Did that "n*gger" word come from Physics or Psychology or Popular Science? Historically, Racists have justified their prejudice with scientific evidence. They too, "engaged" in propagating personal repugnance disguised as scientific facts. — Gnomon

What? You seem particularly unhinged today. This was the term you introduced into the discussion.

You may find it offensive. But it ain't racist.

Where does woo-woo come from? Woo-woo is first recorded in the 1980s, used to mock beliefs associated with the likes of New Age culture. The term may have originated as an imitation of the sound of the theremin in horror and sci-fi films and TV, or of the spooky noises associated with ghosts and the supernatural.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/woo-woo#:~:text=Where%20does%20woo%2Dwoo%20come,with%20ghosts%20and%20the%20supernatural.

Unstated assumptions : Speculation Bad! Metaphysics Bad! — Gnomon

If I've misrepresented your argument, tell me which of my statements you don't agree with. Tell me what your conclusion is if not the one I state in the last bullet.

Did you omit a prejudicial step, in your logical calculation of that damning conclusion from an unfavorable reading of the OP? Would you apply such biased reasoning (sophistry) to Massimo Pigliucci, too. In the Skeptical Inquirer article, he implied that he has had accusing fingers pointing at him. — Gnomon

I didn't read Pigliucci's article and I wasn't commenting on what he wrote. I was commenting on your interpretation of what he wrote. Again, tell me which point of my summary don't you agree with. Tell me what your conclusion is.

It's hard to respond to smears without getting sh*t on your hands. — Gnomon

What did I say that was a smear?

Syād, all this Sturm und Drang about QM reminds me of a problem faced by string theorists - there are multiple models that are all acceptable and there's no way at the moment to help us decide which one is best.

If metaphysics is involved in hypothesis generation/testing/choice then all science is to that extent metaphysics and I don't see why QM is being singled out for inserting/reviving philosophy, metaphysics in particular, into/in science.

Plus the technology machine that is used for that measurement , which is also part of the system. — dimosthenis9

That is in fact exactly what I would focus on with my own biosemiotic approach to the measurement problem.

The significant thing is that human intelligence can impose a system of mechanical switches on a thermally decohering reality. That is what a measurement is. Turning a material event into a number on a dial.

So now we are only saying that if we constrain quantum indeterminism to the point it has to answer a yes/no question, then - not particularly magically or weirdly - we get a yes or a no from our device. We have forced the world to act in a mechanical fashion. It has given us a classical reply – even if this reply failed to constrain all the other things we might have chosen to measure in the same mechanical fashion.

So in this way, we can see that we use the idea of the machine - the binary switch – to impose our chosen simple metaphysics on a more complex reality. But this doesn't have to mean the world actually collapsed into classicality at that point. It only had to be forced towards that classicality as the decoherent limit.

The mysteries of the quantum are preserved by saying it is not human consciousness or anything like that which cause a physical collapse to classicality. It is only human intelligence that allows it to construct a mechanism of measurement which will limit a quantum potential to such a degree that a device reacts in some black and white way. An event is recorded.

And humans with their instruments can only exist in a very cold and empty vacuum where there are stars and planets and other such crud to turn into mechanisms. Measurement operates in a far from typical condition. And reality certainly doesn't demand to be measured to exist.

So the whole collapse thing is an artefact in this view. It is tied to human acts of measurement which involves the physics of flipping switches – a physics that itself exists only at this atypical moment in cosmic history, and only due to the fact that humans have invented this whole system for turning reality into numbers on dials.

But anyhow, the way you throw the 2014 revision of the Bicep data into the conversation as some kind of "gotcha" is indicative of how little you are aware of the constraints on the conversation to be had. It shows you don't really know what you are talking about. — apokrisis

I'm not familiar with the "bicep data" that you claim I "threw" into the conversation as a "gotcha". Sounds like you know more about what I'm talking about than I do. Why don't you read my mind, and tell me more about that "bee in the bonnet". Or is it buzzing in your bonnet? You keep swatting at something I can't see. :joke:

This was the term you introduced into the discussion. — apokrisis

Actually, It was Pigliucci, who objected to the use of such a derisive slang term "woo" in a philosophical or scientific context. It's a short-hand emotive term for "I'm right, you're wrong", and avoids a lot of uncertainty & rational thinking. So, It is very popular among self-righteous posters on this forum. And, the question of "who introduced it", is moot.

Anyway, all of this hand-waving is beside the question, of "foundational issues of physics", which Pigliucci noted "smells like metaphysics". Are we discussing "settled" physics here, or questions that go beyond (meta) our understanding of physical reality? What are you so afraid of, that you feel the need to defend an orthodox interpretation of "foundational physics"? Did someone warn you that metaphysical ghosts will get you, if you stray from the true faith in physics?

I'm just kidding. I don't doubt that you know more than me about some technical aspects of borderline physics. But these "woo boo" diversions get tiresome, so I have to poke fun, in hopes of getting back on track : "philosophical diffidence" toward all-knowing Physics. :wink:

You may find it offensive. But it ain't racist. — apokrisis

In the immortal words of late-night TV philosopher Craig Ferguson, "you're a racist, man". He says, in response to any top-down authoritarian shout-down. :joke:

You are treating this like some kind of cultural power struggle. But that is a bad lens for understanding the sociology at play in the scientific community. — apokrisis

Yes, the clash of metaphysical worldviews is a cultural, political and aesthetic power struggle. But ‘power’ here doesn’t mean that persuasion is blind to reasons. On the contrary, the choice of a particular metaphysical framework is essentially based on pragmatic utility. But the pragmatic advantages are internal to the framework itself rather than to anything in the world supposedly external to it. The realist would insist that the metaphysics must conform itself to what the evidence points to, and this gives the methods of the scientist a certain priority over those of the metaphysician. I would argue instead that concepts like evidence and observation are so thoroughly intertwined with the metaphysics ( the holistically organized pragmatic ways in which we interact with the world) that makes them intelligible that no significant progress in science is possible without a transformation in metaphysical underpinnings, which precede rather than follow the observations and the evidence.

Mechanics itself needs a proper metaphysical foundation. Atomism was always just the convenient story that fitted with a particular mathematics. — apokrisis

This makes it sound like the metaphysics comes later, to be tacked onto the science as an ad hoc specific account of the theory from a slightly higher level of abstraction.


How could Mechanics ‘need’ a proper metaphysics when it wouldn’t have been possible to create it in the first place if the scientific concepts weren’t already guided by a metaphysics?The space between Medieval Scholasticism and the Cartesian Enlightenment provided this metaphysical grounding for the intelligibility of Mechanics as it was understood in Newton’s time. QM, by contrast, links to a very different metaphysical backdrop.

So from my own point of view, my own interests, QM interpretations are a part of that much bigger adventure. Which also drags it back towards metaphysics as the conversation to be had. What ontology can have both the classical and the quantum as its dichotomous faces? — apokrisis

The indirect influence of Kantian Idealism , and more recently, of Hegelian and post-Hegelian metaphysics on the outlook of physicists is what made the formulation of QM possible. This doesnt mean that physicists needed to have read a word of Kant or Hegel , but these ways of organizing the world have slowly made their way into the general culture. Your favorite philosopher , Peirce, who has closely been influenced by both writers, wouldn’t seem to have any trouble in synthesizing classical and quantum models within his metaphysics.

If I've misrepresented your argument, tell me which of my statements you don't agree with. Tell me what your conclusion is if not the one I state in the last bullet. — T Clark

Don't worry about it. Just as you read something from your own imagination into my posts, I read some un-stated assumptions into your post. So, we're even.

Now, we can get back to the OP question about philosophical deference (diffidence) to Gospel Science on the debatable fringes of Physics : "Foundational Questions of Physics". The survey found that there is no single "consensus" interpretation of those fundamental questions of physics*1. Yet, some interpreters like to pretend that borderline (meta-physical) issues are authoritatively settled, and beyond question*2.

Although I quoted part of Pigliucci's discussion about "What does it mean to interpret Quantum Physics", It would be helpful to read the whole Skeptical Inquirer article, so you won't go-off on a wild tangent. No need to imagine heretical beliefs on my part. Heresy assumes some unquestionable, orthodox opinion established by authoritarian priests.

Besides, does it strike you as ironic that such a "woo-monger", as others have mis-labeled me, would be reading Skeptical Inquirer magazine. I have subscribed to SI, and SKEPTIC magazines for over 40 years. So, I'm well-informed on the erroneous beliefs & methods of pseudo-science. Yet, I'm also well-aware of how defenders of the faith can rise-up in self-righteous anger at any un-conventional interpretations of the unsettled borderlands of knowledge. Philosophical pioneers, undaunted by inquisitors of orthodoxy, explore the realm of reputed dragons in search of philosophical wisdom. Besides, that fuzzy area off the map is not-yet settled Science, so it's open to interpretation. :cool:


*1. The Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum weirdness was proposed a century ago, in order to settle the acrimonious debates -- including accusations of "woo" -- that caused a great disturbance in the force of Physics. Several of the pioneers turned to Eastern philosophy -- often labeled derogatorily as "mysticism" -- in search of ways to interpret their counter-intuitive and non-classical observations. And the debate-goes-on to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation

*2. Quantum mysticism :
Olav Hammer stated that Werner Heisenberg was so interested in India that he got the nickname "The Buddha". "However," states Hammer, "in Heisenberg's Physics and Philosophy (1959) there is no substantial trace of quantum mysticism;" and adds "In fact, Heisenberg discusses at length and endorses the decidedly non-mystical Copenhagen interpretation."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

This makes it sound like the metaphysics comes later, to be tacked onto the science as an ad hoc specific account of the theory from a slightly higher level of abstraction. — Joshs

As you say, it is a semiotic process of sense making. So it is all intwined and develops in hierarchical fashion with new levels of abstraction coming to incorporate the earlier stages of development.

You can’t treat this as both the feature and the bug as suits your rhetorical purpose.

The Scientific Revolution is painted as a correcting of the very wrong theories of Aristotelean metaphysics. The new metaphysics had to be seen to be replacing the old one in a big way. That is the usual social dynamic. But historians of science then look back and see less of a leap than supposed.

Your favorite philosopher , Peirce, who has closely been influenced by both writers, wouldn’t seem to have any trouble in synthesizing classical and quantum models within his metaphysics. — Joshs

Well of course. I mean that is exactly what I’ve said so I have to agree. :razz:

So now we are only saying that if we constrain quantum indeterminism to the point it has to answer a yes/no question, then - not particularly magically or weirdly - we get a yes or a no from our device. We have forced the world to act in a mechanical fashion. It has given us a classical reply – even if this reply failed to constrain all the other things we might have chosen to measure in the same mechanical fashion. — apokrisis

Your approach is really interesting and it triggers a question that i have for years and it applies here also.
Our senses are limited.That is a fact.We invent technology-devices to extend our already given senses.And they do, but only to the specific senses we have.

So following to what you wrote above.Can we actually escape from the mechanical way we see the nature??Can we Indeed build-invent a device that can actually give us a different from "yes or no" answer?? Or are we condemned to our realization of things in a limited way from our own consciousness?The way it is structured?Our limited senses?Can we actually achieve that?? Quantum mechanics at its core rises that questions, I think.

It is only human intelligence that allows it to construct a mechanism of measurement which will limit a quantum potential to such a degree that a device reacts in some black and white way. An event is recorded. — apokrisis

Again as above.

So the whole collapse thing is an artefact in this view. It is tied to human acts of measurement which involves the physics of flipping switches – a physics that itself exists only at this atypical moment in cosmic history, and only due to the fact that humans have invented this whole system for turning reality into numbers on dials. — apokrisis

Can we escape dials then?Maths is science's God.And they do deserve that title.It is our most reliable way for evidences.
But still as you mentioned for reality and measurement, also here reality doesn't require maths as to exist.Maths could easily be just a human invention and nothing more.

Since you seem like a person with scientific background i wanna make another question to you also.

What would you say about the idea that there is happening no collapse at all.But we just think that we "spot"one ,cause we are condemned from our own consciousness to see it like that?Cause our consciousness can't conceive something being everywhere at the same time?
It just is out of its abilities, lower than its radar.Notice ,it is not metaphysics here.Just the way that our consciousness-senses actually are built.
I mean it's not consciousness that interferes matter and "decides" for the result of what we observe.It is just what our consciousness can actually reach.And same as with the devices we build for measurements,as extensions to that consciousness.

Our consciousness "needs" a specific result for the observation cause that's how it works as to interpretate things and well it "sees" a specific result at the end because nothing else would make "sense" for it.

Do you get what i ask or am I too vague?Is that somehow going back to Coppenchangen approach??

What would you say about the idea that there is happening no collapse at all.But we just think that we "spot"one ,cause we are condemned from our own consciousness to see it like that? — dimosthenis9

Good point. , to what extent is the "collapse" simply the experiment being resolved by identifying one of the many solutions of the Schrödinger equation, all of which "exist" together?

So following to what you wrote above.Can we actually escape from the mechanical way we see the nature??Can we Indeed build-invent a device that can actually give us a different from "yes or no" answer?? — dimosthenis9

I would say that misses the point. From the point of view of semiosis as a theory of meaning, our great advantage – what makes us intelligent organisms – is that we can actually impose a logical framework of counterfactuality on our environments. It is by finding ways to reduce our environments to numbers on dials that we can actually then model it in ways that are of maximal interest to us.

Peircean semiotics in particular – or what we called the modelling relation in theoretical biology – is about constructing a model of the world with us in it. An Umwelt. So it is the "us" that is constructed along with the "that" which is outside us. Our model is thus a meaningful relationship because both self and world are what are being represented, and indeed created. We experience a world as a place ripe with all its potential to serve our interests. We are as central to the model making as the world.

From that point of view, we don't want to transcend the limits of our experience for any good reason. We have the opposite desire of wanting to make the world ever more like our rationalising model of it.

So semiosis - as the modelling relation that gave rise to life and mind as evolutionary structures – is founded on four main levels of code. Genes and neurons take care of biology. Words and numbers take care of human sociology – our existence as cultural creatures.

Evolution shaped our neurobiology and gave us our sense organs. They were exactly whatever were needed to decode our environments at the time – set up a rational self~world relation where we just have to look or listen and it all makes pragmatic sense. Our senses break everything into a world of threats and promises, with us at its centre as a choice maker with some list of priorities, some collection of skilled habits.

Then humans invented a more abstract form of semiotic world modelling based on language. Then later on, mathematics.

And once we had maths, we could go full logical. We could reduce the self in the model to some universal notion of an observer. We could reduce the world in the model to some set of crisp measurement values. We arrive at the scientific method with its formal theories and instruments designed to reduce the material world to a data set.

The eyes only need to be able to read the numbers on the dials. Our senses needed to be limited, not expanded. At least to see reality at this mathematical level of the self~world relation.

But still as you mentioned for reality and measurement, also here reality doesn't require maths as to exist.Maths could easily be just a human invention and nothing more. — dimosthenis9

My argument is different. Maths is the natural culmination of an evolutionary process. It is semiosis taken to its most abstracted level. And a new kind of self has to emerge to be able to live in such a world. For this world to make sense, we need to remake ourselves as that kind of intelligence.

This is a thought that horrifies many. But it is why education pushes at least the basics of logic, maths, critical thinking and a scientific attitude so hard.

As a biosemiotician, I both accept and criticise this outcome. I say this is both nature at work, doing its thing – an evolutionary trajectory. But also, the four levels of semiosis might not be all that well integrated with each other given the rocketing trajectory of Homo sapiens and its semiotic development.

As individuals, we all have to integrate our various levels of semiosis – from genes, to neurons, to words, to numbers. But that is quite a project when our linguistic and numeric selves are still transforming our worlds at an accelerating pace.

So why do we all need to be finding our answers to the biggest possible metaphysical and scientific questions? What point is there in that, and what kind of selves would that then create? That's an interesting discussion in itself.

But what I'm saying is that you have shifted the discussion from ontology to epistemology now. Which is fine as the OP is also about epistemic good practice. It is about why science demands full mathematical rigour and how much room that then leaves for unstructured "metaphysics" – that being then another way of saying you want to reduce knowledge of the world back down to biological sense data. You want to be able to picture something solid and real like billiard balls cannoning around a table.

But my definition of metaphysics would be stricter – more mathematical. Metaphysics is about seeking the logical structure that could produce a reality in some self-creating or self-necessitating way.

What would you say about the idea that there is happening no collapse at all.But we just think that we "spot"one ,cause we are condemned from our own consciousness to see it like that?Cause our consciousness can't conceive something being everywhere at the same time? — dimosthenis9

So that is my argument. Semiotics is all about imposing a rational frame on the world. That is how we then deal with the quantum world. We impose a machinery of counterfactual measurements that achieve an effective collapse. To collapse just means the world is so thermally constrained that its indeterminacy is minimised in some way that is counterfactually useful to our thoughts.

We don't actually have to collapse to claim to make an observation. We just give nature no other choice – when it comes to the state of a switch – that it registers the digital fact of being either on or off. It returns either a 0 or a 1.

So yes, we evolved to see ourselves as objects in a world of objects. That is our neurobiological default. We see things that bump and collide in a way best interpreted as local and deterministic in their causality.

It would take a lot of training to think more contextually, structurally, or holistically about causality.

Our consciousness "needs" a specific result for the observation cause that's how it works as to interpretate things and well it "sees" a specific result at the end because nothing else would make "sense" for it. — dimosthenis9

This is what I've tried to explain. Out consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world.

Each level of mind has to be able to read its kind of signs. Sense data is looking for shape and movement – the object oriented point of view that sees a world in terms of rocks, tigers, wasps, rivers, hats and coats. Science seeks to reduce reality to numbers that slot into differential equations.

So it is about a reduction to the signs that make sense to the kind of self for which those signs would make sense. The measurements must be of the kind that plug most directly into the models. And in a more general sense, we become the kind of minds that see their worlds in that particular kind of light.

It is not a problem. It is how it works.

But the problem we experience as selves is the degree to which all the levels of world-making feel unintegrated.

If you don't get the maths in a personal fashion, then all you might hear is the words of those seeking to impose their more abstracted selves, and their more abstracted worlds, upon you.

Naturally there can be resentment. But also you live in a world where the maths works. All the technology that is your modern environment is constructed by that abstracted level of semiotics.

So you have to live in that world, but you can't speak its language. Frustrating.

But hey. All the confusion over quantum interpretations is evidence that even the mathematically informed are largely unsure how to integrate all the levels of semiosis themselves. There is no one community tale to tell as yet.

That is a work in progress.

What did I say that was a smear? — T Clark

That was not directed at you personally, but characterized the depressing downward trend of below-the-belt ideological argumentation, on a question originally raised by a prominent professional philosopher, but linked by an easier-to-besmirch amateur.

As usual, this whole thread has gone off-topic into an indiscriminate mud-slinging battle. I was hoping that my last post to you was my last word on that off-topic. But . . . I just found a new article on Nautilus, a cutting-edge science-oriented online magazine, that reminded me of the "woo-boo" labels on TPF. I wouldn't bother to bother, but you seem to be somewhat more flexible than some others who are alert to quash non-conforming "interpretations" on the unsettled fringes on the "Foundations of Science".

Caleb Scharf is an accredited astronomer & astrobiologist, who feels confident that his credentials allow him to propose a sci-fi notion of mysterious world-creating "aliens", without raising judgmental eyebrows, as long as the aliens are assumed without evidence to be mere biological creatures, just like us, only much more advanced intellectually. Maybe even literally AI, artificial intelligence, existing perhaps due to some un-fathomable pre-big-bang artifice.

But similar super-intelligent creator-concepts for the ultimate source of physical laws -- defined by logic, not by physics -- (e.g. Plato's LOGOS) -- but with just as much physical evidence (the mathematical-logical laws themselves) -- are declared to be beyond-the-pale for Philosophers & non-scientists, who project from the space-time world into the unknowable time-before-time, when god-like aliens could experiment with coded laws to create a simulated reality within Reality.

Who wrote the "laws" limiting how far amateur philosophers can speculate, beyond the "revealed Word" of physical Science? Can't we have a little speculative fun here, without getting stoned as apostates from The Absolute Truth, as interpreted by whom (the physics Pope)? Does a degree in physics qualify you to make--up "crazy" stuff? Or should that kind of free-thinking be banned for non-law-abiding un-fettered philosophers, on a forum with no empirical output ? :nerd:


Is Physical Law an Alien Intelligence? :
Alien life could be so advanced it becomes indistinguishable from physics.
"But viewed through the warped bottom of a beer glass, we can pick out a few cosmic phenomena that—as crazy as it sounds—might fit the requirements".
https://nautil.us/is-physical-law-an-alien-intelligence-236218/

The meaning of "BEYOND THE PALE" is offensive or unacceptable.

Who wrote the "laws" limiting how far amateur philosophers can speculate, beyond the "revealed Word" of physical Science? — Gnomon

There are few restrictions here. But when views are presented others are free to poke at them.

Good point. ↪apokrisis , to what extent is the "collapse" simply the experiment being resolved by identifying one of the many solutions of the Schrödinger equation, all of which "exist" together? — jgill

How do you mean? The act of measurement that picks out a solution is the tricky issue.

As an experimenter how is just one fate picked? And does nature pick a solution in the same fashion, or do all solutions exist as "worlds"?

How do you mean? The act of measurement that picks out a solution is the tricky issue. — apokrisis

From a purely mathematical perspective, when one solves a kind of partial DE there may be many linear combinations of solutions. Question: which one applies to a particular experiment? Answer: the one correlating with an observed measurement. It seems that these are just possible solutions to the problem being investigated, not "possible worlds" or "superpositions" in quasi-mystical senses.

Like a simple problem in d=rt, where one gets two possible solutions, one negative, one positive, and the physical situation determines the positive solution is appropriate. There are not two possible worlds, just two possible answers, one of which correlates with observations. I suspect you are saying this kind of distinction is much trickier in QM?

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.

So following to what you wrote above.Can we actually escape from the mechanical way we see the nature??Can we Indeed build-invent a device that can actually give us a different from "yes or no" answer??
— dimosthenis9

I would say that misses the point. From the point of view of semiosis as a theory of meaning, our great advantage – what makes us intelligent organisms – is that we can actually impose a logical framework of counterfactuality on our environments. It is by finding ways to reduce our environments to numbers on dials that we can actually then model it in ways that are of maximal interest to us.

Peircean semiotics in particular – or what we called the modelling relation in theoretical biology – is about constructing a model of the world with us in it. An Umwelt. So it is the "us" that is constructed along with the "that" which is outside us. Our model is thus a meaningful relationship because both self and world are what are being represented, and indeed created. We experience a world as a place ripe with all its potential to serve our interests. We are as central to the model making as the world.

From that point of view, we don't want to transcend the limits of our experience for any good reason. We have the opposite desire of wanting to make the world ever more like our rationalising model of it.

So semiosis - as the modelling relation that gave rise to life and mind as evolutionary structures – is founded on four main levels of code. Genes and neurons take care of biology. Words and numbers take care of human sociology – our existence as cultural creatures.

Evolution shaped our neurobiology and gave us our sense organs. They were exactly whatever were needed to decode our environments at the time – set up a rational self~world relation where we just have to look or listen and it all makes pragmatic sense. Our senses break everything into a world of threats and promises, with us at its centre as a choice maker with some list of priorities, some collection of skilled habits.

Then humans invented a more abstract form of semiotic world modelling based on language. Then later on, mathematics.

And once we had maths, we could go full logical. We could reduce the self in the model to some universal notion of an observer. We could reduce the world in the model to some set of crisp measurement values. We arrive at the scientific method with its formal theories and instruments designed to reduce the material world to a data set.

The eyes only need to be able to read the numbers on the dials. Our senses needed to be limited, not expanded. At least to see reality at this mathematical level of the self~world relation.

[ ... ]

Maths is the natural culmination of an evolutionary process. It is semiosis taken to its most abstracted level. And a new kind of self has to emerge to be able to live in such a world. For this world to make sense, we need to remake ourselves as that kind of intelligence.

This is a thought that horrifies many. But it is why education pushes at least the basics of logic, maths, critical thinking and a scientific attitude so hard.

As a biosemiotician, I both accept and criticise this outcome. I say this is both nature at work, doing its thing – an evolutionary trajectory. But also, the four levels of semiosis might not be all that well integrated with each other given the rocketing trajectory of Homo sapiens and its semiotic development.

As individuals, we all have to integrate our various levels of semiosis – from genes, to neurons, to words, to numbers. But that is quite a project when our linguistic and numeric selves are still transforming our worlds at an accelerating pace.

So why do we all need to be finding our answers to the biggest possible metaphysical and scientific questions? What point is there in that, and what kind of selves would that then create? That's an interesting discussion in itself.

But what I'm saying is that you have shifted the discussion from ontology to epistemology now. Which is fine as the OP is also about epistemic good practice. It is about why science demands full mathematical rigour and how much room that then leaves for unstructured "metaphysics" – that being then another way of saying you want to reduce knowledge of the world back down to biological sense data. You want to be able to picture something solid and real like billiard balls cannoning around a table.

But my definition of metaphysics would be stricter – more mathematical. Metaphysics is about seeking the logical structure that could produce a reality in some self-creating or self-necessitating way.

[ ... ]

Semiotics is all about imposing a rational frame on the world. That is how we then deal with the quantum world. We impose a machinery of counterfactual measurements that achieve an effective collapse. To collapse just means the world is so thermally constrained that its indeterminacy is minimised in some way that is counterfactually useful to our thoughts.

We don't actually have to collapse to claim to make an observation. We just give nature no other choice – when it comes to the state of a switch – that it registers the digital fact of being either on or off. It returns either a 0 or a 1.

So yes, we evolved to see ourselves as objects in a world of objects. That is our neurobiological default. We see things that bump and collide in a way best interpreted as local and deterministic in their causality.

It would take a lot of training to think more contextually, structurally, or holistically about causality.

[ ... ]


Ou[r] consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world.

Each level of mind has to be able to read its kind of signs. Sense data is looking for shape and movement – the object oriented point of view that sees a world in terms of rocks, tigers, wasps, rivers, hats and coats. Science seeks to reduce reality to numbers that slot into differential equations.

So it is about a reduction to the signs that make sense to the kind of self for which those signs would make sense. The measurements must be of the kind that plug most directly into the models. And in a more general sense, we become the kind of minds that see their worlds in that particular kind of light.

It is not a problem. It is how it works.

But the problem we experience as selves is the degree to which all the levels of world-making feel unintegrated.

If you don't get the maths in a personal fashion, then all you might hear is the words of those seeking to impose their more abstracted selves, and their more abstracted worlds, upon you.

Naturally there can be resentment. But also you live in a world where the maths works. All the technology that is your modern environment is constructed by that abstracted level of semiotics.

So you have to live in that world, but you can't speak its language. Frustrating.

But hey. All the confusion over quantum interpretations is evidence that even the mathematically informed are largely unsure how to integrate all the levels of semiosis themselves. There is no one community tale to tell as yet.

That is a work in progress. — apokrisis

:clap: :100: :fire: Fucking brilliantly succinct and crystal-clear. Thank you for the seminar!

I suspect you are saying this kind of distinction is much trickier in QM? — jgill

Well yes. It’s the difference between tossing a classical coin to discover if it lands head or tails, and knowing that if you toss one of a pair of quantum entangled coins, your fellow experimenter is going to see the opposite of whatever you see, even if he has rocketed to the other side of the universe with his coin.

So both solutions are realised. Both solutions are correlated. Both solutions could just as well have happened the other way around.

It’s tricky.

Enjoy! :cool:

First thanks for your time answering the questions and also for being so analytic.Excellent post.

We have the opposite desire of wanting to make the world ever more like our rationalising model of it. — apokrisis

So we agree that at the end we do try to make world-nature fit into our reasoning about it.But well that's a trap.
The real question is if we could ever figure out how nature is and works regardless of our minds or senses.The real "nature" of nature,so to speak.

We arrive at the scientific method with its formal theories and instruments designed to reduce the material world to a data set. — apokrisis

Is that enough though?Can actually material world be reduced only in data and how accurate that could be?
Is it possible that we might need a new set of semiotics then as to go further,at least to difficult questions like in QM?And can we actually establish a new set of semiotics that could go even Maths further?I have no idea of what these semiotics could be or even if it is actually possible,if you ask me.

And a new kind of self has to emerge to be able to live in such a world. For this world to make sense, we need to remake ourselves as that kind of intelligence. — apokrisis

I think now we reach to the core of our discussion.
So I guess you suggest that we need a new form of reasoning that would make us think different about what we observe.A new intelligence.A paradigm shift.Right?Is that possible then?And if yes how? Would that be a next step in human evolution? Leaving Homo behind?

Metaphysics is about seeking the logical structure that could produce a reality in some self-creating or self-necessitating way. — apokrisis

Nice.

We don't actually have to collapse to claim to make an observation. We just give nature no other choice – when it comes to the state of a switch – that it registers the digital fact of being either on or off. It returns either a 0 or a 1. — apokrisis

So you do agree also that is possible no collapse at all taking place over there and we just think we spot one?Right?

It would take a lot of training to think more contextually, structurally, or holistically about causality. — apokrisis

What could that training be?

And in a more general sense, we become the kind of minds that see their worlds in that particular kind of light. — apokrisis

Exactly.

So you have to live in that world, but you can't speak its language. Frustrating. — apokrisis

More than frustrating..

Who wrote the "laws" limiting how far amateur philosophers can speculate, beyond the "revealed Word" of physical Science? — Gnomon

I don't think I have anything more to add in response to your two most recent posts to me. We could go on for days without getting any closer to agreement. I'm not sure if you'll get any satisfaction from this, but discussing these issues with you always helps me reexamine and refine what I really believe.

Our consciousness is the sum of all four levels of semiosis or self~world making. And each level imposes its own mechanistic kind of measurements on the world — apokrisis

You have offered a story of genesis , unfolding from the physical to the biological to the social. The detailed twists and turns of the structural innovations at each level are contingent and relative , but there are non-relative , non-contingent meta-principles common to all levels, forming their condition of possibility. These would seem to be transcendental , but not in a strictly Kantian sense. What they do have in common with Kant is that they are objective formal principles. The implication is that personal experience , any kind of history and subjective time will forever be guided by a specific unchanging normative meta-frame. Is this right?

The real question is if we could ever figure out how nature is and works regardless of our minds or senses.The real "nature" of nature,so to speak. — dimosthenis9

I think the right view is to marvel at how it has been possible to extend semiosis to the degree that it has. Through metaphysics and science, humans have continued on to develop a level of reality modelling in which the world is seen from a "God's eye view". And not even the old fashioned kind of creating father-figure God that is just an idealised personification of a human observer, but a truly transcendent and coordinate free perspective which is pansemiotic, or the Universe's own view of itself (in some useful epistemic sense).

So once you reduce reality to a disembodied causal description - one based on symmetry and symmetry breaking – then you are claiming to talk about what is necessary and fundamental in regards to any kind of cosmic being whatsoever. You are seeing the deepest principles of nature and how it works – having stripped the view of all its superficial accidents to fix on its structural necessities.

So yeah. We are limited by our biology and sociology to being embodied observers of reality. But it is astonishing how well we can construct a useful notion of the perfectly disembodied observer contemplating the mathematical necessities of its own cosmic existence.

Celebrate the fact. No need to downplay the achievement.

Is it possible that we might need a new set of semiotics then as to go further,at least to difficult questions like in QM?And can we actually establish a new set of semiotics that could go even Maths further?I have no idea of what these semiotics could be or even if it is actually possible,if you ask me. — dimosthenis9

This is a tough question. First I would say that "real semiosis" is about an actual modelling relation in which a self is wanting to act on a world. There is some organism living and thriving in its environment. This means all the semiotic intelligence is being paid for by its functional results. It is a negentropic eddy in its environment that earns it keep by degrading entropy gradients. Baseline, life and mind exist because they use energy and increase entropy as the second law of thermodynamics demands.

Humans equipped with words and numbers just take this kind of "intelligence entrained to entropification" to a new level. We are now technological and civilisational organisms, growing at an exponential rate like bacterial spores on a Petrie dish. We produce enough waste heat to kill a planet.

Bad for us perhaps. But certainly this is following the logic of the cosmos. Semiosis exists because there is entropification to be done.

So what does semiosis mean once it rises above the worldly constraints of the second law? Science is still entrained to the second law when it is building human social machinery. Even our most sophisticated abstractions, like social media or bitcoin, have a considerable energy footprint. The electronics behind the information runs hot.

But would understanding the reality of the Big Bang be useful information in that entropic sense? Would we be able to create our own further Big Bangs – as was feared when they fired up the last supercollider? Or create simulated Big Bangs – as some claim our own Big Bang existence to be?

So yeah. Something changes as the modelling relation stops being between actual organisms entrained to the second law and instead this more lofty and disinterested pansemiotic view that may simply have no payback. Or in other words, becomes not even testable in terms of its conceivable practical effects.

This is a tricky area. But hey. It is not as if it is even a widely considered question. Semiosis is largely only understood in biology and sociology circles. It hasn't entered physics as a pansemiotic paradigm – although dissipative structure theory is paving the way.

So I guess you suggest that we need a new form of reasoning that would make us think different about what we observe.A new intelligence.A paradigm shift.Right?Is that possible then?And if yes how? Would that be a next step in human evolution? Leaving Homo behind? — dimosthenis9

Well there is a lot of what I think is silly talk about the Singularity and other thoughts about being uploaded to the cybersphere to become eternal and infinitely smart beings. That extrapolates the bad metaphysics of the Cartesian mind.

The self is seen as a disconnected and passive representer of reality, and so a data structure in a supercomputer ought to be able to replicate the same kind of informational state at far greater scale.

This is the model of the mind that semiotics explicitly rejects in talking about consciousness as an embodied or enactive modelling relation.

So my answer is that if you stop to think about Homo sapiens as a semiotic organism that serves the second law, then it becomes clear that we took our big evolutionary leaps first with the invention of language – quite a swift transition about 40,000 years ago once the grammatical structure was fully codified. And then about 400 years ago, we took another huge step with the codification of the "grammar" of our mathematical reality models. Differential equations in particular – the path to engineering and machinery – created a new modelling capacity.

That capacity would then have been not much of a big deal except we then also found we were sitting on buried reservoirs of fossil hydrocarbon. A planet's worth of coal and petroleum that the Universe would really want entropifying if anyone was smart enough to "eat" such toxic waste.

And Homo sapiens obliged. We became that sort of creature. And the Earth became that sort of planet.

So this is nature doing its thing. Finding ways to dissipate. Organisms armed with semiosis are nature's way to break down the barriers to dissipation. That is what intelligence is for in the cosmic scheme.

So yes. We can definitely use a deep understanding of nature to predict what lies in the future for us.

That explains why humans use so much of their smarts to deny and ignore climate change. We evolved to do a job. We can't just abandon it half done.

Too bad if this looks as dumb as bacteria reproducing furiously on a Petrie dish until their exponential growth collapses. Humans might have thought they were smart, but only discovered the reasons they came to view the world as they did – entrained to endless upward "progress" – much too late.

So the modern technological human self is in fact a quite unaware self in this regard. A social order was built around the cheap and limitless energy of fossil carbon. Modern society has the inbuilt urge to perpetuate that dissipative structure, and has never - in its short 400 years – had the reason or stimulus to build in a longer term energy transition plan.

But that gives you an answer to next possible levels of semiosis perhaps. We could have done something even just by instituting a simple mathematical trick like a carbon tax. We could have factored environmental costs into our economic projections. We could have regulated the markets so that information about the true ecological price of our consumption was something every market participant had clear in their minds.

The maths of these moves is completely trivial. No new semiotic technology required. But semiosis is about meaning creation. And building a new level of meaning into the system was what was required. The health of the planet should have been included in the cost of daily life.

So you do agree also that is possible no collapse at all taking place over there and we just think we spot one?Right? — dimosthenis9

No. My point is that "quantum weirdness" runs the gamut from maximally weird to not detectably weird at all under the mathematical framework provided by decoherence theory – the bolting of statistical mechanics onto quantum field theory.

So nature provides us with situations that range from minimally constrained to maximally constrained. Quantum mechanics simply reveals that nature runs this gamut. That is why an experimenter can arrange a measurement so that the observation is as nonlocal as possible, or as local as possible ... if the experimenter has the right machinery to shut the valve or open the valve.

This is important as life itself is based on molecular machinery – protein structures that can act as switches that turn "quantumness" on and off at the nanoscale level of quantum chemistry. Your existence is wholly dependent on respiratory chains that can take a hot electron and skip it down a set of precisely spaced receptors using quantum tunnelling, and so milk the electron of the energy needed to load up an ATP or other energy-carrying molecule.

Experimenters can turn knobs to tune quantum weirdness in and out of focus. Life is the semiotic trick of being able to do the same at the level needed to regulate organic chemistry. (Although we've only really known this for about 15 years.)

So I am saying that decoherence is a no collapse story. But only in the sense that it is instead a model of how nature runs the gamut between quantum coherence and quantum decoherence. Either a system has so many informational constraints that it approaches the classical limit, or it is so informationally unconstrained that it approaches the quantum limit.

And then on top of this labile spectrum, we can drop our own system of semiotic switches. We can control the degree of constraint – turn a knob from "collapsed" to "uncollapsed" and back again.

So nature has a richness of states. We make life simple by imposing a binary logic upon that. And even life itself exists because it invented codes that could operate a set of molecular switches to regulate decoherence. A respiratory chain could have its sequenece of iron-sulphur clusters spaced at exactly the right distance, down to angstroms, so a hot electron could do nothing else but skip down the fixed path provided to the waiting oxygen atom at the end of the line.

History's greatest feat of precision engineering, especially once you understand how much mitochondrial damage would be wreaked by a hot electron escaping the chain.

What could that training be? — dimosthenis9

It might help to start with a science like ecology where you need that kind of maths coupled to that kind of holistic situation. My story was that I was getting frustrated with the state of neurobiology and mind science – too reductionist. And so I looked around to see who really had a handle on holistic models of reality. It turned out to be theoretical biologists who were by then into hierarchy theory, systems science, cybernetics and - eventually - Peircean semiotics.

So you won't get given a training. You really have to go looking for it.

There is holism in physics as well. You have condensed matter physics, topological order, dissipative structure theory and holographic approaches all starting to come through strongly.

And even neurobiology has caught up with its "enactive turn". Friston's Bayesian brain is exactly the kind of semiotic model I'm talking about.

These would seem to be transcendental , but not in a strictly Kantian sense. What they do have in common with Kant is that they are objective formal principles. The implication is that personal experience , any kind of history and subjective time will forever be guided by a specific unchanging normative meta-frame. Is this right? — Joshs

It is true that Peirce moves us usefully beyond the start made by Kant.

But why take the conversation back to Descartes by talking about "personal experience" as if it could be anything else but a normed construct – a product of a modelling relation in which the "self" arises as part of "its world".

You are making "personal experience" into your own eternalised given here, aren't you?

Semiosis is the explanation for how such "first person" points of view arise as part of the information economy of a dissipation-driven enterprise. Meaning and value is what emerges as a result of that thermally embodied modelling process.

So you sound like you want to be able to preserve your conscious or unconscious Cartesian framing of the metaphysics. I am saying that Peirce already takes us into another world where nothing is eternal and fixed, all is co-emergent and developmental.

Reality is a self-organising process and not a state of substantial being. Although of course in the foreshortened synchronic view of any persisting structure, what we mostly see is just what looks fixed and eternal.

But you can indeed recover that familiar viewpoint in the diachronic limit. The self can seem to exist as it own hard centre of value and meaning. Otherwise how else would Romanticism and PoMo find their claims to metaphysical legitimacy? :wink:

You answered my questions but you generated many more.Unfortunately my knowledge in semiotics isn't deep at all as to counter argue your thesis and keep up.
But you have interesting views, especially with the holistic way of approaching nature's function and wanting to force that holistic view in physics also.I liked that.I can't say that i m convinced that this could be the right approach to QM also but sure it's something that worths consideration.

Anyway your posts were really interesting and analytic.And made me extra curious about semiotics.I will search more.

Anyway your posts were really interesting and analytic.And made me extra curious about semiotics.I will search more. — dimosthenis9

The hardcore stuff is Howard Pattee's biosemiosis papers, and earlier epistemic cut approach. There is also Rosen's modelling relations, but that was more based on category theory.

But generally, if it is Peircean semiotics, it is what I'm talking about. If it is Saussure's semiotics, then that is something else that is very popular in Continental circles.

Semiosis is the explanation for how such "first person" points of view arise as part of the information economy of a dissipation-driven enterprise. Meaning and value is what emerges as a result of that thermally embodied modelling process. — apokrisis

Peirce already takes us into another world where nothing is eternal and fixed, all is co-emergent and developmental. — apokrisis

What about the formal basis of such concepts as semiosis, code, information and thermal dissipation? Is there not an assumed irreducible ground for them , a formal content of some sort that is not itself co-emergent but is instead the condition of possibility of co-emergence?

The self can seem to exist as it own hard centre of value and meaning. Otherwise how else would Romanticism and PoMo find their claims to metaphysical legitimacy? — apokrisis

Doesn’t seem to be much use among postmodernists for the depiction of self as a “its own hard center of value and meaning.” Hardness and centers are hard to come by in their writing. Decentering difference is the watchword. Genes and thermodynamic processes exist for a postmodern writer like Deleuze, but a difference in degree does not exist without simultaneously being a difference in kind. Is this thinking consistent with a Peircean grounding of codes, information and thermal dissipation processes?

What about the formal basis of such concepts as semiosis, code, information and thermal dissipation? Is there not an assumed irreducible ground for them , a formal content of some sort that is not itself co-emergent but is instead the condition of possibility of co-emergence? — Joshs

Sure. But that is covered by Peirce too. You have the cycle of reasoning which is abductive hypothesis, deductive theory forming, and inductive confirmation. Rinse and repeat. Even to be able to state that this is the canonical process is covered by this turning out to be the process.

One must axiomatise to construct a formal system. But that itself starts out as a productive stab in the dark turned into inveterate habit.

Decentering difference is the watchword. — Joshs

Everyone becoming their own world is another way of saying the same thing.

And when plurality is taken to its own logical extreme, it becomes wokism. We see the hard, fixed and eternal becoming the enforced collective norm that tolerates no diversity when it comes to its diversity.

That is the advantage of pragmatism. It’s always about the actuality of selves and worlds in functional interaction. Semiotics is the structure of how things exist - or rather, how they historically persist - as dynamical balances employing cybernetic feedback.

Everyone becoming their own world is another way of saying the same thing.

And when plurality is taken to its own logical extreme, it becomes wokism. We see the hard, fixed and eternal becoming the enforced collective norm that tolerates no diversity when it comes to its diversity. — apokrisis

Wokism is mostly Marxist and pre-Marxist dialectics. Modernist emancipatory dialectics is what postmodernism rejected.

Wokism is mostly Marxist and pre-Marxist dialectics. Modernist emancipatory dialectics is what postmodernism rejected. — Joshs

Ah. Thanks for the clarification. :up:

REG: Listen. If you wanted to join the P.F.J., you'd have to really hate the Romans.

BRIAN: I do!

REG: Right. You're in. Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.

FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.

LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.

P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

REG: What? We're the People's Front of Judea!

LORETTA: Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.

FRANCIS: Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

REG: He's over there.

P.F.J.: Splitter!