Re: Philosophy specifies: organisms process information
- From: "Perplexed in Peoria" <jimmenegay@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Apr 2007 21:43:50 GMT
"dkomo" <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:-oudnR18ptmuYqjbnZ2dnUVZ_hynnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
John Wilkins wrote:
dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
John Wilkins wrote:
dkomo <dkomo871@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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.
And what would that "hole" be?
If the objects in general relativity like 4D spacetime, curvature of
space and spacetime events are abstractions -- mental pictures only --
you're saying they are nonetheless "real" objects because they are in a
scientific model that works. So your noumenal world (the
"world-in-itself" to use Kant's expression) contains abstractions, hence
reality itself is at least partially a set of abstractions. Your
territory becomes conflated with its map.
That is a really weird argument. So far as I can tell, you are saying
something like this:
1. The theory has abstract entities
2. I say the abstract entities represent real entities
Therefore
C. I say abstract entities exist
Whereas I would say
1. The theory has abstract entities (because all theories do)
2. The entities of a good theory represent real entities
You didn't say "represent" before. You simply 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."
By which I took it that anything at all that is in a theory, be it
mathematical or apparently physical, is a real entity in your philosophy.
3. This is a good theory
Therefore
C. I say that real entities are represented in this theory
which doesn't lead to anything like your conclusion. Please elaborate
how this leads me to your conclusion. Note that the distinction between
the concept and the object is important in my argument. The abstractions
are concepts. The reference of those concepts are not themselves
concepts.
But to be able to have some test to distinguish between a concept and a
real physical object is what I'm after. Is 4D spacetime a real physical
thing or is it only a concept? I don't know. And neither do you in the
sense that you can supply some kind of objective test to be able to say.
In other words, in everything I've written so far in this thread, I've
been after a way to distinguish the map from the territory in scientific
theories, especially those in physics which deal with the fundamental
aspects of nature. Nobody here has yet supplied a satisfactory answer.
The map is not the territory. Period. I think that what you are really after
is a way to distinguish maps which directly represent 'real' territory from maps
which represent something fanciful, even though they do it in a 'useful' way.
Nobody here has yet supplied a satisfactory answer.
So I'm still of the opinion that the map is inextricably tangled up with
the territory. And in this realm, at least, it is not a valid claim
that there is an independent, objective world outside our minds unless
we have a way to determinably remove that tangle.
Moreover, note that saying that entities in a good theory can be assumed
to be real doesn't mean we have equal warrant for the reality of *all*
the entities in a theory, but I will accept that for the moment.
And you have no way to distinguish the two types of entities.
I don't have a way of distinguishing 'realistic' maps from 'fanciful' maps
either. So I am with you to this extent. Since we only can see the maps
and we can't directly see the territory, there is a certain kind of Occam-ish
economy in restricting discourse to discussion of the relative merits of
various maps and never mentioning the territory.
.
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