I think EricS' digestion puts too much gloss on the (lack of) crispness between
the qualities. There's a (possibly preemptive) registration of the ontology
where (e.g.) mass, length, and time are disjoint, albeit I can infer that might
not be the case if we can replace (ground, foundationally) any quality with a
collection of substitutable acts/behaviors. While Dave mentions LSD and the
(quantitative) greater or less than of brain activity, he doesn't mention
things like synesthesia, the pollution of one quality with another [⛧]. So,
while I don't quite buy the Analytic Idealism concept that scientists have
replaced the object with the sign (referent with the descriptor), I do buy that
the scientific-ish crisp distinction between things like mass and length can be
artificial.
Such a gooey context is amenable to such (artificial) distinction - analytic -. But that
slicing is lossy ... information is lost in the distinction between qualities [⛤]. The
same would be true of the/whatever recipe of action that replaces the quality. Recipes
for length could be (more strongly "already are") mixed with recipes for mass
(or time). But it's our Scientismist/Objectivist bias that allows us to impute any
artificial crispness into the world.
[⛧] In arguing that the qualities/dimensions may not be distinct, I'm relying
on the data fusion activities of animals with a CNS and a relatively large
brain. While it may seem like swinging a bucket of water around is not
substitutable with a yard stick, composing such high-order activities out of
smaller activities (like moving one's opposable thumb or realtime monitoring of
a moving object with saccadic binary vision) relies fundamentally on the goo
inside our heads. Mess with the goo and you mess with the composability of the
actions. LSD messes with the goo.
[⛤] If we try to speak more jargonally, I'm challenging the idea that a "space"
of qualities can ever have an orthogonal basis. Orthogonality isn't necessarily a feature
of the way our CNS/brains work. And worse yet, it may not be a feature of the world.
On 3/22/22 18:15, David Eric Smith wrote:
Dave —
I’m not sure I understand qualitative and quantitative as a partition, or as a
pair of alternative predicates, though of course I recognize the usage of
setting one against the other. This is probably because I don’t understand
“qualitative” as a category. (Given that I don’t understand Brouwer’s
intuitionism beyond the small feature of its requirement for constructions, I
probably don’t understand “quantitative” as a category either.)
A place this comes up for me is when I try to teach dimensional analysis to
beginning physics students (or sometimes to liberal arts students).
Very little of what we do involves “pure numbers” (and even those often include
more; but I’ll come back to that). In all of dimensional analysis, a number
has to be paired with a dimension. So I have to explain to my students what “a
dimension” is. Since I have told them that we are going to require operational
definitions, I have to tell them somehow operationally, and not just say “you
know it when you see it”.
What I come up with is that each dimension corresponds to a recipe for a set of _acts_ one can carry out, and the concept of a dimension refers to certain substitutabilities in those acts. So if I say a ruler has length, by that I mean that I can put two objects on a tabletop abutting the two ends of the ruler. Saying that length “is a dimension” is saying that I can take away the rule and put bananas, or king’s feet, end to end and perform the same operation of holding two things apart. A different recipe goes with swinging objects around in a bucket to measure mass, or dunking them in water to measure volume, etc. (Anecdote from Lucy Jacobs, squirrel-woman supreme: During the harvest season, when squirrels pick up acorns, they shake them vigorously a time or two in their teeth, before choosing to keep or to toss. We are pretty sure they want to know which ones have a lot of nut-meat and moisture. Even squirrels understand what mass is, and that it is not identical to
weight.)
One has to go a little further than just the recipe for substitution to say
that something “is a dimension”; the operation also has to admit subdivision.
So in place of one meterstick, I must be allowed to substitute three and 1/3rd
kings’ feet, so I am saying that stringing the feet end to end, and so
separating them, is an operation _of the same kind_ as using the string of feet
or the meterstick to separate to objects on the table. It is in
subdivisibility without changing the nature of the operation that I bring in
quantity.
To the extent that one program of activity can’t be substituted for another,
the dimensions have distinctness. Swinging buckets can’t be used as a
surrogate for lining up kings’ feet, or dunking objects in water.
It is conventional, in physics, to see three dimensions (mass, length, time) as
“the” dimensions upon which dimensional analysis is built, and to call other
things counted “pure numbers”. However, there are many places where I have
reason not to leave it at that. Counts of atoms need to be partitioned,
sometimes, among which elements they are, and I can use those partition labels
as dimensions. Often, in economics, I want to treat goods-types, and also
monies, credit denominations, or near-monies, as having dimensions. If I do
so, I can do many of the same things done with dimensional analysis in physics
with them. The question of what “a dimension” “is” therefore seems to me not
to be closed with a memorization of three cases.
So are dimensions “qualities”? To the extent that we perceive them as somehow
different in kind, I would assume it is because our nature has become shaped
around the different kinds of things one can do, or can witness happening in
the world, but I can’t defend that belief with a validated origin story.
The above, for me, are not meant to be exemplars of all notions of
“qualitative”, but only some entry-point to whether there is a category, from
places where I know how to speak carefully.
My above question, about what relation the “qualitative” aspects of some
experience or program have to the quantitative, is about testing whether you
can say what you mean. A quite different invocation of the quantitative has
always been about being able to hold people to account for whether what they
are claiming could ever be said to have “truth-value”, and of what kind? To
say “I checked that the rod is 1m long, and you can check it too” has a kind of
intersubjective easy fungibility that “I know that God loves me” does not (at
least to me) have.
I am _sure_ that wherever the discussion is, it wasn’t meant to be where I cast
it above. But I don’t know how one would check whether my certainty is right.
Eric
On Mar 23, 2022, at 6:31 AM, Prof David West <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
/
"Back in the seventeenth century, when science as we know it today took its
first steps, scientists based their entire work on—what else?—/*/perceptual
experience/*/: the things and phenomena they could see, touch, smell, taste or hear
around them. That starting point, is course,/*_/qualitative/_*/in nature./
/Soon, however, scientists realized that it is very convenient to describe the
eminently*qualitative*world by means of*_quantities_*./
/But then something bizarre happened: many scientists seemingly forgot where it
all started and began attributing fundamental reality only to
the*_quantities_*./
/This, in a nutshell, is the beginning of/metaphysical materialism/, a
philosophy that—absurdly—grants fundamental reality to mere*descriptions*,
while denying the reality of that which is described. ... we began cluelessly
replacing reality with its description, the territory with the map./
/And so now we face the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness': the
impossibility of explaining qualities in terms of quantities./
/In the space of a couple of centuries, we tied ourselves up in hopelessly
abstract conceptual knots and managed to lose touch with reality altogether./
/Laboratory results in quantum mechanics, for instance, strongly indicate that there
is no autonomous material world of tables and chairs out there. Coupled with the
inability of materialist neuroscience to explain experience, this is forcing us to
reexamine our earlier assumptions and contemplate alternatives.*_Analytic
idealism_*—the notion that reality, while equally amenable to scientific inquiry, is
fundamentally qualitiative–is a leading contender to replace metaphysical
materialism."/
The preceding was from/Science Ideated/by Bernado Klastrup.
Factoid: when "perceiving alternate realities," e.g., while on LSD, brain
activity decreases when material neuroscience predicts an increase.
/"Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the world we
inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the world we experience. ///
/Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between the
hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what each hemisphere
does – they are both involved in everything – but how it does it, that matters.
And the prime difference between the brain hemispheres is the manner in which
they attend. For reasons of survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many
animals, the left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we
need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything else. The
result is that one hemisphere is good at/*_/utilising/_*/the world, the other
better at/*_/understanding/_*/it.///
/Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained
or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter whatever it meets. The play of
attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How
you attend to something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal."/
Preceding from Iain McGilchrist's/Ways of Attending/. I am a big fan of
McGilchrist and his book The Master and his Emissary and, I expect, the just
ordered two volume,/The Matter with Things/.
Just throwing some things to see if they stick against anyone's walls and
prompts some conversation.
Also, big fan of/The Dawn of Everything/mentioned on the list in the last
couple of days. I think it has some valuable information and insights that
would inform a lot of conversations on this list with regard sociopolitical
organization and means of effecting change.
davew
--
Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
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