Consider a computer image let's say 100 by 100 pixels, black and white so 10,000 bits. There are a lot of different ways this can be ordered; I will consider one simple one, where the bottom half is a repeat of the top half. It is surely immediately clear, that the information content is halved? — unenlightened

If the same image is repeated twice, then I suppose the same information is presented twice. But the correct comparision is between any image and random number of pixels with no image. Isn't it the case that the latter contains, and therefore conveys, no information?

Energy dissipates, disorder/information increases — unenlightened

Maximal order is minimal total information — unenlightened

How does that follow? Information is ordered, isn't it?

I don’t believe Trump will be eligible to run, but we’ll see. Two of the big trials are early ‘24, plus the 14th Amendment cases in progress now. Trump may lead in the polls but these legal factors may, ahem, trump them.

I believe Biden will run, but next in line is Kamala Harris if he doesn’t (as Gavin Newsom said).

If some Republican other than a MAGA fanatic were to win, that wouldn’t be a bad outcome as far as I’m concerned. It’s Trump/MAGA that is a threat to the Republic.

To second you're later affirmation, to me it’s not so much the verbal abstractions which words conjure but the absence of adequate, preestablished meanings/abstractions in the languages of western cultures required to gain an accurate understanding of what these Indian philosophies in large part consist of. — javra

:100: That's all I was getting at. Sorry if I came off as self-righteous.

If he gets forced out at the convention in favor of someone like Newsom, nobody will shed a tear. — RogueAI

The problem with that theory is that nominations close real soon now, and Newsom is not on the ballot. He's also declared a number of times he's not running (e.g. here). There's a lot of bullshit being thrown around about Biden being senile or mentally incompetent. Granted, he's never projected well on the podium - nobody could call him a great orator - but he's quite competent, and the scuttlebutt around his age is just part of the Republican disinformation machine. It's still staggering to me, not to mention extremely dissappointing, that Trump is even considered a candidate, but I'll save that for the other thread.

Hi and welcome to the forum. You've picked a fascinating topic! Off the top of my head some titles that come to mind:

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Howard Bloom. (I'd run that one by your thesis supervisor first.)

Also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self; Richard Sorabji, Self; Richard Carey, Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self.

I mean, if you say as a philosophical proposition, that the self doesn't exist, it will often generate a hostile reaction, on the one hand (what nonsense, I'm completely aware of my own existence) or nihilism ("oh, you mean nothing is real?"). There's a very succinct illustration of this very tendency in one of the early Buddhist texts, wherein the 'wanderer Vachagotta' approaches the Buddha and asks whether the self is real. The entire dialogue is as below:

Then the wanderer Vacchagotta went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, exchanged courteous greetings with him. After an exchange of friendly greetings & courtesies, he sat to one side. As he was sitting there he asked the Blessed One: "Now then, Venerable Gotama, is there a self?"

When this was said, the Blessed One was silent.

"Then is there no self?"

A second time, the Blessed One was silent.

Then Vacchagotta the wanderer got up from his seat and left.

Then, not long after Vacchagotta the wanderer had left, Ven. Ananda said to the Blessed One, "Why, lord, did the Blessed One not answer when asked a question by Vacchagotta the wanderer?"

"Ananda, if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of eternalism [the view that there is an eternal, unchanging soul]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, that would be conforming with those brahmans & contemplatives who are exponents of annihilationism [the view that death is the annihilation of consciousness]. If I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is a self — were to answer that there is a self, would that be in keeping with the arising of knowledge that all phenomena are not-self?"

"No, lord."

"And if I — being asked by Vacchagotta the wanderer if there is no self — were to answer that there is no self, the bewildered Vacchagotta would become even more bewildered: 'Does the self I used to have now not exist?'" — Ananda Sutta

Vachagotta is a character who appears in several of the Buddhist texts and who asks philosophical questions - whether the soul and body are one, whether the world began to exist, whether the Buddha continues to exist after death. Such questions are generally classed as unanswerable or inadmissible (this is where the 'no metaphysics' reputation of the Buddha comes from.) Vaccha represents philosophical perplexity. In the end, though, as described in another of the dialogues, his doubts are overcome and he takes refuge in the Sangha.

I interpret the refusal to answer the question with a straight-out yes or no as a recognition that there is something that Vacchagotta has to understand or gain insight into, that he doesn't yet see, such that either answer will be misleading to him. (This brief verse, by the way, is said by many to be the origin of the Madhyamaka philosophy of Buddhism.)

Are you, for example, suggesting that I’ve reduced these philosophical principles to words by talking about them on a philosophy forum, thereby depriving them of meaning? — javra

No, not you, just a general observation. Your statements are not at all erroneous, they're very accurate. I'm commenting on general tendency to try and understand these kinds of philosophies through verbal abstractions, that's all.

If the things-in-themselves are completely unintelligible, then I honestly no reason to believe they exist in the first place (since I no longer think it is possible to prove that I have a representative faculty transcendentally and the empirical evidence for it presupposes various forms like logic and math, which I allegedly cannot assume of the things-in-themselves). — Bob Ross

The issue I see with that criticism, is that it reads too much into what Kant intends with the term 'thing in itself'. He's not positing a set of 'unknowable things', which we will forever fail to see. That reading imparts an apparent urgency to trying to 'peek behind the curtain' and see what the mysterious things in themselves really are.

I've quoted this from an online primer on Kant before, but I think it provides a better idea of his intention:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble. — Emrys Westacott

Mind-independent empirical nature for Husserl is this relative product of constitution, a mere hypothesis. — Joshs

By investing the objective domain with a mind-independent status, as if it exists independently of any mind, we absolutize it. — Wayfarer

The attempt to conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possible evidence, the two being related to one another merely externally by a rigid law, is nonsensical ~ Husserl.

That could have come directly from the lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda in the other thread, 'The Indisputable Self'.

As far as I can best currently discern, Hinduism considers this pure awareness the “true self” whereas Buddhism considers it “non-self” (which I find relative to how the term “self” gets understood) but both these expressions seem to me to address the same notion of a pure awareness devoid of I-ness in which samsura is done away with in full. — javra

I think if these principles are reduced to words, then there's a risk of them loosing their meaning. Indian philosophies are sādhanā, spiritual disciplines, ways of being. There are parallels to that in the recent re-discovery of the practice of stocism and Pierre Hadot's 'philosophy as a way of life'. I don't want to come across all holier-than-thou, I have mainly failed to bring any form of sādhanā to fruition, although at least I learned from the effort that there is more to it than words.

I'm afraid it all looks like physics envy, allied to loose use of metaphor. — unenlightened

Speaking of metaphor.....

Only if one elects to remain ignorant as to what biologists mean by natural selection. — wonderer1

Interesting that one of the first mentions of the term in the linked article encloses it in quotations:

The likelihood of these traits being 'selected' and passed down are determined by many factors.

In the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote:

It may be metaphorically said that Natural Selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the improvement of each organic being.” (1876 ed., 68-69)

(Emphasis added). It's a metaphor, yet at the same time central to the theory. I think this lives on in the popular mind where we speak of the 'wonders' of evolution, as if evolution itself were an agent, when in reality, the only agents in the frame are organisms themselves.

It’s hard to impart the flavour of it by trying to summarise it. I did take the time to watch that lecture, and I feel it was worth it, as he conveys the sense of what the OP is getting at.

besides, one doesn't have to sit through the whole thing to get the flavour of the presentation. Since this thread opened, I've listened to a little of Swami-ji's talks, he's a good speaker, and quite a versatile thinker. Profile here.

The problem is, so far as science knows, awareness is dependent on the body. If the body dies it looses awareness of all kinds — Wayfarer

In the above lecture, this objection is answered at 38:00 (with explicit reference to 'the hard problem of consciousness').

The lecturer I had in Indian Philosophy used to say that in the West, when someone dies, we say 'he's given up the ghost'. In the East, when someone dies, they say 'he's given up the body'.

I would have thought that in philosophy, one ought to understand what is to be refuted. I can perfectly understand your lack of interest in the subject, but then there are plenty of other threads.

The problem with this OP, as I already said, is that the contributor who introduced it, has insufficient knowledge to defend it. Were it presented by a Vedantin there are answers to the various challenges posed to it, but it requires extensive knowledge of the tradition from which one isolated idea has been taken.

To which end, hereunder a recent lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda, who is the current director of the Vedanta Society, mentioned in the OP. I find him a very charming lecturer, and he seems knowledgeable of philosophy both Eastern and Western (notice he quotes David Hume in the first couple of minutes of this lecture.)

@Joshs I copied in this passage from the thread in which you provided it as it has relevance here:

The question

Is the existence of the world absolutely or only relatively real? — Joshs

Introduces a passage from Husserl:

Now, however, we must not fail to clarify expressly the
fundamental and essential distinction between transcendental­ phenomenological idealism versus that idealism against which realism battles as against its forsworn opponent. Above all: phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly. Its sole task and accomplishment is to clarify the sense of this world, precisely the sense in which everyone accepts it - and rightly so - as actually existing. That the world exists, that it is given as existing universe in uninterrupted experience which is constantly fusing into universal concordance, is entirely beyond doubt. But it is quite another matter to understand this indubitability which sustains life and positive science and to clarify the ground of its legitimacy.

In this regard, it is a fundamental of philosophy, according to the expositions in the text of the Ideas, that the continual prog­ression of experience in this form of universal concordance is a mere presumption, even if a legitimately valid one, and that consequently the non-existence of the world ever remains think­able, notwithstanding the fact that it was previously, and now still is, actually given in concordant experience. The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of any conceivable real world at all, is that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is "irrelative" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due,namely, to the fact that it can have its sense as being only as an intentional sense-formation of transcendental subjectivity. Natural life, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its "naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection. — Husserl, Ideas II

Here I illustrate some convergences between Mind-Created World and Husserl's 'phenomenological idealism':

He distinguishes subjective and phenomenological idealism:

...phenomenological idealism does not deny the actual existence of the real world (in the first place, that means nature), as if it maintained that the world were mere semblance, to which natural thinking and the positive sciences would be subject, though unwittingly...

As do I:

...there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — The Mind-Created World

Then he introduces the transcendental subject:

...the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity.

Which corresponds with:

But what we know of its existence is inextricably bound by and to the mind we have, and so, in that sense, reality is not straightforwardly objective. It is not solely constituted by objects and their relations. Reality has an inextricably mental aspect, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. — The Mind-Created World

The 'inextricably mental aspect' I am referring to is the transcendental subject.

What am I missing that they are saying? — unenlightened

that none of this is implied by or can be justified on the basis of currently-understood natural law, which they quote at the head of the paper. As you no doubt recall, the second law of thermodynamics has it that entropy always increases, the total order of a system decreases. Here is a proposal to explain why despite this, the total information density (a measure of order) of the universe increases. At least that is my gloss on it. (I stalled at the section with the equations, as always :yikes: )

So I am wondering how this new law of physics can be distinguished from a drunkards walk of evolution that simply explores the whole space of the possible in a random undirected way? — unenlightened

It's not a proposed law of physics, as such, but of nature, more generally. They're attempting to identity what disparate complex phenomena have in common, what are the principles that lead to the growth of complexity and information-encoding capacity in very different kinds of systems where an “evolving system” is a "collective phenomenon of many interacting components that displays a temporal increase in diversity, distribution, and patterned behavior."

The new work presents a modern addition — a macroscopic law recognizing evolution as a common feature of the natural world’s complex systems, which are characterised as follows:

* They are formed from many different components, such as atoms, molecules, or cells, that can be arranged and rearranged repeatedly
* Are subject to natural processes that cause countless different arrangements to be formed
* Only a small fraction of all these configurations survive in a process called “selection for function.” — Commentary

There's more to it than "stuff happens".

Something that occurs to me, though, is that 'selection' is a transitive verb. It implies a sense of agency - that something is doing the selecting. I'll have to think about that some more.

The body changes slower but changes nonetheless. Awareness seems to be the only possible candidate for an enduring, relatively unchanging self. — Art48

The problem is, so far as science knows, awareness is dependent on the body. If the body dies it looses awareness of all kinds. Philosophically speaking the case has to be made that something about awareness transcends the physical body.

Incidentally it is just this claim of the changelessness of the self that is denied by the Buddha.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'chance occurrence' here — flannel jesus

Look up a book called Chance and Necessity: An Essay in the Natural Philosophy of Biology, Jacques Monod. He was a Nobel prize winning biochemist, and that book, published 1970, articulates the argument that life arises as a consequence of pure chance. It's a very tightly-argued book and quite influential. '...chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution..'

That's what I mean by 'chance occurence'. It is not at all unique to Monod, although he articulated it very thoroughly. But you find many similar ideas in 20th century thought.

Most biologists, I'm pretty sure, think life was pretty likely to occur somewhere in this universe, at some time, — flannel jesus

It's actually not as straightforward as it seems. There is a concept called the protein hyperspace. Proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids that fold into complex three-dimensional structures. The process of folding is determined by the sequence of amino acids and their chemical interactions. Because there are 20 standard amino acids, the number of possible combinations and resulting structures for even a small protein is astronomically high—hence a "hyperspace" of potential structures. But of these, only a minute fraction of possible formations can form viable proteins. If it were a matter of pure chance, there is not enough time in the history of the cosmos for all of them to be formed, so if left to chance alone, the chances of them forming are astronomically slight. There are other similar anomolies cosmology and biology. It doesn't mean 'god did it', but it does throw shade on the appeal to chance as any kind of formative hypothesis. I think Monod's kind of argument only makes sense as a counter to a rather simplistic form of creationist theory - that pure chance and deliberate intention are the only two possibilities available.

What's the alternative? That there's a being deliberately guiding the whole process? — flannel jesus

That's the kind of dichotomy underlying the whole debate. Obviously it's a vexed issue and the source of many arguments, and I have hashed it out here for many years. I will say I'm reasonably conversant with scientific cosmology and evolutionary biology and would never challenge the empirical facts of the matter. But there's also the meaning of the facts to consider. In the case of evolution, we're not only the objects of analysis, we're also subjects of experience, and there is more to human existence than what is determined solely by biology. I do say from time to time that in some vital sense h. sapiens transcends biology, by being able to grasp domains of being that are not perceivable by simpler organisms. You can call that a religious sentiment if you like, but it's not aligned with any type of creation theory.

To go back to the article in the OP (still haven't finished it yet!), as I think I mentioned, I'm quite interested in the hypothesis of 'orthogenesis'. This is the theory that evolution has an overall direction - towards greater intelligence, say. It is widely viewed as discredited, but I wonder how you would validate or falsify such an hypothesis. But I do consider the idea that the evolution of rational sentient beings is in some sense purposeful - doesn't mean that some super-designer set out to execute a plan.

Abilities like being able to outrun, outclimb, outhink... tend to be adaptive. Why would you think otherwise? — wonderer1

Adaption to the environment is a different thing to general intelligence. General intelligence may provide for greater versatility, but it saying that is all that it does rather sells it short.

I know evolutionary biology quite well, but it’s also often used in support of philosophical arguments that are well beyond the scope of the theory itself. Although you would have to have some appreciation of philosophy, as distinct from science, to appreciate that, I expect.

I’ve always felt that the idea that life, or for that matter cosmic order, is a chance occurrence is a profoundly unscientific attitude. After all, every field of science is concerned with establishing lawful relations between cause and effect. The difference with philosophy is that it is concerned with the notion of causation in a general sense - what is causation apart from observable instances of cause and effect (the shadow of Hume looms here). Because causation in that sense not amenable to empirical investigation, it’s ruled out of bounds as ‘unjustifiable metaphysical speculation.’ There may be specific causal relationships and chains of physical causation, but causation in any deeper sense is another matter.

I’ve often felt like asking, is the idea that evolutionary biology tends towards higher levels of intelligence within the scope of evolutionary theory? I discussed this on the previous forum at some length and the response was always dismissive. It seems to be, ‘sure, evolution happened to produce h. Sapiens, but it also gave rise to many other species and kinds of life that have persisted across far greater time-scales.’ Again the idea is that of fortuitous origins, and again I fail to see how that is justified by science. I think it more likely reflects the ‘conflict thesis’ of Victorian culture than anything in science itself.

One of the news items on the article says

Regardless of whether the system is living or nonliving, when a novel configuration works well and function improves, evolution occurs.

It seems implicitly value-laden (and, so, teleological) - what does ‘well’ mean, in this context? What is ‘an improvement’? Why is it that persistence of increased complexity is a desideratum? If so, who wants it? It seems to imply ‘working towards an outcome’. It’s very much like Schopenhauer’s ‘blind will’.

Tibetan Buddhists have a language of words only they can understand, — Astrophel

That would be 'Tibetan', would it not? Augmented by knowledge of the Tibetan canon and oral traditions.

When we observe the world and its phenomena, the metaphysics is not on the other side, so to speak, of what is witnessed, impossible to reach perceptually, but making for sound and necessary postulation. Rather, the radically "other" lies undisclosed, as if forgotten, IN what appears. Kant's "concepts without (sensory) intuitions and empty; intuitions without concepts are blind" rests on the assumption that normal, ordinary apprehensions of the world are all that can constitute experience, and the idea that the noumenal was identical to the phenomenal was entirely lost on him. — Astrophel

I can see we're going to go deep in the long grass here.

It wasn't that this distinction was lost on him, but that in his philosophy, the terms signify different aspects of the world. He uses pheomena in the standard sense as 'what appears'. Noumena is a different matter and a source of both controversy and confusion. First, etymology - 'noumenal' means 'an object of nous', which is usually translated as 'intellect' albeit with different connotations to the modern equivalent. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy says "Platonic Ideas and Forms are noumena, and phenomena are things displaying themselves to the senses... This dichotomy is the most characteristic feature of Plato's dualism; that noumena and the noumenal world are objects of the highest knowledge, truths, and values is Plato's principal legacy to philosophy."

But Schopenhauer pointed out that Kant's use of 'noumenal' was completely different to the previous usage:

The difference between abstract and intuitive cognition, which Kant entirely overlooks, was the very one that ancient philosophers indicated as φαινόμενα [phainomena] and νοούμενα [nooumena]; the opposition and incommensurability between these terms proved very productive in the philosophemes of the Eleatics, in Plato's doctrine of Ideas, in the dialectic of the Megarics, and later in the scholastics, in the conflict between nominalism and realism. This latter conflict was the late development of a seed already present in the opposed tendencies of Plato and Aristotle. But Kant, who completely and irresponsibly neglected the issue for which the terms φαινομένα and νοούμενα were already in use, then took possession of the terms as if they were stray and ownerless, and used them as designations of things in themselves and their appearances. — WWR p556

That introduces the further complication of the 'ding an sich' (thing in itself) and the vexed question of whether that is the same as, or different to, the noumenal. And one last confusion, that of the conflation between the noumenal and the numinous, which sound similar, but which come from entirely different roots and have very different meanings, albeit with a kind of overlap (in that the noumenal is sometimes conflated with the numinous, which means 'the holy'.)

That said, I'm *kind of* getting what you mean by this question:

how does one step out of language to affirm this cup which has a presence that is clearly not at all language? — Astrophel

That is what I tried to previously compare with the Buddhist 'suchness' or 'tathata' and also the scholastic 'quiddity'. There are some similarities, although also great divergences, in that both seek to articulate the 'true nature' (Buddhist) or 'essence' (scholasticism) of things. (I checked it against ChatGPT, you can review it here.)

I agree with this depiction of the 'thing in itself' from an online primer on Kant:

Kant's introduced the concept of the “thing in itself” to refer to reality as it is independent of our experience of it and unstructured by our cognitive constitution. The concept was harshly criticized in his own time and has been lambasted by generations of critics since. A standard objection to the notion is that Kant has no business positing it given his insistence that we can only know what lies within the limits of possible experience. But a more sympathetic reading is to see the concept of the “thing in itself” as a sort of placeholder in Kant's system; it both marks the limits of what we can know and expresses a sense of mystery that cannot be dissolved, the sense of mystery that underlies our unanswerable questions. Through both of these functions it serves to keep us humble.

So all that said, I think I see where you're going with this line, but there are other issues (which I'll leave aside for now.)

News organizations have turned Biden’s age (granted, a legitimate concern) into the equivalent of a scandal. In story after story, headline after headline, they emphasize not his administration’s accomplishments, but the fact that he’s 80. A New York Times headline during his recent diplomatic mission to Asia epitomized this, turning the president’s joke about jet lag into an impression of a doddering fool: “‘It is evening, isn’t it?’ An 80-Year-Old President’s Whirlwind Trip.” Ian Millhiser of Vox nailed the problem: “I worry the ‘Biden is old’ coverage is starting to take on the same character as the 2016 But Her Emails coverage – find something that is genuinely suboptimal about the Democratic candidate and dwell on it endlessly to ‘balance’ coverage of the criminal in charge of the GOP.”

The evidence-free Biden impeachment efforts in the House of Representatives are presented to news consumers without sufficient context. In the first round of headlines last week, most news outlets simply reported what speaker Kevin McCarthy was doing as if it were completely legitimate – the result of his likely high crimes and misdemeanors. The Washington Post presented it seriously: “Kevin McCarthy directs House committees to open formal Biden impeachment inquiries,” adding in a credulous line: “The inquiry will center on whether President Biden benefited from his son’s business dealings … ” No hint of what is really happening here. In this case, the New York Times was a welcome exception: “McCarthy, Facing an Ouster and a Shutdown, Orders an Impeachment Inquiry.” That’s more like it.

Trump continues to be covered mostly as an entertaining sideshow – his mugshot! His latest insults! – not a perilous threat to democracy, despite four indictments and 91 charges against him, and despite his own clear statements that his re-election would bring extreme anti-democratic results; he would replace public servants with the cronies who’ll do his bidding. “We will look back on this and wish more people had understood that Biden is our bulwark of democratic freedoms and the alternative is worse than most Americans can imagine,” commented Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongmen, and an expert in authoritarian regimes. — The Guardian

And one more - the disgraceful attacks on electoral officers by Team Trump and the MAGA thugs. If the anti-democratic efforts of MAGA aren’t obvious enough in their continued defence of the Jan 6th outrage. Electoral officers are generally just administrators and office workers who, you would think, would be admired for their role in tending to the system of democratic governance, instead of being threatened, harassed and fired for their efforts. The story concerns one who is fighting back through a lawsuit, more strength to her.

Here's the link to the very nicely formatted .pdf of the paper.

I was sceptical first up, but having started to read it, I'm coming around to it.

Headline could be: 'Scientists Discover Logos!'

I think reason like empiricism has its limits. And using reason to justify reason's sovereignty is, naturally, circular. — Tom Storm

But as Nagel says, the buck has to stop somewhere. Unless, that is, you take necessary statements as contingent! That's where the circularity enters the picture.

How would we demonstrate either? — Tom Storm

I suggest you would have to deploy reason in support of an argument, and that it's a logical argument, not necessarily requiring empirical validation.

Strange, to think of laws of logic as discoveries or the results of evolution. — Banno

I didn't say they were. I asked the rhetorical question, can such principles be considered a consequence of evolutionary development. The reason being the claim of the role of 'human cognition' in deriving truth statements - that everything we know is dependent on our cognitive capacities. I'm trying to demonstrate that there are things we grasp - quite fundamental things - which are not dependent on our cognitive apparatus, which are grasped by reason.

At back of all this there is a distinction between the unconditioned and the contingent. I think that is a large part of what metaphysics was concerned with, and that it has mainly dropped out of the dialogue, nowadays.

I don't see how we can make that claim since knowledge of such principles are predicated on human understanding and cognitive processes. — Tom Storm

Does the law of identity, or the law of the excluded middle, begin to exist as a consequence of biological evolution? Or are they principles that are discovered by a being that is sufficiently evolved to grasp them?

The only form that genuine reasoning can take consists in seeing the validity of the arguments, in virtue of what they say. As soon as one tries to step outside of such thoughts, one loses contact with their true content. And one cannot be outside and inside them at the same time: If one thinks in logic, one cannot simultaneously regard those thoughts as mere psychological dispositions, however caused or however biologically grounded. If one decides that some of one's psychological dispositions are, as a contingent matter of fact, reliable methods of reaching the truth (as one may with perception, for example), then in doing so one must rely on other thoughts that one actually thinks, without regarding them as mere dispositions. One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. By this I mean not that there must be some premises that are forever unrevisable but, rather, that in any process of reasoning or argument there must be some thoughts that one simply thinks from the inside--rather than thinking of them as biologically programmed dispositions. — Thomas Nagel

Thanks! I'll look into that.

But you never leave the world of human cognition, which holds the scheme of understanding by which this makes sense and can be employed. The logical absolutes are not a view from nowhere. — Tom Storm

That's where the distinction between intelligible and sensible objects is relevant. To quote Einstein, 'I cannot prove scientifically that Truth must be conceived as a Truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man.' But it is something that can only be grasped by a rational intellect. As Bertrand Russell remarks in his comments on universals, that 'universals are not thoughts, but they appear as thoughts.' Why? Because they're again only discernable by reason. Due to the empiricist prejudices of modern culture, I maintain we've lost sight of the significance of that.

This goes back a long, long way in philosophy. For the Greeks, nous (the rational intellect) was that faculty in us which allowed us to perceive the logic of the cosmos, the domain of universal truth. Now, of course, it's just the evolutionary adaptation of an advanced hominid, mainly considered for its usefulness. ;-)

But since we only have our possible world to go by, how do we know that the logical absolutes, for instance, transcend our world? — Tom Storm

By rational argument. That some fundamental logical principles must obtain in order for a world to exist in the first place.

I don't think you can justify 'must be the case'. You can presuppose it. You can wish it. But can you say it must be true? — Tom Storm

Isn't there a connection between metaphysics and the domain of necessary truth? I am thinking of the idea that 'there are things which are true in all possible worlds'. Logical principles and arithmetical proofs are often included under that heading. That idea is associated with Leibniz, and also with the principle of sufficient reason, which is precisely concerned with the reason why things are the way they are. (But then, of course, Leibniz' style of metaphysics was one of Kant's targets of criticism.)

In contemporary terms, all such ideas as principles of sufficient reason and the domain of necessary truths are regarded as outmoded ways of thought. But then, I ask, on what authority are such judgements made? This is why I've become interested in neo-thomism and contemporary Aristotelian philosophers who make the case for a revisionist form of metaphysics in full awareness of the scientific worldview and of Kant's criticism of metaphysics. 'Philosophy', as one of those neo-thomists said, 'always manages to bury its undertakers'.

Yes as I noted in my second response, my first might have been hasty, and I'm now reading the actual paper. :yikes:

The Lincoln Project pulling no punches.

The issue here is principally how one can establish what is the case in the world at the level of philosophy, the most basic level, without an analytic of the structure of the relation between the known and the knower. — Astrophel

:100:

Put another way, a metaphysic is a statement of what must be the case, in order for the world to be as it is. Most analytical philosophy deprecates such endeavours, on the grounds that the world is all that is the case. Hence leading to relativism and subjectivism:

it pleases some of us to 'find' meaning, and others not to find meaning. — Tom Storm

Is it possible Kant was just a Platonist? — Gregory

There is continuity between Plato and Kant. Plato's Forms or Ideas are intelligible structures that make sense of the sensible world, while Kant's categories of the understanding are a priori concepts that structure our experience.

Kant's categories were adapted in slightly modified form from Aristotle who was of course a (critical) student of Plato.

Both Plato and Kant posit that what we perceive with our senses is not the totality of things - for Plato, the sensory world is a shadow of a higher reality. Kant likewise argues that things-in-themselves (noumena) exist beyond our sensory experiences (phenomena), even though they are not directly knowable. Plato and Kant both maintain a close connection between knowledge and ethics - for Plato, knowledge of the Good is crucial for ethical behavior. Kant also sees moral action as connected to rationality and autonomy, asserting that ethical conduct arises from practical reason.

Both emphasize the role of reason as a crucial faculty for understanding. Plato's rationalism is evident in his theory of recollection and the ascent to true knowledge, while Kant's critical philosophy is an investigation into the powers and limits of pure reason, but again with a strong emphasis on the a priori elements of knowledge, arguably inherited from Plato.

In both Plato's "Republic" and Kant there's the ideal of the philosopher as a mediator between the intelligible and sensible worlds, someone who, through reason, can guide others or even society toward a better state (for example Kant's famous essay What Is Enlightenment?) But it's also important not to downplay the way in which Kant differed from Plato, particularly in his rejection of the idea of the intuitive, direct knowledge of the Forms - it would overstate the case to call Kant 'a Platonist' but there is discernable continuity between them.

The question is: if the mechanism by which complexity arises in bacteria evolution, autocatalysis, galaxy formation, ant hive construction, etc. is modeled similarly, doesn't that denote a larger general principle? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now you put it like that, I'm starting to see the point (and to be honest, I ought to have read more of the actual paper before responding.) It ties in with Wigner's 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics', does it not? And also with orthogenesis, it seems to me, which is said to have fallen out of favour, but which has always appealed to me.

I'll read the remainder of it before commenting further.

Americans do seem to tend to have a real antipathy toward Darwin. Not just the religious fundamentalists. — Danno

I have an antipathy towards neo-darwinian materialism, which draws many existential conclusions about life from scientific conjecture about its development (the subject of Thomas Nagel's 2011 book Mind and Cosmos). I have never had any doubt about the reality of evolution - I grew up on the superb Time Life books on naturalism in the 1960's - but I don't much like the role that neo-Darwinian theory, when allied with philosophical materialism, occupies in contemporary culture. But I'll admit, one of the reasons for my initial reaction to the paper was 'oh no, yet more darwinism' - in the sense that 'natural selection' seems to be a kind of omnibus principle that is now taken as a kind of master hypothesis. (There's been theory around called 'quantum darwinism' for some time already.)

Given that some neural processes experience qualia... — Danno

Bear in mind 'neural processes' do not experience anything, as they're not subjects of experience. It is an example of the 'mereological fallacy' which arises when you mistakenly ascribe to the properties of individual components of a complex system attributes which are only properly characteristic of the whole. The point about qualia (which is actually a rather unpleasant piece of academic jargon for 'qualities of experience') is that they are real for subjects, and not in any other sense.

You know, there's an old truism in science, 'a theory that explains everything explains nothing'. It suggests that if a theory is so broad and all-encompassing that it can be used to explain any observation or phenomenon, it may lack specificity and predictive power. In other words, a theory should be able to make testable predictions and provide a clear framework for understanding specific phenomena. If a theory can be stretched to explain anything, it becomes less useful as a scientific tool because it doesn't provide meaningful constraints or insights into the natural world. Good scientific theories are typically more precise and focused, allowing scientists to make specific predictions and test their validity through experimentation and observation.

How would 'the universe' be, if the observable increases in complexity that gave rise to matter and then to life didn't hold? I expect we would never be in a position to know, because it has to be as it is to give rise to the kinds of worlds that accomodate beings such as ourselves. On the other hand, it might have been more organised, or even less organised, but we would never be in a position to make an empirical judgement about the comparative degree of organisation in different universes, as we couldn't ever compare them.

Lord Martin Rees, whose book Just Six Numbers is a well-known popular book on the cosmological constants, said “Given an immense amount of space and time, and the laws of physics and chemistry, an expanding variety of materials, environments and structures will emerge in the inanimate world,” said Prof Martin Rees.

“But I don’t see that this need be a manifestation of any new underlying principle analogous to the role of Darwinian selection via inheritance in the biological world.”