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Non-physical "Stuff" and Physical Stuff

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Non-physical "Stuff" and Physical Stuff

astaire1
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Posted 01/21/09 - 07:40 AM:	#401
Hi Vumba, I think we've been talking past each other due to using different meanings for the term self. You seem to be speaking of a human self or a conscious self or perhaps at least a DNA-based living organism. I was thinking of the word self as it might be used in the following sentence: This very sentence is self referential because it refers to its self. I had thought that perhaps part of your claim regarded the difficulty of establishing a clear boundary. Vumba wrote: I'm sure one could debate whether anything has a self. But there's a large amount of evidence that genes do not. When one uses words of conscious motive like 'selfish', 'cooperative', 'altruistic' this entails that there is a self acting in a certain way. He writes: "We are survival machines - robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes...The gene is the basic unit of selfishness." I think its important not to take such a sentence out of its context. I'm not an expert in the history of biological science but I think, at the time biologists tended to focus on individual organisms as the focus of natural selection. Indeed the theme of Dawkins books is that the explanatory power of evolutionary biology can be greatly enhanced by recognizing the significance of selection at the level of genes within cooperative gene pools. If I am not mistaken, his book has a dramatic effect and now everyone takes the unit of a gene for granted (although selection at the level of individual organisms and species has not been abandoned in any way). Genes are snippets of information coded by DNA molecules - there is enough research in the field to refute the claim that genes are independent selves using humans as vehicles. Dawkins never meant his claim to be read the way you are reading it here. Indeed it is common for biologists to use anthropomorphic talk as a shortcut in their descriptions. This antibody wants to unit with whatever. The heart is frantically trying to empty itself. Dawkins major mantra is that the evolutionary process is a BLIND process meaning that there CANNOT be any motivations involved. Dawkins would be very unhappy that people use his arguments to support the silly notion that genes have genuine desires. He specifically points out in his book that we are free to ignore the impulses that are programmed into us by way of our genes. He probably say that genes wants to make copies of themselves but that IN NO WAY implies that genes have genuine desires. Its merely a shorcut for saying that: Genes are the way they are because genes that are good at making copies of themselves tends to proliferate whereas genes that are less good at making copies of themselves tend to go extinct. Its much faster to say that genes want to make copies of themselves and there are no biologists that are taken in by the dangers of using the shortcut. (I think Dawkins book was mainly directed toward biologists in contrast with his more recent books). The description just doesn't fit the bill, neither as metaphor nor science. More of a shortcut than a metaphor. The danger of using the shortcut is NOT a direct obstacle to science (as it is in amateur philsophy). There is no ambiguity among biologists regarding the use of the shortcut. It can always be unambiguously translated into its longer form as I have done above. cheers Astaire
Heaven, I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak. And I seem to find the happiness I seek. When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

JB
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Posted 01/22/09 - 08:24 PM:	#402
CypressMoon wrote: Pardon this, if it's out of line, but I'd like to here your take on veridical paradoxes and ambiguity, JB. What if there was a metaphor that wasn't ontological, but a metaphor, or a "system" of metaphors that are paradoxical? I mean, considering the paradoxes both in Science and Aesthetics, shouldn't we try to express metaphor(s) that embrace the transformation of categorical specifics (like descriptive concepts, e.g., vanishing points in perspective, Natural Language points (specific meaning)) into ambiguous, impure, "mixed" paradoxes? CM, I have "pruned" this post from the mind and the brain thread because I think it will help me to give you a better answer if I try to formulate it in this context. I will finish reading some of the other exchanges in this thread and then respond, if that's okay. Best, JB
Vuja De I've never been here before and I don't remember being any place like this either. Why go ad hominem when ad absurdum will do?

CypressMoon
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Posted 01/22/09 - 08:28 PM:	#403
Thanks, JB. I appreciate it. Maybe a PM would have been more appropriate.
"IN THE spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flowercovered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone." - Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays A good determinant of success is when people start buying your shit.

JB
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Posted 01/22/09 - 11:38 PM:	#404
Gosh, CM, I had no idea what I was getting into when I said that I would read through this thread. Seriously, it seems like its overall thrust is geared toward the search for enhanced modeling power of reality, toward trying to better define and attain epistemic virtue, toward a reconsideration of the "best practices" to be employed in our normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. The way you framed the question in the O.P. seems, too, like a search for a Goldilocks epistemology, which is to say, one that has neither too much hubris nor an excessive humility. When it comes to humankind's descriptive enterprises, which are inherently normative, when we encounter paradox, we sort through different scenarios and try our best to determine its origins. To the extent we cannot determine whether any given knowledge advance is being thwarted by, on one hand, methodological constraints, or on the other, some type of in-principle occulting, the proper bias is to assume the former and eschew the latter. This is simply a pragmatic approach wherein methods will generally precede systems. Our methods will necessarily assume such things as common sense notions of causation, reality's intelligibility, certain first principles like identity, noncontradiction and excluded middle, such principles alternately holding or folding in a semantical vagueness that flows naturally from the ontological and epistemic vagueness we ordinarily encounter in reality. Ontological vagueness means we change our modal ontology from the possible, actual and necessary to the possible, actual and probable. Epistemic vagueness is when we don't know if we are constrained methodologically or ontologically (the in-principle occulting I mentioned above). So, while the postmodern critique deserved a response, the proper response, in my view, was the move from a naive realism to a critical realism or even a pragmatic fallibilism. Even if reality writ large remains incomprehensible, it is also still apprehensible, which is to say intelligible, lending itself to varying degrees of modeling power. Anyone who wants to enhance this modeling power must accept the onus of cashing out their novel methods in practical value-realizations. Human evaluative concerns go beyond our descriptive and normative enterprises with their empirical observations, logical demonstrations and practical realizations. All things being equal, once we've exhausted our best descriptive and normative approaches to reality, we remain immersed in paradox vis a vis reality's intial conditions, boundaries and limits, or with what might be called its primal origin, primal support, primal being, primal goal and primal axioms. This gives rise to different sets of paradoxes, beyond mere godelian-like constraints, that we sometimes try to resolve through a coincidentia oppositorum, sometimes by nurturing tensions creatively, sometimes resolving them dialectically in syntheses, sometimes dissolving them through paradigm shifts, sometimes side-stepping them due to our lack of interest or due to their triviality, or what have you. The most rigorous philosophical methods as applied to the most recent scientific insights leave us with nothing but Scottish verdicts (not proven) for all of our putative ontologies or metaphysical systems. Our methodological naturalism does not imply, in the least, a philosophical naturalism. Still, this immersion in paradox has deep significance for certain of our evaluative concerns, such ultimate concerns having profound existential import for very urgent and most insistent human yearnings and longings. The interpretive stances that then result from this dance between our descriptive, normative and evaluative approaches, for many people, take on the attributes so well described by William James as representing options that are vital, forced and live. The manifold and varied interpretive stances of humankind, in my view, if they are going to be optimally compelling for the most earnest seekers of truth, beauty, goodness and unity in our communities of value-realizers, must not jettison, in fact, must be constrained by, the historical fruits of our common descriptive and normative endeavors, going beyond those value-realizations but not without them. This is just to say that good religion will be hypothetically consonant with good science and good philosophy. It is in the going beyond our descriptive and normative value-realizations to a more robust interpretive approach, then, that I can affirm at least some of what I think you are recommending, Cypress Moon, as best I can understand your thrust. The rich texture of reality invites a rich tapestry of interpretation and the cultivation of those very same aesthetic sensibilities that have often guided our scientific value-realizations, like symmetry, elegance, parsimony, simplicity, beauty. In fact, some have coherently argued for a cosmic adventure governed by an aesthetic teleology, taking note of how novel structures emerge in far from equilibrium environments and the greater the number of bifurcations and permutations of complexity, the more fragile and the more beautiful the reality. We can also recall Whitehead saying that creative advance, in fact, takes place only along the borders of chaos. In summary, then, when it comes to enhanced modeling power for reality taken in its manifold and multiform parts, our scientific and philosophical rubrics, however fallible, commend themselves to any earnest seeker of value. When it comes to celebrating and interpreting Reality writ large, as a whole, we really need a more robust cultivation and depthful engagement of our aesthetic and ethical sensibilities for truth has so often come flying in on the wings of beauty and goodness, these values not strictly logically-related but clearly intellectually-related. We need to better engage our analogical imaginations, too, and realize that we just might successfully refer to realities we have long been otherwise unable to successfully describe, for even if we cannot prove the truth of the axioms of our systems, Godel was not suggesting we might not otherwise be able to see their truth. Not all of our interactions with reality are formal and can be rendered through formal construction. Biosemiotic realities that we are, we must also taste and see the goodness of reality (even if that taste is quasi-epiphenomenal). Very truly yours, JB
Vuja De I've never been here before and I don't remember being any place like this either. Why go ad hominem when ad absurdum will do?

CypressMoon
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Posted 01/23/09 - 12:51 AM:	#405
I can't thank you enough for your words here, JB. It means more than you might imagine to me... Seriously, it seems like its overall thrust is geared toward the search for enhanced modeling power of reality, toward trying to better define and attain epistemic virtue, toward a reconsideration of the "best practices" to be employed in our normative sciences of logic, aesthetics and ethics. The way you framed the question in the O.P. seems, too, like a search for a Goldilocks epistemology, which is to say, one that has neither too much hubris nor an excessive humility. Yes. When it comes to humankind's descriptive enterprises, which are inherently normative, when we encounter paradox, we sort through different scenarios and try our best to determine its origins. To the extent we cannot determine whether any given knowledge advance is being thwarted by, on one hand, methodological constraints, or on the other, some type of in-principle occulting, the proper bias is to assume the former and eschew the latter. Yeah. I agree. Ultimately, for now at least, aesthetic paradoxes are my interest. When our rule-following (normative) methodologies fail to resolve a paradoxical conflict, another approah is necessary, I think. Where I've found it, is in revising the constraints of a logical containment, by either adding or subtracting something within the category, (say optics and perspective for instance) where upon extraction or immersion (subtraction/addition) the bounds of the containment shifts. This is a normative approach to a problematic paradox. But, interestingly, aesthetically, after the act of manifesting an extrapolated re-arranged logical containment - bringing it to it's manifested end as a sculpture, painting drawing film, mixed media etc. - it becomes a metaphor that temporarily lifts, if only to a degree, the normative (rule-following) mind, and allows the senses to enhance to a new degree of feeling alive. It is an unconventional language (the art I'm speaking of) that is expressive rather than normative. It is a way of manipulating matter into an expressive entity that surges into the glass body of experience, where the normative is undermined by the power of its expression. To percieve a paradox, or paradoxes is to feel them with the body. This is simply a pragmatic approach wherein methods will generally precede systems. Our methods will necessarily assume such things as common sense notions of causation, reality's intelligibility, certain first principles like identity, noncontradiction and excluded middle, such principles alternately holding or folding in a semantical vagueness that flows naturally from the ontological and epistemic vagueness we ordinarily encounter in reality. Ontological vagueness means we change our modal ontology from the possible, actual and necessary to the possible, actual and probable. Epistemic vagueness is when we don't know if we are constrained methodologically or ontologically (the in-principle occulting I mentioned above). I think we might be in disagreement here. It may just be a misunderstanding of your termonology, or rather a disagreement with it. I don't think ontology is a logical approach to reality, but rather ontology might be called an "enantientology", or an "alogos of the experiencing body". Now, I say this from a very scientifically uninformed perspective. Maybe I'm valueing the arts too much. It is because of these paradoxes found through normative approaches, that give merit to a revision of the means of the approach and the end... Even if reality writ large remains incomprehensible, it is also still apprehensible, which is to say intelligible, lending itself to varying degrees of modeling power. Anyone who wants to enhance this modeling power must accept the onus of cashing out their novel methods in practical value-realizations. Yes. It lends itself to varying degrees of modeling power. The practical value-realizations need to be re-valued. Is this just another way of saying, "methodological constraints need to be changed"? Or am I missing something here? All things being equal, once we've exhausted our best descriptive and normative approaches to reality, we remain immersed in paradox vis a vis reality's intial conditions, boundaries and limits, or with what might be called its primal origin, primal support, primal being, primal goal and primal axioms. This gives rise to different sets of paradoxes, beyond mere godelian-like constraints, that we sometimes try to resolve through a coincidentia oppositorum, *sometimes by nurturing tensions creatively, sometimes resolving them dialectically in syntheses, sometimes dissolving them through paradigm shifts, sometimes side-stepping them due to our lack of interest or due to their triviality, or what have you. I agree with my emboldenments of your words here. However, I think the dialectical doesn't always resolve itself into a synthesis. Sure, there are convergences in a dialectic, but I think leaving (some) dialectics as disparate entities that are opposed to each other, might benefit the advancement of sensationally experiencing the complex texture (to use your own eloquent description) of reality. For instance, a dialectic between experience and a logically exptrapolated field (like optics), while remaining (for the most part) disparate, incompatable entities, inform one another. The thrusting spirit of the logical extrapolations, and manifestations is , I think, to progress experience away from our tentative normative, biased (evaluative) appraoches to reality. Still, this immersion in paradox has deep significance for certain of our evaluative concerns, such ultimate concerns having profound existential import for very urgent and most insistent human yearnings and longings. The interpretive stances that then result from this dance between our descriptive, normative and evaluative approaches, for many people, take on the attributes so well described by William James as representing options that are vital, forced and live. That's a great way to put it. I particularly like "vital, forced, and live". What would happen if we ended this (maybe futile) attempt at synthesizing these dialectical relationships, in a practical way... and left the descriptive, normative, and evaluative approaches seperate from the "side" of the body of experience - the alogos* of experience? It is in the going beyond our descriptive and normative value-realizations to a more robust interpretive approach, then, that I can affirm at least some of what I think you are recommending, Cypress Moon, as best I can understand your thrust... We can also recall Whitehead saying that creative advance, in fact, takes place only along the borders of chaos. You understand it very well, and you articulated it nicely. Creative advancement, I would say, is beyond the borders of rationallity. JB wrote: Not all of our interactions with reality are formal and can be rendered through formal construction. There we have it, folks. This is the value of my current project. Right here, in this succinct sentence contains a bounty of reasons to do what I'm doing, which is to create, beyond our normative biases. Thanks JB, CM
"IN THE spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flowercovered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone." - Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays A good determinant of success is when people start buying your shit.

180 Proof
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Posted 01/23/09 - 02:58 AM:	#406
JB wrote: In summary, then, when it comes to enhanced modeling power for reality taken in its manifold and multiform parts, our scientific and philosophical rubrics, however fallible, commend themselves to any earnest seeker of value. When it comes to celebrating and interpreting Reality writ large, as a whole, we really need a more robust cultivation and depthful engagement of our aesthetic and ethical sensibilities for truth has so often come flying in on the wings of beauty and goodness, these values not strictly logically-related but clearly intellectually-related. We need to better engage our analogical imaginations, too, and realize that we just might successfully refer to realities we have long been otherwise unable to successfully describe, for even if we cannot prove the truth of the axioms of our systems, Godel was not suggesting we might not otherwise be able to see their truth. Not all of our interactions with reality are formal and can be rendered through formal construction. Biosemiotic realities that we are, we must also taste and see the goodness of reality (even if that taste is quasi-epiphenomenal). Why doesn't (contemplative) silence suffice as the mode of address for observing those (anomalous) aspects of reality which exceed the grasp of our formal (& semantic) constructs? It does not follow from (forced) synaesthetic rorschach-projections (e.g. "analogical imagining") that "letting things be" happens.
The question isn't "Which explanations do I believe?" but rather "Which explanations do I least disbelieve?" Absence of evidence THAT MUST BE THERE (i.e. implied by any claim, concept, or (its) predicates, that affects changes in/to the world) entails evidence of absence. [What cannot be done?[What cannot be hoped?[What cannot be known?]]]

Dunamis
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Posted 01/23/09 - 08:01 AM:	#407
180 Proof wrote: Why doesn't (contemplative) silence suffice as the mode of address for observing those (anomalous) aspects of reality which exceed the grasp of our formal (& semantic) constructs? It does not follow from (forced) synaesthetic rorschach-projections (e.g. "analogical imagining") that "letting things be" happens. This would make an interesting thread. The contemplative silence thread. Is not the role of metaphor, 180, (or various synaesthetic projections), to elicit and further grow what can be said within the grasp of our "formal (& semantic) concepts"? As Quine called it, meaning is the cleared away ground in the jungle of use. How else did the ground get cleared away if we did not break our mode of silent address? Or do you see these as mutually exclusive? One can systematically and richly increase the "reach" of our concepts without the engagments of the imagination?
Tractatus theologico-politicus [is a] work forged in Hell by a renegade Jew and the Devil and issued with the knowledge of Mynheer Jan de Witt. - Church Council of Amsterdam If no man ever thinks alone, then we might say that to know really is to think ever less by oneself - Balibar

CypressMoon
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Posted 01/23/09 - 08:29 AM:	#408
180 Proof wrote: Why doesn't (contemplative) silence suffice as the mode of address for observing those (anomalous) aspects of reality which exceed the grasp of our formal (& semantic) constructs? It does not follow from (forced) synaesthetic rorschach-projections (e.g. "analogical imagining") that "letting things be" happens. What is mystical to you, might be referred to as "pointing to the future", or even "walking" by others. What I think you don't get, 180, is that our formal and semantic constructs are themselves adaptable to one another, until one encounters a material paradox, whether it be under a microscope or through the glass eyes of experience. If we want a synthesis of relations between these different paradoxes at different scales of matter (micro, eye and ear, macro), what you would call "mystics" need to point into the future, by creatively manipulating reality (through defining their own logical limits, and categories) into a blatantly expressive material entity, that temporarily, and to a degree, lifts the historically and culturally contingent, normative (biased) mind.
"IN THE spring, Tipasa is inhabited by gods and the gods speak in the sun and the scent of absinthe leaves, in the silver armor of the sea, in the raw blue sky, the flowercovered ruins, and the great bubbles of light among the heaps of stone." - Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays A good determinant of success is when people start buying your shit.

JB
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Posted 01/23/09 - 01:15 PM:	#409
CypressMoon wrote: Yes. It lends itself to varying degrees of modeling power. The practical value-realizations need to be re-valued. Is this just another way of saying, "methodological constraints need to be changed"? Or am I missing something here? C-Moon, I'm not sure what you are saying or asking here. The normative mediates between the descriptive and the interpretive to effect the evaluative. These different approaches to reality are integrally related, each presupposing the other, each with its own autonomous methodologies. To be more explicit, I was pretty much implicitly rejecting any application of your critique to humankind's normative and descriptive endeavors. To be more plain, I have no serious quarrels with the disciplines of philosophy and science vis a vis how far they have come and where they now stand, here, on the threshold of a new millennium. At the same time, I do see value in your approach for aesthetics, as a normative science, and also for humankind's interpretive endeavors, broadly conceived, to include all the great traditions, both religious and ideological, as we all attempt to tie our normative, descriptive and evaluative stances together, somehow. CypressMoon wrote: I agree with my emboldenments of your words here. However, I think the dialectical doesn't always resolve itself into a synthesis. This is correct. We do not a priori know when tensions will resolve vs dissolve vs be maintained, which is why I presented a list of possibilities. CypressMoon wrote: That's a great way to put it. I particularly like "vital, forced, and live". What would happen if we ended this (maybe futile) attempt at synthesizing these dialectical relationships, in a practical way... and left the descriptive, normative, and evaluative approaches seperate from the "side" of the body of experience - the alogos of experience? See the immediately preceding answer. Also, it seems to me that there are no too few people who take a false comfort in James' rubric for the will to believe vis a vis what they are apparently willing to consider "live options," which, in my view, do not withstand philosophical rigor and scientific scrutiny. CypressMoon wrote: You understand it very well, and you articulated it nicely. Creative advancement, I would say, is beyond the borders of rationallity. Let me issue a cautionary note here. When we say beyond rationality and speak of the transrational, we are recognizing that, in addition to the empirical, logical, practical and prudential, there are also nonrational and relational aspects to human value-realizations; and it is only because we are finite and fallible that we must necessarily fallback on what are weaker truth-indicative signs (like symmetry, parsimony and usefulness, for example) and cannot otherwise rely solely on the more robustly truth-conducive operations like empirical observation and logical demonstration. We must first exhaust our best truth-conducive efforts before relying on truth-indicative signs (as fallible tie-breakers); and we must keep all of these modeling power attempts very integrally related even as we respect the autonomy of their different methodologies. My caveat emptor, then, is that we must be clear when we affirm the transrational that we are not otherwise actually affirming the arational. And I say this because, for example, it seems to me that some folks, like Ken Wilber, use the words transrational and integral differently from what I am suggesting. What I am describing as different aspects of a singular mode and/or act of knowing, he seems to describe as different modes of knowing. He seems to affirm, then, different epistemologies as equally efficacious routes to engaging reality. In my view, epistemology is epistemology is epistemology and we do not approach reality by filling our epistemic platters from a smorgasboard of autonomous modes of engagement. That is not transrational. It is, rather, an arational, gnosticism. Best, JB
Vuja De I've never been here before and I don't remember being any place like this either. Why go ad hominem when ad absurdum will do?

JB
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Posted 01/23/09 - 01:51 PM:	#410
180 Proof wrote: Why doesn't (contemplative) silence suffice as the mode of address for observing those (anomalous) aspects of reality which exceed the grasp of our formal (& semantic) constructs? It does not follow from (forced) synaesthetic rorschach-projections (e.g. "analogical imagining") that "letting things be" happens. Contemplative silence is indeed an aspect of address. It can help us cultivate raw awareness and give us an efficacious pause between stimulus and response, or between sensation and abstraction, or between abstraction and judgment. It can also help us subvert our worn out tautologies from within and/or foster paradigm shifts from without. In my view, it is necessary, even, but not sufficient. In our attempts to gain descriptive accuracy, in addition to our attempts to say what a putative reality is like, analogically, we also try to articulate what it is not like, analogically, as well as what it manifestly is not, literally. There are many physical and biological realities (formerly so-called anomalous, even) to which science successfully referred, via abductive inference, long before it successfuly described them. Not all things which exceed the grasp of our formal and semantic constructs are destined to remain beyond them. Of course, I am talking about reality as considered in bits and pieces. For reality writ large, taken as a whole, contemplative silence ... ... ... in my view, is way underappreciated. Best, JB
Vuja De I've never been here before and I don't remember being any place like this either. Why go ad hominem when ad absurdum will do?

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