Is it Metaphysics or Science Fiction...?

[Terrapin Station]

@Terrapin Station
What do you mean by, 'Huh?' Do you disagree with me or not follow what I am trying to say?

Both to some extent. Partially because you seemed to be both avoiding answering straightforwardly and avoiding thinking about what you were saying in comparative context.

Let's say that we're talking about the relationship of a tire to a car. Aren't we talking about something visible? (And before you answer, think about what's going on when you're talking about something that you would say is visible, assuming you'd say anything is--otherwise that can't work for making a distinction here.)

[JackDaydream]

@Terrapin Station
I am not wishing to avoid speaking or thinking about anything and find the issue of the visible and invisible to be fascinating. As far as a tire to a car, the tire only works as an aspect of driving. In this way, it is about the processes. It is about understanding what lies behind what becomes manifest in life. For example, with Wifi there is the essential equipment but the actual transfer involves what cannot be seen as information is transferred.

In a similar way, changes in life involve processes which take place, but it is about an interplay of shifts in the physical world, including the three dimensions, as well as time, or even many more aspects. So, it may go right back to where the thread started from, with the idea of the multiverse, as a possibility...

[Steve3007]

viewtopic.php?p=399241#p399241

Basically if we're making an instrumentalist interpretation of the mathematics (and the entire process re doing experiments etc.), we're still making an interpretation.

I agree.

Also, MWI/multiverses can still be instrumentalist rather than something making an ontological commitment. You can parse that is more of an "as if" visualization tool.

Yes, the many worlds hypothesis, as invoked in QM, could still be instrumentalist, but in my experience it's not. As I said it seems to be invoked as an attempt to (as I put it before) "rescue reality". That is, to be able to say what is really happening rather than just to be able to say what the results of some experiments appear to be. We discussed this kind of thing in slightly more depth here, but in that topic couldn't get past your view that mathematics was being reified.

[Terrapin Station]

@Terrapin Station
I am not wishing to avoid speaking or thinking about anything and find the issue of the visible and invisible to be fascinating. As far as a tire to a car, the tire only works as an aspect of driving. In this way, it is about the processes. It is about understanding what lies behind what becomes manifest in life. For example, with Wifi there is the essential equipment but the actual transfer involves what cannot be seen as information is transferred.

So how would the same thing not be true of the sciences? In which case this doesn't at all work as an attempt to make a distinction between metaphysics and the sciences.

[JackDaydream]

@Terrapin Station
Some people have come up with some fairly good distinctions between physics and metaphysics during the thread discussion. However, I would argue that the edges of this are fuzzy because models within physics rely on descriptions, words and imagination. They are may contain very useful explanations but they still are ways in which human beings construct pictures of systems and processes.

[Terrapin Station]

@Terrapin Station
Some people have come up with some fairly good distinctions between physics and metaphysics during the thread discussion. However, I would argue that the edges of this are fuzzy because models within physics rely on descriptions, words and imagination. They are may contain very useful explanations but they still are ways in which human beings construct pictures of systems and processes.

The point, really, is that metaphysics has nothing at all to do with "not visible" contra science. And it doesn't refer to anything in the vein of "beyond science," "phenomena that transcend science," etc. Or anything mystical, etc.

[Consul]

Metaphysics has been defined as the theoretical science of being (scientia theoretica de ente – Franz Albert Aepinus, 1710), the speculative science of being (scientia speculativa entis – Pierre Bayle, 1737), the contemplative science of being (scientia contemplativa entis – Anselm Schnell, 1744).

(Note that Bayle didn't use "speculative" in the pejorative sense of "merely conjectural"!)

Whether metaphysics is truly a science, i.e. a knowledge-producing discipline, depends centrally on the possibility of synthetic knowledge a priori.

Anyway, the epistemically neutral word studium (study) may be substituted for scientia (science): Metaphysica est studium theoreticum/speculativum/contemplativum entis. (Metaphysics is the theoretical/speculative/contemplative study of being.)

However, the natural sciences have a theoretical department too; so what's the difference between metaphysics and natural science? The concept of theory as used in natural science is such that in order for theorizing to be scientific, it must be grounded or rooted in empirical facts.
In order for a hypothesis or theory to be grounded or rooted in empirical facts, there must be a logical relation, an inferential connection between them in the form of deduction, induction, or abduction (deductive, inductive, or abductive arguments).

So one can say that what makes the difference between metaphysical and scientific theorizing is its degree of empirical grounding, i.e. how strongly or firmly it is rooted in observational or experimental data. Depending on the respective degrees or strengths of empirical grounding, one metaphysical theory can more or less metaphysical than another; and one scientific theory can be more or less scientific than another.

By the way, what needs to be mentioned from the linguistic, particularly etymological perspective is that the words theory, speculation, and contemplation (and also intuition and consideration) all have something to do with vision, with sight (and insight),with seeing, looking, watching. But in the philosophical context the kind of vision in question isn't sensory vision but intellectual vision (visio intellectualis – Cusanus) with the intellectual or mental eye ("the mind's eye") (oculus intellectualis – Aquinas).

QUOTE>
"CONTEMPLATE/CONTEMPLATION:
To observe (from Latin, contemplare); the templum (related to temple) being a space or arch – the arch of the sky; to ‘contemplate’ is to literally look at or study the heavens and their course, hence, to regard intently, to meditate or reflectively think to oneself (to be in awe at what offers itself for thought – the Greek vision of the sacred cosmos, Augustine’s vision of the City of God (De Civitate Dei), Dante’s vision of Beatrice, or Kant’s similar vision of the lawfulness of planetary motion).

For Plato and Aristotle, contemplation expressed the form of life most conducive to human eudaimonia (hence a life of well-being, contentment, happiness). The bios theoretikos was, of course, the life of speculative thought and philosophy that allowed the philosopher to see into the heart of the matter. What such a life presupposed was the material conditions that enabled one class of society to engage in theory and contemplation. The life of theory presupposed slavery or forced labour. If speculation is a product of a society that created free time, what we would call the spiritual life has its dark horizon in unacknowledged forms of servility.

In religious contexts contemplation is one of the many spiritual exercises designed to empty the mind of corporeal connections and desires, purifying the soul as a way of identifying with the Godhead. A contemplative attitude toward the universe, knowledge and moral life is characteristic of both Western and Eastern mysticism – informing many of the currents of thought in contemporary culture."
(pp. 221-2)

"INSIGHT:
Seeing into the essence of things; the power of eidetic discernment (eidetic intuition)."
(p. 363)

"INTUITION:
1. From Latin, intueri, ‘to look at’ or contemplate (thus the German term Anschauung literally means seeing into), an immediate grasping of whatever is directly and immediately given to the mind. Intuition is also: a hunch; derivatively, an instinctive feel for some situation, phenomenon, relation; an ungrounded vision (but not thereby a ‘groundless’ vision); a guess; whatever is prior to and sustains analytic forms of reasonableness (for example, the possible contents of Charles S. Peirce’s category of firstness). Many different currents of epistemology concur that the work of some form of direct intuition unmediated by words, concepts or discursive argumentation (sensibility, knowledge-by-acquaintance, concrete perception, eidetic seeing, feeling, etc) takes priority over the faculty of thinking and intellectual experience (for example, in Schopenhauer’s privileging of perceptual intuition over rational knowledge or the ‘intuitionism’ defended by the Dutch mathematicians, L.E.J. Brouwer (1881–1966) and A. Heyting (1898–1980)).

2. Intuition in empiricism is the primary means by which we gain evidence – and perhaps knowledge – of the existence of particular things: defined by the unmediated schema of visual perception, intuition is supposed to ‘present’ objects to the mind (typically in the form of representative ‘ideas’ or ‘impressions’) with no admixture of signs or thought. Another expression for the data of intuition is ‘the given’, whatever is intuited as ‘mental entities’. In a Kantian idiom, intuitions are the ways in which our senses are affected by an object (1997/2001: 151). The doctrine is parodied in Nietzsche’s phrase, the myth of immaculate perception.

3 . Descartes inverted this older understanding of sensory experience and sensory intuition, rejecting the Aristotelian idea that whatever is in the intellect must first put in an appearance before the senses. As part of his rationalist critique of empiricism, intuition is seen as a faculty of pure intellect that gives the mind unmediated access to innate ideas:
—
By intuition I understand not the unstable testimony of the senses, nor the deceptive judgment of the imagination with its useless constructions; but a conception of a pure and attentive mind so easy and so distinct that no doubt at all remains about that which we are understanding. Or, what amounts to the same thing, intuition is the indubitable conception of a pure and attentive mind, which comes from the light of reason alone and is more certain even than deduction because it is simpler ... Thus everyone can see by intuition that he exists, that a triangle is bounded by only three sides, a sphere by a single surface, and other similar facts (Rules for the Direction of the Mind (1628), Rule 3; for a modified translation, see Cottingham, Stoothoff and Murdoch, eds, 1998: 3).
—
4. Descartes’ revision of the grammar of ‘intuition’ prepares the way for the doctrine of ‘intellectual intuition’ (or categorical intuition) in modern philosophy. Both sensuous (empiricist) and categorial (rationalist) connotations are ambivalently preserved in the German philosophical term Anschauung, popularized most persuasively and powerfully in the late eighteenth century by Immanuel Kant. For Kant, intuition is whatever is primarily intuited (primary data, immediacy, presence, the givens of sensibility, the self-evident data of common sense, etc). Here intuition
is not a purely receptive faculty; rather, intuition is always informed by the work of understanding (or ‘concepts’ in Kant’s usage): ‘intuitions without concepts are blind’ (Critique of Pure Reason, 1933, A51/B75). ‘Space’ and ‘time’ are conceptualized as the two forms of pure intuition.

It has been the dream of philosophers since the beginnings of Greek philosophy to comprehend the truth of things in one intuitive ‘catch’. The idea that the world as a totality might be grasped ‘intuitively’ becomes the ‘object’ of world-intuition, and ultimately the basis of a Weltanschauung.

Privileging ‘intuitive’ cognition reappears in the ‘self-evidence of intuition’ (in the early phenomenology of Edmund Husserl or the mathematical foundationalism of L.E.J. Brouwer (‘intuitionism’): the most basic categories of mathematical order are, according to Brouwer, given as immediately known, intuitive terms. Brouwer may well have derived this view from Schopenhauer who writes: ‘there will be no doubt that the evidence of mathematics, which has become the pattern and symbol of all evidence, rests essentially not on proofs, but on immediate intuition or perception. Here, as everywhere, that is the ultimate ground and source of all truth’ (1966, vol. 1: 76). The ‘bedrock’ that we reach when argument and demonstration is exhausted is what we invoke with the term ‘originary intuition’ (an analogous argument runs through many of the sections of Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) especially in relation to the concept of proof in mathematics).

Husserl frequently speaks of Anschauung in its primary sense as a direct seeing of essences, construing the idea of categorical intuition along the model of our perception of visible spatiotemporal objects (of external thing perception). Schopenhauer defended a similar doctrine: ‘All ultimate, i.e., original, evidence is one of intuitive perception, as the word already discloses’ (1966, vol, 1: 65). But unlike Schopenhauer’s, the Husserlian notion of Anschauung is given a broader meaning than perceptual intuition to include every thing that can be ‘given’ to consciousness in pure immanence (hence the noematic ‘objects’ of imagination, fantasy, recollection, and so on, as well as perceptual consciousness of spatiotemporal things; cf. for example, ‘Psychological Studies in the Elements of Logic’ (1894), in 1994: 139–70, especially 148–54). In the middle of his intellectual odyssey Husserl appears to have viewed his doctrine of the ‘intuition of essences’ as his most significant contribution to philosophy and the way out of the crisis of scepticism – and by generalization, the crisis of Western reason. Husserl’s faith in categorical intuition as the basis of transcendental logic is still alive and unquestioned in such late works as Experience and Judgement, Formal and Transcendental Logic, and his last manuscripts collectively known as The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936/1970a).

5. A post-Cartesian and now broadly phenomenological criterion of truth or certainty: the ‘lived-temporality’ of retentional and protentional modalities of consciousness in Husserl’s The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1964a) and subsequent works. Husserl formulates ‘the principle of all principles’ as: ‘every originarily giving intuition [is] a source of legitimation for knowledge; everything that presents itself to us in “intuition” originarily (in its bodily actuality, so to speak) [is] simply to be accepted as it gives itself, but also only within the limits in which it gives itself there …’ (Ideas 1, section 24; cited in Heidegger, 1978: 382).

6. Henri Bergson’s terminological solution for the traditional static, dualistic, bifurcational ‘problems of metaphysics’: to help the mind to return from intellect and rational conceptualization to the primary flowing sources of living intuition, the insight gained by attending to the flowing ‘duration’ of consciousness, the involuntary surges of memory and the élan vital of the life process itself. Bergson tried to give intuition the founding role in a spiritual philosophy of creative evolution (in his Creative Evolution of 1907). The fact that Bergsonism failed in its project does not discredit the claims of intuition (but it sinks the original idealist project of intuitionism)."
(pp. 367-9)

SPECULATE/SPECULATION/SPECTATOR:
From the Latin spectare or speculari, to look at or behold; whence, spectator, spectre (appearances, presences, manifestations). Specula also means a watch-tower, from where we can ‘speculate’, observe from a distance, engage in mental guess-work, entertain an ‘elevated’ train of thought; also closely linked with this group of terms is the word speculum or mirror (giving the metaphoric sense of ‘speculation’ as the intellect’s reflective act of turning thought back upon itself, and hence the grammatical thicket associated with the terms reflection, reflexivity and theorizing. Given this semantic complex, we can construct a description of videological metaphysics as fundamentally ‘spectatorial’, advocating a ‘spectator theory of knowledge’ (a visual ontology of the ‘link’ between ‘mind’ and ‘world’) and licensing a predominantly cognitive or intellectual image of social and ethicopolitical life. The spectator watches rather than acts, sees rather than makes. Needless to say, this mirror-reflection image of speculation does not exhaust the possible meanings of the idea of speculative thought (indeed without speculation and the imaginative resources it involves, there would be no art, craft, science or philosophy)."
(p. 550)

"THEORY:
Greek theoria, to look, observe, view, spectate, from theoros or thearos (probably a synthesis of thea and horao), a spectator (the Latin equivalent being ‘spectare’ from which we derive the English words spectator and speculation). Hence to theorize is to attend from the standpoint of an onlooker, to look into some topic, problem or thesis, as that which elicits wonder, curiosity, interest (originally the activities of an ambassador from one city-state visiting the spectacles and festivals of another city-state).

Theorizing, from theorein, is thus at root the process or activity of looking – in the sense of ‘beholding’, of wondering and questioning (theasthai, thaumazein). The theoros is both the spectator at a theatre and one who travels in order to see strange and wonderful things. The place for so-seeing or beholding being the theatron (in its ritual and religious roots, the theatre was once a place of wonder – as, for example, in the mythological and religious dramas of the Greek theatre).

The passion for theoria, later identified with the word philosophia, is conventionally dated to the beginnings of astronomy and the desire to see into the wonder of the cosmos. The founding hero of theory in this sense is said to be Thales of Miletus (624–544 BCE). From these anecdotal stories we see that the first and last thesis of theoria is the wonder before the presence of Being, the wonder that Being sustains and nurtures beings, including the being that wonders and participates with others in sharing this wonder. To theorize in its original sense is thus to ask questions not merely of beings, but of the whole that is called kosmos and phusis.

Theoria would later be understood as the activity of contemplation (contemplatio) or speculative knowledge: the object of the most supreme form of life, the vita contemplativa or ‘life of contemplation’ (see Aristotle,Nicomachean Ethics, 2003, 10.7.1 17 7a19 –b26 and throughout the Metaphysics).

From the optic of a secular age, ‘theory’ is defined more instrumentally as a hypothetical framework of scientific concepts capable of generating networks of interlinked variables (and thereby ‘generalizations’, ‘explanations’ and other cognitive instruments). The COED gives the following glosses: (1) a supposition or a system of ideas intended to explain something, especially one based on general principles independent of the thing to be explained; (2) an idea accounting for or justifying something; and (3) a set of principles on which an activity is based.

Used in the singular, a theory is often thought to be a specific proposition (or set of propositions) relating manifest effects to underlying causes."
(pp. 571-2)

(Sandywell, Barry. Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.)
<QUOTE

[JackDaydream]

@Consul
I read your post here and the extract from Bayle is excellent, so I hope that some others see it too. Intuition and contemplation may be undervalued by many within the philosophy of the twentieth and twenty first century.

[Consul]

I read your post here and the extract from Bayle is excellent, so I hope that some others see it too. Intuition and contemplation may be undervalued by many within the philosophy of the twentieth and twenty first century.

The question of the a priori: Is purely intellectual or rational intuition/contemplation/speculation a source of knowledge (especially knowledge of nonanalytic/synthetic truths)?

Intuition: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuition/

[3017Metaphysician]

I read your post here and the extract from Bayle is excellent, so I hope that some others see it too. Intuition and contemplation may be undervalued by many within the philosophy of the twentieth and twenty first century.

The question of the a priori: Is purely intellectual or rational intuition/contemplation/speculation a source of knowledge (especially knowledge of nonanalytic/synthetic truths)?

Intuition: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuition/

Consul!

Indeed! As a direct example of a 'logical' form of intuition, one can wonder how synthetic a priori propositions/judgements are even possible(?). The infamous judgement 'all events must have a cause' seems to be certain, yet not so certain. In any case, those same synthetic a priori judgements are what causes one to advance a theory about a some-thing. It's pragmatic, yet metaphysical.

[JackDaydream]

@3017metaphysician
The nature of intuitions and a priori propositions does seem such an extraordinary possibility, beyond the material world, that it may suggest that metaphysics points to some kind of objective reality beyond human constructs. It is of a different nature to the world of causes and physics but it may be an important aspect of the idea of there being more to reality than the physical world. I am not sure that everyone would see it in that way but it is something which I wonder about.

[3017Metaphysician]

@3017metaphysician
The nature of intuitions and a priori propositions does seem such an extraordinary possibility, beyond the material world, that it may suggest that metaphysics points to some kind of objective reality beyond human constructs. It is of a different nature to the world of causes and physics but it may be an important aspect of the idea of there being more to reality than the physical world. I am not sure that everyone would see it in that way but it is something which I wonder about.

Jack!

It's really not, a priori propositions themselves being part of the discourse; it's the synthetic a priori that is so perplexing... . Accordingly, say, in the physical sciences, that similar sense of intuition/wonder in this case, about causation, seems to be logically necessary to advance any given theory. Synthetic judgements/proposition's are most often used because they can be tested. So, the metaphysical judgement not only involves the ultimate nature of reality itself (causation) but why we even have that sense of wonderment and/or care to even posit such a judgement (Qualia) to begin with... .

The takeaway there is that you end-up having two components to metaphysical phenomena (Kantian intuition) to parse. One is Qualia itself (the thing called 'wonder' or intuition), and the thing called 'causation'. Wonder is part of Affect Consciousness and Causation involves the nature of reality and existing things. Both are Metaphysical concepts.

Affect Consciousness (to include one's sense of wonder/intuition/Qualia):

These four abilities are operationalized as degrees of awareness, tolerance, emotional (nonverbal) expression, and conceptual (verbal) expression of each of the following eleven affect categories:[4]

1.Interest/Excitement
2.Enjoyment/Joy
3.Fear/Panic
4.Anger/Rage
5.Shame/Humiliation
6.Contempt/Condescension
7.Disgust/Revulsion
8.Sadness/Despair
9.Envy/Jealousy
10.Guilt/Remorse
11.Tenderness/Care


Universal Causation:

1. Nothing takes place without a cause
2.The magnitude of an effect is proportional to the magnitude of its cause
3.To every action there is an equal and opposed reaction.

If all effects are the result of previous causes, then the cause of a given effect must itself be the effect of a previous cause, which itself is the effect of a previous cause, and so on, forming an infinite logical chain of events that can have no beginning.

Exception for the Universal Causation - First Cause is sometimes pointed out to be logically necessary for it to not contradict itself. Infinite chain of events is hard to conceive in finite world. The answer is looped chain of events. But this is also questioned as the whole loop would have no cause. However it can not be ruled out that the Universe is infinite in time.



Philosophical questions: What causes intuition and why should we care? Are synthetic propositions/judgements necessary for theoretical physics? The concepts and feelings of intuition, wonder and causation (time/space) itself, are they considered physical or metaphysical or both?

[JackDaydream]

@3017Metaphysician
The whole way in which you describe the sense of wonder/ intuition and qualia makes me ask what are human beings and what is human consciousness? Intuition and caring are bound up with human meanings and I wonder how this fits in within larger metaphysics or contexts of meaning and interpretations. Ideas about wonder, intuition and causation may be much larger aspects of metaphysics, and may involve 'out there' realities, but it human beings who realise these possibilities, so it may lead to the question of who who we are and what we are within any grand scheme of meaning or significance? Do we think that we are of greater significance than we are, or are humans a central part of the way consciousness is realised in the metaphysical or cosmic drama?

[3017Metaphysician]

@3017Metaphysician
The whole way in which you describe the sense of wonder/ intuition and qualia makes me ask what are human beings and what is human consciousness? Intuition and caring are bound up with human meanings and I wonder how this fits in within larger metaphysics or contexts of meaning and interpretations. Ideas about wonder, intuition and causation may be much larger aspects of metaphysics, and may involve 'out there' realities, but it human beings who realise these possibilities, so it may lead to the question of who who we are and what we are within any grand scheme of meaning or significance? Do we think that we are of greater significance than we are, or are humans a central part of the way consciousness is realised in the metaphysical or cosmic drama?

Jack!

Well, remember in biology, the origin(s) of life is described as information (axiom). In that sense, genetic information or genetically coded information. And biological life forms are both physical and metaphysical (abstract structures of consciousness/sentience). Intuition, wonder, the Will, and other sentience qualities (Qualia) of conscious life forms are metaphysical 'in nature'.

With respect to your "out there" reality, sure, mathematics (the laws of the universe) has often times been argued as having an timeless/changeless/eternal independent existence (a priori).

And sure, things/theories like Emergence, Evolutionary Biology, Teleology, Anthropy and so forth all relate to how something from nothing can involve consciousness. Kind of like the BB Singularity, other than primordial soup, no one really knows why/where conscious/biological life forms initially came from... . Aside from primordial soup, Darwinism doesn't posit the initial cause. It only extrapolates from an existing ensemble of coveting species. Other than ToE, the last hurdle for science is conscious existence.

[JackDaydream]

@3017Metaphysician
It seems as if we are back to the mystery of existence. I wonder if there is more to unconscious aspects of existence than many people realise. Of course, I am partly coming from the idea of Jung's collective unconscious. But in some emergent views of consciousness it almost seems that consciousness is seen as an add on feature whereas it may be that there is some underlying consciousness which is primary. Some thinkers have thought that the world of consciousness preceeded descent into the material world. I am not sure that this is what happened but sometimes I do wonder about it as a possibility.