Cosmology

[YesNo]

Since we may not be able to recognize them, they can also be very near.

Perhaps just like "many worlds", according to some interpretations of quantum mechanics. Who knows where they are? Conveniently, they can't be seen. This allows the skeptics on all sides a way out. They can always take a positivist perspective and deny meaning (or even "existence") to concepts that can't be repeatedly observed.

It is interesting that quantum experiments are not repeatable except on average when we switch between measuring observables whose operators don't commute. Ask an electron it's position and it makes a choice. Ask an electron its momentum and it makes another choice. Then ask it for its position again, just to make sure you have it right, and it changes its fickle "mind", but only within a range of possible choices. At least that is how I see it at the moment, and my own fickle mind might change tomorrow.

I am reminded that earlier in the discussion I used the term dualism when the term I was grasping for was pluralism. Definitely different concepts under the assignments of philosophy. My bad.

Generally, people believe in some sort of dualism or pluralism. Some things look like agents because you have to deal with their choices directly. Other things look like non-agents and can be manipulated without worrying about what they think about it.

I am afraid I was using the word miracle more poetically and for its hyperbolic value (I will probably think of a more appropriate term here, too). The crossover zone of the two disciplines always gets me in trouble in the philosophy room.

What I think people are looking for in a "miracle" is a sign of "love", not so much a violation of unconscious deterministic laws. The world would be very chaotic, perhaps even love-less, if those deterministic laws were too erratic.

This takes a little more thought. I don't know if I get it...."but reductionism limits our possibilities to what can be found at the quantum level." How so?

Reductionism assumes that we only need information at the smallest level and we can show how everything else follows or evolves from that. That low level could be quantum stuff, or an atom (to move further up the reductionist chain), or a gene. They are the building blocks of bigger stuff. if reductionism is all there is, then everything we observe in the bigger stuff has to be in the smaller stuff. Hence panpsychism assumes consciousness is in the smaller stuff. One still needs some "operators" to get the simpler stuff to the more complicated forms and that is where the emergent belief comes in.

An alternate view would be that the smaller stuff is derived from more complicated stuff which like the aliens may not be visible to us.

If there is only reductionism, then all the possibilities have to be in the smaller stuff. That is where the limitation comes from. Of course there are the emergent operators, but how far do they extend the possibilities of this small stuff, if they are there at all?

I believe dykes exist. I don't know about these figurative dikes, though. Is poetry or a poor cousin unfolding in the discussion out of necessity? Metaphor and formula are strange bedfellows.

I look at science as a form of literature.

[desiresjab]

There will always be another operator missing from wherever we stand. Isn't that the essence of Godel? The operator is XXX...but what operates that? There is nothing new in this game. That is why philosophy can never make progress. I am not saying philosophy could do anything else, mind you. I do not expect philosophy to become a fantasy exercise. But the transitory and purely speculative nature of its results make it a game played for fun rather than truth, and to me it is precisely a fantasy exercise with stylized constraints. I accept those stylized constraints, logic premier among them. None of us chooses a framework resembling Witgenstein's for our discussion, though. A more freewheeling approach is superior, methinks. In fact, a discovery like Godel's instructs us to reinvent philosophy. I am gald that is not my job.

[desiresjab]

In fact, a discovery like Godel's instructs us to reinvent philosophy. I am gald that is not my job.

Forum chours:

AND SO ARE WE.

[YesNo]

None of us chooses a framework resembling Witgenstein's for our discussion, though. A more freewheeling approach is superior, methinks.

What was Wittgenstein's framework? I found him mostly unintelligible.

[desiresjab]

What was Wittgenstein's framework? I found him mostly unintelligible.

Hardcore logical analysis. He is not known as a cosmologist, but a mathematics logician. I might have been unfair to him. I just wanted someone who was difficult and a logician old enough to have once desired the perfect logical framework for all mathematics envisioned by Hilbert, which was apparently destroyed once and for all by Godel. I say apparently because the world of mathematics or philosophy is not through interpreting precisely what Godel implies, and perhaps never will be.

[YesNo]

Do you mean Whitehead and Russell? They wrote the Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus.

[desiresjab]

Do you mean Whitehead and Russell? They wrote the Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus.

Whitehead and Russel were of the same ilk as Wittgenstein. Russel was Wittgenstein's teacher. The Principia and Tractatus had the same goal.

[YesNo]

What was that goal?

This is from the Tractatus (preface) where Wittgenstein claims the book's "whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/...2bc22a5186441d

[desiresjab]

What was that goal?

This is from the Tractatus (preface) where Wittgenstein claims the book's "whole meaning could be summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/...2bc22a5186441d

That goal was to place all of mathematics on unassailable footing by correspondence with formal logic. Wittgenstein was born early enough to have partaken in the frenzy of optimism in his early period until Godel sent everyone home.

Cosmology always gets back to the question of First Cause, one of the oldest arguments in formal philosophy. One can make pretty words and pretty arguments. This is what philosophers have done.

People great and small have lain awake pondering the question. We can make such statemnts as Gauss did that All creation would be a waste without immortality. It may even be a leakage of higher metalogic into our consciousness that allows one to share this intuition with Gauss in reflective moments. I have difficulty getting past a first cause with no motive in it. I see a lot of motive packed in nature (via infinite enfolding) at all levels. Perhaps it also exists at the quantum level.

In the actual Game Of Life, from a few basic rules, staggering complexity evolved. You have to be smart to know a few basic rules will do this. Or maybe a meta-consciousness is merely letting its experiment run to see what happens, like the inventor of the game was doing. Slightly different rules lead to vastly different unfoldings in the game.

Everything coming about for nothing, is the hard part to accept. Something has to push the start button. But something had to create that something. It appears there can be no first cause. To our minds this can only mean either a type of circularity or everything existing at once without cause.

I feel everything could not come about for nothing, but our particular existence, our kind, even our minerals, did come about for nothing, without plan, without particulars. In the game of life you do not knock a piece to another postion with your finger, you simply let the game run and the complexity unfold. Any creator would be too proud to interfere, so forget divine intervention. The game runs, that's all, its simple rules managing infinitely enfolded emergent properties blindly, i.e. without intervention.

These opinions are more philosophy than cosmology, I know. I am not sure they are quite beliefs. But they are close.

[YesNo]

That goal was to place all of mathematics on unassailable footing by correspondence with formal logic. Wittgenstein was born early enough to have partaken in the frenzy of optimism in his early period until Godel sent everyone home.

I think Wittgenstein is looking more at an ideal human language rather than mathematics. Mathematics starts with assumptions. They are the closest thing mathematics has to empirical data, but they do not come from sense experience. Then reason takes over. A human language is talking about "facts" and not just assumptions which are statements.

I'm trying to read his essay to see if it makes more sense today. It made no sense to me 15 years ago.

I have difficulty getting past a first cause with no motive in it. I see a lot of motive packed in nature (via infinite enfolding) at all levels. Perhaps it also exists at the quantum level.

I see no way to have "motive" without "consciousness". What evidence is there that "infinite enfolding" exists?

In the actual Game Of Life, from a few basic rules, staggering complexity evolved. You have to be smart to know a few basic rules will do this. Or maybe a meta-consciousness is merely letting its experiment run to see what happens, like the inventor of the game was doing. Slightly different rules lead to vastly different unfoldings in the game.

This sounds too mechanistic for me.

In the game of life you do not knock a piece to another postion with your finger, you simply let the game run and the complexity unfold. Any creator would be too proud to interfere, so forget divine intervention. The game runs, that's all, its simple rules managing infinitely enfolded emergent properties blindly, i.e. without intervention.

Those pieces you might move imply a belief that unconscious matter really exists.

These opinions are more philosophy than cosmology, I know. I am not sure they are quite beliefs. But they are close.

I would say they are beliefs and on no firmer foundation than belief in a deity. What makes the foundation firm? That is where philosophy becomes valuable clarifying what is at stake so one isn't basing one's life upon assumptions one has not examined.

[desiresjab]

I think Wittgenstein is looking more at an ideal human language rather than mathematics. Mathematics starts with assumptions. They are the closest thing mathematics has to empirical data, but they do not come from sense experience. Then reason takes over. A human language is talking about "facts" and not just assumptions which are statements.

Wittgenstein was not talking about a normal everyday language to write poetry in or flirt with a girl. This is the same unassailable language Russel and Whitehead and Peano were after. It is a language of logical propositions. Wittgenstein is not teaching people how to write clearer prose. His is the language of pure mathematics in the clothing of unassailable logic. That is the ideal human language he was striving toward.

Look at it this way, Wittgenstein was not some kind of rebel, he was a principle player in logical positivism. He was not primarily at odds with the other players, but held their view of this "perfect language."

There are more things under heaven and earth, Horatio, than your philosophy has ever dreamed of.

The above is not a verifiable statement, and therefore is not cognitively meaningful and is a mere psuedostatement. I think you need to discard any notion that Wittgenstein and the others were after a normal language to accomplish their purposes. A quite limited form of English, for instance, would have carried the load. This restricted language might have been useful in the courtroom or the classroom, but not when shooting the breeze with your neighbor or demonstrating how much you love your wife.

Their axiomatic skeleton of language would never have produced great poetry. It never did, and it never would have. And the fact is, they could not make it work for their other purpose, either. Shakespeare succeeded, Wittgenstein and his allies failed in their interesting experiment. Only Godel succeeded, and he did this by proving their efforts were doomed to ultimate failure.

Leibniz, over two hundred years earlier, had dreamed of the same perfect language.

[YesNo]

I agree that Whitehead, Russell and Wittgenstein were trying to find a language that represented everything objectively. Perhaps an unconscious machine could be made to use it.

However, the subject matters of their languages were different. Whitehead and Russell started with propositions (axioms or assumptions) as the subject matter and from these initial statements derived other statements. They assumed their language was both consistent and complete. Godel showed it was not complete, assuming it was consistent. There were statements that could be formed in their language that could not be derived from it. They could not know everything about their subject matter they might think they should be able to know.

I don't think Godel addressed Wittgenstein's language whose subject matter was the world. His subject matter was not a set of propositions like Whitehead and Russell had as their subject matter, but "facts" about the world. He tried to reduce the "world" to "facts" so that his language could manipulate them.

To show they were talking about a different subject matter consider 2.0211: "If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true." Whitehead and Russell were starting with initial propositions (axioms, not "facts") that had no "substance".

Quantum physics might have done to Wittgenstein's language what Godel did to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein cannot know all the "facts" about the world that he could formulate. He cannot know, for example, both the position and momentum of a quantum particle at any given time, but they could both be represented as facts. This seems to falsify 1.11: "The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts."

[desiresjab]

I agree that Whitehead, Russell and Wittgenstein were trying to find a language that represented everything objectively. Perhaps an unconscious machine could be made to use it.

However, the subject matters of their languages were different. Whitehead and Russell started with propositions (axioms or assumptions) as the subject matter and from these initial statements derived other statements. They assumed their language was both consistent and complete. Godel showed it was not complete, assuming it was consistent. There were statements that could be formed in their language that could not be derived from it. They could not know everything about their subject matter they might think they should be able to know.

I don't think Godel addressed Wittgenstein's language whose subject matter was the world. His subject matter was not a set of propositions like Whitehead and Russell had as their subject matter, but "facts" about the world. He tried to reduce the "world" to "facts" so that his language could manipulate them.

To show they were talking about a different subject matter consider 2.0211: "If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true." Whitehead and Russell were starting with initial propositions (axioms, not "facts") that had no "substance".

Quantum physics might have done to Wittgenstein's language what Godel did to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica. Wittgenstein cannot know all the "facts" about the world that he could formulate. He cannot know, for example, both the position and momentum of a quantum particle at any given time, but they could both be represented as facts. This seems to falsify 1.11: "The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts."

I think it was an attack on the same fort from a different angle. A true proposition was a fact to Russel and Whitehead. Wittgenstein tried to redefine fact. He cannot get away from propositiions, though.

"If the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true."

That is an if/then proposition. Are we to believe it?

That whole school which quibbled over language and propositions was a batch of necessary reasoning in our historical unfolding, then the world moved on the way it moved on from Kant. Not three people a year read Principia Mathematica. Fifty might finish a work by Wittgenstein, but probably not that many. After Godel, only an end run was possible. I think that is all Witty was up to. But I am not about to delve into a year of him so I can say so for sure. I believe I know roughly what he was up to, though there were certain differences you point out, because it is what they have all been up to (philosophers) since the Greeks. They wanted to talk the universe plain. The universe is not plain, though. Shakespeare knew that before Wittgenstein was born.

[YesNo]

I don't think Wittgenstein is worth reading either, but his Tractatus keeps coming up like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and so I pick it up to remind myself why I put it down.

[desiresjab]

I don't think Wittgenstein is worth reading either, but his Tractatus keeps coming up like Joyce's Finnegan's Wake and so I pick it up to remind myself why I put it down.

Russel and Whitehead's language might have had a chance at becoming a real tool, if it had only been what they had hoped. But Wittgenstein's language sounds like an abstract ideal rather than something that could actually come about and be useful. It would have been more intractable than legal documents, if it did come about. I am not sure who it could be useful to besides lawyers. Not science? Probably not, but maybe. Not sure what his purpose for it was.