Comments

  • Is the real world fair and just?
    "The world as it is" is for us just an idea — Janus

    Sure. Let’s not confuse epistemology and ontology once more. It would be handy to have some kind of highlighter button to mark the switch in register.

    "Optimization algorithm" is still an anthropomorphic notion, so perhaps we could rule that out? — Janus

    This is an ontological commitment we might make as part of an evolutionary metaphysics. Such as Big Bang cosmology.

    The reason inflation seems a must at the start of the Universe is eliminate all other geometries except the very flattest. The Goldilocks balance of being not too positively or negatively curved but instead “just right” as that which can then dump its energy into particles and continue on its way, expanding and cooling as infinitum.

    One can’t believe in physics without going along with its least action principle. Optimisation of dialectical balances just is the reality physics describes.
  • Perception
    like when a banana turns green to yellow as the chlorophyll breaks down. — NOS4A2

    I wonder how we see yellow when the retina has three kinds of photoreceptor cone and none are tuned to yellow as their frequency?
  • Books, what for, exactly?
    ↪tim wood
    Books here I take as the construction of an interior world of increasing semiotic abstraction. And that can run counter to life’s other enterprise of living in the day to day real world.

    One could substitute a mobile phone here as the modern complaint. Too much texting instead of too much reading. But the fixity of books is at least a sign of the intent to communicate ideas of matching endurance.

    So we have a real life dilemma. We have created a world where we expect people to have abstractly structured thoughts. And yet there is also the other thing of the daily routine. The question becomes not which extreme is correct but pragmatically can they be balanced?

    I say yes. But this has to be realised early enough in life for life to be built around it. And to be balanced, both sides of this modern educated life must feed back to support each other.

    One can earn a living by being a professional abstracter, but then might ought to go part time to look after the house and kids. One can spend hours of the day reading, but then also ought spend as many hours exercising and socialising to keep the old brain cells in peak condition.

    So identifying the possible positive feedback loops between wife and books - how each might be arranged to complement the other - is what you would call the win-win.

    It things are arranged as a negative feedback loop, life ain’t going to be so hot. :wink:
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    ↪Banno
    "Bob, bob, bobbing along, joyfully singing its song"
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well, in line with what I said, we don't know what they are. — Janus

    So there are the known unknowns and then the unknown unknowns which we can believe surely also must exist? That kind of thing?

    Whether or not you acknowledge that determines your basic orientation towards life. — Janus

    For me, it would is a matter for empirical inquiry. As in how far does one really get by employing tunnel vision?

    The dog that didn't bark could be the clue. The world as it "is" might exist as an optimisation algorithm such as we find at the base of all physics – the least action principle. The "ought" that eliminated all the other worlds that felt they too might have been possible if we hadn't outcompeted them in the race to be the case.

    The irony is that someone like Wayfarer who doesn't want to acknowledge that many things have happened, are happening and will happen that we can never know about, nonetheless believes that sages can "directly" know "what is really going on". — Janus

    But does he clearly believe either side of the proposition at any time? There are those who assert and won't explain. There are those who don't understand. Then there is this other thing of seeming to agree and then slipping back across the boundary towards the other side. A foot in both camps.

    There are many ways that arguments are never won on PF. :wink:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Do you think the Santa Fe Institute is a bunch of amateurs? — Gnomon

    No. It gathered a good bunch of people to drill into self-organising complexity in the broad sense. But then over-generalised that dynamicist view at the expense of the further thing which biosemiotics is focused on. Dynamics regulated by information. Systems with the added thing of an encoding memory. The genes to control a metabolism, the neurons to control an environment, the words to control a society, the numbers to control a world.

    So a rookie blunder right there to the degree Santa Fe folk hyped up the dynamical half of the equation when it comes to the story of life and mind as it exists as a local exercise in informational modelling in a dynamically-unwinding, entropy-driven, world.

    This paper might be useful to you here – The Physics of Symbols: Bridging the Epistemic Cut
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    How is deciding what we ought do algorithmic? — Banno

    As the OP said. Dialectically. As a rationalising balance of the competition~cooperation dynamic by which all natural systems – from ecologies to societies – self-organise.

    So singalong now .... "flush me one more time baby!"
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Is there one you think is the correct path, — schopenhauer1

    I hoped the world would wake up and change. But that moment was already missed in the 1990s if not the 1970s. So Model B is the world as it is likely to be.

    And what I argued is that this would look like a deglobalising pluralism. Everyone will locally be inventing whatever way of life seems to work across the scale at which they can hope to construct some fabric of social and economic relations.

    So to address the planet at a global ethical scale, we might all have agreed on one common political slogan that could be implemented as a win-win proposal across all of humanity. Then accepting this hope will fail - and might always have been impossible - now is a good time for thought to turn to other options.

    If everyone will wind up having to relocalise, then doing that in Sudan is going to be different from doing that in Switzerland or Tasmania. Time to look around your immediate community and see how well it is prepared to make the best of the situation it will likely find itself in.

    For the US, does it need to take alway people’s guns or is having those guns the stabilising political choice? Should Elon Musk be stopped in his tracks right now for his silly diversionary stunts or does everyone want to join in scaling his Mars colony so US citizens of even more modest incomes have a new planet to escape too.

    I may joke, but really, we need to be aware that the geoengineering response is a live possibility. Why wouldn’t a rich nation try to fix climate change by tinkering with the world’s weather patterns when things get desperate. What ethical ought is going to apply even if they shift the rains off their more vulnerable neighbours.

    As banjo’s comments show, moral philosophy has surprisingly little to say about a future that is outside its regular scope of operations. It is locked into the Enlightenment humanisation project as it’s moralising ought.

    One should not kick puppies. Fact! But it is also a fact that my neighbours next door when I was a child had fat little puppies delivered for the weekend barbecue. In a deglobalising world, we will be faced with this human variety again.

    So I simply argue for a better understanding of how human societies do pragmatically self-organise according to ethical algorithms. We can’t just desire any future as our collective “is”. Nature falls into its stubborn patterns for perfectly comprehensible and predictable reasons.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    ↪Banno
    Bye bye. :grin:
  • Does physics describe logic?
    Physicists are currently siting on two stubborn patterns that are incompatible: quantum mechanics and gravity. — Tarskian

    But they arise within the beauty of this larger pattern. Okun’s cube of theories. As outlined here….
    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/586530

    And is maths itself organised in any grand cube of theories? Is everything slotted together under some grand unifying project like category theory or the Langland’s program?

    On this issue, you seem just interested in being contentious rather than insightful.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Time now to agree that the question of what we ought do remains unaddressed. — Banno

    By you.

    Are you sure you’re feeling quite well this morning? You seem to be in some kind of psychic crisis.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    ↪Banno
    Yep and what? If you want to strut about here, answer the OP. What do you propose as the dialectical ethical algorithm that could scale so as to make the best of our possible future?

    If you have no thoughts on this, wobble off.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    There are limits on our choices, sure, obviously. But our choices are not fixed. We have options. — Banno

    We have options. The OP says that. Time now to give your answer on the option that scales.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    That is, to aim to set out transformations such that an observation made in one frame of reference will be true, of that frame of reference, in any other frame of reference. — Banno

    Hence all things being constrained by Poincaré invariance. Or stepping back further to a thermalising perspective, de Sitter invariance.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    If the future is fixed as you suggest, there is no point to this thread, or any discourse about what to do. It will happen regardless. — Banno

    I said the future is pragmatically constrained. I really don’t understand how you keep failing to understand what is simply obvious.

    What should Tasmania do when the climate refugee boats come hunting as an unsustainable flux with uncertain intentions? Ought it extend the humanitarian hand or thank goodness if had prepared its counter fleet of sea drones?

    The future is open. The question becomes how we can expect the predictable state of the world to reshape our social values at a fundamental level.

    The OP indeed was premised on exploring two quite distinct futures so as to elicit sharper thought on how these things work.

    If you can’t even figure out how this argument has been set out, there is no place here for your belligerent presence.
  • The ethical issue: Does it scale?
    Notice again that understanding what is the case does not tell us what you ought do about it. — Banno

    And also that the real issue is what can be done about it. Which returns us to the “is” rather neatly. Our range of views on the oughts is pragmatically constrained by what could be the collectively scaled choice. The futurised “is” of the situation.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    In a sense, I get that it can be seen as a disappointing view — boundless

    But we can have a theory of reference frames can’t we? We continue on as we see with holography, de Sitter metrics, or twistor space. We can have general arguments that pick out 3-space as special as the only dimensionality that has the same number of rotational degrees of freedom as translational ones.

    There may always be questions but they also can be new ones.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    They do not say it explicitly, but to me it is obvious that what they want from the ToE, is a "theory" that satisfies the requirements of the definition for the term in mathematical logic. — Tarskian

    It depends on your metaphysics if an exact quantum gravity theory is needed instead of an effective one. It you believe that emergence rules, that topological order is now king, then effective is all you expect.

    That was the point I just argued in recounting the way the physics keeps jamming itself into the contortions of gauge invariance to ensure the rolling weight of the Big Bang continued long enough to have become interesting to those such as us.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Decoherence gives the definiteness of the observed outcome but is not enough to explain the uniqueness of the outcome. — boundless

    Doesn’t the same problem crop up in a relativistic context such as the simultaneity issue? No absolute reference frame and yet that can still be approached in the limit.

    Events certainly happen in spacetime. But fixing them precisely is a problem for both the quantum and relativistic view. Which in turn leads us to a contextual view of things becoming counterfactually definite as a classical logic would seem to demand. It is enough that our uncertainty is tightly constrained.

    I favor epistemic interpretations like QBism. I think that it is impossible to make a literal interpretation of the 'orthodox' quantum formalism that makes 'fully' sense, so to speak. — boundless

    Yes. It is perfectly acceptable to me to go full Copenhagen and say all we can know is the numbers we read off dials. If a proper ontic interpretation isn’t available, quantum physics still works as instrumentalism. Copenhagen remains the sensible backstop epistemic position.

    I am a Pragmatist after all.

    I have a hunch that you might find interesting the Thermal interpretation by Arnold Neumaier. — boundless

    Yeah. Heard quite a bit from him on Physics Forum some years back. But I can’t remember whether I was agreeing or disagreeing with him at the time. I will have to check that reference. :up:
  • Does physics describe logic?
    No matter how well physics manages to study a plethora of stubborn physical patterns, it hasn't reached the stage at which mathematical logic can consider it to be a legitimate "theory". — Tarskian

    Says who apart from you? Can you cite some source for this opinion? And why would maths be a judge of how physics proceeds anyway.

    I just point out there is a relationship which you appear to be overlooking. And from a physicist’s point of view, the way mathematicians carry on can look equally wasteful of smart young minds. Chasing patterns that aren’t even useful.

    The Yang-Mills mass gap may be a good example of whether mathematical purity matters to anyone but mathematicians. Is it actually important for some physical reason?

    Then, and only then, physics will be a legitimate "theory" in accordance with the definition in mathematical logic. — Tarskian

    These are sweeping statements. But are they more than your own personal opinion?
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    But still I don't understand how 'classicality' 'comes to be' in your view. — boundless

    Classicality comes to be in the limit. So reality never arrives at that ideal conception we have of it, but through decoherence, it approaches a classical state for all practical purposes. We can apply that brand of physics and logic to it.

    Decoherence IMO can only remove interference, not superposition, hence the cat is still, if we take the quantum formalism literally, awake and asleep at the same time. — boundless

    But the cat is a hot body in a warm place. It went into the box decohered and not coherent. It wasn't converted to a Bose condensate. It remained always in a "thermalised to classicality state".

    Now if you supercool and properly isolate some system of entangled particles or coherent light, then it goes into the box and remains coherent until the box is opened – or rather, rudely probed by a thermalising measuring device. That is when the quantum description becomes a more appropriate theoretical account.

    Spontaneous collapse theories - (Edit: or maybe some version of MWI) - IMO seem to me the most compatible to your views. — boundless

    MWI is the kind of nonsense to be avoided. Spontaneous collapse fails if you demand that reality actually be classical rather than just decohered towards its concrete limit. Zeilinger's information principle captures some aspects nicely.

    To be honest, I set the interpretation aside these last few years to let the dust settle. Youngsters like Emily Adlam are coming along and making more sense.

    But as I say, biophysics puts it all in a new light. Something has been missing. It seems obvious to me that this is it.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    It is an entire collection of such stubborn patterns that would be the counterpart of a theory in mathematical logic, on the condition that these patterns sufficiently hang together in one way or another. — Tarskian

    I can't take this too seriously. Have you studied much fundamental physics? Especially with quantum field theory and particle physics, the tendency has been just to apply the mathematical patterns and marvel how they force nature onto these stubborn outcomes.

    The maths is "unreasonably effective". Somehow or other, nature keeps jamming itself into the arrangements described by permutation symmetries and matrix mechanics. You might need the Higgs field to force the SU(2) electroweak sector to crack diagonally into SU(2)xU(1), but because something had to do the job physically, the Higgs could be the fictional beast with its own SU(2) structure that could "eat" three of the electroweak's degrees of freedom, so allowing the U(1) photon to burst free.

    It is a crazy tale of science being forced into a wild speculation. And yet tellingly – as this was the mindset that particle physics had learnt to adopt from painful experience – three groups came up with the same solution all at the same time, making the distribution of the Nobel prize uncomfortably contentious.

    So there we have physics reaching the point where the maths constructs the patterns, and if the patterns are possible, nature must wriggle about until it has discovered a strange machinery to achieve the goal of fitting the forms preordained.

    The Big Bang could have been halted at many points in its hot unfolding. But with every phase change, it kept on track to become as mathematically self-simplified as possible.

    Inflation seems needed to have prevented an immediate gravitational collapse. The Higgs transition looks to have then stabilised the vacuum when inflation broke and dumped its energy into a lot of reheated particles. Even then particle physics was doomed as all the matter was going to be consumed by all the antimatter eventually. But another completely different kind of mechanism – the strong force with its SU(3) confinement – came into play, wrapping up quarks into proton balls and so allow a new game based on electron~proton electrodynamics to take over from matter~antimatter annihilation.

    In just the first few minutes of the Big Bang, the physics had tumbled down a hierarchy of algebraic geometry – permutation symmetries – to become stable enough to now last "forever". It was composed of particles with no further possibility to decay, in a vacuum properly secured.

    I would agree that the fact that this worked – believing that nature must find its way into mathematical-strength patterns – has itself become rather an issue for the practice of physics. Now we are flooded by every kind of maths-first theorising like string theory and a hundred more. A lot of speculative crap has followed as I don't think the way that the maths and physics have connected in symmetry terms is a trick that is properly understood.

    This is why I mention topological order as the actual root that connects. And here physics has its own kind of lead in its condensed matter models and such-like. These are now becoming quite influential on mathematics. Ricci curvature and other thermodynamical flow models have proven some pretty big results.

    And isn't that the healthy outcome? Some kind of mutual connection between maths and physics as cultures of inquiry? No need to make it a contest between logical rigour vs experimental validity. We have to come at nature from both these directions to grasp its truth.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Much of what I've read so far is on the contribution of Kant to Uexküll vision of the 'umwelt' but I'm still going.... — Wayfarer

    But note the comment that Uexküll creatively re-interpreted Kant's transcendental idealism so as to make it more biologically realistic. Idealism had to be pulled back from the ledge Kant had left it on. The cognitive model was the part of the story that was stressed.

    All reality is subjective appearance. — Wayfarer

    The paper nicely makes clear that Uexküll was making the modelling relations point – the story shared by other biologists like Rosen and Pattee. An organism forms its own bubble of psychology – an internal informational economy that balances expectation and surprise. A sense of self arises to the degree this model achieves control over the world.

    A newborn even has to discover it owns its hands and feet. The pole it starts from is neither subjective nor objective. It is just a vagueness. A blooming buzzing confusion. But very quickly a pragmatic connection to reality is formed. A strong sense of self emerges to stand opposed to an equally strong sense of living in a world, with even other such minds.

    In all this, there is no real metaphysical tension between mind and reality. It is just all about developing an epistemic structure. An organism develops a habit of predicting its environment so as to minimise its surprise. In this way, it can impose its "will" on the world. The world can come to be seen as an extension of its own desires.

    You can then say this means all we experience is the limits of our own mentality. The thing in itself is left out of the equation. And science makes a big mistake in seeming to claim otherwise. But while science often does seem to claim this, along with the lumpen realists, science just as much understands in great detail the way it is all a self-interested cognitive construct that we dwell in as our personal space. That other semiotic view has always been there and has grown stronger in recent years.

    So there is epistemic idealism and ontic idealism. And epistemic idealism is easy to defend. That is the way cognitive psychology has been trending again.

    You can see this enactive turn now casually cited as a paradigm shift. As in this random Nature paper I was reading:

    The past couple of decades in the cognitive sciences have brought about profound changes in our understanding of the mind. Once mainly characterized in purely abstract computational terms of rule-based symbol manipulation, it is nowadays widely emphasized that our mind is embodied in a living organism as well as extended into our concrete technological and social environment. Perceptual experience is no longer seen as resulting from passive information processing, but as “enacted” via regulation of sensorimotor loops and active exploration of the environment.

    https://www.nature.com/articles/srep03672
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I wonder why. — Banno

    I don't make shit up like you just did. Wonder a bit more about the why of that.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    Physics is a collection of stubborn patterns that can be observed in the physical universe and not a theory theorem in the mathematical sense. — Tarskian
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Pretty much silentism. — Banno

    So maybe your confusion is that we all ought to be silent in your presence? If you say very little, that is already quite enough for everyone concerned.

    Perhaps @Wayfarer could take you on a Zen retreat? All parties would be satisfied by that solution!
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well, you keep replying to my posts... — Banno

    Only to point out how you keep failing to properly answer anything. The only concrete updates concern the height of your intray of urgent messages to attend, and how long before you can retire to your well earnt lunch.

    What an important life you lead.

    SO here is my first post:
    Only if we make it so.
    — Banno

    And yours:
    Eusocial doesn't quite cover it as that applies to a social organism and hive mind at the level of ants and bees.

    Humans have their biology – the eusociality of a chimp troop – but then also the further levels of semiosis that result from language and logic. So it is this further level that arguably is first and foremost these days. Well it was language until logic started to take over once science could harness fossil fuels through technology.

    So the question of political organisation – what constitutes the fair and just – has ramped up through some actual sweeping transitions. We have evolved from ape troops to agricultural empires to free trade/fossil fuel economic networks.

    Good and bad, fair and just, are terms that take some redefining as we move on up this hierarchy of dissipative order.
    — apokrisis     — Banno

    That is pretty outrageous given the reality is so easy to check.

    Yes that was indeed your first post. @Gnomon's second reply. I'm sure he valued its razor insightfulness. No doubt the thread ought to have ended right there.

    Then I offered four posts after that, approaching 2000 words, none addressed to you. I mean, what could one have said to counter a slogan that might have fallen out of someone's crumbled fortune cookie?

    Then you cite a further reply I made to @180 Proof as if it were a reply to your only contribution to that point.

    You seem to be trying to construct a scenario where you have been the egregious victim of some most foul attack. This suggest a loose contact with reality.

    Have we made progress? I still think I'm right and you are not even answering the question. — Banno

    Of course you do. Or of course it is what you would say. But the facts speak for themselves. All you deliver is posturing and never a good faith answer. It has been that way forever. Do you fault me for finding it all so amusing?
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I often wonder if this odd commitment of Banno's derives from his Wittgenstenianism: — Leontiskos

    It has been many years now. Banno remains coy about what his metaphysics truly is. I have no idea what he wants to hide from us. But it is probably something to do with showing rather than speaking. Which isn't so easy a position to defend given this is a forum dealing in the currency of words. :smile:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    ↪Banno
    It seems you tried to spit and embarrassingly the drool trails down your shirtfront. Is this the school yard retort you hoped for in lieu of actually engaging in the multiple points raised against you?

    Why are you always so flustered when the weaknesses of your positions are itemised in public. Do think someone cares?
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    More spit. — Banno

    More dribble.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well, you said:

    The world just is as it is, regardless of what you think of it
    — Banno

    Isn't that just another way of saying that its reality is a given? What else could it possibly mean?     — Wayfarer

    This is his problem. If the world reveals itself to the degree it can frustrate our desires, then dialectically this epistemology of truth demands the existence of those desires as the other half of its egocentric equation.

    That half of the story is what had gone missing in the way his theory is set out. This is where a lack of rigour appears in the locutions.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Well, not for the folk for whom the world is what is not the case. — Banno

    So it is for the folk. But only if they are just like you?

    Sounds accurate.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    The complexity of the world is actually quite scary. — Shawn

    The wrath of the mighty will soon be upon you. First cutting and then magnanimous. As the godly always are. :wink:
  • Does physics describe logic?
    I think the philologists would object if we were to reduce language to a social construction, — Leontiskos

    But I am doing the opposite. Social construction is what language allowed. (The paleoanthropology of language evolution is one of my special areas.)

    So too for Aristotle and many Aristotelians, the division between deductive and inductive logic is not so clear-cut. — Leontiskos

    Two sides of the same coin. Deduce the particulars. Induce the generalities.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    I don't really know. I'm just as confused as you are.

    Hegel may have made some sense with dialectical materialism as you alluded to.     — Shawn

    Ooh, burn! :fire:
  • Perception
    You want a serious answer about how the telephone system is run by a computer? — frank

    Well I wanted a serious answer in terms of the beliefs that led to a stampede into symbolic processing as the way to crack consciousness in the 1970s and 1980s. Before your time perhaps?

    What's your background in electronic engineering? — frank

    As in most things, surprisingly good.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    The Trivium pertains to communication, generally speaking. — Leontiskos

    But that is the syntax, or the rules of argument construction and transmission. The geometry of relations to complement the algebra of the relatables.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    An academic education rather teaches the fine points of sophistry, suitable for bamboozling the masses. — Tarskian

    That is only half the deal though. These days you must have also fudged some data. :razz:
  • Perception
    ↪frank
    I was only hoping for a serious answer. I've spent enough time in lectures and presentations on the matter.
  • Does physics describe logic?
    one would study the Quadrivium: — Leontiskos

    So that suggests it all comes back to "number", even for what where then the liberal arts (a way to squeeze things past the eagle eye of the Church?).

    Then grammar, logic and rhetoric concern themselves with the syntax of number rather than the semantics.

    So numbers carry sense both as general variables and as particular facts. Or better yet, measurements.

    I would agree with all this. The point of an education is to lift us above the socio-cultural constraints of an oral world order – socially constructed in words – to a technocratic or rational world order. And that is socially constructed in numbers as signs that connect semantics and syntax into some pragmatic business of utterances and locutions.

    So that would make the maths more clearly the handmaiden to the physics? Physics employs numbers in both the syntactic and semantic sense – as the scientific generality of a variable, as the particularity of a measurement.

    That could be too harsh if it is recognised that logic is larger than just propositional calculus. Logic as a triadic system of inference becomes the common root of thought under Peirce. It injects the same pragmatism into the practice of philosophy too.

    As in....

    Many 19th-century logicians (for example, John S. Mill, George Boole, John Venn and William Stanley Jevons) took the range of logic to include deductive as well as inductive logic.

    As appears from the classification, the remarkable novelty of Peirce’s logical critics is that it embraces three essentially distinct though not entirely unrelated types of inferences: deduction, induction, and abduction.

    Initially, Peirce had conceived deductive logic as the logic of mathematics, and inductive and abductive logic as the logic of science. Later in his life, however, he saw these as three different stages of inquiry rather than different kinds of inference employed in different areas of scientific inquiry.

    https://iep.utm.edu/peir-log/
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