On 12 Jul 2010, at 20:27, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 7/12/2010 6:33 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
I don't think we can use reason to defeat reason.
What machines can do is to use reason to go beyond reason, and find
some non provable or non rational truth.
What do you mean by a non-rational truth? A statement that is true
but unprovable or a statement for which there is no evidence or is
contrary to the preponderance of evidence, i.e. no reason to believe
it true? I can understand using reason and experience to find
statements that are true but unprovable (either axiomatically or
empirically. But if we find a non-rational truth doesn't that mean
finding some evidence for it and hence making it a rational truth?
By non rational I mean either (according to the context) just non
provable.
To believe in a numbers or arithmetical consistency, God, or in any
Reality, gives typical examples.
Scientist believes only in conditionals. I mean theoreticians.
I agree with your comments below, on the Meillassoux prose. Except
that I would say that explanations exists, as part of reality.
Bruno
This is not a defeat of reason. It is the complete contrary, I
would say.
Bruno
On 02 Jul 2010, at 22:55, rexallen...@gmail.com wrote:
Any thoughts?
http://speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.pdf
"I call 'facticity' the absence of reason for any reality; in other
words, the impossibility of providing an ultimate ground for the
existence of any being. We can only attain conditional necessity,
never absolute necessity. If definite causes and physical laws are
posited, then we can claim that a determined effect must follow. But
we shall never find a ground for these laws and causes, except
eventually other ungrounded causes and laws: there is no ultimate
cause, nor ultimate law, that is to say, a cause or a law including
the ground of its own existence. But this facticity is also proper
to
thought. The Cartesian Cogito clearly shows this point: what is
necessary, in the Cogito, is a conditional necessity: if I think,
then
I must be. But it is not an absolute necessity: it is not necessary
that I should think. From the inside of the subjective
correlation, I
accede to my own facticity, and so to the facticity of the world
correlated with my subjective access to it. I do it by attaining the
lack of an ultimate reason, of a causa sui, able to ground my
existence.
[...]
That’s why I don’t believe in metaphysics in general: because a
metaphysics always believes, in one way or the other, in the
principle
of reason: a metaphysician is a philosopher who believes it is
possible to explain why things must be what they are, or why things
must necessarily change, and perish- why things must be what they
are,
or why things must change as they do change. I believe on the
contrary
that reason has to explain why things and why becoming itself can
always become what they are not- and why there is no ultimate reason
for this game. In this way, “factial speculation” is still a
rationalism, but a paradoxical one: it is a rationalism which
explain
why things must be without reason, and how precisely they can be
without reason. Figures are such necessary modalities of facticity-
and non-contradiction is the first figure I deduce from the
principle
of factiality.
You don't spell out what this principle of facticity is, but it
seems that it refers not to the world, but to our explanations of
the world. It is explanations that may be contradictory, not
facts. And so the principle reduces to the well known one that
every explanation is in terms of something else (hopefull something
we understand better).
This demonstrates that one can reason about the absence
of reason- if the very idea of reason is subjected to a profound
transformation, if it becomes a reason liberated from the
principle of
reason- or, more exactly: if it is a reason which liberates us from
principle of reason.
Now, my project consists of a problem which I don’t resolve in After
Finitude, but which I hope to resolve in the future: it is a very
difficult problem, one that I can’t rigorously set out here, but
that
I can sum up in this simple question: Would it be possible to
derive,
to draw from the principle of factiality, the ability of the natural
sciences to know, by way of mathematical discourse, reality in
itself,
We may have a complete explanation of reality - but we can never
know that we do.
Brent
by which I mean our world, the factual world as it is actually
produced by Hyperchaos, and which exists independently of our
subjectivity? To answer this very difficult problem is a condition
of
a real resolution of the problem of ancestrality, and this
constitutes
the theoretical finality of my present work."
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