Miscellaneous Chatter > Philosophy & Science
Is there really a Determinism/Indeterminism Dichotomy?
H:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 22, 2019, 03:22:53 pm ---I think the universe has events, and while the mathematical modeling is useful the actual events are better described via Aristotle's ideas of causation and entities having particular natures & causal powers.
Re: Intentionality, I think of it just as having Aboutness of Thought, as in Thoughts about the World. Given most of our cause-effect descriptions pre-suppose consciousness due to their interest-relativity it suggests there is something...interesting...going on there...
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I'd be willing to buy something like a "limit to math."
I'm just unclear if it could be that Intentiality could rise of things unIntentional. Kind of how the "infinite" nature of language seems it could arise from, well, no language at all...
sciborg2:
--- Quote from: H on March 22, 2019, 03:47:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 22, 2019, 03:22:53 pm ---I think the universe has events, and while the mathematical modeling is useful the actual events are better described via Aristotle's ideas of causation and entities having particular natures & causal powers.
Re: Intentionality, I think of it just as having Aboutness of Thought, as in Thoughts about the World. Given most of our cause-effect descriptions pre-suppose consciousness due to their interest-relativity it suggests there is something...interesting...going on there...
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I'd be willing to buy something like a "limit to math."
I'm just unclear if it could be that Intentiality could rise of things unIntentional. Kind of how the "infinite" nature of language seems it could arise from, well, no language at all...
--- End quote ---
Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.
But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...
H:
--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 22, 2019, 03:54:05 pm ---Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.
But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...
--- End quote ---
And that is sort of a problem, because math and language are sort of the tools we are using to investigate. So, if everything we find is a mathematical/linguistic answer, that makes sense, because we are looking at everything through a sort of math/language lens.
I mean, maybe, I don't know...
sciborg2:
--- Quote from: H on March 22, 2019, 04:18:16 pm ---
--- Quote from: sciborg2 on March 22, 2019, 03:54:05 pm ---Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.
But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...
--- End quote ---
And that is sort of a problem, because math and language are sort of the tools we are using to investigate. So, if everything we find is a mathematical/linguistic answer, that makes sense, because we are looking at everything through a sort of math/language lens.
I mean, maybe, I don't know...
--- End quote ---
I'd say Rationality / Intentionality / Subjectivity underpin our scientific investigation.
And science itself could be defined as the discovery of patterns through observation of change.
Can this yield knowledge of things-in-themselves, rather than relational structures? Seems unlikely since much of this investigation assumes both dynamism and stability so I don't see an answer to "Why don't the Laws of Nature change?".
To go back to the OP, math is useful modeling but its lingual limits - namely describing events through probability - is not an actual restrictive dichotomy [of randomness / determinism ] on Nature.
sciborg2:
From Freya Matthew's Why has the West Failed to Embrace Panpsychism?
--- Quote --- "Consider, for instance, Newton’s laws of motion. If we are given Newton’s second law then we can indeed predict that a billiard ball will accelerate in proportion to the strength of the force applied to it, but if we have no idea why force and mass and acceleration are related in the way the law describes, we will not really understand why the ball behaves as it does. In other words, since this model of explanation leaves universals themselves unexplained, it ultimately begs the explanatory question. The illusion of explanatory power that attaches to this structure of inference from universal to particular emanates not from ontology but from logic, and reflects the fact that ‘the world,’ as it is re-presented in theoria, is organized not by innate ontological necessity but by the rules that govern propositions. These are rules of predication, consistency and inference, first and foremost inference from universal to particular. So the structure of theoria subtly follows the structure of mental doubling or re-presentation via the mirror of picture-propositions; in conformity with this, theoria orders these picture-propositions in accordance with the laws apposite to them, namely, the laws of logic, rather than discerning in reality itself the contours of any innate ontological necessity. In this way the world takes on the aspect of a rational order: in characterizing it as rational however we are in fact identifying the logical structure of the mental mirror rather than the structure of the world itself."
"I would like to spell out in a little more detail how the conundrum of causation at the heart of science is a consequence, at a subtler level, of the mirroring maneuver at the base of theory. In this mirroring maneuver the mind, as we have seen, projects ‘the world’ as an idealized totality onto a kind of mental screen and in the process differentiates itself, in just the kind of way Kant detailed in his analysis of the transcendental unity of apperception, into a knowing subject, on the one hand, and the world as object or known, on the other. Since this object is, despite its world-content, mentally a passive construct of the subject, it will be understood by the subject to be, in an ultimate sense, inert. In the explanatory scenario of theoria, self-activity, and hence motive power, will always be intuited to lie outside the object. The object by definition, qua object, lacks the power of self-creation or self-animation. It will for this reason seem intuitively natural, from the perspective of the subject, to posit an external source of motive power for the world, a Prime Mover or, as secular substitute for such a Mover in science, a principle of causation, which is, as we have seen, a principle of coercion or force. The laws of nature are held in place by the arbitrary but coercive force of causation."
--- End quote ---
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