/lit/ - Literature

>>22947644
post excerpts

>MacIntyre holds that After Virtue makes seven central claims. It begins with an allegory suggestive of the premise of the science-fiction novel A Canticle for Leibowitz: a world where all sciences have been dismantled quickly and almost entirely. MacIntyre asks what the sciences would look like if they were re-assembled from the remnants of scientific knowledge that survived the catastrophe.

>He claims that the new sciences, though superficially similar to the old, would in fact be devoid of real scientific content, because the key suppositions and attitudes would not be present. "The hypothesis which I wish to advance", he continues, "is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described." Specifically, MacIntyre applies this hypothesis to advance the notion that the moral structures that emerged from the Enlightenment were philosophically doomed from the start because they were formed using the aforementioned incoherent language of morality. MacIntyre claims that this failure encompasses the work of many significant Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment moral philosophers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume. These philosophers "fail because of certain shared characteristics deriving from their highly specific historical background." That background is the Enlightenment's abandonment of Aristotelianism, and in particular the Aristotelian concept of teleology.

>Ancient and medieval ethics, argues MacIntyre, relied wholly on the teleological idea that human life had a proper end or character, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation. Renaissance science rejected Aristotle's teleological physics as an incorrect and unnecessary account, which led Renaissance philosophy to make a similar rejection in the realm of ethics. But shorn of teleology, ethics as a body of knowledge was expurgated of its central content, and only remained as, essentially, a vocabulary list with few definitions and no context. With such an incomplete framework on which to base their moral understanding, the philosophers of the Enlightenment and their successors were doomed from the beginning.

>>22947648

>In the journal of his third voyage Captain Cook records the first
discovery by English speakers of the Polynesian word taboo (in a variety
of forms). The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to
be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished
to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such
conduct as that of men and women eating together. When they enquired
why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were
told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information. Clearly taboo did not
simply mean prohibited; for to say that something-person or practice or
theory-is taboo is to give some particular sort of reason for its prohibition.
But what sort of reason? It has not only been Cook's seamen who have
had trouble with that question...

>had the Polynesian culture
enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the
question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number
of ways. Taboo, it would have been said by one party, is merely the name
of a non-natural property; and precisely the same reasoning which led
Moore to see good as the name of such a property and Prichard and Ross
to see obligatory and right as the names of such properties would have been
available to show that taboo is the name of such a property. Another party
would doubtless have argued that 'This is taboo' means roughly the same
as 'I disapprove of this; do so as well'; and precisely the same reasoning
which led Stevenson and Ayer to see 'good' as having primarily an emotive
use would have been available to support the emotive theory of taboo. A
third party would presumably have arisen which would have argued that
the grammatical form of 'this is taboo' disguises a universalizable imperative prescription.


(At the very least this is a good put down on analytics)

>The pointlessness of this imaginary debate arises from a shared presup-position of the contending parties, namely that the set of rules whose status
and justification they are investigating provides an adequately demarcated
subject matter for investigation, provides the material for an autonomous
field of study.

>The rules which govern both action and evaluative judgment in the Iliad resemble the rules and the precepts of a game such as chess. It is a question of fact whether a man is a good chess player, whether he is good at devising end-game strategies, whether a move is the right move to make in a particular situation. The game of chess presupposes, indeed is partially constituted by agreement on how to play chess. Within the vocabulary of chess it makes no sense to say "that was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?"

>>22947644
>>all we get is garbage like BAP

Please don't summon the BAPpers.

>>22947658
>"The hypothesis which I wish to advance", he continues, "is that in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in the same state of grave disorder as the language of natural science in the imaginary world which I described."
picked up

>>22947706
> Within the vocabulary of chess it makes no sense to say "that was the one and only move which would achieve checkmate, but was it the right move to make?"
only if you define “right” to mean “the move which maximizes winning chances.” But trying to define “right” outside chess is not so simple :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e6a7SW8wZA

>>22947658
Does he make a positive argument for teleology, or is this the classic "I don't like what happens if this concept doesn't apply so I'll just treat it as axiomatic" cope that most post-enlightenment ethicists lean on?

>>22947706
it doesn't seem like the Polynesians gained anything from analytical philosphy here

>>22948230
Oh nvm I'm retarded

>>22948224
He argued for it in "First principles, final ends and contemporary philosophical issues"
I don't know about "after virtue" though, haven't read IT yet

I wish nu-/lit/ knew MacIntyre better. We barely discussed him before but seeing a thread like this is interesting.

Fun fact: Rod Dreher's entire schtick is based on misreading MacIntyre, and MacIntyre himself once called out Dreher on it to his face.

>>22947644
I liked it.

>>22948224
He does make a positive argument for teleology, although I don't think it is perfect.

For teleology of the human person, I think Plato's conception of homoiosis theoi and later Patristic reformulations work better. Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato and Hegel," is the best example here, and it would be great to put that book in blender with "After Virtue," and "The Philosophy of Right," (the latter for the social sphere) to make an ideal ethics. I should note that the book is far more about human freedom, self-determination, and the good than "mysticism" in any direct sense. The title is somewhat misleading.

Author formulations of this idea are more mature, there is for example Saint Augustine's view of man as a pilgrim in the Earthly City, straining for the beatific vision and conformity to the Imago Dei, which then matures into the Catholic/Orthodox ideas of theosis, illumination, and diefication — transformation on both the individual, social (Eusebius, Saint Jerome, Hegel), and cosmic scales (Saint Maximums the Confessor, Saint Bonaventure).

Unfortunately, these ideas, while more mature, and tied to a deep tradition of praxis (asceticism, aesthetics, piety, meditation, contemplation, and mysticism), are largely ignored in contemporary debates precisely because they are framed in Christian terms, and philosophers are allergic to these. Hence, Wallace, typical of academic philosophers, is more comfortable with references to pagan, Hindu, Buddhist, and post-Hegelian liberal theology than the vast tradition stretching from Saint Athanasius' "God became man so that man might become God," to current Catholic philosophy — even though the Patristics actually represent the ideal he finds in Plato better than Plato himself.

You see a similar thing in how secular Westerners eschew the West's own deep history of spiritual praxis, meditation, contemplation, etc., finding Eastern traditions to be far less threatening.

This is a huge miss for two reasons. First, because the Western tradition has a huge amount to offer even if you were to secularize it. Pansemiotic views are popular now and the Medievals were all over this with the idea of the Divine Word speaking being into existence.

Second, because there is this whole huge camp of Catholic philosophy that does a lot of good work merging ancient/medieval thought with modern academic philosophy and the sciences, but which is mostly ignored by academic philosophy due to its use of religious language.

Telos can also be recovered through phenomenology, e.g. Sokolowski's idea of "veracity" in "The Phenomenology of the Human Person," a blend of Husserl and Aristotle with some Thomistic elements grounded in analytical philosophy and modern cognitive science.

Telos can also be recovered via semiotics. This is done in a naturalist mold by biologist Terrance Deacon's "Incomplete Nature," using thermodynamics to recover Aristotlean formal cause, or it can be done in a more...

>>22949185
...abstract form, using semiosis, as in Nathan Lyons excellent "Signs in the Dust," which used Aquinas' conception of "intentions in the medium" to create a plausible theory of pansemiosis which would probably merge well with pancomputationalism in physics (e.g. relational theories like Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics, Wheeler's "It From Bit," etc.).

Interestingly, Sokolowski's phenomenological recovery seems like it could be merged with Deacon's naturalistic approach and Lyons' semiotic approach. Husserl's "object, word, concept" triad maps quite well to Augustinian/Piercean tripartite semiotics for example. So you get two routes to the same recovery of telos.

MacIntyre is more set on advancing an Aristotlean ethics, but I tend to agree with Chappelle that Platonic Virtue Ethics can sit on top of Aristotlean Virtue Ethics. They are not necessarily in conflict.

So the grounds for a new ethics (and the defeat of indirect realism and reintegration of ethics and metaphysics) seems there, but unfortunately it sits in a space that is sidelined. You can sort of see this in MacIntyre, who started off as a Marxist in academia, and through his philosophical investigations ended up converting to Catholicism.

The liberal Protestant tradition might have been a bridge here, but it's A. Mostly dying, B. so post modern that it no longer has remotely the same goals.

>>22947798
This is actually exactly the point he is making the the broader context of that section. Where as the characters of the Iliad are pretty much in a Chess-like situation, the author recognizes there is an external frame where winning can also be losing. This matures into the great tragic dramas, where Homeric virtues are often pitted against each other, e.g. in Antigone. In Sophocles and others, these dillemas don't get resolved, but rather a God shows up and solved the impasse without answering to the moral contradiction.

By the time we get to Plato's project, we see someone actively trying to replace the Homeric heroes with a better morality, Socrates taking on the role of hero and role model.

You see something similar in the Bible in that many of the heroes of Judges and even David and Solomon, have vices almost as prodigious as their virtues. It is only their faithfulness that outweighs such vices, and it is the role of the prophet, Samuel, Nathan, etc. to take the external frame. Exilic literature completes this shift in reference (e.g. Ezekiel, if the righteous becomes wicked they shall be punished, if the wicked becomes righteous God shall forgive them), although there is still no solid role model. The prophets suffer for this higher view, e.g., Jeremiah 20 where he wishes he was never born. Only Christ, the God man resolves this. Rather than man leaving the Platonic cave, the sun itself enters the cave through the Virgin womb

After careful perusal of this thread I'm coming to the realization that I'm retarded.

>>22947644
Isn't he a marxist? I've only read a bit of it but that kind of put me off. How can you preach aristotelian virtue ethics and end up a fucking marxist of all things.
>>22947798
Anon, that's kind of the whole point of the book.

>>22949185
>>22949198
Maybe I'm missing something, but none of this reads as a positive argument for teleology.

I see the geneaology: where telos comes from, why we abandoned it, why we're more willing to interact with eastern than western spiritual practices. I also see arguments for why the concept of telos is useful. But neither of those is an argument for its truth.

I took a quick look at "The Phenomenology of the Human Person," and my understanding of its central argument is that humans essentially and naturally become agents of truth. I could buy this. But this doesn't show that our purpose is to be agents of truth, which would be required to establish a teleology.

I think the root of the problem is similar to Hume's is-ought distinction. For human beings to have telos, there must be some outside purpose-giver. But biology, psychology, phenomenology, or any other empirical science can only establish that humans have certain tendencies, not that their purpose is to have those tendencies. For that, we'd need to rely on some pre-existing framework. But that only begs the question, since we can ask why we ought to adopt the framework grounding telos. (Homoiosis theoi, for example, is just an appeal to God, which only works when your interlocutor is also religious.)

For what it's worth, I actually like the ideas in virtue ethics (with the exception of the "golden mean" model, which seems both too narrow and too flexible to be useful in practice). My own inclination is to make a egoist-pragmatic argument:
>i should do things which are good for me, which feel good, and which help me achieve my ends
>cultivating virtue is good for me
>it feels good to cultivate virtue
>virtue will help me achieve my other ends
>therefore, i should cultivate virtue
This gets me past the question of "telos" pretty quickly, but admittedly it's deflationary and not especially high-minded.

Thanks for the detailed response btw. Made for some good reading even though I'm not fully on board with the project.

>>22949750
That wasn't intended to be a summary of the arguments for teleology, but rather pointing to good sources for such arguments. The arguments themselves would take too long to summarize unfortunately.

Your thinking is probably right in line with what most well informed, modern readers are going to jump to given the premise. I would just say that you'd have to read MacIntyre's book to see where he is coming from, because he is taking on this exact position, his point being that it is actually packed with a bunch of modern assumptions that we don't tend to see because we are so used to them.

One of the key things he points out is that, for the ancients, the community, the polis, is prior to the individual. You get a similar view in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and of course Hegel was a student of the Greeks. Modern individualism has us trying to divorce morality from a unique social sphere, and this is perhaps fatally flawed.

Sokolowski's thesis is relevant in that it would seem to flow very well into core conceptions in Platonist ethics, but it shows how things "must be this way," for the human person because of the essential nature of phenomenal experience.

Plato and Aristotle both focus a good deal on practical wisdom. I think there is a sort of virtue argument that wraps around deontological and utilitarian ethics.

In order to be a good person, you must know what the good is and what right action is. This is clearly not easy to do, as any study of public policy analysis or economics will show you. This means that the aquisition of knowledge, and epistemic virtues is going to be essential to any ethics, regardless of what the good reveals itself to be.

The only way around this seems to be to claim that emotivism, relativism, nihilism, etc. is the case from the outset. But this seems like a hard claim to make given how many ethical theories are plausible, even if they are not air tight.

Second, to be a good person requires being free to do good. But we aren't free to do what we think is right if we are ruled over by desire, circumstance, and instinct. So again, developing the virtues has the pragmatic value you've identified. But this conception of reflexive freedom also merges very nicely with Platonist ethics.

What the ancients miss, in part because they take it for granted, is the social aspects of freedom. Since one free man can do things that deprive another of freedom, and because positive freedom (e.g. freedom to become a doctor, scientist etc.) relies on schools, etc. social freedom is an essential element of individual freedom. People can only be free in a society that is organized such that people choose to promote each other's freedom.

And here Hegel is instructive, in that he identifies how institutions shape social life such that we want to promote each other's rights. E.g., markets give us a share in wanting others to have property rights and others to have economic success, as recessions hit all parties in a market

>>22949847
Moral freedom presupposed social freedom, in that we are often restrained from doing what we think is right because of how society is set up.

This is why individualistic ethics, which look for "rules any rational agent will follow," fail.

Moral freedom is the crowing achievement of the society and the individual, and even the existentialists allow that a meaningful life must involve self-determination.

Telos is defined in the social sphere to some degree. There is a higher telos, in the contemplation of the Good, and that's where Wallace's book I mentioned shines.

But either way, the Socratic preference for pursuing knowledge and self-control can win out of purely pragmatic grounds in the face of skepticism about any higher telos. However, I would imagine that, once people begin on this path, they will tend to come around on the higher level claims of Plato, the Patristics, Hegel, etc.

Right, so you need that book and The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt
https://archive.org/details/TheOriginsOfTotalitarianism/page/n165/mode/2up?q=generation
Both it and After Virtue are filled with references to other literature as well as the sort of style you see in The Denial of Death by Becker
There are all "hedgehog books" insofar as they have one big idea
Origins - the only totalitarianism is racist scapegoat totalitarianism
After Virtue - catastrophe in moral reasoning that makes it impossible to reason about morality (in other words communism exists, but we call it "the catastrophe" like we're characters in The Giver by Lois Lowry)
The Denial of Death - the essence of cocaine-fueled Freudian personal psychological subconscious reasoning, illustrated with the power object and the leader

>>22949576
Read chapter 1 and everything will be fine. The "catastrophe" is simply communism.
https://archive.org/details/4.Macintyre/page/n17/mode/2up

>>22950763
Well, the "collapse" is actually German idealism, but communism is based on it.

So, there's one sort of big idea here, namely that
>le saving people from sin
is
>le bad
because we want to make a lot of money, and you need sin to do that, you can't get a lot of money just filling people's basic desires and keeping people alive, you have to elevate their spirits and get them ADDICTED to your special formula, the special formula only (You) can provide
the "catastrophe" is this idea that we're going to use capitalism to sell people books that basically say
>"Well, you know that guy Jesus and how he's going to SAVE YOU FROM SIN???"
>"Well, he SUCKS. I'm going to show you THE PATH THAT ROCKS!!!!"
and it's all
- rock 'n' roll
- sex
- drugs
- sinning
- making a lot of money using weird ass tricks connected to all of this garbage and culture
so it makes sense that
>le moral reasoning
is going to go
>le goodbye
because the whole idea is we KNOW we KNOW we're going to get people hooked on SIN because we're GREEDY MOTHERFUCKER and we want to make a lot of money
so how the FUCK how the absolute FUCK are we going to any definite conclusions concerning MORALITY when we're running IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION and trying to MAKE MONEY using SMOKE AND MIRRORS concerning the TRUTH OF MORALITY
this is also connected to Oldmeadow's "pseudo-mythology" in his "Tradition Betrayed" speech
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_9G95Ozonw "Tradition betrayed ; the false prophets of modernism by Professor Harry Oldmeadow"

>>22950882
So, there's something slightly more sinister going on here, and that is the idea that Jesus Christ, for all of his theatrics, was really just about restarting the Egyptian economy after an economic crash, as happened after Rome absolutely CRUSHED the Egyptian economy, very painfully, over the course of 700 years or so, staring around 700 BC. Jesus Christ and Roman democracy are two sides of the same coin: you can't get Egyptians panicking about the economy without a superior Roman democratic system of political control, able to OUTRUN the Egyptian Kingdom at every corner and pass, leading to the BIRTH OF LORD CHRIST and THE NEW TESTAMENT to say nothing of the extraordinary HONESTY and TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT achieved at the time...truly a work of Indian / Vedic mathematics

>>22948224
He's a Marxist and rejects teleology but Dialectic doesn't make much sense if you don't allow for teleologies so yes, he does the "teleology isn't real but I'll talk about how great it would be if it was" bit.

>>22949750
>why we abandoned it
Because Classical teleology makes no sense when you realize that things aren't made out of Substances but are just big atom-blobs.

>>22950920
He is not a Marxist. I can't believe this. He's a Catholic, for chrissakes. He's an anti-Marxist anti-communist in fine form. We're witnessing Marx as clown, not as sometime "liberator" or whatever. Now the Chinese think we're geniuses or something, while they point guns at us and command us to think our way to the revolution.
This is, of course, how Russian communism collapsed, and Chinese communism will collapse for the same reason: we're thinking for them, and they just refuse to listen to our quarterly reports. It's that simple.
>"From these bones, the just wars are raised."

by the way, a pragmatic understanding of teleology produces what I'd call "functional" teleology or the ordinary activities of work in an open, Capitalist society: explanations for novices are given teleologically, while the historical basis for their existence is considered a particularly juicy social tidbit, nerd gossip if you will

>>22951051
So teleology is a teaching tool? That's not a good argument for it actually existing.

>>22951083
Huh?
1. How do you expect to teach anything if you're throwing away all of the teaching tools?
2. Teaching is not what happens at work. At work, time is of the essence, and we don't have an opportunity to teach or learn anything (exceptions for finance and hedge funds). Instead, workers teach each other how the various parts of the shop work as functional units, describing the processes and so on, adopting the procedural teaching style rather than the declarative, as the opportunity to demonstrate is right before the novice

>>22951168
>How do you expect to teach anything if you're throwing away all of the teaching tools?
You don't throw them away but you don't act like they're descriptions of reality either. The little balls orbiting a larger lumpy ball is a teaching tool for the atom not but it's not really physics view of an atom.
>Teaching is not what happens at work. At work, time is of the essence, and we don't have an opportunity to teach or learn anything
Yeah and that leads to pragmatic whatever works concepts. If teleology is something like that it there is no reason to believe it actually exists. When I worked at a grocery store we called the trash compactor cookie monster.

>>22951235
I'm sorry, a teleology is an explanation of a thing in terms of its purpose, not its origin or where it came from.
So, if I say "I use this pencil to write my name" then the sentence is a teleology for the pencil. It is not a teleology to say "The short film 'I, Pencil" explains the difficulty in tracing the origin of any particular real pencil in a multi-national capitalist society where many nations may compete for contracts providing raw materials for pencil production. In fact, one could say that modernism rather obscures the origin of any good at any particular point in the supply chain."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67tHtpac5ws

>>22951294
>I'm sorry, a teleology is an explanation of a thing in terms of its purpose, not its origin or where it came from.
I understand that but the question the other anon asked is how do we know teleology exists? And I agree that nothing you've presented here seems to give a reason to believe it does. Assigning a purpose to something as a practical concern doesn't mean that purpose exists objectively.
>So, if I say "I use this pencil to write my name" then the sentence is a teleology for the pencil
And that purpose is subjective to you. What you're being asked is how we know objective teleology exists.

>>22951311
this sounds like Bolshevik garbage
is this the ARMY getting me back for my Red Dawn theatrics in /pol/ or something?!?!
No, no, don't tell me. The communists are here.
And they mean BUSINESS
Jesus Saves™

>>22951311
Anons like this that refuse to use English grammar are probably Bolshevik bots. They want you to disbelieve the evidence of your eyes. It's very nasty stuff.
Bolsheviks need to be murdered. They are violent anti-Christians.
Support your local murderer! Make sure all Bolsheviks are murdered regularly!

Alasdair is brilliant. His Catholicism horrifies me. Something is very wrong there, perhaps he is a holdover from the Chesterton-Eliot-Lewis era when blindly and desperately returning to the mother's teat seemed a better means of food than the forlorn search of a wild earth, whose fruits though few are known and lush like Venusine, the thin and glossy veneer which is used in like manner to our wood veneer in the decoration of advanced Dharmacraft from outer face.

>>22951315
You think it's Marxist to doubt teleology exists? Pretty much all of modern philosophy does. The only place you see it still accepted is by religious people who think it bolsters their apologetics. The passage you gave from After Virtue makes it pretty clear he is relying on teleology existing for his whole argument. So it's reasonable to ask how we know that teleology exists. You've given several subjective assignments of purpose but if that's what you mean by teleology you're using a non-standard definition.

>>22951311
This is really sick shit. You sound like a psychopath. Are you suicidal? You sound TOTALLY FUCKED UP, MAN!!!!!
I WANT YOU MURDERED, MAN!!!!!
YOU'RE A FUCKING BOLSHEVIK!!!!!!!!!

>>22951324
>Bolsheviks need to be murdered. They are violent anti-Christians.
??????????????? why you so dumb ????

Rationalists have been a failure for 2500 years, and they still can't show up with any truth, any purpose for life, any meaning.
All they always present is a dubious claim which is always extremely contingent to their epoch.

MURDER THE GODDAMN FUCKING COMMUNISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MURDER THE GODDAMN FUCKING BOLSHEVIKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
MURDER MURDER MURDER MURDER
BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD BLOOD

>>22951325
MURDER THE GODDAMN FUCKING COMMUNISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

>>22951347
THE COMMUNISTS ARE VIOLENT ANTI-CHRISTIANS
MURDER THE GODDAMN FUCKING COMMUNISTS

TURN THE OTHER CHEEK
OR I MURDER YOU, ANTI-CHRISTIAN

Tell the anti-Christians that they will be murdered.

/lit/ - Schizophrenia

Christians tell OTHER people to TURN THE OTHER CHEEK so the Christian has an easier time murdering the Christian's victim.

>>22951368
Teleology is formalized schizophrenia. It literally ascribes purpose to everything that happens. Not surprising that a crazy person would like it.

>>22951381
a teleology is an explanation
you people just refuse to use English, don't you???
drives me CRAZY

>>22951381
Not that, dumbass. The retard spamming all-caps shit.

>>22950763
>>22950755
The "catastrophe" is emotivism and nihilism — the idea that any statements about what is "good," "what ought to be done," or "right action," comes down the irrational, subjective emotional preference. I don't know where you're getting the idea that it's about Marxism. Analytical philosophy and Moore's goodness as a "non-natural property," come in for the heaviest criticism. Marxism shows up, but largely by way of a critique of consequentialist untilitatianism.

Your dismissive summation doesn't even seem to be grounded in even a basic understanding of the content.

>>22950920
>He's a Marxist.
Was. If you think he is positive on Marxism, it's hard to imagine you read the book. He hasn't been a Marxist for decades at that point.

>why we abandoned it because teleology makes no sense when you realize that things aren't made out of Substances but are just big atom-blobs.

Which would be a good argument if this was 1950, which is ironically the point at which the laity's conception of physics is frozen. Reductive materialism is today a minority position in physics proper. Pancomputationalism is all the rage, which is essentially a process metaphysics (e.g. Deutsch, Lloyd, Davies, Vedral, etc.) Tegmark is off with his ontic structural realism cum Platonism.

The idea that the entire world is just little balls of stuff bouncing off each other, and that properties of the balls explain all things has been effectively falsified. In QFT for example, the particle is only deniable in terms of the whole.

The entire argument for fatalism and the impossiblity of emergence hinges on reductionism and smallism being true. There is absolutely no reason to think these are true. The project to reduce chemistry to physics is 120 years in the making and now a majority of chemists think it is simply impossible due to strong emergence. Superveniance and causal closure can't even be defined coherently, so Jaegwon Kim's arguments against emergence start to look suspect, especially when you consider that even he allows they don't work for process metaphysics.

At the height of reductionism and positivism, when you had pomos and analytics all hot on the idea that "if we can't define truth it can't exist," maybe denying purpose made sense. It also helped ground the flavor of Nietzschean existentialism that became an influential religion of sorts for Boomers. But now there are plenty of plausible ways for both formal cause and telos to be reintroduced.

The larger claim that purpose doesn't exist period is just ridiculous. We have purposes, we experience meaning. The universe obviously can produce such meaning and purpose. The only vehicle for denying this is brain dead shit like eliminitivism, the old "we don't actually exist because if we did my neat and tidy Empedoclean view of the world as little balls falls apart," lol.

>>22951384
Teleology
the explanation of phenomena in terms of the purpose they serve rather than of the cause by which they arise.

Teleology or finality is a branch of causality giving the reason or an explanation for something as a function of its end, its purpose, or its goal, as opposed to as a function of its cause.

>>22951294
So... we would still have eyes if eyes didn't see? We would still have hearts if they didn't pump blood?

Teleology is alive and well in the sciences. Biology absolutely can't dispense with it. It just gets relabeled "function," because for Boomers their particular brand of physicalism is like a religion to them. Just check out the EES crisis in biology. It's not about ideas that should be particularly controversial EXCEPT for the fact that they open the door to a larger role for something you might call "purpose." This gets the Boomerites extremely hot an bothered because it violates their dogma.

Which is ironic since one of the great failures of the life sciences is explaining how purpose obviously does emerge from life. But dogmatists keep hoping that problem can be resolved without their dogma having to change. Love of flatland "meaningless purposeless" life is the Aristotlean physics of our era.

>>22951387
>think it is simply impossible due to STRONG emergence
There is no evidence that strong emergence being true. If you have some evidence get ready for your Nobel. Strong emergence is not even really connected to weak emergence and weak emergence is easily compatible with reductionism.
>The larger claim that purpose doesn't exist period is just ridiculous. We have purposes, we experience meaning
Subjective purposes and meanings that differ between all of us.
>The universe obviously can produce such meaning and purpose.
Hiding behind an "obviously" does little to help your position. If you're the anon above you claimed that you had several different paths to show teleology actually exists. He didn't give them claiming they were too long to go into but that differs quite a bit from your "obviously"

>>22951408
NTA but it seems like a pretty straightforward argument. If matter is all that exists, and people came about by a very long process of matter happening to arrange itself into patterns and chemicals and organics, and people are the ones who decide what meaning is and what is meaningful, then matter produces meaning.

>>22951325
Go watch the Seventh Seal and then consider that while Bergman was trying to make a movie about his atheism he instead makes an almost perfect Catholic movie. To be sure, he caricatures religion and only shows the most grotesque excesses of the Black Death panic, while also throwing in references to rapist priests and crusades, but this doesn't overcome the hole at the center of the narrative.

The knight is tormented by his doubt. Yet he never tries to find God except in a completely sterile and intellectual fashion. He talks to two people about God. One is Death, and when he begins talking to him he makes a "confession" that is in no way a real confession of sin, but rather a statement of his existential angst alone. Then the other person he asks is the accused witch, so that he can learn about God through Satan.

The atheist stand-in meanwhile is funny, but also makes jokes about his previous rapes of women.

The knight wants to have "one meaningful act," but never gets to do it. This is because meaning and God are two heads of the same coin.

His one happy moment is eating wild strawberries and fresh milk with the actor family, a naturalistic parody of the Eucharist that can only fill him with temporary and ultimately hollow pleasure.

The peak of post WWII atheist, existentialist cinema turns out to be profoundly Catholic in its messaging. The irony would be sublime if it wasn't so sad.

>>22951417
>and people are the ones who decide what meaning is and what is meaningful
That is not the type of meaning the teleology anon wants. That type of meaning is subjective and changes from person to person. If you try to ground morality on that type of meaning you're just doing relativism with another step and teleology anon hates relativism. Again as commonly understood teleology refers to an objective meaning to things that exists outside of anyone's preferences. The existence of that type of meaning seems very dubious and teleology anon has done nothing to support it's existence.

>>22951408
Show me any evidence reductionism is true?

At the very least, the existence of conciousness is good evidence for strong emergence. The only good counter to this is invoking panpsychism.

Again, that whole reductionist world view relies on the belief that "reductionism should be assumed true until proven false." Why? It's literally just a recap of old Greek theories that are 2,000+ years old. They are intuitive theories and people like them because they seem "neat and tidy," but that's no reason to think they aren't true.

So let me flip it around, show me your proof that reductionism is true? Why does this one claim require no burden of proof? There is no prima facie reason for smallism to be true. It is assumed true because it's essentially a religious dogma for scientism at this point.

>Obviously
Yes, obviously. I am not talking about any sort of global teleology. I am talking about human purpose, intersubjective purpose. Are you really going to claim that jet fighters don't exist for the purpose of blowing shit up? Do pipes not exist for the purpose of sending water to sinks? Do toilets not exist for the purposes of carrying shit away?

No, they obviously do. Unless human beings are somehow sui generis and magic, then if we have purposes, the universe produces purposes. If the universe can produce some level of purpose, there is prima facie no reason it can't produce others.

And this is the big wrinkle in the middle of scientism. On the one hand, it wants to say we live in a dead purposeless universe (else how could we be based Nietzschean overcomers getting over absurdity?). It wants to say man isn't special. On the other hand, it wants to say logic, purpose, meaning, these all emerge magically from a universe that lacks these things in man. From whence do these things come?

It's a set of contradictions that ultimately collapsed into nihilism and solipsism . I submit as my evidence our entire culture and especially this God forsaken, benighted website.

>>22951470
>Show me any evidence reductionism is true?
All of modern science.
>I am talking about human purpose, intersubjective purpose
That type of purpose is not teleology. If it was teleology wouldn't talk about the purpose of something it would talk about the PURPOSES plural since the purpose would differ between individual people. If you're just using teleology to mean individuals ascribe different purposes and meanings to things I don't have an issue besides you using the term in a non-standard way.

>>22951452
>Objective means the same thing as "in itself or noumenal."

Tell me friendo, how can such "objective meaning," exist? Please explain how any meaning exists "objectively."

You're setting up a strawman and knocking it down. The system you're obviously invested in relies heavily on this incoherent definition of objectivity, and the uses that to justify its conclusions.

Objectivity can only be coherent in the context of subjectivity. Saying "objective purpose must be the purpose as it exists for no observer," is like saying "what a tree actually looks like is the view you get without eyes," or "the accurate conception of the world is the one you get without a mind."

Objectivity is the subjective views of a phenomena with the (relevant) biases removed. This old positivist view of objectivity as somehow approaching truth at the limit was BTFO 70 years ago and yet somehow it lives on through bad popular science in a surprising number of people

Consider then the frame of this conversation: "human ethics." How are the purposes of human beings "not the right type of purpose," to consider here?

>>22951499
Ok, show me how chemistry reduces to physics. Why haven't YOU claimed your Noble Prize yet? Show me how conciousness reduced to physics? Clearly you know the answers to these open questions. Show me why all the physicists who claim QM itself demonstrates strong emergence are wrong. You should be able to wrap up Nobles in three fields with that.

Again, you are assuming your dogma is true, so "all of science," including 120 years of chemistry failing to reduce, is apparently actually evidence of how true your braindead world view is.

>>22951507
>Tell me friendo, how can such "objective meaning," exist?
It can't that's my exact point.
>Objectivity can only be coherent in the context of subjectivity.
Ah I see to keep teleology alive you're willing to say objectivity doesn't exist. Are or are you not the anon here >>22949847 railing against relativism? But anyway there is no point arguing with someone who thinks everything is subjective.

>>22951524
>Ok, show me how chemistry reduces to physics
Quantum chemistry is a ongoing field of research. There is no sign of strong emergence yet.
>so "all of science," including 120 years of chemistry failing to reduce
Where has it failed to reduce? To be clear I'm asking where is the chemical reaction that does not obey physical laws?

>>22951507
>Consider then the frame of this conversation: "human ethics." How are the purposes of human beings "not the right type of purpose," to consider here?
I've said this several time already. The subjective purposes of individuals differ wildly from person to person. An ethics built on that is the same thing as relativism. Are you a relativist in ethics? That is not the impression I got. MacIntyre certainly isn't

>>22951525
Objectivity exists. It just isn't a synonym for noumenal lol. It never has been, it's just that yours is a remarkably common misconception.

It's like asking what the "absolute" meaning of "red dog," is. Do the words "red dog" have no objective meaning just because it will conjure a different image in each person's mind. When a store has a sign that says "closed" on its front door, does this not objectively mean the store is closed?

According to "objective = noumenal," folks, the answer ends up being "no." Because of course a sign means nothing outside the context of a person reading it. But this then implies that no language has objective meaning, including science.

This is how so many dedicated positivist physicalists think their way into a sort of Kantian crypto dualism/indirect realism.

It's a convoluted system of thought only motivated by dogma.

>everything is subjective
>but everything is definetly describable by reductive physicalism

This is particularly incoherent.

When nihilists get tired of their sophistry, Hegelians and Neo-Thomists will be waiting to help them back to reality.

>>22951534
>Where has it failed to reduce?

Molecular structure for one. Can you not see how the view you are advancing is one that has to assume reduction is true until decisively proven otherwise?

Again, what is the prima facie reason why smallism should be assumed true until fatally overturned. That you cannot derive simple molecular structures from physics 100+ years after quantum mechanics isn't the tiniest bit of a speed bump? "So long as it isn't decisively disproved, it must be assumed true?"

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/#QuanChem

>No sign of emergence yet
Except if you ask the chemists: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/

Again, this was actually surveyed and reduction is now a minority opinion. Maybe they are wrong, but it still seems like the biggest thing reductionism has going for it is intertia and that it is assumed to be true on dogmatic grounds.

But claims they universal fields determine parts seems just as valid from the perspective of physics, the part determined by the whole, etc.

>>22951572
>Do the words "red dog" have no objective meaning just because it will conjure a different image in each person's mind.
The words "red dog" do not have an objective meaning. If every human was dead and all our civilization was vaporized there would be no way for an alien to determine what "red dog" meant be it written down or spoken.
>But this then implies that no language has objective meaning, including science.
The language of science doesn't have an objective meaning since objective meaning doesn't exist. Again teleology is not real.
>everything is subjective
You were the one who claimed this not me. Here is you saying it
>Objectivity can only be coherent in the context of subjectivity.

>>22951556
False dichotomy. Are toilets not objectively for carrying off shit and piss? Again, it's your incoherent definition of "objective" that forces you into nihilism.

>>22951595
>Molecular structure for one.
Where is the paper saying some molecular structure exhibits behavior contrary to the laws of physics? That would massively in both chemistry and physics. The authors would have won Nobels in both fields.>>22951595
>Except if you ask the chemists: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chemistry/
You have one instance of strong emergence in that whole page and it's from a controversial "philosopher of chemistry"
>More CONTROVERSIALLY, some philosophers of chemistry have argued that chemical properties may constrain the
behavior of physical systems, something akin to what philosophers of mind call strong emergence, or downwards causation

>>22951607
>Are toilets not objectively for carrying off shit and piss?
No. I take it you're not a fan of Marcel Duchamp

>>22949847
>his point being that it is actually packed with a bunch of modern assumptions that we don't tend to see because we are so used to them.
This is a fundemental question. How aware should we be of our assumptions? Complete awareness of the premises of our thinking and their contingencies is paralysing and antithetical to action. If one person with a belief is equal to a force of 99 who have only interests (Mill), then it is exactly for the reason of not having that kind of awareness. Basically a brain (or information processing system) that has achieved complete awareness of all brain activity at any given moment is involved in some kind of Gödel paradox of self-erasing self-reference.

>>22951616
You have now moved the goal posts to "decidedly prove strong emergence or reductionism must be assumed true."

Again, for what reason should we assume reduction is true until proven otherwise?

I am not claiming strong emergence is true, I don't even think emergence is a coherent notion. Process metaphysics, which I prefer, does away with emergence and superveniance. But your claim is that reduction must be assumed true. Why? What empirical evidence is there? There are some successful reductions, sure. There are also many that have failed for decades despite consistent efforts to produce them.

>>22951627
>Toilets aren't for shitting, signs on stores that say closed don't objectively mean a store is closed.

Seems like a pretty radical and solipsistic position to take just to save you from having to say "yeah, I guess making noumenal and objective synonyms was pretty silly, no wonder everyone agreed positivism collapse a full 60 years ago..."

I remember really liking this book when I read it but having some criticisms. I just can’t remember what they were. There’s a woman on YouTube that does a decent lecture series on it.

>>22951677
>You have now moved the goal posts to "decidedly prove strong emergence or reductionism must be assumed true."
As much as anything in science can be assumed to be true. Again all of modern science supports reductionism. There is no evidence of strong emergence. You tried to give some and failed.
>But your claim is that reduction must be assumed true. Why? What empirical evidence is there?
See modern science.
>Seems like a pretty radical and solipsistic position
It's not. Teleology is the bizarre position here. There is no such thing as objective meaning or purpose. Teleology supporters want to pretend like there is so they can claim their subjective meaning or purpose is objective and therefore right. It's a pretty transparent tactic and not to be taken seriously

>>22951616
Anon, asking for a violation of a physical law as evidence for emergence is incoherent. If such evidence was observed, the natural law would be reformulated. This is a naive conception of how falsification works and how scientific paradigms are formed.

"Natural laws," get falsified all the time. Constantly. When this happens what we do is either assume the measurement is wrong, assume some other thing we weren't aware of is producing the result, or, in the most dire situations, we reformulate the natural law. So for instance, Newton's laws were falsified by observations almost immediately. We didn't scrap them. We posited extra planets we couldn't currently observe that would explain the strange orbits we could observe. We did indeed end up finding those planets, but sometimes these posits are just ass pulls to save the paradigm and end up looking silly in retrospect (e.g. Ptolemaic epicycles to save heliocentrism).

There are lots of these. Dark matter for instance. Some theories do away with dark matter, they posit other changes to natural laws or hitherto unconfirmed forces that will explain observations.

You will never have emergence that "violates natural laws," because if such a thing was observed we'd realize we had simply been mistaken about physics. But this in no way precludes something like emergence. Emergence, if it exists, would rather explain curious facts about physics.

For example, no one takes the Wigner-Von Neumann interpretation of quantum mechanics that seriously anymore. But nothing necessarily precludes it. Assume for the sake of argument that it is true, conciousness causes collapse. Well right there, that's strongly emergent conciousness having a huge effect on physics, completely consistent with current physics. If this were true, we would have failed to notice it simply because of how ubiquitous the emergent effect is (pair it with Penrose-Wheeler retrocausality and it seems hard to see how we'd ever even discover this). The same would be true for other proposed incidences of emergence like 4D space-time emerging from entanglements.

>>22947644
It’s a profound blackpill

>>22951697
>See modern science.
Better tell all the scientists, they use the term "emergence" all the time.

Despite what you seem to think, "modern science," and your metaphysical position (not the type of thing science even deals in) are not equivalent.

>>22951780
>Anon, asking for a violation of a physical law as evidence for emergence is incoherent. If such evidence was observed, the natural law would be reformulated.
This is dishonest on your part. I clearly meant a violation of a commonly accepted physical law. That's the way physical theories are disproved.

>Well right there, that's strongly emergent conciousness having a huge effect on physics, completely consistent with current physics.
If it's completely consistent with current physics it can't be a strongly emergent phenomena. Strong emergence can't be explained by reductionist physics that's part of it's fucking definition. If you think strong emergence can be explained by modern physics then I guess strong emergence is reductionist.

>>22951790
>Better tell all the scientists, they use the term "emergence" all the time.
They mean weak emergence. No real scientist believes strong emergence exists or is even connected with weak emergence.

>>22951697
Can you name one example of successful reduction other than thermodynamics -> statistical mechanics (which was more of one being involved in a flawed substance theory of heat and thus a redefinition rather than a true reduction)?

Roger Penrose
>The common view of reductionism is that if you know how the little things work, you know how the big things work. But I don't think that's reliable because that’s where quantum mechanics goes wrong.'

George Ellis
>An abstract logic has physical outcomes in the real world. Abstract entities are driving the physics at the bottom level. The physics is not controlling what happens.’

Paul Davies

>A law of nature of the sort we know and love will not create biological information, or indeed any information at all. (210) ... The whole point of the genetic code, for example, is to free life from the shackles of non-random chemical bonding. (211) ... The key step that was taken on the road to biogenesis was the transition from a state in which molecules slavishly follow mundane chemical pathways, to one in which they organize themselves to follow their own pathways. (211) ... Once this essential point is grasped, the real problem of biogenesis is clear. Since the heady success of molecular biology, most investigators have sought the secret of life in the physics and chemistry of molecules. But they will look in vain for conventional physics and chemistry to explain life, for this is a classic case of confusing the medium with the message. The secret of life lies, not in its chemical basis, but in the logical and informational rules it exploits. (212) ... Real progress with the mystery of biogenesis will be made, I believe, not through exotic chemistry, but from something conceptually new. (216)."

>Deterministic thinking, even in the weaker forms of de Duve and [Stuart] Kauffmann, represents a fundamental challenge to the existing scientific paradigm.... Although biological determinists strongly deny that there is any actual design, or predetermined goal, involved in their proposals, the idea that the laws of nature may be slanted towards life, while not contradicting the letter of Darwinism, certainly offends its spirit. It slips an element of teleology back into nature, a century and a half after Darwin banished it." (218-219).

>>22951837
>Can you name one example of successful reduction
Is this a joke? Electromagnetism wasn't always smushed together. More recently The weak nuclear force and electromagnetism was smushed together in electroweak theory. The aether was disappeared by special relativity. X-rays were determined to be electromagnetic waves and not their own thing. The Standard Model explains a whole zoo of particles that before were their own unique experimental results. Outside of physics there is the disproof of vitalism and the explanation of chirality by molecular structure. Shit chemistry has had the most radical instances of reduction since the discovery of atoms and molecules.

>>22951782
the real black pill is realizing that even it doesn't matter how coherent any new moral system might be. no one reads that shit anyhow. on a psychological level, no philosophy is going to be able to compete with the claim that nothing you do is actually bad because badness isn't even real bro.

"you do you, you make your own meaning. cheat on your husband, cheat on your wife, fap all you want, fap to cp, consume all you want, none of this will ever be bad. you have been absolved of all possible sin go forth and maximize your utility brah."

what could possibly compete with that even if it wasn't true? why learn to see good and bad it you don't have to?

>>22951866
Do you even know what a reduction actually is? A reduction is not a paradigm shift that gets rid of old theories.

>>22951876
>it doesn't matter how coherent any new moral system might be
Say it with me. COHERENCE DOES NOT GUARANTEE TRUTH. You can have a coherent moral system that says eating babies is good:
Moral axioms
1. Eating babies is good
Since there are no more axioms the system is coherent automatically.

>>22951882
>Do you even know what a reduction actually is?
You gave a fucking example of reduction in your post. All of those things I listed eliminated the real existence of the entities described in favor of an explanation of more fundamental elements. Just like statistical mechanics.

>>22951895
Yes, I started with a real reduction. That does not support the claim that all sciences can be reduced until proven otherwise.

You need to look into the difference between a unification and a reduction because you are clearly confused on that point. Also the difference between a constitutive hierarchy and a reductive hierarchy.

>>22951876
If virtue is grounded in some epistemology of reality like they’ve always claimed it is the course correction is basically inevitable

>>22951923
>That does not support the claim that all sciences can be reduced until proven otherwise.
Yes it does because you haven't given one example of strong emergence backed by evidence. That's how science works, lack of evidence against a theory supports it.
>You need to look into the difference between a unification and a reduction because you are clearly confused on that point. Also the difference between a constitutive hierarchy and a reductive hierarchy.
Bizarre. So give me an example of emergent phenomena in physics then. You seem to think all the examples of emergence physicists talk about are not emergent. If I accept that you need to defend the existence of emergence itself then and not just strong emergence.

>>22951876
>none of this will ever be bad.
But it will have consequences.

>>22947644
Life doesn't matter anymore and it has become very obvious everywhere you go.
You can feel it when you are out in public, no one gives a fuck about anything anymore. Even normies are blackpilled husks now.
I go to work and basically just do nothing. I don't give a shit if they fire me, it literally doesn't matter at this point. I'm poor if I'm NEETing and poor if I work full time. This society is pointless.
No community, no property, no families, no future. Where the fuck do we even go from here?

>>22952817
FUCK OFF and quit spamming your shitty doomer take everywhere.

>>22953266
It's obviously his telos. To stop him is immoral

>>22953276
Im going to fuck your ass

>>22951944
Wasn't molecular structure mentioned earlier? This is a phenomena it has not proven possible to reduce and current attempts to bridge physics and chemistry rely on all sorts of inaccurate and ad hoc additions based on observation. Entanglement would be another situation that, while not being an example of strong emergence per say, also seems to completely violate reductionist intuitions as well. This is important in that the entire idea of emergence is grounded in superveniance/ causal closure based definitions of the physical, i.e. the philosophical position of "physicalism." If neither reduction or emergence seem to work, that it an indictment of physicalism as commonly defined.

>However, it should be observed that quantum entanglement does not manifest a fundamental novelty in feature or associated causal power, as it concerns only the value or magnitude of a feature/associated power had by its components. (Correlated “spin” values, e.g., are permutations on the fundamental feature of spin, rather than being akin to mass or charge as wholly distinctive features.) As such, it does not fit the criteria of many accounts of strongly emergence. It is, however, relevant to the epistemic status of such accounts: if one thinks that the existence of strong emergence is implausible on grounds that a kind of strong local supervenience is a priori very plausible for composed systems generally, then the surprising phenomenon of quantum entanglement should lead you to be more circumspect in your assumptions regarding how complex systems are put together.

But overall, you seem to conflate the general position that "everything is physical," and that there is a "dependence hierarchy," e.g., that cells depend on molecules for their existence, with reduction. Reduction is not simply the position that molecules depend on atoms for their existence, that brains depend on neurons, etc. It is not unification, the explanation of diverse phenomena using more general laws (the unification of the electro weak force, thermodynamics to statistical mechanics). It is the claim that a macro level phenomena is entirely explainable in terms of some micro level phenomena.

You are simply not going to find an airtight version of this for the very fact that the term "reduction" itself is not well defined and it's coherence is a major topic of philosophical.

It's important to note here that reductionism is a philosophical theory in metaphysics, not a scientific one. People very often conflate reductionism with naturalism writ large or physicalism, but reductionism is a far more specific claim.

>>22953354
>This is a phenomena it has not proven possible to reduce yet
It hasn't been proven to be strong emergence either. Nothing has. There is plenty of physical phenomena that is proven to reduce to more fundamental explanations.
>It is the claim that a macro level phenomena is entirely explainable in terms of some micro level phenomena.
Again give one example with evidence of a macro phenomena that behaves differently than predicted by it's micro level parts. You can't. The best you've come up with is examples where we don't have the computational resources to work out the full system at a micro level and then you god of the gaps the macro phenomena.
>You are simply not going to find an airtight version of this for the very fact that the term "reduction" itself is not well defined
>People very often conflate reductionism with naturalism writ large or physicalism, but reductionism is a far more specific claim.
A far more specific claim that is not well defined. Do you even read the verbal diarrhea that spills out of your mouth?

>>22951556
Views of the world vary wildly from person to person. This does not preclude objectivity. Is the Earth not objectively round because some people believe it is flat? Does penicillin not objectively cure some diseases because some people deny the germ theory of disease?

That people disagree about things doesn't mean there is no facts of the matter. People disagree about the answer to arithmetic all the time for example.

Every person's view being subjective seems to force one into solipsism, or if not solipsism, at least a weird sort of eliminitivism towards most of the stuff in life. For example, how could "the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776," be an objective fact. The verb "signed" is tied up with subjectivity and human definition. But now you are stuck being eliminitivist about all historical facts.

>someone who already believes everything is subjective.

So why harp on about the "truth" of reductive physicalism? The thing with solipsistic sophists is that even their own actions reveal their position to be affectation.

>>22953462
>Views of the world vary wildly from person to person. This does not preclude objectivity.
When then I say it did? What I said was that teleology based on the subjective meanings and purposes of diverse people is not objective.

>>someone who already believes everything is subjective.
>So why harp on about the "truth" of reductive physicalism?
Again where are you getting this from? I'm saying the teleology you're defending is subjective since it is based based on the subjective meanings and purposes of diverse people. I don't believe everything is subjective.

>>22951387
>Reductive materialism is today a minority position in physics proper. >Pancomputationalism is all the rage
Physics proper had abandoned most attempts at reconciling physics and metaphysics back in the 1930s, and been hanging on the bastard offshoots of positivism ever since, which everyone kinda hates, but nobody does anything about because as a physicist you can get academic funding and recognition for experiments, while essays on the issue are the realm of Patreon and retweets.

>>22953546
>Physics proper had abandoned most attempts at reconciling physics and metaphysics back
What is there to reconcile? If a metaphysical theory makes a physical prediction then it's physics and can be proven or disproven like any other physical theory. Science disregards metaphysics because it is superfluous.

>and what might be done to stem the tide of nihi-ACK!

>>22953550
>What is there to reconcile?
A system model with empyrical data. The age-old positivist approach of "muh reproducible facts everything else is superfluous" leads to us gaining predictive power for behavior of systems, but entirely ommits the description and characterization of those systems: we can have some decent data on how it works, but the further we go the less we understand what it is that we are building a model for, because looking at it and trying to describe it is superfluous, since you can't do a reproducible double-blind experiment for describing a thing. That's one of the many factors for why positivism died in a ditch - even if everything other than falsifiable theory and reproducible data is superfluous to the inherent nature of a thing, its might be not superfluous whatsoever to our understanding of it. Which is actually vital for epistemological practice, such as formulating sensible study goals and interfield communication - everything that is not "eh we'll try to gather more hard data" suffers immensly under the current paradigm. But we kinda don't have an academic approach for it that is not indistinguishable from the grift that is modern humanities, so we just gruble and get back to "shut up and calculate", even if it's a causes a lot of headache.

>>22953546
I'd say this is partly true. You did have a long running "anti-philosophical" trend from the 30s through the Boomers. But this trend has also been dying out with the dominance of the Boomers. Work in quantum foundations, which necessarily gets into metaphysics, was a good way to destroy your career up through the 1990s. Copenhagen orthodoxy was enforced from on high. Now we are seeing an explosion of work in quantum foundations.

Physicists can't help but work with metaphysics. The same is true for all science. Questions like: "are species real," are ontological questions. Questions like: "was Russell right to argue for eliminating causation," have been taken up by physics. Things like Landauer's Principle, "information is physical," or Wheeler's "It From Bit," make metaphysical claims. Quantum foundations, theories of "what is really real," also get into metaphysics.

Philosophy of physics proper is taken seriously in physics, even if metaphysics is generally not, probably owing to the fact that people working there are trained in both fields. Read any big name theoretician and you're going to see books packed with metaphysical claims. For example, Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe." Co-authorship between the disciples has also become not uncommon.

The whole "anti-metaphysics," position wasn't actually a science that didn't get involved with metaphysics. It was a science that had a single, dogmatically enforced metaphysics.

The funny thing though is that the logical positivist position is actually very far from what the laity thinks of when they think of "what science says the world is like," and scientism. Mermin, who came up with "shit up and calculate," also said "the Moon objectively does not exist when no one is observing it." Scientism writ large never picked up the philosophy that became dominant in physics. It always stayed with a sort of Empedoclean substance metaphysics where all that exists is "particles" and any apparent change is explainable in particle interactions. The dominance of quantum field theory and the relegation of particles to being less basic than universal fields did nothing to disabuse the public of the interpretation.

Hence, the general idea that 19th century reductive corpusclarism is "what science says the world is like," that defines most modern forms of scientism. That "is information ontologically basic, on par with matter and energy, or is information THE ontologicaly basic entity from which matter and energy emerge," would be an active topic in physics would thus surprise a lot of people.

I would say this has to do with how the Empedoclean view was used to support a certain brand of humanism and ethics since the late 19th century. EES is a scandal in biology that ruins careers and work in quantum foundations was a career death sentence for 50 years precisely because philosophical statements based on what "science is supposed to say," became wed to an almost religion-like world view.

>>22953619
Also the problem of theory ladenness. Having unquestionable assumptions about what is relevant leads to bad paradigms that only ever get patched over, not replaced.

Ask the wrong sorts of questions and no amount of data will save you.

>>22953637
It's funny because Mach, a progenitor of the dominant view after the 1930s said that atoms were unfalsifiable pseudoscience. When quarks were first proposed they were also rejected as unfalsifiable pseudoscience. Virtual particles come in for a similar critique today, as being "fictional," as opposed to "real."

>>22947644
AF has been mentioned here many many times, and is on the /lit/ book lists

But ...what is BAP?

>>22954051
BAP is Bronze Age Pervert
pic unrelated, but only a little

>>22947706
>had the Polynesian culture
>enjoyed the blessings of analytical philosophy it is all too clear that the
>question of the meaning of taboo could have been resolved in a number
>of ways.
I cringed so hard I had to walk away from the screen

>>22954196
I am 99.9% confident that's supposed to be a joke aimed at modern moral philosophy.

>>22953619
>leads to us gaining predictive power for behavior of systems, but entirely ommits the description and characterization of those systems
What do you think description and characterization means in that sentence? If it doesn't effect predictive power it's just a question of picking whichever interchangeable just-so metaphysical story that floats your boat. Just don't bother with it if you're smart.

>Which is actually vital for epistemological practice, such as formulating sensible study goals and interfield communication
Interfield communication between what fields? There is no issue with other fields subject to empirical verification. As for formulating sensible study goals claiming metaphysics can help is a joke. Metaphysics guiding physics led to a stagnant dead end for over a thousand years after Aristotle.

>>22954278
OP even says as much after that passage
>(At the very least this is a good put down on analytics)

>>22953677
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger–Marsden_experiments
Supposedly, the experiments that produced the atom theory can be reproduced at any college or university with a nuclear chemistry lab.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBqHkraf8iE
I'm sure Mach was simply misinformed and didn't have access to the lab equipment to perform the experiments. Also, Mach was almost dead, so he probably wanted to see the deflection angle detector equipment himself.
It's worth pointing out that you need modern technology to properly calculate the empirical distribution of the angle as a function of the material the alpha particle beam is pointing at. You need a computer to count the number of deflections at any particular angle and you need a reticulating detector. You could do it with an analogue computer, but it appears nobody has built one yet.
Frankly, the distribution of deflection angles for various substances could be measured, but you would need a special machine like I've described above to collect the raw data.

>>22951429
Based. I need to watch that. Thanks catholicbro

>>22954362
The Seventh Seal is one of the great classics. Reminds me that I need to watch more classic movies. I've been meaning to watch Ran and Throne of Blood for a long time.

>>22954286
>Interfield communication between what fields?
Between any interacting fields, as focus on (or rather, complete disregard of anything other than) experimental data naturally leads to every new form of experiment creating it's own sub-field, with it's own set of theories, assumptions, notions, best practices and goals - which is not a problem in itself, it becomes a problem when solution requires integration of those fields, but it turns out that two neighboring high-energy physics labs have their own fundamentally incompatible paradigms, and as far as they are concerned, all the issues are on the other guy's end, our model works on our machine. And there is no end to the process - it is fractal. Particles cannot be infinitely divided into smaller parts, but scientific fields are.

>If it doesn't effect predictive power it's just a question of picking whichever interchangeable just-so metaphysical story that floats your boat. Just don't bother with it if you're smart.
>As for formulating sensible study goals claiming metaphysics can help is a joke.
We can do just that, reduce all of the issues raised to a language problem, make sure once again that we can't ground scientific language in pure logic or create an unambiguous scientific language, and that in fact very few of the linguistic problems that we've produced in this reduction can be simply reasoned away - and find out that in 15 seconds we have just repeated the last 100 years of analytical philosophy, productive for the IT field, and utterly useless for epistemology.

>Metaphysics guiding physics led to a stagnant dead end for over a thousand years after Aristotle.
Firstly - that is historically ignorant, both in regard of all the scientific progress that was happening between Aristotle and the Comte, and in implying that positivism has lead to the emergence of scientific method, instead of scientific method producing positivism.
Secondly - as someone up the thread has pointed out already, the positivist paradigm does not actually reject metaphysics - it just imposes one of it's own. One that was a natural and useful product of it's time to solve the issue of the time - conducting the birth of modern scientific academia as a separate and self-sufficient entity - but today about as useful as Christian theology.

The point here is that now we objectively required to manufacture world-views - plural - that are conductive to understanding of the models we make by humans that are trying to use those models for scientific purposes. Required not by some idealistic quest for the truth, but by simple utility of conducting research, and the existing paradigm is against that in it's dogmatic principle of trying to eject the human element from a process that does, functionally, require humans and human understanding.

>>22951837
Eh, don't quote Penrose on quantum mechanics.

>>22951616
>Where is the paper
Man you is clownin'.

>>22954687
So is there not a paper on then? Give me the evidence and I'll write the paper myself. Can't wait to get my Nobels in physics and chemistry. There is zero evidence for strong emergence.

>>22947644
I've owned this book for at least 8 years and still haven't read it and now I feel like a MORON

>>22951037
He is a former Marxist and yes, he is a Catholic, though not quite anti-Marxist