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.
