[FRIAM] Analytic Idealism

Prof David West profwest at fastmail.fm
Thu Mar 24 15:07:09 EDT 2022 

a minor (?) point of clarification: what is being asserted by these authors (in various ways and from various perspectives) has to do with what we assert to be Real, i.e., to have ontological (metaphysical) status.

With regard the mythical apple hitting Newton on the head:
   -  Mass, velocity, inertia, volume, even the Pantone value of the red skin—the description—are *Real*.
   -  "ouch," the grey scale perception of the apple's skin because I am colorblind, even the "Wow, I just realized what gravity is,"—the perceptions—are *Not Real*.

A different example: the quantized and digitized values from five types of sensor that feed a neural net 'describe' human perception and are *Real*. Any aspect of human perception that cannot be similarly formalized and captured, is therefore *Not Real*.

Questions about whether or not a description can 'capture' an object are orthogonal. (Of course, no description can ever be complete, or accurate from one moment to the next.)

davew


On Thu, Mar 24, 2022, at 10:21 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Obviously, there can be flaws in observing a system from within the 
> system.    If a hardware platform is in some weird state, the software 
> running on it may not be computing or observing in an accurate way.    
> But I'd be first to claim there is no such thing as independent 
> measurement.   
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2022 9:57 AM
> To: friam at redfish.com
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Analytic Idealism
>
> I don't think the point is that the description(s) *cannot* capture the 
> object, only that there *can be* flaws in the description(s). Saying 
> that descriptions *do not* is not the same thing as saying they *can 
> not*. But I haven't read the book(s). So maybe I'm giving it too much 
> benefit.
>
> On 3/24/22 09:47, Marcus Daniels wrote:
>> There wouldn't be, say, a LIGO experiment if people were confusing the referent with the descriptor.
>> It is absurd by construction:   Communicate using description given the belief that description can't capture the essence of a quality.
>> Just stay stoned and enjoy, no?
>> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of glen
>> Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2022 9:30 AM
>> To: friam at redfish.com
>> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Analytic Idealism
>> 
>> I think EricS' digestion puts too much gloss on the (lack of) crispness between the qualities. There's a (possibly preemptive) registration of the ontology where (e.g.) mass, length, and time are disjoint, albeit I can infer that might not be the case if we can replace (ground, foundationally) any quality with a collection of substitutable acts/behaviors. While Dave mentions LSD and the (quantitative) greater or less than of brain activity, he doesn't mention things like synesthesia, the pollution of one quality with another [⛧]. So, while I don't quite buy the Analytic Idealism concept that scientists have replaced the object with the sign (referent with the descriptor), I do buy that the scientific-ish crisp distinction between things like mass and length can be artificial.
>> 
>> Such a gooey context is amenable to such (artificial) distinction - analytic -. But that slicing is lossy ... information is lost in the distinction between qualities [⛤]. The same would be true of the/whatever recipe of action that replaces the quality. Recipes for length could be (more strongly "already are") mixed with recipes for mass (or time). But it's our Scientismist/Objectivist bias that allows us to impute any artificial crispness into the world.
>> 
>> 
>> [⛧] In arguing that the qualities/dimensions may not be distinct, I'm relying on the data fusion activities of animals with a CNS and a relatively large brain. While it may seem like swinging a bucket of water around is not substitutable with a yard stick, composing such high-order activities out of smaller activities (like moving one's opposable thumb or realtime monitoring of a moving object with saccadic binary vision) relies fundamentally on the goo inside our heads. Mess with the goo and you mess with the composability of the actions. LSD messes with the goo.
>> 
>> [⛤] If we try to speak more jargonally, I'm challenging the idea that a "space" of qualities can ever have an orthogonal basis. Orthogonality isn't necessarily a feature of the way our CNS/brains work. And worse yet, it may not be a feature of the world.
>> 
>> On 3/22/22 18:15, David Eric Smith wrote:
>>> Dave —
>>>
>>> I’m not sure I understand qualitative and quantitative as a 
>>> partition, or as a pair of alternative predicates, though of course I 
>>> recognize the usage of setting one against the other.  This is 
>>> probably because I don’t understand “qualitative” as a category.  
>>> (Given that I don’t understand Brouwer’s intuitionism beyond the 
>>> small feature of its requirement for constructions, I probably don’t 
>>> understand “quantitative” as a category either.)
>>>
>>> A place this comes up for me is when I try to teach dimensional analysis to beginning physics students (or sometimes to liberal arts students).
>>>
>>> Very little of what we do involves “pure numbers” (and even those often include more; but I’ll come back to that).  In all of dimensional analysis, a number has to be paired with a dimension.  So I have to explain to my students what “a dimension” is.  Since I have told them that we are going to require operational definitions, I have to tell them somehow operationally, and not just say “you know it when you see it”.
>>>
>>> What I come up with is that each dimension corresponds to a recipe 
>>> for a set of _acts_ one can carry out, and the concept of a dimension 
>>> refers to certain substitutabilities in those acts.  So if I say a 
>>> ruler has length, by that I mean that I can put two objects on a 
>>> tabletop abutting the two ends of the ruler.  Saying that length “is 
>>> a dimension” is saying that I can take away the rule and put bananas, 
>>> or king’s feet, end to end and perform the same operation of holding 
>>> two things apart.  A different recipe goes with swinging objects 
>>> around in a bucket to measure mass, or dunking them in water to 
>>> measure volume, etc.  (Anecdote from Lucy Jacobs, squirrel-woman 
>>> supreme:  During the harvest season, when squirrels pick up acorns, 
>>> they shake them vigorously a time or two in their teeth, before 
>>> choosing to keep or to toss.  We are pretty sure they want to know 
>>> which ones have a lot of nut-meat and moisture.  Even squirrels 
>>> understand what mass is, and that it is not identical to
>>> weight.)
>>>
>>> One has to go a little further than just the recipe for substitution to say that something “is a dimension”; the operation also has to admit subdivision.  So in place of one meterstick, I must be allowed to substitute three and 1/3rd kings’ feet, so I am saying that stringing the feet end to end, and so separating them, is an operation _of the same kind_ as using the string of feet or the meterstick to separate to objects on the table.  It is in subdivisibility without changing the nature of the operation that I bring in quantity.
>>>
>>> To the extent that one program of activity can’t be substituted for another, the dimensions have distinctness.  Swinging buckets can’t be used as a surrogate for lining up kings’ feet, or dunking objects in water.
>>>
>>> It is conventional, in physics, to see three dimensions (mass, length, time) as “the” dimensions upon which dimensional analysis is built, and to call other things counted “pure numbers”.  However, there are many places where I have reason not to leave it at that.  Counts of atoms need to be partitioned, sometimes, among which elements they are, and I can use those partition labels as dimensions.  Often, in economics, I want to treat goods-types, and also monies, credit denominations, or near-monies, as having dimensions.  If I do so, I can do many of the same things done with dimensional analysis in physics with them.  The question of what “a dimension” “is” therefore seems to me not to be closed with a memorization of three cases.
>>>
>>>
>>> So are dimensions “qualities”?  To the extent that we perceive them as somehow different in kind, I would assume it is because our nature has become shaped around the different kinds of things one can do, or can witness happening in the world, but I can’t defend that belief with a validated origin story.
>>>
>>> The above, for me, are not meant to be exemplars of all notions of “qualitative”, but only some entry-point to whether there is a category, from places where I know how to speak carefully.
>>>
>>>
>>> My above question, about what relation the “qualitative” aspects of some experience or program have to the quantitative, is about testing whether you can say what you mean.  A quite different invocation of the quantitative has always been about being able to hold people to account for whether what they are claiming could ever be said to have “truth-value”, and of what kind?  To say “I checked that the rod is 1m long, and you can check it too” has a kind of intersubjective easy fungibility that “I know that God loves me” does not (at least to me) have.
>>>
>>> I am _sure_ that wherever the discussion is, it wasn’t meant to be where I cast it above.  But I don’t know how one would check whether my certainty is right.
>>>
>>> Eric
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>> On Mar 23, 2022, at 6:31 AM, Prof David West <profwest at fastmail.fm <mailto:profwest at fastmail.fm>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> /
>>>> "Back in the seventeenth century, when science as we know it today 
>>>> took its first steps, scientists based their entire work on—what 
>>>> else?—/*/perceptual experience/*/: the things and phenomena they 
>>>> could see, touch, smell, taste or hear around them. That starting 
>>>> point, is course,/*_/qualitative/_*/in nature./
>>>>
>>>> /Soon, however, scientists realized that it is very convenient to 
>>>> describe the eminently*qualitative*world by means of*_quantities_*./
>>>>
>>>> /But then something bizarre happened: many scientists seemingly 
>>>> forgot where it all started and began attributing fundamental 
>>>> reality only to the*_quantities_*./
>>>>
>>>> /This, in a nutshell, is the beginning of/metaphysical materialism/, 
>>>> a philosophy that—absurdly—grants fundamental reality to 
>>>> mere*descriptions*, while denying the reality of that which is 
>>>> described. ... we began cluelessly replacing reality with its 
>>>> description, the territory with the map./
>>>>
>>>> /And so now we face the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness':
>>>> the impossibility of explaining qualities in terms of quantities./
>>>>
>>>> /In the space of a couple of centuries, we tied ourselves up in 
>>>> hopelessly abstract conceptual knots and managed to lose touch with 
>>>> reality altogether./
>>>>
>>>> /Laboratory results in quantum mechanics, for instance, strongly 
>>>> indicate that there is no autonomous material world of tables and 
>>>> chairs out there. Coupled with the inability of materialist 
>>>> neuroscience to explain experience, this is forcing us to reexamine 
>>>> our earlier assumptions and contemplate alternatives.*_Analytic 
>>>> idealism_*—the notion that reality, while equally amenable to 
>>>> scientific inquiry, is fundamentally qualitiative–is a leading 
>>>> contender to replace metaphysical materialism."/
>>>>
>>>> The preceding was from/Science Ideated/by Bernado Klastrup.
>>>>
>>>> Factoid: when "perceiving alternate realities," e.g., while on LSD, brain activity decreases when material neuroscience predicts an increase.
>>>>
>>>> /"Attention is not just receptive, but actively creative of the 
>>>> world we inhabit. How we attend makes all the difference to the 
>>>> world we experience. ///
>>>>
>>>> /Forget everything you thought you knew about the difference between 
>>>> the hemispheres, because it will be largely wrong. It is not what 
>>>> each hemisphere does – they are both involved in everything – but 
>>>> how it does it, that matters. And the prime difference between the 
>>>> brain hemispheres is the manner in which they attend. For reasons of 
>>>> survival we need one hemisphere (in humans and many animals, the
>>>> left) to pay narrow attention to detail, to grab hold of things we 
>>>> need, while the other, the right, keeps an eye out for everything 
>>>> else. The result is that one hemisphere is good 
>>>> at/*_/utilising/_*/the world, the other better 
>>>> at/*_/understanding/_*/it.///
>>>>
>>>> /Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or 
>>>> narrow, sustained or piecemeal, attention has the power to alter 
>>>> whatever it meets. The play of attention can both create and 
>>>> destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged. How you attend to 
>>>> something – or don’t attend to it – matters a very great deal."/
>>>>
>>>> Preceding from Iain McGilchrist's/Ways of Attending/. I am a big fan of McGilchrist and his book The Master and his Emissary and, I expect, the just ordered two volume,/The Matter with Things/.
>>>>
>>>> Just throwing some things to see if they stick against anyone's walls and prompts some conversation.
>>>>
>>>> Also, big fan of/The Dawn of Everything/mentioned on the list in the last couple of days. I think it has some valuable information and insights that would inform a lot of conversations on this list with regard sociopolitical organization and means of effecting change.
>
>
> --
> Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙
>
>
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