Brent (and Bruno?) I salute Brent as fellow agnostic (cf: your closing sentence). Then again I "THINK" (for me, comparing my 4th to 5th language) "reason" is slightly different in taste from "raison" - closer to Bruno's motherly vocabulary. Anyway, both are the products of human thinking, human logic, even if someone thinks in 'numbers' <G>. Furthermore a term like 'facticity' (I love it) is whatever WE in our human logic ACCEPT as factual - from that fraction of the totality we MAY know at all. We are impaired by thinking in terms of a "physical world" fallacy, as conventional sciences imprinted into human minds over these millennia. Granted, we (on this list anyway) are further than restrict 'facts' to matterly processes and objects, but we certainly cannot include into our inventory those items that we (still) don't know about. And THOSE items contribute to 'being factual', part of facticity. Anybody around to identify "fact"? (like "truth"?)
John M On 7/12/10, Brent Meeker <meeke...@dslextreme.com> 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? > > > 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." > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > > > > http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/ > > > > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com<everything-list%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com> > . > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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