...is crying out, "Captin'! Tha mail server, she kinna take much mora
this!"
On Mon, 5 Mar 2001, Dan Minette wrote:
> Well, I don't think so. The strongest argument for this position, off the
> top of my head, is the enormous trouble inherent in any self-referential
> statement. Think of Godel's proofs.
For the true mathematicians and physicists (i.e. not me)....is it by any
means clear that Godel's proofs preclude a complete human (scientific)
understanding of the universe, including humans, just because we're in the
universe? (Might need a new thread for that one.) I take it from
William Goodall's post that he doesn't think so.... Need the troubles
inherent in a self-referential statement of pure mathematics apply to a
self-referential description of the physical world which mathematics
models but which is not itself deduced altogether mathematically?
> Well, we have experiences of our inner states that are different from
> phenomenon.
Do we, really? I'm thinking of the monk in meditation, observing his
thoughts bubble into his consciousness whether he wills them to or not.
How is internal observation any less phenomenal in character than external
observation?
> Wittgenstein addressed this fairly well with his "beetle in a
> box" metaphor in Philosophical Investigations. It is said that he destroyed
> logical positivism with this last work, as he had founded it with Tractatus
> Logico-Philosophicus.
I have to admit I've not read Wittgenstein. How does this metaphor work?
> It depends on what you want to do. If you are a realist, you can explain
> most of the world in a self-consistent realistic fashion. I do think you
> would have to throw away most of the understanding we obtain from-self
> reflection as worthless, since it is not reducible to external observations.
> In particular, things like free will and the meaning of "ought" go away. I
> think that ethics are reduced to something far less than they were thought
> to be for 2000 years.
I don't think these conclusions follow at all--or if they do, they
certainly don't *clearly* follow. Ethics may be changed, but that doesn't
mean they are diminished. And exactly what kind of knowledge do we get
from self-reflection (aside from Idealism) that would have to be thrown
away? Certainly not self-understanding or empathy for our fellow beings.
"Free will" has always been problematic, and is not a given for all
ethical systems. How much does humanity benefit, for instance, from
learning that depression (for one example) isn't necessariliy a
consequence of weakness of the will but has a biological origin?
No, these claims all have to be pursued in their own long and complicated
threads.... <vbg>
>
> Well, all we have to do is be able to model it in terms of the phenomenal
> world. We know it only has to be close enough to be an acceptable working
> approximation. I've know
Not sure how you were going to finish that sentence, but I'll toss out a
thought: why doesn't any idealism--in which the existence of the observed
universe depends upon human cognition--falsify evolution? One the one
hand, we can say that our phenomena-based explanation (science) only has
to be consistent with itself, since we can't very well prove whether or
not it's consistent with the noumenal reality.
But...if such synthetic a priori cognitions as space, time, and even
cause-&-effect are only products of human consciousness, and not actually
"real," that means that the very laws of science used to explain evolution
didn't exist for the whole of prehuman history. Transcription errors in
cell divison, cosmic rays knocking nucleotides out of place, animals
killing each other...none of this could have existed or happened for the
only definitions of "exist" and "happen" that mean anything to science.
Then again, the idealist metaphysician's response might be to say that
past and future, as humans conceive it, had no meaning for the universe
(which didn't exist as science describes it) until humans were around to
think and perceive in those terms or categories. Talking about a past is
just an anthropocentric (anthropometric?) way of organizing observed
phenomena, nothing more.
Contrariwise: if the rules of time and space and cause-n-effect are just
grounds for human perception, why don't we (I'm assuming we don't) get
glimpses of things at the macro level that violate our perceptual powers?
One could imagine that there are things out there whose relationship to
the noumenal world is utterly unlike our own--so unlike our own that we
and they could coexist and never know it; but it seems to me that we
should expect to run into things that can *sort of* fit into our
perceptual scheme but not really. The example that leaps to mind is T.H.
White's Merlin, whose relationship with time is remarkably different
from our own, but not wholly divorced from ours either.
> I am not really clear what you mean here. Are you trying to go back to
> macro-realism and micro non-realism?
I really just trying to say that just because an electron doesn't behave
like a billiards ball doesn't mean that billiards balls don't really
behave like billiards balls or that they fundamentally aren't billiards
balls.
> Maybe I should clarify my point. Let us consider renormalization. The
> problem faced by QM was that the vacuum polarization is part of the observed
> charge of the electron. In order to obtain the same value for the observed
> charge, after the polarization effects, Feynman had to assign just the right
> infinite value to the charge of the electron.
>
> To me, this has the feel of an arbitrary "fudge factor" which allows us to
> calculate the observed value.
While this certainly implies there's something about space/time/
matter/energy we don't understand, I'm not sure it implies the existence
of a thing-in-itself, and I'm not sure it implies that we'll *never*
understand.
> We will, of course, always be language limited. But, I think that the
> argument of Kant (or at least my argument) is that there is an inherent bias
> in human observations that we cannot get away from. Our minds are good at
> putting together internally consistent models of our every day observations.
> But, as we probe deeper, we find more evidence that what we have are models
> of observations, not reality apart from us.
Why not just say that our models are based on limited observations of the
reality in which we are nevertheless immersed? (And that, as a result,
our language for describing models is biased toward the macroscopic, but
that's an accident of evolution that can be overcome with specialized
terminology.)
> > In other words, language is inaccurate, but instead of blaming language
> > transcendentalism "blames" the universe.
> >
>
> Well, there are significant difficulties with this statement, as far as I
> can see it. First, how do we see photons, quarks, leptons, gluons apart
> from theories? We do not actually "see" any of these; we observe bubble
> chamber tracks, numbers on computer screens, etc. and match these results
> with models that include these fundamental particles.
But we still use words like "particle" which suggest miniature billiards
balls, the very concept we're trying to get rid of. I'm sure that
physicists and philosophers of science have asked this question before,
but why not, instead of referring to particles that defy macrorealistic
expectations, talk instead about probablities with mass and energy?
Instead of being confounded by things that refuse to behave like things,
refer to probabilistic mathematical structures that have some but not all
of the aspects of things, which aren't really things themselves, but in
the aggregate will behave like things.
I have no idea yet how to take that idea further; it just sounded good.
> Almost by definition, if our language (including math) is inadequate, then
> they are inadequate.
I don't mean that it's inadequate once and for all time, just that
macroscopic language is unfit to describe QM. Any QM-compatible realism
would have to be willing to abandon macroscopic linguistic habits at
the very least. Is it possible to talk about a reduction of thingness to
its underlying aspects, no one of which is sufficient to really be a
thing, without denying that things are real...?
> In the last 2000 years, most metaphysics were either idealistic or
> realistic. Kant is viewed by most philosophers that I know as someone
> trying to develop a hybrid.
Those categories do describe opposed tendencies, but not a set of
logically opposite statements such that refuting one automatically proves
the other.
Which brings me to a question I've been wanting to ask, which you can
probably answer more quickly than I can read the Critique of Pure Reason:
what function does the noumenon play in Kant's philosophy generally, aside
from being the thing-in-itself? Fifty words or less. :-))
Just kidding about the 50 word bit.
> Sure you can. You always could, and there is no way to either prove or
> falsify what exists apart from our understanding. But, it should be clear,
> then, that the existence of God is a matter of faith, and not knowledge.
Well, yeah. No God worth his salt would make it *that* easy, would he?
<g>
> >
> >At the risk of going in circles, why does QM not fit the description of
> >"can longer peer into the next layer of mechanisms?"
>
> There are a few very critical differences. First, at the level of QM,
> values, such as position and momentum, that had been assumed to be definite
> for centuries, have been found to be indeterminate. Second, for 75 years,
> there has been no hint of an layer underlying QM. Third, we are getting to
> the point where its going to be hard to look much lower. Including cosmic
> ray work, we are looking at energy densities comparable to those that
> existed fractions of a second after the big bang now.
So...if we haven't hit the wall, we're pretty damn close?
> > I don't see why not, in the metaphysical sense. Of course, the math would
> > be simpler without QM, thus inviting less speculation, but the debate
> > between Kant's Transcendental Idealism (which doesn't depend upon QM) and
> >the realists would still go on.
>
> Well, realists would have the same self consistent picture they've lived
> with and will quite happily argue that it was self evident
Yeah, but that's pretty much what they did before QM came along, too. In
the case of irreducible particles, realism would cease to be a metaphysics
and would instead become a generic inference (which might be all that it
is anyway). Meanwhile, the question of why the universe is *this* way
would go on.
> > If you have God, though, do you really need a noumenon? Why not suppose
> > that QM supports a somewhat modified view of Berkley instead of a somewhat
> > modified view of Kant?
>
> Well, I think the main difference between idealism and Kant's view is the
> concept that by knowing directly about God or the truer world of ideas, that
> one can better understand reality than by observation. I think that one can
> argue that both observation and introspection gives us partial, distorted
> pictures, and that the rest must be taken on faith. We know what we see; we
> don't know what is real.
Still, if we don't know what is real, we also don't know that what we see
isn't real.
> Obviously, I'm taking a bit to answer, but Marvin's questions are good and
> require some thought. I think the next thing I should do is describe why I
> think the 4 interpretations refer to something close to nomenon.
I appreciate your effort, Dan. I feel kind of guilty for being the "dumb
skeptic" in a way. I don't feel especially married to a particular
metaphysical view (compared to Keith's scientism, for example), so I'm
making you work hard to explain your POV to me rather than try to defend
one of my own.... If it's any consolation, I've lagged way behind in my
guitar and tai chi practice for the last couple of weeks because of the
time I've spend reading, thinking about, looking stuff up, and then
replying to your posts.
And I've got another question: it seems to me that Kant talks about
"things-in-themselves" as though chairs and cats have "real" identities in
a noumenal world which, though it might be perpendicular to our own and
thus unknowable to us, nevertheless tracks closely in some way with the
world we observe.
But that doesn't sound right to me, since everything we use to define a
thing as a thing by definition can't exist in the noumenal world. So,
whatever is "in-itself," it ain't a "thing." Even if God were part of the
noumenon, he wouldn't be able to care about human beings because it would
be categorically impossible for him to observe human beings.
So here's a conjecture: there are no things in themselves, but there are
multiple (2 or more) perspectives on reality. Perhaps from another
perspective the problems of QM don't exist, nor do space and time or
anything remotely resembling them. Whatever beings might live in one of
these realities would be experiencing exactly the same meta-universe as
we but would live in an utterly different cosmology. But they might still
be able to have the same realism vs. idealism debate as we, not realizing
that their noumenon is our phenomenon, and vice versa.
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
