My righteous efforts would amount to squat. — Janus

Sadly so. But also, you could look on the sunny side.

AI scrapes PF along with the rest. My own opinions are being quoted back to me as a source on my searches. So filling PF with more nonsense might be a friction that drags the almighty LLM down into the same pit of confusion.

Let's rally and bring AI down to our level!!! :strong:

What worries me is that the view that everything is hopeless is so useful to certain politicians and corporate interests who would like to rule without the rule of law. — Tom Storm

What worries me is that the urge to fight injustice moves out of the real world and into the realm of social media.

It was easy to be the young and angry standing against "the establishment". A lot of social change happened as a result of getting out in the streets with placards. And once the rational case against injustice had been made, the establishment relatively smoothly got behind a more progressive agenda. A positive democratic feedback loop was created. While also remaining in a real world of money, work and wars. A progressive agenda could be mounted across the board – but one that also still encountered the conservative agenda as the other it needed to work with.

Hippies got families and careers. Wherever they landed politically became the new collective norm.

But what happens instead when the world of work, money and wars becomes detached from this political process and all the youthful energy can only focus on identity politics as where the changes can be made – if you can organise this new supposedly democratic space of social media through cancel culture.

The millennials at least looked to the internet for its promise of social entrepreneurship. The chance to promote good causes that scaled. A way to fix the whole planet because any individual could make a big difference with a clever idea.

But the internet moved on. What was a medium for promoting social change became an algorithmic echo chamber that simply promoted polarised conservatism. Two fixed ideologies in mortal contest.

The autocratically minded political and corporate interests didn't have to steal anything away. They simply had to have the brazen gall to step confidently into the resulting power vacuum.

People haven't given up so much as they got homogenised. They lost their individualism to identity politics. The loss of democratic liberties is following along as no one is minding the shop.

What I’ve noticed is that many younger people these days seem to experience considerable anxiety and struggle to make decisions, and as a result, are often caught up in endless “what ifs.” — Tom Storm

Too many rewards bring with it the logical corollary of too many risks. If you can win, you could also lose.

So the question is whether risk and reward are being pragmatically balanced in the mental arithmetic of life.

The boomer generation was probably irrationally optimistic. What could go wrong? The current generation – probably more rationally now that they must live in the world the boomer's made – might be wondering, well, what could possibly go right? :grin:

Or indeed there is the simpler rebuttal available if – as I do – you accept Charlie Lineweaver as providing the most up to date big picture view of the Heat Death.

To use the analogy I made earlier in the thread, there is thermodynamics as the closed box of particles in some starting equilibrium state. Then the same box with the lid open and all the particles escaping. Well the third part of the story is the now empty box after all the particles have long gone.

So Wolfram seems to be stuck with the image of a closed box of particles. He doesn't really think about the fact that the Universe exists because it persists. It is forever expanding and cooling. The lid is sort of open on the box and the particles are sort of escaping. Or because the box expands, the particles are losing the energy of their interacting.

The capacity to do work that seemed there at the start – at the ultimately small and hot Planck scale which was the Big Bang's initial conditions – is steadily evaporating as all the box's contents are becoming increasingly disconnected.

Then as dark energy takes over as a relentless vacuum acceleration, the particles now actually all escape the box by being superluminally exported across the holographic cosmic event horizon. Any electron or proton that might escape being sucked into a black hole and fizzled to radiation will eventually find itself all alone in its own cosmic box. The only particle, or degree of gravitational freedom, in its Universe.

So not a lot of information to do any computing. And given time, effectively every lightcone volume of this post Heat Death reality – where there is only the residual holographic radiation being created by the continuing action of dark energy to disturb the perfect vacuum stillness – will be emptied out. Volumes with a particle will be themselves exceptionally rare.

Thus you can see Wolfram's error. He hasn't extrapolated the correct mathematical description of the Cosmos.

But not being a cosmologist is something that doesn't seem to bother him. The Universe he sees in his imagination is a place of computation. And not even computation as it is restricted under the laws of thermodynamics, let alone the laws of cosmological evolution.

Out of curiosity what are your thoughts on Wolfram's view on the second law and heat death? — Forgottenticket

Well, it certainly illustrates the idiocy of extrapolating the wrong maths.

One could start by considering the role that Maxwell’s Demon has played in the successful development of thermodynamic thought.

AI says:

Maxwell's demon is a thought experiment involving a hypothetical being that can seemingly defy the second law of thermodynamics by decreasing a system's entropy. The "demon" controls a tiny trapdoor in a partition separating gas molecules, allowing only faster, hotter molecules to pass to one side and slower, colder molecules to the other, which creates a temperature difference. The resolution to this paradox is that the demon must gather information about the molecules, and this information processing, especially the erasure of memory, has a thermodynamic cost that increases the total system's entropy, thereby upholding the second law.

And then there is Landauer’s principle.

AI says:

Landauer's principle is a fundamental physical principle in thermodynamics and information theory that states that there is a minimum theoretical amount of energy required to erase one bit of information. It was first proposed by Rolf Landauer in 1961.

The core idea is that "information is physical". Because information must be stored in a physical system, like a memory bit, it is subject to the laws of physics, including the laws of thermodynamics.
When a logically irreversible operation, such as erasing a bit of information, is performed, it causes a reduction of the information entropy in the system. To satisfy the second law of thermodynamics (which states that total entropy must never decrease in an isolated system), the lost information entropy must be expelled as heat into the environment, increasing the environment's thermodynamic entropy.

The minimum amount of energy that must be dissipated as heat during the erasure of one bit is known as the Landauer limit or Landauer bound.

One could mention Hilary Putnam’s posit - Does a rock implement every finite-state automaton?

Really there is a heap of stuff to counter Wolfram’s hype. When all is entropy, then by definition nothing is negentropy.

But a computer scientist finds it easy to believe that computation is real. Information is information even if it is not being read. A faulty extrapolation of the “does a tree that falls in the woods still make a noise?” conundrum.

This is just natural dialectic logic at work. Any move has to arise in the context of the counter move being possible. If you turn left, then you could have turned right. And now the agony of that counterfactuality has become apparent to you.

To make a choice is to move towards some goal, but then leave behind everything else that lies in the other direction. And yet you must move in some positive direction or else there is only a state of undifferentiated confusion. Which is of course worse.

If you can strike out one way, that also reveals the other way you could have gone. So there is at least the possible now of making a return. Except to the degree that irreversible changes have been made.

A smashed mirror is difficult to glue back together. The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies also to life.

So choices are necessarily counterfactual. But also frictional. To turn left or right might have the same cost. But to reverse that choice now adds a cost.

This would seem to be what would give pause to your thoughts. You can always have done the other thing. But you also can’t wind back time. And that makes life complicated. So full of choices. But also then so full of this kind of second guessing. The costs of living with the frictional consequences.

Because they're connected. Every element of the universe is an image of the universe itself. Elements project the universe, the universe projects its elements. — Copernicus

The relation would have to be an inverse one to connect what is local to what is global. And indeed, what is past and what is future.

If the current state of the Universe is a void with atoms, in what way are the elements an image of the dimensionality that contains them except as the antithesis? The inverse or the reciprocal?

Without contrast, nothing can exist. Only vagueness.

Even control or constraint only makes sense in the context of there being its absence. Which is why global constraints would be an “image” of the local freedoms, and those freedoms an image of the global constraints. Two opposing extremes fixed in a mutual balance.

Pure anything is what can’t exist as it instead what is needed to represent the bounding dichotomous limits of Being. Absolute order and absolute chaos define the boundaries as that which cannot be reached and so make existence the reality which arises in-between.

Or in Aristotelean terms, the actuality that arises out of the hylomorphic interaction of the potential and the necessary. Another way of talking about tychic spontaneity and synechic order or holistic continuity.

So I asked YOU on what you conclude as the fate of the cosmos. — Copernicus

Yeah. And I asked YOU why do you need to know?

What’s your actual thesis here and what level of answer could you indeed follow? The thread appeared to be a restatement of biosemiosis. Now what is it about?

Do you say it won’t or do you say it will? And on what grounds for either alternative.

If you just want to ask vague questions, let a chatbot be your friend. :up:

Take away all laws of physics or the natural order. That's true chaos. — Copernicus

Or true vagueness. True Apeiron. True Ungrund. And indeed true Chaos if you go right back to Hesiod.

And then, in jargon terms, there is modern maths that had to find a name for describing chance with a single boxed scale of being - Gaussian randomness. And after that, realised it needed a name with the right historical ring for unboxed randomness that was growing in its own self-organising or recursive multi scale fashion. What was called deterministic chaos to let you know that there was a seed of structure operating even though letting the particles escape seemed like some kind of pure unbound wildness.

In the end, there is always structure, even if its the most minimal notion of structure. Or indeed, this is precisely what exists at the beginning. Structure is what emerges from a state of “pure everythingness” - a vagueness, an Apeiron - as chaos can’t help already being the source of its own limitation.

So what is more unstructured than even the suddenly unlidded box of randomised particles headed off on their now individual random walks? You might add derivatives terms, such as a dark energy, that exponentialises things. An acceleration of the random walking. A more chaotic state than just inertia.

The Universe seems to have thought of that trick too. But is that an addition of order or disorder. Is dark energy - being an energy density under cosmology’s FLWR equation of state - an entropy term or a negentropy one?

Gets tricky again.

That's entropy. — Copernicus

Well non-extensive entropy, perhaps. Tsallis entropy rather than Boltzmann-Gibbs entropy. And still a touchy issue.

Any large-scale or permanent chaos would doom the universe. — Copernicus

Explain further.

The Universe is only doomed if you think that the Heat Death is an existential disaster rather than the entropic gradient we get to ride.

In my book, the Universe is busy constructing the very heat sink it is thrown itself down into. So you can flip the script and call the final large, cold and dead max ent condition the destiny rather than the dooming of all things possible.

We are part of the Cosmos to the degree we participate in that project. That is the biosemiotic thesis. Life and mind arise as dissipative structure. Organismic dissipative structure evolving on top of the cosmic dissipative structure.

The big picture 
In summary, the theory that entanglement entropy gives rise to spacetime proposes a revolutionary reversal of our conventional understanding: 
From geometry to information: Instead of spacetime being a fundamental backdrop in which quantum mechanics operates, the geometry of spacetime and even its existence are determined by the patterns of quantum entanglement within a more fundamental, information-based reality.
A computational universe: The universe can be viewed as a massive, continuous quantum computation, where spacetime, time, and gravity are the emergent macroscopic consequences of how information is processed and entangled at the quantum level. — PoeticUniverse

Yep. But you see how the urge to collapse the holism of holography to some new form of reductionism shows itself once again. A Bayseian prior that most can't escape.

As soon as you discover the dichotomy – as in AdS/CFT – you must collapse it to a story where one is more fundamental than the other. One is baseline and the other emerges.

But I'm saying that it is instead the complementary limits on Being that emerge. The dichotomies or symmetry breaking is what it is about all the way down.

Besides, AdS/CFT has the fatal problem that it is anti-de Sitter spacetime and not de Sitter spacetime. And the Universe is de Sitter by observation. It even has the dark energy to prove it. A rather empirical constraint on the rational speculation.

But string theory still has hopes this keeps it going. One last swing for the stands. :grin:

Empirical data says chaos exists. You argue otherwise. — Copernicus

It really is a silly concept when you really think about it (clearly). — punos

Randomness – as physical degrees of freedom or a count of entropy content – only exists within a context of constraint. A system must be closed and thus able to reach its equilibrium balance in some way.

So pure randomness and pure chaos are rather meaningless terms. We can however speak of Gaussian distributions and powerlaw distribution as what we can measurably assert about real world systems.

A completely random system, like an ideal gas, is what an equilibrium system such as a box of freely moving particles looks like when its lid is closed and the particle momentum has averaged out to have a Gaussian distribution.

A completely chaotic system is then what became the term for a fractal, scalefree, or otherwise powerlaw distribution. A log/log process rather than merely a normal/normal process. A process that grows in its randomness in a doubling~halving or expanding~diluting fashion as now it is the same box of particles, it is just that the lid has been lifted and all the particles have started wandered off. The probability of finding them and ever rounding them up again has become powerlaw unlikely.

So empirical data finds real world distributions that range between simple boxed freedom and simple unboxed freedom.

Geological growth processes like river branching and mountain range building tend to attract to the fractal end of this spectrum. Many other more complex processes, like stock market fluctuations and city size, are log-normal – the skewed long tail distribution.

It all gets a bit messy as the real world is always somewhere inbetween these two extremes of being absolutely closed and absolutely open. Purely Gaussian random, or purely Powerlaw chaotic.

But the point is we have mathematical theory to frame our gut notion of randomness/chaos. The maths gives the simple image of the opposing extremes of what can be the case. A box of particles that is closed and not spreading or cooling in any fashion. And a box of particles that is open, so is spreading and cooling its contents in freely growing fashion.

Then Nature strikes up some balance that works for it somewhere inbetween.

Not so uninteresting as some. — Banno

Yes. You measure your worth in mentions. What could be more cringe?

So sure, take Maxwell's equations and apply gauge symmetry, and "the answer just jumps out"; but don't then claim that the theory is ex nihilo; it used Maxwell's equations and gauge symmetry. — Banno

Exactly. Which was the point. :up:

There were the Bayesian priors. And they could be well chosen for a reason. The answer might have lain anywhere. But it became tightly constrained to a somewhere.

A community of inquiry exploring a new physical paradigm – quantum theory – had to reconcile it with another newish paradigm – relativity – and this combo of priors drove it rapidly to the only logically self-consistent outcome possible. Quantum field theory.

Maths – or at least algebraic geometry and matrix multiplication – was discovered to be "unreasonably effective". A level of theory so robust that even its observables were determined. Establish the symmetry and its symmetry breakings came with it. Something that seemed like Platonic magic.

A trick that folk like string theorists have been trying to repeat to reach their goal of a total symmetrification of existence in terms of quantum gravity as the final theory of everything. But something went wrong. Physics had made its extraordinary leap pursuing one uber-paradigm – the merger of two quite contradictory seeming paradigms – and then stalled.

A huge army of the best minds found themselves bashing their heads against a new wall. Symmetry had turned into the enemy when the moment came to make the last push and assimilate general relativity to quantum field theory (that being the Bayesian prior that felt right to the particle physics community, having already worked so splendidly with special relativity being assimilated to quantum mechanics.).

String theory still persists. You can't kill a bad paradigm until a better one comes along. But the lack of observables is seeing it fade out to be "just interesting maths". Not "unreasonably effective" maths.

So this is a nice little tale of how science works. Plug in the right priors and you create a context that narrows your search to its most fruitful avenues of thought. Follow the symmetries, became the collective thought. And that worked splendidly until it didn't.

This is the theory space I am now interested in. The need for a fresh IBE. But one that is a refinement on what already works. You can't junk everything. That's how crackpots think. You want to jettison the right things.

Penrose for example – a great illustration as he his very public about his creative process – argues that the error is trying to assimilate the complex number magic of the quantum to the real number realm of gravity. GR doesn't reduce to QFT. It has to be the other way around.

So at heart, a pretty simple flip in priors. The obvious logic of counterfactuality. If pushing on the door doesn't work, pull it instead. One is never working without a context of established rational habit. Abduction always starts standing on the shoulders of giants. It is never "just a lucky guess".

As I have remarked many times, my own expectation is that rather than symmetries all the way down, it is symmetry breaking all the way down. And that is the systems view first outlined by Anaximander, and brought home nicely by Peirce, to be generally confirmed by more recent scientific developments – such as not only the stories of Big Bang cosmology and the topological hierarchy of the Standard Model of particle physics, but of course, the failure to unify GR and QFT by a simple reductionist metaphysics.

The current impasse is exhibit A in the argument that it is instead dichotomies all the way down. Or at least until you strike the vagueness that Peirce defined in logic as the failure of the PNC to apply. The unity at the bottom of it all has to have the irreducible complexity of a triadic relation. And indeed, we already know this from Okun's cube of theories. The fact that the whole edifice of modern fundamental physics has been about taking the Planck triad of constants – c, G and h – and combining them to create a structure of theories.

You add c to Newtonian mechanics to get special relativity. You add h, and you instead get quantum mechanics. You add the c to h and you get quantum field theory. You add the G to the c and you get general relativity.

So you wind up with GR and QFT as both having eaten two of the three Planck constants. GR eats cG, and QFT eats ch. Naturally – it is by now bleeding obvious – one must finish the job with a theory of quantum gravity. A final theory that eats all three constants as cGh.



[Or actually I find there is this neat new website with animations devoted to the cube. Check https://cube-of-physics.org.]

The belief in quantum gravity seems a necessary truth. The wall physics has been banging its head against for longer than it took to figure out GR and QFT. Again, this is how the process of scientific reasoning actually plays out. Your priors just become so specific as you follow the trail of what has worked. Any IBE-ing has become as constrained as driving your 18-wheeler semi up a tiny country road.

But as I say, you can make a bigger inversion than Penrose suggests. Not just apply the symmetry flip of GR=>QFT into QFT=>GR, but apply the larger flip of symmetry=>symmetry-breaking. You start from the cGh of the Planck scale as itself a unity of opposites. The unit 1 description of not three disparate constants but of the one irreducible triad of relations. A collection of self-organising fundamental ratios.

The first breaking that could then keep breaking forever. Or at least until its Heat Death saw it all fizzle to effectively nothing. The biggest and coldest nothing that could ever exist in terms a dichotomisation under the complementary bounds of Nature described by GR and QFT.

So does this have anything much to do with Hume's scepticism and even Peirce's abduction by now? Well it certainly ought to inform any current Philosophy of Science in terms of what we've actually got done.

We have both success and failure to tell us about IBE in practice. Or Bayesian reasoning if you prefer. We can now see how Newton was standing on the shoulders of giants, but also why his turn towards blind faith in the maths – I feign no hypotheses – was indeed a paradigm shift that raced us all the way to QFT in particular. Just follow the damn symmetries no matter how weird its seems to start getting.

But then now, what about following the symmetry breakings instead? Or understand how the two ideas of the complementary limits of the third thing which really concerns us – the asymmetry which is the actual hierarchical order of a Cosmos born of the self-stabilising balance of symmetries and their breaking.

Again, this was essentially the IBE already framed by Anaximander in simple physicalist terms, and what Peirce came to understand as both the structure of mathematical logic and cognitive reality. So it has a rich pedigree. Scoff all you like.

A pinch and a punch and no returns, eh. :up:

Why not just say what is really bothering you? :grin:

No one forced you to engage in a topic you have only contempt for. — unenlightened

You are waving words around as if they were arguments. What is abduction, and how does it help? — Banno

By page 4, the subject had switched to abduction.

If we follow Hume, our best theories of physics function because our habits are such as to recognise patterns in the stuff around us, — Banno

Hume is deeply uninteresting. He says something obvious about cognition. It is modelling. And now we can move along swiftly.

Peirce gets us back to ontology. His exciting idea is that epistemology and ontology both have the same essential causal self organising structure. Mind is of course modelling and the Cosmos is the physical reality. But still. The metaphysical level logic is the same in important ways. And it has to be so as that is the only way self organisation can take place.

So bang on about Hume all you like. Peirce already fixed up science as a rational method. Epistemology is sorted. Move on.

But what about this crazy idea that the Cosmos is an evolutionary process of taking habits? A growth of rational structure. Something that begins as a vague everythingness and then develops with a systems logic of downward acting constraints and upward constructing degrees of freedom. A whole complex metaphysics of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Or potentiality, actuality and necessity. The irreducibility of the triadic relation.

You have this whole story laid out. One that was there at the start of philosophy with Anaximander and continues to bob about in the background through Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Aristotle and Plato. Then reappears with German Naturphilosphie - though mixed up with Christian theology and the wishful thinking of the Romantics. And finally we get science and maths really along for the ride as systems science and complexity theory fire up.

So Peirce was there at the right moment in history to set out a basic template of self-organisation as a general logic. A logic of both epistemic systems and ontological systems. He gave the reason for why we would have brains that echo the logic of the world. A system is a system is a system. And that is what we need to get to the bottom of.

Of course, this is all rather complicated and demanding. Unfamiliar and scary. Who even needs it if our only pragmatic interests are in building better machines. Reductionism gives you mechanics. You get engineering and computing. Systems are about holism and self organisation. We can pretend that more complex engineering and computing will get us to that too.

But anyways. That is my puzzle. There is this big exciting stuff to sink your teeth into. And science is already eating philosophy’s lunch. Even a modest metaphysical hit like Ontic Structural Realism is only really catching up to 1960s quantum field theory.

Yet maybe that is how it should be. Philosophy doesn’t even seem very good at teaching critical thinking anymore. Maybe it just is now a curatorial exercise. The museum of old ideas. In this room we have Hume. In another we have a dusty old crew that includes the Austins, Collingwoods and Davidsons. No one hardly visits that anymore. The exotic Continentals are more the crowd pleasers.

So rehash Hume for an umpteenth time. The interesting thing about abduction is that it does have its logical structure even if you want to draw a line between hypothesis discovery and theory development. There is the sudden aha! The leap from the particular to the general. The reframing that reveals a fact in a new light. The thing Peirce was getting at in how he set up IBE.

The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

If the world is generally this way as a system of constraints, then the kind of regularities it would generate - the kind of fluctuations or degrees of freedom it would result in - would have this particular character as a matter of course. Guess the correct rule and you will get the kind of variables it must have to be able to operate.

Why take regularity as something given and without genesis? If regularity is an EFFECT, this would completely change the issue of the laws of nature and their origin. Since, and this is not casuality, these laws are also presented as something given and without origin. — JuanZu

This is just what I’m talking about. Why are electrons and photons the way they are? Well the answer just jumps out once you can understand gauge symmetry. This is the marvel of gauge applied to Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism. The fact that U(1) is the simplest complex number Lie group simply demands that reality has electric charge and the massless vector boson we call the photon.

So the holism of quantum field theory says the excitations of Nature must be shaped by fundamental symmetries. And the abductive hoops that science went through to sort out the Standard Model of particle physics are entertaining to read. All the maths of gauge groups was known. So the small library of possible symmetries was known in the same way Plato could know that regular solids could even exist. But fitting the particles popping out of the colliders into the right slots took all sorts wrong turns. Protons and neutrons turned out to be SU(3) - and so were triplets of quarks. The weak force had to have previously been the SU(2) electroweak force and then broken by a matching SU(2) scalar field - the Higgs - to be turned into a force now with massive particles and also reorganised to release the U(1) photon which had been effectively caged inside it.

It is like the world could only be composed of atoms that were spheres, cubes, tetrahedrons, and the other Platonic solids. But here we are now stripping geometry down to algebra and so allowing the maths to range over all the normed division algebras. No longer just the reals, but the complex numbers that embed quantum spin in every fundamental particle, and the quaternions that are especially useful to understanding the half-spin fermions.

So abduction in particle physics became about a small library of Platonic structures that existed because they had irreducible symmetry. And then firing up the collider to look for the tell tale particles that these symmetries would have to produce in their various combinations.

There were the surprises, like the nine kinds of mesons produced in hot collisions. That made sense when it clicked that mesons were actually short lived quark-antiquark pairs. The SU(3) symmetry that gave three colours of the quarks also gave the nine possible pairings of quarks - eight charged and the ninth neutral. The physical reality just drops out of the symmetries that constrain the possible structures of nature, The big deal that Ontic Structural Realism was all about.

So reality had this systems logic. Reality had to be classical because you have real number matrices describing the Poincare symmetry group of special relativity. And it had to be quantum because you have the complex numbers matrices of the gauge theory underpinning quantum field theory. If these number systems could exist as themselves algebraic symmetries, then nature had to express them as the forms its excitations took. Even the classical vs quantum divide boils down to the restrictions that mathematical logic creates for itself.

So Peirce proposed a deep connection between the self-organising mind and a self-organising universe. This led to his triadic logic, his tale of irreducibly hierarchical systems order. Forget the reductionist logic used for deduction and other mechanistic tales of causal entailment. Peirce was on to something way more fun. A logic large enough to forge a world.

And now science really has a sense of what it is looking for. Mathematical strength models of symmetry coupled to colliders or any other instrument which could manifest the particle that must exist as some combination of broken symmetries at a given temperature of the Universe.

Yes again, it is not the deductive logic with its valid arguments that seem so important to some frittering their time away in the margins of philosophy. It is the grand vision Peirce had of a notion or the logical or the rational that could be a theory of everything. A theory of the self organising system, whether that system was epistemic or ontic. Whether it was psychology or physics, mind or matter.

So stuff Hume. Stuff weedy complaints about abduction being an invalid logic, and possibly not even a logic. It is all so trivial. Useful in small ways. But also builds in habits of thought that actively prevent understanding logic as a metaphysical-strength enterprise.

A journey which philosophy started and science is having to complete. Getting at the Cosmos as the growth of rational habits, the manifestation of inevitable order, a process of dialectical evolution. A natural logic truly worth understanding even jf you just want to get at the cognitive mechanics of forming inferences to the best explanation.

The move from any finite sequence of specific statements to a general statement is invalid. More formally, from f(a), f(b), f(c)... we cannot deduce U(x)f(x). This is the "scandal of induction". It is a philosophical problem - scientists and engineers just move on without paying it much attention. But it is part of the plumbing of our understanding of the world, and will niggle at those who worry about such things. — Banno

And what prevents deduction moving from the general to the particular? Or induction moving from the particular to the general? And so the pincer movement on truth as the pragmatism that I describe?

I think when you talk about plumbing, you mean digging another long drop. And mistaking philosophy for applied predicate logic and set theory is like trying to do the Highland fling on one leg.

And oddly, set theory claimed to reach the infinite whereas Peirce preached finitude. That’s what hopping around on one leg gets you. Abstract nonsense.

Most famously, perhaps, is falsification, a very clever response. Instead of proving that U(x)f(x), why not assume it and look for a counter-instance - and x that is not f? We can't prove an universal, but we can disprove it... or so Popper supposed. There are problems there, too, of course. — Banno

Hence the useful dichotomisation of nature into chance and necessity. The set of all the accidents and the set of all the lawful regularities. And the statistical rules for inferring which of these sets is most likely the one you have just pulled that unexpected particular from.

Do we falsify the belief or challenge the doubt? It all winds up back at the same place. Reason bounded by its dichotomous logic. The truth balanced between particularity and generality. Deduction and induction able to do their complementary thing as they have been set up dialectically as each other’s inverse operation.

Now all of this is the standard history of the philosophy of science - regardless of what some here think. — Banno

Yeah. I’m sure Hume was an exam question back in Epistemology 101. Its own important moment in Enlightenment history. One really ought to give the 15 minutes of fame it deserves.

But to elevate it to the Gospel of St Hume? A bit much.

Point is, I'm right about it. Where the answer sits at present is more in Bayesian Calculus, which accepts Hume's point, and instead of looking to justify our scientific theories as true, looks to choose which ones are most believable. — Banno

So you mean I’m right. You just nicked my punchline. And left off the dichotomy. The bit that continues on to say the theories that are the most believable because they are also the least doubtable. :lol:

We have the pragmatist pincer movement that places us somewhere actually measurable on a spectrum. Some place that a sigma confidence can be assigned, the null hypothesis ranked against. Between doubt and belief, we can land in some justified Bayesian spot.

I don't grant that we have ambiguity because we need to lie to ourselves with fictions and both believe and not believe something at the same time. — Leontiskos

That's not it at all. Vagueness comes before counterfactuality. Ambiguity is what counterfactually intends to clean up. We are requiring of ourselves that the truth has to be either this or its "other". Ww are breaking our world into its structure of fact and fiction. Its counterfactual narrative.

But vagueness always remains despite the narrative. The same words can't strike every listener in exactly the same way. Or even the same listener listening twice. As Heraclitus said about stepping into a river.

We are telling ourselves a convincing story. Whatever the ideology. And we need to remember it is that kind of story. A sieve on possibility. An argument attempted in the style of counterfactual logic.

If I have to believe that my country is out-competing the liberal west even when I know it is not true, ambiguity isn't going to save my boat. — Leontiskos

Well I visited Moscow as a child in 1967. And I saw the mostly bare shelves of the department store in Red Square with its crude wooden toys and yet massive queues. I swapped Japanese bubblegum for Soviet badges on the blackmarket bridge. I experience the almost performative level of Marxist forbearance with which the USSR would out-do the soft and decadent West. The narrative that the ordinary person would be able to accept as if it was reasonably true as an ideology. Russians out-toughing the Western blow-hards.

And after experiencing the public narrative, we went back to the baroque gilt splendour of our hotel suite to swig champagne and jest loudly for the microphones before heading down to join the elite in the dining room with its marble fountain and carp pond as its fin de siecle centre. Army officers popping off more champagne corks at the chandeliers. Thick fur coats everywhere. The giant stuffed bear that stood at the entry. The other truth of this Marxist state.

As a foreigner, it was easy to see both sides and arrive at the conclusion that the USSR was genuinely in competition with the West in that the population were sold on out-toughing the West and the elite were living it up in the way you would expect. They were on-board with the narrative too.

Reagan and Thatcher had to turn up the narrative heat for the elite to confront the contradictions and limits of the Soviet system. To make some changes – that quickly turned into a slippery slide into chaos that even Reagan and Thatcher never expected.

This "always larger view" is the transcendent fiction. So what are the contradictions and what is the fiction? — Leontiskos

Not sure that you can insist on it being fictional. And certainly as a Peircean, I would take constraints or mathematical symmetries to be as real as the "contradictions", or degrees of freedom and broken symmetries, that they would generate in the word.

So are you trying to win the argument by semantics – seizing on other meanings to what I might have intended? Holding words hostage rather than seeing then as words I might accept in the spirit of having some common ground – some larger and vaguer view – from which to launch into the dialectical task we seem to have agreed to?

Equal opportunity combined with an allowance of consequences can seem like a contradiction, but I think we agree that this is only true when one is thinking about equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. — Leontiskos

Well exactly. It somehow seems both fair and unfair at the same time that liberalism would give everyone the same opportunity and yet not deliver the same outcome.

At least Marxism promised both – "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" to quote Marx.

So Marxism seems to win in its simple equation. We can see the balance implicit in this complementary and dialectical framing of how a society ought to be.

Which is why I say liberalism only makes better sense as it speaks to a dichotomy that can scale. The one where the complementary dynamic is to each, compete as hard as you can while also cooperating as fully as possible. Do the Christian thing of treating others as you would have them treat you.

Every ideology needs its dialectical algorithm that requires you to see social interactions as always inherently not just dyadic but complementary. An inversion or reciprocal relation where both sides of the equation are "good, just, fair, beautiful, divine, etc".

And that is what an ideal ideological algorithm achieves. A win-win blend that scales.

Christianity got to take over the Roman empire and eventually much of the world. It had the clever trick of owning the souls and allowing the secular everyday get on with its business. A trickle up economics where the church could become a rich and powerful political enterprise with a sideline in social services.

Soviet Marxism could do OK for a while as a police state and information autocracy. Western liberal democracy just went mad on it productivity growth. Go fully secular and worship money creation. Or go turbo-secular and start believing in the supreme good of debt creation and now the infinite money glitch of AI and Crypto.

OK. What was I saying about needing a win-win algorithm to anchor society? What happened to the good thinking there?....

...Although I would say that we are only partially socially constructed. There are important "constraints" on the theory that we are socially constructed. — Leontiskos

Well yes. I only stress the social constructionism as when I launched into evolutionary psychology I found that everyone else was going down the genetic route to the exclusion of the social level of semiotic structure.

I had already studied the ethological science, so that covered the genetic basis of things pretty well. It was the difference that language makes that was the weakly explored area of Western philosophy and science. It was Marxist Jews like Vygotsky and Luria who had the stellar insights on that side of things.

Western liberal democracy actually does human psychology shockingly badly. Damagingly badly. Worse than the Catholic Church. That in itself should tell us something.

Not about what works. But about the need for a social narrative so powerful it does turn the individual into the kind of psychological being it needs that individual to be.

Really be. But if they just have to wear a social mask and suck it up as a dubious fiction, then that is OK. Good enough if less than ideal.

If I recall, I originally said that liberalism requires the lie of value-neutrality, and you said that such a thing was the transcendent fiction that undergirds liberalism. ... When I use "fiction" I mean something like a "noble lie," i.e. a lie that is meant to have a beneficial effect. — Leontiskos

Yes. I realise you meant a white lie or a noble lie or a necessary lie. And so not really a lie. Or at least a lie absolved of some of its original sin. :wink:

So if liberalism (or else pragmatism) is a thing that exists in some places and not in other places, and if its central tenets are the points you outlined about equality of opportunity, consequences, etc., then is liberalism something that ought to be sought or not? In other words, you are implying all sorts of arguments for the normative superiority of liberalism while at the same time resisting the conclusion that liberalism is normatively superior. — Leontiskos

What works is what works. So sure, you can claim tautology.

And if what works is what works at particular times and places in history, that is now instead the breaking if that tautological symmetry. You have some general ideology that works. And you have its particular instances that this also work – or now counterfactually don't. Something new is perhaps revealed by things becoming properly developed into a hierarchical structure. Some system of constraint and its degrees of freedom. A state and its people. Doing their thing. Discovering how that goes, especially in the face of others doing their own thing.

To be honest, I never really think in terms of normative arguments and is/ought dichotomies. I have to look up what they might mean nearly every time someone wants to discuss them. Just not really a distinction that means much from my pragmatist point of view. Way too simplistic.

Put differently, if we fall away from liberalism you will apparently just "switch" from liberalism to pragmatism. Analogously, someone who champions motorboats might move from motorboats to sailboats when the gasoline runs dry, but then protest that what they really championed was not motorboats but rather boats in general. — Leontiskos

You see, all this sounds silly to my ears. Pragmatism makes sense as the most all-encompassing and general viewpoint. As Peirce argued, even the Cosmos is pragmatically structured. And life and mind share the same self-organising causal logic – just with the added self-referential semiotics.

Liberalism is then a rather general and grab-bag term for talking about human social and economic order. It is the new pragmatism that arose in the Enlightenment, along with the Romantic reaction the Enlightenment engendered. You can read the books of that time and assemble some kind of semi-coherent narrative of what this unholy secular mess was all about in spirit.

For the sake of a discussion, I go along with this loose, rather vague, jargon. Seeking to get precise where its starts to seem to matter.

So perhaps I am more a builder of boats who sees pragmatism as the lake or sea that would even need a boat. And it wouldn't be the end of the world if there never were any boats. Or at least boats where folk might imagine they were there for the fun of it – whether under sail or thrust along by motor.

When it comes to boats, I would thus have a well developed hierarchy of perspectives for sure. Boats can move stuff from place to place in a way that is good. Boats for pleasure always struck me as nuts.

I come from a seafaring family. My dad built me a first dinky sail boat when I was seven. I wasn't the faintest bit interested. I would rather body surf any day.

So no. I don't just switch simple categories as if everything exists as a plurality of choices on a single plane of contingency. I go up and down levels of hierarchies. There is the rigour of a dichotomous order which can aim to become fully developed as a systems narrative. The generality that frames the particularity. And the particularity that likewise retains the ambiguity to challenge that habit of generalising.

Do I like boats? It depends.

Do I like boating? Yeah, nah. Too much faffing around with gear and time. Going around for the sake of going around.

Is liberalism a brand that is fundamentally "me"? It depends. Well, yeah nah. Call me a pragmatist. Or maybe more specifically a Greenie – though no longer much of a believer that humans could organise under that particular ideological banner.

Right, I'm more sympathetic to the idea that nature's regularities have evolved like habits than that they are given as eternal verities by some imagined lawgiver. — Janus

When you face a lumpen realist, there is no harm in shaking up their presuppositions with a dose of what seems like idealism.

The lumpen realist has to be the closet idealist anyway. They are the ones who believe in "the laws of nature" as sacrosanct verities. Truths spoken by ... well someone in the position to know.

Showing that it is alright to psychologise nature by talk of sedimentary habit and the evolutionary cosmos might help them one day to come out of the closet of their own accord. Let a little happy diversity into their shuttered lives. :grin:

So your reminder for this morning. As you do tend to slither away.

We are going with your suggestion that the unexpected starts the game. And so the question is how does a line of thought logically unfold from there if you are a rational inquirer into Nature of the kind that we would regard as conforming to the pragmatic epistemology of a scientist?

I replied, that being struck by some particular fact, we would look to its general explanation. And that is how Peirce sets up IBE. The logical move is to think that the exceptional exists within the greater context of the universal. And so we isolate the particular and look for how it might fit into some larger generality.

If something is merely "unexpected", then this could be the kind of accident that generally happens. The avalanche slides, the beam buckles. It could be something that should have happened but didn't. The lift arrives but its door doesn't open, the house was burgled and yet the dog didn't bark. It could be that shit was shoved through your letterbox and you want to find out who did it.

So there are events we immediately and habitually interpret as being in the class of mere accidents or failures of normal prediction. Generalities of those kinds. Or there are events which suddenly seem untoward – paradigm breaking – because they don't immediately assimilate to your regular structure of belief.

"Shit through my letterbox? But I'm such a nice guy! Widely admired. Was it some unlikely accident? Does this kind of thing just have to be expected as a general fact of the neighbourhood? Am I in fact not so popular as I thought?" [Hurriedly rejects the last paradigm shifting notion as just too ugly to even investigate further.]

So you can see how the abductive step goes. Casting around in a general fashion. Accidents can explain things as one extreme of how particulars are caused, then intention or lawful necessity can get the credit at the other end of this causal dichotomy. The idea of generality itself developed with the logical structure of the symmetry-breaking dichotomy.

The exciting thing would be dimissing mere accident, rejecting also a known general cause, and so having to figure out something new. The stage of thought we are labelling abduction is already passing from its the level of a habitual classification of the unexpected event to now the attentional level of feeling the need to inquire more closely. We have to actually wheel out the epistemic method that secured those previous classification skills as ingrained IBE and get prepared to work this one out at the level of fully attentive and rationally structured inquiry.

Friston's Bayesian brain, in other words. Embodied cognition. Peircean semiosis. All the models of cognition as having the structure where IBE becomes the sedimentary layers formed by a lifetime of learning how best to understand the world as it exists for "us" at its centre. You build up the wisdom of habits, and then keep on adding to that store of what works for you in the same manner.

The logic of the reasoning arc is the same. But a habit is just your many particular experiences of the world suitably generalised to the point they feel automatic. Attention is what you wheel in when you need to take a little more time to figure out a proper fit to a known generalisation, or even to begin adding some new habit of interpretance as a useful addition to the sedimented layers.

If you are truly flexible of mind and rigorous of thought, you might even be able to unravel old established thought patterns. Dissolve some sedimentary layers that may seem so deeply embedded that they have become undoubtable, but now you see they are habits that were wrong. Or just not general enough to continue to take up so much space in your head.

So there we have the complex but quite logical structure of abduction. The structure that evolution itself has already discovered and which organises every brain or cognitive enterprise. The unexpected arises. And it immediately is recognised as significant in some fashion as it doesn't seem to answer to the logical dichotomy of chance~necessity. It fits neither with your notions of mere chance, nor known regularity. IBE at the first habit level of response glitches. You must pause and reason it out in a more positively inquisitive fashion.

The IBE logic of habitual response becomes now the IBE logic of the attentional response. You cast around. If not mere accident, nor known regularity, then what? We have discarded whole categories of experience and narrowed the scope of our thoughts to see this unexpected particular as in fact the clue to some deeper mystery. And what do we do when we are Sherlock Holmes? Deduce consequences and seek inductive confirmation.

Take the particular, identify its generality, generate the prediction that would best test this new rule. The ability to now predict the particular from its general rule is all the proof you will ever need, or could ever get, that you are right in your thinking. Congrats. You have a new thought habit thanks to the logic of IBE. You can dichotomise or symmetry-break any event you come across as an example of a know regularity. Or the other thing of a difference that doesn't make a difference – to you. Just an accident to be dismissed as such.

That is a summary of a thesis that should after so many years be quite familiar to your ears. But your ears don't listen. Your brain doesn't engage. Your spidey senses just flash red alert. Danger, danger, Will Smith! Our impression management shield is failing! Slide away fast pretending you made an argument that was a celebrated success and lunch now calls you to your real world duties. :up:

Or that you finally agree with them.

For the more technical version of this thesis on the emergence of biosemiosis. The evolution of matter with an organismic point of view.

Artificial Life Needs a Real Epistemology, Howard Pattee (1995)

Your interest is reward enough. :up:

Second, the turning of a ‘now’ into the next ‘now’ sits on the thinnest knife edge imaginable, the previous ‘now’ wholly consumed in the making of the new ‘now’ all over the universe at once in a dynamical updating—the present now exhausting all reality. The incredibly short Planck time would be the processing time and that is not much at all. — PoeticUniverse

Yep. So this is why I point to the way that the growing block universe has to have a present moment structure that is complex and not simple.

The baseline view might be special relativity’s casual lightcone structure. But then general relativity breaks that with its comoving rest mass frame. Riemann spacetime replacing Minkowski spacetime. And quantum mechanics of the comoving rest mass frame then breaks that with its wavefunction spacetime holism - the way individual events are smeared out by an element of temporal entanglement or retrocausality.

So rest mass has its present moment in the strong sense of being located at spacetime points. Light and gravity move at c and so are stretched out over cogent lightcone moments as events. Then quantum moments are events that are reflect their present moment context in a nonlocal fashion. They feel the decohering weight of the accumulating bulk of the past as the constraint on their freedom to happen “anywhen”.

So the growing bulk universe would have this complex emergent structure and what we think of as time is generally the average state of the bulk - its current cross-section state of development in terms of being a doubling-halving and expanding-cooling Big Bang metric. A place with some temperature reading and redshift that locates it on the sliding scale that is the Planck scale being inverted. We are some spacetime extent and energy density content away from the ultimate smallness and hotness of the Big Bang and now also some matching distance away from the ultimate largeness and coldness of its Heat Death.

So there is a now - a current slice across the cosmic evolution - defined by the past that has on the whole happened and the future on the whole still to happen. The CMB is that ticking clock in being a generalised fireball of radiation with a temperature of 2.7 degrees K and a comoving particle horizon of 46.5 billion lightyears. That is the scale which defines the present.

But then there is still all the lagging matter - the cosmic web of stars, interstellar gas and other gravitating crud - that is hotter and less spread out than the CMB bulk. And all this lagging matter is still adding radiative and gravitational events to the Cosmos - quantum possibilities that are being created and needing to be dechohered as localised and individuated connecting strands of interaction. The photon some ancient star emitted and which tonight will find its absorber when it hits your eyeball.

So from that secondary point of view - the mass that lags the general dissipative rate of the cosmic fireball - the present is whenever some “newly” created quantum possibility finds that it’s time has finally expired. Its wavefunction has been collapsed and so its energy added to the “now” of the evolving block universe. Decoherence has put an open possibility safely into the thermal past even as it has also set up some new state of quantum possibility if the event remains warmer and denser that the backdrop baseline of the CMB.

Your eyeball will be warmed slightly by the ancient photon. The energy will be handed on in the form of some further quantum-structured temporal event. Much colder photons, but still warm enough to be seeking their future within a bath of 2.7 degree K radiation mostly now headed only to the end of time.

Presentism vs Eternalism vs spaceless Quantum Field Monads fun vid: — PoeticUniverse

Hmmm.

I’ll stick to talking these issues through even if it is just a conversation I have with myself. :smile:

You are obscure Apo. — bert1

Or is it that the pool has its shallow end yet also its deep end. Then even its paddling pool.

If I am obscure then you are…?

You claimed to be responding to my jest…

You have to sound reasonable when you make your grant application. — apokrisis

…with…

Is that a law of nature? I think it's the advice of a propagandist. Scream softly or the children might hear. — unenlightened

So forgive me if that came across as unhelpful twaddle. What did you really mean to say and do you think it was a helpful contribution?

That explains quite a bit. — Banno

Zing!!!!

Is that a law of nature? I think it's the advice of a propagandist. Scream softly or the children might hear. — unenlightened

I appreciate your effort. But as a zinger, it’s a complete fail. Take some pride in your work if you want to wound.

Soon after you start listening. — Banno

Look at the big sook. Not one reply to any point I have made. Just the usual posturing and deflection.

We know induction is invalid. — Banno

Who gives a fuck about validity. Pragmatism is about being happy that reasoning can be useful. What matters is defining reason in a reasonable fashion. Mathematics might want proof. But then where does its axioms come from? What is the psychological process that grounds them? When does all the specious bullshit stop?

replied:
the unexpected — Banno

You seemed to want to safely distance yourself from that. OK. So what do you deduce from the unexpected? How is the sudden need for an explanation also the idea of an explanation? When are you going to start saying something sensible here rather than posturing?

Yes! Again, we are not disagreeing with what's been said; I'm just pointing out that this is not logic. — Banno

But then…

One has reason to suspect a general principle lurks. It is worth shaping up in systematic fashion through deducing the consequences of such an explanation and then seeking the evidence that would offer inductive support. Or abduction as inference to the best explanation. — apokrisis

Note the move involved. From the particular to the general and from the general back to the particular. The surprise, the principle, the prediction. If you can get back out what you first put in, you’re in good shape.

So you simply reply in bad faith. It’s all you’ve got. Lame and performative efforts to pretend you are waving and not drowning.

You already have your causal relation, before you start on the logic of checking it. You bring it in to confirm your bias. That's the criticism. — Banno

Tediously you again skip over the deduction that fleshes out the move from the particular to the general.

If first comes the particular surprise as you argue, then has to come its general explanation. After that you have something to test.

And how is it confirming a bias? It is seeking to confirm the general explanation of the particular surprise. The confirmation comes then in the form of narrowing the scope for doubt, not for actually asserting complete faith in some prior hazy belief.

It is like you haven’t even been introduced to science as a method. You come up with the whackiest claims.

Abduction is not a formalisable process that can provide an algorithmic answer to Hume's scepticism. — Banno

To go from the particular to the general isn’t that hard to understand surely? Why else is fundamental physics all about seeking the symmetries that explain Nature? If symmetry is getting broken, then what is the symmetry is the sensible question. What is the general ground to the particular event? What is the wider principle that would make some unexpected event a matter of course? It’s all pretty bleeding simple.

You are making such a fool of yourself with your strained efforts to deny the obvious. But why stop now that you are on a roll? :up:

It's a leap of faith. — unenlightened

Nah. We are talking science here. You have to sound reasonable when you make your grant application. You have to offer a causal explanation that would be worth testing. Or at least you have to be owed a favour by someone dishing out the dosh.

I would have thought that the cosmos would display something more like inertia, but regardless of what one calls it, there is no evidence of it from the future, and the move from past to future, or from explanation to prediction, remains unsupported by any logic or evidence. — unenlightened

Sounds like hopeful twaddle.

Your theory — Banno

Nope. Even if you feel Peirce’s account to be inadequate, you have to offer something better or there’s nothing to discuss.

So keep on ducking and dodging. Or step up for once. How else is a hypothesis to be formed except that it seems to be a thought that strikes the mark?

Something catches the attention as it seems to suggest a causal connection. One has reason to suspect a general principle lurks. It is worth shaping up in systematic fashion through deducing the consequences of such an explanation and then seeking the evidence that would offer inductive support. Or abduction as inference to the best explanation.

If you have some sharper story of how explanations originate and come to be believed, speak up. Don't be shy. Otherwise ya got nuthin’, as you say.

So how do you say a process of scientific inquiry normally begins?

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic. — Banno

Strawman. It is a necessary part of a logic of science. The bit that gets the game of deduction and inductive confirmation started.

You seem to be very confused about this issue. But then you seem to exist in some world where logic is only a mathematical exercise rather than a pragmatic enterprise. The psychology is rather the point.

Simpler to cut, paste and trim SEP for you….

The term “abduction” was coined by Charles Sanders Peirce in his work on the logic of science. He introduced it to denote a type of non-deductive inference that was different from the already familiar inductive type.

It is clear that, as Peirce understood the term, “abduction” did not quite mean what it is currently taken to mean. One main difference between his conception and the modern one is that, whereas according to the latter, abduction belongs to what the logical empiricists called the “context of justification”—the stage of scientific inquiry in which we are concerned with the assessment of theories—for Peirce abduction had its proper place in the context of discovery, the stage of inquiry in which we try to generate theories which may then later be assessed.

As he says, “[a]bduction is the process of forming explanatory hypotheses. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea” (CP 5.172); elsewhere he says that abduction encompasses “all the operations by which theories and conceptions are engendered” (CP 5.590). Deduction and induction, then, come into play at the later stage of theory assessment: deduction helps to derive testable consequences from the explanatory hypotheses that abduction has helped us to conceive, and induction finally helps us to reach a verdict on the hypotheses, where the nature of the verdict is dependent on the number of testable consequences that have been verified.

Gerhard Schurz has recently defended a view of abduction that is again very much in the Peircean spirit. On this view, “the crucial function of a pattern of abduction … consists in its function as a search strategy which leads us, for a given kind of scenario, in a reasonable time to a most promising explanatory conjecture which is then subject to further test” (Schurz 2008, 205).

Harry Frankfurt (1958) has noted, however, that abuctiion is supposed to be part of the logic of science, but what exactly is logical about inventing explanatory hypotheses? According to Peirce (CP 5.189), abduction belongs to logic because it can be given a schematic characterization, to wit, the following:

The surprising fact, C, is observed.
But if A were true, C would be a matter of course.
Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

But Frankfurt rightly remarks that this is not an inference leading to any new idea. After all, the new idea—the explanatory hypothesis A—must have occurred to one before one infers that there is reason to suspect that A is true, for A already figures in the second premise.

Frankfurt then goes on to argue that Peirce suggests an understanding of abduction not so much as a process of inventing hypotheses but rather as one of adopting hypotheses, where the adoption of the hypothesis is not as being true or verified or confirmed, but as being a worthy candidate for further investigation. On this understanding, abduction could still be thought of as being part of the context of discovery. It would work as a kind of selection function, or filter, determining which of the hypotheses that have been conceived in the stage of discovery are to pass to the next stage and be subjected to empirical testing.

The selection criterion is that there must be a reason to suspect that the hypothesis is true, and we will have such a reason if the hypothesis makes whichever observed facts we are interested in explaining a matter of course. This would indeed make better sense of Peirce’s claim that abduction is a logical operation.

Frankfurt ultimately rejects this proposal as well. Given, he says, that there may be infinitely many hypotheses that account for a given fact or set of facts, it can hardly be a sufficient condition for the adoption of a hypothesis (in the above sense) that its truth would make that fact or set of facts a matter of course. At a minimum, abduction would not seem to be of much use as a selection function.

One may doubt whether this is a valid objection, however. Echoing what was said in connection with underdetermination arguments, we note that it is by no means clear that “accounting for a given fact” is to be identified with “making that fact a matter of course.”

For all Frankfurt says, for a hypothesis to account for a fact, it is enough if it entails that fact. But virtually no philosopher of science nowadays holds that entailment is sufficient for explanation. And it would seem reasonable to read the phrase “making a given fact a matter of course” as “giving a satisfactory explanation of that fact.

Even so, it is remarkable that there is no reference in Peirce’s writings on abduction to the notion of best explanation. Some satisfactory explanations might still be better than others, and there might even be a unique best one. This idea is crucial in all recent thinking about abduction. Therein lies another main difference between Peirce’s conception of abduction and the modern one

There is hype around ai, but it's already been transformative. — RogueAI

In what ways are you thinking? What are good examples of LLMs that are transforming the productivity of the world?

There will be some undoubtedly. But what are already impacting the bottom line in such significant fashion that we can see that it will all be worth it.

And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause. — Banno

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. — Banno

Whatever happened to the principle of charity I wonder?

So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up:

The Sora 2 videos I'm seeing don't look like hype. They look amazing, and the technology is only going to get better. — RogueAI

Does what you pay to use it even cover the price of the electricity consumed at the datacentre? Or make up for the social and environmental costs of those computer farms jacking up electricity prices in the middle of nowhere and soon to become white elephants when the latencies become an issue for the users in the cities?

My point was that the social costs are what this thread is about. But it gets worse. It is not about making profits but raising debt.

Trillions are going in, but only billions are coming out. And what always happens in tech is that only a couple of firms are left standing when the dust settles. The proprietary monopoly and some vaguely open source or public backed alternative.

So even if there are trillions in profits to be extracted from a market base, four of the current big players are likely to get trashed. A big enough reckoning to tank economies. Then great, we are in a captive monopoly market that gets the pricing it wants.

So do we completely reorganise society to start paying obeisance to the next IBM, or Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta? Is life going to be that much better?

The social trade offs are one thing to think about. But so are the financial and environmental realities.

This is why we have politics. To make decisions in our own best collective interest.

Oh wait. LLMs and Crypto have spent some of their investor debt wisely. The tech bros can afford the best politicians. :grin: