The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => General Misc. => Topic started by: TaoHorror on February 24, 2020, 05:51:33 pm
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So we don't know where thoughts come from. What is your best guess? Select "You" if you think you ever, even just once in your lifetime, create your own thought(s).
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I see someone did at least one playthrough of Doki Doki Literature Club...
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Why isn't there an "All The Above" option? I want to vote that.
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Why isn't there an "All The Above" option? I want to vote that.
Oh, just pick one! LOL!
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I could see all of the above in a Non-dualist sense, where Awareness is the juxtaposition "between" and "around" Form and Formlessness...
That might be closest to how I think of things...
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I could see all of the above in a Non-dualist sense, where Awareness is the juxtaposition "between" and "around" Form and Formlessness...
That might be closest to how I think of things...
Interesting - can you describe or give examples of what you're saying? Like "what" is formlessness.
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Interesting - can you describe or give examples of what you're saying? Like "what" is formlessness.
Well I was thinking of this dude's essays of Nondual Logic ->
Tetralemmic Polarity (https://sites.google.com/site/nondualistlogic/tetralemmic-polarity?authuser=0)
One gets a tetralemmic polarity when one of the poles is not an object. By "object" I mean whatever can be observed or thought about. So a tree, a hallucination, a concept, a process are all objects. All objects have form. A form is a set of distinctions that allows one to identify an object as a particular object, distinct from all other objects. However, this raises the question of whether an object is a form, or is it that it has a form, and its form is not all there is to it. If the latter, then that "extra" must be formless. I will argue that formlessness is indeed a reality in all objects, and that formlessness and form are a tetralemmic polarity.
Let us go through the tetralemma, considering the possibilities:
1) There is ultimately only formlessness (and form is somehow derived from formlessness).
2) There is ultimately only form (and formlessness is just vacuous word-mongering).
3) There is ultimately both form and formlessness.
4) The ultimate is neither form nor formlessness.
(1) can be dismissed by noting that, given only formlessness, there is no explanation, nor can there be any explanation of how form can be derived from it. One can only say "it just happens", which is of course no explanation.
(2) is considerably more difficult. One could imagine a universe consisting only of a bunch of objects, which could be distinguished if there were an observer, but nevertheless exist without an observer. Indeed, most people in modern societies think that just such a universe existed for billions of years. Now being without an observer, there is no distinguishing, so in this imagined universe, a form just is an object, and we would say it is made out of parts, not a set of distinctions. This would mean that an observer, when they finally come into existence, is just another such object. This raises the question of how one object can be aware of another object. An observing object must somehow connect each element of the observed form into a whole. But if the observing object is itself nothing but a set of parts, where can it "put", so to speak, these connections? If we say that some elemental parts of the observing object are changed in an observation (like cells in the retina are changed when struck by photons, causing changes in neurons), then either each of those elemental parts are observing, or other parts of the observing object observe the changed parts of itself. The second possibility obviously just pushes the problem back, so the elemental parts must themselves be observers, like Leibniz' monads. But this just repeats the initial problem on a smaller scale: how does this tiny observer make its connections? Where can it put the knowledge that it has changed, and what can connect these bits of knowledge? So this too is just regressing the question. It might be objected that a form need not be made up of discrete "elemental parts", but is, perhaps something like a continuous field (like an electromagnetic field). However, this doesn't change anything. There would still have to be differences -- different field strengths, perhaps -- and the observing form still needs to alter its continuous features as it observes, and we have the same infinite regress. Another possible objection is that awareness isn't a structure of parts, but of events. Again, this doesn't change anything. Simply substitute 'event' for 'part', and you get the same argument. The only way out is to acknowledge that awareness of form requires that which is other than form, and that can only be formlessness.
Note that there can only be one formlessness, since if there were two, there must be that which distinguishes one from the other, which means they would have form.
What (3) asserts is that there is form, and then there is also formlessness. Now it would appear that in rebutting (1) and (2) we have just shown this, but what an assertion like (3) means is that there are two separable entities that co-exist. However, form and formlessness are not separable. That is, (3) asserts dualism, but the relation between form and formlessness is not dualistic. The way to see this is to consider our own thinking, for as it turns out, our thinking exemplifies this interplay of form and formlessness. A thought has a form, and if we consider what thinking is in addition to all thoughts -- one might call it the power to think, or something like that -- well, this power to think is formless. Without thoughts there is no thinking, and without the power to think there are no thoughts. It is the formless aspect of thinking that unites concepts (forms) into more complex forms, that allows awareness of them. Thoughts and the power to think completely depend on each other. Now if A depends on B and B depends on A, and A and B are not reducible to something else, then A and B must be one. But the non-reducibility to "something else" has still to be covered, which brings us to...
The rebuttal of (4) lies first of all in noting that to posit a somewhat that is neither formlessness nor form (a prior unity, say) adds nothing that is helpful in accounting for our experience. In that sense, it is metaphysically useless. Furthermore, it creates a new problem, namely how this somewhat relates to formlessness and form. If what is posited is a prior unity, one is left with no explanation of how it unites formlessness and form, and without an explanation of how formlessness and form are derived from it (this latter being the same problem with (1)).
Having seen all four horns of the tetralemma fail, what next? The way forward, as I see it, is to treat the unresolvability of the polarity from being a problem to being the solution. That is, to describe fundamental reality as this never-resolving opposition of the two poles. The way to do this is to think of the two poles as forces (what makes things happen) rather than states of being, or as partial descriptions of reality. Reality is not fundamentally just formless, or form, or both, or neither, rather it is formlessness and form in action, constituting each other as they work against each other. To say that experiencing is the tetralemmic polarity of formlessness and form provides a basis for developing a complete and coherent metaphysics -- given the idealist stance that there is nothing outside of experiencing. No more is needed, and any less cannot produce an explanation of awareness of forms.
Where I might balk is the Idealist part...hard for me to accept that Consciousness is the All, though I am pretty skeptical of Physicalism as well...
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Where I might balk is the Idealist part...hard for me to accept that Consciousness is the All, though I am pretty skeptical of Physicalism as well...
Reads to a simpleton like me as a sort of Hegelian position. The Absolute as not a closed unity, it is a sort of open opposition.
See, the issue for me in voting for this is that I can't possibly disentangle A, B and C at all. D seems like a farce, or a word game. But I can't bring myself to isolate any one option over the others...
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This poll was really meant to resurrect our discussion on consciousness - I feel like talking about it again. Sci has posted a ton of cool stuff and musing it all over, wondering if I/we are closer to understanding it or just vetted out more possibilities of what it could/couldn't be.
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This poll was really meant to resurrect our discussion on consciousness - I feel like talking about it again. Sci has posted a ton of cool stuff and musing it all over, wondering if I/we are closer to understanding it or just vetted out more possibilities of what it could/couldn't be.
Well, in a way I am just teasing on the structure of the question.
See, I think we could, maybe, make progress, but probably not if we prefigure that it must be the case that volition, I guess we could call it for now, is something like "single-caused."
The question of what moves us is very complicated. In fact, maybe even one of the most complicated possible questions. That might even be why we, sort of a priori, come to a "theory of mind." As Bakker likes to call it, a sort of heuristic view of ourselves and so of others. It is practically useful and generates practically useful results in many cases.
That doesn't mean it is the fundamental "answer" to the question. In the same way that Newtonian, or classical physics was useful in understanding gravity, but ultimately did not "fully" explain the whole paradigm.
In one sense, I do think this ties back to a "question of causality" that is hard for me to summarize. Essentially though, what we think of, in a sort of folk-way, as "causal" is not really all that intelligibly rendered out rationally. Sometimes we'd consider possible worlds, sometimes counter-factual cases, sometimes a notion of necessity. All of these have problems being applied though, broadly.
The more contemporary take is to consider "causality" as a look at intervention. That is, what changes under an intervention. Now, I am unfortunately not qualified to summarize this, but it likely is more intelligible than the previous sorts of notional causality.
To draw this back, what we are doing if we are asking, "what made me do X" is a very complicated question, like a three-body problem of physics, except is is an X-body problem where X could plausibly be anything and everything that could possibly influence the outcome.
So, even if we to simplify this and make it a "3-Body problem" and consider only you, other agents, the world at large, we'd still be in quite a quagmire. The difficulty is rendering out all the possible micro-states and then fully calculate every outcome from there. Even, likely tiny variations in initial starting conditions play out wildly different.
So, in the end, it is not clear which of these "strings" is the one that "moves" you. It's all of them, none of them, some of them, and some other ones too, most likely. Sorry if this posts is a bit disjointed and muddled, it was basically a sort of stream-of-consciousness take.
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H's laying out of the problem is why I see some charm in the Nondualist position - I think there are only two cases where we have experience with "things in themselves" and that is our 1st person PoV and our observation of causation.
However, in the second case there's little reason to think that observing cause/effect relations is giving us insight into causal power. In fact QM shows us our ignorance of Causation in stark relief. But there has to be something going on intrinsically when we observe change, because something selects one of the myriad possibilities that could happen as the actual occurrence.
And so the only possible chance we have to get an intimate sense of causal power is in our own volition, as tangled as it might be from varied strings. Of course this sense could be completely illusory, but it remains the only sense we have of what causation looks like from the inside as opposed to observations we tag with circularly defined terms (energy, force, fields, etc).
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Hmmm, do you actually think that a first-person perspective is an in-itself and not a for-itself?
As for causality, do we really ever see "causality" as an in-itself? Like Hume says, you see on ball hit another and that one moves, with no third term between them. So what is the in-itself of causality there? The outcome? The movement? One thing moved now another moves, but what is cause? The regularity? The conjunction of the preceding and the antecedent?
I guess I am asking, how are these in-themselves and not concepts/constructs/categories that we mind-meadiate onto/into whatever the Noumenal actually is?
Or do we just take them as immediate to be a Ground and go from there?
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Hmmm, do you actually think that a first-person perspective is an in-itself and not a for-itself?
As for causality, do we really ever see "causality" as an in-itself? Like Hume says, you see on ball hit another and that one moves, with no third term between them. So what is the in-itself of causality there? The outcome? The movement? One thing moved now another moves, but what is cause? The regularity? The conjunction of the preceding and the antecedent?
I guess I am asking, how are these in-themselves and not concepts/constructs/categories that we mind-meadiate onto/into whatever the Noumenal actually is?
Or do we just take them as immediate to be a Ground and go from there?
Well the fact that you see change happens means there is a shift in the Ground. It doesn't have to actually resemble what is observed. The video game causation is not real as observed, but the computer running it is still undergoing change.
By Thing-In-Itself I mean something that is not just a collection of relations. Consciousness and Causation don't have to, IMO, be as they appear to us to still be representative of a thing-in-itself.
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By Thing-In-Itself I mean something that is not just a collection of relations. Consciousness and Causation don't have to, IMO, be as they appear to us to still be representative of a thing-in-itself.
Consciousness is not a set of relations? Even if it were the only thing in the universe, wouldn't it relate to itself? Isn't that the foundation of Subjectivity, that it appears as an "immediate" relation to itself? Maybe I am splitting hairs though.
Even so, I am unsure how causality would not be a collection of relations. One ball hits another, that second one moves. All of these are relations and critically, are related to the observer. Since, if there was no Subject to declare [one ball] and [second ball] and motion relative to this, or that, I think I am failing to grasp the immediacy of causality here. What then is causality if not a collection of relations? A substance?
I seem to be failing to grasp the argument here, I think something is going over my head.
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Consciousness is not a set of relations? Even if it were the only thing in the universe, wouldn't it relate to itself? Isn't that the foundation of Subjectivity, that it appears as an "immediate" relation to itself? Maybe I am splitting hairs though.
Even so, I am unsure how causality would not be a collection of relations. One ball hits another, that second one moves. All of these are relations and critically, are related to the observer. Since, if there was no Subject to declare [one ball] and [second ball] and motion relative to this, or that, I think I am failing to grasp the immediacy of causality here. What then is causality if not a collection of relations? A substance?
I seem to be failing to grasp the argument here, I think something is going over my head.
Re: Consciousness & Relations, I think the physicist Lee Smolin explains this well [in Time Reborn]:
"We don't know what a rock really is, or an atom, or an electron. We can only observe how they interact with other things and thereby describe their relational properties. Perhaps everything has external and internal aspects. The external properties are those that science can capture and describe - through interactions, in terms of relationships. The internal aspect is the intrinsic essence, it is the reality that is not expressible in the language of interactions and relations. Consciousness, whatever it is, is an aspect of the intrinsic essence of brains."
So cause-effect are relations, but there is something that makes the cause(s) precede a particular effect(s). Whatever it is that ensures the relation holds is the thing-in-itself.
There simply cannot just be relations, there have to be relata.
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Perhaps, to rephrase for TH (and others), how do you "experience" "your" "selves" in terms of his poll? "" for all the other words I might substitute in but feel might unnecessarily muddy the conversation for those not practicing academic level philosophy.
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So cause-effect are relations, but there is something that makes the cause(s) precede a particular effect(s). Whatever it is that ensures the relation holds is the thing-in-itself.
There simply cannot just be relations, there have to be relata.
Right, I mean, I am not the sort of skeptic to claim there are no Noumena. I think that is frankly absurd. So, there is/are relata, but what else could we say about them but their relations? Even for first-person conscious experience, what could we say of that except how it relates to itself?
So, I am failing to grasp the argument in that quote. The first two sentences, I agree with fully. We only have access to the phenomenal, not the noumenal. Then a seeming speculative leap is made, to propose two classes of "aspect." Which is well and fine, but I don't follow that this distinction makes much sense. For example, if we take an electron as a having a "negative charge" of course we could say that it has no negative charge in-itself, since if not in relation to something with no charge, or a positive charge, what is its charge? There isn't an answer to that, as far as I could tell. Charge only relates something in so far as it relates to anything, no?
So, to then posit that consciousness could not be relational seems unfounded. Why can't consciousness be expressed in "a language of interactions and relations?" Could a particle's charge be discussed absent the interaction and relation of other things? What is "charge" in-itself? I don't see it as Substance, that is, something which can be explained with no reference to anything else. Surely the sort of consciousness that is being referred to is self-consciousness and so, at the very least, we'd have to admit that this relates and interacts with itself, no? So to say that consciousness, as experienced, must be some "special class" of somehow immediate non-interactional, non-relational noumenal relata, I don't know, seems unfounded to me. It seems to me that the quote posits that consciousness in-itself (which for-itself, as far as I can tell) must be the in-itself in itself. But all we have is the for-itself of consciousness to inform us of that!
In other words, why are we taking the phenomena of consciousness as necessarily the noumena of consciousness?
Maybe I am just thinking about this in the fundamentally wrong way or something...
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Perhaps, to rephrase for TH (and others), how do you "experience" "your" "selves" in terms of his poll? "" for all the other words I might substitute in but feel might unnecessarily muddy the conversation for those not practicing academic level philosophy.
Well, non-technically, I still feel like that answer is "all the above."
I don't "feel" compelled sometimes. I do feel the "pull" from myself, from other people and from other things (institutions, customs, etc.) at other times.
So, even from the broadest experiential view, to me, there isn't a single answer.
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I am pretty firmly in the "you" camp on this. You are the sum of all the external and internal influences over the course of your life. If you see a clown and hightail the other way, it's because you are the person who watched "It" when they were five.
I guess it could be argued then that "It" or the person who let you watch it or Steven King is pulling your strings. But you are also the person whose mind had a greater susceptibility to being scared by Tim Curry in a clown suit. And you are the person who didn't confront, rationalize and overcome your fear.
Maybe you can't help it, that's just how your brain was wired through genetics, evolution, creation, whatever, but it is still "you" whether making a conscious choice or not.
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I am pretty firmly in the "you" camp on this. You are the sum of all the external and internal influences over the course of your life. If you see a clown and hightail the other way, it's because you are the person who watched "It" when they were five.
I guess it could be argued then that "It" or the person who let you watch it or Steven King is pulling your strings. But you are also the person whose mind had a greater susceptibility to being scared by Tim Curry in a clown suit. And you are the person who didn't confront, rationalize and overcome your fear.
Maybe you can't help it, that's just how your brain was wired through genetics, evolution, creation, whatever, but it is still "you" whether making a conscious choice or not.
That is sort of the crux of it, then, right? What is the "you?"
But I don't know that I follow your final example there. What happens if it is the case that you don't make a conscious choice? Is that still "you." Let us pretend that you have been subliminally conditioned to salivate when a bell is rung. The bell rings, you don't consciously choose the salivation, yet, "you" still do it. So, it seems like, in some sense, in some cases "consciousness" is not relevant.
Mind you, I am not really trying to be a sophist here. I just think a sort of Socratic Method, whereby we should be clear as to what we are (and are not) talking about (and meaning) is really needed, if you aren't just going to have a superficial discussion where we have assumptions that talk past each other. On the other hand, Socrates was killed for a reason...
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Yeah, how "you" is defined is key. Someone can condition you to have a pavlovian conditioned response, but then I'd say that "you" is changed to the person with that response.
I guess we need to define "pulling" as well. If that connotes a conscious decision, then any subconscious action or response can't be "pulled" by "you." I didn't really think of pulling as a conscious decision before writing that last bit.
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Yeah, how "you" is defined is key. Someone can condition you to have a pavlovian conditioned response, but then I'd say that "you" is changed to the person with that response.
I guess we need to define "pulling" as well. If that connotes a conscious decision, then any subconscious action or response can't be "pulled" by "you." I didn't really think of pulling as a conscious decision before writing that last bit.
Well, if "you" is a unity of all things that go into determining your behavior, then I think we can arrive at a fairly simple answer that then, yes, the answer is just "you."
However, I would kind of doubt this was the intent of TH's question. Or at least, I would kind of doubt it as a sufficient answer. Because it simply makes the "you" all-encompassing. In the case, where, say you were somehow unknowingly (to yourself) brainwashed into doing, or saying, or thinking something, there would be a significant disconnect between the you that is consciously experienced and the you that the facticity of the whole case would present.
So, you could have a case where, for example, you think you are making a choice "freely" but were actually "forced to" by compelling things outside your own Being. Notionally you did it all, but was it you who "moved yourself" to do so? That seems less clear cut, if you don't accept the fundamental unity above.
Does that make sense? It seems to, to me. It's why I can't bring myself to give a simple answer. That, or just generally being a jerk, maybe.
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TH's question is pretty straight forward. Who is pulling my strings? As far as I know, I'm not brainwashed. Any influences I've had put on me, I think I've had the opportunity to accept or overcome; be it advertising, social pressures, indoctrination.
Certainly it's possible for a person's strings to be pulled by various forces, but I think most of the time it's just "you" doing the pulling.
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TH's question is pretty straight forward. Who is pulling my strings? As far as I know, I'm not brainwashed. Any influences I've had put on me, I think I've had the opportunity to accept or overcome; be it advertising, social pressures, indoctrination.
Certainly it's possible for a person's strings to be pulled by various forces, but I think most of the time it's just "you" doing the pulling.
From an experiential stance, I'd agree. But I guess I am just apt to somewhat doubt the experiential account.
To borrow Bakker's sort of terms, if it is from "the darkness that comes before" which moves and I can't see what is in that darkness, how apt is it to say that it must be "me?"
It might be me, it might be something else. Without being able to definitively say what does move one, the question seems open, as to what is in that darkness. At least, it seems so to me.
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In other words, why are we taking the phenomena of consciousness as necessarily the noumena of consciousness?
Maybe I am just thinking about this in the fundamentally wrong way or something...
I'd separate the observations from the observer. Consciousness is the container and "measurer" of relations, by which Smolin means that which is mathematically observable and communicable. Even to say consciousness is related to itself is to express something more than a relation, as it would be an awareness of a relation.
Another quote:
“I am drawn to the idea that relational properties do need an intrinsic ground, and this tends to lead towards a panpsychist picture because the only intrinsic nature we have access to is qualitative consciousness itself.”
- William Seager
TH's question is pretty straight forward. Who is pulling my strings? As far as I know, I'm not brainwashed. Any influences I've had put on me, I think I've had the opportunity to accept or overcome; be it advertising, social pressures, indoctrination.
Certainly it's possible for a person's strings to be pulled by various forces, but I think most of the time it's just "you" doing the pulling.
I agree, but it's actually very rare for someone in philosophy to hold this view perhaps best expressed by Sartre -> "Freedom is what you do with what is done to you."
To me the "what's done to you" is the translation of the agent into a new Possibility Space of choices, where each choice then leads to a chain of cause-effect relations that place the agent in a new Possibility Space.
There are times when I suspect something even "crazier", that the aforementioned "movement" of the agent into new Possibility Spaces is how all causation works...
[it] has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow "debunks" the account given from the inside. "All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from the inside," says the wiseacre, "are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos."
And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, "If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature."
~ C.S. Lewis
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TH's question is pretty straight forward. Who is pulling my strings? As far as I know, I'm not brainwashed. Any influences I've had put on me, I think I've had the opportunity to accept or overcome; be it advertising, social pressures, indoctrination.
Certainly it's possible for a person's strings to be pulled by various forces, but I think most of the time it's just "you" doing the pulling.
From an experiential stance, I'd agree. But I guess I am just apt to somewhat doubt the experiential account.
To borrow Bakker's sort of terms, if it is from "the darkness that comes before" which moves and I can't see what is in that darkness, how apt is it to say that it must be "me?"
It might be me, it might be something else. Without being able to definitively say what does move one, the question seems open, as to what is in that darkness. At least, it seems so to me.
As per the above I think thoughts comes from the Darkness, but the arrival of thoughts is different from this leading to a binding causal chain.
At the very least I think one has to concede that rather than a binding chain what we really have is Hyper Chaos if we go with the picture of causal relations as falling into a necessary/random dichotomy rather than dispositional.
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In other words, why are we taking the phenomena of consciousness as necessarily the noumena of consciousness?
Maybe I am just thinking about this in the fundamentally wrong way or something...
I'd separate the observations from the observer. Consciousness is the container and "measurer" of relations, by which Smolin means that which is mathematically observable and communicable. Even to say consciousness is related to itself is to express something more than a relation, as it would be an awareness of a relation.
Another quote:
“I am drawn to the idea that relational properties do need an intrinsic ground, and this tends to lead towards a panpsychist picture because the only intrinsic nature we have access to is qualitative consciousness itself.”
- William Seager
I'm still not quite getting it here though.
Even if I take that quote and run with it's initial assumption, that there is an intrinsic ground, perhaps we could call that a noumenal realm, I still don't see how this makes consciousness, or mind, fundamental. Just because you only have access to something doesn't mean that must be the basal noumenal reality. As an example, if we were in a simulation, and things within that simulation are all you could access, would we then say that this is the base-level noumenal reality? I'd hardly think so.
[it] has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow "debunks" the account given from the inside. "All these moral ideals which look so transcendental and beautiful from the inside," says the wiseacre, "are really only a mass of biological instincts and inherited taboos."
And no one plays the game the other way round by replying, "If you will only step inside, the things that look to you like instincts and taboos will suddenly reveal their real and transcendental nature."
~ C.S. Lewis
Well, here I guess I would ask why it need to be one or the other?
Let's say we have a VR headset. You put it on and you are inside. You take it off and you are outside. Which one is "real?" Is it not both? Sure, they aren't the same, but that doesn't mean one does not exist.
In other words, why do we have to presuppose that each is mutually exclusive. They can both exist, but are different manners of internal or external relations.
Again, I might just be utterly failing to really grasp this...
As per the above I think thoughts comes from the Darkness, but the arrival of thoughts is different from this leading to a binding causal chain.
At the very least I think one has to concede that rather than a binding chain what we really have is Hyper Chaos if we go with the picture of causal relations as falling into a necessary/random dichotomy rather than dispositional.
Well, I still don't quite buy the notion that we are, in fact, in Hyper Chaos (because as far as I understand it, were that the case, thought itself would be impossible). However, I also do not buy the notion of necessity either, really.
But I think I lack the real grasp to elucidate that further.
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I'm still not quite getting it here though.
Even if I take that quote and run with it's initial assumption, that there is an intrinsic ground, perhaps we could call that a noumenal realm, I still don't see how this makes consciousness, or mind, fundamental. Just because you only have access to something doesn't mean that must be the basal noumenal reality. As an example, if we were in a simulation, and things within that simulation are all you could access, would we then say that this is the base-level noumenal reality? I'd hardly think so.
You can be deceived with regards to what is experienced, but you cannot be deceived that you are having an experience of some sort.
But I'd agree that we may not quite be at the level of the Ground just because we are in the realm of the First Person PoV. Though it is hard to think of anything that might be things-in-themselves that are not in some way related to Consciousness & Causation.
Well, here I guess I would ask why it need to be one or the other?
Let's say we have a VR headset. You put it on and you are inside. You take it off and you are outside. Which one is "real?" Is it not both? Sure, they aren't the same, but that doesn't mean one does not exist.
But both the VR environment and the Outside are something you are observing [- they are both "Outside"]. The quote compares the idea that the Ground is insensate stuff vs the idea that the Ground is Living.
In other words, why do we have to presuppose that each is mutually exclusive. They can both exist, but are different manners of internal or external relations.
Well aren't the Physicalist and non-Physicalist two mutually exclusive options?
Well, I still don't quite buy the notion that we are, in fact, in Hyper Chaos (because as far as I understand it, were that the case, thought itself would be impossible). However, I also do not buy the notion of necessity either, really.
Why would thought be impossible? What makes thought possible in the picture where we are not in Hyper Chaos?
I mean I don't think Hyper Chaos is possible/plausible b/c I think Mathematical/Logical Truths are of the Ground, but for anyone who denies that there doesn't seem to be anything that can challenge the assertion that everything could be contingent.
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Why would thought be impossible? What makes thought possible in the picture where we are not in Hyper Chaos?
I mean I don't think Hyper Chaos is possible/plausible b/c I think Mathematical/Logical Truths are of the Ground, but for anyone who denies that there doesn't seem to be anything that can challenge the assertion that everything could be contingent.
Hmm, it seems that my initial take of his notion of this super-contingency was not quite what he likely meant.
While I do, in a sense, share his skepticism about necessity and I'd agree that that "laws could change" the only way we'd really know would be if they did.
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Why would thought be impossible? What makes thought possible in the picture where we are not in Hyper Chaos?
I mean I don't think Hyper Chaos is possible/plausible b/c I think Mathematical/Logical Truths are of the Ground, but for anyone who denies that there doesn't seem to be anything that can challenge the assertion that everything could be contingent.
Hmm, it seems that my initial take of his notion of this super-contingency was not quite what he likely meant.
While I do, in a sense, share his skepticism about necessity and I'd agree that that "laws could change" the only way we'd really know would be if they did.
Well there's a difference between "can" and "will". If nothing is holding the Laws in place then their immutability is inherently contingent.
One can argue the Laws are immutable by nature but I'd argue we already see this is questionably by observing the very fact that some aspects are probabilistic (the number of photons that bounce back vs go through a window) + the fact the picture of laws looked rather different at the beginning of the Universe.
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Well there's a difference between "can" and "will". If nothing is holding the Laws in place then their immutability is inherently contingent.
One can argue the Laws are immutable by nature but I'd argue we already see this is questionably by observing the very fact that some aspects are probabilistic (the number of photons that bounce back vs go through a window) + the fact the picture of laws looked rather different at the beginning of the Universe.
Well, to me, that would seem to mean that they aren't "totally" contingent. But I think I am operating with a different notion of contingent there.
With the example of laws at the beginning of the universe to laws now, the laws might have been different because they derived from conditions present then and not present now. But here I think I am just screwing myself up by mentally conjoining the notion of contingent and a notion of arbitrary. So, I do agree that since conditions continue to change, the laws could well change as well, especially since we know not what they derive from.
I think now I have a better idea that Meillassoux is saying, even if I do keep confounding myself.
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Well, to me, that would seem to mean that they aren't "totally" contingent. But I think I am operating with a different notion of contingent there.
With the example of laws at the beginning of the universe to laws now, the laws might have been different because they derived from conditions present then and not present now. But here I think I am just screwing myself up by mentally conjoining the notion of contingent and a notion of arbitrary. So, I do agree that since conditions continue to change, the laws could well change as well, especially since we know not what they derive from.
I think now I have a better idea that Meillassoux is saying, even if I do keep confounding myself.
Do the conditions of the world determine the laws, or do the laws determine the conditions of the world?
I would equate contingent and arbitrary, and I think this is what Hyper Chaos is meant to signify as opposed to those outcomes that can be modeled using a Random Variable rather than the usual kind of functions we use in modeling when we figure the chance of a particular effect is 100% -> P(effect) = 1.
IIRC there's a 1 in 4 chance that a photon bounces back from the window instead of passing through, which is why you can see your reflection as well as the scene on the other side of the glass. Hyper Chaos would be the fact that this could easily shift to 1 in 100, or 3 in 4. Similarly an event that we assigned probability of 1 to could become uncertain.
After all, once you have a little bit of arbitrary contingency, how does that end up contained? What does it even mean to talk about probabilistic "laws"?
Even assuming there are Laws of Nature binding the cause-effect processes of the Real leads to issues, as noted by Stephen Talbott's Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen (https://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual/ch03.htm):
The Impossibility of Mere Obedience to Law
The conviction that laws somehow give us a full accounting of events seems often to be based on the idea that they govern the world's substance or matter from outside, "making" things happen. If this is the case, however, then we must provide some way for matter to recognize and then obey these external laws. But, plainly, whatever supports this capacity for recognition and obedience cannot itself be the mere obedience. Anything capable of obeying wholly external laws is not only its obedience but also its capability, and this capability remains unexplained by the laws.
If, with so many scientists today, we construe laws as rules, we can put the matter this way: much more than rule-following is required of anything able to follow rules; conversely, no set of rules can by themselves explain the presence or functioning of that which is capable of following them.
It is, in other words, impossible to imagine matter that does not have some character of its own. To begin with, it must exist. But if it exists, it must do so in some particular manner, according to its own way of being. Even if we were to say, absurdly, that its only character is to obey external laws, this "law of obedience" itself could not be just another one of the external laws being obeyed. Something will be "going on" that could not be understood as obedience to law, and this something would be an essential expression of what matter was. To apprehend the world we would need to understand this expressive character in its own right, and we could never gain such an understanding solely through a consideration of external laws.
So we can hardly find coherence in the rather dualistic notion that physical laws reside, ghost-like, in some detached, abstract realm from which they impinge upon matter. But if, contrary to our initial assumption, we take laws to be in one way or another bound up with the world's substance — if we take them to be at least in part an expression of this substance — then the difficulty in the conventional view of law becomes even more intense. Surely it makes no sense to say that the world's material phenomena are the result — the wholly explained result — of matter obeying laws which it is itself busy expressing. In whatever manner we prefer to understand the material expression of the laws, this expression cannot be a matter of obedience to the laws being expressed! If whatever is there as the substance of the world at least in part determines the laws, then the laws cannot be said to determine what is there.
All this gives you some indication why so many scientists, when stepping back from the rather messy reality of their daily work and considering the character of their science, show such great reluctance to reckon with the substance of the observable world. They much prefer to conceive the explanatory value of science in terms of abstract laws — equations, rules, algorithms — which naturally remain gratifyingly lawful in an uncomplicated way. The world disappears into a vague notion of "whatever gives material reality to the laws".
But a willingness to consider this reality in its own terms immediately reveals the impossibility of the all-explaining laws with which science supposedly has to do. We come to realize that a physical phenomenon and its lawfulness must be considered as a unity — a syntactic-semantic unity of a sort that receives little recognition within science for the simple reason that physical phenomena (as opposed to their "governing" syntax) receive little recognition.
See also Raymond Tallis' The Strange Idea that What Happens Has to be Made to Happen. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRiVYv2ettA)
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I am inclined to view the strings or their hypothetical puppets being one thing, itself being a part of a larger system.
Here's a three hour lecture by Alan Watts that deals with these ideas precisely called "Do You do It or does It do You?" and it is essentially aligned with my own views on this topic, only described with far greater articulation and wisdom than I could actually ever achieve. Despite its length, the first 15 minutes are probably more than enough to get the jist of my beliefs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAFH_nwqSHQ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAFH_nwqSHQ)