So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm

Consider what philosophers have said:-
1 Everything is physics
2 Everything is language
3 Everything is experienced
All true. They are all perspectives and there can be more than one perspective on anything. Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect. — Ludwig V

As you are aware, the Continentalists are fond of ontological groundings that have built into their very premise the genesis of perspectivalism as an irreducible primordial a priori ( Nietzsche’s Will to Power, Heidegger’s Being, Merleau-Ponty’s Flesh of the World, Deleuze’s desiring machines, Husserl’s Transcendental Ego).

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. They cannot be understood without taking a holistic view of the organism and what helps to keep it alive - a concept that physics has no room for.
Except I heard that some physicists are talking of causality as information. But I don't know anything about the background. — Ludwig V

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore.

So I think the point here isn’t that psychology and biology are not in principle reducible to a more fundamental description like physics. It is that today’s physics is not up to the job because it is mired in older metaphysical assumptions. It would have to re-invent itself as a new kind of physics. Maybe it wouldnt even call itself physics anymore. — Joshs

It seems strange to me that someone would even consider the question of whether physics is up to the job. To me, it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking.

But you didn't get the memo about categories. I'm afraid the news is that there are many different kinds of existence. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you're implying or what you are referring to in what I said. Categories are things we apply enactively like any other knowledge. They reflect things we do, rather than something inherent about fundamental ontologies.

Including physics. — Ludwig V

Yup, already said this.

Oh, to be sure they are. My brain is heavily involved. But the point is that my brain is not the whole story. Same applies to plus tasks. — Ludwig V

Well, all I can do is point you back at what I already said about why I think this kind of perspective is only rather superficial significance and doesn't really contribute much. At the same time, I have no trouble saying that a calculator does plus tasks.

You seriously mean that you live in your head? — Ludwig V

If you are not a dualist, and there is something like an isomorphism between experiences and how the brain functions, and there is only a single realm of existence, then it is clear that consciousness is in the vicinity of the brain. How could it be any other way? Yes, we all conceptualize ourselves in terms of an extended person in the physical world (or perhaps any other way you choose) but all of these concepts emerge, are constructed directly, are vicariously engaged with in experience. Experience is inside your head. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions are tied to neural activity in your head. However you may conceptualize the world, it is via experience, and experience must be situated in the vicinity of your brain if you take the isomorphism of consciousness and brain descriptions seriously, if you think there is only one realm of existence.

The idea that the self or the person is another creature like us inside our heads was the founding mistake of dualism. — Ludwig V

Well this is nothing like what I have said. What are you then if you are not a dualist?

And yet you defend your brain tirelessly. So it must be important to you even if it is not big. — Ludwig V

Not sure this makes sense. You must have misunderstood something but it doesn't seem like a significant point.

So the concept of ontological grounding is not perspective-dependent? H'm. — Ludwig V

Well no; but, by observing the world, we can make the conceptual distinction between a world that in-principle exists in a mind-independent way and the frameworks we use to engage with it. I think that the fact that we cannot talk about anything in a perspective-independent way shouldn't necessary preclude us from talking about the concept of a perspective-independent world. There may not be much at all that can be said; nonetheless, I think such a concept is important in how we see the world.

We can then note the difference between issues of derivation and reduction between different explanatory frameworks as opposed to the empirical observation of how the world seems to decompose when we zoom in at different scales. Most people's objections seem to be really preoccupied with the former. To me, objections to the latter seem to require a radically different conception of reality which frankly I know wouldn't seem plausible to me.

Looking back on my description, I think introducing the notion of "behaviors at different scales" does actually introduce perspective in a stronger way than I had desired with regard to ontology - because scale is a perspectival concept. But I still think the idea of how the world seems to decompose as we zoom-in with out observations is reasonably independent of any specific kind of field of knowledge you can invoke.

The calculator neither knows not cares whether it is correct. It cannot evaluate its own answer, in the sense of trying to correct wrong answers. — Ludwig V

True, but this just identifies a difference between people and calculators. I don't see it as necessarily meaning much for whether we should say a plus task is being performed. After all, the calculators knows almost as little about how it performs a plus task as we do.

Try stopping your heart or draining your blood. Same result. — Ludwig V

Yes, but it only does this vicariously through your brain. There is nothing in the universe that could get the same result without being mediated by your brain.

Physics, from my perspective, is not unique in any respect. — Ludwig V

But what about the smallest scales of existence. You think events observed at large scales are not grounded on what can be observed at a higher resolution?

What you’re calling the lower level physical description, the irreducible ground floor for the understanding of all higher order descriptions (chemical, biological, psychological and cultural) has evolved over the history of philosophical and scientific inquiry. And it has evolved in such a way that all of the higher order resources of cultural knowledge arebrought to bear on redetermining in each era of inquiry the nature of the lowest level. Another way of putting it is that the very highest level of cultural understanding is inextricably intertwined with our models of the very lowest level. This may not seem like an objectionable claim in itself, but what if I were to suggest that it often happens in the historical course of scientific inquiry that insights gained from scientific and philosophical investigations of phenomena seemingly far removed from the subject matter of physics, that supposed ground floor level of study, can point the way toward paradigm shifts in the models describing the nature of that lowest level? — Joshs

Yes, this is a fair point. I would just question if it ever seems reasonable to say that events observed at the larger scale of existence do [not] depend on and are decomposable in terms of the smaller scales or higher resolutions.

This was true in the early days of the social and psychological sciences — Joshs

It still is true because no matter how complicated we view biology or social sciences, a description at the level of physics would be orders of magnitude more complex to describe the same phenomena and it may not even make a lot of sense.

1) You are not actually treating the higher order psychological account as consistent with the lower order one, but you are just assuming without examining the details that the higher must be reducible to the lower since of course the physics has been rigorously validated empirically. — Joshs

No, this is nothing specifically to do with physics, it is about whether it logically makes sense that observations on larger scales do not depend on lower scales. If the difference between higher and lower scales amounts to expanding the spatial and temporal scales and coarse-graining on a single reality, then I am not sure an alternative in principle makes sense for any kind of description. It would result in a radically different view of reality which would seem strange to me.

2) You interpret the higher order as subsumed by the same theoretical logic as the lower one, and so miss the radical departure of the former from the latter’s grounding assumptions. — Joshs

I have made the distinction between issues that are concerned with the actual structure and reducibility / derivability of different explanatory frameworks (what you are saying is part of this issue) vs. more general issues of ontology. I have not been making a point about the former.

Edit: first reply changed

It seems strange to me that someone would even consider the question of whether physics is up to the job. To me, it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking. — wonderer1

.

I didnt say that all physicists are not up to the job. There are a handful who try to force an interpretation onto the established body of results which allows the field to bridge the conceptual gap between itself and recent thinking in the biological and psychological sciences. Without such significant work of reinterpretation, I don’t believe that physics can be a useful participant alongside the life and social disciplines.

What I was implying is that all of the events that led to the development of neuronal structure- whether on an evolutionary or developmental scale - can be in principle described purely in terms of particles and how they move in space and time. In principle, such a thing could be simulated using a complete model of fundamental physics - it would just obviously be orders of magnitude too complicated to ever be possible to do. — Apustimelogist

Describing wouldn’t be explaining. Simulating wouldn’t be capturing the causality in question.

You won’t read it, but here is how Pattee covers that..
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221531066_Artificial_Life_Needs_a_Real_Epistemology

Yours becomes a really odd position when physics can’t even settle on an agreement of how a classical realm emerges from a quantum one. Or how a non-linear system can be reduced to a linear model.

Coarse graining is needed because fine graining can’t deliver. Physics delivers only effective versions of “fundamental reality”.

Of course for my position, as an Aristotelian hierarchicalist on causality, that is what is expected. The systems view of causality is that nature is all about global constraints shaping up the local degrees of freedom in evolutionary fashion. Atoms emerge due to the constraints of top-down topological order being imposed on quantum possibility.

But that is another - pansemiotic - story alongside the semiotic story I’ve been outlining here. I’m just pointing out that reductionism doesn’t just fail when it comes to life and mind. It is inadequate for physics itself.

Although of course, for the purposes of building machines, building technology, reductionism is perfectly suited to that task. Mechanics is the right mindset for imposing a mechanical causality on the physics of nature.

Because obviously, in principle one could describe the entire process of cell development and the entire history of the world in which evolution occurs in terms of particles moving in space - it would just not be tractably comprehensible by yourself. — Apustimelogist

I am asking you to ground your account in its causal principles. Because your physics is reductionist, you can’t deliver on that. You can only assure me you could reconstruct the world as some kind of simulation of its shaped material parts. Some set of atoms arranged in space and moving “because” of Newtonian laws.

As a reductionist, you can’t in fact reduce at all. You can only enumerate parts. You can’t speak to the causality of the whole. The only compaction of information you can offer is a mechanics of atoms. The offer to simulate is given in lieu of what is meant by a causal account.

Our observations about reality are grounded on and instantiated in the most zoomed-in scale, fully resolved, fully decomposed — Apustimelogist

You mean reality resolves into its fundamental atomistic detail at the level of the Planckscale? Of the quantum foam? Of quantum gravity?

Yeah. How is that project going exactly?

...I don’t believe that physics can be a useful participant alongside the life and social disciplines. — Joshs

I would think that most everyone well informed in the life sciences would recognize the usefulness of physics in such an interdisciplinary project. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

I would think that most everyone well informed in the life sciences would recognize the usefulness of physics in such an interdisciplinary project. Do you have evidence to the contrary? — wonderer1

I certainly do, but it involves a familiarity with the substance of scholarship integrating naturalism with phenomenology. And again, the issue of usefulness has to do not strictly with the results of physical experimentation but with the theoretical interpretation of those results.

…we can see historically how the concept of nature as physical being got constructed in an objectivist way, while at the same time we can begin to conceive of the possibility of a different kind of construction that would be post-physicalist and post-dualist–that is, beyond the divide between the “mental” (understood as not conceptually involving the physical) and the “physical” (understood as not conceptually involving the mental). (Evan Thompson)

I certainly do, but it involves a familiarity with the substance of scholarship integrating naturalism with phenomenology. — Joshs

I'm not seeing how how that is a source of evidence, as to the views of most everyone well informed in the life sciences.

Can you point out specific papers that make a case for what the consensus towards physics is, of people in the life sciences?

That's like saying that a phone encodes the information passing down it. — Ludwig V

Or more like saying a street plan encodes a functional map of its world, the city. If you want to move about, there is some habitual pattern that gets you from a to b in an efficient fashion.

A phone line transmits information. A phone system can start to encode the world it serves in terms of its functional pattern of highways and back alleys.

Even our machines can start to have organic form as they become intelligently organised into a civil engineering infrastructure. A system designed on dissipative structure principles.

So a single phone line doesn’t embody much semiotic meaning except that I might want to talk to you. But our infrastructure systems become the meaningful structure of our modern existence as a civilisation level super organism.

Biology is not reducible to physics because a living body, though it is a physical object, cannot be explained without reference to concepts that have no place in physics. — Ludwig V

Biologists like Robert Rosen would argue that biology is larger than physics as it includes all the ways matter can be shaped by form. It includes intelligent form along with inanimate form.

So biology makes physics one of its subsidiary disciplines. :razz:

I'm not seeing how how that is a source of evidence, as to the views of most everyone well informed in the life sciences. — wonderer1

That isnt a source of evidence concerning the views of most everyone informed in the life sciences, its a source of evidence concerning the views of a particular community of scholars who integrate phenomenological insights with pragmatism, biology and embodied , enactive cognitive science. They would lose the popularity contest, but It should be added that the kind of evidence that matters to them doesn’t concern whether today’s physics is correct or incorrect in some objective sense, but how its practices and results can be viewed under a different light, according to a model which doesnt invalidate it but leads to alternative ways of relating the physics, the biological and the cultural.

Sure, there are people with all sorts of agendas, but perhaps we should step back.

Do you agree when I say:

...it is so clearly a matter for extremely interdisciplinary thinking. — wonderer1

Describing wouldn’t be explaining. Simulating wouldn’t be capturing the causality in question. — apokrisis

Or how a non-linear system can be reduced to a linear model. — apokrisis

Coarse graining is needed because fine graining can’t deliver. — apokrisis

But my point isn't about explaining. As I have said multiple times, many explanatory frameworks are important. I don't expect all explanations to be reduced to or replaced by fundamental physics because those aren't the only explanations we need or find useful; at the same time, their incompleteness and issues of complexity prevent such things pragmatically.

The point is though that such simulations as alluded in the first quote above should be possible in principle if we had the computational power, and able to reproduce all possible events of reality above the fidelity of its description. If all biological processes are composed of things like particles moving in space then this should be plausible. I don't see why not. We may need better explanations, but that doesn't preclude the fact that in principle the lower resolution descriptions are undergirded by the higher resolution description.

Yours becomes a really odd position when physics can’t even settle on an agreement of how a classical realm emerges from a quantum one. — apokrisis

Under my preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics, the emergence of the classical from quantum is extremely straightforward and therr are no fundamental issues here

The systems view of causality is that nature is all about global constraints shaping up the local degrees of freedom — apokrisis

Like which constraints?

Atoms emerge due to the constraints of top-down topological order being imposed on quantum possibility. — apokrisis

source?

You can only assure me you could reconstruct the world as some kind of simulation of its shaped material parts. Some set of atoms arranged in space and moving “because” of Newtonian laws. — apokrisis

But in principle, why wouldn't that be enough to demonstrate my point? The only thing I am saying is that everything else you can possibly explain or describe in principle can be instantiated in that description at the lowest level, until you can find an even lower level.

The fact that it doesn't provide comprehensible explanations of your concepts in special sciences or everyday life is irrelevant if reality is indifferent to your ability to comprehend it.

As a reductionist, you can’t in fact reduce at all. You can only enumerate parts. You can’t speak to the causality of the whole. The only compaction of information you can offer is a mechanics of atoms. The offer to simulate is given in lieu of what is meant by a causal account. — apokrisis

I am asking you to ground your account in its causal principles. — apokrisis

You mean reality resolves into its fundamental atomistic detail at the level of the Planckscale? Of the quantum foam? Of quantum gravity?

Yeah. How is that project going exactly? — apokrisis

Again, you confuse my point. My point has nothing to do with explanations that we might find attractive or necessary as observers.

Its about the idea that in principle all of the possible information about reality is only attainable if it is maximally resolved, if it isn't coarse-grained, if details are not ignored.

If a description misses out details that one knows to exist by utilizing higher resolutions of observation, how can that description be considered more fundamental to reality?

I want to go back on the idea I think I have been alluding that this grounding issue has something to do with ontology in a way which is contrasted to or independent of explanation. Because, thinking about it, I don't think it is.

I think what I am talking about is just some very general idea of decomposition when it comes to all our empirical observations about reality. We observe reality at different scales where the windows of space and time are expanded or contracted, details fine-grained or coarse-grained. We can divide up and model the reality constructed from observations with various boundaries plausibly, and perhaps not in mutually exclusive ways. Following that, notions of causality are welded to particular descriptions or models. Insofar as there is a plurality of possible descriptions there is no downward, upward or horizontal causation between frameworks; after all, they are all engaging with the same reality, just under different purviews from observers.

My position becomes weaker then when I think about what it means for one scale to depend on the other in a way which is inherently asymmetrical. In my mind, implying such a relationship suggests that different scales are independently manipulable in a way that one can test a direction of causality like you might in statistical modelling. Clearly we cannot do this because they are just different views on the same reality.

Rather, maybe the importance is in the coarse-graining of our observations and conceptualizations of reality - simply, when we zoom-out we lose information about reality. There is redundancy if you allow different levels of zooming out / in simultaneously. But the more you zoom-out, the more information is lost regarding a mapping to some mind-independent reality.

Maybe the degree to which information is lost is what I mean about fundamentality here.

As I have said multiple times, many explanatory frameworks are important. — Apustimelogist

OK. A pragmatist would have to agree. A pragmatist – for want of something better – would wind itself back all the way to raw instrumentalism.

But perhaps the surprise is that there is a totalising metaphysical discourse that arises from all our many models. Perhaps this is why some of us get excited about semiotics and systems science.

If you have no larger interests, fine. I just say that folk like Peirce – who established pragmatism as an epistemology – continued on to show how semiosis could be matchingly totalising as an ontology.

The point is though that such simulations as alluded in the first quote above should be possible in principle if we had the computational power, and able to reproduce all possible events of reality above the fidelity of its description. If all biological processes are composed of things like particles moving in space then this should be plausible. I don't see why not. — Apustimelogist

You keep saying you don't see there is a problem. But the sciences of life and mind exist because physics can't even model physics with a computational notion of laws and initial conditions, let alone jump the divide once semiosis enters the chat.

Have you read Schrodinger's classic What is Life? He understood the issue and so was already able to guess that organisms embody not just their rate dependent dynamics – all the stuff you want to simulate – but also their rate independent information. He said there must be a negentropic memory structure – an aperiodic solid – to encode the constraints on the entropic flows of organic chemistry.

But sure. You don't care. The rate independent dynamics is the whole of the story according to your preferred metaphysics. Anything beyond that is just another model at a different level you protest in epistemic plurality as you fall back on that familiar reductionist ontology that all systems are essentially a collection of atoms in a void.

Its about the idea that in principle all of the possible information about reality is only attainable if it is maximally resolved, if it isn't coarse-grained, if details are not ignored. — Apustimelogist

And how does that pan out given Heisenberg uncertainty?

You keep saying you don't see there is a problem. But the sciences of life and mind exist because physics can't even model physics with a computational notion of laws and initial conditions, let alone jump the divide once semiosis enters the chat. — apokrisis

Because what current physics can or can't model has nothing to do with my point, otherwise I wouldn't be defending it with a simulation that can't be built. At the same time, I'm not entirely sure how far biology has actually got with actual successful models of these things.

Have you read Schrodinger's classic What is Life? — apokrisis

Are you aware I advocated the free energy principle and active inference a few posts ago?

But sure. You don't care. The rate independent dynamics is the whole of the story according to your preferred metaphysics. Anything beyond that is just another model at a different level you protest in epistemic plurality as you fall back on that familiar reductionist ontology that all systems are essentially a collection of atoms in a void. — apokrisis

Its all models from physics upwards to anything else. No part of science is any less of just a model than any other.

The point is that any kind of observation or perhaps description about the smallest scales of reality will have more information about reality than all the scales upwards simply by the fact that descriptions on higher scales necessarily coarse-grain over details, while at the same time all the observations on higher scales are effectively redundant in terms of how they would correspond to a mind-independent reality. Doesn't matter what the descriptions are, which is why in previous posts I tried to make an effort to not mix up physics and smallest scales of existence. If you were to take a correspondence view of truth, then obviously the smallest scales would carry the most information about distinctions one could make about the mind-independent reality beyond one's senses. Because if higher scale descriptions are coarse-grained over, they lose information about correspondences.

And how does that pan out given Heisenberg uncertainty? — apokrisis

Heisenberg uncertainty principle is referring to constraints on probability distributions regarding the behavior of statistical systems. Uncertainty relations like this are generically derivable for all stochastic systems including classical ones like Brownian motion. Purely incidentally (I am not attributing the discovery of this fact to him), Karl Friston actually derives it in his free energy principle papers A free energy principle for a particular physics and parcels and particles as a generic property of the non-equilibrium steady state when discounting solenoidal flow, and it is also responsible for non-quantum energy-temperature uncertainty relations in thermodynamics.

Are you aware I advocated the free energy principle and active inference a few posts ago? — Apustimelogist

Yeah. But the brain isn’t literally minimising free energy is it? It is minimising information surprisal.

So Friston is talking about the modelling relation just like the biologists. An epistemic cut has to be involved. An observer has to be inserted into the physics as the rate independent information creating the non-holonomic constraints on the rate dependent dynamics or environmental entropy.

Something unphysical is going on even if it must also have its physical basis. And whether you fine grain or coarse grain the physics ain’t going to make no difference.

On the other hand, toss a Bayesian inference engine into the mix - armed with the need to repair and reproduce itself on the basis of an informational relation with the world - and then you will see something novel start to happen.

…any kind of observation or perhaps description about the smallest scales of reality will have more information about reality than all the scales upwards simply by the fact that descriptions on higher scales necessarily coarse-grain over details, while at the same time all the observations on higher scales are effectively redundant in terms of how they would correspond to a mind-independent reality. Doesn't matter what the descriptions are, which is why in previous posts I tried to make an effort to not mix up physics and smallest scales of existence. If you were to take a correspondence view of truth, then obviously the smallest scales would carry the most information about distinctions one could make about the mind-independent reality beyond one's senses. Because if higher scale descriptions are coarse-grained over, they lose information about correspondences — Apustimelogist

Let’s look at an example where this dependence of a higher on a lower scale of explanation falls apart. Newtonian analysis of colliding billiard balls or falling dominoes assigns fixed , universal qualitative causal properties to physical bodies, measured in relation to fixed temporal and spatial girds external to these bodies. Because these qualitative properties are assumed to be fixed, if we know the initial conditions completely , we can simply run off the future behavior of the interacting billiard balls or dominoes on a computer programmed with the right correlations between qualitative attributes and numeric relations.

Now let’s take a non-linear model of a particular sort, an account which begins from the assumption that no attributes of a physical object pre-exist its actual interactions with other objects, and that each actual interaction subtly changes the qualitative properties of the objects involved. Karen Barad is a physicist who uses this approach to interpret the results of the double slit experiment in quantum field physics. Put differently, when a cause produces an effect, the object being affected mutually affects its cause such as to modify the qualitative nature of that cause,

When we compare this model with the Newtonian one, it reveals to us that the latter description produces its universal, fixed results by ignoring and flattening the subtle quantitative changes in the nature of the phenomena (the ‘bodies’ and their temporal-spatial frame) that take place through their interactive reciprocal affecting. Such idealizing distortions don’t present a big problem with respect to the needs of the lower sciences. Conceptualizing the world in abstractive , generalizing and flattening terms is what makes possible a field like physics or chemistry, and the useful technologies which emerge from them. But what is useful when we want to build an iphone is profoundly less useful when we are trying to understand human behavior or the nature of living systems. The simplifying, universalizing of abstractions of physics obscure all that is most relevant and meaningful about how we understand each other (the fact that they also obscure much about the physical world doesn’t keep our planes from staying up in the air).

That isnt a source of evidence concerning the views of most everyone informed in the life sciences, its a source of evidence concerning the views of a particular community of scholars who integrate phenomenological insights with pragmatism, biology and embodied , enactive cognitive science. They would lose the popularity contest, but It should be added that the kind of evidence that matters to them doesn’t concern whether today’s physics is correct or incorrect in some objective sense, but how its practices and results can be viewed under a different light, according to a model which doesnt invalidate it but leads to alternative ways of relating the physics, the biological and the cultural. — Joshs

I'm still curious about this. It sounds to me like you are describing a priesthood (of which you are a part?) which you think should be listened to as authoritative on all matters related to human minds.

Can you say how I am getting something significantly wrong there?

Yeah. But the brain isn’t literally minimising free energy is it? It is minimising information surprisal. — apokrisis

Friston appeals to more or less exactly the same thing Schrodinger is talking about in his original motivations for the free energy principle.

So Friston is talking about the modelling relation just like the biologists. An epistemic cut has to be involved — apokrisis

Well this role is taken on by Markov blankets but is much more general than what is implied by Patee. It isn't special in any way, and markov blankets are nested within markov blankets ubiquitously. "Observers" then just reflect the slowly evolving regularities of their components on smaller scales.

Something unphysical is going on even if it must also have its physical basis. And whether you fine grain or coarse grain the physics ain’t going to make no difference. — apokrisis

"Unphysical" just seems like a misleading word imo when you are just talking about the utility of high level explanations that trace over and present what we observe in a nice, useful way.

And the higher level explanations are coarse-graining over physics if they supervene on it, e.g. the self-regulatory dynamics of homeostasis can plausibly be re-described or re-modelled in terms of the behavior of particles under the laws of physics.

Imo, the fact of the matter is that there is only one reality. Nothing about observation or coarse-graining due to observation changes that, but we can only maximize information about reality by being able to make distinctions at the smallest possible scales.

On the other hand, toss a Bayesian inference engine into the mix - armed with the need to repair and reproduce itself — apokrisis

I believe that in the free energy perspective, the describing of things in terms of the former effectively follows from the latter, tautologically.

"Unphysical" just seems like a misleading word imo when you are just talking about the utility of high level explanations that trace over and present what we observe in a nice, useful way. — Apustimelogist

:up:

"Epistemically pragmatic metaphors" I like to say.

I'm still curious about this. It sounds to me like you are describing a priesthood (of which you are a part?) which you think should be listened to as authoritative on all matters related to human minds.

Can you say how I am getting something significantly wrong there — wonderer1

You likely wouldn’t refer to the scientists whose work leads to replicated, accepted results according to the consensus of a worldwide scientific community as a ‘priesthood’. I’m assuming the reason is because you are making a distinction between ideas which must be accepted on faith and those that have been validated through accepted scientific method.

Let me put it this way. I believe that what the testing aspect of scientific practice does is conventionalize and define precisely a set of ideas so that they can be shared among a larger community. Scientific practice is not able to render a paradigmatic set of ideas true or false, what it validates or invalidates is particular aspects within an already established paradigmatic framework that it operates under. The creative, world-changing work of science has to do with its movement from one paradigm to another, not its validating or invalidating facts within a given paradigm. This movement is more revolutionary than evolutionary, and the genesis of paradigms relies on faith , not empirical test.

A new paradigm is not ‘more true’ than one it replaces. This is not to say that there are not good reasons to prefer one paradigm over another. To say one has faith in a new scientific paradigm is to see it as aesthetically more pleasing than the alternatives , as organizing the world in terms of more intimate and harmonious patterns than its rivals. I endorse the work of the researchers I mentioned not because their ideas are empirically more ‘true’ than their rivals, but because they introduce a new way of organizing experience that I see as less arbitrary than the paradigmatic framework employed by the current consensus. Their work will only seem authoritative to you if you perform the gestalt shift they are attempting to get you to do and you see for yourself what they see. Their world either pops into focus for you or it doesn’t , like those magic eye hidden 3-d images. No amount of vetting by empirical test will make this happen. You have to do the work yourself to make it authoritative for you. You are your own priesthood when it comes to paradigms, worldviews, metaphysical groundings.

Well this role is taken on by Markov blankets but is much more general than what is implied by Patee. — Apustimelogist

You are just talking past the distinction between information and dynamics. That mechanics can impose network behaviours is relevant. But that is what emerges from information being used to organise dynamics. Neurons form Hebbian networks. That is functional. But also only possible because cells with dendrites and axons are physical structures that genes can encode.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle is referring to constraints on probability distributions regarding the behavior of statistical systems — Apustimelogist

You again talk past the point. Fine graining in the real world means not just cutting smaller and smaller in spatiotemporal scale but going hotter and hotter in energy scale. Whatever seemed to exist in the form of topological order at your coarse grain scale just got melted as you zoomed in.

I want to emphasize that I think all of the descriptions are "just models" or at least, none are any less so than others; but, they are all being applied to the same reality and thats why I thought the distinction "physical" and "unphysical" seemed misleading. Sure I guess you were probably meaning literally physics but I always use the word in a much more general sense that may even be closer just to the idea of naturalism.

I don't think this is example is actually apt to what you said it was going to demonstrate in the first sentence. You are more or less comparing quantum mechanics under a specific interpretation with Newtonian mechanics; but quantum mechanics is not going to satisfy the requirements of @apokrisis for explaining higher level things like complex biology any more than Newtonian mechanics; so this demonstration doesn't really say anything about the relationship between different scales or levels.

On top of that I could also say that what you sare saying is very clearly interpretation dependent and so I don't see any reason why I shouldn't just reject Barad's ideas (Maybe you have a link to them? The quick search I did earlier didn't give me anything immediate) given that I advocate a completely different interpretation. At the same time, some would argue that you don't need to conceptualize quantum mechanics as non-linear since on face-value it is linear and deterministic in terms of Schrodinger equation.

You are just talking past the distinction between information and dynamics. — apokrisis

Not sure what you mean here but I think from the free energy perspective, information can be more or less equated with dynamics. In fact, some recent free energy papers have started using the phrase "Bayesian mechanics". Central to this is the fact that free energy minimization can be generalized to any kind of random dynamical system as first seen in the A free energy principle for a particular physics paper where Friston also goes through quantum, statistical and classical mechanics through this perspective. Therefore, any physical system can be interpreted as encoding information from beyond the Markov blanket. Markov blankets can be recursively nested; for instances - regarding the more interesting biological cases - in terms of genes translation and regulation, cell boundaries, neuronal axons and synapses, long-range connections between brain-regions, the human body, social groups, eco-systems, societies. They all come under the same generic informational surprisal minimization framework in terms of the dynamics of these systems.

The genetalization of free energy minimization to anything has its precursor in the following paper / result in which the fokker-planck equation - which can generically describe time-evolutions of probability density functions - can be interpreted in terms of variational free energy minimization:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=17970774975628711245&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

You again talk past the point. Fine graining in the real world means not just cutting smaller and smaller in spatiotemporal scale but going hotter and hotter in energy scale. Whatever seemed to exist in the form of topological order at your coarse grain scale just got melted as you zoomed in. — apokrisis

I don't really know what you mean or what exactly is in conflict here.

From my perspective on quantum, subatomic particles have definite positions all the time (and when you zoom in), they just have random motion (the randomness less apparent as you coarse-grain). Heisenberg uncertainty is a property of the statistical distributiond regarding those particles. From my perspective, no point was talked past here.

I want to emphasize that I think all of the descriptions are "just models" or at least, none are any less so than others; but, they are all being applied to the same reality — Apustimelogist

Sure. :up:

And I was talking not about particular models but about the model of modelling relationships in general. That is what Friston, Pattee, and anyone concerned about epistemology would have an interest in. What can it mean for physics to also contain a point of view?

Also you were earlier posting your beliefs about this. Which is what I have been challenging by arguing that modelling is generic to life and mind. The point you were making here is covered by reality modelling being a nested hierarchy spanning four levels of semiotic encoding in modern humans. Genes, neurons, words and numbers. A hierarchy of increasing modelling abstraction. But all with the same epistemic structure. All with the same ontological grounding in dissipative structure theory.

Models, and any word meanings for that matter, are nothing above the cause and effect mediated by people's implicit neuronal processes that drive the generation of future experiences in the context of the past. The equations in our theories written down on paper and the words we physically say cannot actually do anything independently of the minds that generated them and do things with them; neither is there necessarily a determinate way of expressing models and theories which is not contextualized by what is deemed acceptable by people in the context of their cognitive abilities and neuronal architectures. Therefore, in this kind of view, minds and cognition are only as deep as our experiences and the momentary unfolding of their dynamics.

The point you were making here is covered by reality modelling being a nested hierarchy spanning four levels of semiotic encoding in modern humans. — apokrisis

Well, the point I was making in that passage was to deflate representation, meaning and encoding purely in terms of dynamics.

Not sure what you mean here but I think from the free energy perspective, information can be more or less equated with dynamics. In fact, some recent free energy papers have started using the phrase "Bayesian mechanics". Central to this is the fact that free energy minimization can be generalized to any kind of random dynamical system as first seen in the A free energy principle for a particular physics paper where Friston also goes through quantum, statistical and classical mechanics through this perspective. — Apustimelogist

You have jumped to a conclusion. All this arises out of the 1990s dilemma in neuroscience about what we could mean to talk about a “neural code” to parallel the genetic code that revolutionised and demystified biology.

The problem was that there were two general camps. The computationalists and the dynamicists. The computationalist kind of made sense as they became neural networkers. But then the brain is also a biological organ and not an information machine. So that pointed towards the dynamicists like Scott Kelso and Walter Freeman. The code would be some kind of holistic entropy minimisation principle.

As I said, Friston was making the most sense of anyone I talked to. He was on his way to coarse graining the heck out the issue so that he could arrive at his Bayesian mechanics. Extract the essence of generative neural network models and marry them to the thermodynamical reality that a biological organism is intending to regulate.

I went off instead to see how theoretical biologists were handling all this at the level the genetic code. Friston aims to generalise his Bayesian mechanics so it can capture this level of semiosis as well.

So this is a huge research project in the life sciences. Cracking the code in a way that can then connect information and entropy as they apply to the description of an organismic state of being.

Your comments simply brush that major project aside. More Markov blankets please.

From my perspective on quantum, subatomic particles have definite positions all the time (and when you zoom in), they just have random motion (the randomness less apparent as you coarse-grain). Heisenberg uncertainty is a property of the statistical distributiond regarding those particles. From my perspective, no point was talked past here. — Apustimelogist

You believe things that other folk don’t believe in. Positional certainty may be matched by momentum uncertainty. However the reverse also applies.

So either you are basing your metaphysics on a self-contradiction when it comes to your notion of zooming in, or you have to turn that bug into the feature and agree it means that reality is scalefree so far as the zooming across scale goes. It is a story of fractal or log/log growth.

What you see going larger or smaller is the same fundamental physics, just boosted in terms of your reference frame. The Big Bang cools because it expands, and expands because it can cool. Whatever scale you then inspect it on, you find the same thing. A doubling of the volume and a halving of the density.

If the Planckscale defines one limit in terms of a maximum heat and a minimum distance, then the Heat Death is its inverse as a minimum heat because of a maximised distance.

So the HUP enshrines this duality as a unit 1 start point. And decoherence speaks to the scalefree fractal symmetry of a cosmos that doubles and halves its way to eternity. By the end of effective time, the whole deal will be inverted to become the coldest and largest void possible under quantum law. The blackbody de Sitter solution of a universe now merely the bath of radiation emitted by its own event horizon.

Your position relies on classical views about reality that have been debunked. Although of course I accept that treating the Cosmos as a Newtonian clockwork is perfectly acceptable on pragmatic grounds when one only wants to model processes in a rather narrow middle ground range of momentum and position values. All the other complications can be allowed to drop out of the picture for epistemic simplicity.