On 7/2/2014 8:51 AM, David Nyman wrote:
On 2 July 2014 01:24, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
Well, I was trying to be short, hence "to put it simply". Would you
take issue with the preceding statement that "The point, again in
principle at least, is that nothing *above* the level of the basic
ontology need be taken into account in the evolution of states defined
in terms of it."? And if so, what essential difference would your
specific disagreement make to the point in question?
I agree with that.
Good, that's the essential premise I've been reasoning from.
I'm saying that comp uses its basic ontological assumptions to
motivate an epistemology - i.e. a theory of knowledge and knowers.
Well, it assumes one; although I'm not sure how the ontology of arithmetical
realism motivated it. It assumes that provable+true=known. I don't think
this is a good axiom in the sense of "obviously true". It's subject to
Gettier's paradox.
I don't think this is the right way to think about it. Take, for
example, the truth of what I see (i.e. the truth-consequence of my
"visual belief system"). The truth of what I see is incorrigible and
quite distinct from any interpretations that may subsequently be
imposed on it (as we can intuit from demonstrations of how easily our
visual belief system can be fooled). Since the primary truth of what I
see is simply what I see (i.e. it is incorrigible) it can't be subject
to Gettier's paradox. I can't be right about what I see for the wrong
reasons because what I see is constitutively true.
But is it incorrigble? An optical illusion can cause you to see "A is bigger than B" even
though A is smaller than B. Of course you can say, "Well, it's still incorrigbly true
that A *appeared* bigger than B." but that's different. What you literally *saw* was that
A was bigger than B, i.e. that is the immediate perception and it only later that you are
persuaded that it was "mere" appearance. So the perception that your brain forms is
really creating a model based on sensory input and it can be wrong - which is why you're
not usually aware of your blind spot. In other words there is no "seeing at all without
interpretation"; There is no "simply what I see".
But that's not the point of Gettier's paradox. Gettier's paradox is that you may believe
something that is true by accident, e.g. with no causal connection to the facts that make
it true. Under Theaetetus's definition this counts as knowledge, but not under a common
sense understanding.
To the contrary, the irreducible relation between truth and belief in
this sense may point towards a resolution of a different and more
intractable paradox, the POPJ. I think the thrust of Bruno's argument
is that the truth of what I see and the logic of my visual beliefs
(both of which, as manifested physically, I take to be represented in
my neurology) converge on the same referents by means of distinct
epistemological logics. More crudely, they represent the same thing
under two different ways of knowing.
By contrast it is difficult to see how any theory relying on a
reductionist ontology without recourse to an explicit epistemology can
avoid the POPJ. My judgements about what I see cannot be a consequence
of what I see, since ex hypothesi both what I see and my judgements
about it are "really" my neurology (as in the case of "one part of the
brain monitoring another"). At least, that's the conventional take on
the paradox. More stringently, one might say that under reductionism
(as I think Stathis has, in effect, suggested) the POPJ is eliminated
in the same move as the phenomena and the judgements. Whether this
outcome is an improvement is, I guess, a matter of taste.
But there's nothing wrong with assuming a model and
seeing where it leads.
My point exactly. And my argument, in general, has been that where a
model can lead may fundamentally be delimited by the explanatory
strategy adopted at the outset. Specifically, if a theory lacks an
explicit epistemological strategy then, in despite of any success in
elucidating the structure of appearance, it may in the end tend to
obfuscate, rather than illuminate, fundamental questions pertaining to
the knowledge of such appearances.
"May tend" is fairly weak criticism in face to enormous success. The success is because
science "closes the loop" by testing its theories. The "epistemological strategy" is to
pass those tests.
What is interesting, at the very
least, is that Bruno has presented some general grounds for hoping
that a suitably developed "general theory of epistemology" may be
capable of illuminating both.
Maybe. But Bruno also wants to reach empirical tests. Otherwise it's armchair
philosophizing - as was so common and unproductive among the scholastics.
I disagree. I'm using epistemological in the sense of what is
consequential on an explicit theory of knowledge and knowers. AFAIK
physics deploys no such explicit theory and relies on no such
consequences; in fact it seeks to be independent of any particular
such theory, which is tacitly regarded as being irrelevant to what is
to be explained. That is my criterion for distinguishing the two types
of theory I had in mind.
OK. Although, physics does struggle with that it means to observe something
because observation is never as a superposition. It is assumed that we need
to know about how humans work to answer this in detail.
Is that true? In what way do the collapse hypothesis or Everett's
interpretation depend on how human beings work in detail?
They depend on human thought being quasi-classical, even though humans are (presumably)
made of quantum systems. This is just part of the bigger question of how does the
appearance of the classical world arise from a quantum substrate.
Brent
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