On 5/6/2017 2:29 PM, David Nyman wrote:
On 6 May 2017 9:48 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote:On 5/6/2017 10:07 AM, David Nyman wrote:On 4 May 2017 9:31 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 5/3/2017 11:22 PM, David Nyman wrote:On 3 May 2017 10:47 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> wrote: On 5/3/2017 2:34 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:Le 3 mai 2017 11:23 PM, "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net <mailto:meeke...@verizon.net>> a écrit : On 5/3/2017 1:32 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote:This an extreme reductionist view, i.e. if X is the fundamental ontology then only X exists. But that leads to nonsense: "If the standard model is fundamental ontology then football doesn't exist."But it's true, football does not exist in any ontological sense, and we are talking about ontology.So neither Sherlock Holmes nor Donald Trump exist. That's certainly a relief.What about ontology don't you understand?I don't understand why atoms imply that things made of atoms don't exist. Ok, this the heart and core of the disagreement. Noone is saying that things made of atoms don't exist and your saying this is just setting up an easy straw man for you to pointlessly knock down. So what do you suppose that Quentin and I are saying here? I'll repeat it. "Extreme reductionism" as you call it (and what other kind is there unless you believe in some form of causally effective top-down emergence?) is the search for the ontological building blocks of a theory which themselves will remain unexplained but in terms of which all other ontological composition will be understood. That at least is the ambition. So if we say that atoms are the building blocks then the claim is that everything else is to be understood as the interactions of atoms (this is meant to be illustrative only). So what then is the status in the theory of "everything else" if such entities are merely ontologically composite and consequently at that fundamental level indistinguishable from the interactions of their components? The answer (obviously) is that their "concrete" or substantial emergence is perceptual, or epistemological as we like to say here. I suspect the fact that some people find this so hard to accept is not some intellectual barrier to understanding, since the distinction is in fact rather obvious, but because of a distaste for taking epistemology as a fundamental determinant of reality.Maybe some people, but one of my slogans is "Epistemology precedes ontology."Of course when we speak of epistemology here it's not merely its final neurocognitive stages we should have in mind, but the entire process of epistemological emergence of perceiving subjects and their environments from the posited ontological basis. For this of course we need an adequate theory that takes both aspects and in particular their peculiar entanglement into account. And indeed it is only the ultimate explanatory success of such a theory that can justify the ascription of "existence" to anything above the level of the ontological base because, as you will recall, the whole point of the reductionist thrust is that this base is capable of explaining the evolution of its states entirely in its own terms, without any necessary reference to composition or emergence.I agree with that, except I would have ended the sentence at "anything". It is the explanatory (plus predictive) success that justifies the existence of the ontological base as well as the theory built on it. That's what I mean by epistemology precedes ontology.I would esteem it a courtesy if you would address the above argument directly, as distinct from changing the subject in line with your preferred way of thinking, as I would truly like to know what you think is wrong with it. As Bruno says, a different argument is not the same thing as a counter-argument.My "counter-argument", i.e. why I'm not convinced by Bruno's argument is two-fold. First, I don't see any predictive success and only a little explanatory success. And I see some predictive failure - although it's like string theory in that it seems difficult to say exactly what it predicts about human consciousness. Second, as an argument it is not a logical inference, it is a reductio. It starts from a physical classical computer can be substituted for you brain with no profound effect on your consciousness. Then it purports to conclude that the physical aspect of the computer is irrelevant and simply the mathematical existence of computation in Platonia is enough to realize your consciousness. Which is OK, but I think the consequence is overstated. It is the mathematical existence of your thoughts AND the world they are about that is necessary to maintaining your consciousness. So it becomes a (better, more explicit, more comprehensive) version of Tegmark's computational universe hypothesis. Looked at another way it is saying the world is everything that is true in a model of some axioms (either Peano or Turing or...) and if you think this doesn't explain something about the world you're wrongbecause it explains everything explainable and then some. But what explains everything fails to explain at all.I've never really been convinced by that slogan, frankly. Isn't QM, in a certain sense, supposed to encapsulate the explanation for everything? (I know it doesn't, but bear with me here). What I mean is that the point of a fundamental theory is supposed to be that it provides a unique basis for every explanation that, as it were, supervenes on it. In any case, if QM for example were indeed the TOE, then that would be the case whether we could explain it or not.Of course it's just an aphorism. It means that if you have a theory that explains why X and also why not-X, it's not really explaining either one. A TOE is supposed to only explain the X's that are observed.Thanks for your interesting remarks above (really) but in point of fact you didn't address my question. You originally said "I don't understand why atoms imply that things made of atoms don't exist." I gave you my view on the matter and asked you if you would be kind enough to tell me what you thought was wrong with it without changing the subject, but AFAICT you did in fact change the subject. If I ask you kindly again would you make another stab at it?Perhaps it's just a difference in semantics. I don't regard reductionism as making the thing reduce unreal, anymore than I would regard synthesis as nullifying the base ontology.But I went out of my way to explain that of course neither I, nor I assume Quentin to whom the remark was addressed, believe composite entities to be unreal. The distinction I was striving to make was between ontologically real and epistemologically real. By the way, I'm happy to grant your point that any theoretical ontology must also be judged, like any of its derivatives, by its ultimate explanatory success. The point seemed too obvious to state. But in any case, when you consider any reductive theory from the ground up, as it were, then anything we take to be real above that ground level must be both ontologically real (elementary) and epistemologically or perceptually real (composite). Perhaps what can make this hard to see (if indeed it is) is that we can't avoid implicitly viewing the situation from an already-interpreted point of view. IOW, we can't help *seeing* things in a concrete or substantial way and hence take this view for granted rather than reconsidering its provenance from first principles.
Implicit in talking that way, "provenance" "first principles" "can't avoid", is an assumption that you have the right reductionist theory and so the perceptions which led you to it are "less real" or "illusory". That's logical enough IF you have the right theory. My point is that you never know if the theory (and it's ontology) is right. That's what I mean by epistemology precedes ontology. We infer the theory and the ontology from experience, so the epistemology is prior. Even though we're explaining experience in terms of things not experienced (numbers, quarks, fields,...) it is the experience that is the concrete. We're not just "taking it for granted" we must take it for our explanandum.
Brent
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