The second point is that, scientism is inherently anti-philosophical in nature. It poses as philosophy, and adopts philosophical rhetorics, but ultimately it seeks to undermine philosophy by only admitting what can be definitely known, measured and assessed. The point about the Western philosophical tradition is that there has always been a place for the unknowable, for aporia, questions which really can’t be neatly resolved but need to be asked nonetheless. Whereas scientistic positivism declares all such questions out of bounds. — Wayfarer

I would say the difference lies more in the quality of the evidence being accepted.

Mystics are quite happy to claim proof of their theories in terms of feelings, intuitions, revelations and surprising coincidences. You, for instance, regularly cite oceanic experiences as proof of transcendent being. All “philosophy” is empirical in the sense that the structure of explanation involves relating the particular to the general. We have a broad belief because it appears to account for many and varied impressions.

Dig into scientific positivism or instrumentalist enough and I would argue that you discover the underlying pragmatism that in fact sees even “measured evidence” for what it really is - the reading of numbers off dials.

So it is all experiential. But then it is experience rendered in mathematical signs. And this in turn is secured in the western philosophic tradition by our recognition of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.

You are always pointing out how Platonism seems to be trying to tell us something deep. Science actually relies on the language of numbers, the rational structure of mathematical relations. That is what it uses to harden empiricism and give experience some actual kind of transcendent status as a form of evidence.

What you feel is what you feel. It lacks objective distance as evidence. It lacks disambiguation,

Science employs number as a rational structure that gives that safe distance. It is the general of a mathematical structure that becomes related to the particular of some act of counting. And so it’s empirical evidence both accepts the subjectivity of our reality models, but also deals with that in the best quality way possible.

The fact that science wants to give everything a number rather than a feeling is the feature, not the bug.

And that was always what was distinctive about the Western metaphysical tradition that arose out of the universalisation of mathematical structure in Ancient Greece. What you call Scientism is simply what has worked best for understanding reality ever since then.

And I agree as usual that Scientism has the flaw nevertheless of being overly enamoured with bottom up construction - bottom up construction being the way mathematical operations generally have to work. Another issue.

I'm increasingly convinced that beliefs are a folk-psychological back-construct; that they are an invention that serves, however poorly, our attempts to explain what we do; but which does not correspond to anything real. — Banno

The mental reality is of course often much vaguer or more indeterminate than the words called forth to account for it.

That just is a consequence of the human mind being composed of two levels of semiosis - the neural and the linguistic. Language imposes it’s more definite structure on the inherently less definite neurological goings on.

So a belief described to another in words takes the form of some overly concrete set of reasons.

And that linguistic sharpening shows here in your own post. You - due to linguistic habit - reject vagueness as an option. It has to be a case of either/or. Hence if you can’t believe that our words describe some actual mental object, the only dialectical possibility is that there are no mental objects in any sense.

Yet ambiguity is part of the whole business, as we know. In practice, we have the art to navigate the gap and talk about our beliefs as if they were communicable objects while also retaining their individually experienced ineffability.

So you are imposing a false dichotomy on the situation. We regularly navigate the difficulties involved in using language to sharpen cognition. Our actual thinking copes well with ambiguity of reference.

It's important to note that this is entirely implausible on any reasonable reading of M-P, who spends page after page in the Phenomenology arguing against such a view. — StreetlightX

Hah, yes. I admit that saying M-P was veering right towards a sense-data view was a wild exaggeration on my part. M-P's basic gestalt approach is of course very good - exactly the systems causality I would argue. And Brender gives a wonderfully clear account of that.

So I am thinking more of the ambiguity that Brender identifies....

Merleau-Ponty distinguishes his position from transcendental idealism by insisting that form does not require a consciousness to constitute it. But in order to distinguish his position from materialism, Merleau-Ponty argues that physical form is a perceptual being, “conceivable only as an object of perception.” (SB, 144) Even if we understand perception as a bodily rather than an intellectual activity, this formulation seems to reinscribe the logic of transcendental idealism at the level of vital behavior, placing us right back in the old antinomies:

https://philpapers.org/archive/MOSSAS-2.pdf

...so the issue is there according to the paper.

And Brender argues that Thompson rescues M-P from this veering into a idealist grounding. Although I then agree that M-P is always aiming at an essentially logicist account, a structural account, in intuitively understanding that the forms of nature are emergently self-organising. They will snap into place holistically in gestalt fashion.

Really, the paper is very good. And rereading it with more time, I can see better now how it addresses a weakness in the Peircean story. It allows one to place a sign in the mediating zone that is behaviour.

The relation between consciousness and nature is split in two by the appearance of behaviour as a mediating term...

From a more strongly logicist view, a sign can seem like a token, a static symbol. It is hard to see how "a mark" can stand for an actual lived connection with the world. It sounds too much like still being an idealist and representational approach to the issue.

But behaviour puts the sign out in the gap between the mind and the world. It can be a two-way connection.

And so we can understand the sign as in fact a switch or gestalt-driven bifurcation. This is what Brender makes clear in discussing dynamical systems theory and autopoiesis. What we call the sign is really the mind is putting out there a binary choice - a suggested instability that represents a dialectical choice as to which way to jump. And then the world bumps up against this neurally-encoded suggestion and tips the balance one way or other with gestalt counterfactual definiteness.

So a sign is not something already an object in a single definite state waiting to be read. A sign is a binary choice being suggested - an instability that must have its poised symmetry broken in one direction or the other.

Do I see a cat? The image of whatever it is must be resolved decisively by some set of binary perceptual judgements. Its ears are pointy and perky enough not to be a dog or a rat. Its face is flat enough not to be a fox. Its tail is not too bushy nor too hairless.

So the signs aren't representational in themselves. They represent dialectical switches going off - logically-sharp hypotheticals about the world that then get nudged just enough to trip them decisively and result in a stable interpretation.

The larger story is that the world itself is formed - by its own much longer run history - of a whole concatenation of such symmetry-breakings. So the mind is only reflecting the dynamics of the world in a modelling relation based on this rapid fire Bayesianism. We are seeing in a flash - by throwing out there a whole set of super-sensitive switches - the history that produces "a world of objects, a world of medium size dry goods".

So what on one view seems like mere data processing - imposing a conceptual framework on arriving sense data - would be the more profound thing of recreating in a flash the entire casual history of a process that must lie behind the steady objects of experience. A cat is seen as a cat in a way that truly reflects the ontology of nature. The context, the constraints, that would be needed to conjure up a cat in a place at a time are part of what we perceive.

And of course the enactive turn in psychology captures that probing nature of signs very well. Unless there is "behaviour" - a move that reveals an effect - then there is nothing to connect the mental to the physical, the model to the world.

This in itself is hardly an original thought. It was prominent in Russian neuropsychology - the post-Pavlovian work on the orienting reflex. And also in cybernetics. See perceptual control theory in particular - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_control_theory

But it does give a better understanding of a semiotic sign as being a behavioural switch. It is not a sense-data - a passive element already inscribed in some mentalese - but a choice of which way to jump put out there in the world as an active uncertainty. Only the reality of an interaction can nudge matters one way or the other. So the sign represents a dichotomy, a possible symmetry-breaking, rather than a point of reality, a bit of information, that somehow - magically - finds itself crossing the gap between the world and the mind.

1 & 2.

Now what? — Banno

So it seems you accept that there is at least a para-linguistic translation going on here. There is something communicable between two states of mind.

If Jack is smart like my cat, he would also stand expectantly at the door to the garage, or scratch on my office door to get some attention.

It is not so unrieslingable to consider that states of mind or points of view are in play.

And thus any theory of truth needs to include a model of the “self” said to be the subject of a belief. Naive realism does not suffice.

What, the entire visible universe and this putative unproven anisotropy is so vanishingly faint?

And you still haven’t said why the dark matter outflow would be seen as a generalised acceleration rather than a generalised deceleration. Are you suggesting dark matter has antigravity?

the explanations are post hock and sufficient — Banno

As usual, your responses are an insult to all Riesling. :razz:

The perforative paradox comes about only when expressed in the first person. — Banno

Again, you thus need to provide a theory of what makes for a point of view.

So does Jack have a mind? Curious how you avoid answering.

Have you read the paper by Noah Moss Brender that StreetlightX linked to recently (Sense-Making and Symmetry-Breaking, Merleau-Ponty, Cognitive Science, and Dynamic System Theory)? — Pierre-Normand

Just read it quickly. I like the phenomenological slant. And I like the nice summary of symmetry-breaking as differentiation or individuation.

The point of my last long post is that symmetry-breaking is really a dynamical process. Traditional physics has only focused on the EFT view - where the dynamics have gone all the way to equilibrium or heat death. Asymmetry has been achieved for good in that the locally emergent forms have become now the universalised rule - a habit to be taken homogenously for granted.

But a biological or semiotic view sees the larger reality - the one in which the dynamism is still in play for the world. Now contextuality is a living parameter. The rule of some collective form applies only in some relative degree. And it is the hidden non-linearity of that phase transition which makes it eminently "switchable".

If change was always boringly linear and gradual - adiabiatic - the Cosmos would never have been anything other than a cooling~expanding bath of thermal radiation. Complexity - with all its own emergent properties and laws - depends on the orthogonality of abrupt ruptures.

Again, emergence seems mysterious to reductionists as its essential story is hidden off at right angles to the universal gradualism that bottom-up summation or construction can imagine. But sudden transitions are completely natural. Non-linearity is more fundamental than linearity - a dynamicist would say.

So once instability (as in quantum indeterminism or Peircean tychism) is understood as the more fundamental condition of nature, then the best explanation of nature is the pan-semiotic one - the one that speaks directly to the context that controls the abrupt switches in global state.

The cosmic issue is not how does change happen in an essentially timeless and changeless world, but how can unbound change become so firmly regulated? It is all about the emergence of downward acting constraints. The meaningless fluctuations can pretty much be taken for granted.

On Brender's paper, what made me think was the contrast between the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Peirce.

One tries to assimilate ontology to the fundamentals of sense-knowledge. The other instead tries to assimilate it to the fundamentals of logic or rational inquiry.

I think Peirce goes directly to the issue of form - the structure of intelligibility itself. That is why he shines for me. It is phenomenology. But it aims for that general structural logic.

While the Merleau-Ponty school is headed towards a sense-data view - one that risks takes qualia too seriously as drops of conscious experience.

So yes, you can pull back from that and steer the phenomenology towards a modelling relations view. You get back towards a semiotic story. You can understand how it fits with an enactive approach to cognition, or Rosen's relational biology.

But that makes this route - veering towards the senses and away from logic - a rather indirect way to get to the ultimate destination of a process view of structure and form, a metaphysics based on existence as intelligible organisation.

Still a nicely argued paper though.

Yeah. But how do you not understand symmetry breaking? :)

You are an engineer. You must be familiar with classic examples like the magnetisation of a bar magnet, or an Ising model.

What about a buckling beam? Or the onset of turbulence? These are very concrete examples.

But blasting dark matter out to create "cosmic voids" doesn't connect with a dark energy story of a faint added accelerative repulsion that is part of the void itself.

It just spreads the gravitating mass about. It doesn't create a new generalised source of "antigravity".

And there is no reason to think it would create an anisotropy. Why would these supermassive blackholes be distributed in a non-random fashion? What extra factor are you claiming would be in play?

Again, I don't see the dots being connected. You would have to provide the motivating argument.

Now it is also quite possible that a belief in dark energy is wrong. It is merely an optical effect - http://www.canterbury.ac.nz/news/2017/uc-cosmologists-reframe-dark-energy-debate-with-new-supernova-study.html

But of course we do have a missing mass problem. And more than that, dark energy ensures the Universe - being apparently so evenly balanced - could defeat the prospect of a gravitational collapse. So - like inflation - it is a useful idea to be true.

You seem to be headed towards a hypothesis that creates more problems than it would solve. So there would have to be good evidence of an actual anisotropy to want to go there.

Just saying. Physics would accept weaker evidence for an effect that reduces complexity - like dark energy or inflation - than for an effect that would increase it.

Hence you have to provide a good motivation for why the way you are heading would simplify anything for cosmology.

I find Crowther’s presentation very confused - upside down indeed.

But anyway, the essential point about superconductivity is that QM gets restored as having an effect at low temperature.

Electrons themselves emerge as the universe cools enough for them to pop out of the quantum foam as classical point particles with individual momenta or incoherent kinetic energy. They are fermionic and disentangled. So in EFT fashion, symmetries are broken and new universalised properties are established. Electrons become a universal thing described by their own emergent EFT - as in classical electrodynamics.

But cool down their world even further - and make it the world of a confined metalic lattice, another pretty arbitrary and non-universal or non-holonomic constraint - and you get a recovery of a quantum possibility. You can get point particles behaving like collective phonons with bosonic statistics. The asymmetry, or broken chiral symmetry, of being a fermion can be reversed by teaming up as "Cooper pairs".

So a general rule of the quantum level - Pauli's exclusion principle - becomes again explanatory of what is going on at a "super-classical" level. Electrons could be melted back to pre-fermionic matter - effectively - by travelling back in time to the white heat of the Big Bang. And they can also lose their fermionic identity at the end of time, when things get so cool that pairs of electrons can find it easy to entangle as symmetry-increasing combos. They may still have some individual kinetic momenta, but that is now so weak it can't combat the stronger urge to unit as a way to meet the energetic constraints imposed by a motion through a metallic lattice.

This all makes BCS a bad example of a "tower of EFTs". It kind of combines two different things at once. And that is confusing.

Let's step back a bit.

The key thing about EFTs is they are about a collective mode of organisation being spread out absolutely everywhere and so becoming a “law”. It is about a phase transition that occurs when a limit is "crossed".

For example, in a world of gaseous H2O, it is the law that the molecules behave everywhere and at all times like a liquid when the temperature and density crosses a critical threshold. The collective behaviour - due to weak van der Waals forces - overcomes the individual kinetic energies of the molecules. And so a new state of matter arises - one that itself has new relevant properties, like being a reasonably universal solvent, and having an unusual latent heat capacity, that are very relevant to explaining chemistry and even life itself.

So emergence is all about a collective mode of organisation becoming a universalised property. And it is "a property" - something that justifies "more as different" - from the point of view of the further complexity of which it becomes the generalised platform.

In a weakly emergent way - a supervenient way - water is just water. It is nothing more interesting than a form of organisation where an integrative force has taken over from a previously differentiating one. I mean water doesn't even seem an unpredictable surprise if you know that the same H2O molecules have both a kinetic energy and a van der Waals attraction as properties. We ought to be able to calculate "wateriness" from first principles knowledge of what was already lurking in the background - a suppressed integrative urge.

But then water, once it forms, becomes a generalised substrate that reveals it itself to have unpredictable properties - like being just right as a medium for complex organic chemistry and life. Higher level theories discover these properties in water. It takes further levels of context to give water these new measurable qualities. The emergence is essentially semiotic.

This gets to one of my discomforts with Crowther's presentation (which I only skimmed through, I admit). As a hierarchy of emergence, it doesn't start from the simple and move towards the complex - the natural or systems way of thinking about emergence. Instead it confuses things by trying to stick to the emergence of the simple from the simple - the "simple" meaning whatever is cosmically and universally the most simple condition given the time since the Big Bang.

Now this is a useful view. But it depends on accepting the reality of a thermodynamic direction to time. And of course, standard reductionist or mechanical physical models deal in laws that are fundamentally reversible or time-symmetric. They thus hardwire in a presumption of linearity. Going forwards and going backwards are two views of the same thing. There just is no room for the non-linearities that are these abrupt phase transitions, these sudden changes in state, when a collective mode spreads exponentially across a system to become a new universalised property.

Mechanical models that wire in time-symmetry cannot see emergence for this reason. Which is why collective modes of behaviour seem so spooky or epiphenomenal - not properly physical, causal and real.

In the big view, physics is working towards a directional understanding of a temporal cosmos. The Universe begins in a "pure" quantum state at the Big Bang. And it is headed towards a "pure" inverse of that state at the Heat Death. Everything will become quantum again - an undifferentiated sea of fluctuations - but the other way round. All that was as hot as possible will be as cold as possible. All that was as small as possible will be as large as possible.

Complexity and classicality are thus something that arise in the middle of it all. It is rather like a Benard cell.

What many don't tell you is that a Benard cell only appears briefly. You have to keep the oil in the pan at precisely the right "boiling" point to see a simple pattern of convection currents. Keep heating and the hexagons break up into turbulence.

So simple global order is what you get at the edge of chaos. The starting of a flip, the beginnings of an inversion, the middle of the change. It is the first big fluctuation that heralds the descent into that kind of fluctuation erupting fractally over all available physical scales.

Again, EFTs don't really capture this. They do describe fluctuations in the infinite limit. So they do describe the world that has gone to maximum fractal turbulence and now looks - if we could stand outside it - to be a flat and simple surface. A platform with universal properties that is now suitable for the next level of more complex hierarchical organisation, based on the further use of those properties.

So EFT thinking is good for accounting how the quantum realm becomes thermodynamically cohered at a certain physical scale and takes on the universal properties of the classical realm. And then in turn, biophysics is now investigating the nanoscale quasi-classical scale (of water as a solvent matrix) and showing how its hidden non-linearity is a resource of the semiotic properties that life needed to exist.

So you have the sweeping view of physics where all the quantumness of the cosmos can get brushed under the carpet when things get large and cold enough for electrons and protons to be modelled in terms of individual particles with particular momenta and forces.

The quasi-classical nature of the electron only becomes an issue again when electron behaviour has to be explained in the highly atypical scenario of a chilled metal lattice. Or when we roll forward to the end of time when quantum effects find a way to decay all matter back to cosmic radiation.

And then biology has to get interested in the particular and atypical scenario that is the quasi-classical scale of water. Life depends on the fact that it can insert itself into the zone of criticality, or the edge of chaos, where things are not generally stable but generally poised on the edge of instability. The whole point now is that the EFT outcome - the hitting of a universalised limit - hasn't happened. Instead, life is playing around at the point where it is in-between - like a Benard cell. The collective mode is only being expressed in a fractured or fractal fashion. It is a bit quantum and a bit classical. And so the emergence of a property is this very in-betweenness - this lability, this instability, this duality, indeed this liveliness.

So again, an important distinction that Crowther's presentation brushes over it seems.

There is EFT emergence - where a system has just gone to the limit and universalised a collective mode as a system-wide homogenous property. A phase transition has happened and there is no going back.

Well, reheating or depressurising the system can reverse its state. Water can re-evaporate. Particle accelerators can melt individual particles. But generally - if we are talking about the fundamental laws of a universe - then the direction of time itself locks in the transitions. EFTs seem the rule because they can safely presume symmetries have been broken, lines have been crossed, and there is no general way of ever going back. The general change is now dead and buried, safe to encode as an emergent law.

Then there is this other kind of emergence that is becoming now really important for understanding complexity. Instead of wanting a world that is fundamentally dead and stable, it needs a world poised on the brink of change. It needs instability - as that then becomes the something that it itself can exist to control. If the world is poised for bifurcation - ready to go either way towards begin fully a gas or fully a liquid - then there is room to insert "intelligence" or semiotic mechanism in that gap and mine it in useful fashion.

This was the dream of Maxwell's demon, by the way. And life - as negentropic or dissipative structure - can behave in that fashion, adding Benard cell like order that manages the transition from smooth flows to turbulent ones.

So yes, emergence is a tricky subject as Crowther says. But I am against the idea that it is essentially pluralistic. Let's not leap straight from the one to the many.

For me, a pan-semiotic metaphysics does bring all the strands of the story together. A triadic or hierarchical ontology makes complexity itself irreducible. And spontaneity or instability is part of that irreducible triad.

So between the one and the many is the three-ness of actual hierarchical causality - the true systems of holistic view. This is where it is all leading as you muddle through "more is different" and the move away from an essentially dead and timeless, reductionist or constructivist, physics.

Yep. So at best, this is an ongoing controversy. The consensus continues to advise caution.

chief scientist from WMAP, Charles L. Bennett suggested coincidence and human psychology were involved, "I do think there is a bit of a psychological effect; people want to find unusual things."

Sorry to be harsh, but the title of your OP suggests some half-baked thinking.

"Is dark energy the outflow of dark matter from a universal black hole?"

You might need to refine your terms. What is this dark matter such that its outflow would cause a general cosmic acceleration rather than a localised gravitational deceleration?

If it is powerful enough to account for "70% of the missing mass", why does its flow from one place to another create such a remarkably insignificant cosmic anisotropy?

What is a universal black hole here? Supermassive black holes are located in places within the universe. It sounds as you may be wanting to make some kind of "we are trapped inside a white hole" story that explains cosmic dark energy acceleration ... with a faint anisotropy. But why would that generalised hole even have an anisotropy?

If you can put all the bits of the puzzle together, that would be interesting. So far I'm not seeing a well-motivated thought at the back of your OP.

I'd be happy enough to be proved wrong, of course.

How is that particular claim bearing up?

Thus, we conclude that there is no significant evidence for anomalous dipole anisotropy in the LSS....

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06751.pdf

Nope.

Whatever dark energy is, it would have to be distributed absolutely evenly across every point of space (to match with the astronomical observations that identified its existence as a faint repulsive pressure present in the fabric of the void itself).

What counts is not a thing in Jack's minds, but what he does — Banno

So does Jack have a mind?

If not, really?

If so, what is it for?

There's potential within both groups and individuals, although that's often potential to different things — BlueBanana

That’s covered by calling us social creatures. Yes, we are biological individuals as well.

But the context is the OP and it’s Romantic suggestion that the potential would be just that of the individual.

Respectfully, the idea of "human potential" is so tainted with economic ideology that there's hardly any way of conceiving of what human potential might actually be independent of it. — darthbarracuda

That is a bit defeatest. The very fact that we can see we have allowed the economic machine to take over our lives is already the start of imagining what could be different. And we have plenty of folk trying to invent a better world right now.

I think they're called Millennials. :)

Just because this is something I've been busy with this week, here are a couple of good talks....

Rifkin on the general picture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QX3M8Ka9vUA

Then this lady on "animal-less meat", which should appeal to your ethics -
https://vimeo.com/229663434

It is as if the potential comes from nowhere but our own will, a deus ex nihilo. — darthbarracuda

No. That cannot work. It is unnatural.

We are social creatures and so the potential has to be socially constructed. It has to come from us collectively and pragmatically.

You are still speaking as if it can only - Romantically - come from within each of us in a personal and individual fashion. But this is about us as social creatures and what that means in terms of flourishing.

but we aren't indifferent to life as living itself requires axiological assessments, — schopenhauer1

Well yes. And through our actions we can make choices too.

So why would we make a general choice of being a pessimist rather than an optimist? That is the issue here.

You are saying there is no other sane choice but pessimism. Our optimistic pursuits lack "reality" for some reason. And it is at this point that a whole bunch of contradictions appear in your argument.

Though the metaphysical claim might be true.... — schopenhauer1

Well you just said that nature is indifferent. Hence neutral. So any valuing is ours.

Now you have to explain why we then have no choice about that valuing. Or why a positive valuing is "secretly faking it" ... as a metaphysical truth.

Bear in mind that optimism doesn't have to pretend everything is always wonderful. Just that goals are good and their satisfaction a possibility. And the naturalism I advocate is not even an optimism opposed to your pessimism. I am saying that nature does have preferences which shape us. If we want to locate meaningfulness, there is a larger story.

So whichever way your argument leads you, it winds up in a contradiction. Either pessimism is a free human choice, and so optimism is the more sane option. Or else the world is really some way, and we ought to recognise that - and at worst, the world is only indifferent on your own admission.

I can see you want to arrive at the naturalistic argument that we have evolved to be miserable. Whether by accident or design, we are just trapped in a state of being self-aware of a life that can only be dominated by suffering and pointlessness.

But while that is indeed how many people may feel, it has to be stacked up against the psychological evidence. And the evidence says there are ways out of the trap. It just doesn't have the universality you want to claim. And from there, the ethical obligation is on you to make an effort, not wallow in misery and build a philosophy around bringing everyone else down to the same level.

Indeed it is important to me, but no one has to live up to being a perfect pessimist ideal. — schopenhauer1

So why do you suffer in public and not in silence? What is the point of arguing your case so doggedly?

Is it about convincing yourself? Is it in fact evidence of how our identities are socially constructed through our interactions and so you need the Pollyannas to give sharp definition to your own choice about a worldview?

It sounds like you are saying either that "we must contribute to the system which created us" or "the system will provide the tools for living a happy life", then I think you are being naively dismissive of the situation. — schopenhauer1

If you present me as saying such naiveties, then yes, I certainly sound naively dismissive.

But that's not what I said.

You are so ready to frame my thoughts with your own construction of Enlightenment "isolating of humans from cosmos/god" and Romanticism's "rebellion of the individualistic human hero"... — schopenhauer1

Thanks for the credit. But this Enlightenment vs Romanticism is a well-advertised and self-proclaimed opposition in modern Western culture.

I mean it's been defining what's cool, and what's not, since cool got invented. ;)

Unless you really fully try to internalize the idea of "vicious absurdity" and the awareness of this, then it will be lost. — schopenhauer1

So we are back to your self-contradiction on the issue of whether you are speaking of nature or individual belief.

Why would I want to "fully internalise" an attitude that is either a) not metaphysically real, or b) not subjectively ideal?

What is this flourishing you speak of? It sounds a bit... Romantic! — schopenhauer1

I agree. But I could talk more dryly of how it would cash out in measurable and naturalistic psychological models.

It is just that given you are speaking in the language of Romanticism here, it is useful to remind that even Romanticism recognises there are alternatives to believing life is one great unflushed toilet of woe.

We are trapped with our own survival, trapped with our own maintenance, trapped with our own pursuing of X, Y, or Z avenues to what we think to be happiness. By framing it as "opportunities", the fact that it could never not be the case, was glossed over. — schopenhauer1

Trapped in being alive, hey? How utterly ghastly! Forever condemned to the hedonic treadmill.

I must give more thought to that too but it rings similar to Bitbol's thesis in his paper Quantum Mechanics as a Generalized Theory of Probabilities. — Pierre-Normand

Hah, Bitbol's paper is one of those lined up in a crowd of browser tabs waiting to get read.

I certainly liked his earlier downward causality paper - http://michel.bitbol.pagesperso-orange.fr/DownwardCausationDraft.pdf

Columnar basalt — T Clark

Nice. Cooling causes contraction. Hexagonal cracking expresses the outcome which distributes the effort of rupture in the most symmetric or general fashion possible. The highest number of the smallest sides - given the cooling is slow enough, the liquid even enough, not to insert any local preferences into the story.

Likewise, Crowther provides an examples of relative independence between pairs of domains that are both being governed by quantum mechanics. — Pierre-Normand

[Apologies. This is a bit roundabout as an actual response, but I started so I finished...]

The philosophical tension here would seem to be the issue of how closely do our models of the world match the actuality of the world. And - in the name of pragmatic efficiency - would they even want to mirror that actuality? Does the map need to be like the territory, or is the whole point that it is not, which is why you can fold it up and stick it in your back pocket?

But I would argue that our hierarchical approach to scientific modelling - starting off with the "fundamental" and building our way up to the messy complexity of actual reality - does deeply mirror reality in being about symmetries (a generalised lack of constraints) and symmetry-breaking (the addition or emergence of constraints).

And then a further wrinkle, symmetry-breaking itself halts - and forms a hierarchical level - when it reaches an equilibrium condition. A new symmetry emerges when - as in an ideal gas - differences no longer make a difference. Macroscale order rules once the internals of the system are reduced to a statistical noise so far as the world is concerned.

This is why more can be ontically different. The internal parts that construct the system have lost any power to disturb the general state of the system. As an equilibrium balance, its fluctuations don't count. And so now - when nature goes searching for symmetries to break, and we go searching for breakings to describe - it is the macrostate that forms the new hierarchical level, the new platform, for any breaking.

That is a roundabout way of getting at the fundamentality of quantum mechanics. QM is a highly general view that includes "everything" by removing every symmetry-breaking and just talking nakedly about the statistics of fluctuations or individuations. It forms a ground zero at the point where indeterminism itself is constrained to produce determinism.

So it arises from considering what could be the barest kind of intelligibility imposed on an unorganised possibility. And it discovers that any definite answer, any act of particularisation, must have the dialectical or complementary form of a dichotomy. To ask a symmetry-breaking question of nature, it must be posed as the either/or of two polar limits.

This is just a principle of logic. To be A with complete definiteness, you have to be not not-A. And the quantum issue is you can't ask both questions - the questions being diametrically opposed - at the same time. Hence you can ask about location, but then you must lose sight of the complementary thing of momentum. The duality is baked in by the complementary nature of the questions you must ask to pin something down in a particular fashion when its existence is itself relative to the context of these two limits that must be "far out of each other's sight" to be real themselves.

So quantumness itself arises due to the requirements of contextuality or holism. For even a fluctuation to have counterfactual definiteness, it must be placed relative to a context. And the barest context is already an asymmetry - a broken symmetry - in being formed by dichotomous boundary conditions. It has to be "world" that is described by logically complementary limits to being.

So while reductionism/constructionism is based on the maths of bottom-up addition or summation, at the heart of holism is the maths of reciprocal or inverse relations. A-ness is defined in terms of its lack of not-A-ness. And not-A-ness in turn is defined by its lack of A-ness.

To be located is to lack momentum. To have momentum is to lack location. Each stands as the other's ground of measurement. And as a reciprocal relation, that yields the uncertain curve. Shrinking the uncertainty concerning one leads to a matching increase in the uncertainty of the other.

Anyway, our notion of the quantum arises by asking the deep question of what would the most general symmetry-breaking look like? And logic tells us that it is the bare reciprocal. It would have to be a world where the question was being posed in terms of the most fundamental complementary pair of properties. Dialectics would rule.

So quantum mechanics describes that bare state. Well, it is not completely bare as QM has to presume a backdrop dimension of time which can make the simultaneity of the question-asking a thing. If the most global logical constraint is we don't get to ask two opposed question in the one act of measurement, then there has to be a passage of time to underpin that.

A theory of everything, a theory of quantum gravity, of course hopes to get past that and show that time too is an emergent phenomenon of some kind.

But that is what quantum theory does. It sets a baseline on intelligible existence. It is the minimal view that arises when we start not with some reductionist view of existence as a brute state, but a view of existence as a self-organising semiotic process of inquiry. If anything is to have definite existence, it would have to start with the dichotomy that is its boundaries. The symmetry-breaking kind of has to exist before the symmetry it breaks.

This is an argument for strong holism, then. Or ontic structural realism. It is pretty Platonic in fact. A bootstrapping ontology. It says that it is the possibility of being organised that produces the material needed to construct the organisation. So not just "more is different", but it is the more that differentiates.

Finally getting back around to the examples like phonons and superconductivity, science then adds further mathematical or Platonic structure to this fundamental quantum generality.

What condensed matter phenomena, like phonons, demonstrate is that nature, at the quantum level, does not distinguish between solitary and collective excitations. It is not a fundamental fact that matter has to be atomistic. It is a more fundamental fact that matter has to have organised form. What makes the difference is the "shape" of the excitation, not the "number of parts" it seems to be composed of.

So collective excitations of matter can have exactly the same quantum weirdness as individual particles. Nature sees no essential difference - as the complementarity of any fundamental "question asking" is the thing. Individuation is individuation. And QM is the general rules of the most primal possible acts of individuation.

To break nature's indifference to fundamental level "excitations of a field", the world has to cool and expand. Bosons must become actually different to fermions in their statistics because something happens to break the symmetry of their spin and expose a handedness or chirality that adds a new level of anti-symmetric possibility. Once left looks different from right, another level of structure can arise as there is now a solid basis for a constraint that differentiates one vanilla excitation from another.

Getting back to how closely our models of reality actually match that reality, I think what I have shown is that the bottom-up constructive view is really the view of things which is pretty much exactly back to front. It works because it is the formal inverse of "what is really going on".

Holism is then more correct as it says form conjures matter into being. Reality bootstraps because there are mathematical-strength regularities it can't escape. Quantum mechanics is our picture of the first step at which this inevitable organisation - the one that is forced on indeterminate possibility by the very nature of a determining question - arises. And once that game has started, more specific constraining questions can follow. You get the cascade of further symmetry breakings which produce all the quantum particles of the Standard Model for a start.

This is the thesis of Ontic Structural Realism. It was vogue as the bootstrap model - Chew's S-matrix model - of 1960s. John Wheeler said it nicely in his "it from bit" papers. The quantum reconstruction and quantum information approaches are reviving it currently.

But still, I admit there is a problem. Even a completely formalist and logicist approach - one that says it is constraints all the way down to the bottom - has to grant some reality to materiality somewhere.

Ontic Structural Realism or a Theory of Everything can shrink the notion of a bare action - a primal material/efficient cause - to practical invisibility. But a complete metaphysics still would want to say something about this complementary aspect of reality.

Once holism has explained everything in terms of the constraints on fluctuations, there will still be the fluctuation itself to be explained.

(Even if - as in the theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking - "anything" would start the tipping. A pencil will not stay balanced on its tip forever because anything and everything could shake it. And so a primal fluctuation would have no particular nature that had a "constructive" impact on the world it happened to produce. The mystery of the first fluctuation would become the least kind of possible mystery on that argument.)

This is what really helped me in the Anderson paper - the discussion of reductionist vs. constructionist views. — T Clark

Yep. Reductionism can mean two different things.

All modelling involves a reduction of a world to a model. So even holism is a reduction of the lived, messy complexity of the world to the abstracted simplicity of a model.

But then holism is opposed to reductionism as reductionism is about bottom up construction, and holism adds the other countering thing of top down constraint.

In reductionism, global organisation can emerge, but it is just a sum of all the parts. Nothing new of different arises. We might describe the global organisation with higher level macro laws. But in principle, the real explanation is all the detailed mechanics going on down at the base level.

It is like freewill. It can’t be real - according to bottom up construction - as ultimately it is the result of a whole mass of completely deterministic atomic actions.

But holism - as argued with mathematical clarity in hierarchy theory and cybernetics - says global organisation is a real level of causation as it has the power to bear down and shape the very parts making the whole.

The world on the microscale is actually pretty irregular, indeterminate, unconstrained. Global order then arises by constraining those parts so they are simplified and regularised in a way that makes them all fit.

You can think of a bee honeycomb. To squish a whole lot of wax tubes together, they must become hexagons. Maybe they could be all sorts of flattened shapes in principle. Triangular, octagonal, some kind of irregular never repeated lattice like your Mayan stone wall. But through the principle of least action, the regularity of a hexagonal pattern is the simplest way to tile that space.

And hexagonal patterns are what we see emerging in the classic examples of self organising chaos, or dissipative structure, like the hexagonal convection currents of Benard cells -https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh–Bénard_convection

So more is different gets at this constraints based view. Hierarchical organisation develops because higher levels can simplify the world enough to shape the parts, regular and numerous, needed to construct them.

It is cybernetic feedback. The system emerges from the noise as it tunes into its own grounding simplicity or regularity.

So there's a collision between the traditionalist understanding and the Enlightenment mentality - this is what arguably underlies the 'culture wars'. — Wayfarer

So Aristotle did argue against atomism and in favour of a full "four causes" systems ontology. And atomism then made its roaring return as Enlightenment science.

In terms of metaphysics, that was its own culture war. And Newtonian physics was seen to defeat Aristotelian physics - for the time being at least.

But theistic metaphysics was its own dualistic thing. It stood against Aristotelian hylomorphism and immanence to bring in a transcendent and immaterial "mind". It was Platonic. So that led to the culture war that was not holism vs reductionism, but the Enlightenment vs Romanticism.

Of course, if we are talking "traditional", then animism would be the original generic metaphysics. And the general materialism of Ancient Greek philosophy - coupled in uncertain fashion to the shock that mathematics could have an axiomatic basis - was the initial culture war against that.

Step back and you can see the bigger story is of metaphysics finding it always wants to split in two. Some, indeed most, then take this as a sign it should be utterly split - resulting in a war. Some, always a minority, see that the split itself is what the holism of the metaphysics needs to embrace.

So that is where the "meta-cultural war" takes place. Between the reductionists who are happy with opposed worlds, and their opposing world-views, and the holists who see division or symmetry-breaking as the creative step that produces a world in the first place. It takes yin and yang to tango. :)

I doubt any biologist thinks of herself as practicing a branch of physics. — T Clark

Yes and no. Biology is my training. And I've seen it become normal to think of life as an essentially thermodynamic phenomenon.

So back in the 1960s, life would have been seen as a chemical phenomenon. There was a reason organic chemistry was pretty mandatory. Biology 101 focused rather a lot on metabolic equations.

Schrodinger's What is Life? was famous for spelling out that biology was in fact really about dissipative structure. The duo of negentropic order and the entropy it can produce.

And this was good for the biologist's ego. It said not only was biology well-founded on deep cosmic principles, but biology was showing physics needed re-writing in a substantial fashion. Biology - because it understood this new nexus of information and dynamics - was the "larger view".

So physics was really a simpler and less complex branch of biology, if you like. ;)

The philosophical relevance of this is that, when it comes to protein folding, space and time carry information, or rather, spacing and timing, specific geometries and specific timings have effects that cannot be 'read off' primary structure alone. Another way to put this is that spacing and timing are material: they are not idealized 'forms', but forces in their own regard, worldly 'contents'. — StreetlightX

So this is arguing a constraints-based or pan-semiotic view. But it wants to reject the reality of forms and talk about the reality of materiality.

I would instead argue for the complementarity of the two. A systems approach would see each as equally real in their own way. And progress would be making that explicit in the scientific modelling of the situation.

This was of course exactly what Pattee (Rosen's colleague) did with his epistemic cut approach to protein folding in particular. It is why the kind of biophysics described by Hoffman is so significant. We can see how life is the semiotic combo of information and dynamics, or formal cause and material cause. With a new understanding of the biophysics of the quasi-classical nanoscale, we can even see how biological information arises because the differences between kinds of material entropies disappears. Materiality can be regulated because it cost essentially nothing to switch it from one track to the other. Materiality becomes programmable.

And this is a fact about spatio-temporality. It is due to there being a symmetry-breaking transition between a quantum state of materiality and a classical one at a certain distance and energy scale.

So Kant is a bit irrelevant. He was only thinking of the classical conception of materiality that seems necessary - as an informational constraint - to make the world appear comprehensible to the senses. And that was an essentially "dead" framework. It reflected the Newtonian view of time and space as a backdrop a-causal frame.

We already know from quantum theory that even spacetime is "lively" - observer-dependent in some important fashion. And this essentially informational view is being cashed out through holography and dissipative structure theory. The backdrop is causally involved in its own creation. Physics is arriving at the pan-semiotic view argued by Peirce.

So yes. Information is alive and active everywhere in the Universe. But at the same time, the Universe has a hierarchical organisation of constraints. You can't just simply reject a global backdrop view and replace it by some story of absolute local contingency. A bricolage. That is leaping from one extreme to the other.

The pan-semiotic approach, the holographic approach, the hierarchy theory approach, the infodynamic approach, are all ways of saying the same thing. Reality is an emergent equilibrium balance of its own internally opposed tendencies. It is formed by its dichotomous actions - in particular, the tension between global integration and local differentiation.

So a globalised view - one that sees space and time as a dispassionate or a-causal container - is not the sole story. But nor will any completely local and contingent view - one that invokes an infinite variety of particular individuated causes - be either.

The art of telling the story of existence lies in seeing how at every scale of being it is expressing the balancing of its formative tensions.

And that too is a metaphysics with its political implications of course. :)

But I have always claimed though, that our three main goals are survival-related drives, maintenance/comfort-seeking goals (clean the room, put oil in the car, take a shower, etc.), and entertainment-related drives (what to do with sense of boredom and emptiness). — schopenhauer1

Yep. Instead of talking about life having the purpose of flourishing, you need it to be all about blind and pointless survival. You need it to be the case that once the basics of "existence maintenance" are achieved, everything else can be viewed as a meaningless filling in of the time.

So you wire in your conclusions from the start.

The alternative picture is that humans - once they have sorted the more basic needs outlined by Maslow's hierarchy - then will continue on to self-actualise. That is, they will reflect the natural logic of their evolved situation and seek to flourish even further by being personally creative in some socially valued fashion.

Turning to "entertainment" to fill a psychic void is obviously the wrong thing to do - the unnatural thing.

Yes, we do have the problem that the modern consumer society has encouraged that kind of "fulfilment". But then we can't critique modern society if we simply believe it is essentially right about the human condition.

There is no potential to live up to. It is just repetitious survival and finding hope in entertainments of sorts. — schopenhauer1

You still have the problem that you are employing a value-laden argument to argue against value laden arguments.

If I am saying life has the point of living up to your potential - because that feels fulfilling and worthwhile - then you are saying no, that's some kind of delusion. It is just forced and repetitious survival, a vain invention of a reason to hope. So you are arguing against a positive assessment with a negative assessment.

If you were truly arguing for an essential meaninglessness to life and however we might choose to live it, then you ought to be simply neutral. However I viewed life - optimist or pessimist - shouldn't make a difference. Nature would be as indifferent to the anti-natalist as it is to everything else (in your view).

I mean aren't you striving your utmost in a repetitious and time-filling fashion to fulfil your potential as a Pessimist here? Isn't that the purpose giving meaning and direction to your life?

You kill your own argument by showing how much you care about it. It matters that you are right. If you convince others, you will have achieved something useful with your efforts. You will have proved yourself the best Pessimist you could have been.

A true Nihilist wouldn't even bother to post. :)

Stepping back to consider the actual existential situation we find ourselves in, the answer from positive psychology would be that we are indeed alienated by the "scientific" realisation that we are "cosmically insignificant". And this goes along with its polar opposite "realisation" - that in the end, only "we" can count.

What our modern expanded philosophical view of ourselves does is force us to a strongly dichotomous metaphysics where reality becomes something essenatially empty, pointless and meaningless, which then throws all the responsibility for being fulfilled and meaningful back on this "us" - this Romantic notion of the human self as a witnessing soul that stands dualistically separated from the actual world it is forced to inhabit.

But this is a faulty metaphysics. Actual science tells us that we are the products of biological and social complexity. We are parts of a whole. We are individuated selves - but individuated due to a larger evolving context. And that is an intrinsic source of any felt meaningfulness, any assessment either positive or negative.

So if we are parts of a whole - naturally embodied in a lived human context - then that is what we rationally ought to focus on if we want a co-ordinate frame with which to plot our own individual path in life.

It is crazy, irrational, to act like a dualist and try to make sense of our existence as if we are some brief guttering flame of consciousness that is illuminating a cosmically vast and empty void. That is a metaphysical framing that seems scientifically justified - given astronomy and Newton - and yet is also a huge exaggeration of our actual position.

Our actual position is better understood from natural philosophy/systems science which focuses on the way everything is an embodied part of a "living" whole. This would then say we are each a product of our biology and culture. We are not solitary sparks as dualism would have it. Therefore we should expect to find our life purpose in that actual evolutionary history, in all its fantastic complexity and essential openness.

We just aren't designed to feel personally connected to the Cosmos. Even religion - in offering an image of a connection to a larger whole - generally paints a picture of that in social terms. Everyone gathered together in a state of love in the garden of the Big Daddy in the Sky.

So an honest metaphysics would be honest to the right scientific picture of existence. And that is what positive psychology in particular would attempt. We are born to find meaning in our biological and social context. And while that is a fairly specific kind of constraint, it is also not a closed and deterministic one. Part of the realism is that the finding of meaning is an open and creative exercise - a continuing journey of adaptation.

What I am arguing is that you reject the actual complexity and naturalism of life because you accept this simplistic metaphysics of a lonely soul in an empty void. That was the shocking existential picture that Enlightenment science appeared to reveal, so setting off the opposite reaction of a Romanticist revulsion.

But that scientific reductionism and romantic existentialism are only two sides of the same coin - the two views of the one faulty metaphysics.

We know enough now about actual complexity, actual systems metaphysics, to see this framing of the situation as very flawed. And thus any philosophy that tries to found itself on it will be too.

But I never claimed this was an ideal state either (that of knowing that it's not a metaphysical fact that we have to live up to some ideal state). — schopenhauer1

It has to be one or the other.

Either you are saying something righter than us, therefore we all need to take notice of you. Or you are saying you are just another dude making a random noise and so we don't need to take any notice.

Your anti-natalist lament has this self under-mining logic. It's been pointed out before.

If we all speak different languages, then that logically implies that there is a global language that comes before words, ie: we don't think in words.

Mr Chomsky's answer was "Introspection reveals to me that i think in words."

Babies obviously have thoughts, not in any language until they are trained. — Gary McKinnon

I would reply the big mistake is asking what we think in. The real issue is what constrains our thoughts to be about some thing in some particular way. And words, with their grammatical structure, are an immensely powerful means of constraining thoughts in a particular fashion.

So animals and babies "have thoughts". The brain itself is set up to work in anticipatory fashion. It must have some kind of image of what is just about to happen next in the world - what it would want to happen even - so as then to make sense of what does actually happen that is a surprise, or fail to meet some intention we had.

The mind is thus generally constrained by its long-term experience of the world and its short-term expectations concerning the world. Those focus its thoughts to be about certain things in terms of anticipations and plans.

Words - and the structure of ideas they encode - then add to what is already going on at that biological level. We don't think in words. But we certainly talk to ourselves to constrain our own expectations and behaviour just as we talk to others to do the same to them and their states of mind.

So language gives humans a unique ability to self-constrain their states of mind. Words limit our thought in a very particular and socially constructed fashion. They shouldn't be understood merely as symbol strings carrying some already present cargo of meaning.

You don't need an already present mentalese which forms the thought and then gets translated into overt speech. Instead, speaking is the skilled action of forming up a thought with grammatical clarity by applying a structure of limits on all the things that could possibly be going on in another mind ... or our own.

If I say "cat", you should not be thinking of horses, cake, Russia or a Sherman tank. You should be now limited in your conceptions to cat-like experiences and expectations. If I say "that black cat that's always crapping in your vegetable patch", then your state of mind should be that much more constrained in what it is thinking.

All that "thought" was always there in your head - potentially. But words and sentences build little fences that enclose states of active interpretation. It narrows what you are likely to be actually thinking to the point that it becomes highly predictable to me. We can be of like mind and communicate.

So yeah. Words don't carry the actual meanings themselves. They are a tool to regulate meanings - a way to restrict the natural roaming freedom of another's wandering mind. And once humans started regulating each others thoughts through language, it was a short step to turning the trick on themselves and regulating their own thinking in just as strict a fashion.

The PL is Electro-Magnetic Energy, the NL is Neural Activity in the Visual areas, and the CL is the thing that we actually perceive. — SteveKlinko

This sums up a representational position on consciousness. There is a world, there is the data processing, and then third, mysteriously, there is a self that witnesses the resulting neural output.

So it is setting the problem up as an issue of translation - a transformation of inputs into outputs. First there is the physical output, then the neural output and then the conscious output ... which is somehow an experiential output. It has this new and substantial property of "being aware".

Nothing is being explained by this line of thought. We know that neural processing must have something critical to do with qualitative experience. But we don't answer any important question by positing it as an "inter" stage as that just shovels the essential mystery down the line to a new blackbox that somehow contains a self that does the witnessing of the neural output.

The better approach is to understand the neural processing in terms of a model of reality - a model of reality that dynamically incorporates a "selfish" point of view of the world.

So it is no surprise that a model of reality - one that is starting from a "selfish" point of view - should feel like something. If there is all this information being constructed into a living relation between a "self" and a "world", then why wouldn't it feel like something?

I would stick to understanding how brains model their worlds. And then turning the table on Hard Problem questions by asking is it really conceivable that a model with its own personalised point of view wouldn't feel like it was just such a personalised view?

If the neuroscience is viewed in the right light - as embodied reality modelling, with a "self" as an essential part of that construction of a reality - then the zombie argument loses its metaphysical force.

We can see why any amount of "information processing" wouldn't "light up" with the further substantial property of "consciousness". If the problem is framed as one based on representationalism, then the witnesser of the representation is forever left out of the conversation and zombies are made conceivable.

But if we understand how the brain is representing the observer as much as the observables, then the question becomes how could a sense of being conscious get left out of such a dynamic and highly personalised process of reality modelling? How could it be lacking when it would be the starting point of the "representing"?

‘Dimension’ in the sense of ‘an aspect or mode of existence or lived reality’. — Wayfarer

It literally means to measure. So I am pointing out the irony of you using such a scientistic term to lend prestige to your argument against Scientism.

It sounds precise, doesn’t it. So I’m asking, what is precise about your use of it?

I'm simply agreeing with Janus - that art has more than simply or only a social dimension, even though it does have a social dimension. — Wayfarer

Dimensions are things that imply measurements. Do you mean to make that kind of scientistic claim here?

Great if you do, but you then need to spell out the kind of measurements we could make to cash out whatever conception the dimension entails.

So what is the nature of this further dimension such that we can quantify it in the name of philosophic intelligibility?

So within that ‘enchanted garden’, art evokes the archetypes and mythological re-enactments of the great themes and tragedies of culture. — Wayfarer

So was the pre-modern mind actually an enchanted garden or is that the Rousseauian myth of the noble savage?

Do these archetypes actually reside in the collective Jungian unconscious or does structuralist anthropology explain why certain themes repeat as the rational expression of being social creatures creating social organisation?

In a nutshell, is the foundation of our philosophising the coherence of the Enlightenment or the incoherence of Romanticism?

As for the notion of ‘collective construction’ - it’s certainly true that most of us inhabit a kind of ‘consensus realiity’ which is precisely that. But what that doesn’t accomodate is ‘the boundless’ - the unconditioned, the immeasurable. That is outside of the ‘constructed’ worldview (symbolised in Oriental culture as renunciation, ‘the forest’.) Probably rather too ‘religious’ for your liking but ought to be said, nonetheless. — Wayfarer

OK. But then I approach the "other" of the boundless from a rationalist's point of view. As a systems scientist and natural philosopher, I would talk about it as the Apeiron of Anaximander, the Firstness of Peirce.

Maths and science would be the suitable path, not art or mediation.

Maybe speech acts come in different varieties. Some necessarily volitional and some not. — frank

We can start by replacing the dualist conscious~unconscious distinction with the neurobiological distinction of attention~habit. Volition then speaks to attentional processing, where the prefrontal in particular is engaged in a half second’s worth of evolving a state. This is then opposed to the automatic which is the emitting of a habitual response via the mid-brain basal ganglia in about a fifth of a second.

In other words, there is a clear and well mapped pair of brain paths - one that is volitional in having the time and plasticity to form a novel response, the other that is automatic in being the fast and unthinking release of actions we are already prepared to perform with practised skill.

That is the general neurobiological model - one in which epiphenomenalism can’t even be a thing.

And then speech acts are just acts like any other. They are a blend of the attentional and the habitual.

For the sake of efficiency, we will want to act as much as possible out of skilled habit. But volition is always there as whatever level of attention we must still devote to connecting some specific speech act to its more general communicative intent.

So yes, epiphenomenalism is self-contradictory if you hold it as true that it feels like we are in some kind of control of our ability to assert meanings.

But bring in the neurobiology and what is revealed is our faulty notion of this homuncular “we” that is suppose to author (or not) every individual speech act. That is a false binary. The truth is that “we” are both our in the moment conceptions and our generic bedrock of well learnt habits.

You could say we are both our conscious and unconscious selves, but working in functional unison and not at dysfunctional odds - which is the Freudian romantic version of the neurobiological story.

I was pointing out the differences between the arts and the sciences in terms of the ability to achieve, or at least approach, universal consensus. Nothing you have said touches on that point in any way signifiant enough to refute it, as far as I can tell. — Janus

I’m surprised that you would even target universal consensus so strongly here. In another era, there might simply be a notion of good taste or artistic perfection towards which all creative endeavour would want to aim. This led to the familiar art teachings about proportion and symmetry, the Greek ideal of beauty, etc.

But today - art still being the social technology for inventing the self - the whole point that art would want to teach is the modern cultural ideal. Which is that we are all actually individual and so will show that in our aesthetic responses. The new ideal is the destruction of the old, rather Platonic, notion of a universal consensus. Art has to be challenging, weird, transgressive.

So Romanticism treats selfhood as an inward act of discovery. Artistic practice has evolved as an expression of that metaphysics.

Speaking for the scientistic Enlightenment, I would point out the psychological facts. This self of which Romanticism speaks is a social construction, a linguistic structure. It is not some foundational essence - a soul or spirit - but the very thing that the cultural activity of art is there to manufacture.

So science here explains art in terms of the facts of the world. It provides the larger view of what is really going on.

Alternatively, if there were a soul for creative training to discover, then science would give the evidence for that theory of the wider reality. Science wouldn’t rule the possibility out. But it would be - philosophically - the way we would decide the question as best we can.

Art consists in saying something in a suggestive or evocative way, or in a metaphorical or allegorical way, rather than in a logically rigorous way, about the human situation, about the aspects of being that we care about. — Janus

Yes. So there is here the possibility of another way of doing philosophy - one that claims an evidential basis in the subjective, as opposed to the objective.

It is a familiar argument. Perhaps it is right that there are truths that are best accessed by evocative language rather that direct language. Perhaps there are things we think and feel that are so vague or ephemeral that they break apart if we try to grasp them in a firm and frontal assault.

Yet still, what works will reveal itself to us. We can allow this as an alternative, or even complementary, approach to philosophy, and then judge the results. Science - as epistemic method - doesn’t rule this out. Science here only represents the pragmatic maxim that the approach have some generally agreed social utility as the evidence it is a worthwhile thing to believe.

But if you accept that essentially scientistic view - that a general consensus on pragmatic utility is the epistemic foundation - then that would seem to be at odds with your other desire to treat the subjective as spiritually real rather than collectively constructed.

Again, in appealing to any notion of a universal consensus, you are setting your own argument against itself in contradicting fashion. Evidence that is private is evidence that is not corrobable. And so in that direction you can only wind up with a philosophical method that is solipsistic and completely personal. It’s evidential basis is simply revelation backed by faith.

So yes, philosophy could well entertain two complementary approaches to truth - the objective and the subjective, the real and the ideal, the factual and the poetic. It is a simple fact of metaphysical logic itself that two paths must exist for there to be any path at all. So the fact that philosophy is home to its own counter-impulses is not a surprise but a necessity.

And we can even say both flourish in their different spheres. Science is the branch of philosophy that went off and perfected a method of inquiry into the metaphysically foundational. Art is the branch of philosophy that went off and perfected its own inquiry into the subjective and aesthetic.

Yet science is then the larger exercise - if we agree that it has dispelled a theistic worldview and replaced that with a naturalistic one.

I can see that is still a big “if” for some. But that is what all this comes down to.

And I would note that a defence of an evocative and poetic approach to evidence gathering and consensus corroboration building looks quite carefully a socially constructed position.

In the good old days, God and his supernatural world, just simply existed in a direct graspable way for folk. You could paint God’s picture on a church ceiling. And now to argue we must use the most evanenscent and allusive methods to grasp that same truth seems pretty telling.

The evidence has evaporated before our eyes - our scientistic eyes. At some point you really need to consider the alternative that when it comes to a subjective essence, there was never anything really there beyond a utilitarian social construction.

Like any diverse activity, as Wittgenstein pointed out, it cannot be precisely defined in some essentialist manner. — Janus

Yes, it all comes back to constraints-based thinking. ;)

No inter-subjective corroboration, as opposed to mere agreement, is possible here just as it is not possible with religious and mystical experience, and, really, even philosophy. Corroboration would consist in universal agreement; the inability of any suitably good-willed and unbiased observer to disagree once they have been presented with, and understood, the evidence. This exists, if it exist anywhere in the the human enquiry, only in science, and more so in some categories of science than in others, it seems. — Janus

Again, pragmatism already says this.

So the only place where we can differ is that you want to treat the private ineffable experience of the individual as some kind of reliable interior evidence - for a communally-defined externalist methodology.

Which would be Romanticism in a nutshell. It's art if I think it is art ... even if the whole notion of "art" is a form of life, a language game.

No. Communities seek to impose increasingly restrictive standards to socially-construct a hierarchy of "artistic impulse". You know you have really made it when they hang it on a gallery wall as if it were a sacred cultural relic. So some committee of the great and the good gets to choose whose vision is communally celebrated.

It's just like science in other words. Though science pretends to be much more democratic in its admission criteria - and indeed, it often is.

You say - "Corroboration would consist in universal agreement; the inability of any suitably good-willed and unbiased observer to disagree once they have been presented with, and understood, the evidence."

You must know that the art world doesn't operate with this kind of open-minded good will and lack of bias. And the art world justifies that by saying it is all subjective in the end anyway.

It is only science which openly sets this kind of standard of public acceptability. Well, and courts of law and other rational institutions that expect the evidence to tell its own story.

And as I say, in practice, the first thing fine art faculties want to teach its young and impressionable students is that it is social game. You need to network to get ahead. You need to focus on what's the new innovation and then market the hell out of yourself if you hope to earn a living out of it.

So the human artistic impulse is a bad example for your case.

I agree we certainly do feel something when we approach a great work of art with a correctly cultivated mindset. It is not as if we can get eliminativist about that aesthetic response.

But feeling an aesthetic delight at clever solutions to difficult problems is something all our creative endeavours share in common. It is as true of science and maths. And neurobiologically, it makes evolutionary sense that we are atuned to recognising ideas that strike upon the optimal path - the solutions that reduce the most information in accordance to that dearest principle of science, the least action principle.

It is only the target of the art that has changed. The "problem to be solved with optimal efficiency" used to be the manufacture of religious awe and the communication of moral precepts on behalf of the institutional church. Then it became kings, queens and the power hierarchy that needed to be communicated the same way. Then the right national "form of life" - the quintessential Englishman, or whatever.

Eventually it has become the manufacture of social disorientation and dissent. We have reasons collectively to want to shake things up.

The game goes on in the same way, even as its targets change to best suit the problems of the times.

The Romantic view of course is that art is instead an excavation of what is deepest and most precious in the individual human soul. But regard that as just a self-serving cover story of the modern institutional elite, the guard-dogs of the galleries and salons.

So in addition to being vacuous, closed-minded, toxic, cancerous, disingenuous, infantile, barren, and ignorant, and I'm now also a troll? — Pseudonym

You missed out callous and brazen. Those especially amused me. I could only read that bit in the tone of a communist Chinese denunciation of the Western bourgeoisie. The hyperbole dial cranked up to 11. :)

This is where we disagree; I think philosophy is as much an art as it is a science. — Janus

Define art.

There is a reason why modern fine art departments sell their courses as applied critical thinking these days. Just like philosophy departments. Indeed the humanities sell themselves as crucial to the modern economy - another STEM subject in effect as tech goes social.

I think you are trying to preserve some fusty Oxbridge culture wars distinctions here.

Art is a social technology. It always has been since the first beads and cave paintings.

By not declaring every problem amenable to a scientific solution; by recognising what is and isn't a scientific problem. — Wayfarer

That is a fair point. But it is a general one. Religions might treat prayer or mediation as the universal solvent of problems as well.

Maybe some things, even many things, are merely accidents with no especial causal mechanism.

But then isn’t that what the scientific method already presumes? The null hypothesis is what is provisionally held. It is up to the weight of the evidence to falsify it.

So by training, scientists ought to limit the scope of what demands explaining. They can shrug their shoulders at even quite “miraculous” coincidences.

And as always in the modern view, Darwin trumps Plato, right? So ultimately it comes down to what survives, or what propagates; that's the only kind of 'meaning' that has currency in today's world. — Wayfarer

You are the one who needs Scientism to justify your anti-Scientism.

My position is different. Holism doesn’t have to reject reductionism. It just has to show how material and effective cause are a small part of the bigger causal picture.

Science relies on there being an 'epistemic gap' between knower and known. And ultimately we're not apart from reality. So all knowledge is forever conditional, it can't be any other way. So 'cracking holism' requires breaking out of the dualistic mindset that underlies science. — Wayfarer

Hence semiosis - as a science. Hence dualism giving away to the trichotomy of the generalised modelling relation.

So yes, cracking holism is all about getting past dualism.