Nature selects things all the time with no intention; the Omicron variant, for instance.

Given the above, ↪Wayfarer is not mistaken. — Mww

Philosophy via sentence analysis. Never a good idea.

Philosophy via concept analysis. Always a good idea.

Not sure if that variant is selected by anyone. Or maybe that virus is more intelligent than we know. It could be that information flows both ways. It's still a dogma in biology on which that view on evolution is based...

Philosophy via concept analysis. Always a good idea.
1h — Mww

Maybe

I parse the entire subject of the reality of ideas differently. My view is that proper 'intelligible objects' such as natural numbers, scientific principles, and the like, are real, but they're not existent things - they don't exist in the same way that regular objects do. They are strictly speaking noumenal - meaning 'objects of mind', although the sense in which they are 'objects' is debatable. — Wayfarer

I suppose you are viewing "intelligible objects" from a god-like Rationalist perspective -- from outside the world system. As far as God is concerned, everything in the world is real, and objective. But. from the human point-of-view, we depend on physical senses for most of our knowledge of reality. So, what Epistemologists refer to as a priori knowledge is literally non-sense. We obtain such god-like knowledge via reasoning from specific sensory data to generalized concepts -- which are not real things, but artificial (synthetic) propositions about holistic collections of things & logical relationships. Hence, we can only communicate those intangible ideas in terms of metaphors analogous to physical things.

The Logical Positivists denied that humans are capable of "synthetic" a priori knowledge. So, they dismissed such non-empirical information as mere imaginary fantasies. I'm not a Logical Positivist, but I am aware that most people apply the term "Real" only to what they can see & touch. Any other forms of knowledge are either Un-real or Ideal or spiritual or "ghostly", and consequently their "existence" is debatable. That's why -- although Enformationism includes both aspects (real & ideal) as forms of Generic Information -- for the sake of clarity, I try to make a distinction between those ways of being. Even on this Philosophy Forum. when we discuss noumenal concepts, the debates can become never-ending. So, I am constantly forced to define my definitions to make sure that my Ideal meta-physical metaphors are not interpreted as assertions of real physical things.

Nevertheless, I like to discuss all "intelligible" topics, but those that are "synthetic" (rational) instead of natural (physical) need to be handled with kid-gloves to avoid mis-interpretation. Hence, a ghost is analogous to a human body, but some will take it to be a real entity, that under certain conditions, or with technical instruments, can be rendered sensible to the physical senses (re: shrouded image in previous post). So, I agree that "the sense in which they are 'objects' is debatable". :cool:

Where that presents difficulties, is that there is no provision in most people's minds for things to exist in different ways - in other words, things either exist, or they don't. — Wayfarer

Yes. But the Enformationism thesis is all about the "different ways" (forms) that things can exist. Which is what makes its phenomenal & noumenal topics so hard for some, especially philosophical Realists & Logical Positivists, to conceive. For them, you are either a truth-seeking Realist, or a fantasy-seeking Idealist. Hence, my complementary notion of BothAnd does not compute. :meh:

This again is incoherent. A 2d surface is a flat plane. To give that plane any type of curvature requires a third dimension. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are disputing about the most significant step forward in modern geometrical thought. Drop the hysteria.

The Gaussian radius of curvature is the reciprocal of Κ. For example, a sphere of radius r has Gaussian curvature 1/r2 everywhere, and a flat plane and a cylinder have Gaussian curvature zero everywhere. The Gaussian curvature can also be negative, as in the case of a hyperboloid or the inside of a torus.

Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic measure of curvature, depending only on distances that are measured on the surface, not on the way it is isometrically embedded in Euclidean space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_curvature

This again is incoherent. A 2d surface is a flat plane. To give that plane any type of curvature requires a third dimension. You could give a line (1D) curvature, with a second dimension, but then what you get is a circular plane. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is intrinsic curvature and Gaussian curvature. A 2d spherical surface can be curved without a third dimension its in. The inside of a 2d torus, has negative Gaussian curvature, if embedded in 3D. It's intrinsic is zero, like that of a circle or cylinder.

:up: :clap: :100:

I suppose you are viewing "intelligible objects" from a god-like Rationalist perspective -- from outside the world system. As far as God is concerned, everything in the world is real, and objective. — Gnomon

With respect to "the criterion of objectivity": I did some research on the word and found that it only comes into use in the early modern period. And I contend that this is because of an actual shift in consciousness that marks the advent of modernity, which is when humans begin to orient themselves with respect to objects and things, or become aware of themselves as separate subjects in a domain of objects. Prior to this reality was experienced very differently (and so, was actually different.) But you generally won't find direct awareness of this shift or re-orientation in the subject of philosophy, certainly not in analytic philosophy. Hegel might have had an awareness of it, with his emphasis on the historicity of consciousness. Also maybe you find awareness of it in anthropology, philosophical sociology (for instance Max Weber's 'spirit of capitalism') but more markedly in authors such as Owen Barfield and Jean Gebser. *

I'm not a Logical Positivist, but I am aware that most people apply the term "Real" only to what they can see & touch. Any other forms of knowledge are either Un-real or Ideal or spiritual or "ghostly", and consequently their "existence" is debatable. — Gnomon

Again, that customary attitude, which is practically assumed, grows out of empiricism as a stance or attitude towards the world. Locke and Hume (in particular) are so profoundly influential in our culture, we see the world through the spectacles they fashioned without being aware of it. ('What spectacles?' people will ask.) And I think you're still actually thinking within that mode, while wanting to see beyond it, and sensing something beyond it That's why you revert to the images of 'ghostliness' or 'ethereality' to depict your understanding of anything 'beyond the empirical', because you still are trying to conceive of what is beyond it in quasi-objective terms. Whereas what is needed is a kind of gestalt shift or re-orientation into a different kind of cognitive modality, which of course is a very difficult thing to either accomplish or convey (and I can't claim with certainty that I have done either). But, I think you're heading in the right direction.

artificial (synthetic) propositions — Gnomon

That's an equivocation of the meaning of "synthetic". Synthetic substances are indeed artificial, but that is not what is meant in Kantian philosophy:

synthesis: integration of two opposing representations into one new representation, with a view towards constructing a new level of the object’s reality. Philosophy as Critique employs synthesis more than analysis. On the operation of synthesis in the first Critique, see imagination. (Cf. analysis.)

synthetic: a statement or item of knowledge which is known to be true because of its connection with some intuition. (Cf. analytic.)

source.

-----------------
^{* Just found those two great blog entries, am going to go back and absorb them after writing this. Ain't the internet amazing.}

Mww doing analytic philosophy!

Always knew you had it in you.

Again, it is not clear that physical causes are physically necessary, so any relation to logical necessity is fraught.

Did we agree on this?

The term I used was ‘physical causation’ by which I mean the identification of causes that can be understood in principle by the physical or natural sciences. But as many of the comments in this thread have made clear, the nature of causation is a complex and multi-factorial issue, whereas logical necessity is a relatively simple and discrete subject which can be described in a few pages of text.

I’ve come to the view that what are described as ‘scientific laws’ are where physical causation can be harnessed to logical necessity. That’s what enables the application of logical and mathematical methods to practical and theoretical sciences, to great effect, as evidenced by the progress of science and technology since Galileo. But it never goes ‘all the way down’ due to the fact that empiricism is restricted in scope to contingent facts.

The topic I’m still very interested in studying in greater detail is the significance of Kant’s ‘synthetic a priori’ and the application of all of these ideas to the subject of metaphysics.

Grade? 1 - 10?

The topic I’m still very interested in studying in greater detail is the significance of Kant’s ‘synthetic a priori’ and the application of all of these ideas to the subject of metaphysics. — Wayfarer

If you can get back to us with a good brief summary of this matter, please do. Some years ago I spent time with this but, not being an academic, found it slippery. Silly question perhaps, but if god is understood as a necessary being, is god a putative example of synthetic a priori?

Oh, OK.

I don't think logical necessity is as simple as might be supposed. 's mention of linear logic and mine of logical pluralism hint as more depth.

Our difference might be that while you suppose "physical causation can be harnessed to logical necessity", I suggest "logical necessity can be harnessed to physical causation". It's not a surprise that the mathematics we choose to talk about the world happens to fit the word, anymore than that a Philips head screw driver fits a Philips head screw, or that a knife happens to be able to cut a tomato.

I am puzzled by folk returning to Kant. Quine's account of the analytic/synthetic division should have put an end to the synthetic a priori.

Grade? 1 - 10? — Mww

Being a left-leaning do-gooder, I refuse to grade.

But as mentioned above, I'd gently commend Quine to you, to help you along your path.

You are disputing about the most significant step forward in modern geometrical thought. — apokrisis

Is your appeal to authority supposed to impress me? Did you just meet me yesterday? Are you going to defend your assertions or not? Can you justify your claim that space is the type of thing which can be both curved and not curved at the same time? Will you resolve this contradiction?

I think the idea that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason has been superseded by Quine or subsequent science is plain wrong. I think it’s more likely that either people don’t understand it, or don’t want to engage with Kant’s work. I know that trying to read Kant is like studying accountancy or tort law but I’m still convinced of the importance of Kant (and his successors including Schopenhauer). I find modern analytical philosophy on the whole is shallow and superficial and is not concerned with the foundational questions that Kant and Schopenhauer dared to articulate.

It's not a surprise that the mathematics we choose to talk about the world happens to fit the world, — Banno

That’s a lame attitude, it seeks to explain away the ability of reason to make genuine discoveries - to uncover, disclose, intuit, things about the world which were never previously known and could not be known by any other means. It’s a kind of covert neo-Darwinism which reduces everything about humans to an adaptation, it’s what I mean about modern philosophy being basically irrational (or sub-rational).

well, as I’m saying, reading Kant is just hard work but I’ve downloaded a very nicely-formatted edition of his Prologemena for Kindle and am finding it generally approachable. It’s written in a deliberately user-friendly kind of style even with some humour in places. But it’s still very dry.

The whole Hume-Kant argument is basically this. Hume and the other empiricists have the conviction that all knowledge is acquired by experience (in the broadest definition including ‘sensory input’, which the tradition confusingly calls ‘sensible’.) Locke’s conviction was that the mind is tabula rasa, a blank slate, he rejects anything like innate ideas (the historical precendent being Plato’s Meno, where innate knowledge of geometry is elicited from a slave boy.) Empiricism then amounts to the conviction that only what can be validated with reference to sensable data can amount to a valid knowledge claim. A priori truths are an exception because they’re true by definition - the textbook example being that you can say of a bachelor that he’s an unmarried man. Even though it’s a trite example, the principle has broad scope, including (Hume would argue) mathematics and all those things we can know a priori, that is, on the basis of logic not experience.

I think in very simple and high-level terms, the thrust of Kant’s critique is that it’s not possible to reduce everything to the merely sensable. Even to interpret sense-experience to the point of being able to talk rationally about it, requires that the mind calls on the ‘categories of the understanding’ which are not themselves acquired through experience but have to be regarded as innate in some sense (this is where I see the tie in between Kant and Aristotelian hylomorphism, it’s laid out in this book.) This is the basis of his claim that ‘percepts without concepts are blind’. Kant also shows that even logical claims are not simply matters of definition - that we can come to conclusions based on logical grounds that encompass more than simply the terms from which the conclusions are drawn - that is where the synthetic a priori comes in. The mind is all the time organising and managing incoming sensory data in accordance with innate faculties. If that sounds commonplace, it’s because Kant’s philosophy has also had a huge impact on the way we think about thinking. (There’s a scholar called Andrew Brooks who specialises in Kant’s impact on cognitive science.) But Kant hasn’t displaced empirical dogmatism, because, I think, his critique is very hard to understand. Hence the widespread conviction that what is real has to be ‘out there somewhere’, situated in time and space.

Why is this concerned with metaphysics? For Kant, it’s because metaphysics must be based on non-experiential or a priori understanding. However where I think Kant is vulnerable to criticism is that he doesn’t allow for the category of extraordinary cognition corresponding with divine illumination. This is why Jacques Maritain criticises him. So Kant is not the last word. (Sorry for the long post.)

Is your appeal to authority supposed to impress me? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is meant to inform you.

Can you justify your claim that space is the type of thing which can be both curved and not curved at the same time? Will you resolve this contradiction? — Metaphysician Undercover

What contradiction? Even in ordinary language, flat and curved would be a pair of dichotomously opposed limits - two extremes of the one spectrum. Something would be flat to the degree it wasn't curved, and curved to the degree it wasn't flat.

The question for maths is how to go about measuring the relative curvature of a smooth manifold once you have got past the naive Euclidean view that space is some kind of absolutely flat backdrop.

You might rant and rave in defence of this antique view. But geometry has just got on with developing the means for modelling spaces where perfect flatness only means an extreme constraint on any intrinsic curvature.

It would help to learn more about this subject before mouthing off further. For this purpose, I would suggest Wildberger's lectures on hyperbolic geometry.

The pertinent bit is how he shows that the Euclidean yardsticks developed for measuring spaces without curvature - distance and angle - must be replaced by the new dichotomy of quadrance and spread when dealing with hyperbolic "flatness".

So there is nothing arbitrary going on as it is all motivate by the rigorousness of dialectical argument.

And Appollonius had already worked out the basics for this approach back in 200 BC.

So even if your knowledge of maths is still rooted in distant antiquity, you ought to know better.

See Wildberger's lecture series - https://youtu.be/EvP8VtyhzXs

A priori truths are an exception because they’re true by definition - the textbook example being that you can say of a bachelor that he’s an unmarried man. Even though it’s a trite example, the principle has broad scope, including (Hume would argue) mathematics and all those things we can know a priori, that is, on the basis of logic not experience. — Wayfarer

I get it and within this hints of idealism.

What contradiction? Even in ordinary language, flat and curved would be a pair of dichotomously opposed limits - two extremes of the one spectrum. Something would be flat to the degree it wasn't curved, and curved to the degree it wasn't flat. — apokrisis

"Two extremes of one spectrum" is not a proper description. It is not what you told me, nor is it what your Gaussian curvature exemplified. A flat thing has zero curvature. And anything which is not flat has some degree of curvature. They are not two extremes of one spectrum. Being flat (zero curvature) excludes any degree of curvature. And any degree of curvature excludes being flat. So all degrees are degrees of curvature, and flatness has no degrees, flat is zero degrees of curvature

The question for maths is how to go about measuring the relative curvature of a smooth manifold once you have got past the naive Euclidean view that space is some kind of absolutely flat backdrop.

You might rant and rave in defence of this antique view. But geometry has just got on with developing the means for modelling spaces where perfect flatness only means an extreme constraint on any intrinsic curvature.

It would help to learn more about this subject before mouthing off further. For this purpose, I would suggest Wildberger's lectures on hyperbolic geometry.

The pertinent bit is how he shows that the Euclidean yardsticks developed for measuring spaces without curvature - distance and angle - must be replaced by the new dichotomy of quadrance and spread when dealing with hyperbolic "flatness".

So there is nothing arbitrary going on as it is all motivate by the rigorousness of dialectical argument.

And Appollonius had already worked out the basics for this approach back in 200 BC.

So even if your knowledge of maths is still rooted in distant antiquity, you ought to know better.

See Wildberger's lecture series - https://youtu.be/EvP8VtyhzXs — apokrisis

I agree, that if we are going to work with curvatures, we need to get past the "absolutely flat backdrop".
But it's you who is not willing to let go of the flat backdrop. You insist on a "zero curvature", which I've shown is nothing but contradiction. And from this contradictory premise you produce positive and negative curves, which only have meaning relative to that contradictory premise, "zero curvature", which is nothing but the manifestation of your refusal to get "past the naive Euclidean view that space is some kind of absolutely flat backdrop". If you'd discard that flat backdrop, "zero curvature", then you could get on with a real understanding of curvature, rather than one based in contradiction.

A Wittgensteinian answer to this question would that there is no such thing as physical causation as is generally understood in modern science, but that physical causation is an a priori intuition, which is useful for hypotheses, but which tells us nothing about the world in-itself or its meaning.

Wittgenstein was a fucking idiot, and he had not one reasonable philosophical thought.

Here he merely regurgitated Hume's tenet, and he makes the categorical mistake of CATEGORICALLY denying that causation can exist. Hume said things could be mere coincidences, but consistent in their appearance, and that gives an impression of causation. But Hume also recommended that causation is possible, and that the coincidence theory is not superior to the causation theory. Fucking idiot stupid cunt-face Wittgenstein carried it too far, making fart out of his thought.

A flat thing has zero curvature. And anything which is not flat has some degree of curvature. — Metaphysician Undercover

And how are you measuring that degree of curvature exactly? What is your non-arbitrary yardstick? :rofl:

So all degrees are degrees of curvature, and flatness has no degrees, flat is zero degrees of curvature — Metaphysician Undercover

Let me check. So to be flat is to lack curve. And to be curved is to lack flat?

Thus we agree? :up:

All that remains is for you to explain how you measure the difference in some non-arbitrary metric basis.

I await the next bout of bluster and rant. You are never actually going to check out the primers I provide you.

I think it’s more likely that either people don’t understand it, or don’t want to engage with Kant’s work. — Wayfarer

Meh. I think it’s more likely that either people don’t understand it, or don’t want to engage with Quine's work. This line gets us nowhere.

That’s a lame attitude, it seeks to explain away the ability of reason to make genuine discoveries - to uncover, disclose, intuit, things about the world which were never previously known and could not be known by any other means. It’s a kind of covert neo-Darwinism which reduces everything about humans to an adaptation, it’s what I mean about modern philosophy being basically irrational (or sub-rational). — Wayfarer

I don't think you could be more wrong. That maths is made by people enhances its beauty. That we can build such a thing, not just to talk about, but to manipulate the world is what invokes awe.

People do maths, not god.

So, you don’t like him? :yikes:

People do maths, not god. — Banno

Nothing to do with what you said previously, that the effectiveness of math is due to it being ‘fit’. As I said, covert neo-Darwinism.

I see no reason to engage with Quine, and he’s not known outside the parlour-game which passes for philosophy in today’s culture. I know you and I have very different ideas of what constitutes the subject - yours is much more in line with philosophy as it is taught and understood in today’s universities, my original orientation was more counter-cultural in orientation so naturally not disposed towards that.

I think a strong subtext behind this whole conversation is the instinctive dislike of the idea of ‘natural law’ - because it harks back to its theistic origins, ‘the handiwork of God’. That’s reason enough for a lot of folk to flee screaming. It’s why I post Nagel’s essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion. (And at least Nagel has broken out of the ivory tower.)

I get it and within this hints of idealism. — Tom Storm

Significant that Bishop Berkeley was strictly empiricist. It took me a long while to understand how that could be so, but I came to see that in his interpretation, what we take to be external objects, really are just ideas or sensations in the experiential domain.

So, you don’t like him? — Wayfarer

That's right. I hate Wittgenstein for 1. He had no original thought and 2. He copied thoughts of others, he claimed the thoughts are his own, and in the process he reinterpreted those thoughts wrongly.

He was a complete fuck-up.

So, you don’t like him? — Wayfarer

Yeah, that's really about Must, isn't it.

I see no reason to engage with Kant, and he’s not known outside the parlour-game which passes for philosophy in today’s culture. As if out thinking had made no progress over the last two hundred years.

Your need to see "natural laws" as transcendent in the hope that they might somehow lead you beyond yourself to an ultimate understanding. You keep struggling to put into words what cannot be expressed in words. Hence enlightenment always eludes you.

But this is neither here nor there; we can psychologise, stack ad hom on ad hom, even throw in the occasional insult; but it will get nowhere.

In the end, silence.

In the end, silence. — Banno

You say that a lot. :wink:

:lol: