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[Quotidian]

I propose these as axioms which you may refute only by offering a counter-example. You might not like it, mate, but that's the way it works in natural philosophy.

That is not 'how it works' in philosophy. For that matter, have you ever studed philosophy formally, i.e. gone to lectures in it, submitted essays, and so on? (Full disclosure in my case: 2 undergraduate years at Uni Sydney, under David Stove, Paul Crittenden, and several others who I no longer recall, late 70's early 80's. Subsequently switched to comparative religion and Buddhist Studies.)

In any case, what place do 'peer-reviewed' papers have in philosophy? There are many points that can be made, with reference to the current ideas about 'multiverses' and parallel worlds and the like, which are never going to make it into 'peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, but which still have implications, i.e. why people find it necessary to engage in such conjectures in the first place. You might vehemently reject all such ideas as 'nonsense' but there are qualified commentators who are absolutely adamant that the Many World's Interpretation of quantum physics is the ultimate reality, and that those who deny it are destined to oblivion. I would say that all such controversies are beyond adjudication, to all intents. That is one of the things that is both infuriating and interesting about the modern world.

Regarding your Axiom 1: I always thought 'cosmos is all there is' came from Carl Sagan, and basically means to me that 'the scope of knowledge is defined by what can be analysed through the natural sciences, scientific instruments and methods'.

Before we go further, have I got that right? Is that what you actually mean by 'the Universe is all there is?'

-- Updated August 8th, 2014, 3:16 pm to add the following --

I think it depends on what one means by "reductionism".

What I mean by 'reductionism' is basically the idea that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, which is an evolved organ that can be understood solely in terms of molecular biology and evolutionary development. That I regard as the mainstream of Anglo-American secular~scientific philosophy. It is the subject of criticism in books such as the Thomas Nagel book I mentioned, Mind and Cosmos, and also other books such as Aping Mankind by Raymond Tallis, and various others.

Pinker is very much a spokesman for what I regard as the mainstream view. In saying that, no wish to demonize him, or them. It is simply the outlook of many educated non-religious people nowadays.

I have an argument as to why 'mind' can't be understood in principle, in the same way, and by the same means, as the objects of the natural sciences. I am perfectly happy with the idea that when it comes to the analysis of the Universe and everything in it, science is the method. But 'mind' itself, is never the object of analysis, because it is always that which is doing the analysing.

I think that is why 'the primacy of mind' is the very first thing which reductionism is obliged to deny. John B. Watson, for instance, who founded Behaviourism, believed that the word 'mind' itself, was the relic of a supersitious past. The 'eliminative materialists' and also Daniel Dennett in some places, also must insist that 'the mind' is in some profound sense illusory (or at any rate no difference in essence from a computer). Whereas I am essentially arguing that 'mind' is irreducible, i.e., not something that can be explained, as it is not amongst the objects of scientific analysis. (That is not to say you can't study cognition and so on. Here I am referring to 'mind' in the sense recognized as a hard problem - I guess this is another way of stating that.)

[Obvious Leo]

This will be my last statement on this dispute Q, since once again you have declined to respond to my question and are seeking to obfuscate yet further.

Natural philosophy began to lose favour in the middle of the nineteenth century as the various sciences started to become more specialised. It was dealt a mortal death blow on the publication of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity early in the 20th, a blow from which it had no hope of recovering. The methodology of science differs from the methodology of philosophy but in natural philosophy it is necessary to be able to arrive at the same conclusion by both of these methodologies. If this is not possible for any given proposition then any conclusions which derive from it are insufficient for truth. After SR the physicists had to drop philosophy like a hot spud and the philosophers were asleep at the wheel, where they have been slumbering for a century gazing deeply into their navels whilst arguing over the meanings of words. SR made no sense, so it could not be accessed by the tools of reason, and it contradicted the works of every philosopher since the pre-Socratics. The marriage was over.

The new natural philosophers are a new breed, although I was certain almost from the outset that the flaw in SR was entirely attributable to the divorce. If it did not make sense it could not be true. I call the new breed the Blues Brothers, because they're trying to put the band back together in the face of some stiff opposition. These are the new physicists, some of whom are not young but have undergone a conversion since the collapse of string theory. These innovators have finally seen that physics has become so specialised and mathematical that their dream of a comprehensible universe seems to be receding ever further and further away from them.

These are just some of the names of the leaders in the field of physics who in the past ten years have made public statements to the effect that no coherent model for our cosmos will ever be achievable without an explanation for consciousness. Brian Greene, Max Tegmark, Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Randall, Jakob Bekenstein, Paul Davies. Leonard Susskind, Frank Wilcek. There are more but these guys are at the top of their respective fields and publish regularly. These aren't the only physicists who I'll listen to but these are the ones who came to the same conclusion as I did all those years ago so I naturally tend to favour them. This is only natural and I make no apology for it. Of those I reject utterly probably only Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking have a public profile. Krauss reckons the universe sprang from nothing and Hawking reckons life is a "random chemical smear" of no significance to physics.

Complexity theory didn't exist when I began my work but this didn't really matter much because I had plenty to learn without it. I knew well enough that if I was to find the problem of physics I would need to know everything there was to know about it. Complexity theory was a child of the information age and my main scientific interests always lay in the biological sciences, most especially evolutionary theory. It was essentially Dawkins who first recognised that biology was an information science but it took a couple of decades before this was fully accepted. Complexity is still a science in its infancy and may well take a few more decades to fully mature but the rate at which it was adopted by so many sciences, both physical and sociological, was truly astonishing. The constraints of academia means that new paradigms can only be adopted when the dinosaurs who built their careers on the old ones die off, about the same speed as glaciers recede. However as an independent researcher across a broad range of sciences I was well placed to realise that reductionism was dead, would stay dead, and could never be revived. I could see that non-linear dynamic theory was a totally new way of thinking the world which would have been impossible a few generations earlier and I took this new way of thinking on board and starting applying it to what I already knew, and also to what I thought I knew only to find that I didn't know it at all. It was an epiphany but not a Pauline one because it took a long time to sink in that the entire universe must be interrelated in this way. Re-reading philosophy all along the way I then discovered that this is exactly what most of them had been saying all along. Plato had information theory worked out over two thousand years ago and nobody noticed. The divorce was over for me and I then started to put it all together.

That's it,Q, I'm not going to argue with you any more.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

You asked me 'whether there is a peer-reviewed paper on the existence of the multiverse', right? And I addressed that question: I responded to it.Then I asked you what your axiom 'the world is all that exists' means, and whether I understood it properly. You answered with a 790 word essay on the history of philosophy. So who is obfuscating?

We are actually making progress, Leo, if you can put aside your regular attacks of apoplexy, not only will it benefit your health, but we might actually end up understanding each other to some extent.

-- Updated August 8th, 2014, 4:48 pm to add the following --

Plato had information theory worked out over two thousand years ago and nobody noticed

If we're still on speaking terms, you might care to elaborate.

Brian Greene, Max Tegmark, Lee Smolin, Carlo Rovelli, Lisa Randall, Jakob Bekenstein, Paul Davies. Leonard Susskind, Frank Wilcek.

As you say, these are physicists rather than philosophers, although not without philosophical insights; I am a big Davies fan. You do know that Brian Greene and Max Tegmark's latest books were both about 'the multiverse'?

[Obvious Leo]

Fair enough. Answering a question with a question strikes me as obfuscation but I'm happy enough to offer you a definition of the universe which is exactly the same definition as the entire community of science uses. I'm surprised you don't know it. They use this definition because science is in the business of making meaningful statements and this is the only definition of the universe which they can make any meaningful statements about. With the proviso that I deny that the universe began at the big bang, science defines the universe as an entity which began at the big bang and has existed for approximately 13.8 billion years since.

You now have a simple binary option. Yes or No are both possible answers but there exist no others.

Do you accept that in the universe as defined above no events can occur which have a causal origin external to it?

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Right. So would the inference that this means 'the scope of knowledge is defined by what can be analysed through the natural sciences, scientific instruments and methods', be a fair one?

[Obvious Leo]

. Answering a question with a question strikes me as obfuscation

[Quotidian]

It is actually an attempt to work out what you mean, because, on face value, 'the Universe is all there is', is a tautology, along the lines of 'whatever exists, exists', or 'whatever is, is'.

As for 'events having causes', philosophy (as distinct from physics) recognizes causes of different types, in addition to those understood by the physical sciences, but let's not go there.

So you're right, I think we have reached an impasse, but I won't say it hasn't been fun!

[Obvious Leo]

Q. Once again I thank you for your contribution, but what you are attempting to do here is not philosophy and you very well know it. Although I defined the universe often enough in the body of my text you persistently refused to speak to that definition. You pressed on relentlessly until I finally gave you the definition which everybody in the community of science shares. Once again you backed away and proceeded to try and get on to what inferences can be drawn from this definition. You know perfectly well that when we skip such an important step as to agree on a common definition of the object under scrutiny we cannot proceed to draw any inferences whatsoever. This is navel-gazing, not philosophy. In some I would regard this as an act of willful sabotage but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and simply call it obfuscation, as I have.

I'll remind you that you brought this on yourself because I have several times indicated that we had no common ground from which to proceed and I had no desire to paint you into this corner. Philosophy is not a game to me but a tool that I use to find answers to important human questions and I'm not here to piss about.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

Well, I read Bertrand Russell's 'The HIstory of Western Philosophy' cover to cover before I started my undergraduate studies, and I must confess that I don't recall that it contained the expression 'the Universe is all there Is'.

Perhaps you could refresh my memory as to which philosopher said it.

[Belinda]

My mother was also a sharp observer who died about 5 years ago. We saw each other rarely because I migrated abroad at age 23 but she always kept up with what I was doing. I kept her informed as best I could and not long before she died she said this to me. I've always known that you were trying to kill god but I also know that he'll forgive you for it. I couldn't say a word to her and I've been crying ever since. Natural philosophy is not easy.

Regards Leo

Different Gods. You were both right. You are also right to cry about it. thank goodness for feelings.

[Bohm2]

I have an argument as to why 'mind' can't be understood in principle, in the same way, and by the same means, as the objects of the natural sciences. I am perfectly happy with the idea that when it comes to the analysis of the Universe and everything in it, science is the method. But 'mind' itself, is never the object of analysis, because it is always that which is doing the analysing.

I agree with you, at least with the stuff like qualia/the experiential/consciousness. Molecular biology/neuroscience hasn't made any headway in this area. Even neural network/connectionism models have produced zilch understanding on the "hard" problem. And you might be right, as others have argued, that the problem lies at the gate; that is, the problem has its source as some special feature of consciousness, itself; that is, by having this special access (inner experience) to it that we have to nothing else (and nothing else to us), this may not allow us to see the connection. Personally, I doubt the answer lies in more neuroscience. I spent 4 years getting a degree in it and I didn't find anything remotely enlightning with respect to the "hard" problem.

[Obvious Leo]

I have an argument as to why 'mind' can't be understood in principle, in the same way, and by the same means, as the objects of the natural sciences. I am perfectly happy with the idea that when it comes to the analysis of the Universe and everything in it, science is the method. But 'mind' itself, is never the object of analysis, because it is always that which is doing the analysing.

I agree with you, at least with the stuff like qualia/the experiential/consciousness. Molecular biology/neuroscience hasn't made any headway in this area. Even neural network/connectionism models have produced zilch understanding on the "hard" problem. And you might be right, as others have argued, that the problem lies at the gate; that is, the problem has its source as some special feature of consciousness, itself; that is, by having this special access (inner experience) to it that we have to nothing else (and nothing else to us), this may not allow us to see the connection. Personally, I doubt the answer lies in more neuroscience. I spent 4 years getting a degree in it and I didn't find anything remotely enlightning with respect to the "hard" problem.

I agree completely, and I'm glad of your neuroscience background, which will be far superior to mine. The "hard problem" is simply looking for something that can't be found because consciousness is emergent, just as the wetness of water can't be found or the "dogginess" of dogs can't be found. Why should we expect that the humanity of humans should be reducible in such a ridiculous way. This is why I call the "hard problem" the "non-problem" because we're simply asking a stupid question founded on the flawed reductionist thinking which we've all grown up with.

Consciousness just iS and it cannot be the same thing for any two sentient organisms on the entire planet. We would have no more chance of unravelling the consciousness of an earthworm than we'd have of flying to the moon. By what convoluted artifice of reasoning should we expect to be able to do it for humans?

Regards Leo

-- Updated August 9th, 2014, 1:48 pm to add the following --

I'm going to veer off course onto my own self-selected path, which is a curious blend of science, philosophy, history and farce. This was always to be the chosen style for my narrative, because I honour my own culture, my own vernacular, and thereby my own readership.

It wouldn't much matter where I start, because my philosophy has no particular beginning or end. It's just an eclectic compendium of stories centred around a small handful of themes. It won't appeal to everybody but this is my schtick and my own crack at originality. It was Quotidian who prompted me to start here, because I feel bad about how it all went pear-shaped with Q. It couldn't be helped, mate, this is a serious business, but I'm grateful to you for bringing this up elsewhere.

Collapsing a wave function.

Amongst a strong field of ambitious contenders, one of the oddest concepts in physics is the notion of “collapsing a wave function”, which is just a fancy term for saying “taking a look”. The paradigm of spacetime implies that an event cannot be said to have occurred until an observer looks at it. This is an absolutely logical and completely uncontroversial conclusion from the model which cannot be interpreted in any other way. If we accept that spacetime is physically real then an unobserved event cannot occur. You can well imagine that this threw the world of physics into a maelstrom of confusion when this was first noticed, but an even worse consequence was that the entire 99% of humanity who comprise the world of non-physicists just shook their heads and turned sadly away, thinking these poor buggers have lost it. These spacetime deniers were the clever ones, as I propose to demonstrate, and we can form our own conclusions about the cognitive dissonance of physicists. For a couple of decades the priesthood of physics clung to this notion with a grim certainty which was somewhat embarrassing for them. Nowadays they show a bit more modesty and just turn sheepishly away and mumble: “we’re still working on that one”, and try to change the subject.. At the time they had major arguments on how they were to justify this nonsense to those outside the priesthood but unsurprisingly no consensus was ever reached. You can't put lipstick on a pig and turn it into Marilyn Monroe. Essentially individual physicists were left to their own devices to explain what they meant as best they could, and most of them took the easy way out. Although they couched their words in a diplomatic language they effectively said that the universe was simply too complex an entity for dumb schmucks like us to understand.

Albert Einstein was not one of them, and this made him unpopular with his mates, because Albert simply said: “********, the moon is still there whether somebody’s looking at it or not” , to which the priesthood would reply: “Ssshh, Albert, you’re making the rest of us look silly”, to which Albert would reply: “ You don’t need my help”, and so on. The war was on, and this to-ing and fro-ing went on for quite some time with all manner of stupid statements being made, so the big shots got together and said: “Enough of this crap, let’s get together for a few beers and get this **** sorted out once and for all”. The leading uber-geniuses met at a place called the Solvay Institute in Brussels, and by all accounts a wonderful time was had by all. Either they simply drank too much, or maybe they just chucked the whole mess into the too hard basket, because nothing came out of it except more confusion. The Solvay conference delegated to Niels Bohr, an inspired genius of lofty calibre, the task of making the announcement to the world, and this became known as the Copenhagen Interpretation. No doubt Niels reckoned that because his mates had landed him in it the least he could do was name the verdict after his home town. Even though nobody realised it at the time, including Bohr himself, Niels emerged with a statement of such a profound and simple truth that it will mark him as one of the greatest accidental geniuses in history. So profound and simple was it that nobody understood what it meant.

This is what he said. “ It is not the role of the physicist to tell us what the universe is, but merely to determine what we can meaningfully say about its behaviour.” This is a tribute to Immanuel Kant of such elegance that nobody noticed it. Nobody noticed it because the philosophers were ****-scared of the physicists' extravagant mathematical virtuosity and were worried about making dickheads of themselves. They needn’t have worried because this was the prevailing public opinion anyway and it didn’t seem to bother the physicists. Nevertheless they felt it might be safer to just stick with arguing about the meanings of words and pretend they hadn’t noticed. Of course the physicists never noticed it at all because they were far too clever to read philosophy books. None of this was helped by the fact that Kant observed the honourable German tradition of ensuring that his philosophy was unreadable, but in his “Critique of Pure Reason” he made exactly this point. Kant’s point is scattered throughout his “Critique” in such a way as to make it very difficult for the reader to find it, as was fashionable in his time, and yet it was this very point which was his reason for writing it. He stole his idea from Plato and Omar, but he refined it in such a way that he could pass it off as an original idea of his own. I’m not going to critique the “Critique” but I’ll simply leap to Kant’s conclusion, which was simply this. We have to be very bloody careful about what assumptions we make about what we observe, because these assumptions are made in the mind of the observer. This problem comes under many guises in Kant’s masterpiece, but the layman might think of it as the age-old subjective/objective dichotomy. Those with a taste for the formal language of the philosopher might prefer to call this the ontology vs. epistemology debate. In physics they simply call it the “observer problem” or the “measurement problem”, without having the slightest idea of the true nature of this problem, and without realising that many philosophers had identified it before them. This is only one of an entire herd of elephants which dwell in the room of physics, waiting patiently to be acknowledged.

Physicists are not stony-faced and timorous logicians but decisive men of action, and thus were never going to allow such a trivial thing as impossibility to stand in their way. They simply decided to do what Ptolemy did and press on regardless. All wordsmiths are vain and love making up their own words, so I’ve decided to coin a new word to describe such behaviour. It’s not actually a new word but an old word simply changed from a noun into a verb, in deference to the modern fashion, and given a different meaning.

From the lexicon of the bloody obvious, and in homage to the great man, Ptolemy:


Epicycle (to). v.t. To prop up an absurd hypothesis with one or more supplementary hypotheses of escalating absurdity.

The physicists simply decided to epicycle their way around their problem and they’ve been pedalling furiously ever since.

Regards Leo

P.S. I’ve decided to proceed with this story in instalments because I’m trying to just pick the main ideas out of a large number of far more detailed essays. This is basically a re-write (which does me good) , but it means I need to make sure I put stuff down in the right order. Hopefully, for those that are interested, this means it should come out in manageable chunks, as well as allowing me to do all the other things I’m supposed to be doing. Like my chores.

[Bohm2]

The "hard problem" is simply looking for something that can't be found because consciousness is emergent, just as the wetness of water can't be found...

As I mentioned previously, the problem for me is that emergence of non-experiental stuff from other non-experiential stuff (say chemistry from physics or biology from chemistry or liquidity from water molecules, etc. to use your example), seems vastly easier to conceptualize than is the case of mind/consciousness from non-experiential stuff. This was Chalmer's point and HM summarized this nicely in this quote from his post:

In a round-a-bout way, what I'm really getting at is that "liquidity" is just another example of what falls under the excellent Chalmers quote...Where "what's going on" is alterations in the existing structural / dynamic properties of the entities involved. At its own level a Microphysical-Entity-X and its "comrades" composing liquidity haven't radically transformed much individually. Just some relational / spatial modifications between them in the context of their already available capacities (due to energy being inputted or taken away, etc).

Thus, the basic point is that there is a major difference when comparing emergence of non-experiential stuff from other non-experiential stuff (e.g. liquidity from water molecules) versus experiential stuff (qualia/consciousness) from non-experiential stuff (neurons, cells, etc.). And since I'm not a panpsychist, I favour Chomsky's point that, of course we can't conceptualize how you get consciousness/experiential stuff from non-experiential because we don't have a good understanding of non-experiential stuff; that is, we don't really know what matter is. Our conception of matter is open and evolving.

[Obvious Leo]

Bohm. I think I can see what the problem is. I wasn't kidding when I said I find it hard to think the world the way I used to and I really do struggle to see why the bloody obvious can be so obscure. Although we can conclude that human consciousness is emergent from the physical structures of the brain/body continuum solely on logical grounds we see it as being somehow different from the "chairness" of a chair.. However it can be no different from the "dogginess" of a dog or the "worminess" of a worm. This would make no biological sense. In the complexity modelling of biology it is also no different from the "mushroomness" of a mushroom. However I'll stick to the dog because Fido is more familiar to us. The "dogginess" of the dog can only be defined in terms of its pattern of organisation because the dog is held together in this pattern by a process called homeostasis. As long as the dog remains alive he consumes energy to maintain this pattern but once he dies the pattern begins to disintegrate. His dogginess disappears at the instant of his death but the physical structures take longer to fall apart.

In the philosophy of the bloody obvious I extend the non-linear dynamic systems model all the way down to the most fundamental units of reality. I'll cover this in more detail later but essentially I make no distinction between living and non-living matter, a distinction which in biology is rather arbitrary anyway. Life is emergent and there simply is no line in the sand. Thus when I see a chair I see a physical object which is only definable by its pattern of organisation. It is me who calls it a chair and thus its "chairness" is my own construct with no independent ontological status. It doesn't die like Fido but it disintegrates eventually and loses this pattern. Interestingly it loses this pattern very quickly on earth because most of its matter is an energy source for a living system. If I put my chair on the moon someone can come along and sit on it in a billion years time and it will be in perfect condition, as long as it hasn't been clobbered by some cosmic object. The chair is a non-living system, something which no biologist would question, and thus needs to absorb no energy from its external environment to maintain its pattern. Instead of being in homeostasis it is in a state of thermodynamic equilibrium, which is its non-living analogue. This is also a process because the chair is actually changing into a different chair at the speed of light. Electrons are still whizzing around inside it at 0.99999992c, neutrinos even faster, photons and gluons at full throttle. Whatever they're doing they're doing it over and over again in exactly the same way because the emergent pattern is being maintained unaltered. This is the way I think matter, but I hope to cover this in more detail later. I have no problem of thinking of the chair as being alive in a very simple sort of way and of Fido as being alive in a more complex sort of way. Both are the emergent consequence of a dynamic process.

Regards Leo

[Quotidian]

In the philosophy of the bloody obvious I extend the non-linear dynamic systems model all the way down to the most fundamental units of reality. I'll cover this in more detail later but essentially I make no distinction between living and non-living matter.

Ergo, you're advocating a materialist approach. Pure and simple. That is not an insult or an ad hominem, because it is not about 'Obvious Leo', but about this proposition. (I say that because people frequently react as if that is a a demeaning statement, but it is not meant as such.)