1. Deny the existence of mind-independent objects and/or

2. We cannot grasp the features of external objects which happen to be mind-independent and/or

3. We cannot justify our knowledge of mind-independent objects — Sirius

Imo, I want to remove 1. because I don't see how you can do this in a way which [doesn't] either suggests you hold a view like idealism or is just something that has been expressed by 2.

Regarding 2.? I think the problem is that realists and anti-realists will often assent to the same "facts" about reality or at least acknowledge them. The issue is that they have different notions of what it means to "grasp" which in a way is kind of subjective. I feel like realists may actually agree with an anti-realists analysis of how science works but they just consider this enough to "grasp". Then again, when asked what "grasp" means or related terms like "ontology you just get into dead ends imo that compromise whether "real" has any kind of useful, distinctive meaning beyond use in contexts which are just that... context-dependent, dependent on one's personal use of language and perception and envisioning. Ofcourse, the Davidsonian/Banno-ian does not consider this a barrier to realism as long as you can seemingly, coherently say things are 'true' or 'false'. I have sympathy for this because I have no problem with people saying things are 'true' or 'false' or making similar assertions, including myself. I just don't think such things have a determinate, unambiguous meaning when you look at it in higher order terms. Its not clear what people mean when they say things are 'true' or 'false' or whatever in a way which is[n't] context-dependent or relies on prior assumptions or relies on other people just agreeing or understanding you, which doesn't necessarily imply anything else about reality imo, [at least not in a metaphysically fundamental sense, albeit perhaps still in the sense that you can agree where Paris is and behave coherently in a physical world because of that. If you want to be extremely blunt and coarse and commonsensical you might then say that we agree that Paris has an objective physical existence].

Regarding 3. ? Similarly, I have no idea what justify means and I don't think anyone can give me a good version of that which anymore overcomes the drawbacks of my analysis in my preceding paragraph. Similarly to before, realists and anti-realists all agree on things like problems of induction and that people often are wrong.

I think realists then rely on the idea that someday we may come across unique "correct" descriptions of reality. But I don't see how a realist can overcome the fact that pluralist descriptions are ubiquitious. It then comes down to whether you think empirical adequacy can be identified with truth. Then again, what 'truth' means rears its head again. Our use of 'truth' is nothing over its use like a 'tool' in how biological organisms use words, communicate, behave. Exactly the same can be said for all facets of theories, ontologies, sciences, folk knowledge.

The whole thing is under-self-specified like some strange loop. [Easy example of this when I make a statement about what truth is... I am clearly acting within the paradigm to making a statement about the paradigm, which risks contradiction given I am trying to deflate 'something is the case' but using it at the same time. But I don't see any conflict since I am acknowledging that when I say these statements, they are about 'use'... but I did it again! Smells like Munchausen trilemma! - correction and to clarify, the Munchausen trilemma reference maybe isn't the best one. I think the strange loop analogy better describes what I meant there maybe. But there is something trilemma-ish about it. The fact that I end up using the same 'something is the case' just clarifies that it really is something one just uses almost automatically if anything, without explicit foundations. And this was always the case! So by clarifying the deflation is not to change something about the way one is using words]

Edited: additions in [ ]

Sure, it’s a path that involves struggle, but it’s a different kind of struggle- one that cuts through the noise instead of adding to it. — schopenhauer1

Why would that struggle be anymore preferable? If you are not an insular person and are also adept at social situations and dealing with stress then this may be the lesser option.

and in doing so, they find a quieter, more enduring form of satisfaction. — schopenhauer1

Yes, and its likely there is something in that life that attracted and continues to pull them in because they are compatible with it. I'm sure some people find it is not for them or change their minds.

At the same time, are all of these institutions really living up to the ideals they purport? Are they engaging in a different kind of withdrawal?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-63792923

You might not see on the surface that withdrawing leads to greater happiness.. You become content with yourself and you will see the tremendous amounts of strife in interactions — schopenhauer1

But why should I believe this dogmatism that withdrawal would be any better? What is this based on? Why should it be so general to every person on the planet. Just seems like your intuition that oversimplifies human experience. You don't think many people would absolutely struggle with this kind of existence? Who's to say that this struggle is any less than the alternative for those people? I don't tend to believe there is some natural idyllic state of human existence and I am hesitant to say people naturally can just block out the kind of desires people have and then withdraw anymore than you can pretend you don't feel pain. Sure, some people may naturally like that kind of existence. I am not convinced it is the same for everyone. Like in virtually every single dimensoon of human existence you can get a whole bunch of people to try something but probably a large amount will also be simply unable to do it or not like doing it. Are monks not a selected group of people? You seem to be railing against one kind of dogmatic, perhaps unsubstantiated prescription of how people shpuld live and simply offering another one.

You don't think monks do what they do because they want to do it and think it is beneficial to them? Differences that most people don't need convincing about things they are already inclined to like doing or at least want to do. Its obviously very clear that you think withdrawal is the right thing to do. I don't see anything in your post that is convincing from my perspective. Sure, some people may want to do that or like doing that or find it benefits them and thats fair and fine but my issue is with the prescription here. I just don't see any fantastically backed up or convincing grounds for saying this is some general thing people ought to do.


Don't know what this means.

I just don't see why I should do it if I don't think its going to benefit me at all.

Sounds very tiresome to me. I would consider it if there was some good evidence that this would make life much better.

Well this is not really the context of what I was talking about and I dont agree with his sentiment anyway.

Right. Like the standard model of particle physics itself. Something which physicalism tends to overlook. — Wayfarer

Not sure what you mean by this.

I really meant in a much more trivial way that doesn't threaten physicalism tbh. The fact that some constructs in science don't represent real physical objects doesn't imply anything about physicalism vs. alternatives.

That wasn’t the point at issue — Wayfarer

It was because you were saying quantum theory undermines objectivity, to which I say - not necessarily.

‘name one thing that is outside space and time’ that the wavefunction fits that description, and yet is also at the heart of the success of modern physics. — Wayfarer

But this can be in the trivial sense of the wavefunction being a predictive construct without explicit physical instantiation. There are many other constructs in physics and science that fit that description.

It's supported by an argument based on the double-slit experiment. That argument is that the interference exhibits the same wave-like pattern even if photons are fired one at a time. — Wayfarer

Nothing about that inherently suggests anything about subjectivity. There are quantum interpretations with a mathematical basis from which you can build models showing particles going through slits and forming interference patterns one at a time in an objective way, even if the wavefunction may not be real in these interpretations.

That Ψ is not inside space-time. — Wayfarer

Well this is interpretation dependent. It isn't a fact that quantum mechanics formally, or otherwise, entails inherent subjectiveor non-objective universe. There are interpretations where the wave function is not a real object but the world is still perfectly objective in the sense of pre-quantum classical kinds of physics.

↪Apustimelogist Check out The Timeless Wave.

"I suggest that the interference pattern is not caused by a physical wave — because, as we shall see, no conventional physical wave can account for the actual observations. So what the “wave” is, is one of the greatest conundrums posed by quantum physics, and the philosophical implications are profound. Let’s explore them." — Wayfarer

Not sure what you are trying to convey here.

That is where quantum physics undermines the intuitive sense of the objectivity of the external world. I'm not denying that there are objective facts - that would be out-and-out relativism - but that objectivity can ever be complete. — Wayfarer

There are quantum interpretations which are entirly objective.

Alas, such interpretations don't afford sell-able book titles as the ones you suggest.

The question is whether "ridding ourselves of physicalism" has any actual meaningful consequences for physicalists. I think what gives physicalists meaning and contrasts them to others like idealists is not just the weight they put onto scientific rigor and perhaps consensus, but the story that science seems to tell you about the centrality of physics compared to other ontologies. Maybe not always in a practical or epistemic sense but it seems hard to contradict the picture that things kind of all sit on top of physics which describes reality at the finest granularity and prescribes the most general descriptions of how our sensory world changes, when we strip away all the redundant complexity. I think many physicalists would then contrast themselves with idealists and others in the sense that idealists don't believe in this kind of centrality, which usually means subscribing to or being open to scientifically unsubstantiated ideas like the afterlife or Kastruppian dissociative alters or psycho-physical laws. I think a lot of these metaphysical debates like physicalism vs idealism can be boiled down to whether you entertain certain hypotheses about nature. Other than that, any underlying fundamental metaphysical notions seem for all practical purposes indistinguishable, unfalsifiable, uninstantiable. Similarly, the idea of a "scientific method" comes up with similar problems. So what are you left with but contending these hypotheses about the afterlife or alters or psycho-physical laws. Anything else isn't substantially different from physical metaphysics which itself is vague and unfalsifiable and insubstantial.

We haven't chosen this arbitrarily though. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, but in general things are not mutually exclusive like that in our language use. The same physical scenarios can have overlapping descriptions which is not mutually exclusive.

Well, I suppose ones attitude towards reductionism and smallism will probably guide the extent to which one thinks quantum foundations is particularly relevant here. On the one hand, there seems to be increasing consensus around the idea that there is no hard dividing line between "quantum and classical worlds." On the other, there is strong consensus in physics that the same living cat cannot be simultaneously in College Park and strolling the the Champs-Élysées.

If we are unsure that being in Rome, New York differs from Rome, Italy, I think we have left empiricism and the natural sciences behind a long time ago.
40m — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think it matters whether it is actually the case or not; what matters is whether someone cpuld plausibly hold this kind of conception of the world in a cohetent way.

Jha et al. argue that various presuppositions such as the principle of mass conservation and the physical integrity of individual objects (this has to be assumed in order to get “whole and unbroken”) — J

Disagree, because the question is clearly independent of the exact physical content. You can draw arbitrary boundaries on the world and apply this question.

Q3: Why must the LNC hold (under the usual constraints) as a principle of thought?
Q4: Why can’t my cat be on my lap and in Paris at the same time? (constraint: I live in Maryland) — J

Again, I think these rules are so abstract that they do not depend on the physical content. The fact your cat can't be simultaneously be in Maryland and Paris is because you have chosen to define "Maryland" and "Paris" in ways that are mutually exclusive and so one is not the other. But there is no need to do this for any physical things, whether in the trivial senses we talk about all the time or in more fundamental ways; for instance, some quantum interpretations will ascribe an ontological realism to the idea that a thing can be in two places at once in the sense suggested by traditional conceptions of quantum superposition.

Don't know what you mean

Continentals
Scholastics
Ancient Greeks
Postmodernists

So do you say that relationship is hierarchical up to down or down to up or just mutual. — Ludwig V

Mutual in the sense of just reflecting how we choose to apply labels and where those labels end.

we need to say that the explanation in physics is an analysis of the rainbow, not a cause. — Ludwig V

Yes, I would say so; but I would say what we would call a genuine cause is also just an analysis in the same way, so no distinction here imo.

Does our picture of pictures/maps at large and small scales - and there's nothing wrong with it - or a piece of furniture with parts that constitute the whole, make sense of the rainbow? I think they are all different from each other. That's all I'm saying. — Ludwig V

Not sure what you are saying here

Wow, this is a genuinely interesting position.

No, because you can have observations at multiple different scales and independently apply the abstract concept of design to each scale. It has nothing necessarily to do with the relationship between different scales in a way that is different from how the observations at different scales relate to each other.

The design is not a physical object; it is an abstract object - it belongs in a different category from the parts. — Ludwig V

True, though this could apply to any scale of description I think.

Yes, true; though they still have a correspondence to the same area of reality, which injects redundancy. By virtue of coarse-graining itself, the coarse picture also loses information about distinctions or events in reality, like blurring over the details in a photo.

So a map of a single grain of sand cannot signal distinctions between grains, and a map of the inside of a grain cannot signal the whole grain — Ludwig V

Well I don't want to take this example too seriously but surely these distinctions are more or less at the same scale or granularity? At the same time, the mapping of a whole grain is mapping to the same part of reality as mappings to different parts of the grain so there is a redundancy. The parts mapping is mapping to the same part only it makes more distinctions, more information. The coarser grain mapping ignores distinctions that exist.

What is what you are saying to do with? — Ludwig V

Simply that observations about reality naturally carry more information about it at the smallest scales when looked at through a kind of correspondence view of truth.

You really hate an example, don't you? Nothing but large-scale generalizations. So you miss the detail. — Ludwig V

What are you implying? I don't understand what you are saying here. My answer reflects the fact that I am saying something much more general than the status of specific contemporary theories in physics or chemistry.

But then you don't get the bigger (larger-scale) picture. Then you can't see the wood for the trees. You may know the wood is there, but that's only because you've looked at a larger scale picture. The larger-scale picture doesn't tells you about the wood, but not the trees. The smaller-scale picture tells you about the trees, but not the wood. — Ludwig V

Yes, I agree. But that has not much to do with what I am saying imo. Hence why I can agree with this and also uphold what I said. What I am saying isn't to do with the pragmatics of navigating one's picture of the universe. It is not really about strong reductions as in the wikipedia descriptions I gave.

You don't get information about the unobservable reality beyond the picture. It's unobservable in the picture. So it is observable, but only in a different picture. — Ludwig V

What I mean by information here is purely about distinctions one can signal that map to distinctions in reality. There doesn't have to be a fact of the matter about the meaning or content of the signal for the observer and the observer doesn't need to know anything else about the unobservable reality causing the signal. The only assumption is that in principle there is consistent mapping between some area of reality and a signal being made by the observer. Coarse-grained distinctions will obviously smooth over and blend finer-distinctions that would have only been possible with a more fine-grained observations - and they are both caused by the same areas of reality.

That seems to fit what you are saying pretty well. — Ludwig V

Not at all. I haven't been talking about prescribing explanations to get smaller.

I'm not sure whether you are saying that the analysis of water as H2O captures all the information about it. — Ludwig V

I'm just saying when you make observations at finer, smaller scale, you get more information.

What do you mean "more information"? — Ludwig V

In the sense of distinctions. When we make obaervations we are forming a map between our acts and the external world, distinguishing parts of reality. Finer-grained observations make distinctions that do not exist for coarse-grained observations even though they may be mapping to the same sets of events.

but wider scope. — Ludwig V

But this is a pragmatic issue that doesn't negate the idea that, in principle, it is always missing details in our mapping to reality.

A picture of something close up which is 5" x 7" or 100,000 pixels has the same amount of information whether it is a picture of a landscape or a picture of a molecule. — Ludwig V

Its not about information in the picture but information about the unobservable reality beyond. Neither is it about the picture as a.whole but simply the fact that any coarsed-grain observation of events in reality could be swapped for a finer-grained pne which reveals more distinctions or details whether you're talking about the cameras or the weather or bishops or whatever. The point has nothing to do with what information is "relevant" or useful for us to do science, which is why it has nothing to do with methodological reductionism.

And you!

How is that not reduction? All the information is given the smallest scale description. — Ludwig V

I think its a lot weaker than reduction: e.g. consider these descriptions from wikipedia.

"Ontological reductionism: a belief that the whole of reality consists of a minimal number of parts."

"Methodological reductionism: the scientific attempt to provide an explanation in terms of ever-smaller entities."

"Theory reductionism: the suggestion that a newer theory does not replace or absorb an older one, but reduces it to more basic terms. Theory reduction itself is divisible into three parts: translation, derivation, and explanation"

I don't think what I said resembles any of these. On the other hand, it seems almost tautologically the case that if you examine reality at the finest details, you will have more information about it in the sense of being able to make distinctions - specifically in the sense of correspondence ideas about truth.

I should also probably refer back to my post here:

- — Apustimelogist

I wonder if maybe you are applying the criteria for science to philosophy? — Ludwig V

No, I just think what was being talked about implied a scientific comparison based on things that are not disputed scientifically. Either way, I don't think Joshs's initial comment really engaged eith the nature of the discussions about different levels.

That's fair enough then! :up:

Specifically whether the assumption that all the different descriptive perspectives that are available to us dovetail neatly into a single hierarchy. — Ludwig V

What do you mean?

Suit yourself. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. She held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. — Joshs

Well I am just implying that her work isn't actual physics, its philosophy and what she is saying is not a description of reality with scientific consensus which is relevant because it means that introducing her into a comparison with newtoenian physics is more or less just postulation.

If that isn't reductionism, I'll eat my hat. It's the "higher scales are effectively redundant" that does it. — Ludwig V

I mean redundant more in the informational sense wherein it just means that these descriptions are already repeating information about reality (in a correspondence theory of truth sense) that is already in the smaller scale descriptions.

Ok. But what about uniformity/universality of physical laws?
Why, say, do electromagnetic interaction and gravitation seem to behave the same everywhere?
If there weren't any kind of 'top-down' constraints, how can one explain this universality? — boundless

I don't think of the fact that laws may behave the same everywhere as holism.

With regard to explanation, you could equally ask why should there not be universality without reason?

This objection is of course not a problem for dBB as far as predictions go but it would be certainly strange that when we measure velocities, the 'real' velocity is something else.

It seems that stochastic interpretations do not share this conceptual pecularity. Interesting. — boundless

The Bohmian formulation is very closely related to the stochastic one. Effectively The stochastic mechanics momentum / velocities are equivalent to the standard quantum ones. Bohmian mechanics includes very similar kinds of momentum /velocity to the stochastic ones abd then essentially adds extra deterministic particle trajectories on top of it. The way I personally see it, the main difference between Bohm and stochastic mechanics is that the latter eschews this last assumption of additional deterministic trajectories. Without that, the natural way to viee trajectories is stochastic and we see this directly in the path integral formulation of standard mechanics because the paths in this formulation that are used to calculate ptobabilities are the same as the stochastic mechanics particle trajectories. Because quantum mechanics is so bizarre though, it is always assumed these paths in the path integral formulation are not real but purely computational tools. Stochastic mechanics just takes them at face value.

I mean, clearly she is not a physicist and there is no mathematical model here. It's just speculative interpretation withiut the benefit of a formal model that demonstrates anything tangible.

but the model of causality it expresses is designed to apply equally to the micro and the macro level. — Joshs

I don't think the "model of causality" is as much at stake as the question of whether models at one scale can give satisfying explanations of higher levels. You can have complicated non-linear complex models of interacting particles. You can have complicated non-linear complex models of economics. It doesn't necessarily mean that the satisfying explanations for former can come from latter.

Ok, I think I can get what you are sayinh. However, to be fair, it seems to me even in this kind of 'bottom-up' model, conservation laws, symmetries seem like something that happens due to some kind of 'happy chance'. — boundless

Imo it would only be 'happy chance' if one of the equivalent descriptions could be the case while the other (e.g. conservation laws) failed, but clearly that isn't the case if one follows from the other formally.

but IMO the picture is simpler. — boundless

I don't think it is simpler imo; because, if these conservation behaviors are properties of individual interactions, and individual interactions can only propagate locally, then there is no reason for me to attribute this as a holistic property of the whole system. The principle applied to the system would be rendered redundant if it holds for subsystems, subsystems of subsystems... right down to local interactions. It would be explanatorily simpler to say that the conservation property holds for the whole system in virtue of the fact it holds at any interaction propagating in some local part of the system.

Ok, interesting. Just for curiosity, but in this interpretation do the 'real' momenta of particles coincide with the 'observed' ones? — boundless

Not sure exactly what you mean but stochastically behaving particles (whether classical or quantum) do not have well-defined velocity / momentum in general so in stochastic mechanics velocity fields are constructed using averages regarding particle motion.

You have jumped to a conclusion. — apokrisis

Which conclusion?

Friston aims to generalise his Bayesian mechanics so it can capture this level of semiosis as well. — apokrisis

What do you mean, specifically?

Your comments simply brush that major project aside. — apokrisis

Don't know what you mean, I am literally just reporting Friston's account to you. I actually don't know what your specific objection is in this passage you have written.

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

Well actually Bohmians believe in positional certainty also.

But most people are completely ignorant about the stochastic interpretation and the literature on it. Even in standard quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies to the probability distribution of particles in a way that can only be realized when you measure a system many many times. There is no empirical fact about quantum mechanics that contradicts the stochastic or statistical or Bohmian interpretation of Heisenberg uncertainty. Any confusion comes from thinking the wavefunction has to be the actual physical particle as opposed to possibly a construct that holds information about statistics.

Again, uncertainty relations are inherent in stochastic systems. They were first discovered for Brownian motion by Furth in 1933:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=218273391326247766&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

I have already mentioned a Friston source that shows it too for classical stochastic systems and there are many other sources I could give you too if you wanted. Classical stochastic systems describe things like a dust particle floating in a glass of water, behaving randomly. Yes, under certain conditions, uncertainty relations like Heisenberg's would show up in the statistical behavior of a system like this. This is a classical system you can observe with your own eyes and in fact, the Heisenberg uncertainty relations exist in quantum mechanics for the same reason as they do in the classical case - you can mathematically derive them from the non-differentiable (i.e. randomly behaving) nature of quantum paths as in path integral formulation, which have exactly the same fractal properties as the random motion of classical Brownian paths: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=9621050886572313269&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

Similarly, non-commutativity in path integral formulation is derived for the same reasons and this is explicitly states on the path integral wikiedia page.

The fact of the matter is that Heiseinberg uncertainty is perfectly compatible with the idea of definite particle positions and it must be so because classical stochastic systems have definite particle positions and they also have uncertainty relations. Furthermore, given how uncertainty principle can be derived from quantum mechanics for the exact same reason it can in classical stochastic systems, there is no barrier from that kind of formal angle of interpreting quantum Heisenberg uncertainty from the perspective of definite particle positions.

Quantum mechanics can be derived in its entirety from unremarkable assumptions concerning statistical systems where particles are always in definite positions or configurations. It is just not very well known at all though I am pretty sure I have already shown you papers. Even the strangest quantum phenomena such as Bell violating perfect spin correlations fall out of stochastic mechanics models: e.g.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=15973777865898642687&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2024&as_vis=1

It is just a mathematical fact that stochastic systems where particles are in definite configurations can reproduce all of the predictions of quantum mechanics.

Stochastic mechanics also can be applied to field theories: e.g.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.03188

And the nice thing about this paper is that you can watch some of the simulations on youtube (links in paper, youtube channel below):

https://youtube.com/@quantumbeables?si=hOVFbzHhEZAvManc

Given that stochastic formulations are empirically consistent with quantum mechanics in a formally demonstrable way, I cannot agree with your idea that this kind of "classical" view of reality has been debunked.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

In a sense, yes, they would describe the behavior of the interactions. But whereas the 'bottom-up' perspective says that conservations law are 'contingent consequences' of the behavior of interactions, the 'top-down' picture (i.e. interactions are more fundamental) says the reverse. — boundless

Not sure I agree. I've only started to think more deeply into this after a conversation I am having in another thread and it is beginning to dawn on me there are potentially a number of ways to view this kind of thing. Maybe too off point to go into those thoughts though; so, to skip to the point:

The kind of "behavior of interactions" I had in mind would be effectively equivalent to the conservation principles. Just alternative descriptions of the same thing though this I imagine depends on the nature of specific statements, formulations, descriptions. An example special case could be:

https://www.engineering.com/whats-the-similarities-between-these-principles-1-dalemberts-principle-2-law-of-conservation-of-energy/

It seems to me that whatever is conserved is always implied in the described behavior of the interactions. Obviously you might be able to apply these principles as a blanket description of various systems of different sizes and claim holism in virtue of the fact you could be talking about large spatially separated systems. Thinking about it then; for me, I would accept a holistic explanation if say, the forces and displacements in the above link were non-local. But if they are solely local or mediated locally, then I don't see the need for a holistic description. Sure I may not be able to directly explain why these descriptions apply, but if everything interacts only locally then I don't see the need for holistic descriptions. The blanket description for the system would not be distinct from compatible descriptions applied to all the sub-components of a system.

Obviously, you this may seem to not apply for quantum non-locality and so holism seems the case there. My reply again would be that quantum non-locality is not a real example of the exertion of forces over space and time, but a correlation whose origin is local.

I don't see how this isn't some kind of 'non-realism', thought. It seems to imply this rejection of 'unicity' — boundless

Based on the Stanford article, I would say the stochastic interpretation manages to fulfil unicity in the sense of: "a single point represents the exact state of a system at any given time" ehich applies to particles but not the wave-function.