Re: The reality of entity

brodix <brodix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

I have no trouble with inferring unobservables. I do have a problem
when they become effectively canonized,

Well, yes, if I understand correctly. However, you may be mixing up two
different issues here. One is the ontological status of unobservables,
for which one either says a) they are real, b) they are only useful
mental constructs. But you mix this issue with the point that
theoretical objects (such as the Big Bang) become canonical. I assume
this is so when there is insufficient empirical grounds to distinguish
among alternative explanations.

The Big Bang hypothesis is a good example of abductive reasoning. That
is, from a known outcome we estimate in some original state what about
it had made that outcome possible and perhaps even probable. This method
has the advantage of offering real explanation (whether it happens to be
true or not) and offers explanation of past events, but it seems to me
to face a serious internal challenge about which I'd like to know more.

When using the abductive method, we find out all we can about the
original state of the system in order to generate some hypotheses that
might account for the eventual known outcome. One difficulty arises from
our having to choose among these alternative hypotheses. Yes, there is
an array of well known internal criteria with which we might choose one
hypotheses over another, but normally we like to have have external
criteria as well. In a laboratory one can impose empirical tests, but in
the abductive method, the original state of the system no longer exists.

However, traces (empirical effects) of that original system do happen to
persist, and one test of the relative truth value of our preferred
hypothesis is that further empirical investigation of these traces
yields results that are accommodated by the hypotheses. They represent a
kind of prediction of what bugs we will find when we turn the rock
over. The problem here is that we are looking at only traces of the
past, not at a past reality, and traces are one step removed from
it. Another is that investigation is informed by the theory that we seek
to evaluate, and so there's a danger of solipsism; we find what we
expect to find; we employ a self-validating evaluation.

The other big problem that I can see with the abductive method is that
outcomes are usually not unequivocally determined by some past initial
state of the system. The road from there to here is not smooth. This
is for two reasons: a) there are always outside perturbations that
influence the path of the system, so that it becomes difficult to read
from its present state the extent to which it is due to some initial
state, b) some systems, and often the systems that interest us the most,
are emergent systems, which by definition achieve outcomes that are not
mechanically reducible to some initial state.

I go into this, not only because it is something that interests me
greatly, but also because of your interest in cosmology, in which the
abductive method is necessarily used. As a person interested in
cosmology, I assume you have some interesting things to say about the
issues I've just raised.

as Big Bang Theory has, so that when problems do arise, the
institutional tendency is to accept whatever it takes to preserve the
original theory,

Sorry to be a little critical, but are you not again mixing up two
different things here? One is the difficulty of empirical tests for a
hypothesis regarding a past situation that no longer exists; the other
is the Kuhnian point about paradigms - the institutional reasons why a
particular theory becomes canonical. You really seem more interested in
the first and, if so, shouldn't have clouded the issue by bringing in
institutional conservatism.

Another would be the concept of spacetime. As I may have pointed out
previously, we could use the same logic to argue temperature is a
parameter of volume space, as we use to say that time is a dimension
of distance space and the math would be just as precise. If the math
adds up, it's proof the model accurately describes reality and it
becomes canon. If something is off, "renormalizations" are
introduced. Science is infested with humanity.

Not sure I quite follow this. One thing is your reference to
"space-time". Yes, it was once thought that time is a kind of fourth
dimension of things, but today that view seems to have become
problematic. That is, is time a property of things, analogous to spatial
dimensions, or is it something we cook up for our own convenience. I,
for one, am inclined to adopt a causal theory of time, in which
before/after make sense, but not any flow of time. Is my take on this
the consensus today? No idea.

Then you may suggest that successful mathematization offers evidence for
the truth value of a hypothesis, or are you denying that proposition? If
you are suggesting that an adequate mathematization of a phenomenon
implies that the mathematics adequately describes reality, I find that
to be unpersuasive - or better, dangerously tautological. That is, an
adequate mathematization shows that the mathematization is adequate
;-). If "description" here means adequate mathematization, then the
mathematization is a kind of description, but what does that have to do
with its its truth value in relation to the world? For example, I can
accurately describe a mirage in terms of sentences that may be true in
relation to my observations, but not true in relation to the real world
in which the mirage is presumably non-existent by definition: I am
adequately (accurately and fully) describing a fantasy. I suppose I
could express what I in mathematical terms, so we would have an adequate
mathematization of a non-reality.

Is a theory's becoming "canonical" a bad thing? Canonical I presume
means authoritative or recognized. While we assess positively criticisms
launched at established theories, scientific research would be
impossible to pursue if nothing was authoritative or recognized by a
consensus to begin with - if nothing was canonical. Research always
starts somewhere, usually in relation to received knowlege, and its
foundation consists of facts and theories for which there is a consensus
of their truth. You never start out with a tabula rasa. True, there's a
possibly negative sociological implication that one reason for canons is
that they are attached to social authority and serve to manifest and
perpetuate that authority. But this is surely not the only function of
canons or is it an implication we can function without them.

As for the contribution of math to canonization, is not math an
expression of the internal logic of a theory, and is not an internal
coherence one factor that makes a theory "robust"? In other words, a
successful mathematization seems part of a justification or a
contribution to the truth value of a theory and hence to its becoming
canonical.

As for renormalizations, I'm not sure whether or not you are critical of
that procedure. To put it into more broadly philosophical terms, all
theories encounter new embarrassing facts that seems to conflict with
them. That usually does not suffice to cast the theory into the dustbin,
and instead auxiliary hypotheses are cooked up to accommodate the new
fact with the old theory. It is only after there are many such auxiliary
hypotheses that the theoretical ship begins for founder under their
combined weight, and it is time to build a new theory. That is,
renormalizations seem necessary and inevitable, and only become a
problem after a certain point.

Does the acceptance of real unobservables open the door to ghosts?
Good question, and one that must be addressed. However, I don't think
it does. The reason is that the unobservable is posited in scientific
realism as being merely a dimension, aspect or property of
processes. It is not a self-contained reality in itself, as I presume
ghosts are. A causal potency, for example, only exists as a property
of matter, which ghosts do not, for they are non-matter almost by
definition. I suppose one could say that causal potency cannot exist
without the observable (empirical), and the observable cannot exist
without an unobservable causal potency or relation (i.e., all things
are processes).

Why would ghosts be self contained? Presumably they haunt the living
because they have unfinished business or can not otherwise let go. Not
that I'm arguing for ghost, just taking issue with your point.

Not what I meant by "self-contained". What I meant was unobservables are
not a Ding-an-sich, but a property of something else (a process).

Consciousness isn't exactly understood, physical reality is as much,
if not far more a function of relationships, as any hard and fast
physical beingness/particles, so if you are going to postulate hidden
dimensions, how do you logically limit what might occupy these dark
corners?

Yes, that's the question. A radical empiricist has an easy answer: what
exists is phenomenal; therefore unobservables are not real. The problem
is that scientists have long assumed the reality of unobservables
despite radical empiricism, and that assumption has been necessary in
successful scientific practice (I am aware of Timpanaro's objection to
this line of argument). A radical empiricism seems no longer adequate,
in part because it does not really explain anything (as Rom Harré and
many others have pointed out). It is seriously argued that real
explanation requires the presumption of the reality of unobservables.

Your question strikes me as quite legitimate: if there are hidden
dimensions, in the absense of empirical constraints how do we constrain
them so that things don't get out of hand?

a) I suppose that a generic answer is that without calling upon them,
explanation becomes impossible, and so we posit only so much in the
way of unobservables as is necessary for adequate explanation (the
test of Okham's Razor).

b) Secondly, these hidden dimensions are not independent of the
observable dimension, but these dimensions are aspects of one process,
and so the constraint of the observables is still present, although
instead of looking at a static state as evidence of it, we are
looking at change in time; the observed dynamic of the system rather
than its empirical qualities.

c) Finally, our explanations have to "work for us", either because
they lend themselves to successful Praxis, or because they are
heuristic (lend themselves to new scientific research programs, as
Lakatos put it). That "success" implies some external test of success
that remains unvalidated is an interesting issue, but not one I need
pursue here.

Incidentally, these points are all exploratory, and I'd sure like to see
some critical comment on them.

I believe "causal potency" is a reduction, a hypothetical isolation
of a system in thought, so that we might say something about it even
though its nature really depends in part on its environment about
which we are ill-informed. I.e., everything else being the same,
here's how the system would work if it were in isolation. Only with
scientific realism, as opposed to empiricism, it is represented as a
process and present is a driving force for change. If there are any
lurkers who are into such matters, I'd sure appreciate a criticism of
this point.

Controlling the environment is an obsession which extends far beyond
the sciences, but "The more we know, the more we know we don't know."

I here quote this little exchange because you may have misunderstood my
point and because my point was rather adventurous and needs to be
exposed to a critical gaze as much as possible. My point was simply that
the "environment" (not simply in terms of the natural environment we
experience here on earth, but of what surrounds any kind of any system
anywhere (except the cosmos as a whole, I guess). As you suggest, that
environment can never be entirely known, either in principle or in
theory. If a connection with its environment is intrinsic to the nature
of a system (it is a process, a holon), then the system is never
entirely intelligible (unless represented as a hypothetical isolated
system).

My point (which seems adventurous because I don't know of of anyone else
who has suggested quite the same thing) is that to make an open system
intelligible, we have to represent it in thought as being isolated or
closed and hope that the result is a sufficient approximation of
reality to serve our purposes. But when we represent all things as
essentially and causally connected with their environment and for the
sake of intelligibility, close that system in thought, then we end up
with a causal relation of one thing ;-). I hazarded the suggestion that
a "causal potency" is simply a name for a causal relation in which only
one end of the relation is known, so that it becomes an indeterminate
source of motion. This may not be quite as useless as it might at first
seem, for often our concern is emergent systems that are driven by
environmental dissipation, and to a degree we can just assume that the
environment is capable of further dissipation (increase in entropy) in a
variety of ways at least for the time being. That is, we can often just
assume an engine of change without worrying too much about its source.

However, any scientific practice is theory-laden, and this theory
in part shapes the reality of the objects we observe and
measure. Usually the implicit theory is left un-inspected, but
when there are "scientific revolutions" or when a science probes
an unknown where the dominant theory is not well established,
philosophical speculation leading to a new theoretical orientation
can really change the whole direction of the science.

Basing ones view on mental models also extends far beyond the
sciences, or even humanity. I would argue that not only do words
connote mental models, but even

Picky point: do not models consist of "sentences" (in philosophical
terms) that therefore have truth value? Are not words simply "names" (in
a philosophical sense) by which we index things and which do not have
truth value?

I think String Theory is a grasping effort by particle theorists to
avoid the possibility that there is no there there. That at its most
fundamental level, reality might really be an illusion constructed out
of the interaction of pure opposites, with no monolithic core. I don't
know, so lets wait and see if they actually do find the Higgs
particle, or if it's just static all the way down.

Not being a cosmologist (or mathematician), I'm sure in no position to
judge string theory or to assess your comment that it's subtle aim is to
construct space, which might otherwise collapse to nothing more than our
illusion. Your comment is interesting. Would you expand a bit upon it
for the non-expert? I've sometimes toyed with the idea that with
probabilistic causality, there could be an infinite array of outcomes,
and if that implies multiple worlds, that time is a way to avoid the
contradiction of having multiple worlds that are not the same, but would
otherwise be in the same place. Are you suggesting something like this
for string theory?

As for reality being constructed out of opposites, my reaction would be
negative if your comment was meant as metaphysical (forces of
light/forces of darkness; yin/yang; Ahura Mazda/Ahriman, essential
form/matter, etc.) rather than naturalistic. In naturalistic terms I'd
insist (again, siding a bit with David Layzer, _Cosmogenesis_, 1990)
that any "construction" (the emergence of improbable outcomes) is
necessarily the result of a thermodynamic engine (dissipation of the
environment driving the emergence of novel structures), and therefore a
contradictory process, or processes that are opposite with respect to
the direction of their change in entropy. I suspect this is not what you
had in mind by your remark, but offer it only to suggest that what might
be a conventional metaphysical postulate could also have a real and
naturalistic basis in fact.

Change between A and B constitute digital points of an unobserved
timeline.

No. That is, your acceptance of McTaggart's A-time is very problematic
today. The best work on the subject (as best I can make out), which is
quite readable, is that of D.H. Mellor, _Real Time II_ (1998). The whole
point of this book is to address your proposition above. He also
discusses at length what "change" means and a causal theory of
time. I'll not try to summarize Mellor because he does is work very
effectively. Whether Mellor represents the current consensus on the time
issue, I'm not at all sure, and would appreciate any lurkers who might
have some knowledge of this question.

Still though, they do die and their energy continues toward other
uses, usually further up the food chain.

Still don't understand. When the chicken dies, I assume it has little
free energy. The substances of which the chick was composed to an extent
may be far-from-equilibrium, but these complex hydrocarbon molecules soon
enough break down into heat, water, and more stable compounds. That is,
the potential and free energy represented by the chicken spontaneously
dissipate, and I don't see how any kind of energy bundle is passed along
to the newborn check. Even if we suggest that a decomposed chicken makes
good fertilizer, the energy represented by the plants that will become
chicken feed derives from the sun and is locked up in improbable
structures. I just don't see any significant transfer of the dying
chicken to a newborn chick unless the chick came from her egg, and even
then, the chick in the egg gets energy from nutrients provided by its
mother chicken, not from the mother's energy itself.

The physical reality that is the system of you and the system that is
that tree have gone from May, through all the events which constitute
your particular paths, until you meet again in September. May no
longer exists, but it went from future potential to past circumstance.
It is that "arbitrary frame of reference" which goes from future to
past, because the physical reality creates it and then replaces it. So
if time is only that "arbitrary frame of reference," it doesn't go
from past to future, but the other way around!!!

Of course, my position as noted before, is that times does not "go" at
all. Mellor offers a persuasive discussion of the contradiction of
A-time that I'll not try to reproduce here unless you ask.

That is why I argue time is a measure of motion, similar to
temperature, rather then the basis for it.

This is is a contentious position. That is, it is in need of defense
against the attacks coming from the opposite position. Your point is not
something that can be taken for granted.

To go completely off subject, here are some thoughts I've been
batting around as to the future of the monetary system;

I wish I could comment on what follows, but my granddaughter just
returned my car and I have to get out to do something. I'll try to
re-read the following section and if I'm up to it, comment in a future
note.

A meteor flying through space doesn't process much energy either, but
it does have potential energy. Just as your words have the potential
to keep me up past my bedtime.

The meteor has kinetic energy, I thought.

Again, there is no past information, but only information about the
past, which of course is necessarily subject to corruption (Second
Law).

As the energy of which it consists is disrupted.

My point was that the past does not exist in the present, but only its
traces. Yes, some "traces" may have energy in some form (the firecracker
I purchased at the store), but I'd argue there's no flow of energy from
past to present because there's no flow of time from past to present.

Oops. The "traces" of the past that exist in the present are, of
course, not the past, but mere empirical effects.

You are modeling time as a dimension in which the past is somewhere
back there and the future is somewhere up there.

No. Just the opposite. For some reason you keep getting me wrong on this
point. Not sure why. I'm inclined to _deny_ that there is a time
dimension in that time is a property of things. That is, there _is_ no
past, no present and no future outside of our consciousness. Defending
this point is something else; I'm just trying to tell you where I stand
on the issue.

Not at all and quite the opposite. I'm saying the past exists only as
traces (empirical effects) that can exists only in the present. These
traces were created in the past, but really exist only in the
present. There is no time dimension outside our consciousness.

I wasn't disagreeing, just pointing out the narrative structure of
thought is hard to escape.

"Narrative structure"? "Hard to escape"? Are you saying that my logic is
inescapable (is compelling) or that my narrative structure is a kind of
prison that entraps the flight of thought?

Put it this way, if those traces didn't exist, there would be no
concept of past events. It is these traces which constrain future
events, either actively or reactively.

Agreed.

It tends to be reactive to order. Ordered systems absorb less
information/energy, but tend to lose it and decay. Often as a
consequence of interaction with outside processes.

Gain entropy, loose information, or loose energy? A crystal has an
improbable state of low entropy, high information, but virtually no
energy. Most crystals will probably not "decay" in the foreseeable
future, but if they did, its movement toward an improbable structure
would be manifest as heat and trash (structures that are more probable
than the original crystal). I'm not sure what it means for a system to
"absorb" information. I'm not sure if I'd be willing to equate energy
and information. Heat, for example, is almost by definition an energy
without information. It takes energy to create information, but surely
they are different things. A nuclear blast has great energy, but little
information. The printed word is high in information, but has no free
energy, etc.

Sorry to be so rushed in my last comments. Must head out.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



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Relevant Pages

  • Re: The reality of entity
    ... One is the ontological status of unobservables, ... from a known outcome we estimate in some original state what about ... has the advantage of offering real explanation (whether it happens to be ... which by definition achieve outcomes that are not ...
    (sci.philosophy.meta)
  • Re: Future/present hopes
    ... outcomes that will be revealed or manifest in the future). ... present and hopes (for the even more distant future) which may be held in ... the future some further explanation is necessary. ...
    (alt.usage.english)
  • Re: consciousness, was Re: etc.
    ... What constitutes an explanation? ... as the one you gave, into the language of behaviorism, ... Are the presence of unobservables NESCESSARILY a good thing? ... traditions of science. ...
    (comp.ai.philosophy)