Ok. — Banno

Oh, Banno… you’re so cute.

Taoism seems to assert that there is an ultimate reality that transcends conceptual categories. — boundless

Yes, that’s how I see it.

BTW, as an aside I don't know if you are familiar with David Bohm's philosophical views — boundless

Not really. I’ve heard his name here and there on the forum, but I don’t really know what his beliefs were.

I quoted Feynman because he says that the conservation of energy is an 'abstract idea', which IMO implies that he also viewed that energy itself is an 'abstract idea', i.e. a concept that is useful to us but not necessarily something that 'represents' something external. — boundless

Are speed, distance, time, and force abstract ideas? Do they exist? How about goals, purposes, and intentions?

In any case, I believe that the precise ontological status of physical quantities like 'mass', 'energy', 'momentum', 'electric charge' etc is still a matter of debate among scientists and philosophers. — boundless

I don’t think there’s any serious debate among scientists. Philosophers? Among philosophers everything is always a matter of debate.

It is not so easy. — Wayfarer

It is exactly that easy

Leaving aside kicking the ball into the long grass by declaring it ‘metaphysical — Wayfarer

I declare it metaphysical for two reasons. First, because it is. Second, because if I treated it as if it were supposed to be some sort of actual description of the real world, it would be impossible for me to take it seriously.

Hah. I'm usually arguing a case a step more sophisticated. And this is indeed an issue I am wrestling with right now in its most general physicalist sense. — apokrisis

This is a great response. @Wayfarer, @Metaphysician Undercover, @boundless, and I will all be able to say "See, Apokrisis agrees with me."

In short, I argue from the point of view of systems science with its basically Aristotelean understanding of hierarchical order and causality. The key thing is how a new state of global order can only emerge by simplifying the local degrees of freedom as the "stuff" from which the new state of global order is being constructed from...

...You need global constraints to shape the raw material into the functional units which now come together in a natural way to express that global purpose driving the whole show. It is necessary to form or shape the local degrees of freedom to ensure you already start with the "right stuff". — apokrisis

A lot of the things you write about are either over my head or come from a really different direction than my way of seeing things. We've talked about emergence a few times before and one thing that has stuck with me most is the idea of constraints. I was reading about early criticisms of the idea of emergence and it was claimed that it requires backward causation. It struck me how wrong-headed that is. Constraint isn't causation. When I stop my car so I won't run into the car stopped ahead of me, that car doesn't cause me to stop, it keeps me from going.

Life and mind then lucked into codes – genes and neurons – that could act as internal memories for the kind of constraints that would organise them into organismic selves. They could represent physical constraints – which have to exist concretely in space and time – as information that could now be deployed at any place or moment of the organism's own choosing. — apokrisis

You wrote "Life and mind then lucked into codes." That makes sense to me, but I have been confused by some things you wrote in the past. When you wrote about biosemiosis in the context of coding in DNA, I always got the feeling you were talking about the kind of teleosis that Wayfarer et. al. are.

Nevertheless, it has been an interesting discussion for me. — boundless

For me also. There's no better way to understand what you believe than to bump up against something you don't believe.

Yes! I think that reductionist versions of physicalism have serious problems. But this isn't the case for non-reductionist versions. After, 'physicalism' can be a very broad category. — boundless

For what it's worth, I don't call myself a physicalist, although you might. I call myself a pragmatist.

I believe that our concept 'mass-energy' either corresponds or represent a property that physical systems have and which can be measured. I don't think it is a 'thing' or anything substantial. I'm not sure what you are taking issue with.
The points I was making do not rely on a particular ontological position about 'mass-energy', 'momentum' etc. If they are simply 'abstract ideas', as Feynman put it, nothing really changes. — boundless

I doubt Feynman thought "the ontological status 'mass-energy' is a rather controversial topic." That's certainly not what he wrote in that quote you included.

Actually "final cause" was intended to put an end to the infinite regress. Any chain of causation would begin from an intentional act. If it wasn't begun in a freely willed act of a human being, it began as a freely willed act of God. I don't think God can be classified as "sentient". — Metaphysician Undercover

I have no problem with a religious point of view where God is the final cause giving the universe, the world, reality, or whatever you want to call it, meaning and purpose. That's not my way of seeing things, but it's something I understand. My problem is with all this talk about teleology without God.

To say that reality is confined to this human box called "the universe" is an arrogant self-indulgent attitude of certitude. It suggests that we have reality all figured out, and it all fits into this concept, "the universe". But the reality of intention and free will don't fit into this concept, and this demonstrates to us that a significant part of reality actually escapes this determinist concept of "the universe". — Metaphysician Undercover

You can call it the universe, reality, the world, existence, the Tao, or whatever you want. I'm just talking about everything there is even before all those things are things.

So contrary to what you say, the scientific approach is to jam reality into the box of human experience, empiricism, while the teleological approach, which accepts the reality of free will and intention, allows for a vast aspect of reality beyond what we can experience with our senses. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I wrote previously, if you think God is the source of purpose and meaning, there's no need for this discussion to go any further. I recognize and respect a religious argument, even though it's not how I see things.

But is it an analogy at all? Isn’t it pointing to something real — not metaphorical, but actual? — Wayfarer

Umm... No, not as I see it. Isn't that the whole point of this discussion.

Now, if you’re an artillery officer, all you need to know is how to aim — and that’s what Newtonian physics helps with. Your tables and calculations tell you how to fire accurately. That’s one kind of aim — and it’s the kind physics is concerned with. And it made a huge difference!

But there’s also another level of aim: why you’re firing, why you joined the army, what the war is about — and none of that appears in the physics. Yet it’s still part of the aim. Physics models the trajectory, but not the reason. — Wayfarer

The artillery officer, the war planners, and the politicians are all human. I've never claimed human actions can't have purposes and goals.

In the same way, when Aristotle speaks of telos, he’s not always invoking a designer’s intention or a conscious goal. He’s pointing to the formative structure of things — the way they unfold, and what they tend toward in their becoming. The acorn doesn’t “intend” to be an oak tree, but neither is its development just accident and brute cause. — Wayfarer

You and I are just making the same arguments over and over. You say the acorn and the artillery officer are analogous. I know you disagree with me, but by now you must recognize that's an argument I find weak, to put it kindly.

But the question of what all this is for? — Wayfarer

And the obvious answer from where I stand is it's not for anything. It's not that you're wrong. As I've said previously, this is metaphysics. It's not true or false, it's more or less useful. I don't find your way of seeing things as useful and I think it's misleading.

But he also refers to natural things, acorns and foals. Elsewhere the distinction is made between artifacts and organisms, but here the distinction is not that important in this context - only that artifacts have purposes imposed by their designers while organisms have purposes that are intrinsic to them. — Wayfarer

That’s why I said I think it’s a bad analogy. As I said, I don’t really want to reopen this whole argument.

Be that as it may, I wasn’t trying to reopen the argument, I was trying to explain why I reject itso strongly.

I’d agree that when teleology becomes a way of carving up nature to fit our needs or narratives, then it’s missing the point. But if it’s a way of attending to the inner coherence of things then it might be closer to reverence than to imposition. — Wayfarer

I think it’s probably needless to say I don’t agree with this.

If we want to understand what something is, it must be understood in terms of that end ...Consider a knife. If you wanted to describe a knife, you would talk about its size, and its shape, and what it is made out of, among other things. But Aristotle believes that you would also, as part of your description, have to say that it is made to cut things. ...The knife’s purpose, or reason for existing, is to cut... — Aristotle, Politics, IEP

A knife is designed and made by humans to cut. I think that is a bad analogy for the kind of goal or purpose you have been talking about. It implies there is a designer and a creator, an idea which, as I understood it, you have rejected.

@Wayfarer @Metaphysician Undercover

It struck me just now why I find the teleological approach to understanding the world so distasteful. It's disrespectful to the universe - to reality, to the Tao - to try to jam it into human boxes. It's arrogant and self-indulgent. I really do hate it.

Sound similar to Logan's Run. Mostly cuz of the 30-year-old cutoff for their society, and that it's also a bad and wonderful scifi flick. (1976) — Moliere

It is also my understanding that Soylent Green is people.

I would even say that mass is an abstract property no more real than energy. — boundless

Mass is energy. Energy is mass. Your conception of what is real and what is not doesn't make much sense to me.

I question if there is a meaningful distinction between strong and weak emergence. — boundless

As I noted, you and I are just too far apart on this.

I would say that we have a similar understanding, — boundless

I strongly disagree.

Another point is that, perhaps, in order to have an acceptable explanation of life and consciousness, physicalism needs at least to be 'expanded' or corrected in some ways. — boundless

We've been through this. The physicalism you seem to be talking about is the reductionism you and I both reject.

Nuff said.

I often think while observing the insect world, that there seems to be an excess of awareness. A vibrant interactivity going on. A kind of bursting with life, which seems to outstrip the basic necessities of finding food and procreating, in their specific evolutionary niche. — Punshhh

This is from Antonio Damasio's "Feeling & Knowing: Making Minds Conscious." Damasio is a well-known cognitive scientist.

Once we are capable of consciousness, what we become conscious of is the contents of our minds. Minds equipped with feeling and with some perspective on the world around them are conscious and are widely present in the animal kingdom, not just in humans. All mammals and birds and fish are minded and conscious, and I suspect that so are social insects. — Antonio Damasio - Feeling and Knowing

the one teleological principle I’m willing to defend — even if it’s heresy in mainstream biology — is orthogenesis: the idea that there has been, over evolutionary time, a real tendency toward greater awareness, self-consciousness, and intelligence. — Wayfarer

Well, of course there has been. When you start at zero complexity, zero consciousness, the only place to go is up.

There are a number of different ways in which intention can be the cause of the movements of things, without intention being within the thing that is moving. Since we observe the activities of things, and notice that many are moved by intention, while the intention which moves them is external to them, (including chains of causation), it makes sense that non-sentient objects could be moving in intentionally designed trajectories without us being aware of the intention which sets them on their way. — Metaphysician Undercover

This seems like the whole infinite regress problem. A rock is moving with intention, but the intention came from outside it. Where did that intention come from? From the other rock that knocked into it? Where did it's intention come from? How far back do we have to go? When is intention actually inside something non-sentient?

Often though, there is an inclination to make intention synonymous with purpose. This would mean that all cases of purpose are intentional. However, I think it is probably more productive in the long run to maintain a conceptual separation. This would mean that not all instances of intention are conscious, and also that not all instances of purpose are intentional. This allows versatility to the concept of "purpose", providing freedom from the restrictions of an end, or goal, which "intention" imposes. Purposeful acts could be carried out without being directed toward any specific end, such as in the case of some forms of trial and error perhaps. — Metaphysician Undercover

This all seems very convoluted to me. A distinction without a difference. I just don't get it. I don't think there's any reason for us to trudge down this path any further.

I think it is the only reasonable way of looking at things. — Metaphysician Undercover

Boy. This is a disappointing response. Puts an end to the conversation.

That is true, in a way, but it was because the thinkers of those times were schooled in, and trying to improve on (or supersede) the metaphysics and philosophy of their day. — Wayfarer

I wasn't trying to use your affection for Burtt as an argument against your position. It just struck me after reading @Metaphysician Undercover's comment that he is right - Galileo et. al. were creating a new mathematical science, but they were keeping in the intention/goal directedness in the picture, even though it wasn't stated explicitly. It was bound up in their religious understanding. I guess the problem for you is that aspect has been lost as the world has become more secular. For me, that isn't a problem. I'm not a theist and I'm comfortable with a metaphysics without intention, at least in the limited realm of science.

modern science gave rise to this split (or ‘bifurcation’) between lived experience and scientific abstraction, which is very much what this thread is concerned with. — Wayfarer

I think that's only true for people who don't recognize that the metaphysics of science does not make sense as an organizing principle for all of reality. No metaphysical position does, including the teleological approach you favor. There is no one size fits all metaphysics, at least not an effective one.

Collingwood: the only modernization of Kant worth a damn. (That I know about)

Absolute presuppositions of the one, are the transcendental principles of the other. — Mww

I clearly haven't read nearly as much philosophy as you, so I can't compare philosophers. I will say I feel very at home with Collingwood, and not just with metaphysics. I also really like his "Principles of Art." I wouldn't have thought of him as following Kant, but my experience with Kant is limited to the "Critique of Pure Reason" and his categorical imperative.

Once we understand that conscious intention is just one form of intention, that opens up an entirely new range of possibility for how we understand and study the nature of "telos", teleology.

Restricting intention to human consciousness, such that only human actions can be understood as teleological, is a foundational, metaphysical mistake, which is common and prevalent in the modern western society. — Metaphysician Undercover

Maybe I’m a bit confused. Are you saying that it makes sense to think of non-sentient objects as capable of having intention? I think that is at the heart of the argument being made in the OP. I agree that some animals at least are capable of having intention.

When we understand the common defining term of "intention" as purpose, — Metaphysician Undercover

If you define “intention” as a synonym for “purpose,” then you’re just restating the position of the OP - a circular argument. If you define it as a mental state, which is one of the primary meanings of the word, then clearly only an entity with a mind can have intention.

Further, releasing intention from the constraints of consciousness allows us a much less confusing approach to the principles of panpsychism. "Consciousness" is generally understood as a property of higher level living beings, dependent on a brain. When panpsychism proposes consciousness as fundamental to the universe, this is commonly apprehended as incoherent, due to the fact that "consciousness" as we generally conceive it, is dependent on a brain. So when we release intention from the constraints of consciousness, and understand how intention relates to temporality in a way not at all understood by human knowledge, because temporality is not at all understood by human knowledge, this allows intention as a "consciousness-like" aspect of reality, to be pervasive in its causal role. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you’ve restated the argument in the OP, as I understand it, very clearly. Do you find that way of looking at things compelling?

Physics was specifically designed to deal with the mechanical motions of bodies. The early physicists who pioneered the way, did not exclude the reality of the spiritual, or immaterial, they recognized the division, and knew that physics was being designed exclusively to understand that one aspect of reality, the bodily. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is right. @Wayfarer and I are both fans of Burtt’s “The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science,” which makes this case strongly. What those early physicists did was metaphysics, not science.

Do you really mean to say that. We shouldn't give a truth value to a metaphysical question for this reason? Or do you mean that they truly can't be true or false. In the sense that i.e. free will exists and doesn't exist and doesn't (exist and not exist) and so on? — Jack2848

I guess I mean it both ways. A question that can’t be answered either truly or falsely is either metaphysical or meaningless. Turning that around, a metaphysical statement has no truth value. It is neither true nor false.

You’re pretty new here, so you likely aren’t familiar with my deep interest in, you might say obsession with, metaphysics. I’ve written about it many times here, and I bring it into many of my posts. As I understand it, metaphysics is the study of what R.G. Collingwood called “absolute presuppositions.” These are the underlying assumptions that we bring, either consciously or non-consciously, into our understanding of how reality works.

As I said, they are neither true nor false. Your example of free will is a good one. We could argue about whether we think that’s correct or not, but let’s not. It’s a very long argument, and I rarely convince anyone of my position. It’s also a bit off subject for this thread.

There was a very, very bad and very, very wonderful movie back in the late 60s or early 70s called “Wild in the Streets”. In it, the voting age was reduced to 12 and anyone over 30 was put in camps where they were given psychedelic drugs to keep them passive.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

But I would say that pressure is weakly emergent. It's perfectly understandable in terms of the properties of the particles. — boundless

Yes, this is correct.

I am not sure that I understood how is defined the concept of strong emergence. — boundless

It’s exactly the same. This is not a scientific way of speaking, it’s statistics. This is how statisticians talk about distributions of data points. As the number of points of a property that is normally distributed increases to infinity, the graph of the data points approaches a normal curve. If there’s only one or two data points, it’s impossible to tell whether the data is normally distributed or not. Typically, it doesn’t take a vast number of points to estimate the distribution. For example polls, intended to measure the opinions of all Americans typically include the data of only a few thousand.

Yes, but it is assumed that the mass of, say, the Earth is the sum of the masses of its components. The distance between, say, Earth and the Sun is approximated as a distance between the distances of their centers, because being almost spherical, their gravitational effects are approximately like the one of a point particle of their mass. And so on. Also, it is assumed that the gravitational force of the Earth or the Sun is the combined effect of the forces that each of their constituents cause. — boundless

I don’t see how this is relevant.

Try to see it this way. You can define energy as a property of both an individual object or a system of objects. If you consider the energy of a closed system you find that it's conserved. And this constrains the behavior of energy of the single parts of the system. — boundless

You and I have a different understanding of what the words “reductionism” and “emergence” mean and how the processes they designate work. I’m not going to change my understanding and I don’t think you are either. There’s probably no reason for us to continue this part of the discussion.

In my original response to this post, I wrote there are trillions of molecules in a container of air. That’s not right. When we deal with thermodynamic properties, we generally talk in terms of moles - 6x10^23 molecules. That’s almost a trillion trillion. Close enough to infinity for me.

More of your rabid anti-religious bigotry. In this case especially lame.

The author says that some (strongly) 'emergent properties', like violation of some symmetries, occur at the infinite limit of the number of the constituents.
So, the theory can explain the arising of those properties because they appear at that limit. — boundless

You're making the idea that properties manifest as the number of elements approach infinity seem more exotic than it is. The term is just shorthand for the number of elements necessary so that it makes sense to talk about specific macroscopic properties. For example - it doesn't really make sense to talk about the pressure of one molecule bouncing around inside a container. In a container full of air at atmospheric pressure, however, there are trillions of molecules bouncing around and off each other and talking about pressure is reasonable. Somewhere between one and trillions of molecules it starts to make sense to talk about pressure.

Newtonian mechanics is now understood as a limit case of relativity. And, in fact, one obtains Galileian trransformation by taking the limit where the velocity of light is infinite. But notice that there is a subtle difference here. The limit is taken to explain an approximation and to explain that, in fact, if you don't take that limit you actually get more precise results. — boundless

This is true, but a bit misleading. At normal human scale velocities, say 100 mph, length contraction will be less than 1/(1x10^14). Calling a value less than 1/(1/10^14) from the actual value an approximation or imprecise is a bit of a stretch.

That's why I think that weak emergence and reductionism are the same thing seen in different ways. — boundless

Agreed.

his worldview is far more sympathetic of intentionality, purpose, 'holism' and so on than a purely mechanicistic worldview. — boundless

I'm not sure he would agree with that. Then again, I'm not sure he wouldn't.

I don't think it's reductionistic at all. That's because the properties and behavior of phenomena described are determined by the physical principles at the same level of scale. Newton's cosmology is based on observations of the sun, moon, earth, and other planetary bodies acted on by the forces that act on them directly, e.g. gravity.
— T Clark

I'm not sure of what you mean here. — boundless

Newton's law of universal gravitation is specifically developed to address the gravitational attraction between massive objects. The physical properties considered - mass, distance, and time - are measured directly on those objects. There is no reduction.

the conservation laws are what is fundamental and they determine the behavior of the 'parts' of the isolated system. — boundless

I don't understand this. How can the law of conservation of energy be more fundamental than the idea of energy? Conservation of energy is a phenomenon that is understood by observing energetic interactions among physical objects. How can it be more fundamental? How do you observe conservation of energy? By making measurements of time, mass, and distance in various combinations.

I made my point about 'strong emergence' with reference to a reductionist paradigm - in fact, 'strong' emergence doesn't seem to me to sit well with a reductionist paradigm, where all properties of a whole can be explained via the properties of the parts. I admit that I went by memory but I thought that in strong emergence the mechanism of emergence is left somewhat unexplained and, in fact, I thought that, in contrast to weak emergence, strong emergence is based on the idea that some properties of the whole can't be explained with reference to the properties of the parts. — boundless

All this is exactly right. Strong emergence is not compatible with reductionism. That's the subject of the paper I linked. Perhaps I was confused. I thought you used reductionism/weak emergence as the necessary alternative to intention/teleology without considering another alternative - strong emergence. Was I wrong about that?

Regarding 'weak emergence' and 'reductionism', I know that there is a subtle distinction between them. A strict 'reductionist' would say that weakly emergent features are mere illusions. Instead, an 'emergentist' would say that they are 'real' but everything about them can be explained in terms of the properties of the part. — boundless

As I understand it, reductionism's focus is on analysis of the properties of higher level phenomena from physical principles at lower levels while emergence focuses on constructing the properties of higher level phenomena from lower level principles. The difference between weak and strong emergence is that, for weak emergence, it works but for strong emergence it doesn't. The thermodynamic properties of gases can be determined based on the behavior of the gases themselves but also on the basis of the behavior of their molecular components - both reductionism and constructionism. On the other hand, the properties of biological phenomena can not be determined based on physical properties alone. At least that is the claim.

I had a discussion with apokrisis about the emergence of life. IIRC, he or she argued for a non-reductionist physicalist model of such an emergence. Such an emergence was understood as a sort of phase transition, which of course generally is a paradigmatic example of weak emergence. unfortunately, I don't recall the specifics of their model but I am sure that it wasn't understood in a mechanicistic way. — boundless

I like this description. @Apokrisis is a smart guy. When he says "non-reductionist physicalist model" I think he means one without reference to just the intentionist/teleological explanations this thread is about. Keeping in mind that I often misunderstand him.

I guess that I think that I should point out that IMO even something like 'Newtonian mechanics' isn't necessarily reductionistic. — boundless

I don't think it's reductionistic at all. That's because the properties and behavior of phenomena described are determined by the physical principles at the same level of scale. Newton's cosmology is based on observations of the sun, moon, earth, and other planetary bodies acted on by the forces that act on them directly, e.g. gravity.

I linked to the source, it has ample documentation. — Wayfarer

I did what I will admit was a quick scan and I didn’t see any answer to my specific request which was show me some evidence that “no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life”

I've had my say. I'll leave it at that.

The philosophical point about the irreducible nature of life, is that life is not reducible to chemistry. — Wayfarer

No, life is reducible to chemistry, it's just that it is not constructable from chemistry.

...no amount of chemical evolution can cross the barrier that divides the analogue world of chemistry from the digital world of life,. — What is Information? Marcello Barbieri

Says who? Show me some evidence. Give me some inkling of a reason to believe this might be true.

But I am not sure if all the properties that we observe in living beings (i.e. behaving as a distinct 'whole', goal-directedness, striving for survival and so on) can be explained in terms of the known chemical and physical laws. I really can't see how such properties can be understood in a reductionist (or 'weakly emergentist'*) paradigm.

*BTW, I think 'weak emergence' is a form of reductionism. Nothing really 'new' arises in the case of 'weak emergence'. What 'emerges' is just a convenient abstraction that allow us to make simpler explanations. — boundless

This really confused me. You say that weak emergence is the same thing as reductionism. I'm ok with that, although I don't think it's quite accurate. I'm not a reductionist. I asked myself - "Well, how come you don't talk about strong emergence?" So I went back through your comments in this thread and found this:

It is understandable why some try to explain away the intentionality, 'holism' etc which seem to be present in life as illusions (i.e. living beings behave 'as if' they have those properties...). It is perhaps the only consistent way to account for these properties. Some, instead, try to explain these things in a 'strong emergent' model, which seems to be unintelligible. So IMO these difficulties point to the possibility that, indeed, the reductionist/emergentist models are wrong and we need something else. — boundless

You write off strong emergence as "unintelligible" but your fall back position is a universe infused with intentionality. You reject an established, if sometimes controversial, scientific principle with a wave of your hand and then point us at elan vital as the answer to our questions.

Here's a link to a famous paper on emergence "More is Different" by P.W. Anderson. It's not long.

Hardly, right? It doesn't seem like our era should be unique. It's just that ideology is more transparent when one lives within it, especially when it has "gone global." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I've already acknowledged that societal values and political considerations influence what is considered worth studying, knowing. And you're right - same as it ever was. But you didn't address the main point of my comment. This intrusion of societal influence into science is exactly the opposite of what you call "this sort of separation of value and purpose from a wholly mathematized world (which, of course, excludes value by definition, axiomatically)." It is the intrusion of values into science that has corrupted it.

Ha, well that was exactly the point I was trying to make. "Goodness, Beauty (and sometimes Truth) only exist in your head, as a privatized projection, a sui generis hallucination produced by the mysterious, but ultimately mechanistic mind," obviously isn't neutral. It is not a view that arose through sheer substraction, i.e., just "stripping away old narratives and superstitions," to get to the "clear view of reason." It is itself an ideological construct, a particular tradition. And the motivations for it have been variously political, economic, religious, etc., as well as philosophical. The idea of freedom as primarily being "freedom from constraint," and "the ability to do anything" (i.e. freedom as power/potency) seems quite relevant here too (and it's a notion of freedom that comes out of early-modern theology, man being the image of a God who was sheer will). — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's really frustrating I can't get you to acknowledge that the characteristics you seem to deplore - a bias for reason, mathematics, and freedom from constraint - are human values just as much as "Goodness, Beauty (and sometimes Truth)" are.

I agree in principle, but I would question the exact way in which this is "mainstream." I don't think it was ever overwhelmingly popular as a position accepted by your average person on the street, or even a majority of people. It was dominant within the narrow silo of Anglo-empiricist philosophy and with some scientists, and I think even that is less true today than it was in the 20th century. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's true. The metaphysics of everyday life is different from that of science. Why would you expect anything different? Scientists are trying to do different things than insurance salespeople and truck drivers. Something around half of Americans don't believe the human species developed from previously living organisms without outside influence. That doesn't prove evolutionary biologists are barking up the wrong tree.

We focus on 'description'" (where "description" is axiomatically assumed to exclude value, which is privatized). This isn't true for all science though. No one expects medical researchers to do this, or zoologists, or even evolutionary biologists, let alone social scientists. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As I see it, the difference between physics and the sciences you describe isn't primarily that physics excludes value while the others don't. It's that for the others, it is much, much harder to exclude outside influences on the results and so it's much, much harder to get clear, definitive answers to questions. Of course all science is value laden - values control what is studied, what questions are asked, and who gets funded. Beyond that, sciences that deal with people directly have to, theoretically at least, deal with those people humanely. The scientific method varies depending on what is being studied, but the basics are the same. It requires standing back and looking at phenomena from a suitable distance, objectivity if you will. That's true of psychology as much as it is chemistry.

If one looks back to earlier epochs, one sees that shifts in the "scientific model," that predominates in societies, what C.S. Lewis call the "backcloth," were often resisted for political and ideological reasons. I don't think our own era is any different here. A view that makes all questions of value and purpose "subjective" aligns with the hegemonic political ideology of our era by effectively privatizing all questions of value, all the way down to the level of metaphysics and "what science says is true." It's worth remembering here that the current model grows out of a particular theology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So, science is embedded in the society it operates in and takes on many of the values of that society. Sure, but you make is sound like some sort of conspiracy. The difficulty some scientists have in getting society to accept their well-studied and critical understanding of the world makes it hard to accept the claim that politics is unfairly hindering the inclusion of human values. It is exactly human values - money and power - that is muddying the water.

Such a view, by making all questions of goodness, usefulness, beauty, etc. "subjective" also helps to support the anthropology assumed by classical liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Does your whole argument rest on the basis of absolute, i.e. non-subjective, morality?

the anthropology assumed by classical liberalism. This thin anthropology ("utility" as a sort of black box which decides all intentional human action, but which cannot itself be judged, i.e., volanturism) is hugely influential in contemporary economics and public policy. The entire global political and economic system is organized around such a view, and considerable effort is expended to make man conform to this view of him, to positively educated him in this role (e.g., highly consequential economic "shock treatments" aimed at privatization and atomization). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you're example makes a point exactly in contradiction to the one you seem to think it does. It is the human values embraced by classical liberalism that corrupt the process. It seems your problem isn't the exclusion of human values, it's the exclusion of the particular values you share.

It isn't clear how can the intentionality which is present in life arise, in an intelligible way, 'out of' the inanimate, which seems to be without any kind of intentionality. So, either some kind of teleology was present even before the arising of life or it just 'started' with the arising of life. In the latter case, how was that possible? If the former, however, what is the evidence of that teleology? — boundless

The origin of life from inanimate material - abiogenesis - is not some mysterious unknowable process. It can be, and is, studied by science. It's not a question of certain chemicals happening to combine in very, very unlikely ways by the random action of molecules jiggling around. There are some who think life is inevitable given a suitable environment. I recommend "What is LIfe - How Chemistry Becomes Biology" by Addy Pross. It's definitely pop-sci, but it's interesting and thought provoking.

This to me suggests that life can't be explained in physical terms, precisely because the method that physics uses isn't adequate to explain the properties associated with life. So, the 'unlikeliness' might be explained by the fact that the models neglect some fundamental property of the physical world. — boundless

It's true, life can't be explained using physics. The structure, development, and behavior of living organisms operate according to a different set of "rules" than physics - the rules of biology. At the same time, all biological phenomena act consistent with our understanding of physics.

If you're ever bored :rofl: perhaps you would be interested in "playing along" with it. "For the sake of argument, let's say you're right..." I don't know how to finis — Patterner

I don’t know if you’ve paid much attention to any of my posts. If you had you would find I am obsessed with metaphysics and the difference between metaphysics and everyday knowledge of the world, including science. As I understand it, what you are talking about is exactly that - metaphysics. And for me, metaphysics is not about what’s true or false, it’s about what is a useful way to think about things.

It doesn’t seem to me that kind of a discussion is really what you’re looking for in this thread.

I think we ought to consider that what we know as the Universe, is a construction of human minds, and as such it was created with purpose. What modern physics demonstrates to us is that much of reality is far beyond our grasp, not even perceptible to us. What we take to be the Universe, the model we make, is formed and shaped by usefulness and purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

I really like your post. I guess it helps that I agree with you on just about everything, but I don’t know that I could have expressed it as clearly as you have.

↪jorndoe I'd already avoided saying that. — Banno

You’re just jealous because I think @jorndoe is cute too.

In short: Consciousness is subjective experience. I have heard that wording more than any other, but I prefer Annaka Harris' "felt experience". I think feeling is what it all means. When Nagel asks "What is it like to be a bat?", the question is really: "What does it feel like to be a bat?" Not how does it feel physically, although that may be a part of it. Not how does it feel emotionally, although that may be a part of it. It's the overall feeling of being. — Patterner

I like your thread a lot. My biggest gripe when it comes to discussions about consciousness is that people never get around to defining what they really mean. It pleases me that you’ve been so careful to do that.

A rock experiences being a rock. What does that entail? Well, not much, from my point of view. A rock doesn't have any mental characteristics or processes. It doesn't think about being a rock. It doesn't have memories of being a rock. It doesn't have preferences of any sort, to any degree, in regards to anything. It doesn't have perceptions, of itself or anything other than itself. It doesn't even have any activity that's what we think of as purely physical. No part of a rock is moving relative to any other part of the rock. If a rock is scratched, the discussion of its experience of the scratch begins and ends with the simple fact that it was scratched. The rock's experience of its existence is different after the scratch, because some of it was scraped away. But there is no discussion of the rock being scratched, because it has no memory, thought, or feeling of the event. — Patterner

I especially like this. It’s not that I agree with it. It’s just the clarity you’ve put into saying what you mean. You’ve made me feel a little bit of what it might feel like to be rock.

For those who want to argue the premise, I won't be participating. — Patterner

Since I can’t really buy into your premise, I won’t be participating anymore. But I did want you to know how much I appreciate what you’ve put into this.

Odd. That ↑ comment looked like a (low-quality) hand-wave to me. — jorndoe

Oh. @jorndoe. You’re so cute.

@Banno