tools and objects as real facets of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly. Ontological holism emphasizes the systematicity or radical interdependence of concepts (hence 'the Concept' singular in Kojeve's Lectures on Hegel). (These lectures are dear to me as my entry into the aromatic Hegelian wetlands.)

The concrete Real (of which we speak) is both Real revealed by a discourse, and Discourse revealing a real. And the Hegelian experience is related neither to the Real nor to Discourse taken separately, but to their indissoluble unity. And since it is itself a revealing Discourse, it is itself an aspect of the concrete Real which it describes. It therefore brings in nothing from outside, and the thought or the discourse which is born from it is not a reflection on the Real: the Real itself is what reflects itself or is reflected in the discourse or as thought. In particular, if the thought and the discourse of the Hegelian Scientist or the Wise Man are dialectical, it is only because they faithfully reflect the “dialectical movement” of the Real of which they are a part and which they experience adequately by giving themselves to it without any preconceived method. — Kojeve

https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/kojeve.htm

we realize that we ourselves are not some free transcendental subject as Kant would have it, but that our self actualization takes place within a larger whole, later to be called horizon or maybe even 'episteme'. — Tobias

This 'episteme' reminds me of Braver's book on anti-realism, in which we have Kant => Hegel => Heidegger => Foucault. This is not to be understood as an ascension but to chart a movement of the big idea that the 'subject' is a kind of unstable liquid lens. Kant gives us the lens metaphor but wants it to be crystalline and eternal, so that we can have that kind of knowledge. Hegel liquifies it (makes it a function of an evolving community) but gives a journey toward eventual comprehensiveness. Then Heidegger and Foucault allow finally for unanchored drifting. The lens metaphor breaks down along the way, so we get some kind of form-of-life goo where entities are no more mound than mutter. Do please forgive any absurdities in this hasty sketch.

Progress toward the Absolute, according to Hegel was completed by Hegel.

I don't think this is a correct interpretation. The Phenomenology and Greater and Lesser Logics serve in defining Absolute Knowing, and indeed it's arguable that the main goal of the Phenomenology is to bring the reader to the standpoint of Absolute Knowing, the place where philosophy transitions from "love of wisdom," to actual "wisdom," the elevation of speculation to science. This concept of Absolute Knowing is not identical with the Absolute. Hegel has a number of "Absolutes" that exist within his "circle of circles," systems (e.g. the Concept, Absolute Concept).

I don't think, although some commentators argue this, that it represents an omniscient knowledge. Nor does it represent some sort of special enlightenment Hegel had (normally a position of critics).

For one, the Preface to PhS is explicitly a call for a shift in the current prevailing perspectives of the day, but the Absolute represents a process occuring across being and would be inclusive of all concious beings. Towards the end of the Preface, Hegel reflects explicitly on the intuition that his work won't be immediately grasped by many, and so the process of realization of the Absolute won't be completed.

The problem with the omniscience version of Absolute Knowing is that it appears to be contradicted throughout Hegel.

The problem with the narrow view of knowledge in a broad sense essentially being completed with Hegel is that it totally ignores his "truth is the whole" epistemology, which obviously is incomplete at the time of his writing. It also clashes with his commentary on the sciences of his day


A good working definition I've found is:

Hegel's doctrine of thought,
philosophic thought, is given in the category of absolute knowledge, which is arrived at through the procedure of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The conception is thus based directly upon our actual knowing experience, and claims to give us an account of thought as it essentially is. Thought, as here defined, is genuinely objective, transcending the relativity of individual experiences and being the determination of things as they are in themselves. But this s is not to say that reality is identical with abstract cognition.

For thought finds its capacity to express the real in the fact that its universals are always the syntheses of differences, and not the blank universals of purely formal logic. Actual living thought includes within itself the data of so-called intuitive perception, of feeling, of volition, of cognition, and it is adequately conceived of only as this unifying principle of experience; it is the living unity of mind, the one reason which appears in every mental activity.

Therefore, when Hegel teaches that thought is conterminous with the real, he is simply stating the doctrine that experience and reality are one.

I like Hackett's treatment more but it's not so neatly summarized.



Anyhow, that's all tangential. I think the main point would be, what reality would a thing have that can't be thought?

thinking has content. It is not just the movement of thought thinking itself. What there is, being, is not limited by what has been thought. If there are limits to human thought, that is, if we are not omniscient, then the limits of thought are not the limits of being.

Physicalism is necissarily an ontology where an abstraction (physical reality) is accepted as more basic than perception. However, for any knower, subjective experience is obviously going to be more appear ontologically primitive than the abstraction of the physical world.

Now we know appearances can be deceiving, and we have plenty of good reasons to believe in physicalism, but this does pose a problem for physicalism in that it has to reduce what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive (subjective experience) and fit it satisfactorily into an abstraction that is itself necissarily a facet of subjective experience. Hence, we have the "Hard Problem," where it appears to be impossible to derive the experiences of the subject from the abstraction the subject experiences (the model of the physical world).

If those sentences seem circular, it's because the attempted reduction is circular.

Upon reflection, the Hard Problem shouldn't be at all suprising, because it's essentially demanding that an abstraction somehow account for sensation despite the fact that thinking through an abstraction is itself a sensation (and just one type of sensation).

Now if something can't be thought (and thus also can't be perceived) it's hard to see what sort of being it can have. It can't exist as part of subjective experience obviously, but it also can't exist as a physical entity that has any sort of support for its existence, as empircle evidence for its existance would be impossible since it cannot be thought of.

To be sure, there might be things that humans can't think of that aliens or later forms of life can. There might also be things we can't observe currently that new technologies will let us observe in the future. I don't know though if there can be things that exist which can never be observed or thought of by anyone however. The existence of such things would, for all observers, forever be identical with their non-existence. But if two things are definitionally identical, as they must be for all observers in this case, than every trait held by state X (the thing's being) must also be held by state Y (the thing's not being) for all targets of the proposition. This seems to violate Liebnitz' law of identity. The thing could only be as an object within a third person abstraction of "absolute/noumenal being," but such abstractions by definition only contain things that can be thought.

Doesn’t this swallow up and bury the mystery of sense? As in the ‘sense of a meaning’? Isnt the sense of any concept , fact , perception subject to constant contextual shift in its sense? Do we simply reduce sense and its transformations to biological causal processes, or does trying to ground sense in causal mechanisms just keep us trapped within the circle? Is it totalizing finality we need or endlessly rejuvenating creative wonder? — Joshs

Why do you keep insisting on reducing dichotomies to monisms? Haven't I spent enough time on explaining that they are the step towards the holism of a triadic metaphysics?

If you check back to my response to this OP, you will find that I argued the Cosmos must begin in the free possibility of a state of everythingness. So you have infinite creativity and fecundity right there.

And then the second part of the story is that this infinite potentiality must be constrained by a totalising structure for it to then have definite local possibilities, or fundamental and atomistic degrees of freedom. The formless must gain a general formative capacity for producing its informed materials.

So to get to your concrete plurality - the many contained within the one - we have to constrain a shapeless and pure creative potential in a way that it gains useful and cohesive form ... as localised variety playing the common game even as its pursues its individual trajectories.

I get that your idea of phenomenology demands you defend a Cartesian dualism where matter and mind are your fundamental categories of nature.

But as I say, such a metaphysics can never make sense as it only speaks to the division and not its resolution.

And to make your flawed metaphysics sound more appealing in every conversation, you must thus dogmatically oppose it to a monistic strawman and avoid engaging with the triadic position I always argue.

What are the moral implications of this totalizing univocal game? As ethical agents what should we strive for? I assume not just historically contingent, relativistic change?
Are there certain universals we should be guided by in our relations with others? — Joshs

Again, I have said the same thing so many times to you that it becomes tedious to have to repeat myself.

The systems view, the biosemiotic view, has a huge amount to say about such things. For instance, as I said, it shows why competition~cooperation is the natural dynamic driving any society. And it is hardly rocket science to draw the usual pragmatic moral imperatives from that.

So a successful ethical agent would be defined as an individual able to balance this dynamic in its most synergistic way. A win-win where the creative possibility is being invested in making a better social structure for all - and that better social structure being in turn one that would be capable of fostering exactly that kind of individual disposition.

Something like a modern social democracy, as enjoyed by the world's happiest nations. :razz:

So what have you got against golden rules like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?

Is this not a simple statement of reasonableness in your eyes? And is it not - on closer examination - exactly a systems science perspective?

competition~cooperation is the natural dynamic driving any society. And it is hardly rocket science to draw the usual pragmatic moral imperatives from that.

a successful ethical agent would be defined as an individual able to balance this dynamic in its most synergistic way. A win-win where the creative possibility is being invested in making a better social structure for all - and that better social structure being in turn one that would be capable of fostering exactly that kind of individual disposition.

Something like a modern social democracy, as enjoyed by the worlds happiest nations. So what have you got against golden rules like "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"? — apokrisis

I’m writing a paper on the modern history of moral blame, which gives me a slightly new framework within which to view our previous conversations.
It strikes me that cooperation and competition both require shared values. Without agreement on a larger system of practices , neither cooperation nor competition are coherent. Relativistic approaches to ethics argue that there can be no ultimate agreement among disparate cultures on what constitutes a better social structure (Russia vs the West, or social conservatives vs liberals in the U.S.). In the U.S. there is wide disagreement over what makes us happy ( only some believe we need to “make American great again”). So the golden rule turns out to be as relativistic as the values that determine what we want to have done to us or in our name.

Opposing the moral relativists are those who believe utilitarian consensus is possible. Their justifying metaphysics tends to involve some
form of objective naturalism, providing the ground of correctness and consensus.

It strikes me that cooperation and competition both require shared values. Without agreement on a larger system of practices , neither cooperation nor competition are coherent. — Joshs

Mmm. So still trying to talk past the triadic logic then.

The global coherence of the cooperation is only possible due to the local incoherence of the competition. Or more accurately, the system must both integrate and differentiate to exist in a definite dichotomous fashion.

So yes, there must be global integration. That is what underwrites the long-term persistence of the social fabric. And there must also be the moment-to-moment local differentiation. That is what provides the definite local degrees of freedom that give the system its creative capacity to keep adapting.

If all the parts of the system marched in lockstep, it would be a machine. But a society is an organism. It has to make mistakes if it is to learn. Individuals have to be free to fuck up royally in the most definite and binary fashion. They have to be able to be wrong - so they can counterfactually also prove to be decisively right ... in terms of what consequences result in from the acts so far as the overall cohesive stability of the social organism is concerned.

So contingency is hard-wired into the deal. It is a virtue to be black and white right or wrong as that is the "requisite variety" that any Darwinian process uses as its informational fuel.

Even if individuals act blindly, as long as the action is binary in its counterfactual definiteness, then it will serve to drive the evolutionary progress of the whole.

Being able to act at the level of a self-aware social agent is just an added advantage. One can start to work within a community of interest groups - the more complex thing of a nested hierarchical structure.

So in modern society, we are meant to be able to participate in many interest groups with somewhat different organismic identities - our workplace, our home, our pub, our football club, our library, our courtroom. And this becomes possible as we accept our identities as individuals wearing many different masks to suit the institutional occasion, along with our overall identity as "thinking and feeling human beings" operating within some overall notion of sovereign state and rule of law.

Relativistic approaches to ethics argue that there can be no ultimate agreement among disparate cultures on what constitutes a better social structure (Russia vs the West, or social conservatives vs liberals in the U.S.). — Joshs

Well if we weren't all constrained to live on the one planet with its hard entropic and ecological constraints, then we could simply let all the systems run and see which manages to persist the longest. Does social democracy win out in the long run, or ruthless neoliberalism, or autocratic empire, or whatever.

And even here, the answer from ecology is dichotomous, and hence about a dynamical balance.

Evolution is famously punctuated as ecosystems fluctuate between immature and senescent states. The two opposed ways of persisting as a dynamical system are either to have a high metabolic turnover and repair capacity - a bias towards youthful creative recklessness - or instead the opposite bias of being organised by wise, efficient, already well-adapted, habit.

Immaturity makes many mistakes but has the energy throughput to bounce back. Senescence makes few mistakes and is super efficient, but lacks the flexibility to recover from major perturbations. So one is flexible but wasteful, the other is economical but brittle.

So the systems view has no problem framing this debate. But it is triadically complex. It requires a grounding in the maths of hierarchy theory and dissipative structure.

In the U.S. there is wide disagreement over what makes us happy ( only some believe we need to “make American great again”). So the golden rule turns out to be as relativistic as the values that determine what we want to have done to us or in our name. — Joshs

Well all you have only shown is that it is possible for societies to think in the shallowest and most short-term fashion. Their application of the golden rule has one spatiotemporal horizon and not some other.

So it can be "completely correct" if one doesn't actually need to worry about peak oil, climate change, the breakdown of social cohesion, etc, etc.

And unfortunately for the rest of the world, the US is shifting away from its "American way" neoliberal globalism because it probably will do better in the medium term by turning in on its North American fiefdom.

It has all the advantages of geography and demographics to continue to flourish in energy and resource profligate fashion for another 50 years of so, especially now it has pinned down Canada and Mexico as captive trade partners, and secured its Asian alliances on the other side of the Pacific.

America has been great ever since the old empires burnt down their own homes in WW2. First it was great because of Bretton Woods and the establishment of King Dollar. The corporate America era.

Then it was great because globalisation meant the world could become its sweatshops and ecological dumping ground.

Next if will be great because it can retreat back into a North American sphere of influence where the Canadians provide the resources, the Mexicans the factories, and the US can keep doing its entropic thing until the poles melt and the skies catch fire.

Opposing the moral relativists are those who believe utilitarian consensus is possible. Their justifying metaphysics tends to involve some form of objective naturalism, providing the ground of correctness and consensus. — Joshs

Of course. If you have your pro and your con position, you have the two sides of your argument. The only thing that remains is to pick the winner and jeer at the loser.

Get back to me when you can see how the subjectivist and the objectivist are the two sides of the one coin. Then you will be starting to see where I am coming from.

[EDIT]: I didn't complete the point on your US example. What is consistent in the three versions of America the Great is the valuing of the immature stage of the canonical ecosystem life-cycle. American remains in pursuit of an eternalised youth where there is always energy to burn and every reckless mistake heals itself fast.

And that has been its self-identity since it founded itself on a heady mix of Enlightenment~Romantic ideals. The boundless human frontier, the world as constructed by independent genius.

So each stage involves a radical socio-economic shift, but only so as to continue in the same vein.

Trump and Bannon are speaking for something quite rational in its narrow self-interest when they seek to put an end to Davos-world and get on with Fortress North America - the empire right-sized for the next age of generalised environmental disaster and 10 billion people in resource conflict.

This concept of Absolute Knowing is not identical with the Absolute — Count Timothy von Icarus

Right. The universal is unity of the immediacy, direct and unmediated, of knowing and being, of knowing and for knowing. (Preface to the Phenomenology, #17)

"truth is the whole" — Count Timothy von Icarus

The true is the whole. However, the whole is only the essence completing itself through its own development. This much must be said of the absolute: It is essentially a result, and only at the end is it what it is in truth. — Preface #20

The true is not an original unity as such, or, not an immediate unity as such. It is the coming-to-be of itself, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal and has its end for its beginning, and which is actual only through this accomplishment and its end. — Preface #18

Physicalism is necissarily an ontology where an abstraction (physical reality) is accepted as more basic than perception. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For there to be perception there must be something to be perceived, the object of perception.

Now if something can't be thought (and thus also can't be perceived) it's hard to see what sort of being it can have. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This begs the question. To ask what sort of being it can have is to say what it is. To treat it as an object of thought. Whenever we discover something new, something previously unknown, we have an example of something that is but was until then not thought and not perceived. It does not come into existence when it is perceived, it already was, we simply become aware of it. In fact, at the astronomic level it may no longer exist. What we perceive is what was but no longer is.

Now we know appearances can be deceiving, and we have plenty of good reasons to believe in physicalism, but this does pose a problem for physicalism in that it has to reduce what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive (subjective experience) and fit it satisfactorily into an abstraction that is itself necessarily a facet of subjective experience. Hence, we have the "Hard Problem," where it appears to be impossible to derive the experiences of the subject from the abstraction the subject experiences (the model of the physical world). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice setting up of the 'heard problem of conch is this' ! Lots of complexity in 'what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive.' One machete for this overgrowth might be thinking in terms of the individual navigating its relationship with tribe, as opposed to mentality as mediation of an otherwise unknowable physical substrate. Then 'reality' is (approximately) the best way for the tribe to talk, and 'seems like' is a kind of modesty or tentativeness in reports brought to that tribe (and its virtual surrogate in the self-doubting philosopher.)

the Hard Problem shouldn't be at all suprising, because it's essentially demanding that an abstraction somehow account for sensation despite the fact that thinking through an abstraction is itself a sensation — Count Timothy von Icarus

Something similar occurs to me. If you define some X as radically private, then 'obviously' it's excluded from rational explanation. It's even outside of language, an irrelevant beetle in an unopenable box.

The 'sensation' of thought you mention is what I take many to mean by 'pure meaning,' with which the metaphysical subject is supposed to be 'infinitely' intimate. Yet this 'subject' is itself a mere 'dream' or 'sensation' or 'thought' of this (no-longer-a-)subject. ('Watch me pull a hat out that same hat.')

This is sort of all aside the point, because my comment was specifically about the reference to things that can never be thought of, not things that we didn't think of until X point in time.

Whenever we discover something new, something previously unknown, we have an example of something that is but was until then not thought and not perceived.

I get what you are getting at here but this:

It does not come into existence when it is perceived, it already was, we simply become aware of it. In fact, at the astronomic level it may no longer exist. What we perceive is what was but no longer is.

does not follow as a necessity. It's simply a good assumption that needs to be confirmed. We think things we perceived for the first time already existed because empircle analysis tends to allow us to find evidence of its prior existance.

So, while we didn't have observations of bacteria for much of our recorded history, but we had a huge historical record to look back on as evidence that bacteria existed before we knew about them. The same holds for electrons, gravity, etc. In cases where this evidence is not as clear cut, we have the general pattern of having found such evidence in the past to support our inference that the newly discovered entity didn't just appear when we perceived it.

On the other hand, we generally don't have good data to suggest that things tend to appear ex nihilo, at least not at the scale of every day objects (quantum foam arguably being a notable counter example, and quantum mechanics being an example where repeated experimental evidence suggests that observation does cause a state to exist that did not exist prior to observation).

That said, all these inferences are the results of prior experience and the shared experiences of others. They aren't the products of deduction. It is a guideline based on past experience itself, the results of observation.

If a second, pink moon appeared tomorrow and began orbiting the Earth, it would not make sense to assume it had always been there despite it being observed for the first time just recently.

nothing but the relation is real. — Tobias

I agree. However, I think "the relation" is factual (Witty) and not just virtual (Bergson).

I am already familiar with a resolution to this paradox, although I have never heard it formulated in the same way.

If logic concerns rules of correct inference from assumed premises, then when attempting to use logic to discuss ultimate causes, you have these choices:
1. Make use of circular reasoning (which is typically considered to be incorrect).
2. Make use of unjustifiable premises (which really doesn't come to ultimate answers, unless you call the unjustifiable premise "God", and this is a form of the first mover argument).
3. Have an infinite regression of causes.

The conclusion I come to is that having a total logical knowledge of everything is beyond human comprehension. Since "ultimate" explanations seem by definition to be beyond the scope of human understanding, we can stop there. We do not need to speculate about whether an uncaused God created everything, whether we are in an infinite loop (circular reasoning as applied to physics), or whether there is a metaphysics that explains the origin of regular physics (and a meta meta physics, and so on forever). It is unknown and unknowable.

This is sort of all aside the point, because my comment was specifically about the reference to things that can never be thought of, not things that we didn't think of until X point in time. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Things that were not thought of until X point existed before X point. Can we know that there will be an X point for everything that exists?

They aren't the products of deduction. It is a guideline based on past experience itself, the results of observation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't see what this is supposed to show. One might argue that if thinking and being are the same then we should be able, a priori, to deduce all that is.

I should add @Tobias that the identity of thinking and being for Hegel is based on the aufheben of the difference between thinking and being. It there is no difference there cannot be an identity.

Maybe I wasn't being clear. I was thinking of entities that are necessarily unthinkable, not contingently so. For example, a theoretical particle that exerts no observable influence on any part of the universe, versus a rock floating through space that no one ever looks at, but could see if they did look at it.

In this first case, the point is simply that empiricism does set the limits of what can be said to be as what can be observed. This is not to imply that this observation cannot be indirect, or reliant on multiple levels of abstraction and inference, as is the case for quarks and leptons. This is true for the ultimate sense of being "unobservable," that is, being necissarily unobservable versus contingently so, not in the sense of "not having been observed to date," or "possibly not being observed in the future."

The unthinkable (as in unthinkable for all minds, past, present, and future, necissarily as opposed to contingently unthinkable) obviously can't be observed, and has the added lack of reality of being unable to be imagined or deduced since it can't, by definition, occur as an object of thought. It seems empiricism and idealism must declare such things to be meaningless or lacking in any ontic status.

I don't see what this is supposed to show. One might argue that if thinking and being are the same then we should be able, a priori, to deduce all that is.

It's hard for me to imagine the contents of mind existing outside of experience. If everything is thinking, I'm not sure what reality would look like, unless perceiving is covered under "thinking?"

I'm not sure if the claim that all things should be deducable holds for most idealist ontologies, which do posit that all reality is mental, but perhaps not that all things are thinking. Modern idealist ontologies generally suppose that mental objects behave in the manor we observe in the "physical" sciences. These behaviors/properties cannot be deduced, but require inductive inference to derive.

The arguments I normally see for these ontologies is ironically that physicalists introduce too much epistemological baggage and speculation by positing that a set of mental abstractions (i.e., the explanatory model of the physical world we experience in thought), which are necissarily a sort of second order type of mental object, is actually what should hold the primary ontic status, over and above the more concrete and accessible world of subjectivity, of which mental abstractions are just a part.

I say ironic because in the modern context idealists are generally stereotyped as the more speculative, less analytical types, but the newer forms are generally arguing from Occam's Razor, the formal logical consistency of the ontology, and parsimony.

I'm not ready to switch camps or anything, but it is something that idealism has just one ontological primitive, experience, and computational/informational ontology also has just one ontological primitive, whilst physicalism now has an absolute zoo of them, hordes of particles of virtual and non-virtual varieties, various forces and fields, all of which are only accessible using multiple layers of abstraction. The two aforementioned ontologies also have the benefit of looking at the Hard Problem and the role of the observer in physics and saying "well yeah, that's what you'd expect."

a theoretical particle — Count Timothy von Icarus

A theoretical particle is by definition thinkable. To theorize is to think.

necissarily unobservable — Count Timothy von Icarus

You shift from 'thinkable' to 'observable'. Thinkable, in the context of Rasmussen's paradox means explainable.

The unthinkable (as in unthinkable for all minds, past, present, and future, necissarily as opposed to contingently unthinkable) obviously can't be observed — Count Timothy von Icarus

All that is thinkable is contingent on our ability to think. Will we ever be able to explain all that is observable that goes on at the subatomic level? Maybe, but maybe not. When you shift from our minds to hypothetical minds then you can posit whatever you want, including omniscient minds. But to think about the existence of minds that do not have human limits does not mean that there are such minds, even though we can think them in the sense of hypothesize or imagine them.

Addendum to

nothing but the relation is real. — Tobias

... and in order to show the fly the way out of the Kant-Fichte-Hegel fly-bottle, this break follows:

Thought comes from being, but being does not come from thought [ … ] The essence of being as being (i.e. in contrast to the mere thought of being) is the essence of nature. — L. Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie

:fire:

(emphases added)

I don't see what this is supposed to show. One might argue that if thinking and being are the same then we should be able, a priori, to deduce all that is.

I should add Tobias that the identity of thinking and being for Hegel is based on the aufheben of the difference between thinking and being. It there is no difference there cannot be an identity. — Fooloso4

That last part is true, of course. thinking and being are not the same thing, yet they are identical, one finds upon reflection. Yet, it takes time for this insight to break trough.

The first part is interesting. I think you have a too phenomenological reading of the "phenomenology". Being is not the same as 'beings', thinking for Hegel is not the thinking qua intentionality that the phenonologists seem to me to support. If something is to be an object for us, ('Gegenstand', standing opposed to us, against us), it must be thinkable for us in so far as it fits within our web of conceptual relations. Of course we might discover new things, we will discover new things until the end of time. However for it to be discoverable as a 'new thing' it has to fit within the conceptual makeup of 'spirit' that whole of rational relations in which 'we' dwell.

That insight, the insight that there is such a realm in which we articulate ourselves (maybe close to Heideggers Seinsverständnis, though that has much more realistic connotations) broke through with Hegel. Not only the emergence of this realm though 'appeared', our relation to it appeared as well, which is a dialectical relation. I always see myself as different from reality, as a perspective on reality, but at the same time I know I am part of this greater whole. We are 'being the same in difference'.

Actually, the idea that everything is deducible is very un-hegelian I would say, because it would fall into some sore of transcendental subject an all knowing mind. The whole dialectic would be unnecessary. However, we 'find ourselves thrown into a world which seems to be not-mind, which seems totally different. It remains different, just also the same as thought in the sense that it must be understandable for us, we assume it can be understood, the world is not totally alien in the end.

I agree. However, I think "the relation" is factual (Witty) and not just virtual (Bergson). — 180 Proof

... and in order to show the fly the way out of the Kant-Fichte-Hegel fly-bottle, this break follows:
Thought comes from being, but being does not come from thought [ … ] The essence of being as being (i.e. in contrast to the mere thought of being) is the essence of nature.
— L. Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie — 180 Proof

I am still struggling with the following: to what extent did Hegel also want that relation to be real and to what extent did he succeed? He prioritizes 'life' sometimes he feels rather naturalistic. I do think he was looking for this actual relation. When 'my' prof explained the absolute to me, he hit his hand on the table, and said 'this, this is absolute'. I feel he is right, yet, what Hegel does in his work is all conceptual, on and on, spiral after spiral, circle after circle. He does try to be bodily but it is a very abstract, conceptual 'bodyliness' if that makes sense. Does he succeed in making the break on through to the other side? I am not sure.

I feel that is why one of the reactions against him is the phenonological, more realist approach leading to a reappraisal of the body, seen in the French thinkers, Merleau Ponty, Foucault to a lesser extent, perhaps even Nietzsche. If he can not, if his system cannot account for nature or life, because it is in the end one sided, then there resides the 'more', the abundance of life over and above the concept. The price for that is high though. We rescue some sort of abundant 'physis' but what is our place in it? We are essentially drifting never knowing whether we are at home in nature. It is by all means the prevailing view though. Hegel's enlightenment homeliness has lost its place to ecosophical estrangement.

Great discussion by the way. Even if do not react I am keenly reading what you write. If it starts to involve QM, I am out because I simply do not know enough of it. Back in the day Hegel was almost not studied at all and no one on the PF was really into a discussion. Now we have a number of perspectives... :fire:

Being is not the same as 'beings' — Tobias

Are you claiming that Hegel made the Heideggerian distinction? He distinguishes between pure being and determinate beings. Pure being is not.

If something is to be an object for us ... it must be thinkable for us — Tobias

Of course! How could something be an object for us and not be thinkable for us?

However for it to be discoverable as a 'new thing' it has to fit within the conceptual makeup of 'spirit' that whole of rational relations in which 'we' dwell. — Tobias

For Hegel 'Concept' 'Begriff' has both an overarching sense of the movement or working out of spirit and concepts as in the concepts of mathematics or physics. It is this latter sense that both enables and impedes knowledge. For example, QM does not fit within the division of the concepts of 'wave' and 'particle'. Here thinking had to change to get more in line with being, that is, with what is.

Actually, the idea that everything is deducible is very un-hegelian I would say — Tobias

I was responding to this:

They aren't the products of deduction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

A theoretical particle is by definition thinkable. To theorize is to think.

Yeah, that was the point I was trying to make. Such a particle is thinkable, but unverifiable. It still has being in some sense in that it can be posited. It falls beyond the limits of empiricism to define being. The unthinkable, arguably, falls beyond the limits of being itself.

The unthinkable cannot have being for us. The necissarily unthinkable (for all minds,) cannot have being period, unless you posit some sort of absolute God's eye view of existence as a ground, or some sort of unanalyzable bare substratum of being. The problem with positing the being of things that are (necissarily) unthinkable is that their being and not being will always be coidentical for all parties, and so it is unclear if the bare substratum of being posit is actually meaningful. To put it another way, if you can posit it, it is thinkable, so such things cannot even be posited directly.

I guess I was not explicit enough: the points about unobservable things are in reference to the limits of what empircism can accept as having being. The points about things that are unthinkable are about what can even have the potential for being. The distinction between necissarily unobservable/unthinkable things and ones that are only contingently so, is the distinction between the hard limits of being, and simply the horizons of human knowledge.

Did Feuerbach ever give an example of such being without thought? Obviously he didn't, because anything he set down would obviously have been an object of thought.

This is just asserting a bare substratum of being as brute fact, despite the fact that evidence of being without thought is impossible.

Now, the logical positivists had a lot of bad ideas, such as asserting that talk of things existing while not observed is meaningless, but they potentially had a point about this "being as being" talk being meaningless. I am not willing to go that far. Rather, it is simply talk about something that is utterly unprovable and whose reality makes no difference to us. Arguably that fits the definition of meaningless; I don't think it does because such a thing can possibly be imagined, although arguably it cannot be imagined if we must necissarily imagine an observation of this being as being, not the thing itself.

Why? Because the existence of being without thought is always and forever, necissarily the same for all observers if it exists or doesn't exist. This being as being, bare substratum of existence, etc.'s being is indiscernible from its not being.

Now I anticipate the follow up of "does the moon exist when no one is looking at it." This is not a real problem for the point above. Copious amounts of observable evidence exists for the moon having been where it is for a very long while. If we didn't have a moon, and one showed up in the sky tomorrow night, we wouldn't assume it had always been there. A model of unobserved items behaving as they do when observed has plenty of support. It's also a thing that can only exist as an object of thought, a map, not a territory.

The quote above is making a claim about the map being the territory. It's unprovable and unfalsifiable. Thought is contingent on being. Being's contingency on thought is simply an unanswerable questions whose answers are indiscernible from each other.

This issue is incorrectly compared to solipsism. Solipsism is similar, in that it poses questions that cannot be answered, but the answers are discernable across observers. If solipsism is true, then acts of cruelty and kindness only effect one observer, but if solpsism is not true, there is a big difference for people on the receiving end of such acts. This is in contrast to being as being, where the answer necissarily causes no variance for any observers, ever.

The necissarily unthinkable (for all minds,) cannot have being period, unless you posit some sort of absolute God's eye view of existence as a ground, or some sort of unanalyzable bare substratum of being. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This assumes the very thing in question.Esse est percipi is a supposition. I see no reason to assume that existence is dependent on the existence of sentient beings. I also see no reason to assume that being requires a substratum. I don't think it is even a coherent concept.

Did Feuerbach ever give an example of such being without thought? Obviously he didn't, because anything he set down would obviously have been an object of thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course he did: nature before humans existed; but also your body before you developed self-awareness or bodily-awareness, and The Bard's "the undiscovered country" – c'mon, Count, how could one not recognize that thought presupposes non-thought (other-than-thought)? As Feuerbach points out, the "thought of being" is not being (just as the map of Texas is not Texas). You grok the concepts of presupposing and implicating, don't you? :roll: