>It sounds like you are saying we are waiting for science to discover some grand theme that connects all things, if there is one. I argue that for a brain to produce a mind, it must be supposed that teleological features of this mind (my ability to put purpose to my affairs) are the product of discrete causal events, "things" and their trajectories at the chemical, molecular, atomic level, that can, in order for this to occur, only possess predispositions for this.
An account of causality is exhausted only by an account of the way causal events display possibilities, that is, predispositions. An object is predisposed to fly off in some direction and speed GIVEN that the conditions of flying off in such and such a way are possessed in the relational predispositions contained within the whole event. Simple models produce simple causal affairs. But complex ones can produce qualitatively novel events that reveal purpose, planning and the rest. That is us.
All this shows is that causality, under certain conditions, is not simple any longer, and therefore the simple model has limited application, as is true with all causal explanations. "Objects'" complex totalities exceed the sums of their parts. Even in simple models this is true. Billiard balls rolling across a table are showing properties that are hard to witness subatomically. I am saying this issue applies macroscopically as well as microscopically: Just as Newtonian physics is not sustainable microscopically (so particle physicists tell us), simple causality is not a sustainable description in complex systems, neurological systems like a human body (a kidney being part of the nervous system in a less technical definition), for the "effect" of their totality is the phenomena of meaningful planning, predelineated thinking, anticipation, teleological events, design and all the rest we want to remove from what causality is "all about".
I'm saying that consilience is a valid concept - all knowledge is on a course of convergence. You're still using the god of the gaps argument. There's no reason to believe we can ever track the ultimate causality of anything due to scale so words like predisposition or probability are useful, but they are a measure of ignorance, not of knowledge. They are gap-fillers, just like the entire class of words that reference the transcendent, which is the same root. Because causality is infinite but our perspective is limited, we must understand causality, like all metaphysical things, as limited by purpose. How certain is certain Enough?. To the extent we can make accurate predictions, we consider things causal. There's no room for anything but ignorance in those gaps and we need to acknowledge that to make meaningful progress.
>Same physical stuff? Well, assume it's all the same physical stuff. The principle of sufficient cause has something to say about how this stuff works. The traditional analysis of knowledge assumes P is there to be known in the first place, but this assumes P is there in the first place. Ask about P being there, and you get trapped in epistemology, because you first have to explain the basis of P's affirmation, and "affirmation" is justificatory, not ontological. I am saying P cannot make an appearance to S, the subject at all on the simple model of causality. I mean, not even as a [b]re[/b]presentation. P is just a "presentation".
That was hard to read while high... but i think i parsed it up until you brought causality back in, then i lost the track. The rest sounds like a very technical, complex version of what i'd say.
But whether or not P is "real" in any sense but how we use it doesn't even matter. It's real in all the ways we understand reality if it acts in all the ways we call real. A difference that makes no difference is no difference. If all this is a simulation, it's still reality and we'd need a new word for the new understanding. Whether fact, proof, evidence, belief, presentation, affirmation, etc, it's still the same physical stuff, just different understandings of it.
>is there some unknown unknown?
Since we cannot account for it, can it possibly matter? It's important to maintain our vigilance for new data and it's important to continuously re-register our epistemological warrant but we shouldn't waste energy speculatating on that which is technically impossible to understand. There has to be pragmatism at the foundation of philosophy just as there must be psychology/dialectic in it's practice.
>Of course, ever since Kant...
Kant is basically right about metaphysics until the god bits. This is an exploration of that concept:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... y_X2Kbneo/ Kant has good ideas but his organization of them relative to each other is shit.
>This line of thought is dramatically played out in post Heideggerian phenomenology by the French, which I will not argue about unless you have the inclination. I find them fascinating, beginning with Kierkegaard, Husserl, Fink, Heidegger but ending in Michel Henry, Jean luc Nanci, Emanuel Levinas and others.
I am anti-modern-French-philosophy but Camus has some good points in-between his nonsense. I'm not familiar enough with the others to comment. I prefer to stick to the ideas in lieu of who said what.
>I mention these only because the notion of transcendence is summarily dismissed in analytic philosophy. It is not elsewhere.
I don't dismiss it but i do constrain it. Until there's something we can verify it is literally indistinguishable from fiction. The transcendent is by definition that which is beyond our ken.
