What you often hear from idealists (Kastrup and Hoffman are good examples) is that materialism and a physical world is debunked and quantum physics tells us reality comes into being by the act of observation. Therefore idealism is a more reasonable and parsimonious explanation for our experience. I've often thought that the arguments in favour for idealism are actually more arguments against old school materialism than any great championing of an 'it's all consciousness' style metaphysics. — Tom Storm

Note, however that Hoffman does not really say that. He says, more or less that QM suggests that 'physical reality as it appears to us' comes into being by the act of observation. And he says that this is consistent with his 'interface theory of perception', i.e. the view that perception gives us a simplified interface of the 'external reality' which is useful for our survival.

Unfortunately, this is then mixed up with his 'conscious realism', i.e. his Berkeleyan-like view that conscious agents are the only reality. To his credit, he never say that the 'interface theory of perception'necessarily implies 'conscious realism'.

Note that his 'interface theory of perception' is a kind of epistemological idealism (which is actually compatible with the existence of a mind-independent reality). His 'conscious realism' is of course a form of ontological idealism. Unfortunately, sometimes his two theses are mixed up.

Was everything in superposition back then? — boundless

Nope. Enzymes are large mechanical structures. Decohered and classical for all intents and purposes. But they can dip their toe into the quantum realm, exploiting tunneling to jump chemical thresholds.

I posted this general story here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/679203

*I actually think that we tend to do that also in classical physics. — boundless

I make this same point all the time. :up:

I make this same point all the time. :up: — apokrisis

:up: Glad to hear that! I think that, what is common to all physical theories is that they are predictive tools with an extraordinary range of practical applications. Physics per se does not give us any ontology IMO. I also think that many debates about topics like free will, reductionism* etc are due to an unneeded ontological interpretation of physical theories. In fact, I think that the most consistent form of 'realism' with all physical theories is actually what Bernard d'Espagnat called 'open realism' in his "On Physics and Philosophy" (p.28, emphasis in the original):

Realism (Open). This is - indeed quite 'open' - view that there is something the existence of which does not hinge on thought
Is this 'something' the set of all objects, of all the atoms, of events, God, the Platonic Ideas, still something else? Open realism is mute on this.
...
It just says 'something,' in the widest possible sense of the world.

Of course this does not mean that is the only viable form of realism.

*I do believe, in fact, that even newtonian mechanics is not really 'reductionistic'. Conservation laws seems to me properties of a whole isolated system, not reducible to the properties of its parts. Of course, if one does not make any ontological commitments, newtonian mechanics is neither reductionistic nor holistic.

I posted this general story here - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/679203 — apokrisis

Thanks for the link. I'll ask more questions after reading it :)

Did your astrobiologists remember that classic as they restated what has been well known among those who study these things for so many years. — apokrisis

What difference does that make? Do you imagine that astrobiologists are ignorant of Negentropy? Why are you trying to put-down this "new law" with nit-picky irrelevant comments? Does it contradict your personal worldview in some way? Do you read into it some outrageous religious doctrine? Is there some particular sore-point that it aggravates? Spell it out. What "well known" wheel are they reinventing?

My interest in this "new" perspective on Evolution is because it fits neatly into to my personal Holistic philosophical worldview, which underlies all of my comments on this forum. Biologist Jan Smuts, in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution, foresaw this expansion of evolutionary principles from Biology to Mineralogy and everything else : "The whole-making, holistic tendency, or Holism, . . . . is seen at all stages of existence, and is by no means confined to the biological domain, to which science has hitherto restricted it".

I doubt that the Cornell scientists "remember that classic". But they may have been influenced by its gradual percolation into the philosophical culture of science over the intervening years. Holism is currently known in science & engineering as General Systems Theory. The "missing evolutionary law" they postulated is merely one small step in the direction of a universal holistic worldview. And my renaming of the inappropriate term Negentropy as "EnFormAction", and negative Entropy as positive "Enformy" is just another increment in that trend away from classical scientific Reductionism toward general philosophical Holism*1.

Smuts asserted that Holism "is the motive force behind Evolution". It's what Bergson, grasping for a metaphor, called elan vital*2. But that was mis-interpreted as a religious concept similar to the Holy Spirit. The philosophical worldview of reductive Scientism might understandably be opposed to the notion of Holism, in that it pictures Evolution as a positive trend in Nature, instead of a downhill tumble toward entropic Heat Death. FWIW, my worldview is more optimistic. What about yours? :smile:


*1. I can't get my head around Reductionism vs Holism :
Many articles present reductionism as the whole is the sum of its parts. Holism is presented as the antithesis, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. . . .
According to wikipedia, an example of reductionism is that the solar system can be explained in terms of planets and the gravitational forces between them. What strikes me as contradictory, is that I would have thought that the gravitional forces constitute an interaction between parts, not a part in and of itself? Therefore, this example conveys to me that reductionism is the idea that the whole is the sum of its parts and the interaction between the parts?
https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/vrgba7/i_cant_get_my_head_around_reductionism_vs_holism/
Note --- The "interaction" between parts is what I call EnFormAction.

*2. Élan Vital is a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. ____Wikipedia

Matthew 20:1-16

Why are you trying to put-down this "new law" with nit-picky irrelevant comments? — Gnomon

Degree of function, Ex, is a quantitative measure of a configuration’s ability to perform the function x. In an enzyme, for example, Ex might be defined as the increase in a specific reaction rate that is achieved by the enzyme, whereas for a fluid flowing over a granular medium such as sand, where some form of periodic dune structure emerges, we could define Ex as the minimum perturbation strength required to disrupt the dune structure.

For a given set of parameters, the most persistent dune structure should be that which resists the largest range of perturbations (90, 91). The units of Ex depend on the character of the function under consideration: The catalytic efficiency of an enzyme might be measured as a decrease in activation energy, for example, whereas the function of patterned sand might be to be maximally stable to external flow perturbations (28).

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2310223120#:~:text=Accordingly%252C%2520we%2520propose%2520a%2520%E2%80%9Claw,for%2520one%2520or%2520more%2520functions.

Sure one can equate gene regulated metabolic networks to wind sculpted sand dunes in broad dissipative structure language and then apply Szostak’s notion of functional information to both. But one system actually does have a memory in the semiotic sense, the other doesn’t.

So this becomes another overheated exercise in the Santa Fe tradition where self organising dynamics or topological order are meant to explain everything, and yet they can’t actually explain the key thing of how a molecule becomes a message and so how life and mind arise within the merely physical world.

For astrobiology perhaps especially, this is an amateur hour mistake.

I want to backtrack to the post about the Wheeler diagram and a response to it. The response was:

The point is epistemic. And it reflects the semiotic fact that the mind must reduce reality to a system of signs. The world is a blooming, buzzing confusion of noise and we must distil that down to some orderly arrangement of information. A set of counterfactuals that impose a dialectical crispness on the vagueness of our experience.

So in Gestalt fashion, we turn sensory confusion into perceived order by homing in on critical features that would distinguish and R from an E or a K. We have to be sensitive to the fact that Rs have this loop that Es leave open. This becomes a rule of interpretation for when we start having to deal with a real world of messy handwriting and wild fonts. We have to see information that was meant to be there according to the rules and so ignore the variation that is also in some actual scribble or fancifully elaborate font.

Our interpretative experience of even the alphabet, let alone the world, has this epistemic character. — apokrisis

So, I agree, I think it exactly the point of the diagram. As the response notes, the mind creates gestalts, meaningful wholes, by which recognise not only letters, but also the basic features of the world. Gestalts are fundamental to cognition. Here I also want to mention Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. His basic thesis is likewise that cognition operates in terms of gestalts, those elements, corresponding to categories of animal sensation, which it carves out from the background and recognises as meaningful wholes. This, he says, operates even in insects (citing research to this effect)

Everything you see, hear and think comes to you in structured wholes: When you read, you’re seeing a whole page even when you focus on one word or sentence. When someone speaks, you hear whole words and phrases, not individual bursts of sound. When you listen to music, you hear an ongoing melody, not just the note that is currently being played. Ongoing events enter your awareness as Gestalts, for the Gestalt is the natural unit of mental life. If you try to concentrate on a dot on this page, you will notice that you cannot help but see the context at the same time. Vision would be meaningless, and have no biological function, if people and animals saw anything less than integral scenes. — Chapter 3, Abstract

The question I want to ask is the sense in which gestalts are irreducible. (Maybe it’s here where I'm said to be constantly 'sliding between the epistemic (what is knowledge) and ontological (what are the fundamental constituents of the world.)) But if gestalts are fundamental to cognition, how can you get outside them to see what is causally prior to them? And isn’t the so-called ‘wave function collapse’ exactly analogous to the forming of a gestalt where there was previously only an array of probabilities? It must surely be something like that for Wheeler’s diagram, as it was presented in the context of his discussion of his baffling ‘delayed choice’ experiment. But then, this analysis is naturally holistic rather than reductionist, as in this analysis the fundamental units are not physical but cognitive.

Just trying to work out what your claim is. So we have something like that the universe that, as it slides inevitably towards thermodynamic equilibrium, progresses towards increasing complexity & creative novelty eventually led from a hypothetical Singularity Soup (quark/gluon plasma) to the emergence of complex brains & minds?
It remains that the universe is fair and just only if those "complex brains & minds" make it so - is that right? — Banno

The title of this thread is not a "claim", but a question. In the OP, I did make one positive statement : "Although I'm not comforted by scriptural assurances that "all things work together for good", I do infer a kind of Logic to the chain of Cause & Effect in the physical world --- and an overall proportional parity between positive & negative effects". You claimed that the universe "slides inevitably toward thermodynamic equilibrium". If so, how do you explain the historical fact that the metaphorical Big Bang didn't immediately or inevitably evaporate in a puff of entropic smoke? Why, after 14 billion sol-years of wasted energy, due to disorganizing Entropy, is the "explosion" not only still expanding, but even accelerating, and creating a plethora of novel physical configurations, along with animated organisms, and a few metaphysical (mental) forms of cosmic stuff? How has the world evaded "inevitable" heat death for so long?

Astronomers, who traced the current state of affairs back to a pinpoint in the remote past, concluded that the Singularity began in a size smaller than an atom, and hotter & denser than any star. If so, how could inevitable heat-wasting Entropy produce anything more complex than a cold dark cinder? My philosophical hypothesis --- not a scientific claim --- is in agreement with anthropologist Henri Bergson's notion of Creative Evolution*1, in which he speculated that some then-unknown causal agency or principle, working counter to that of Entropy, is the explanation for the manifold exceptions to Thermodynamic Doom that we observe right here on the Blue Planet. In 400BC, Plato postulated an organizing force in the world, labelled "Logos". The term "Negentropy" was coined by Erwin Schrödinger in his 1944 book What is Life? In 1926, biologist Jan Smuts, presciently coined the term "Holism" to describe that same anti-entropy trend in natural evolution. In 2008, Gnomon, not a scientist nor a genius, coined the terms EnFormAction and Enformy to encapsulate all of the above principles.

None of these scientists relied on religious revelation for their belief in "creative evolution". Instead, they merely applied logical inferences of cause & effect, to explain how isolated things & events could combine into the whole integrated system of morphogenesis*2 (form creation) we call Evolution. Likewise, my own personal philosophical worldview is not grounded on any religious faith, but on rational reasoning from scientific & philosophical evidences. Therefore, I can agree with your assertion that "complex brains & minds make it so". But not with the implication that thermodynamic deconstruction could produce, or even allow, such complexity & consciousness by a random network of cosmic accidents. Entropy is always destructive of order, except when it is morphed into Enformy*3.

Instead, I agree with those geniuses from previous generations that there is some constructive creative agency causing positive form-change in the world. And I point the finger at the aimless Causal Force we call Energy. But energy alone can be either constructive or destructive. So, I follow those predecessors to conclude that raw Energy is directed & guided by internal cohesion & interaction to behave in coordinating cooperating Holistic ways. You next question, I suppose is : is that agency a god? My answer is : I don't know, but I currently treat it as an ordinary force of Nature, similar to abstract formles Energy, except working counter to Entropy. :nerd:


*1a. Élan Vital is a term coined by French philosopher Henri Bergson in his 1907 book Creative Evolution, in which he addresses the question of self-organisation and spontaneous morphogenesis of things in an increasingly complex manner. ____Wikipedia
*1b. Bergson's thesis is that Darwinian and Lamarkian evolution are only half the story and that there is a creative urge inherent in life that defines the direction

*2. Morphogenesis is defined as the suite of underlying biological processes orchestrating the dynamic formation of macroscopic shapes in biological matter.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/morphogenesis

*3. Enformy :
In the Enformationism theory, Enformy is a hypothetical, holistic, meta-physical, natural trend or force, that counteracts Entropy & Randomness to produce complexity & progress.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html

The question I want to ask is the sense in which gestalts are irreducible. — Wayfarer

In being holistic, they would be irreducible to atomic events, but perfectly reducible to semiotic structures – the triadic structure of a hierarchical order.

Semiotic logic says reality has irreducible complexity. You can't get simpler than – as Gestalt theory puts it – the relational view that is a figure and its ground. The hierarchical thing of the local mark within its global frame. Each holistically needs the "other" for anything to definitely be. And what exists to be talked about is that there is not just a difference, but a difference that makes a difference as it is a mark made in a way that has its answering interpretive context.

So holisism reduces, just as atomism reduces. But one finds its irreducible foundations at the level of a system of relations, the other at the level of naked actions in voids.

(And a holist will point out that "actions in voids" is still really a dialectical metaphysics. Atomism just likes to brush over this uncomfortable fact.)

And isn’t the so-called ‘wave function collapse’ exactly analogous to the forming of a gestalt where there was previously only an array of probabilities? — Wayfarer

The "collapse" is reductionism jumping to its atomistic conclusion. The wavefunction is an encoding of how a quantum system has the holism of its relational context.

So a gestalt as a brain process does jump to find its atomistic events by equally abruptly turning everything around the event into the discarded information that becomes the "void" which makes the event now stand out in high contrast fashion.

You can actually measure this with electrodes taped to the skull. When a subject suddenly spots a target – in "Where's Wally" fashion – there is a characteristic P300 wave of activity. The brain attends by suddenly suppressing all the background buzz and so zeroing in on Wally where he has been hiding among to crowd. This takes about 300 milliseconds. One instant, you experience a confused sea of faces, the next you are exactly sure there is that bobble hat, specs and striped jumper just behind some random figure.

It must surely be something like that for Wheeler’s diagram, as it was presented in the context of his discussion of his baffling ‘delayed choice’ experiment. — Wayfarer

Delayed choice says that at the quantum level, entanglement is across time as well as space. As you would expect from spacetime. So emergence must rule. In some physical sense, everything is connected in a global contextual fashion that stands "outside" our classically imagined spacetime.

But then, the Cosmos can have its P300 contrast sharpening event and Wally pops out as a collapse of the wavefunction. A particle appears "right here" in terms of some mechanical recording device having its logic state flipped. The particle could have been anywhere – within the context of the bounds imposed by the constraints of relativistic spacetime. But all those other possible places become now concretely suppressed by the fact that energy got dissipate in precisely this one localised event.

Signal is created by noise being discarded. In Gestalt terms, the squiggled R stands out on the blank page as clearly being the mark that matters and requiring our full attention. Wally is plain and present. But what quantum theory says – as does semiotics – is that the making of the blank page is just as much what just happened as the sudden appearance of this distinctive mark. Voids can't be taken for granted. They appear along with the particles that are being manifested.

At the quantum level, the wavefunction greatly narrows the space of possibilities. It already adds enough constraints to roughly define the outcomes in terms of their probabilities. We are already looking for Wally either going through one slit or both slits, depending on how we choose to add our finishing touch in terms of an act of measurement – a final thermal forcing of the situation that completely constrains things.

But then as I just said, preparing a system to the level it is now counterfactually poised between two equally possible outcomes is already a fairly decohered state of reality. Electrons fired at diffraction grating in a laboratory is hardly the same as even trying to find an electron-like action in the Planckscale fireball of the Big Bang.

We exist at a scale where the Big Bang has become almost its Heat Death void. The blank sheet of paper of the atomistic imagination has become pretty much the case as something that is "just there" and being scribbled all over by the marks of atomic events. The void is no longer hot enough to add the uncertainty that would make it hard to tell electrons and protons apart from the spacetime they exist in.

Wheeler's diagram of course is still just making an epistemic point. But given you want to connect to the ontology of quantum theory, this is how that same "holistic gestalt logic" applies to existence as a story of Big Bang decoherence. The emergence of a blank page and its marks from a hot roil of unbounded possibilities where neither could as yet counterfactually exist.

the mind creates gestalts, meaningful wholes, by which recognise not only letters, but also the basic features of the world. — Wayfarer

Right. the basic features of the world are not mind-created, but mind-recognized.

Semiotic logic says reality has irreducible complexity. You can't get simpler than – as Gestalt theory puts it – the relational view that is a figure and its ground. — apokrisis

Still struggling with how this can be meaningfully said to be physical in nature. The appeal of atomism is the ostensible 'indivisible unit' which represents in atomic form 'the unchanging'. To say that reality is 'irreducibly complex' seems to omit something fundamental to metaphysics, the unconditioned or unmade.

And how is this incompatible with, say, Kastrup's form of analytical idealism?

Henri Bateson — Gnomon

Bergson.

It remains that the universe is fair and just only if those "complex brains & minds" make it so - is that right? — Banno

It's only to rational sentient beings that the question matters.

the basic features of the world are not mind-created, but mind-recognized. — Janus

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe, such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective.

I'm not too keen to join the speculative physics hereabouts. I don't think it has been shown to be particularly relevant to the topic. Justice and fairness are not found in the world in the way that rocks and planets, or even conservation laws, are. They will only come about as the result of our actions.

To my eye your account of energy is wishful thinking.

It certainly is not accepted physics.

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective. — Wayfarer

How can you possibly know this?

Inferentially.

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe, such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective. — Wayfarer

I was just about to write "How could you know that" when I looked directly above and saw that Banno beat me to it.

Inferentially. — Wayfarer

Lay out the reasoning.

SO set out the inference, that we might be guided.

:wink:

I can't think of a better example of "whereof one cannot speak..."

Again, referring to Charles Pinter's book

The book’s argument begins with the British empiricists who raised our awareness of the fact that we have no direct contact with physical reality, but it is the mind that constructs the form and features of objects. It is shown that modern cognitive science brings this insight a step further by suggesting that shape and structure are not internal to objects, but arise in the observer. The author goes yet further by arguing that the meaningful connectedness between things — the hierarchical organization of all we perceive — is the result of the Gestalt nature of perception and thought, and exists only as a property of mind. These insights give the first glimmerings of a new way of seeing the cosmos: not as a mineral wasteland but a place inhabited by creatures. — Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Features & Structure of All Things, and Why this Insight Transforms Physics

You see, this also provides a plausible grounds for why the 'unreasonable efficiency of mathematics in the natural sciences' and Kant's 'synthetic a priori'. As our cognition naturally operates in terms of gestalts, which are fundamentally cognitive in nature, and both logic and mathematics pertain to the relation between gestalts. So there's no longer a question of how what is apparently 'internal to the mind' can be so accurate with respect to 'the external world', as on one level, they're united.

I am anticipating a verrry long wait...

Edit: Some rhetoric appeared above as I wrote...still waiting for the reasoning.

Who is that addressed to?

Or should that be "what..."?

Any interested party, but as I said yesterday, I recognise a brick wall when I see one ;-)

A brick wall's response depends on what you throw at it.

Just to be clear: are you claiming that the world absent any perceivers could not possibly possess any differentiation whatsoever? If that were so, then how to explain the advent of perceivers in a world of difference and diversity?

How did the Great Amorphous Nothing give rise to the Immensely Complex Something?

Ok. If you will not participate in a dialogue...

There are no features without minds. In the absence of minds the universe such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective. — Wayfarer

Even to say that "In the absence of minds the universe such as it is, is featureless, formless, and lacking in any perspective" is too much. Absent the mind, and you absent inference itself.

For us, the world is always, already interpreted.

But you will take this as implying that there is no world without mind. It doesn't. It implies only that there is no interpretation without mind.

You take one step further than your argument allows.

You always take one step further than your argument allows. — Banno

:up: That's an apt and succinct way of putting it.

But you will take this as implying that there is no world without mind. It doesn't. It implies only that there is no interpretation without mind.

You always take one step further than your argument allows. — Banno

No - because 'the world' that you imagine exists in the absence of any mind, is not 'a world'. The etymology of the noun 'world' comes from an old European word for 'time of man'. No mind, no world - not because the world ceases to exist, but it has no form, perspective, duration, and so on.

In order for you to establish what the world would be outside your cognition of it, you would have to stand outside that whole process of cognition. (This is even recognised in analytical philosophy, in Sellars' 'the myth of the given'.)

Shocking but true.

Please excuse my butting in.

In order for you to establish what the world would be outside your cognition of it, you would have to stand outside that whole process of cognition. (This is even recognised in analytical philosophy, in Sellars' 'the myth of the given'.) — Wayfarer

I have no wish to "establish what the world would be outside your cognition"; it's a nonsense.

And that's not "the myth of the given"...

So please correct this Chat input:

The 'myth of the given' is a concept in philosophy, particularly within epistemology, that critiques the idea that there are certain immediate, self-evident pieces of knowledge that serve as a foundation for all other knowledge. This concept was primarily developed by philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956). Sellars argued against the notion that there are "given" elements in experience—such as sense data, raw feels, or basic perceptual inputs—that can serve as an unquestionable foundation for knowledge.

Sellars maintained that any attempt to base knowledge on such "givens" fails because even these purportedly immediate experiences are influenced by our conceptual framework. For example, seeing a red apple is not just a matter of raw sensory input but involves recognizing and categorizing the experience within a framework of concepts and beliefs.

According to Sellars, all knowledge is theory-laden; it is shaped by the language, concepts, and theories that we use to interpret our experiences. Thus, the supposed "givens" are not independent of our conceptual understanding. This view challenges traditional empiricism, which often relies on the idea of foundational, immediate knowledge derived from sensory experience.

The critique of the myth of the given has significant implications for epistemology. It suggests that knowledge cannot be grounded in indubitable perceptual inputs but must instead be understood as a network of interdependent beliefs and concepts. This idea has influenced various areas of philosophy, including debates about foundationalism, coherentism, and the nature of perception and understanding.

Chat — Wayfarer

:roll:

I think it sets out my claim pretty well.

To say that reality is 'irreducibly complex' seems to omit something fundamental to metaphysics, the unconditioned or unmade. — Wayfarer

The triadic structure is now your "unconditioned or unmade". It is the inescapable outcome of anything striving to occur at all.

So rather than starting with some fundamental material, there can only be the vagueness of a "quantum foam" potential. And then that evolves in a natural way by suppressing its own variety to become a well-formed outcome – a state of definite somethingness.

This is reality as encoded by quantum field theory (QFT) as well as Peircean metaphysics or Aristotelean hylomorphism.

So, the world that you claim exists independently of any interpretation - how do you demonstrate the existence of that?