What must reason exclude from conceiving reality as such – what is necessarily not real? — 180 Proof

The ideal as a goal is in a sense not-real though, isn't it? Fichte has an interesting approach, contrasting the "being" of the extant with the "becoming" which is characteristic of the self-positing I.

The ideal as a goal is in a sense not-real though, isn't it? — Pantagruel

:up:

The sun rose for hundreds of thousands of years, it rose yesterday, it'll rise tomorrow too.

But anyway, the is/ought thing is what humans find useful to hold true so as to make explicit the freedoms that are available because the Universe has no reason to care. But at the metaphysical level, or at least the natural philosophy branch of metaphysics, we engage with the finality that the Universe actually does embody. — apokrisis

I find your descriptions apt, but your characterization of freedom as that about which the universe does not care confuses me. Couldn't these localized expressions of freedom be part of the universal telos? Also, contexts (of freedom and law) are themselves the products of other contexts, in a nested-hierarchical fashion. It seems that freedom is something that emerges and is defined (ie. law-constrained freedom or practical freedom) through this emergent-evolutionary process.

A very helpful idea I encountered around 30 years ago was from Albert Ellis, a psychologist, influenced by the Stoics. He said - "You have considerable power to construct self-helping thoughts, feelings and actions as well as to construct self-defeating behaviors. You have the ability, if you use it, to choose healthy instead of unhealthy thinking, feeling and acting.” That idea changed how I deal with others and how I deal with any information I come upon. — Tom Storm

I too, read books by Albert Ellis, and was impressed with his Rational-Emotive self-therapy. You could think of it as self-directed Philosophy, or merely as self-discipline. In a marginal note I wrote : "most people seem to think that emotions and reasoning are separate, un-connected processes. Whereas, in reality they mutually influence each other : emotions color our thinking, and thinking modifies our emotions". Perhaps Hamlet foreshadowed Ellis : "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so". And Hamlet may be paraphrasing the Stoic philosopher Seneca : “Reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” :smile:

My hypothesis is that the philosophical project as such is, at its heart, metaphysical. — Pantagruel

What is the "philosophical project" you are talking about? I wonder esp. because you are not using title capitals, and therefore it doesn't look a known subject or a work (study, book, etc.) by someone. I have found, e.g., "The Philosophical Project of Carnap and Quine" (book), "Descartes and Husserl: The Philosophical Project of Radical Beginnings" (book) and a lot of other "The Philosophical Project of ..."

I try to cover as much ground as humanly possible, philosophy, science, anthropology, sociology, political theory. To what end? — Pantagruel

If you think that there's no purpose in doings all this or you are not sure about it, why do you keep doing it? Would you run towards something if there's no reason for doing it? Would you start learning Mandarin if you have no use of it any reason for doing it?
So, I have to assume that you know the reason that you are doing this and that "To what end?" is only a rhetorical question. Right?

So, I would like to know why are you doing all that, which requires an enormous and never-ending work. A Sisyphian task!

. A rule of thumb: metaphysics is about what is the case, ethics, about what ought be the case. — Banno

In the wake of the dissolution of the fact-value and analytic-synthetic distinctions, Putnam argues that the “is” cannot be understood outside of epistemic values, which are related to ethical valuation.

“The concern that is obviously connected with the values that guide us in choosing between hypotheses (coherence, simplicity, preservation of past doctrine, and the like) is the concern with "right description of the world”.
“…if these episternic values do enable us to correctly describe the world (or to describe more correctly than any alternative set of epistemic values would lead us to do), that is something we see through the lenses of those very values. It does not mean that those values admit an "external" justification.”( The Collapse of the Fact-Value Distinction)

So, I would like to know whay are you doing all that, which rrequires an enormous and never-ending work. A Sisyphian task! — Alkis Piskas

I guess life itself is a Sisyphian task if you look at it like that....broadly speaking, the relationship between subjectivity, the evolution of understanding, and objectivity. And how that should be construed, as you point out, in the context of life.

Couldn't these localized expressions of freedom be part of the universal telos? — Pantagruel

Ultimately they have to be because they must be of the nature to reconstruct the world or context that is giving them their shape. So it is a cybernetic loop. The global constraints produce the local freedoms and those degrees of freedom construct the world that has these constraints.

An equilibrium condition is where the parts freely move and collide, but the overall pressure and temperature don’t change, inject a particular hot or cold particle into this equilibrium and it is soon enough either slowed or speeded to join the collective average. It has freedom shaped to fit the system it has become part of. Even if, as the newcomer, it did make some slight difference to that collective by adding or subtracting to the average kinetic energy.

Also, contexts (of freedom and law) are themselves the products of other contexts, in a nested-hierarchical fashion. It seems that freedom is something that emerges and is defined (ie. law-constrained freedom or practical freedom) through this emergent-evolutionary process. — Pantagruel

Precisely. It is the hierarchy theory view. Stability emerges by the suppression of instability. Global constraints regulate local fluctuations. And one level of stability then becomes the source of the fluctuations that produce the next round of stabilising emergence.

Protons formed after the strong force confined quarks. Then atoms could form because protons still fluctuated enough to produce the pions that became the nuclear glue that allowed them to bind. An elemental table grew until radioactive instability became its limit. Chemistry exists as a collection of definite combinatorial freedoms because stability has been established over the course of many phase transitions and the new levels of particle order that resulted.

Stability emerges by the suppression of instability. — apokrisis

I concur with everything said, but the emergence of complex adaptive systems (and negentropy in general) is still something of a mystery. I wonder if instability is somehow being captured at the systemic level as a kind of 'power source'?

:up:

I concur with everything said, but the emergence of complex adaptive systems (and negentropy in general) is still something of a mystery. I wonder if instability is somehow being captured at the systemic level as a kind of 'power source'? — Pantagruel

Yep. How do we explain the Big Bang? My one liner is that the universe can exist because it is falling into its own heat sink.

We can view the Big Bang as a phase transition in a quantum foam. The foam is as unstructured as can be imagined. It doesn’t even have organised dimensionality. There is no spacetime container, and so no bounded quantum vacuum as its hot fluctuating content.

But this “infinite dimensional” state of foamy unboundedness could become constrained just by accident to have some dimensional order. Such localised fluctuations couldn’t be prevented. And it would turn out that any near enough three dimensional quantum vacua would have some very special properties such that it would be the ideal seed to form the kind of dissipative structure that is our Big Bang cosmos.

Only in 3D are the number of spin degrees of freedom matched by the number of translational degrees of freedom. This results in the chiral structure that is the basis of particle physics. Knots that can stay knotted and so anchor a structure of relations which becomes an expanding and cooling spacetime void.

In such a space, the first level of emergent QFT structure is a scalar field - inflation. Then that quickly breaks into a confusion of vector particles - the reheating step which begins the Big Bang proper.

So in general, you start with an everythingness that is infinite in dimensionality so effectively lacks any dimensionality. It is as unstable as anything could be. And that state must then explore all its possible arrangements just by the accidents of its fluctuations. It is then inevitable that any possible states of more persistent order will be discovered. Striking on a 3D set of constraints will produce the dialectic of spin and translation - the local and global Noether conservation symmetries that give particles with Newtonian characteristics.

If you have “stuff” spinning on the spot, that defines a location. If that stuff also moves in trajectories, that defines the metric within which momentum translates.

The next step is to produce actual gauge particles which lock in CP violation and so have an internal quantum spin structure. The vector particles become symmetry broken to produce the Standard Model’s collection of elemental, chirally separated, scraps of matter now freely spreading and collectively cooling in a heat sink universe heading for its de Sitter heat death.

Instability is what gives meaning to stabilising order. And stabilising order is inevitable if it is possible. The physics of our Universe tells us it is very possible as there was a whole cascade of phase transitions even in the Big Bang’s first trillionth of a second.

The critical step was limiting dimensionality to three dimensions, Or at least that seems the special number on a number of scores - especially as it brings the number of rotational and translational degrees of freedom into the exact balance (3+3) that could define the location of a particle within the space it can move.

Symmetry breaking ends when a new level of symmetry is found. A world fit for vector particles is what emerges from a dimensional arrangement where the local vs global degrees of freedom are balanced enough to form their own closed world of entropy transaction.

I won't argue against any of that, since it's beside the point of my reply to the OP:

The notion of a philosophical "project" with some statable goal misses what's going on. The moment a goal is stated, someone will formulate a counter-instance, adding a new piece that undermines that very goal. — Banno

It seems we agree that metaphysics does not have the special place in philosophy ascribed to it by .

So Aristotle et al are wrong about 'First Philosophy' being first (i.e. fundamental)?

My one liner is that the universe can exist because it is falling into its own heat sink. — apokrisis

:up:

It seems we agree that metaphysics does not have the special place in philosophy ascribed to it by — Banno

Again, it really all boils down to a definition of metaphysics. Apokrisis sees the metaphysical implications of physics and so do I. Popper advocates metaphysical research programs to guide future scientific research. It seems that some people are prone to interpret the term metaphysics in order to exclude rather than embrace it.

Again, it really all boils down to a definition of metaphysics. — Pantagruel

I'd disagree here. @Banno is taking the right approach by putting metaphysics in a lower position, IMO. You can define it how you like, but the history of metaphysics will still be there -- and this is what I'd say I'm talking about in talking metaphysics. It's not what we define it as, but rather what has been done thus far.

It's not what we define it as, but rather what has been done thus far. — Moliere

This talks past the issue at stake. Is metaphysics a method of inquiry aimed at some goal, or is it merely a history of intellectual accidents?

You can take the dismissive or deflationary option. But it would have to be properly argued against those who say it is the dialectical opposite of that.

And whoops, if you accept that challenge, you’ve already lost it. Dialectics being the historical method that defines metaphysical inquiry as the univocal seeking of a foundation in the “unity of opposites”. :cool:

If you like. We might usefully differentiate between speculative physics, which is common hereabouts, and a more general investigation of the logic of existence, which might be called metaphysics. So the recent thread on truth is more metaphysical than that on quantum physics.

There's a sense in which "the universe can exist because it is falling into its own heat sink" begs the question - meaning it's premise assumes its conclusion, not the more recent inviting another question. There being a heat sink assumes there is a universe. That's not to devalue specuLative physics, although there is a tendency to treat the speculation s if it were accepted.

So to my eye the recent progress in metaphysics isn't found in quantum mumbling so much as in working out the implications of quantification, modelling, modal logic, free logic, and so on. Not that the progress in physics is not impressive.

I'm no expert, but in answer to , isn't the purpose of first philosophy, for Aristotle, to provide a firm foundation for politicking, in the broad Greek sense?

First I should say I'm no expert on Aristotle either, just an enthusiast who in another life would have dived deeper. Just to keep things honest.

I'd say that's a good interpretation, but I'm not confident enough to say that it's the purpose. It's very much my interpretation, if you get what I mean. The best way I can make sense of Aristotle's corpus is through understanding it politickly -- in the sense of the life of the human animal (the ethics), and the life of the human species (the politics).

I think it'd be better to say that from our perspective, first philosophy is most important, and hence why Levinas picks up on that in relation to Heidegger and posits ethics. (as a Marxist I'd say, yes, Aristotle's purpose of the metaphysics is politics, but I think that might be too many steps to just say yup, ya'know?)

It seems we agree that metaphysics does not have the special place in philosophy ascribed to it by ↪Pantagruel. — Banno

I’ll be damned, I think you’re right.

@Pantagruel might agree with Rabelais, seeing philosophy as serious play.

I would.

No. IIRC, 'First Philosophy' concerns archai, or first principles, of theoria (ontology theology & cosmology) and, by implication, phronesis.

There's a sense in which "the universe can exist because it is falling into its own heat sink" begs the question - meaning it's premise assumes its conclusion — Banno

Only if you believe predicate logic to be more foundational than dialectical logic. Only if you commit to a reductionist notion of linear cause and effect that has already been empirically trashed by the advent of quantum theory.

So nope. Dynamics can have their attractors. The ends can justify their means. Future goals can solidify the paths that reach them. The principle of least action and the second law of thermodynamics can become the conclusions that exclude all other premises.

There is a whole metaphysics that is having a wonderful party here. And you stand outside like the grumbling neighbour, disturbed from his slumbers, wondering why the council noise patrol won't show up as you've requested.

I think that's a bit too quick. But it's not an important point, so I won't argue it.

But it's not an important point, so I won't argue it. — Banno

Translation: I can't argue against it, so therefore I will call it unimportant.

Always the same old, same old.

I think your posts makes my point. Not that I understood what you said. Indeed, it's not clear to me that you said anything.

A bit more:

Only if you believe predicate logic to be more foundational than dialectical logic. — apokrisis

Well, yes.

Only if you commit to a reductionist notion of linear cause and effect that has already been empirically trashed by the advent of quantum theory. — apokrisis

And here you go off on a tangent I don't follow. I've argued against reductionism, and against the centrality of causality, so that's not I.

And your posts make my point. You have a mind so narrowed by reductionist logicism that it can't even comprehend any other "other". Your insults thus have to take the form "I can't see you, therefore you don't exist". And yet we can all see you standing there with your eyes clamped shut. :lol:

Mere vitriol in the place of discussion. If my posts are too 'narrow' for you, you are free to ignore them. Cheers.