Re: Philosophy specifies: organisms process information

John Wilkins wrote:

dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


John Wilkins wrote:

dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



John Wilkins wrote:


dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:




John Wilkins wrote:

[snip]




Sure - so long as you are talking about the *narratives*. I was joking
with my initial comment; but it seems to me that we should not accept
that the world just is what we tell ourselves it is. That really is
insane. Or religious. At the least it is anthropomorphism.

We may never have a narrative that is adequate to all phenomena (unless
you want to say that the phenomena are also narrative inventions), but I
think that it really *is* an IBE that there is an external reality.

The narrative of an external reality violates Occam's razor. It is
superfluous. If there actually were no independent, objective external
reality, it wouldn't make the slightest difference. We'd still have all
our scientific models and theories, and, if it makes us feel better, we
could go on believing in an independent reality. The important thing
is, though, that our models *work*. They allow us to predict, and in
the realm of engineering (even for biology) they allow us to produce
useful products to make our lives better.

I suggest that sanity is simply a collection of narratives that work for
us, and that the large majority of our peers believe in.


I think scientific realism does conform to Occam's Razor - because it
licenses inferences from one art of a theory to another without needing
further justifications (i.e., if the theory says electrons exist, then
in any other part of the theory, or in any other theory, we can say
electrons exist and are causally influential).

That said, full-blown realism is of course a matter of belief, not of
epistemic warrant. All we need *in science* is some kind of internal
realism - true in T, that sort of thing. But I find full blown realism
solves a further *metaphysical* issue - the stability of things. So it
is parsimonious for me to adopt it.


I still find it superfluous. The stability of things, the permanence of
physical laws, and their usefulness to build and predict are all based
on empirical observations over the course of centuries. Without this
stability science would have been impossible. However, believing in a
"crisp", concrete reality below all of it is just a leap of faith. I
think modern physics has shown that this kind of reality is a chimera.


I can accept everything you said except the final sentence. I do not
think physics shows anything of the kind.


At this point let me ask you a piquant question. As a card carrying Realist do you believe that dinosaurs *still* exist? Not as fossils,
but as actual tail thumping, teeth gnashing giant reptiles? Do you believe that the future *already* exists and that there is a desolate
scene of a burnt-to-a-crisp earth and brown dwarf sun out there in your
Reality at this very moment?


"This very moment"? No. But in the four dimensional spacetime continuum,
dinosaurs exist, yes. The problem of the present is a philosophical one,
not a physics one. But even if it were a problem of physics, I would
still argue that physics doesn't settle it.


Or we could more simply admit that the four dimensional spacetime continuum is only a mathematical abstraction and say, "By God, Kant was right! Space and time are just categories in the mind by means of which we order our experience."

But I almost forgot. You said:

"Strictly I think that the most real objects just *are* those that are
required by the most coherent and consistent theory - in Quine's terms,
to be is to be the value of a bounded variable (in a scientific model
that works). But metaphysically I also think that science has to be
"about" something - what the scholastics would call "first intention".
And since I don't think with the scholastics that *God* is what science
is about in that way, I am happy to think there is a noumenal world."

So the spacetime events are not just mathematical entities but real objects in your noumenal world. You've dug quite a hole for yourself.


--dkomo@xxxxxxxx

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