Dear Steven,
I cannot tell you exactly what "fact" Tim Maudlin had in mind.
My goal was just to better understand Danko's worldview. I have chosen
Tim Maudlin's statements, as in my view, they supplement physicalism
quite well.
By the way, have you seen recent Galen Strawson's paper in
The Times Literary Supplement?
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1523413.ece
I believe that his views are close to yours:
"At the root of the muddle lies an inability to overcome the Very Large
Mistake so clearly identified by Eddington and others in the 1920s – not
to mention the lovely Irishman John Toland in 1704, Anthony Collins in
1707, Hume in 1739, Joseph Priestley in 1777, and many others. The
mistake is to think we know enough about the nature of physical reality
to have any good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical."
Evgenii
Am 29.03.2015 um 20:10 schrieb Steven Ericsson-Zenith:
Can you give me an idea of the types of "fact" you have in mind? Do
you mean statements of the kind "This jam is made from strawberries."
or "If A = B AND B = C, A = C" or "This statement is false." or
"There is a God."
There are well known problems with language that do "supervene" upon
our usage. In inventing ideas, in speaking, about the world
(scientific or not) there is no necessary correlation there is error
and ambiguity and simply ways of speaking. A simple way to state my
view is to say that there is nothing contradictory in the physical
world. It is what it is, it is discoverable, we may develop knowledge
of it and refine that knowledge by falliblism (classic Ontology in
the Epistemology of Science). This knowledge evolves toward the way
things are.
The science of Benjamin Peirce is a/the science of necessity,
"Mathematics is the science that draws necessary conclusions" he
says. And as I noted before, he believed that Logic could build the
bridge between Pure Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. He did not
argue Logicism (that logic is the foundation of mathematics).
This view suggests "a conceivable certainty." That Scientific
knowledge can be developed, still be fallible, but is ultimately
sustainable for all time.
The Peirce family, Rudolf Carnap and I all argue for and by
necessity. There is, indeed, a fundamental state of the world toward
which we, and all other scientists, work.
If there were no necessity then the world would simply not exist.
Since the world manifestly does exist it has the following properties
1. it has always existed (by implication you do not get something
from nothing) 2. it has unidirectional necessity (cause and effect,
by observation). If the world did not exist, at any point, then it
cannot, by any means, exist today. This is an argument that I call
"Logical Existentialism."
Benjamin Peirce, in particular, argued for pure mathematics: the
human mind is necessarily capable of ideas that correspond to the
physical world. "In every form of material manifestation, there is a
corresponding form of human thought, so that the human mind is as
wide in its range of thought as the physical universe in which it
thinks." (in his Linear Associative Algebra)
We lost faith in this view because of the perceived failure of the
Hilbert program at the start of the twentieth century. I argue that
this is a failure not of mathematics in general but a failure of a
particular method (FOL).
So, generally, if anything "supervenes" upon the physical it is what
we call either "error" or "narrative."
Narrative is the story that we tell ourselves about the world and it
includes a range of things that are important to our behaviors.
Religion is such a narrative. How I fit into the world. What people
think of me. How much I am worth. How smart I am. What my politics
are. Etc... Could these ideas be said to "supervene?"
If you limit your Physicalist view and accept Materialism you have
to, by necessity, say that they do. But if you accept the broader
Liberal Physicalism articulated by early Carnap, the Peirce's and
myself, in which a knowledge of sense and response is included, you
do not.
Regards, Steven
On Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 2:09 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi <[email protected]>
wrote:
Thank you. I have one more question about physical. We talk after
all about processes in time and the question would be on how it
happens according to your view. To this end, let me quote from Tim
Maudlin's "The Metaphysics Within Physics"
“I believe there is a fundamental physical state of the world.”
“In addition to the physical state of the universe, I believe in
fundamental physical laws.”
“Once the total physical state of the universe and the laws of
physics are fixed, every other fact, such as may be, supervenes.”
Would you agree with such a description of physical processes? Or
do you consider a physical process differently?
Evgenii
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