/lit/ - Literature

A what?

>>22630649
Wrong question. Does teleology even exist? Answer is no. The purpose of something is subjective to the person giving it that purpose.

>>22630663
Fair, but is it not true that something can have purpose whether or not it comes into being? I guess I am asking if teleology requires our knowledge to contemplate it or not? I don’t think its existence is necessarily the issue here. If it’s entirely subjective we can say that it is just as likely to exist as to not.

>>22630663
>he thinks there's is without ought

>>22630649
your thread on this board is another open Hegel door. i'm gonna go through the section on the syllogism again. i don't think the top level thinker have decided what this stuff actual means because the text changes often.

>>22630663
>A plungers objective purpose isn't to unclog toilets.
>A heart's objective purpose isn't to pump blood.

This is your brain on Kantian style crypto dualism and the positivist "the truth is the view of the world you get without eyes, the conception that is thought without a mind."

Objective doesn't mean noumenal or true. It's a perspective that tries to remove subjective bias. The opposite of objective is subjective, not false. Objectivity is meaningless without the possibility of subjectivity. Purpose isn't subjective because you can see that things have a function, in a biological sense.

If hearts don't have the function of pumping blood then I suppose species wouldn't be real either, or color, or mass, etc. I.e., the world is the conception of it with no mind. In which case, one wonders why we don't mainline anesthesia to come to truth.

>>22630796
I should have just used Aristotle.

>>22630812
>Purpose isn't subjective because you can see that things have a function, in a biological sense.
Evolution frequently repurposes organs to fill different roles. Assigning a purpose to biology is just a useful pedagogical technique to help us think about the vast complexity of living organisms. Teleology is not real.
>I suppose species wouldn't be real either
Another useful fiction that people get hung up on. A common canard from the creationist crowd is that animals cannot change species like species was some metaphysical absolute and not instead and empirical category subject to frequent discussion and recategorization. Teleology is not real.

>>22630827
>Purpose isn't real.
So people don't wipe their asses for the purpose of not having a shitty ass.

But of course they do. So what, are there multiple levels of reality?

And if man has purposes, from whence purpose? Is man magical, a suis generis entity in which purpose arises? Doesn't man's mind emerge entirely from nature? Isn't man part of nature?

This is generally held to be the case. But then if man emerges from, is a part of, nature, then nature has purposes. Nature can only lack purpose of man is suis generis, supernatural.

>>22630852
People don't know how purpose emerges and they don't have any good ideas of how it might work. Per Jaegeon Kim, it seems reductive physicalism would preclude strong emergence. So fully mechanistic, smallist account of reality precludes purpose, but also first person subjective experience.

But clearly first person experience exists. If the world produces subjectivity, then subjectivity is part of the world.

So if reductive physicalism isn't consistent with us, then it seems that reductive physicalism is simply falsified. That is appears falsified by work in fundemental physics seems icing on the cake.

This, is in fact the useful fiction. We teach it in K-12 science and into college, but the idea of little balls causing everything is virtually dead in physics itself.

Rovelli, Tegmark, Deutsch, Davies, Vidal, etc. seem to lean into computational theories, which would necessarily be process theories. But of course, his conciousness emerges isn't their area of expertise. Their area of expertise is the fundamentals that would seem to preclude purpose, which, if IIT or CTM are correct, purpose isn't excluded.

>>22630852
>So people don't wipe their asses for the purpose of not having a shitty ass.
People have subjective purposes is what I said from the beginning. There is no reason our different purposes can't coincide.
>And if man has purposes, from whence purpose?
Man doesn't have purpose. You can assign a purpose but that is your purpose not anyone else's
> Doesn't man's mind emerge entirely from nature? Isn't man part of nature?
Yes and yes. But you can imagine anything you want that doesn't make it real. Imagining something and assigning a purpose are the same type of thing, they exist only in your subjective mind. If you can make useful predictions from them that's great, but that doesn't mean reality works like that. Aristotle thought teleology was what made rocks fall to the ground which is seen as silly now.

>Per Jaegeon Kim, it seems reductive physicalism would preclude strong emergence
Huh? Reductive physicalism provides the quintessential example of emergence with thermodynamics and the concept of heat.
>>22630872
>That is appears falsified by work in fundemental physics seems icing on the cake.
How is reductive physicalism falsified by physics?
>but the idea of little balls causing everything is virtually dead in physics itself.
It is dead as anything besides a pedagogical device. But quantum theory is just as reductively physicalist as any 19th century clockwork universe.

>>22630815
you still need teleology as a cause to have a metaphysics. something can have an end as a mechanism, or it can have an end as reflected in something else. teleology, for Hegel anyway, but also Aristotle to some extent, is the thing that causes a system to have flexibility. like if things had no telos you would have a tool for every problem rather than just a bunch.

>>22630919
I like your answer, thanks. Could it be that it’s the other way around, that we reason to teleology from metaphysics? And I’m also thinking hands or “digitals”, insofar as they can be thought of as tools, could also be conceived as “more than a bunch” of tools, as the first cause of tools.
>>22630872
How can a first person experience in the world take place if the world it is embedded in necessarily produces subjectivity? How is the experience an exception to this way of the world, which could tell me that I am instead a rock?

>>22630940
>Could it be that it’s the other way around, that we reason to teleology from metaphysics?
you could do that and in some sense that is why everyone lives in a country. if you just want to say 'you need reason to form a metaphysical end'... ok sure

>>22630886
Particles are only definable in terms of fields, the part in terms of the whole. And quantum behavior is not reducible to fundemental parts. You can always suppose that some hitherto unseen even more basic level of reality will fix these issues, but that's pure supposition.

Information is also relational, and so not reducible to fundemental parts, although there is more disagreement over whether or not information emerges from matter and energy, or is itself more ontologically basic (It From Bit) or is in a level with energy.

Information and the Nature of Reality is a good set of articles on this. Springer Frontier's Particle Metaphysics too. But you'll see similar ideas in Rovelli's Helgoland, Wilzek's the Lightness of Being, etc.

And if course, IF reductive substance physicalism does preclude strong emergence, and maybe there is some hitherto unpopularized argument that can get around this, then we are left with either panpsychism or else our very existence still falsifies it.

But note, this is "substance metaphysics," the idea that things are what they are because they are made of fundementally different kinds of stuff, and it is reductive as in "the different kinds of stuff have fundemental parts that combine into everything there is." This is a very old idea with a lot of inertia behind it, older than Plato.

But it's been getting eaten away at. The goal of unification is that we shall find that there is only one type of stuff. Matter and energy, for instance, are longer seen as necessarily different kinds of stuff. Neither are quarks or leptons without beginning or end. If there is unification, there is only "one kind of stuff." If that's the case, then substance metaphysics is bunk. Substance does no explanatory lifting if everything is of one substance. Process does all the lifting, Heraclitus winning out over Parmenides.

You can also look into partial haecceity, SEP has a good article on it, which is another example of how fields, the whole, are fundemental, the particles we would "reduce to," are not.

>>22631014
*Particle haecceity.

The SEP article on coherence issues with popularized forms of physicalism is good too, but those are more philosophical issues.

Wilzek's work is particularly interesting because is goal was really to do away with fields, to show the reduction to particles, and he walked away convinced it made no sense.

And then for Tegmark and co, it's the mathematical object that is ontologically basic. Still the whole over the part though.

>>22631014
???i don't see why process can't be a substance

>>22631014
>Particles are only definable in terms of fields, the part in terms of the whole.
Why is the field the whole here instead of a part of particles? Whole and part aren't rigorously defined and can easily be switched around.
>Information is also relational, and so not reducible to fundemental parts
Huh? The whole point of information theory is to study information on it's own and not as something relational. I'm starting to suspect you don't know what you're talking about. Regardless, if information is somehow foundational that is still reductive physicalism with everything reduced to information.

>>22631058
Process is change. Substance is long term stabilities in process, e.g. atoms, protons, quarks. There is a process by which these come into and go out of existence.

It's a question of what accounts for the stabilities and variations we see in the world.

Process isn't reducible in the way substance is. Computation would be a good example of process.

You can decompose elements in a computation, e.g. nested functions, but composition in computation doesn't work like composition in superveniance substance metaphysics. Salt is salt because of how Na and Cl interact. 20 grains of salt is salt in the very same way that 1,000,000 grains of salt is salt. The output comes from the causal properties of fundamental units, which may (arguably) be unpredictable from the properties of these units themselves (classical emergence).

But 5 * 10 is not an output of 50 in the way that Na + Cl = NaCL. You can add grains of salt to salt and it remains salt. If you add more multiples of 5 or 10 to 50 you get a different number.More importantly, there are limitless ways to write an arithmetical function that will output 50 and so the output cannot be uniquely defined by the inputs in the way NaCl is defined by its component particles (bijective, surjective).

Now, chemical compounds are a good example of substance, as are atoms. When these were the most basic things we understood, it made sense to think that the world was "like these," all the way down. But what we seem to find is that there is no fundemental different types of substance that exist without beginning or end. Vacuum shows us a seething sea of virtual particles, continual process.

And this is why the pancomputationalism so popular in physics isn't compatible with superveniance substance views.

Pancomputationalism might be wrong, but I would wager that if it is wrong, it is wrong because reality actually does require real numbers to describe (and computation can't use real numbers since it is definitionally finite as define by Church-Turing)

>The whole point of information theory is to study information on it's own and not as something relational

Yeah, of course. The relation comes down to difference between, see Floridi The Philosophy of Information, Rovelli Helgoland, or pic related. Pic related is probably the most accessible.