Philosophy Now Forum

Obvious Leo wrote:. These are observations made in a universe with life in it so of course the constants must be what they are. This is the simplest imaginable proposition of logic.

Read this

https://austintorney.wordpress.com/2015 ... n-de-jong/

So you agree with the anthropic principle!

Either you accept the anthropic principle and the multiverse or you believe in God.
Well, there is a third option, agnosticism. You know that either there is a God or there is a multiverse but you know that you don't know what option is correct.

In your blog you state that the unknowable does not exist. Are you saying that if something is beyond our hominid brain's understanding it does not exist?
Are you saying that when we understand something we confer existence on it? Pluto did not exist until we discovered it? Planets did not follow an elipse until we understood the math behind an elipse?

By your criteria Modus Tollens does not exist. Modus tollens must apply to every situation. One cannot empirically verify it EVERYWHERE in the universe.
Modus Tollens,
A therefore B
Not B
Therefore not A
For example,
All dogs are mammals
That is not a mammal
Therefore it cannot be a dog.
I can see it verified by dogs. But I cannot verify that it applies to a creature on the edge of the universe.
Modus tollens is untestable!
However, it is valid and I believe in it.

raw_thought wrote:Either you accept the anthropic principle and the multiverse or you believe in God.

Actually the reverse is true because this entire question boils down to a question of the definition of determinism. Either you believe that the universe is everything that exists or you don't. If you believe that the universe is the way it is because of a causal agent external to it then you are a creationist and define determinism as linear. However if you don't accept this then you define the universe as sufficient to its own existence and thus self-causal. This means you are an evolutionist and define determinism as non-linear. It can't be both so take your pick. A universe which evolves does not do so according to a suite of laws any more than a biosphere does and that our universe is evolving is blindly obvious. The so-called laws of physics are a myth and this is where your confusion over the CRAP derives from. The universe is not the way it is because it was designed to be that way. It is the way it is because that's the way it happened, just like you and I are the way we are because that's the way the game played out. The deepest truth in the universe is that shit happens.

raw_thought wrote:In your blog you state that the unknowable does not exist. Are you saying that if something is beyond our hominid brain's understanding it does not exist?
Are you saying that when we understand something we confer existence on it? Pluto did not exist until we discovered it? Planets did not follow an elipse until we understood the math behind an elipse?

No. I'm just saying that the unknowable does not exist. In fact I don't accept that any aspect of our universe is beyond the ability of our minds to grasp but this is not the point I'm making. The point I'm making is merely a restatement of my a priori axiom that the universe is everything that exists. Obviously you don't accept this as axiomatic but in order to understand my philosophy you need to read it in this context because I offer it as a metaphysical first principle and derive all of my arguments from it. For instance if the universe is everything that exists then Newton was plain wrong and determinism cannot possibly be linear.

raw_thought wrote:By your criteria Modus Tollens does not exist. Modus tollens must apply to every situation. One cannot empirically verify it EVERYWHERE in the universe.
Modus Tollens,
A therefore B
Not B
Therefore not A
For example,
All dogs are mammals
That is not a mammal
Therefore it cannot be a dog.
I can see it verified by dogs. But I cannot verify that it applies to a creature on the edge of the universe.
Modus tollens is untestable!
However, it is valid and I believe in it.

I don't recall saying anything about modus tollens, dogs or any other mammals. Sadly I do not read the tarot and my crystal ball is on the blink so you're going to have to tell me what you're banging on about.

Logic is like the tarot???
Your claim is that the only knowlege is that which is testable
Therefore, modus tollens is not knowledge, according to you.

raw_thought wrote:Your claim is that the only knowlege is that which is testable

Where did I say that? As a philosopher of science I certainly share the mainstream view that in order for a hypothesis to be regarded as a scientific one it must be falsifiable, in principle at least. Clearly you take a different view but you must be aware that you defend a minority position in philosophy, although I agree that in physics this hasn't been the case for most of the last century. However the new generation of geeks are not so entrenched in their doctrinal orthodoxies as were their forbears and the mood in theoretical physics has swung dramatically away from the logical positivists since the demise of string theory. They're beginning to realise that the "ontology of the equations" is a crock of shit and they're either going to have to piss or get off the pot.

Modus tollens is like the anthropic principle, untestable but obviously true.

raw_thought wrote:Modus tollens is like the anthropic principle, untestable but obviously true.

Inasmuch as both are statements of the bloody obvious I agree. Inasmuch as either is of the slightest relevance to the observer problem in physics I completely disagree. If the universe were unsuitable for life then there would be nobody in it to observe it but in terms of profundity I don't rate this conclusion very highly.

raw_thought wrote:Either you accept the anthropic principle and the multiverse or you believe in God.

Obvious Leo wrote:Actually the reverse is true because this entire question boils down to a question of the definition of determinism. Either you believe that the universe is everything that exists or you don't.

You are either with us or against us?

None of us know and can only offer a best guess of the moment. Without epistemic humility we are not acting philosophically but as meme salespeople.

Personally I think the whole shebang is alive. We lifeforms have a number of our own "constants" required to function. If our blood was more viscous, had a different pressure, flowed at a different speed or contained different elements then our system wouldn't work. If our heart wasn't in a certain location and size, or operated differently, then we couldn't live.

I also think the multiverse and arthropic principle are credible ideas. Once we believed that ours was the only galaxy and the notion that there were others was thought to be ludicrous. In a multiverse, universes could be produced in a scattershot manner like jellyfish larvae - that is, the vast majority don't survive. That would make our universe naturally selected, through having the right attributes (constants) for persistence and probably luck as well.

However, these are only best guesses.

Obvious Leo wrote:I don't accept that any aspect of our universe is beyond the ability of our minds to grasp

They might not be beyond far more advanced aliens or our future selves but there's surely much that is beyond humanity's current capacity to grasp.

Obvious Leo wrote:The point I'm making is merely a restatement of my a priori axiom that the universe is everything that exists.

As far as we can tell.

Obvious Leo wrote:For instance if the universe is everything that exists then Newton was plain wrong and determinism cannot possibly be linear.

While there's obviously more to the story, Newtons' "cosmic billiard balls" clearly have some significant relationship to reality or they wouldn't be so efficacious.

Greta wrote: You are either with us or against us?

None of us know and can only offer a best guess of the moment. Without epistemic humility we are not acting philosophically but as meme salespeople.

I don't dispute this, Greta, but any philosophy has to start with a metaphysical first principle which is not further reducible. I adopt "the universe is everything that exists" as such a first principle because to do otherwise immediately defines our universe as unknowable and thus beyond the reach of either scientific or philosophical enquiry. In other words if the universe is not everything that exists then we may as well all pack up our philosophical crap and go fishing. I don't deny that in my philosophy I adopt this as an unverifiable assumption and then proceed to draw my conclusions from it. One of these is the only other axiomatic principle in my entire work which is the doctrine of causality. If effects are not preceded by causes in an orderly and generative fashion then my philosophy is wrong and the prediction I derive from it will not be validated. I will have wasted my life's work but as I often say: shit happens.

Greta wrote: Personally I think the whole shebang is alive.

So do I. I absolutely insist that the universe must be modelled as if it were alive. However this doesn't mean it's alive in the same sense that you and I are alive but that it's alive in the same sense as our planet is alive, as modelled by Lovelock and Margulis and foreshadowed by Anaximander and Heraclitus.

Greta wrote: They might not be beyond far more advanced aliens or our future selves but there's surely much that is beyond humanity's current capacity to grasp.

Some clever cognitive neuroscientist managed to figure out that the human brain has more logic gates in it than there are ATOMS in the entire universe. I think it would be fair to say that we have yet to realise our full potential. It is estimated that average human intelligence is increasing by about 3% per decade. I can't be bothered doing the compound interest sums but in even a thousand years we would be many many orders of magnitude smarter than we are now. The problem as I see it is that we're probably not even smart enough to survive another hundred years, let alone a thousand. However if we manage to survive a thousand years we would almost certainly survive a million and if we survive a million we should survive a billion. A human mind a billion years from now would be to ours as ours is to that of an amoeba. We might be getting a tad ahead of ourselves if we start trying to second-guess what such a mind might do.

Greta wrote: While there's obviously more to the story, Newtons' "cosmic billiard balls" clearly have some significant relationship to reality or they wouldn't be so efficacious.

Never ever have I said that physics isn't useful. I'm just agreeing with Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Wheeler and quite a few others who made it clear that physics is NOT designed to explain to us what the universe is. Physics can only make statements about the behaviour of matter and energy within it.

Obvious Leo wrote:It is estimated that average human intelligence is increasing by about 3% per decade. I can't be bothered doing the compound interest sums but in even a thousand years we would be many many orders of magnitude smarter than we are now.

People 1000, 2000, 3000 etc years ago had just as many "logic gates" in their craniums as we have in ours. So how is it possible that in a thousand years hence - which is really a very short time - humans would be many many orders of magnitude smarter than we are now. What would cause a virtually geometric progression of intelligence to occur in such a short time tantamount to no time.

An increase of 3%/decade forces the implication that "going back" would manifest a corresponding erosion of intelligence. What could possibly cause such a massive amount of additional brainpower in a mere one thousand years or even in ten thousand years which has never once happened in nature. It doesn't add up but I'm only reading what you wrote.

Also, although I have an idea, but how is a "logic gate" related to a synapse?

Obvious Leo wrote:... any philosophy has to start with a metaphysical first principle which is not further reducible. I adopt "the universe is everything that exists" as such a first principle because to do otherwise immediately defines our universe as unknowable and thus beyond the reach of either scientific or philosophical enquiry. In other words if the universe is not everything that exists then we may as well all pack up our philosophical crap and go fishing.

There's not that many options (seemingly):

1) Universe as everything - reality per se, not only including the BB but the states beforehand and after its death.

2) Universe as described by current physics and cosmology, a sudden imposition of energy into the void. This universe is not necessarily everything because it doesn't the reality that preceded the BB/inflation, nor the future state.

3) The universe as one of many, a small subset of reality.

I don't believe you'd pack up your philosophical crap if the LHC found evidence of supersymmetry. First you'd query it, then you'd grizzle for a while, and then you'd try to work out what's going on. I'll cross my fingers that nothing is found for the sake of the fish.

Obvious Leo wrote:I don't deny that in my philosophy I adopt this as an unverifiable assumption and then proceed to draw my conclusions from it. One of these is the only other axiomatic principle in my entire work which is the doctrine of causality. If effects are not preceded by causes in an orderly and generative fashion then my philosophy is wrong and the prediction I derive from it will not be validated. I will have wasted my life's work but as I often say: shit happens.

I don't see rightness as verification, nor wrongness as a waste, of a life's work. There's a decent chance that every last one of us is profoundly wrong in our assumptions, beliefs and hunches. Moving closer to reality is still by definition not in touch with reality.

Greta wrote:I absolutely insist that the universe must be modelled as if it were alive. However this doesn't mean it's alive in the same sense that you and I are alive but that it's alive in the same sense as our planet is alive, as modelled by Lovelock and Margulis and foreshadowed by Anaximander and Heraclitus.

Speaking of our planet, I think we should be sobered by just how little we understand of it, let alone the universe. We seem to understand many of its individual features and processes but struggle to put it all together as a single living system, or a component of one. In truth, Even the Earth is too large and complex for us to comprehend.

Obvious Leo wrote:Some clever cognitive neuroscientist managed to figure out that the human brain has more logic gates in it than there are ATOMS in the entire universe. I think it would be fair to say that we have yet to realise our full potential. It is estimated that average human intelligence is increasing by about 3% per decade. I can't be bothered doing the compound interest sums but in even a thousand years we would be many many orders of magnitude smarter than we are now. The problem as I see it is that we're probably not even smart enough to survive another hundred years, let alone a thousand. However if we manage to survive a thousand years we would almost certainly survive a million and if we survive a million we should survive a billion. A human mind a billion years from now would be to ours as ours is to that of an amoeba. We might be getting a tad ahead of ourselves if we start trying to second-guess what such a mind might do.

It's not as though Earthlings are going to be the only intelligent life in the universe/reality. Someone "out there" is going to be enormously smarter than we are. It's hard to be confident in today's observers - all we can really hope for is to be moving in productive and fulfilling directions. That's not to say that we're doing poorly - quite amazingly given that less than 300 years ago we were burning witches.

Greta wrote:While there's obviously more to the story, Newtons' "cosmic billiard balls" clearly have some significant relationship to reality or they wouldn't be so efficacious.

Obvious Leo wrote:Never ever have I said that physics isn't useful. I'm just agreeing with Bohr, Planck, Einstein, Wheeler and quite a few others who made it clear that physics is NOT designed to explain to us what the universe is. Physics can only make statements about the behaviour of matter and energy within it.

Leo, you've disputed the Standard Model's ontological truth - the SM's laws' efficacy suggest that there is some ontological truth in the laws. They aren't just mathematical models and they can tell us a great deal about reality. Your critiques strike me as generally about not seeing the forest for the trees, and I'm pretty sure that that view has plenty of sympathy anyway. There's some big picture/s that we are missing.

Obvious Leo wrote:

raw_thought wrote:Modus tollens is like the anthropic principle, untestable but obviously true.

Inasmuch as both are statements of the bloody obvious I agree. Inasmuch as either is of the slightest relevance to the observer problem in physics I completely disagree. If the universe were unsuitable for life then there would be nobody in it to observe it but in terms of profundity I don't rate this conclusion very highly.

Um, yeah, it has nothing to do with the observer problem. We were talking about the anthropic principle.