...or show clearly how ideas are material things (even as you say they are immaterial). — tim wood

On that, I've said often enough that my metaphysics is semiotic. The realm of ideas, or of formal/final cause, is now subsumed into the physics of information theory.

So physicalism itself has already made the necessary move towards realism on the "immaterial" causes of being. It takes information to be real. The material realm is now understood in terms of entropy or degrees of freedom - the flipside of information as a measure of epistemic uncertainty.

So you can't get clearer than current physics. It is now both dualistic and holistic - that intimate interconnectedness of local degrees of freedom and globally meaningful constraints that you seek.

Talk of materiality is as old hat as talk of immateriality.

I’ll just add the obvious fact that for someone to be elected POTUS they of course must get hundreds of millions in donations. — 0 thru 9

Good point. But weren't they a group of conservative billionaires making the mistake of thinking they were buying themselves a controllable stooge?

Trump would ride his populism to get in. Then deliver the kind of tax breaks, market deregulation, small government, policies they expected once he was surrounded by solid grown-up Republican advisors.

Those like Thiel and Mercer have been expressing buyers remorse - despite getting a lot of that legislation implemented.

Don't forget the Mercer family installed Bannon too. So the "bunker down" alt-right agenda was what some of the billionaires wanted. However that became too alarmingly red-neck and conspiratorial even for them.

Conservative megadonor Rebekah Mercer, owner of a partial stake in the alt-right outlet Breitbart News, wrote Wednesday that the publication’s former chief, Steve Bannon, “took Breitbart in the wrong direction.”...

“Some have recklessly described me as supporting toxic ideologies such as racism and anti-Semitism. More recently I have been accused of being ‘anti-science,’” wrote Mercer, whose family donations have previously backed controversial conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. ...

She declared her support for “a kind and generous United States, where the hungry are fed, the sick are cared for, and the homeless are sheltered” and one “that welcomes immigrants and refugees to apply for entry and ultimately citizenship.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2018/02/15/rebekah-mercer-op-ed-411276

So the rich elite didn't back Trump to be a wrecking ball of the globalist economic paradigm. Mostly the reverse. And why would they even expect that of him, given he more than anyone was an incompetent who got lucky from the financial system, the elite social structure, as it is?

My argument is thus that Trump is a rational phenomenon that reflects "the wisdom of the crowd".

There are dark forces in play in that many ordinary folk have it in the back of their minds that rough and turbulent times are coming. So let's provoke the crisis that is going to bring it on ... because we know we have the power when it comes to the show-down.

It is a cool calculation at that level. And there is no downside to that view because you might get what you want because everyone else just caves in to your demands. China, Russia, Europe and the rest might have to keep the globalist charade going as their best available option. No one will call in their debts. Other countries will have to punish their own populations financially and ecologically.

The worst thing that could happen is the US is tipped into such domestic turmoil that there has to be a big social clamp-down. All the names on the watch list need to be rounded up in black SUVs and taken to the FEMA internment camps for the duration. :)

What percent of the US population coolly and rationally thinks that might not be such a bad thing? Bring it on.

So Trump's billionaire backers certainly hoped they were buying something - the usual kinds of things, but delivered by someone who would cut through all the intellectual bureaucratic Washington bullshit that stops them just getting everything they want it, the moment they ask for it.

However, even if Trump voters are comparatively unworldly and illiberal by the standards of the prevailing intellectual elite, they are quite capable of assessing their reality in this gut rational fashion - "What's in it for me and my kind; what do I care about the consequences for others; if we have the power, why not use it; if the current game is tipped on its head, how am I not going to be a winner?"

And Trump is captive to that mood because he doesn't have the character to rise above narcissistic populism. He is a helpless mirror of the masses as he only truly cares about hearing them cheer at that week's stadium rally.

The billionaires miscalculated in thinking they could buy a stooge. Trump hasn't got the focus to be that organised and stick to some strategic agenda. He is just a mouthpiece for a rumbling discontent and anxiety expecting things to turn nasty, but also feeling fairly cocky about the heat it is packing.

A heart is a piece of meat. — tim wood

But it isn't actually just that, is it? That would be the reductionist view. One that talks about the material rather than the purpose.

For me it is permissible, informally, to take ideas - immaterial things - as real, because they clearly are. For me it is not permissible to include them in reality, or at least the same reality that contains material things, and there are lots of tests that differentiate the two. — tim wood

I think for you it is an ideological necessity to maintain an arbitrary distinction that you don't in fact really believe in.

You have to use teleological language to describe the world. But you don't want to admit to having done so. It seems bad form for some reason.

All I say is that creating that mental block has to be your own choice. It prevents you from going on to a more sophisticated metaphysics. But do you really need a more sophisticated metaphysics to live whatever life you lead? Would it be relevant to you? Seems not.

So our differences are resolved if you acknowledge my distinction, or show clearly how ideas are material things (even as you say they are immaterial). — tim wood

Weird. If you can't give yourself permission to think about these issues with a better set of tools, then that is your problem. I don't need to jump into your hole just because you refuse to use my ladder.

I don't think you could make a plausible case for choosing between them as to their metaphysical verisimilitude based purely on the various numbers of adherents they have attracted. — Janus

But my argument is not that they are doing metaphysics. They are doing society. The metaphysics serves only as a system of differentiation and justification.

Religions are social projects. And to the degree they differentiate between communities, they are real life tests of what works in an anthropological ecosphere. As ways of life, they are a bunch of species in competition. Winners and losers cash out in the raw numbers.

But the metaphysics comes into it as a mechanism for constructing sharp differentiation. It gives the whole theological story of social organisation its next step twist. By creating an abstract rational justification for some particular system of belief, there is now a theory in play. And "faith" becomes the test - the evidence or act of measurement.

The theory is either true or false. Your church is either right or it is wrong. And so things are organised such that there are faith-based facts which make the metaphysics of your creed the only true story.

The glue that binds the religious communities and ensures their continuance is the personal faith of their members, whether that faith is mere lip service or fervent passion, whether it is enforced or merely encouraged, any institution will only last as long as the faith its members have in it, which is measured by the time and money they are willing to devote to it. — Janus

However you characterise it, faith is not about opinion, taste, preference, or whatever. It is framed in logicist fashion as "the true facts". And a community becomes bound to a shared metaphysical theory by being able to point to these the existence of these facts.

Now again, I agree that this very sharp sense of religion - the one that comes into conflict with other brands of metaphysics and evidencing - is extreme.

Chinese temples, just like Roman temples, are pretty open-minded in terms of being able to mix and match all strains of belief. You can have Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian idols all sitting happily alongside each other on the same plinth, along with whatever local deities are part of folklore.

The Anglican church would be another example of where theological doctrine has become optional. It doesn't matter even if the vicar believes in God so long as he/she does believe in pastoral care and social work. (Of course, you then have the schisms that result - African anglicans wondering what the hell is going on with their former colonial masters.)

But here you have been stressing the privileged role that "acts of faith" have in the bolstering of metaphysical systems. And I agree. They are precisely that same logicist thing of setting out a theory and then justifying it with acts of measurement.

And then, we have every right to ask just how robust is that communal method of inquiry? Can it in fact deliver metaphysics of any objective quality. The more honest view is that it is simply a mechanism to shore up some self-interested social structure - a church and its ecclesiastical hierarchy.

So, it is not the faith itself that is "innocent" or guilty, but the evil, the guilt, consists in the authoritarian forces of strict tradition, persecution of "heresy" and coercion through fear. — Janus

No. Faith does not get off so lightly. Modern Romanticism stepped in to fill the "spiritual" vacuum left by the Enlightenment's destruction of Christian authority. And while that might seem a liberation of faith - a free choice about what to believe - it still leaves the issue of how do you support a metaphysics with the kind of acts of measurement which are "faith based".

Sure. It completely works as a way to build workable communities. Romanticism does that. It is everywhere as part of the social fabric of the modern world - the metaphysical justification for ways of life. So there is a reason it exists. It works in that fashion.

But again, if we are talking "real metaphysics", then we need real measurements. If we want to transcend the merely social - as a community of inquiry - then science is the model of how to go.

Isn't there a rational self-interest in voting in a demagogic bully at this stage in the US story? And so even if Trump turns out to be ineffective because of his weak character, at least he is destroying the previous state of order. It is a start, in his supporter's eyes.

So what is playing out here. Isn't it americans wanting the US to assert its power rather than its intellect at this point in history? Less negotiating, more telling.

The US has led an era of economic globalisation that made it rich. It was a rational self-interested move. But it also hollowed out its own middle and working class by exposing them to open global competition. And it also allowed the future rivals to US hegemony to emerge, particularly China.

So it has become clear that intellectualism results in losses as well as wins. And the US still has all this actual brute power it can simply capitalise on. In the voter's eye, it just needed a leader willing to exert that power. The US might have written the rules of the globalised era, but it could now rip those up and who could resist?

Waving good-by to globalisation seems sane as energy and resource constraints are coming on. The world economic system is on the brink of collapse anyway. The US could retreat within its own borders to create a new localism in terms of energy and economics, bunker down for climate change.

So a lot of actually rational thinking could be in the backs of voter's minds. Bunkering down would hit China and other rivals harder. And globalisation has in fact created its own stateless intellectual elite, not beholden to any particular national base. Who would care if they got cut adrift?

Trump may reflect that accurate assessment of changing times. His bull in a china shop mentality may be what is needed to shatter the globalism paradigm - exit that market ahead of the game.

The problem with Trump is that he is a crude bully. A fake strong man. A cartoon version of power. It seems crazy that voters would put him in charge and be sticking with him still.

But maybe there is also a clear-eyed view that the US needs him as a wrecking ball to usher in the change in the world order that many people think they want because they fear the sudden collapse of the globalised economic system, the start of the naked resource wars.

Trump derangement syndrome would be the aghast horror of the prevailing globalised elite who have benefited from the way the world is, and who are out of touch with what it might quickly become.

It would be no surprise at all if the next GFC hits and Trump has prepared the ground for whatever is this century's incarnation of a fascist authoritarian state. His administration already has the makings of a junta with all its generals.

The intelligence services and other aspects of fascist control would be a problem. They still seem pretty much wedded to the paradigm of the globalised elite. And it would take cleverness and time to take over that. But the playbook on that is well understood. Manufacture an existential crisis - like a war on terror, immigrants, or whatever. Create the conditions where the population demands repressive powers be used. After all, the US has built up that internal security apparatus too.

The good thing about Trump is it doesn't seem possible he could organise anything as coherent as that next step. But at the moment, he serves rationally to undermine intellectual globalism, turn the world towards brute power politics and a bunkering down.

The interesting question is now what kind of figure and regime will follow him. Does anyone expect business as usual will resume in terms of the US again returning to the intellectualising, globalising, mindset it has had for the last 30 years or so?

Theologies compete and evolve. In the Christian world, Pentecostalism and evangelicalism are winning the race for bums on seats.

So if you are talking about human metaphysical systems, it’s going to be about something that seems functionally useful in terms of some communal purpose.

I earlier argued a key semiotic distinction - the shift in belief and reason from ordinary language to logical syntax. So I am not being down on religion as such.

Religion is about ways of being, ways of social organisation, which are historically tested and thus historically proven. That wisdom becomes encoded in a community’s linguistic habits. It is not really about faith - until one social system comes into competition with another.

And then it became about faith precisely because prosetlysing religions such as Christianity became a social thing. Seeking converts, arguments and evidence came into play. Beliefs had to be accepted as true, to allow rival views be deemed clearly false.

So faith is hardly innocent. It was the machinery of logicism descending to take control of human populations. It was an insistence that there is a right and a wrong side to be on.

Hence the inevitable fissioning of the denominations once the faith trick got hold of a broad enough flow of Human Resources. The church was based on a forced division of the true and the false. It became fractured into a rainbow of subtypes as that was the trick it was based on.

So what real value does faith have here? It is the instrument of organised religions, which in the end are most interested in fighting their own structural battles. Faith is how corporate theocracy measures the degree of conviction in its adherents.

Maybe Scientology shows that the crazier the metaphysics, the sharper the test of personal adherence. Demanding faith in the face of the ridiculous is the way to cut off a community from the mainstream and so secure its flow of economic resources for the church hierarchy.

But there is not just one single community of inquirers. — Janus

Nor even a single method. And yet that would be the argument here. Some methods have proven better than others.

Even within science, you have a broadly dominant community in the metaphysical atomists. Then a good representation of Aristotelians, especially in the sciences of life and complexity. Elsewhere, a sprinkling of Platonists. And this thread was about who gets it rightest ... in terms of some grand purpose.

So pointing to the fact that there is the usual requisite variety is simply to say natural selection has adequate material to be working on. Variety is what we expect. Then winners and losers too.

That's why I say that any answers to such questions, being ultimately incapable of definitive demonstration to everyon'e satsifaction, come down to personal faith — Janus

Well why that rather than down to the well investigated conclusions of a community of open-minded inquirers? Why would you privilege personal faith over collective research?

Have you ever invented a single article of faith that wasn't itself already present as an articulated possibility in the social circumstances that shaped your intellectual development. If you had been raised by wolves or alone on an island, would you have anything that even resembled a belief that might be either affirmed or denied?

the very idea that existence is not replete and fairly rippling with meaning seems obviously absurd. — Janus

We agree on what matters then. Down with nihilism. Living already has value.

Yep no afterlife. But also perhaps an ensouled universe? Neo-aristotelianism would be a justification for seeing existence as a state of ecological being. The Cosmos is not dead but itself alive - in some minimal pansemiotic, not at all mystic, fashion.

Just knowing enough earth science means you can look around a landscape and see it as a grand material flow organised by its silent purposes. The Earth lives. So do the stars as they pulsate on the brink of gravitational collapse while being in the process of exploding.

So I don’t believe in an after life. But the Cosmos does not seem to lack life and mind when you look around through an Aristotelian scientific lens.

And that would be the kind of richer philosophical view you yourself feel worthwhile. It feels great to be a naturalist. Existence seems so meaningful just in itself. :grin:

Looks like Firiston has worked on a new collaborative book The Pragmatic Turn — Read Parfit

Hey, I didn't even realise. That is going to be a pretty technical volume though.

There is this New Sci article - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Is%20this%20a%20unified%20theory%20of%20the%20brain.pdf

Or another introduction - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/Seed%20The%20Prophetic%20Brain.pdf

As well as all his publications - https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/

My first question after reading this is “so what?.” What it feels like is an answer I experience every day. What I am interested in are the mechanics of consciousness; to gain insight into how my feelings work. — Read Parfit

I agree that scientific theories are not conventionally about explaining "what it is like to be this particular thing" but about "how generally could I make that kind of thing". So a neurocognitive theory would be the kind of general blueprint that would allow us to build something that was conscious - in whatever useful sense of the word that would mean. If we could produce true AI, then we would have a theory of what we meant as the essential trick involved in being conscious.

But still, a causal explanation of "why it would feel like something, rather than nothing" is desired by most people. They don't ask science to actually build consciousness, just talk to them about brains and stuff in a way that reassures them they can "get" why it exists as a result of physical processes.

This is a little crazy in one way. It is like when a scientist gives a layperson an image of how fundamental physics works. Oh, there are these little atoms flying about. Or spacetime warps and so objects just roll along that gravitational curvature.

A mental picture gets painted. It seems logical in itself. The layperson "gets its". No further questions asked.

Now it is in fact just as easy to paint a picture like that with consciousness. Brains model the world. To be modelling the world ought to feel like something, right? Why wouldn't it?

But now the typical layperson is not at all satisfied. It is easy to believe in a world composed of little atoms, or waves, or whatever. But there is not the same cultural preparation to understand nature in terms of structures or functions. If you point at a brain, folk are only expecting to find a lump of meat. A bunch of chemicals. Talk of its structure - grounded in a play of symbols - is just not a conventional way to look at anything. It does not give the same easy intuitive pictures of concrete stuff happening.

In terms of hard scientific analysis of the process, I am guessing it will have to stop at something like 'and then the dopamine is released.' — Read Parfit

No. The right scientific answer is going to be focused on the abstract structure - the modelling relation that is in play.

That is what cognitive psychology was pursuing - a functional description of mind. And that is where the symbol-grounding issue arose as a foundational problem for the overly computational road that cogsci was taking. Science took a big wrong turning for a couple of decades because it thought pure syntax - symbolic processing - would light up and be conscious all by itself.

So symbol grounding was cogsci slowly realising it had taken the wrong path. It had to back up, rediscover the neural networking and other embodied relational approaches it had trampled over, and begin again.

The best current approach to my taste is Karl Friston's Bayesian Brain framework. It is neural networking married to thermodynamics - the mental equivalent of the marriage of genetic constraints and metabolic dissipation in life science.

So you have information and physics united in the one theoretical framework. You have symbols, but they are grounded ... by being the thing inbetween, mediating the relation that connects the information and the physics.

I'm sure this all sounds pretty confusing and abstract. But check out Friston. Our best theory of mind will have to be one that speaks to the embodied modelling relation that exists between minds and worlds, or the functional structure of a brain and the affordances that manifests in some material environment.

When if comes to the "conscious feels" question, it won't be about dopamine but about understanding why I see the butter as "yellow". What function does it serve to reduce the complexity of matter and energy that is "the world" to this informational token?

And then understanding how much information processing went into arriving at this perceptual judgement - a sensation of yellow - would go towards the general question of "why it would feel like anything?". Once you really do get down to the level of understanding the complexity of stuff like the modulatory role of dopamine as an informational signal, then you are going to have to respond, "well, why wouldn't all this intricate world modelling not feel like something rather than nothing?".

As to holism, I find this:
"the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts."

If you accept this, then can you explain to me what "cannot exist independently of the whole," and "is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts" mean?

By "in intimate interconnection," I assume that means in terms of the function of the whole, if the whole has a function. The valves are "intimately interconnected" to the crankshaft in terms of the overall functioning of the engine, but they had better not ever touch!

And from the engine. I can remove parts and put them over there. They exist independently over there, yes? — tim wood

You seemed to think there was still something to address here?

Well let's talk about organisms rather than machines. Can an organ exist without a body, and a body without its organs?

Can a heart have an independent existence - one that never involved the context of being part of an organism which needed it for the purpose of pumping blood. Or is there in fact an intimate interconnection, a co-dependent relation, that speaks to the wholeness of the biological causality?

So as I said, it is nuts to talk about proving existence is a machine because you can prove a machine is a machine. A machine is a device built in the very image of reductionist modelling. It works because all the causal holism has been stripped out of the situation.

That is why machines have to be built. They can't grow. They don't get to decide their own use or design. Quite deliberately, there is a lack of any intimate immanent interconnection between their material/efficient causes of being and formal/final causes of being. Because we, as the human builders of a machine, want to supply that part of the causal equation. It is we who have the purposes and the blueprints.

And so the realm of machinery is a special reduced kind of world we create by constraining the usual holism of nature. An internal combustion engine is a controlled explosion directed at regular intervals through a system of pistons, cylinders, cranks and gears. We make sure all the parts are machined from sturdy metal, that the petrol/air mix is just right, that the timing of the explosion is precise.

In short, we do everything possible to reduce it to a mere assemblage of independent parts. And that is why the human mind - with its ideas about purposes and designs - becomes its own culturally independent thing.

As a species, as an organism, we have been transferring a large part of our being into our technology. It started just with cooking, spears and hammers. Now its iPhones and space shuttles. And in splitting off the material/efficient causes of being into a realm of machinery, that has increasingly freed us to be purely intellectual beings - organisms that are now largely devoted to supplying the other half of the causal equation, the purposes and the plans.

So there is a nice little irony there for @Wayfarer's OP. The mathematical turn in Greek thought was all about fabricating the conditions of organismic transcendence.

We could become the gods of technological creation as maths was the basis of a new epistemic cut in nature. We could split our organismic nature in half, turn to technology as the amplifier of our material/efficient causes of being, and then in matching fashion, become amplified in terms of our scope to have grand purposes and grand designs. We transcended our biology and even sociology to the degree we made it possible to dwell in a technologically-based paradise of ideas.

So we rewrote the rules of organic holism. Or at least took it to the next semiotic level by discovering the power of mathematical/logical language - a generalised syntax or grammar now completely washed clean of any intrinsic semantics.

Again note. Language itself was made mechanical - logical, computational, a composition of atomistic parts with no holistic entanglements. So no wonder that the reductionist mindset - the one that tries to view every situation as another machine - has become so ingrained it can no longer even be noticed as a mindset.

We no longer think in the social language of words - the everyday speech that still reflects the structure of intimate interconnections and interdependencies with our other tribe mates. With a standard modern education, we are trained to be as mechanical as possible in our critical thinking skills. When asked any big questions, it seems the only right way to go. Does this compute ... in the machine-like fashion that is the standard issue model of physical reality now?

So again the ironies. To the degree we have founded ourself in mechanism, we have liberated ourselves to be gods or free spirits of the world in which we live. We have achieved Cartesian dualism as an act of self-made causal division. And that then has become a standard source of philosophical angst.

Are we just enlightened machines, or souls existentially trapped inside fleshbots? Which of the two things are we really - a construction of material/efficient cause, or an expression of transcendent formal/final cause? In fact, we are just living a thoroughly divided life that has been amplifying both aspects of our organismic being exponentially. We are being stretched in opposite directions having stumbled into the means to do so - that Greek turn, the development of pure syntax, the development of a mathematical/logical point of view which can Platonically split our world.

Now that again is why we really, really need neo-Aristotelianism today. We have to accept that all four causes compose any functional system. That has to be our philosophical frame of analysis if we really want to understand "everything".

Most folk are stuck with the conflicted image of Platonic dualism. The world is an unthinking machine. We are rational souls. So metaphysics basically can't make sense of how things are. Caught in this paradox, people fall to bickering about whether everything is in fact all mechanical, or all spiritual. Every thread on this forum goes down that gurgler. It is just the way modern culture leaves people.

And that is why it would be wonderful if more people understood holism properly. It is certainly true that to be a modern human is to be divided between the material possibilities of a mechanised existence, and the intellectual possibilities of a free imagined existence. We have made our lives as Cartesian as possible. But that is really weird when you think about it. Holism would be the way to turn that around and see the further possibilities for a psychic integration of that divided self.

Well, let's not exaggerate. Most people have zero interest in philosophy and do live rather unanalysed lives. They are social organisms, responding to their immediate cultural contexts, and probably all the happier for it. The contradictions are not felt because they just don't believe that other people are merely machines, nor in fact transcendent beings. They are simply other people and the ordinary embodied games of language apply. No need to introduce any mathematical abstractions into this equation and thus set up some further metaphysical drama.

But once you are exercised by the division that is forming our modern intellectual condition, then you ought to be pleased that there is a way to heal it - neo-Aristotelianism, or any other of the many brand-names for a holistic, four causes, understanding of metaphysics.

It settles the old differences while opening up new intellectual horizons. Human anthropology is about the most trivial and easily disposed of issue. It is how holism applies to physics and cosmology that would be cutting edge. Or to life and mind in some properly structural sense. Now we are talking about the new adventures that science has embarked upon.

It is difficult to fathom your logic. Are you saying that reductionist locality can account for the quantum facts? My point was that no matter how absurd you might deem a non local holism, dem are the facts.

You are deflecting. The issue was already the quantum one of Feynman’s path integral. I am the one arguing that it’s models all the way down. I am the one asking you how quantum mechanics can be understood other than holistically, while pointing out that even classical physics is holistic once you ask how the principle of least action could metaphysically be the case.

I am denying the empiricist dogma of 'no innate ideas'. — Wayfarer

That is now another shift in subject. And empirically, psychology supports that particular "dogma" to a large extent. How could genes even code for innate ideas?

On the other hand, genes can code for the general constraints under which the brain develops its processing architecture. So there is a structure that is going to grow in a way that might eventually cash out in well-structured ideas.

Plato had some nonsense about the truths of mathematics being dormant understandings that a rational soul could be prodded into remembering. But was this more than just poetic licence even for Plato? Certainly, it would be the least useful of his metaphysical positions today.

That is why I frequently refer to the IEP article on the necessity of explaining mathematics in empirical terms - the 'indispensability argument for mathematics'. Don't you think that is ridiculous, that it has come to that? That is said to be because, and I quote, 'our best empirical theories seem to debar any knowledge of mathematical objects.' And why do 'our best theories' seem to debar that knowledge? Because 'the rationalist’s [what I'm calling Platonist] claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' And why? Because mathematics is real, but it's not physical; its very nature is incorporeal, and the faculty which grasps it can't be understood through the one-dimensional lens of today's empiricism. That's what empiricism must deny, a priori, because according to it, everything real is physical. Ergo, having to justify mathematics in terms that empiricists will respect. I'm sure the irony is missed on most of them, as that, too, is not physical. — Wayfarer

But surely, having again been caught out by a succession of posters in this very thread, you ought to be more cautious about your enthusiasm to make all the fact fit your desired conclusion?

Right from the off with this post about neo-Aristotelianism, you made the mis-step of conflating the supernatural transcendence of Platonism with the naturalistic immanence of Aristotle. You were taking something directly contradictory as evidence for what you want to believe.

So again, you are wanting to argue that mathematical structure is incorporeal. And my comment was that maths itself divides into the real and the fictional. The kind of maths that physically matters is the kind of maths that empirically works to make actual predictions about nature.

So you can't just gaily claim all maths has this unreasonable effectiveness that no one could explain.

It is only a particular kind of maths - the kind that deals with dynamical structure - which really has this "miraculous" quality. And we can see that it is not in fact a transcendent immaterial miracle but an immanent material one.

Disorder requires order even to be disorder. For entropy to be produced, there must be a dissipative structure. So cosmic structure has to self-develop to create the Cosmos as a steady-state entropic flow - a story of a Big Bang turning into a Heat Death by the end of time.

Nothing could be more corporeal than that structure which is the means by which the substantial actuality of a material being can manifest.

This is how Aristotle fixed Platonism with his immanent hylomorphism. All we have to do then is scrub out the mystical Christian re-write that followed and we are back to the future with neo-Aristotelianism.

Again - no animus against evolution, but against biologism, by the view that our abilities are circumscribed by biological ends. Evolution doesn't address the gap between surviving and living - the space in which human culture emerges - and every attempt to do so, amounts to reductionism. — Wayfarer

Science sees sociology and culture as natural phenomena too. They are part of the same evolutionary story. They are manifestations of the constraints imposed on all forms of existence by the telos of the laws of thermodynamics.

So sure, a systems science perspective - the neo-Aristotelian one - would accept that there is much about human culture and individual taste that is merely accidental. It is not constrained in a strong fashion. And in fact - as we are now talking about a highly developed state of semiosis - it positively fetishes the creative, the spontaneous, the free.

This Romanticism itself is sensible in the context of our hugely accelerated development. We want as many "mutants" and "hopeful monsters" as possible, as that is the requisite variety that evolvability demands. :)

If we want to continue accelerating exponentially into the future we are freely inventing, the name of the game is to increase the scope for contingency, and thus mistakes, and thus the learning which is the pragmatic erasure of those mistakes and the resulting honing of even better habits of action.

So thermodynamical development completely explains life and mind - including the fact that the creative and the spontaneous are a fundamental part of the deal. Developmental structuralism predicts exactly what is observed.

We even have models now. Scalefree networks, constructal theory, and other examples of freely growing natural structures, powered by randomness and yet already predestined to arrive at maximally efficient outcomes when it comes to the job of delivering ever increasing entropic flows.

It 'relates', because it is used to make predictions and calculations. Isn't it revealed when mathematical analysis is used to generate new discoveries about nature? — Wayfarer

Yes. And so now you endorse the necessity of an empirical basis to establish any connection. It just ain't a theory unless it is founded in matching acts of measurement. That is the pragmatic constraint we impose on our free speculation so that our knowledge develops in a purposeful and reasonable fashion.

So you are starting out by granting the very things you normally strongly deny. How long before you forget what you just said here?

The movement of those objects is constrained by the laws of physics, which is what enables us to predict them. That's what I had thought you meant by 'constraints' but please tell me if I'm wrong. — Wayfarer

It is exactly that.

And he really doesn't have an answer; the word 'miracle' appears twelve times in that essay. Likewise Einstein often mused that 'the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprensible'. — Wayfarer

Sure. Newton and Galileo were equally amazed by the universalising power of mathematical physics. Everyone always has been. When you look at "God" in the face - come to understand the inescapable necessity of the structural principles of existence - one always ought to feel awe. It's a dazzling realisation.

So, great scientists like these two, don't themselves actually have a theory about why. — Wayfarer

Well actually, Einstein in particular was famous for his "unreasonable" belief that you just have to go with the structural necessity of symmetries. So he knew what to be looking for in terms of physical reality - even when he wasn't the greatest mathematician himself.

Wigner did foundational work in seeing how symmetry maths mapped onto the emerging bulk of quantum mechanics - revealing the essential mathematical-strength structures involved.

So I think you should read these kinds of comments as a wake-up call to their fellow scientists and the interested lay public. Reality is all about intelligible structure, not meaningless matter.

Maths was merely the science of pattern, a way of modelling dynamical structure. Once you took a structural view of the Cosmos, it was inevitable that it would have to map to the kind of maths which had been developed to talk about structure in this kind of constrained, symmetry-breaking, dynamical and relational fashion.

Where that goes against the grain, is that it is against empiricist dogma that nature ought not to be so ordered; mathematics must be somehow explicable in terms of grey matter, for it to be considered real. — Wayfarer

But remember that you accept the constraint that empiricism should have over our free metaphysical speculation.

Let's not revert to the Platonism of saying human minds discover transcendent truths. All we are doing is arriving at useful models of dynamically self-organising or immanent structures. And then empirical evidence shows that we can apply those models to good predictive descriptions of the Universe as a whole. There is nothing larger that needs to be said ... for as long as evidence confirms what we think.

So the empiricist dogma is still in full force. But structuralism is the approach which says nature has to be deeply ordered to exist. It is structuralist theories that are being produced and so the ones being tested.

If we spend billions searching for a Higgs boson, it is because it has been a mathematical-grade structural necessity for about 40 years.

What I think it means, is that mathematics is inherently a part of the structure of intelligence. — Wayfarer

But which comes first? If the world is inherently structured, then brains are under an evolutionary constraint to be able to master the principles of that structure. And eventually a technical language comes along - mathematics - to take that to a further explicit level of cultural discourse.

Mathematicians get to stop talking about the shape of the world like regular folk. They just sit in a huddle talking about the shape of shapes. And they are happy to be called the most intelligent people on Earth for doing so. Although quite a lot, they get called other names. :)

Where the real conflict lies, is not between that view and physics - many physicists have strongly Platonist tendencies, whether they know it or not - but with Darwinism. — Wayfarer

Bring out your bogeyman. Give the effigy another good kick.

Your animus against evolution and development is misplaced. It is Aristotelian causality at work. It is constraint treated as something physically real, structurally foundational.

As Wigner says, there is something miraculous about the human ability to reason. It enables us to imagine something that has never existed before, and then manifest it. — Wayfarer

Again, the ability to speculate freely is half the story. Yes, it is useful to conjure up fictions, as they might turn out to be truths. But then that is where empirical test comes in - the other necessity that you want to deny.

So there is no maths that anyone invented that matters a fig - except to the degree that science has now put it to good use. End of story.

Without empirical success, all that wild invention would be utterly unmiraculous in most people's view. Who could have any reason to care. At least fabled beasts have some kind of social reality. Maths that never cashed out in an experiment would be the definition of an austistic activity, like rhythmically beating your head against the wall.

So reconsider the arc of your own argument. Maths is only miraculous because it can be used to say something testable about the deep structure of physical reality.

That is the only thing that saves it from being Pythagorean lunacy in the world's eyes.

But such a mind would need to take account of everything that does make a difference and be able to discern the difference between differences that make no difference and those that make a difference in order to eliminate the former and arrive at 'the cosmically general viewpoint". — Janus

You would be talking the mind that has to climb out of ignorance, so not now really God-like and all-knowing?

I would of course be happy with that as we are now talking the proper Peircean cosmic view. Mindfulness becomes that very mechanism which is the development of habits of conception, routines of constraint.

If you want to go that further step, that's great. In the beginning there is just vagueness - neither a point or view nor its absence. And then what self-organises is the foundational temporal distinction between the general and the particular.

You can have differences that make a difference as there is also the embodied purpose in play that determines the differences that don't. General necessity emerges from the fog of the indeterminate, along with the accidental particulars it is determining to be such.

So Schop's Cartesian confusion is thus completely dissolved. Mindfulness - as semiosis - is already everywhere in existence from the start. But it only develops a fully crisp expression by the end. By which time history will be over and no longer matter at all. All the accidents won't make a difference.

This is exactly the kind of ontology modelled by self-organising physics - for instance, Feigenbaum's universality, the point where the definite transition to chaos is achieved. Every possible path winds up at the same Heat Death limit. The details no longer matter. And they never really did.

The third person point of view, the scientific version of the God's eye view, really has to see the whole of creation in a single unifying sweep. And what it would see is this extreme simplicity, and not some complicated world of medium-sized dry goods that seems to us the epitome of material existence.

The Universe began as a featureless radiation bath. All you need to know to describe it in every detail were a few basic parameters - the cosmic equivalent of a temperature and pressure. There just wasn't anything more to say.

Then after an excursion through an era of somewhat more complex and localised turbulence - our small window of observation - it will get back to that original bland state. It will have merely transitioned from one state of ultimate vague simplicity to a matchingly definite state of equivalent material simplicity.

Some deep mathematical possibility, an ontic state of structural possibility, will be fully expressed. But the Universe will be now just again a featureless radiation bath - albeit of maximum possible coldness and extent.

So again, the objective scientific view is the one that sees the essential formal structure and ignores the accidental material particulars which happen along the way.

There is a good metaphysical reason for why scientific modelling winds up with the kind of character it has - one based on the unavoidable mathematical symmetries. It is exactly how the true third person point of view would look.

The God's eye view makes more sense too as that emphasises the view is all about seeing the general purpose, the general necessity, that is cosmically in play, everywhere at all times.

So the view from nowhere is already rather too focused on the notion that a world is simply a set of material objects. And then the problem for a mind is to see these particular located things as they "actually are" - in a material/efficient sense of existence.

And my point is that science naturally moves towards the abstraction of generality in seeking out the objectively dispassionate view of existence. For good reason, the local particulars just don't matter much. They are nature's accidents. What theory has to pursue is the global necessities. What has to be "seen" from a point of view is the formal/final causes of being.

And thus, it ain't quite so dispassionate after all. It is all about the search for some cosmic-level purpose or reason in fact. It is about the necessary constraints that regulate all acts of material individuation.

So the problem is very often framed in reductionist or logically atomistic terms. What vantage point, what God-like mind, is capable of making every possible measurement of reality? How do we know every accidental detail that composes existence all at once, in its entirety, the complete data set with nothing left out.

And yet that way of framing the issue is utterly wrong. The cosmically general viewpoint that can "see it all" is the one that is everywhere but nowhere in that it is only contemplating the absolute bare essentials of existence.

It all boils down to the reason or purpose that there is such a thing as existence. After that, the rest is just the unfolding of a creation, an accumulation of some further history of accidents.

A God would shrug His shoulders, and say Who cares? I got the fundamentals right. The rest followed of its own accord. I've no need to sweat the details. That wasn't how it was meant to work.

Two things are clear from this: 1) whatever holism is good for, it is of no use when applied to anything as mundane as things in the world, and 2) apokrisis has apparently started a correspondence course in sarcasm but hasn't got to the part yet where they teach him that sarcasm is usually without substance, especially the eye-rolling variety. — tim wood

I can't make you out. You seemed smart enough to have a serious conversation. Then you so quickly degenerate into time-wasting bickering.

To deny holism in the context of quantum theory is simply Quixotic.

Sure, it is a good scientific strategy to try to interpret QM or QFT with the least amount of holism possible. We don't want to go overboard with the woo when we can still hope to assimilate aspects of quantum metaphysics to good old reductionist locality. But in the end, you do have to give up that classical picture of a completely mechanical reality. All quantum interpretations now agree on this. The experiments are in.

So I don't know if you are playing a game or seriously believe your anti-holism. Unfortunately stuff like this suggests you have a poor grasp of what QM is actually modelling when it talks about particles and waves....

Do a little research on diffraction gratings. This movement of light as a wave, capable of self-interference, like water in the ocean, I accept as a fact demonstrated by experiment. — tim wood

A wave is a classical collective phenomenon. It can be understood metaphysically as some set of discrete objects - water molecules - with elastic connections that then oscillates with a resonant frequency. The wave forms arise as a common mode that solves its boundary conditions - the various parameters imposed on a body of water like the shape of its container, any steady driving action like a wind or other external impulse.

So wave mechanics is clearly holistic. The "parts" arise to fill the available parameter space. The wave peaks are forced to fit the container in harmonic fashion. A clearer example of top down causation is hard to imagine. A continuous liquid is broken into a set of now discrete vibrations.

Of course, the metaphysical reductionist will point out that the continuous liquid is itself a collection of discrete molecules. But that is both true and missing the point.

The discrete molecules are not discrete at all. They have charges that come into play when they are collected together. They are thus constrained to act in continuous fashion - elastically connected - by that continuous force between them. The sum is already greater than the parts once it becomes necessary for us to recognise the fact that a system contains its interactions as well as its locations.

So anyway, even classical mechanics speaks directly to holism and top-down causation. Harmonics is an actual constraint forming the features in question. When we count the wave peaks or wave troughs, we are counting the locally emergent phenomena ... and treating the underlying liquid as a continuous boundary condition, parameterised by global properties like viscosity. That just is the metaphysics of the situation.

And then once we start talking about quantum waves, we are now parameterising probability spaces - the probabilities of making particular observations. Any underlying materiality has dropped right out of the picture. Talk of a wave is now pure mathematical analogy. It is talk about an organisation imposed on possible measurements.

In the loosest fashion we might talk about some wavefunction as a solution constructed by a collection of all the possible paths connecting two points. And sometimes the additions and subtractions give you a probability that looks like a trajectory carved by a material particle, and other times, a probability that looks like the kind of interference patterns you see from interacting waves.

Yet what we actually see in reality is neither moving particles, nor interfering waves, but simply some registered event - the click of a particle detector. How that empirical fact occurred remains fundamentally mysterious. QM certainly does not model the collapse of the wavefunction. The maths can only generate a probability picture that either looks more particle trajectory like, or more wave interference like.

I say all this to emphasise how far QM moves away from materialist ontological commitments.

Even Newtonian mechanics demanded all kinds of spooky "action at a distance" and "inertial motion" woo. That was the big deal - having the bravery to drop the highly materialistic ontology of "Aristotelian" impetus theories and accept a materialism ruled by global symmetries and forces like gravity which could act without any mediating medium. So even Newtonian mechanics was the big break from literal atomism. (For amusement, check out how Descartes failed to make that mental break and kept trying to make a corpuscular theory of heavenly motions work.)

And now, with QM, the rupture with simple materialism is complete. It is a calculus of the probabilities of observables, not a picture of material events.

Of course we still want to picture what that means in metaphysically intuitive fashion. But now - in the modern era - that has to mean focusing on the mathematical form or structure of nature.

And that is the Aristotelian four causes thing. We are back to wanting to take formal and final cause seriously if we want to understand the Cosmos in some properly deep way.

Whereas, the 'domain of numbers' (for only one example) doesn't exist, in that sense, yet is still real, according to Platonists (including Godel and Frege.) So - real but not existent. And that is the dividing line between Platonism and everyone else, as everyone else says that 'what exists' and 'what is real' are the same. — Wayfarer

I think you have a problem here in that you have to show how the imagined domain relates to physical reality.

It is just like our other imaginary worlds that are so easily constructed by linguistic combination. We can imagine an infinite variety of fictional beasts - unicorns, dragons, orcs, elves, gryphons. They all exist in a domain opened up by syntactical construction. We can freely assemble animals out of bits and pieces like wings, hooves, fire breathing, horns, miniaturisation, the ability to walk through walls, etc, etc. Once you establish a syntax based on unconstrained construction, you can generate an infinite variety of the unreal in modal fashion.

So the question is, how do you divide your mathematical Platonia into a part that is physically realistic (like the maths of the standard model, or the maths of quantum probability amplitudes - both extremely arcane until it was found they had this exact fit with reality) and the part which is simply an unconstrained generation of fictions?

The talk about the unreasonable effectiveness of maths is usually much too loose. And in that confusion, it becomes unclear whether maths is generally just a human construct or an actual science of patterns.

So you can't make a good case for Platonism until you can reliably tell the difference between the fictional creations of maths, and the maths that might actually be the deep structure of nature, of existence itself.

And here is where the constraints of Aristotelian immanence might come in. If we insist that worlds have to be self-organising, then that puts a bound on free construction. Already such a world is far more limited in the patterns it could generate. We can rule out the mathematical unicorns and elves on stronger grounds because the question would become, could every beast we could possibly construct, successfully co-exist.

We are now thinking holistically. We have closed our fictional world and applied a principle of natural selection to it. Would dragons have enough unicorns to keep them fed? Would fairies just wave their wands and eliminate all nasty orcs from their world?

So this is an analogy. But it shows the further Aristotelian constraint that would start to make sense of mathematical Platonism. Once you invoke hylomorphic immanence, then you close the system in holistic fashion. You add the rule that all must be able to co-exist as the one world. And that changes everything really. It creates a boundary separating the actually possible from the fictionally possible - the kind of possibility that is merely a meaningless combination of parts, not a world of possibility united by its common purpose of being able to actually exist in a holistically meaningful fashion.

So holism really counts. It creates the closure that defines the meaningful. It encodes the finality or purpose of a world - even when that purpose is understood as just the most basic thing of being able to exist.

That is why I always point to the centrality of symmetry and symmetry breaking when talking about metaphysics. That is the area above all in maths that is focused on the holism that closes a world while also speaking to the local individuation which allows the other thing of atomistic construction. Symmetry maths takes you to the heart of immanent self-organisation.

But anyway, the critical issue is that not all maths is equal. Some of it is a runaway syntax of the kind that allows us to make infinite bestiaries out of a finite collection of parts. And a core of it gets at the holism needed to unite a world under the common immanent purpose of successfully co-existing as a functioning whole. The usual developmental and evolutionary constraint that is the hallmark of any systems metaphysics or structuralist thinking.

it allows for the slipperiness of your argument. — schopenhauer1

An argument is a model. Your problem lies in grasping the arguments.

Per Feynman in (I think) SIx Easy Pieces, or maybe QED, the light takes all the paths. — tim wood

Worth quoting Feynman probably....

In the case of light we also discussed the question: How does the particle find the right path? From the differential point of view, it is easy to understand. Every moment it gets an acceleration and knows only what to do at that instant. But all your instincts on cause and effect go haywire when you say that the particle decides to take the path that is going to give the minimum action. Does it ‘smell’ the neighboring paths to find out whether or not they have more action? In the case of light, when we put blocks in the way so that the photons could not test all the paths, we found that they couldn’t figure out which way to go, and we had the phenomenon of diffraction.

Is the same thing true in mechanics? Is it true that the particle doesn’t just ‘take the right path’ but that it looks at all the other possible trajectories? And if by having things in the way, we don’t let it look, that we will get an analog of diffraction? The miracle of it all is, of course, that it does just that. That’s what the laws of quantum mechanics say. So our principle of least action is incompletely stated. It isn’t that a particle takes the path of least action but that it smells all the paths in the neighborhood and chooses the one that has the least action by a method analogous to the one by which light chose the shortest time.

You remember that the way light chose the shortest time was this: If it went on a path that took a different amount of time, it would arrive at a different phase. And the total amplitude at some point is the sum of contributions of amplitude for all the different ways the light can arrive. All the paths that give wildly different phases don’t add up to anything. But if you can find a whole sequence of paths which have phases almost all the same, then the little contributions will add up and you get a reasonable total amplitude to arrive. The important path becomes the one for which there are many nearby paths which give the same phase.

http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html

So all your instincts on cause and effect go haywire apparently when you say that the particle decides to take the path that is going to give the minimum action. Yes indeedy. And yet this teleological view is the one that made his name. :)

You don't rebut nonsense. You laugh at it.

Scientific and other analytic explanations tend to be reductionist, in the sense that they fit phenomena or concepts into some theoretical framework. — SophistiCat

Sure, reductionism can have this other meaning. But the discussion was about four causes holism vs atomistic materialism. So why change the subject?

And I would say it gives you more of a problem admitting the principle of least action does reduce to a holistic position which takes finality seriously as part of the fundamental workings of the Cosmos.

If there is a lesson to derive from the four causes it is this pluralism of explanations — SophistiCat

Again, I thought you were arguing against four causes modelling. And now you are championing it under the permissive banner of pluralism.

there are these alternate frameworks that are sometimes exactly equivalent — SophistiCat

So now you have even less to carp about apparently. You think there is a formal duality between reductionism and holism. And I rather agree.

There are deeper and more interesting ways to make sense of such alternate explanatory frameworks. — SophistiCat

Terrific. You will be telling us how that pans out for QM any time now.

Yes, variational approaches in physics have this interesting property that the path taken appears to be explained by the final state, rather than the other way around. — SophistiCat

Interesting? Or entirely paradoxical for reductionist metaphysics?

There are deeper and more interesting ways to make sense of such alternate explanatory frameworks. — SophistiCat

Great. Now is your chance to share them. In the context of Feynman’s path integral.

Where did Aristotle ever give such an account? — tim wood

Note the reference to neo-Aristotelianism. Check the book we are discussing. You'll get it.

...the light takes all the paths. — tim wood

Seriously? In what sense does it actually take all the routes? You are confusing the method of calculation with the metaphysics.

The wonder in both cases arises out of a relative degree of ignorance. This isn't to say that QED isn't strange, but that aspects of it are accessible and make sense. — tim wood

All the trajectories that don't happen are virtual. They exist in concrete fashion as possibilities. And so in turn, in a contextual sense. They express the holism of the constraints being imposed on the action.

Yeah sure. Let's talk about regular statistics and not quantum statistics. Don't mention the non-locality and entanglement.

Nothing going on here folks. Just good wholesome mechanics with no weirdness. :roll:

As to holism, I find this:
"the theory that parts of a whole are in intimate interconnection, such that they cannot exist independently of the whole, or cannot be understood without reference to the whole, which is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts."

If you accept this, then can you explain to me what "cannot exist independently of the whole," and "is thus regarded as greater than the sum of its parts" mean? — tim wood

You mean like an excitation in a field perhaps?

(And if you want to make the mistake of thinking a quantum field is a material stuff rather than a summary of observational probabilities, then be my guest.)

And from the engine. I can remove parts and put them over there. They exist independently over there, yes? — tim wood

Surprise. You can prove existence is a machine because a machine is a machine! Beautiful logic. Shame I've used up my quota of eyerolls already.

Nick Lane argues that there is not a hard line where life begins. — Read Parfit

Not really. Like all biologists, he sees the line defined by the combination of metabolism and replication. Life has to have both the chemistry and the control.

So what he is doing is instead nudging the needle on the metabolism-first story of abiogenesis. For a long time, people felt it would have to be the replication-first story. You would need RNA coding for the proteins that structured the chemical reactions. But he is nicely arguing that metabolism could travel a long way down the self-organising route without a code in the very specific conditions provided by warm alkaline vents in the sea floor.

So the less that replication needs to account for, the smaller that jump becomes. The line that defines life becomes one that is not hard to cross rather than not a hard line.

Feynman described the "quantum event" as taking all possible paths, all but the shortest cancelling each other out. — tim wood

So things want to take all paths, and in doing that, find it is not possible?

I realise that the done thing is to eschew teleological turns of phrase - aim for the studiiedly neutral account. But let's not ignore the now elephantine lump swept under the carpet.

You can't have QM being both the weirdest scientific thing ever, but also no kind of big deal at all. "Hey guys, its just a bunch of particle interference terms which cancel a certain way when you do the infinite sum."

Why would "being scientific" allow you to talk about quantum multiverses with a straight face and yet treat a neo-Aristotelian account of thermal wavefunction collapse as beyond the pale?

Paradigms. It's always paradigms. And no reason not to expect the metaphysical wheel to turn back towards conscious Aristotelianism again.

Hylomorphism remains our most comprehensive causal framework. And as I say, material reductionism honours it even in trying to chop it in half and treat the downward acting constraints as philosophical category errors.

It was a good trick for a long time. But holism remains the ultimate game.

For this question it is required. — schopenhauer1

Fine. You have presumed a state of unlocated and omniscient mind. All the usual confusions will follow. Don't expect much sympathy. :)

The view from nowhere, has no models. — schopenhauer1

LOL.

Anyways, these arguments are a bit beside the point of this particular thread which is the question of what is the point of view outside of the subject object relationship we know. — schopenhauer1

So have you given up your Cartesian framing of the question - the one where the view would emanate from some now unlocated "mind" having "feelings of what it is like to be a third person"?

My point is that this is all about modelling the world for a reason. So a reason gives the over-arching starting point. The world is then seen in terms of that. And can there be any point of view - first, second or third - which is not a model motivated by a purpose?

The natural general purpose of a model is to gain control over the world. Why else would a model evolve or persist?

So just keep following the pragmatic line of thought and the various questions answer themselves with no great drama.

What we call a scientifically or metaphysically general model of the world ends up being that division into theory and measurement. The objective third person perspective is the one that most clearly sees the Cosmos in terms of its universal invariants - its greatest generalities. That is why we end up talking about the laws or symmetries of nature.

The third person objective point of view is the one that can afford to ignore every particular fact, every contingent fluctuation ... at least to the degree that is efficient for constructing a lived model of the world.

There is not much point knowing about neutrinos and quarks unless you can potentially do something with them. And there is absolutely no point in knowing the individual state of every neutrino and quark in the history of the Cosmos as what possible good purpose would that serve? Efficient modelling prefers to get by on making the least effort. So it is how much we can ignore - by summing reality up in t-shirt equations - which is the useful measure of our "objectivity".

F=Ma is the epitome of saying almost everything while saying almost nothing. It is about the least particular fact of the Cosmos we ever learn. Although E=MC^2 is even more generic.

The third person point of view then becomes some actual physical model of the world - an equation plus some set of measurements that will pump out a prediction.

And we find this third person model useful even if it doesn't itself contain anything but the most generalised kind of reason or telos - the thermodynamic imperative that is its maximally generic "point of view", the anchoring locus from which its description of the Cosmos emanates.

Knowing either can be a sign of erudition, but when did Richard Feynman ever resolve his problems in physics by referring to efficient, material, formal, or final causes? — tim wood

But Feynman's great advance was to apply the principle of least action to the calculation of quantum probabilities. So he relied on the presumption that reality really is guided by a global optimising desire.

Somehow a quantum event knows every possibility and selects the shortest path accordingly.

Materialists then thought well that is just weird. But it works, so we will accept his way of doing calculations and ignore the metaphysical implications it raises.

So all you are describing is a blank spot in the reductionist field of vision. Even Newton depended on finality in the guise of the principle of least action. But physics has just got so used to ignoring the fact that it is founded on this kind of systematic or holistic Aristotelian causal analysis.

The social history of it is that Renaissance atomism led to the successful approach of breaking the world into laws and initial conditions. Science was a reductionist framing of reality that deliberately moved formal and final cause out of the picture so that only the material/efficient causes of things remained as the measurable particulars. The facts were all you needed to know - because you had already extracted final/formal cause as the laws governing the facts.

But just because reductionism was an exercise in turning formal/final cause into a set of universal principles - so general that they are eternally in play - doesn't mean that science wasn't just continuing with a four cause analysis. It just relabelled the telic part of the equation as the laws or principles of nature.

Wherever you found a symmetry to be broken, the least action principle gave you the universal reason for why it would get broken in some particular direction.

Grandma might have got locked up in the attic as an ageing embarrassment to hip young reductionist science. But she still bangs her stick on the floor in anger. Finality might be concealed in much of scientific discourse, but it is still so essential that Feynman wrote it directly into the maths of our most foundational physics, just as Lagrange did the same to make Newton's mechanics easier to calculate.

This is the naive realism that I was mentioning. — schopenhauer1

The naive idealist of course only ever sees his own twin, the naive realist. It is the face looking back in the mirror.

To take the math or the models as reality because it is how humans translate is anthropomorphisizing the universe. — schopenhauer1

If you read what I said, you will see that is what I said. And it is the feature, not the bug. It is how the "mind" arises. The mind is a model of the world with us in it. It is an anthropomorphic view.

Even science sticks close to useful knowledge - the kind that gives humans control over nature.

And understand that to be the epistemic game is the way to avoid falling into your idealist trap of forever complaining that "mind" doesn't get explained by science. Science does explain mind to the degree that is anthropomorphically useful.

And if you are not too much worried about that level of neurocognitive detail, then in fact standard theistic/romantic conceptions of the "mind" are the only model you need for day to day life. Cartesianism works as the standard model of everyday living for the ordinary person. Why make things more complicated?

We have a soul. We exist as mental objects in our mental worlds of mental experience. Stick with that simple conception. A whole weight of social machinery depends on us having that kind of straightforward view of our being. It is how systems of laws, and morality, and self-regulation all work. Humans buy into a Cartesian model so they can act in rational Cartesian fashion - a sharp social division between mind and world, and my mind and other minds. That little triad of first, second and third person points of view!

Sure, some people then get really bent out of shape when they realise this Cartesian cultural model leads to a conflict with a more informed scientific view of nature. Something has to give eventually. But rather than getting stuck in that phase forever, you either have to step across, get to grips with what science is actually saying - and how that is a process philosophy view - or just go back to ignoring the issue in general. Live life the way most people do - as if Cartesianism were true.

And yet, in a certain sense, the conception of the whole, seems boundless, or without form. — InternetStranger

Sure. In a certain sense.

If we have a sense of the intelligible, then it is only intelligible that we attempt to understand that itself in terms of an intelligible contrast. And so the very idea of intelligibility calls for its intelligible "other" - the radically unintelligible. The vague or indeterminate potential. The classical apeiron or aperas. The prime matter.

So that is certainly the metaphysical position I am pushing - the one that founds itself in the boundless and formless. It is what makes sense of the intelligible because why else would intelligible contrast even be a thing unless it is precisely what gives form and bound to existence?

So we can conceive what was necessary as the antithesis of necessity itself. Step forward pure unbounded contingency - the condition so vague and limitless that it looks like nothing at all.

Or, no 'monad' is ever without its intelligible character? — InternetStranger

Yep. No figure without a ground. And the mind has to produce both in the same moment when making a sensory distinction.

It's the Law of Form - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_Form

However, the justification for Cartesianism, which has it's roots in ancient philosophy noting the distinction between appearance and reality, is that the way we perceive the world is clearly based on the kind of bodies we have, and not the way the world is. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a notable discrepancy between appearance and reality. — Marchesk

Yeah sure. But would you conclude from that that brains model worlds or that there is a realm of mind that is somehow getting it all wrong about how the world actually is?

Either way, looks bad for Cartesianism. It is only the pragmatism of a modelling relation approach that not only explains the discrepancy, but predicts it.

Pragmatism says the modelling is driven by its self-interested purposes and a need to produce a reliable system of mediating signs. So the whole point would be to manufacture an epistemic cut in which we do things like "see colours" and "hear sounds". Pragmatism explains why it is effective to replace the noumenal with the phenomenal. It becomes the epistemic feature rather than the epistemic bug.

Sure, but in doing so, it reveals a perspectiveless view from nowhere that is different from how we perceive the world. Science reveals a world beyond perception, or in addition to how we perceive things. — Marchesk

It repeats the same pragmatic trick at a new semiotic level. The evolved brain models the world in its embodied neural language. Then us metaphysicians and scientists model the world in terms of disembodied mathematical or logical language.

So yes, we have double vision once we have the right cultural training. We have our biological experience of the world as embodied creatures. Then we have our social view of existence - the Cosmos or Being in general - to the degree we become absorbed into some depersonalising tradition of human discourse.

Science of course never actually breaks through to grasp the noumenal. It is always still self-interested modelling. And very often it doesn't get any further than seeing Cosmos/Being as some kind of grand deterministic machine, a mechanical pattern.

But we can still appreciate why it is heading in the right direction if modelling is about making a clear division between abstract theory and concrete acts of measurement. We can see how it is extremitising what evolved brains already do - dividing the world phenomenally into the particular and the general as the best way to understand it.

What about the case when one merely feels something solid or hard? — InternetStranger

You mean, as intelligibly opposed to the penetrable and squishy?

There is never a monistic "merely" about it. All judgements are contextual or dichotomised in a figure~ground Gestalt fashion.

As the skeptics noted, if you put a cold hand in a luke-warm pitcher of water, you feel something different from when you stick a hot hand in the same water. So judgement is relative. It is up to us to divide reality into a figure and ground every time.

The division just gets made in contrasting fashion itself. Some divisions are hardwired in at the level of fixed sensory habit. Others have to be attentively constructed. This is why the nervous system in fact has a complex hierarchical structure.

It is the same mechanism in operation at all times - imposing an intelligible division on reality is the start of any claim to sensation. But as evolved and developed beings, we can rely on a vast weight of hardwired aperceptual structure to get the game going. Then higher attentive level processes can come in over the top.

This supports a dissociation of perception and conception. There does seem to be a sensorium that founds the intellect because habit level responses seem so fixed, and attentive level responses are the very opposite.

But look closer at how the nervous system is structured and it is a structure of intelligibility being imposed all the way down to the individual sensory receptors standing on the front line. They are already designed as switches poised to signal a contrast - flip one way for "figure", the other way for "ground".

Why do we take this third person point of view on the thing-in-itself and not assume another point of view? What would that point of view even be? — schopenhauer1

The third person point of view is really the search for what is invariant across all possible points of view. So it cashes out as distinguishing between the locally particular and the globally general.

Of course, if you presume that "point of view" is all about some "Cartesian theatre" state of phenomenal being, then you have hardwired in an epistemic confusion already.

Scientific objectivity works because it pragmatic metaphysics. It is willing to go with the useful division of experience into the particular and the general. One is made measurement, the other theory. And so to "see" the world as it is, is simply to extract its general laws - its global invariances ... coupled to the answering ability to make the particular acts of measurement that would then breath fire into the equations.

So ordinary psychology already gives us a third person point of view of the world. As conscious beings, we are already modelling reality in terms of conceptual theories and perceptual measurements. When we are aware, we are taking some particular point of view of some generally understood world. And we get to update that view every half second or so with a fresh act of attentive shift.

But Cartesian dualism creates a different ontic model of what brains are doing. And now the usual confusions enter the picture. The first person point of view is located in its own substantial realm of being. The world is placed outside of that in its own sphere. Gods have to be invoked that would have super-human perception that sees every particular all at once, in omniscient fashion.

What is actually going on in the modelling - the careful division into the generality of concepts and particularity of percepts - gets lost from sight.

Again, the third person point of view is rightfully the invariant generality that would be seen across all possible acts of measurement. And so science turns out to know what it is doing. It is ignoring the Cartesianism which is the philosophical misstep.

To notice anything at all, there must be some intelligible sense of contrast already. So yes, for even the vaguest sense of there being "something", that means there is an intelligible contrast in play. Something stirs just "there" in our sensorium, and not anywhere else. The law of the excluded middle applies to our perceptual state.

Well, that would be the story for attentive awareness. You then have habitual or preconscious level mental processing. When we drive, we can process complicated traffic patterns without any sense of noticing or remembering for reasonable periods while our attention wanders on to other thoughts.

So there is the possibility for real dissociation too.

At a neural level, the nervous system is still set up to process the perceptual in terms of the intelligible. The automatic brain is still relying on understanding the traffic flows in terms of well-learnt contrasts. But now it is more dominated by keeping things constant and unchanging - always the same distance from the car in front, always the same distance from the edges of the traffic lane, etc. So in fact, the brain is managing to ignore the world by making it boringly predictable. The sensorium - as it relates to the task of driving - is so utterly intelligible that it lacks any change or surprise. If contrast is predictable - that constant flow of the world around us - then it falls out of the picture.

Thus you have a complicated story. The whole nervous system is predicated on intelligible contrast from the bottom-up. And then within that, there is a new kind of contrast that can be manufactured between the changes that are predicted and the changes that are not. The brain begins by responding to every contrast, then filtering out as much of the contrast as possible in a forward-modelling fashion, so leaving only the unfamiliar and the unexpected contrasts as that which grabs out attention, and so that which is having to be made intelligible by a higher set of mental processes. We have to seek a fit that works.

So in terms of the sensorium being the limit of intelligibility, the brain can't even get started unless it has imposed an expectation of finding contrast on the world. It begins with the question of whether anything different is happening. Sensory receptors are tiny switches waiting for something to trigger them.

But then there develops a contrasting push and pull. As much as possible is pushed into the category of the constant and predictable. It is pushed outside the sensorium in terms of being some collection of intelligible objects. Normally when we see a shelf of books or your worn path, it is being pushed into the background of our awareness. It is made a literal backdrop - so as to give whatever instead pops out attentively, an intelligible context.

We have to see the majority of the sensorium as the insignificant back-drop to reveal some part of the sensorium as having some basic level of significance. And then within that higher level game, we sometimes know exactly what it is we are seeing. At other times we might be really confused and puzzled, only knowing that there is something right there at that point of our sensorium that needs conceptual clarification.

The hierarchical nature of this contrast building exercise rather defeats any simplistic dualisms.

At times our ideas and our impressions can be miles apart - as when we zone out in our own thoughts while driving on busy but familiar roads. Or when we have just noticed some kind of sensory disturbance, and have yet to figure out what the heck it is.

And at other times, our ideas and impressions are so connected that there appears no proper division at all. We are aware of that book, or this path, as a single concrete act of attentive aperception. We see the object without needing to figure anything out.

apokrisis then brought up the signal grounding problem, which is interesting, and I hope to get to, but in my view this represents an extension of the discussion, rather that a challenge to whether these concepts take a physical form in our head. — Read Parfit

This is still overlooking the point.

You say you see the concept when all you can see is some set of physical marks. That there is a conception in play is a further interpretation you then make.

So regarding the fact that there is some pattern of marks, you can say the marks are there ... because there is material stuff happening that doesn’t seem to be there for normal natural reasons. You see a rock and it has this weirdly regular set of scratches on it. So because it doesn’t look like normal weathering, you would feel right to presume some mind etched them on purpose and so it is likely they are symbols that mean things to some interpreting mind.

That is what you actually see when you see what you believe to be the physical marks that speak to the further possibility of a state of conception as their immaterial or informational cause.

It is really inportant to science to get this right.