You probably didn't read most of my posts in the thread fully, but uncertainty principles occur in lots of contexts. Every time you have a sequence of records over time there is a derived quantity which has an uncertainty principle associated with it. Anyway:

Just because there are current avenues for improvement or further research in a field doesn't make all the predictions of a field wrong. Quantum mechanics has been amazingly successful in producing semiconductors, radiocarbon dating techniques... If you've never read Isaac Asimov's 'The Relativity of Wrong' it's an excellent read:

The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. The young man then quoted with approval what Socrates had said on learning that the Delphic oracle had proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece. "If I am the wisest man," said Socrates, "it is because I alone know that I know nothing." the implication was that I was very foolish because I was under the impression I knew a great deal.

My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

It actually has given us a lot to roll with. Quantum advances have been partially responsible for Moore's Law of computational power growth along with PET scans, radiocarbon dating...

No, we have evidence over a very long period of time. We, roughly, have a paradigm in physics called quantum mechanics which has been around for just under 100 years. The contents of this theory allow predictions on particle behaviour which occur over long time scales, for example an explanation of the slow decay of carbon 14 based on the low probability of observing sufficiently energetic W bosons (which is why radiocarbon dating works) for beta decay. Theory can, and does, make predictions for times before and after the development of the theory. It would be a terrible theory if it couldn't.

I don't actually believe that it's necessary for them to be fixed. If you look at the start of the universe it's predicted that the four fundamental forces of nature join. Having a unification for gravity, the strong force, the weak force and the electromagnetic force is a wildly different reality from our usual gravity + strong + weak + eletromagnetic or gravity+strong+(electroweak) which is sometimes used.

If the laws of nature were not fixed I would be very interested in finding out how they change and whether it's predictable. I would love to see an experiment or theory which, say, found different values for the cosmological constant for different periods of the universe.

However, I think there is good evidence that nature behaves in a roughly constant way over large time scales.

Dogmatism isn't really a function of a person's beliefs, it's a function of HOW they believe them. I try to find evidence for and against my beliefs, this is why I decided to challenge you on this to see if there was any 'cause for concern' in some substructure of my beliefs. As a reward I got a few interesting thoughts about the non-constancy of nature's laws over long time scales, and a few 'arche-fossil 101' arguments to use against QM vitalists. I learned some stuff from talking to you. This is a very non-dogmatic viewpoint. You also probably assume that I dismissed Sheldrake immediately, I didn't - I did a bunch of reading a few years ago and found his ideas not cogent and not relevant, and evidence for these beliefs.

So, have your beliefs shifted at all? Have you learned anything? I don't think you have, since I don't think you spent time trying to understand the arguments I made OR why I disagreed with you in the first place. That's dogmatism, try to avoid it. I hope you did.

Can you give me some examples of how I have been dogmatic?

dogmatism, noun: the tendency to lay down principles as undeniably true, without consideration of evidence or the opinions of others.

I don't think I have displayed this at all. I even went some of the way to critiquing my position for you by presenting that step by step argument (which I also believed was invalid). Your responses to arguments/sub-arguments are generally one liners with, self admittedly, little to no logic in them; bold assertions.

I probably appear as someone who is part of the oppressive academic consensus to you, but you really know nothing about me. Or about my relationship with @apokrisis (which is largely non-existent, since I think it was a disagreement about long term frequency vs Bayesian probability interpretations 5 years ago).

This is a very convenient defence mechanism, as soon as someone presents a systematic and sustained challenge to your worldview you instantly label them as an out-group threat, rather than engage them in an argument. The latter strategy is really what you expect for a philosophy forum.

As an aside: Rupert Sheldrake's 'science' has been refuted at every turn. His most major contribution is the idea of resonance between morphogenetic fields. Rupert Sheldrake (to my knowledge) has never explained how morphic resonance can occur in real life. Instead linking it to proclivities and selection processes which have already been observed which have been shown not to need morphic resonance to work. The most damning evidence of its irrelevance is that you can't find references to Sheldrake's concept of resonance even within the parts of developmental biology that still entertained morphogenetic fields.

I think that post serves as an ad-absurdum for your position. You actually seem committed to the idea that the bone observed now is not the same bone as it was when the dinosaur died, 1 second after it died, 2 seconds ... (lots of dots) now. It might have some different properties due to ageing, but it still displays some permanence over time.

You also seem committed to the non-existence of dinosaurs prior to the advent of human consciousness. If there was no 'observation' without human consciousness there'd be no definite molecular properties, no chemistry... but, alas, we've already been through this.

Despite thinking your argument strategy is invalid, and providing a post showing as such, I'll play your game!

1) So you agree it's the same bone now and whenever the dinosaur was alive.
2) So it's made of the same stuff (up to some ageing, the interior of the bone is fine). (from 1)
3) So the stuff at time t and a different time t' is the same. (from 2)
4) Let t be now. Let t' be 200 million years ago.
5) So it's the same now and 200 million years ago. (from 3,4)
6) We observe a covalent bond in a molecule in the interior of the bone now.
7) That covalent bond was there at t'=200 million years ago. (from 5)
8) We observe a covalent bond that formed at least 200 million years ago (from 7)
9) The covalent bond behaves in the same way at t (now) as it did at t' (200 million years ago).(from 3,5,6)
10) We have observed that there is no change in the covalent bond in the molecule over 200 million years. (from 9)
11) We have observed that natures' operations haven't changed in any consistent way since t'=200 million years ago. (from 10)
12) We have observed evidence for the constancy of nature. (from 11)

For some more details on the unsoundness of your argument - the first premise is not true since there are records of these phenomena. The argument is also invalid since a theory can make statements about events which occurred before the inception of a theory and have those be accurate AND evinced. See red-shift and the radio-carbon dating as worked examples if this point is unclear to you.

I find it interesting that you responded solely to the trollish bait. Why isn't the observation of a millions of years old bone with a similar chemical make up and precisely the same physical/chemical mechanisms governing it NOT an observation of something that happened millions of years ago operating under the same physical laws?

Bones of dinosaurs predate humans. Bones of dinosaurs are chemically much the same as human bones. There, an observation of a phenomenon from millions of years ago showing that nature worked the same as it does now.

You can apply the same thing to redshift.

trolllmode: but you can't know there was 100 million years ago since there are no written records from that date, thus your entire post is meaningless.

You never use logic? :-O

The constancy of nature is a far weaker claim than nature being already described by an immutable set of equations. All that is required are consistent physical phenomena over long time scales. This is exactly what we have on Earth.

Let's take covalent bonding as an example. Whenever you have carbon based life, which is all life (except maybe sulphurous lifeforms at the bottom of the sea) on earth, the molecules and compounds inside it will mostly be covalent bond architectures with some ionic based compounds floating about in them (salts, iron in blood etc). We have good evidence that (almost) all life on Earth is carbon based and WAS carbon based. You can see this from the fossil record. Bones are bones are bones. Plants photosynthesise (chlorophyll compounds).

This is being used to demonstrate A) that there was a world prior to consciousness [fossil record] and B) that there is a theory (carbon based covalent bond architectures) which applies over these timescales.

The significance of A and B to your points is that A') the world doesn't depend on consciousness for its existence and that B') theories which have been evinced during the span of human history (which is all of them) can apply to events before the advent of (human) consciousness.

Aside: your favourite QM also applies seamlessly from 10^-30 secs into the universe's existence and will apply so long as things are sufficiently cool (no unification with gravity).

I have already addressed this argument. It boils down to the following structure:

1) There is no written record that X influences Y before time t.
2) Therefore there is no evidence that X influences Y.

Let's ignore the idea that written record != evidence. Or the validity of the argument. Because regardless this argument has a false premise when t=now for any of the phenomena we've discussed. But let's throw more words at this in the hope that some get through:

The point of understanding a phenomenon means that you understand it whenever it occurs. For example, there is much the same understanding for ionic bonds irrelevant of when the ionic bonds were formed. Red shifting is a theory evinced in human history whose correctness entails that there was a world before consciousness was there to perceive it. So is the theory of ionic bonds, also for nuclear fusion in stars producing the elements on earth, radio-carbon dating...

Let's take radio-carbon dating as another example. The amount of the unstable isotope of Carbon, Carbon 14, in something can be used to see how long ago the thing stopped exchanging Carbon with the atmosphere. The accuracy of this operation requires that radioactive decay operates from the date the entity stopped exchanging carbon to the present date. There is excellent evidence that this procedure is valid, and is well accepted as providing age estimates of the appropriate order of magnitude among the scientific community. The accuracy of radiocarbon dating implies that there was a world prior to consciousness and that the laws of radioactive decay have been constant in this time. This is also evidence that however nature operates has been the same.

More generally, the operation of the entities within these theories predates the theories, and this universality is part of these theories. They have more than sufficient evidence to warrant belief, so there is more than sufficient evidence to believe there is (was?) a world prior to our consciousness whose laws of physics are the same.

Evidence that there is a world before animal life which obeys the same laws of physics - red-shift. Evidence that consciousness is not necessary for a quantum system to attain constrained states - ionic bonding.

These are spelled out in my posts.

I forgot to address 'interpretations require consciousness'. This is in the context of whether consciousness is required for observation/measurement. You said 'observation in the widest sense', so this can include interpretations of observation /measurement which do not require consciousness. It is a moot point that communicating these ideas requires us both to be conscious human beings with a common language. Completely irrelevant to whether observation/measurement requires consciousness.

I have addressed everything you've posted in response to me. You have consistently ignored any evidence or arguments I have presented against your position. You even didn't engage when I made two linked examples to engage my arguments through (red shift and the age of the light it describes). This elusive behaviour is paired with your propensity to respond to small sub-phrases and offer single line refutations with little to no reasoning in them.

I am surprised you don't take your position seriously enough to address major flaws in it.

Your attempt to dismiss what I've said with generalised statements about your world view has not gone unnoticed, nor has your similar elusive, goal-post moving behaviour with other posters in the thread. This leads me to believe that you are playing a game to preserve your worldview after your arguments have taken a critique you don't know how to address.

I would be happy if you proved me wrong and we had a discussion about the behaviour of red-shift I said and what it implies for your position.

1) There are no written records of [the fact that X influences Y].
2) There are no written records of [the fact that X influences Y] before time t.

3)There is no evidence that X influences Y.

t must be after now in order for 2 to imply 3 in some way. t = now is however sufficient for there to be written records when discussing these issues. So your argument is invalid. Perhaps you would have already found this information contradicting your views if you were looking for articles that have already been written?

There is absolutely evidence that the laws of physics haven't changed since before animal life emerged. For one, the theory of red-shifts makes predictions about entities older than animal life. You can also find an example in every single compound in the world

Having the scope of observation include all possible interpretations of it includes interpretations which do not have consciousness as a prerequisite. Insofar as they include the necessity of consciousness for quantum systems taking determinate values, they are consistent with your position. Insofar as they don't, they are not. Ionic and covalent bonding for example is well within the quantum length scale (compounds can diffract) and both are prerequisites for presence of carbon based life. Both require quantitative shifts in wavefunctions and eventually a merger to the wavefunction of the compound. When the electrons are shared they are measured.

Quantum mechanics demonstrably was not known thousands of years ago. There is no evidence that consciousness is necessary for quantisation. Another confusion is that you seem to believe quantisation is generated by observation - it is not. Quantisation describes the propensity for many quantities on the quantum scale (angular momentum, photon emission energy, spin etc) to take values on a discrete rather than continuous spectrum. This occurs before any probability calculation can arise.

You are misinformed on basic properties of quantum systems despite wanting others to 'read up' on them to attain your level of knowledge. Let's try to constrain the discussion.

1) The formation of covalent and ionic bonds requires measurement. This occurs prior to the advent of our consciousness. Therefore our consciousness is not required for wavefunction collapse.

2) There is evidence for the laws of physics applying before the advent of consciousness. Red shift in light makes accurate statements about the ancient light coming to our planet. A simple calculation demonstrates this. The radius of the observable universe divided by the speed of light gives the oldest photons that 'come to our shores' so to speak an age of 46.5 billion years. Roughly 10 times the age of the Earth, nevermind the time elapsed since the advent of animal life.

The universe hasn't changed in terms of physical laws since animal life emerged. This means there are properties or processes that allow the fuzzy quantum soup to produce macroscopic phenomena without animal life. This would be impossible without the interaction of a quantum system with another system also inducing a measurement. This is understood as a map from a probability distribution to an observation from it. Nothing requires consciousness. If it required consciousness conscious life couldn't've arisen. Bizarre quantum vitalism is just as vulnerable to arche-fossils as any idealism.

Not that this tangential matter implies anything about the actuality of chance. Randomness in the territory rather than the map.

Whether reality is random or not doesn't have depend solely on the realism of the wavefunction or derived probabilities. There are plenty of examples of stochastic phenomena on usual Newtonian length scales. Even within Newtonian mechanics This is an example of an indeterminate Newtonian system (one with a free constant).** It is strange to say that predictions from physical laws imply reality is deterministic when there are also stochastic processes which provide excellent predictions (so reality is stochastic? If one is a valid argument so is the other). Also models of some phenomena are intrinsically random. I provided a large list of such things in my previous post in the thread.

Stochastic phenomena like regression to the mean are commonplace. It occurs in the relationship of child height to parent height - more generally for many quantitative traits. It also occurs in the performance of individuals in repeated tasks (like practicing something complicated).

When physicists see if an experiment is consistent with a theory, they also assume their data comes from a random process and see if the best fitting model is within error bounds of the (a?) theoretical solution.

edit: * indeterminate in this sense isn't the same as randomness.

I would like to say to start with that if probability's interpretation is a quantification of uncertainty, then randomness is trivially part of every day life. It is more interesting to ask whether there is a more fundamental sense of probability. Chance in the territory rather than the map.

Calculations in quantum physics are typically deriving or derived from probabilities of certain events [or their probability distributions]. The probabilities of events are related to a system's wavefunction. In my experience physicists believe that the fundamental objects of quantum mechanics - wavefunctions - are real. The probabilities calculated about quantum systems are not generally thought of as representations of our, that is sentient life perceiving events, lack of knowledge. They are instead thought of as the distinguishing properties of a quantum system. What is real are probability and wave functions, at the quantum level. So reality does have intrinsically random elements because of this.

The presence of quantum behaviour in a physical system depends on the size of its constituents. Molecular and compound level scales can still exhibit this behaviour. Whether there is a characteristic size below which quantum behaviour is relevant and above which it is irrelevant (quantum -> non quantum transitions being discrete), or whether quantum effects smoothly decay with respect to some length scale says nothing about whether reality is 'really probabalistic' or 'really deterministic'. It's usually possible, as done in this thread, that since such a transition occurs - we can claim that reality is deterministic 'really' since for most length scales they behave like some largely pre-theoretical folk-physics which usually comes with some intuition of cause and effect and repeatability of events yielding a (usually also undefined) notion of determinism. This largely unarticulated sense of determinism usually conflicts with the following observations:

If definition: intrinsic randomness is random behaviour in a system which cannot be removed through increased knowledge of the system: is permitted, it is actually the case that there are commonplace observable phenomena that arise from random processes in a natural way on usual human length scales (say from about 1 millimetre to the size of America). Usually to do with the aggregate properties of ensembles. Such as there being more small hospitals than large hospitals which on a given day have >60% of their children being born boys (law of large numbers), settlements having the highest per capita and smallest per capita rates of diseases are typically small (law of large numbers). Stock market prices are also random as they depend in a non-trivial way on the properties of ensembles and show many characteristic features of randomness. It's also true that Heisenberg-like uncertainty principles occur with any audio-signal or more generally a sequence of records over time - the uncertainty being an intrinsic property of signals and sequences in a similar fashion to the 'fuzziness' of quantum systems.

**edit: another macro scale example of random properties are gasses.
***edit: another macro scale example is small scale eye movements (jitter/microsaccades) obeying the properties of spatial white noise.

****edit:

The idea that with sufficient information all laws can be derived from quantum mechanics is also quite ridiculous, since such a theory would include limiting behaviour to precisely account for the macroscopic irrelevance of quantum mechanical laws. Such as in relativity when c->infinity for systems much slower than the speed of light (Lorentz factor tending to 1).

Any examples of papers with particularly bad methodology?

I get the feeling, just from the Simondon link you sent, that Simondon is proposing a methodological change in the way we think about ontogenesis. From the methodological change, he gives some general guidelines about how to think about ontogenesis in general, and more specific ontogenetic regimes.

Out of the jargon, this means that we have to change the conceptual tools we use to inquire into the way things become what they are. He gives a bunch of examples for academic fields of study.

The central point of the account, with lots of abbreviation, is that in order to look how an individual sustains itself (perhaps "sustains itself" can harmlessly be replaced with "exists?), look at the way it seperates itself from an environment, the way it was seperated from its environment, and the way it transforms and interacts with with its environment. Moreover, these actions should be taken as not just characteristic of the individual - as if they were properties predicated of it -, but more fundamentally constitutive of the individual's being.

Simondon provides a nice example with a crystal. I'll make it a copper sulphate crystal in a very saturated water solution, in a big vat. (a solution is saturated if it's got a lot of shit in it, so much so that all the shit can't dissolve). If you want to understand the copper sulphate crystal, you look at its molecular structure. Turns out it's a big lattice of copper sulphate molecules that accumulate in a regular manner. Hence, for Simondon, the accumulation of the molecules should be taken as a facet of the crystal despite that the accumulation predates the "completed" crystal seen in the water. Furthermore, the "completed" crystal is only finished accumulating molecules for now - if there pressure was right, it would accumulate more. The (individual) crystal thus extends in space and time and relates to further processes: the lab conditions, the scientists who set it up.

It should be said that these difference-making mechanisms (accumulation, temperature gradients) in the coupling of individual and enviroment also include the capacity for the individual to dissipate To illustrate the point, consider a person. Approximately - an individual can die, its being lives on. It would be odd to insist that a person is alive and dead at the same time. This phrasing suggests a duality between the individual and its being that does not appear in Simondon's account. The ontogenetic (and dissipative) processes of a being are inscribed into its being. In a certain sense then, this is at odds with the law of excluded middle - the person is already dead since it dissipates, the person is still alive since it is stable. I don't think Simondon suggests that the law of excluded middle is strictly false, I think he suggests that it is inappropriate or mystifying when trying to understand individuation.

Simondon probably would not like my example using people, but I think that takes me off topic.

So what? All of this is destructive - "thou shalt not think the individual as the end-goal of its ontogenesis", "thou shalt not remove the inscription of the individual into its individuating processes and vice versa". Luckily Simondon has a recipe for turning examples of ontogenetic processes into general descriptions of how they work.

These general concepts are metastability and transduction. There are others but I think these necessitate Simondon's development of the others. Metastability, which is ripped right out of statistical physics and/or systems theory, denotes the propensity of a system to linger in a not ultimately stable state. Think of balancing a ball on your head. If you're shit at it like me, it will eventually drop. The floor is the stable state. The balancing act being able to continue for a while renders the whole thing a metastable system. Transduction is the change of energy from one form to another. Lightbulbs change electricity into heat and light. How do these notions help? How does Simondon modify them? Let's go back to the crystal.

The crystal condences at a certain location in the vat. Why? It's very sensitive to initial conditions (what it's like in the lab, the pressure it's at). There is a propensity for crystallization at each point in the vat given by the local conditions of the molecules there - the local interactions. And the global stuff about the vat- the temperature, the pressure. This propensity changes over time. Eventually, if the conditions are right, the "sensitivity" to initial conditions resolves itself, an imbalance is created in the solution (energy gradient), and the crystal is all "fuck it I'll crystallize there". Now the other molecules are drawn to the crystal, which is now its own local system - with its own initial conditions. I think Simondon would like to call the transfer between the initial, sensitive state (saturated solution) and the stable state (the crystal) transduction - this occurs over time and relates different amounts of stored energy (ordered configurations) within the fluid. Note that this system is also metastable - it lingers about for a while before it crystallizes in the first place!

This is generalized - now transduction acts to relate states in a metastable system in some field of potential. States - molecule configurations. Metastable system - the whole crystallization experiment. Field of potential - energy/particle density differences across the fluid render certain sites more and less likely to be the locus of crystallization.

Does it seem like we're on the same page?

I take it that would be prohibitively costly.

Edit: Regardless, thanks for asking though. Should've checked the thread before coming here!

Is there Latex support? Can I somehow write things like:

\sum_{n=1}^{\inf} \frac{1}{n^2} = \frac{\pi^2}{6}

?

Would you prefer to receive the response I'm making in the other thread in this one?

Reading. Will have something to say soon.

Quoting out of order because it best illustrates my point. This is also off topic at this point...

And if this is so, we ought to revise our understanding, or, in this case perhaps, our expectations of metaphysics - not as a science of first principles, but as the tracking down of what Foucault once called 'historical a prioris'. — StreetlightX

This view upon things has all sorts of philosophical implications. One among them, off the top of my head, is giving lie to any sort of panpsychic thesis. The kind of body that rocks are, say, would not require of them any need of perception; rocks are not motile, they do not manipulate things with any degree of agency, they do not avoid predators, seek out sustenance in the form of sunshine, water or flesh, etc. Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. — StreetlightX

In other words, the question is: what kind of reality must it be such that emergent, contingent strcutures can attain the status of necessary ones? And what is the status of this 'necessity' itself if necessity is an outcome of a process rather than a principal that underlies process? — StreetlightX

I don't think it's possible to give a philosophical account of the modality particulars attain after their transference. Summary: processes that generate these (retroactive?) necessities need not work to produce a univocal necessity. Call the process by which X passes from contigency to necessity a "transference mechanism".

a) Assume someone had given such a univocal account.

b) The agglomeration of these necessities together into a univocal account inscribes a distinction between a transcendental (pre-conditioning, all consuming) account of necessity that would need to operate within each of its conditioned processes while being logically(operationally?) prior to them.

c) The transcendence/operation distinction in (b) raises a regress. It is started by noting that the immanence of the univocal conditioning mechanism means that it applies to itself. What, then, forces this preconditioning necessity to operate within its conditioned processes? What maintains its operation without requiring an un-moved mover? If the transcandental condition in (a) is univocal it engenders its own operation since it must also be generated (immanence. non-given-ness).

d) If the substitution of the univocal account into (b), which was utilized in (c), is invalid then there are at least two essentially different operating mechanisms for these transference mechanisms. The one in (a) does not obey the rules of the ones in (b) that it conditions. If it is valid then the univocal account is its own condition of individuation - an unmoved mover.

e) From (d), the conception in (a) is not univocal.

More detail on (a)

I hope this is straightfoward.

More detail on (b):

Such an account would either be a list of all transference mechanisms (cannot be constructed, too many!) or a rule to generate and apply them. This rule, then, constitutes the operation of the transference mechanism. Did it too retroactively become necessary, or was it necessary in another sense? Assume the former, otherwise there are already at least two transference mechanisms.

More detail on (c):

I take it as given that there can be no "ultimate conditions", nothing which was not individuated - no un-moved movers, that "in the beginning there was the Word..." cannot be said. Then, the operation of the univocal necessity in (a) itself had a transference mechanism. Since it is univocal and no transference mechanisms condition it* it must be its own...

More detail on (d):
The transference mechanisms that the univocal account conditions are not their own transference mechanisms. The univocal account is. This, then, marks a difference in kind.

More detail on (e):
This is a bit hasty because of *, but I'm pretty sure the same pattern repeats when asking about the necessity of the co-constitution of the "big picture" transference mechanism and the ones it conditions.

_______________________________________________________________________________

This isn't to say the process can't be "truncated" in some sense. What you mentioned before about panpsychism is a good example of it, distinguishing different pre-conditioning webs and transference mechanisms highlights that a panpsychist account is problematic:

Lacking a metabolism or any sensory apparatus there is simply no 'need' for rocks to experience things. There would be no occasion for a genesis of perception.

need there being precisely the operation of a transference mechanism, "truncated" to the level of perception.

Edit: I think the utility of such truncations is kind of the point, right?

Yes absolutely is it a question of the the very conditions of affordances. What's important here is that this ties perception right back into an evolutionary-developmental history, showing that perception is itself historical and environmental through and through. We perceive things the way we dobecause of the sorts of bodies we are: front facing, upright, motile, with hands for grasping and manipulating things, etc. Different bodies would have different phenomenologies. Morris has a nice thought experiment involving spherical beings, who would not have a sense of directionality (up/down, front/back), in the sense that we do — StreetlightX

Glad we are on the same page. Fundamentally I don't see the point in this kind of inquiry insofar as it's speculative though. Will try and flesh that out a bit. Maybe too meta a response.

One of the things I've been thinking about recently is how speaking about perception in terms of 'embodiment' is not enough. It is not enough to point out that perception takes place in embodied beings. What matters too is the type of bodies involved, and the way in which those bodies are simultaneously shaped by, and shape the environment in which they evolved and developed in. 'Embodiment' names a problem to be worked through, rather than a solution to the impasses of thinking about perception (what, after all, is not embodied?). Illusions testify to the historicity of our bodies, of our envelopment in the world among which it co-originates in a dynamic reciprocity of becoming

I agree on all accounts, but I don't see the significance of this as a ground for philosophical speculation. In the absence of any transcendental condition (logical necessity) that predates (logical priority) the genesis of any of the aforementioned affordance conditions, I don't see what substantive claims such an inquiry could provide. At best it's a defense against bad thinking, perhaps this suffices.

"Embodiment" naming, if you'll permit the shorthand, a (the?) mechanism that reciprocally, and historically, enmeshes (using previous terminology) perception and environment within some particular entity, looks to me to resemble any such mechanism which could be derived from this line of inquiry. To put it another way, what's the point in challenging first principles - basic categorizations or thematizations of concepts , when the concepts derived will only name the same space of problems?

More detail on naming the same space of problems: if it's already granted that we're dealing with some notion of what was once contigent [an affordance web being historically-evolutionary conditioned) becoming necessary ( an affordance web being historically-evolutionary stable), how are we to derive any speculative claims about the transference from one to the other given the contingency (particularity?) of the transference? The devil is in the details.

Perhaps what I'm thinking is wrong insofar as it begs for a need to derive these overarching conditions on affordance webs, rather than illustrating their proper treatment.

I think has more to do with how the justification for a given claim "bottoms out". So, the fact that a claim is not directly justified by appeal to empirical observations does not automatically disqualify it from being about the real. A statement is only disqualified in virtue of its justification ultimately bottoming out in appeals to claims about the attitudes of a particular person or group (or into claims about the structure of attitudes as such). So to give a simple example, justification for claims about Harry Potter will ultimately bottom out in appeals to claims about the attitudes of a particular person (i.e. JK Rowling), whereas the justification for claims about the chemical composition of DNA will ultimately bottom out in appeals to empirical observations. — Aaron R

I don't think this is right. Imagine that someone has made a list of justifications (call this set J) for a statement about something and this suffices to demonstrate that r is real. I can invent a set of justifications (P) that is just J with the last statement "at least this is how it is in my Harry Potter Fanfic". By the assumption on J, P suffices to show that r is real, but r is also unreal by construction. This implies that a set of justifications can suffice to show something is real if some subset of that set shows that it is real - or alternatively, that some subset of the set of justifications shows that something is unreal.

"bottoming out" would correspond to choosing the last element(s?) of this set of justifications, right? Then whether something is real or unreal depends on the last (few?) justifications given for it.

This is reminiscent of J.J Gibson's idea of affordances. Namely that to perceive a thing is to perceive the actions that it may promote.

"If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead
of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and
if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords
support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is
stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore
walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a
swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different" (JJ Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception).

I take it, however, a major point you are highlighting is that there are conditions on affordances which render them possible or impossible, and that can change their nature. A concrete example is the affordance of chairs for support: They would unlikely have this affordance if humans did not have arses or tired legs. But to think the objectivity (not just the sharedness) of illusions I think means sharpening these conditions - strictly speaking, what it is they condition in the first place.

"arses" and "tired legs" are not special insofar as they condition the affordance of support, there is a massive, many sorted, relational complex underlying and constituting the support affordance (read: perception of) of the chair. It is composed of physical properties (tensile strength, elasticity), biophysical properties (lactic acid build up), mental properties (fatigue) and importantly relations between these properties - such as a chair strongly affording support when a person returns from the gym after work. It clearly also depends on the historical transmission of this web (paleolithic spear tips are still for-stabbing). Hopefully chairs are not special in this regard either, and that each affordance is associated with a relational web that is implicated in the affordance.

To account for the objectivity of an illusion, then, is to find the conditions on these webs of affordance that give rise to them.

While wieldiness, and illusion, are objective in just the way you describe, does measurement give us a more objective kind of description? Or maybe just a different kind of objectivity? — jamalrob

I realize this was directed at Streetlight, but it's an interesting question. I think the contrast between those two phenomena highlights a contrast (the way we think about?) measurement and illusion. Under the above, the relational character of measurement differs from the relational character of other affordances. I suppose in a certain sense the length of an object doesn't depend on a meter stick, nor could the affordance of for-measuring that meter sticks have arose if it did.

So, to sharpen up the concern that led me to the OP: what is it that leads people to write histories of X? This is a personal decision; in theory, the historian has absolute freedom. But there must be some common trait or traits between salt, clothing, mammals, France, science, the West, the Universe and childhood; these are the stuff about which histories are written of. — Mariner

I suppose such a commonality would have to be a very abstract one. How abstract? Maybe this can be delimited by finding something that couldn't in principle have a history written of it. Is there any property of an entity [placeholder] that denies the possibility of writing a history?

The common thread for the possibility of writing such a history seems to me like being able to agglomerate some collection of entities [placeholder, not necessarily things] in a group such that the grouping is salient for some reason.

A history probably wouldn't be written of the relationship of the last skin flake I shed and the point up the side of a specific bottle of Ginger Joe below which half the bottle's mass resided... on the other side of the world... because it's (almost) impossible to provide a salient link between the two. Unless it was as a footnote in the History of Interconnection or whatever.

I think the last bit: the possibility of subsuming an irrelevant or almost impossible history to construct to some higher order history: is a way of restating something that was already said.
@

There can be a history of anything since everything takes place in history. If there's a problem, then, in my view, the problem is that there can be no unified history. There can only be histories, even if in order to write the history of something, it should in principle contain other histories too. — Πετροκότσυφας

Maybe so according to the notion that more = better, but the most fun times I had at PF were in '02-'05. For me, the discussions were more fun precisely because there were few enough people that I could actually read a whole thread instead of having to skim 10 pages super-quick. And it was possible to get a good back and forth going with someone. Why bother to post if there are going to be too many replies to engage with? — Paul

This. A friend and I started a discussion forum for Leftist literature a few years ago. While it had less than 50 members was the most productive time for reading groups, email exchanges with academics and so on. Friend left due to general malaise, so the admins (self included), decided to promote growth.

A few years down the road it's very difficult to discuss anything due to people spamming Mario-Stalin pictures and shit-talking Jaden Smith for an inappropriate understanding of Hegel.

Probably something structural about it. More people means more replies to older posts in the discussion if everything is working well.

I think it should be regarded as a speech act rather than just a truth apt declaration. If someone actually says that, it's got a certain set of illocutionary forces (hopeful, determined...). The material conditional alone does not.

Maybe another way of seeing this would be to assume it could be translated to the material conditional. Then an equivalent translation would be the transposition. (A => B) <=> (¬B => ¬A), which would yield "Not(McDoodle will get a distinction in his exam) if Not(McDoodle works hard)", I'd like to say this is equivalent to "McDoodle won't get a distinction in his exam if he doesn't work hard", which has a different set of illocutionary forces (threatening, frustrated).

Whether it's appropriate to say the translation to the material conditional isn't possible because it does not preserve (expected?) illocutionary forces (IE the logical validity of the argument I just made) is up in the air.

Edit: though this doesn't deal with the relationship between indicative conditionals and causes, so disregard post if uninteresting or irrelevant.

Reporting in. Despite lurking most of the time it's nice to be here.