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Goodbye Jesus

Logic Is An Act Of Love


Llwellyn

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1.  Thanks for adding some intermediate posts -- I hate to be the nut who repeatedly posts on her same thread.  But I can't avoid being the nut who repeatedly edits her post.  Let me see if I can walk you down the primrose path:  To take a simple example of random error experimentation. If you had a high school physics class of ten students making ten measurements each of the mass of a large granite stone, and then combine all the measurements and plot the hundred measurements on a graph, you would find that the various measurements would make a normal distribution ("bell curve").  If we exchanged one scientific tool for another one, the same result.  No method of measurement is completely error free.  What we prove to be the mass is the mean that the students collectively have noted.  Objective facts can be known;  it is not true that "everything is subjective," or as some put it, "there is no scientific proof, establishment of knowledge."  Proven truth is known stochastically.

 

2.  From this evidence, you could infer one of three possibilities:  (1)  Observational error -- there were errors in the students' ability to measure the fixed mass.  (2)  The human observations were perfect, but the stone itself was randomly changing masses.  (3)  Or you could conjecture that both things were happening -- both observational error and a certain constant swerving of the mass of the stone.  And even if there was some proposed law by which the mass swerves (in 2 and 3), if we attempted to measure that law, we would again find errors from any definite formulas.  We would find errors all the way down, as the particle physicists tell us.  And now let's switch gears for a moment and consider some quite different observations...

 

3.  Consider the following six facts:  (1)  There is biological and astronomical variety -- contrary to the proposal of repeating multiverses, "arbitrary heterogeneity is the feature of the universe the most manifest and characteristic."  (2)  There is spontaneous growth -- "the principle of evolution requires no extraneous cause."  There is no Platonic form of the oak tree;  the oak tree was not preordained from before.  (3)  There is self-consciousness, mind and flow of thought;  the universe is aware of itself.  (4)  There is physical law -- law is a specification which is not, in principle, inexplicable.  (5)  This briar patch of an environment is so well-suited in every way for our animal flourishing.  (6)  We discover that every challenge is an opportunity;  every curse can be experienced as a blessing.  Dewey:  "If a favor done us by the environment conceals a threat, so its disfavor is a potential means of hitherto unexperienced modes of success."  The value of every experience lies on the balance of animal choice and intelligence.

 

4.  Now in the past scientists like Newton chose inference number one in the second paragraph -- all error is observational error.  But it's not clear that possibility one involves fewer assumptions than possibility two.  Between all three possibilities, the third one actually involves the fewest assumptions -- it involves no assumptions, just description of observations.  It speaks only of the known "practical bearings."  We have never had a single observation that could exclude the possibility that there is an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature.  Therefore we have no reason to suppose that it is not true.  To exclude it is pious dogma.  Our science and practice do not require us to deny it -- as is illustrated by the high school laboratory experiment which yields proof.  Tychism is consistent with Ockham's razor, the lex parsimoniae:  among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

 

5.  We see that the evidence should dispose us to accept Tychism because Tychism assumes nothing.  But we also have a positive reason for believing it.  By allowing for the possibility of "the imperfect cogency of the law itself," you exchange Themis for Tyche (to use personifications of law and chance).  Without Tyche troubling the waters, if it was just for Themis guarding the perfect stillness, then you wouldn't see any of these six familiar and ubiquitous observations.  If Tyche were at play, those six observations would be a matter of course.   "It is not of the nature of uniformity to originate variation, nor of law to beget circumstance.  When we gaze upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of a living spontaneity."  It is a conjecture to the best explanation -- abductive logic.  Case proved:  "The universe is happening today also."  This is all evolutionary cosmology need mean.  It could mean much more, but this is all it need mean.

 

6.  Yet, I think that the six observations in paragraph one are signs that one can take as proof.  If what I am saying is true -- that the universe is itself not a rational thing -- then the way anyone is persuaded to this point of view is not strictly speaking rational.  If you ask me to show you "the reason and rationality underpinning it," then you are asking me to show you your belief and not my own.  The way you frame your requirement determines what will be shown.  Tychism cannot be proven in that framework where logic is assumed to be part of the essential nature of reality.  What sporting chance means is to be not pinned.  But, if what I am saying is true, the universe has never been underpinned, although our ancestors have concluded it was, and we have believed them.  The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Let us form our own thoughts based on the evidence.

 

7.  The reasons, like all reasons, are moral, that is to say, human.  What we know to be mass is an aggregation of random activity that is the most pronounced to us when we inquire from where we are, who we are, what we've made ourselves.  In the words of Dewey, "The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction."  "There is no undergoing which is not on our part also a going on and a going through.  Experience, in other words, is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings.  Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events;  our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves."  This way of thinking explores what we can say and what we should admit based on the facts and evidence around us.  We are, as Emerson said, "embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature."

 

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Llwellyn, that was a very helpful post. I'm going to look through it more carefully and get back to you when I have the time to give it the response it deserves. But in the meantime, thank you very much for providing such a clear and detailed explanation of what is being discussed.

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So, if there's no grounds for doing so L, why do cosmologists and theoretical physicists propose the existence of repeating multiverses?

 

Where are they going wrong?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Barrow

 

"No matter how small the probability of an event occurring, so long as that number is non-zero when multiplied by infinity it will give infinity.  This is the number of occurrences of that event that will be be found in an infinite universe." 

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http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html

 

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/PDF/multiverse_sciam.pdf

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Why are they writing these things?

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Not all professional physicists and biologists accept the wild cosmological speculation of repeating multiverses.  Consider the physicist Stephen Hawking and the biologist Ernst Mayr.  

 

I'm sure there are grounds for proposing the idea of identical repetition.  There is no sincerely held opinion that is so wrong that we couldn't learn something from it.  I conjecture that his opinion of identical repetition is a sincere opinion.  By sincere opinion, I mean that it is animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one solution to each question to which a scientist applies the processes.  But it is perplexing to see a scientist describe reiteration when naturalists have never observed a second identical iteration of any event, even the smallest.  Quite the opposite is observed -- "heterogeneity is the feature of the universe the most manifest and characteristic."  Why would you turn away from that and imagine that the universe just reiterates mechanically infinitely?

 

Stephen Hawking said that scientists have married themselves to the idea of immutable scientific law, including the law of causality.  "Many scientists are like Einstein, in that they have a deep emotional attachment to determinism."  It's impossible not to admire the force of character involved in committing oneself to one's chosen and proposing it to be reiterated identically across infinite universes.  What's not to admire about that love?  But I think the theory may come from a lack of imagination where it is too straining to consider how the universe is happening.  It is easier to simply say that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and thus they cannot be explained.  Something is wrong if the only way they can imagine the application of infinity is infinite repetition rather than infinite variation.  Why?

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Not all professional physicists and biologists accept the wild cosmological speculation of repeating multiverses.  Consider the physicist Stephen Hawking and the biologist Ernst Mayr.  
 
I'm sure there are grounds for proposing the idea of identical repetition.  There is no sincerely held opinion that is so wrong that we couldn't learn something from it.  I conjecture that his opinion of identical repetition is a sincere opinion.  By sincere opinion, I mean that it is animated by a cheerful hope that the processes of investigation, if only pushed far enough, will give one solution to each question to which a scientist applies the processes.  But it is perplexing to see a scientist describe reiteration when naturalists have never observed a second identical iteration of any event, even the smallest.  Quite the opposite is observed -- "heterogeneity is the feature of the universe the most manifest and characteristic."  Why would you turn away from that and imagine that the universe just reiterates mechanically infinitely?
 
Stephen Hawking said that scientists have married themselves to the idea of immutable scientific law, including the law of causality.  "Many scientists are like Einstein, in that they have a deep emotional attachment to determinism."  It's impossible not to admire the force of character involved in committing oneself to one's chosen and proposing it to be reiterated identically across infinite universes.  What's not to admire about that love?  But I think the theory may come from a lack of imagination where it is too straining to consider how the universe is happening.  It is easier to simply say that the laws of nature are immutable and ultimate facts, and thus they cannot be explained.  Something is wrong if the only way they can imagine the application of infinity is infinite repetition rather than infinite variation.  Why?

 

 

Llwellyn,

 

I need to think some more about this.

But one thing has bugged me for some time about this thread.  An event cannot have an infinite number of possible outcomes if there is such a thing as a 'law' in operation.  If there were infinite possible outcomes, then we would observe an infinite range of possible outcomes occurring.  We would see gravity pulling planets into cubes rather than into spheres.  No outcome, no matter how bizarre, would be ruled out.  But we don't see that happening.  What we do see is that events are indeterminate, but that quality of indeterminacy doesn't mean that an infinite range of outcomes are possible.  It only means that we cannot know the outcomes.  So indeterminacy doesn't equal infinity.  And I seem to see Peirce's notion of variescence implying an infinite range of outcomes, rather than a limited but unknown (indeterminate) range of outcomes.

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Also, the Cosmological principle invokes homogeneity, not heterogeneity.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_principle

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homogeneity_(physics)

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory (The ergodic distribution of matter is assumed in the simplest form of Multiverse, the kind I have confined myself to in this thread.) 

 

"A central concern of ergodic theory is the behavior of a dynamical system when it is allowed to run for a long time. The first result in this direction is the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which claims that almost all points in any subset of the phase space eventually revisit the set."

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Yes, something is wrong L and I don't know what it is or why.

 

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Could this be relevant?

 

C.S. Peirce lived from 1839 - 1914.

But, Einstein published his theory of General Relativity in 1915, doing so in the then-prevailing belief that the universe was fixed and static (not expanding), was eternal (not originating 13.7 billion years ago) and that the Milky Way galaxy was the entirety of the universe.  In 1923 Edwin Hubble discovered the existence of other galaxies and then in the 1930's he found that the universe was expanding.  These findings forced Einstein to re-evaluate his work and accept the notion of a non-eternal, expanding universe.  Since then, with better telescopes, we now know that the universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic.

 

Therefore, Peirce cannot have known that the observable universe is non-eternal and expanding, yet also uniformly distributed in all directions.

 

So his notion of variescence cannot have taken into account what is now known about the universe.

 

Is this significant?  

 

 

 

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And I seem to see Peirce's notion of variescence implying an infinite range of outcomes, rather than a limited but unknown (indeterminate) range of outcomes.

 

When we see "gravity pulling planets into cubes rather than into spheres," this observation is explained away
 
If in a moment at a certain locale the law of gravity swerved to pull a particle into a formation which would be like a cube, at a place adjacent to it, you would see something completely different.  With the laws of physics being routinely violated in every impossible increment, your experience would fix on the generals rather than on the errors.  "The conclusions of science make no pretense to being more than probable, and considering that a probable inference can at most only suppose something to be most frequently, or otherwise approximately, true, but never that anything is precisely true without exception throughout the universe."  The errors would have no application.  Peirce says:  "In very many cases, especially in practical problems, we deliberately go upon theories which we know are not exactly true, but which have the advantage of a simplicity which enables us to deduce their consequences."  Theories do not satisfy every feature of the facts, just the consequent facts.  Relevance is a moral judgment, that is to say, a human judgment.  
 
If anything, quantum theory is more than ever proving Peirce right that:  "Try to verify any law of nature, and you will find that the more precise your observations, the more certain they will be to show irregular departures from the law."  The Uncertainty Principle implies that every region of space should be full of tiny virtual black holes, which appear and disappear again.  As Stephen Hawking says, "The loss of particles and information down black holes meant that the particles that came out were random. One could calculate probabilities, but one could not make any definite predictions."  Hawking again:  "Although quantum mechanics has been around for nearly 70 years, it is still not generally understood or appreciated, even by those that use it to do calculations. Yet it should concern us all, because it is a completely different picture of the physical universe, and of reality itself."  I must admit, I know almost nothing about quantum behavior, so I have to take Hawking's word for it.  Karl Popper writes:  "I am an indeterminist-like Peirce, Compton, and most other contemporary physicists; and I believe, with most of them, that Einstein was mistaken in trying to hold fast to determinism."
 
I have no complaint with the Cosmological Principle -- it is an expectation that "the part of the universe which we can see is a fair sample."  Surely this is just an extension of common sense.  If you are standing in a forest on one side of a valley and look to the forest  at the other side of the valley, you would certainly be right to believe that the other forest was like your forest.  But if you compared every two leaves, two stones, in your forest and saw them each to be different, you would be dead wrong to imagine that the other forest was exactly like your forest.  If we can't even expect an iteration of a forest in an adjacent locale, then what would make us think that it could be established that there are multiple identical universes?  Mathematical formulas?  "Those observations which are generally adduced in favor of mechanical causation simply prove that there is an element of regularity in nature, and have no bearing whatever upon the question of whether such regularity is exact and universal or not. Nay, in regard to this exactitude, all observation is directly opposed to it; and the most that can be said is that a good deal of this observation can be explained away."
 
I do think there is some connection between a belief in a "beginning" -- like the Big Bang -- and a belief that physical law, like gravity, is mandatory.  Peirce puts it like this:  "You think all the arbitrary specifications of the universe were introduced in one dose, in the beginning, if there was a beginning, and that the variety and complication of nature has always been just as much as it is now. But I, for my part, think that the diversification, the specification, has been continually taking place."  If the universe has a beginning, it becomes easier to avoid effort of appreciating the irregularities.  Atheists agree that regularities happened by chance.  -- whether at the time of the establishment of the universe at the time of the Big Bang, at the establishment of latent potentiality, or under their present establishment.  Peirce is just describing how chance is happening the universe:  "I make use of chance chiefly to make room for a principle of generalization, or tendency to form habits, which I hold has produced all regularities. The mechanical philosopher leaves the whole specification of the world utterly unaccounted for."
 
What I would disbelieve is that there are no errors to scientific law, or that those errors are really not errors because there is another yet unknown or unknowable scientific law that would explain them.  All errors are useless human errors.  This kind of thinking not only sets aside Tyche (chance) and Agape (love), but also Themis (law), and replaces them all with Ananke (invariance), clattering down the hallways of time.
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You trouble me, L.

 

I can make little sense of what you write and I don't know why this is.

 

I'm therefore taking time out and leaving this thread for a while, to observe from the side-lines how it evolves between you and Disillusioned.

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

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Hi again Llwellyn and BAA. I do apologize for my tardiness in replying to this thread. It's been a very busy few days at work for me. Sometimes things just pile up. But I have some time now, so I would like to offer some thoughts on your post, #76 Llwellyn.
 
 

1.  Thanks for adding some intermediate posts -- I hate to be the nut who repeatedly posts on her same thread.  But I can't avoid being the nut who repeatedly edits her post.  Let me see if I can walk you down the primrose path:  To take a simple example of random error experimentation. If you had a high school physics class of ten students making ten measurements each of the mass of a large granite stone, and then combine all the measurements and plot the hundred measurements on a graph, you would find that the various measurements would make a normal distribution ("bell curve").  If we exchanged one scientific tool for another one, the same result.  No method of measurement is completely error free.  What we prove to be the mass is the mean that the students collectively have noted.  Objective facts can be known;  it is not true that "everything is subjective," or as some put it, "there is no scientific proof, establishment of knowledge."  Proven truth is known stochastically.


This is a nice example. I like very much how you explain intrinsic errors and how they cannot be done away with entirely. However, the method of plotting the data gathered, discovering the normal distribution and finding the mean is, in itself, an attempt to apply law to our everyday lives. We apply mathematical laws in order to do science. Science implicitly assumes that mathematics is valid. Only if this is accepted does it follow that objective facts can be known.
 

2.  From this evidence, you could infer one of three possibilities:  (1)  Observational error -- there were errors in the students' ability to measure the fixed mass.  (2)  The human observations were perfect, but the stone itself was randomly changing masses.  (3)  Or you could conjecture that both things were happening -- both observational error and a certain constant swerving of the mass of the stone.  And even if there was some proposed law by which the mass swerves (in 2 and 3), if we attempted to measure that law, we would again find errors from any definite formulas.  We would find errors all the way down, as the particle physicists tell us.  And now let's switch gears for a moment and consider some quite different observations...


I think this is alright in principle, but it is probably not applicable to the example under consideration. If the mass of the stone were randomly changing, these fluctuations would likely be far too minute for any of the measuring instruments being used to detect. Hence, the simplest explanation for this example would seem to be #1.
 

3.  Consider the following six facts:  (1)  There is biological and astronomical variety -- contrary to the proposal of repeating multiverses, "arbitrary heterogeneity is the feature of the universe the most manifest and characteristic."  (2)  There is spontaneous growth -- "the principle of evolution requires no extraneous cause."  There is no Platonic form of the oak tree;  the oak tree was not preordained from before.  (3)  There is self-consciousness, mind and flow of thought;  the universe is aware of itself.  (4)  There is physical law -- law is a specification which is not, in principle, inexplicable.  (5)  This briar patch of an environment is so well-suited in every way for our animal flourishing.  (6)  We discover that every challenge is an opportunity;  every curse can be experienced as a blessing.  Dewey:  "If a favor done us by the environment conceals a threat, so its disfavor is a potential means of hitherto unexperienced modes of success."  The value of every experience lies on the balance of animal choice and intelligence.

 
I'm not sure that I agree with #4. Physical law may be inexplicable. Perhaps the reason that we find ourselves unable to formulate a theory of everything is that the true nature of physical law (if such exists) is incomprehensible to us. But perhaps not.
 

4.  Now in the past scientists like Newton chose inference number one in the second paragraph -- all error is observational error.  But it's not clear that possibility one involves fewer assumptions than possibility two.  Between all three possibilities, the third one actually involves the fewest assumptions -- it involves no assumptions, just description of observations.  It speaks only of the known "practical bearings."  We have never had a single observation that could exclude the possibility that there is an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature.  Therefore we have no reason to suppose that it is not true.  To exclude it is pious dogma.  Our science and practice do not require us to deny it -- as is illustrated by the high school laboratory experiment which yields proof.  Tychism is consistent with Ockham's razor, the lex parsimoniae:  among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.


I must disagree with you here. The third possibility fairly clearly encompasses both the first and the second. It takes their assumptions along with it. Hence it cannot have the fewest assumptions of the three. I agree that to exclude the notion of absolute chance is to assume too much, but to assume that it is present (which is what you claim in #3 when you say that both observational error and error due to the stone changing masses is present) is also to assume to much. If we are aiming for the fewest number of assumptions, we should should not conclude that both 1 and 2 are correct; we should rather conclude that it is possible that both are correct. We cannot disprove that both are correct, but neither can we prove it. We have very good reasons for thinking that 1) is true. I'm not so sure that our reasons for thinking 2) is true are as sound.
 

5.  We see that the evidence should dispose us to accept Tychism because Tychism assumes nothing.  But we also have a positive reason for believing it.  By allowing for the possibility of "the imperfect cogency of the law itself," you exchange Themis for Tyche (to use personifications of law and chance).  Without Tyche troubling the waters, if it was just for Themis guarding the perfect stillness, then you wouldn't see any of these six familiar and ubiquitous observations.  If Tyche were at play, those six observations would be a matter of course.   "It is not of the nature of uniformity to originate variation, nor of law to beget circumstance.  When we gaze upon the multifariousness of nature we are looking straight into the face of a living spontaneity."  It is a conjecture to the best explanation -- abductive logic.  Case proved:  "The universe is happening today also."  This is all evolutionary cosmology need mean.  It could mean much more, but this is all it need mean.

 
Again, I disagree. Tychism does not assume nothing. It does not merely allow for the possibility of random chance, it explicitly assumes that it is present. This is not an insignificant assumption.
 
One can also arrive at most of what is conjectured in 1-6 by taking a statistical approach to physical law. But again, as I've argued before, this type of approach is not to do away with the notion of law. It is simply to replace one kind of law with another. We rely on the laws of the mathematical systems that we use to describe nature. To posit chance is to simply appeal to the laws of chance. These are just a different kind of law. One can, of course, exchange one type of mathematical system for another, but unless we have a well-defined methodology and underlying mathematical framework for investigating and describing the Universe, we will never be able to make any sense at all. Our descriptions are imperfect. Perhaps they are imperfect of necessity. But to think that our rational thought should lead us to the conclusion that there is no rationality seems to me to be self-defeating. If there is no rationality, then why have the conversation?
 

6.  Yet, I think that the six observations in paragraph one are signs that one can take as proof.  If what I am saying is true -- that the universe is itself not a rational thing -- then the way anyone is persuaded to this point of view is not strictly speaking rational.  If you ask me to show you "the reason and rationality underpinning it," then you are asking me to show you your belief and not my own.  The way you frame your requirement determines what will be shown.  Tychism cannot be proven in that framework where logic is assumed to be part of the essential nature of reality.  What sporting chance means is to be not pinned.  But, if what I am saying is true, the universe has never been underpinned, although our ancestors have concluded it was, and we have believed them.  The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?  Let us form our own thoughts based on the evidence.

 
Fair enough. It may be that the universe is not rational, and we are attempting to impose rationality on it. But if this is the case, then it boots nothing to consider that it is the case. How would we do so? We would be devoid of our tools of inquiry. To call the arguments assembled above evidence is to impose rationality on what you specifically posit to be irrational. The mind boggles.
 

7.  The reasons, like all reasons, are moral, that is to say, human.  What we know to be mass is an aggregation of random activity that is the most pronounced to us when we inquire from where we are, who we are, what we've made ourselves.  In the words of Dewey, "The organism brings with it through its own structure, native and acquired, forces that play a part in the interaction."  "There is no undergoing which is not on our part also a going on and a going through.  Experience, in other words, is a matter of simultaneous doings and sufferings.  Our undergoings are experiments in varying the course of events;  our active tryings are trials and tests of ourselves."  This way of thinking explores what we can say and what we should admit based on the facts and evidence around us.  We are, as Emerson said, "embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature."
 

BinomialGaussian_1000.gif

 


This final paragraph brings me back to my central philosophy of logic. We have to start somewhere. We make the assumptions that we deem necessary. Our assumptions are good if they are useful and non-contradictory. I'm not sure that Tychism is either. Hence, I still wonder that Peirce, the eminent pragmatist, advocated it. Nevertheless, it could be true in some absolute sense, but if this were the case then I don't think it would be possible for me to know that it is true. But I still think there is an inherent contradiction in Tychism, in that it seems to posit on the one hand that reality is not underpinned by anything, and on the other that it underpins reality. But perhaps I am still struggling to understand it properly.

 

I will continue to consider this and post more thoughts as my schedule allows.

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 this type of approach is not to do away with the notion of law. It is simply to replace one kind of law with another. 

 

I guarantee you that chance will not be proven to you, and you will not be persuaded by it.  You don't need to believe in chance;  neither you nor I will be frustrated or disappointed if you don't.  I'm sure both of us, having taken physics classes, are well-familiar with the idea of scientific law and cause-and-effect.  I have physics textbooks on my shelf, and they are chock-a-block full of proof that uncertainty can be understood only as another way of describing the imprecision of our measurements.  Uncertainty is only provisional, there is an underlying scientific law that is in effect that is unknown to us.  As BAA says, "It only means that we cannot know the outcomes."  If this is what you want, you have it.  
 
But the Physicist Arthur Holly Compton wrote:  "If such a pair of experiments [Pendulum and Geiger Counter] had been known in Newton's time, it is doubtful whether the idea that events must happen according to precise laws would ever have been formulated. It would have been evident that only under special conditions can one predict definitely what will occur. These conditions are that what we observe shall be the average of a very large number of individual events."  "Uncertainty is fixed in the very nature of matter itself."
 
Scientists like Peirce and Compton said that matter is in flux in ways that violate law, all law, any law.  Ludicrous.  But what if it's true?  I think that what persuaded me about chance is seeing that other people had tried it on and found that it was true.  It provoked me to take seriously what they were saying.  The more that I begin to see what they see, the more I am willing to consider their more extravagant results of their thinking -- I myself began to visualize them as well.  As for Peirce and others, I do think they are trustworthy guides, and I do not wish to prove them wrong -- easy to do -- but to experiment with their thoughts to see how they are right, and what the consequences are, and explore whether there are any facts that would falsify them.
 
Consider what you might be missing.  Compton ends his essay by saying:  "I have found in my inner experience that the world does in fact respond to my efforts. And the findings of science, in particular the findings of physics, which at one stage so sharply denied that freedom had any meaning, are completely consistent with this experience.  Thus the way is cleared for our great task. We are free to shape our destiny."  This is all irrelevant fluff, right?  Has nothing to do with science, right?  But what if it's not?  Peirce said that reality has been established by "vital freedom which is the breath of the spirit of love."  Nuts, right?  The biologist Ernst Mayr said that "behavior is the pacemaker of evolution" -- I think I see it...  I think I see how, as Emerson put it, "striving to be man, the worm mounts through all the spires of form."  I could try to explain what I see, and hopefully you wouldn't be troubled.
 
No doubt I'm partly to blame for having difficulty communicating the vision.  But surely you are partly to blame if you are waiting for me to disprove that the proper interpretation of statistics is "to treat these systems precisely as if they are governed by laws."  Gag.  Please let me know if I have to disprove that before we would consider other questions, because it can't be disproved.
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I think it's becoming a bit more clear to me precisely where we differ, Llwellyn.

 

I agree with your assertion that the universe may not be underpinned. I actually think that it is quite likely that the Universe is fundamentally beyond our comprehension. Hence, from the perspective of our human reason, any principles by which the Universe is actually governed may be incomprehensible.

 

Nevertheless, we remain human. We have the tools that we have. We are rational beings. Our evolution has made us thus. Mathematics follows from logic. When we attempt to apply logic and mathematics to what we see in nature, science is born. As we further our investigations, we build more and more comprehensive models. These models involve the application of more and more laws of logic and mathematics (the tools that we have to work with) to the Universe.

 

Some people think that these laws actually govern the Universe. I am not one such. I don't think the Universe is necessarily governed by anything. But if I am to try and think about it, I must do so with the tools that I have. Hence, I am obligated to apply reason to the Universe, whether this application is appropriate or not. Were I not to do this, I would not be able to do any useful inquiry. But I do try to keep in mind that although I behave as if the Universe is governed by Law, this may not actually be the case. As I said before, the laws are really laws of our models of the Universe, and not laws of the Universe itself.

 

But if Peirce and Compton are right, and matter is in flux in ways that violate all and any laws, then how could we ever possibly know this? Verification, as you have already admitted, is a rational process, and this assertion is that the Universe is fundamentally irrational. It could be true. I do not deny this. But if it is true, then it seems to me that it would be a sort of absolute truth, and as such it would underpin the universe. What I have read of Peirce leads me to believe that he himself accepted that complete disorder is itself a sort of order. Hence it seems to me that this worldview is self-negating. It contradicts itself.

 

Now, the apparent contradiction I identified above has been identified using reason. My reason may not be objectively correct. Reason itself may not be objectively correct. Hence, Tychism could still be true. But if it is true, how is it useful? This is still my biggest issue. Tychism seems to me to be a direct violation of pragmatism. When we apply our reason to the universe, we get useful results. This application might not be completely correct, but it is the best we have. Tychism doesn't seem to improve the picture any, at least not from my perspective. In this it seems to me to be a little too close to religion for my taste.

 

You claim to have a different perspective, and ask me to consider what I might be missing. Again, this line of argument puts me in mind of the arguments that the religious put forth. Please do not mistake me here. I do not mean this to be taken as a criticism of you. If Tychism is like a religion, then I think it is a harmless one. It is certainly one which I would not try to dissuade you from. You seem to find it helpful, and it causes me no real trouble. But as of now, I don't find it convincing either.

 

If you would like to attempt to show me how Tychism is useful, or to share what it helps you to see, then I would be open to this. I am also open to any and all critiques of the above. Please proceed as you will.

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But if Peirce and Compton are right, and matter is in flux in ways that violate all and any laws, then how could we ever possibly know this? 

 

You could listen to the clicks of a Geiger counter and draw your own conclusions about whether absolute chance exists.  Compton said that the clicking sound is a sign that it does:   "Nature provides nothing whose precise measurement would make possible the exact prediction of an atomic event."

 

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/compton/

 

Peirce never called himself a pragmatist, he called himself a scientist.  And he never said that a belief could be considered true if we found it to be useful, in fact he said quite the opposite.  This thread is not about him, though, and it would be true for other reason than that he believed it.  But as for Peirce he was persuaded to believe in Tychism, Chance, "Ontic Uncertainty" -- whatever you may want to call it -- by observing the world carefully:  "A day's ramble in the country ought to bring that home to us."  Compton came to believe in chance from observing atomic and molecular events.   Hawking came to believe it by the science of sub-atomic events.  We may all come at it by a different approach.
 
If you listen to the clicks of a Geiger counter recording what happens when an atom of radium disintegrates, you can interpret your experience in one of two ways.  You can interpret it in the way that you've interpreted it.  As you say, you can "do it with the tools that you have," and then you "behave as if the Universe is governed by Law."  -- we know what that's like.  We all know what those true things are, and how true they are.  BAA has multiverses of you reiterating it.  But in the alternative, when you hear the clicks, you can believe it is a sign that something new is coming into this world.  It is the sound of the physical world mutating, violating any established law, including the law of causation.  
 
Either interpretation is an act of human will, that is to say, an act of love.  It is based on signs rather than mathematical proof, and it is a decisive act of belief.  One vision takes more effort and risk than the other.  I suppose you are right that either interpretation may be considered a quasi-spiritual event.  If you accept the idea of a mutating physical world, you will be destroyed.
 
Some people will tenaciously fasten upon a belief in the law of cause-and-effect and hold it to the bitter end, whatever happens -- that's what they love.  And they wouldn't be altogether wrong, they would be almost completely right.  They believe their knowledge and behave accordingly -- they worship and obey.  Others will strain to change their vision and behavior to establish new reality out of chance -- new mathematics, new morality, new science, new sex, new physiology, new logic.  I think this is what we've done in the past to establish ourselves and our thought tools within the melieu of chance. I think that we can still continue to do that today. As Mayr said:  "In animals, invariably, a change in behavior is the crucial factor initiating evolutionary innovation."  
 
It may sound nuts, and it may be impossible for you to put yourself in a place where it doesn't sound unacceptably mystical.  Maybe you can't, and you won't do the wrong thing -- experiment with the idea of chance and see where it goes.  You already know "precisely where we differ."  You already know where you're right and I am wrong.  So do I.  But please let me know if you would like to try to go down the road that Peirce went down.  Perhaps only for the fuck of it.  Maybe only then can we learn the full extent of the difference it would make to you and to me whether or not the physical world is mutating.
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Some people will tenaciously fasten upon a belief in the law of cause-and-effect and hold it to the bitter end, whatever happens -- that's what they love.  And they wouldn't be altogether wrong, they would be almost completely right.  They believe their knowledge and behave accordingly -- they worship and obey.  Others will strain to change their vision and behavior to establish new reality out of chance -- new mathematics, new morality, new science, new sex, new physiology, new logic.  I think this is what we've done in the past to establish ourselves and our thought tools within the melieu of chance. I think that we can still continue to do that today. As Mayr said:  "In animals, invariably, a change in behavior is the crucial factor initiating evolutionary innovation."

You see, here you've identified another issue. I believe what I find to be convincing. I don't try to believe anything. If an idea is put forth, and I find neither it nor it's negation convincing, then I withhold judgement. I behave as I behave, with respect to reason etcetera, because I find that I cannot operate on the opposite assumption. But that isn't to say that I'm opposed to investigating ideas which I have not yet found to be convincing. On the contrary, it is precisely this sort of investigation that gets me up in the morning.

 

It may sound nuts, and it may be impossible for you to put yourself in a place where it doesn't sound unacceptably mystical.  Maybe you can't, and you won't do the wrong thing -- experiment with the idea of chance and see where it goes.  You already know "precisely where we differ."  You already know where you're right and I am wrong.  So do I.  But please let me know if you would like to try to go down the road that Peirce went down.  Perhaps only for the fuck of it.  Maybe only then can we learn the full extent of the difference it would make to you and to me whether or not the physical world is mutating.

 

I have made no assertion that I am right and you are wrong. I've merely iterated where our approaches seem to differ. But I fully acknowledge that my reason, and indeed all reason, may be fundamentally unsound. I may be altogether wrong, and you right. Moreover, I'm happy to wander down whatever road I find before me. I will try any idea out, and put it to the test. This is what I've always tried to do. If you would care to attempt to lead me down the road that Peirce took, then I'll be happy to see where it leads. But I will bring my skepticism with me. I am skeptical of every novel idea that is put before me. I will try not treat Tychism differently unless I am provided with a reason that I ought to treat it differently. But if you have a further case to make, then please, make it. I look forward to seeing what else I have to learn here.

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But if you have a further case to make, then please, make it. 

 

Why don't you take the turn now -- you know how the train of thought begins, maybe you could describe to me where it would go?  You're an intelligent and energetic person as I am.  It is not as if I am seeing castles in the air, but just what Charles Peirce calls "absolute chance" -- where does it go next?  What's the take-away?  Compton suggests that the pragmatic upshot has something to do with "the additional determining factor of choice," Peirce says that the idea of chance is connected to "evolution by creative love."  No doubt you're just as capable of making the case as I am.  You say you will try any idea out, and put it to the test, and see where it leads -- prove it.

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But the problem is that I don't know where to go next. I'm not sure that anything specific can in principle follow from absolute chance. If absolute chance governs the universe, and there is no law, then there need be no regularity to the conclusions that you and I reach. Why should we expect there to be? 

 

From my perspective it seems that if we begin with the notion that absolute chance underpins the universe, then it follows that there are no laws, and what appear to be laws are averages as you have described above, in your example of measurements made by a science class. But these averages are found using mathematics, and hence depend on laws of a kind. Ergo there are laws of some form which we find indispensable. Perhaps this is a cloudy example. Or perhaps it is my understanding which is cloudy. Or perhaps it is Tychism itself which is cloudy (which, it seems to me, is what we ought to expect if it were true).

 

I have listened to the clicks of a Geiger counter. I understand that chance has a role to play in the disintegration of radioactive elements, and in many other things. But I'm not sure that this must be an absolute chance. Atoms decay in predictable ways. We don't know precisely when each decay will occur, but we know what the possible results are. Carbon-14 has never been observed to decay into Uranium-238. If its decay were ruled by absolute chance only, then at some time and place in the universe it would. Moreover, it would also, at some time and place, decay into a cat. Perhaps some form of regularity would arise out of this chaos, leaving us with the appearance of the physical laws that we seem to have. Or perhaps not. All that we know is that we are here.

 

Karl Popper argued that determinism makes the mistake of holding that "all clouds are clocks--even the most cloudy of clouds". Peirce, on the other hand, Popper argued, turned this around, holding that "all clocks are clouds, to some considerable degree--even the most precise of clocks". I think that both determinism and indeterminism are probably incorrect. I would rather say that "clock" and "cloud" are ideas that we rational beings have. We are forever making the mistake of trying to force nature to fit our ideas. Why should it? To assert that absolute chance underpins the universe is still to assert that the universe is underpinned. It is still to make the mistake of thinking that our ideas accurately describe the universe. Absolute chance is, after all, an idea. It may help us to understand some aspects of the universe. But if it does, I can't seem to find my own way to this understanding. Moreover, I don't see any good reason to think that it describes the universe any more accurately than more traditional modes of thought do.

 

Perhaps this is me being closed-minded. But I don't think so. I still consider that your view may be the correct one. It's just that if it is, I do not see it.

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 Moreover, it would also, at some time and place, decay into a cat. 

 

Your example illustrates what a doctrine like Tychism can offer you that you do not already have.  To believe in Darwinian biology is to believe that the cat and its cat mental processes have, in fact, been established precisely in the manner that you offer as the illustration of the absurdity of Tychism -- they have been established by chance.  Obviously, it goes without saying that chance does not establish the cat and its brain processes immediately and in one generation, but across huge amounts of time and successive generations.  The chance at work may have been different from, but, if I'm right, analagous to, the specific example of the decay of the Carbon-14 atom.  Chance is at play everywhere and in every experience of law, not just in atomic decay.

 

Chance established the cat.  Chance established the universe.  Chance established the laws of physics...  I was under the impression that this was what we atheists believed?  What's the alternative?!?  It should make you stop and reflect when the example that you give of the illogical consequences of Tychism is actually the thing that you see before your very eyes -- the cat.  We do know that chance established the cat -- it was chance out of which the cat and its brain processes are deposited.  And a theory that includes Tychism, in addition to established scientific law, can offer a entry-point into understanding how that happened.  But a theory that leaves out Tychism cannot account for how the cat was established.  Without Tychism, the complication of the cat existed in latent form "from the beginning";  without Tychism, the cat itself is an inevitable result of the outworking of prior law.  This is not atheism, and it is certainly not Darwinian evolution.

 

I want to once again be clear -- a belief in the application of absolute chance does not mean that "there is no law."  It means that the genuine law that exists is Themis law rather than Ananke law, to use the names of Greek gods as personifications of different kinds of law.  Themis law that we know is law that results as a consequence of the interaction of chance and life process.  In humans, life process includes our physiology and our mind.  Law is not Ananke law -- precisely determined law that is fixed into the very nature of matter itself.  In Popper's example, the cloud is a clock under applications of life process.  The life process is the added part that, in conjunction with chance, has established law.  This is the famous "two-stage model" combining chance with choice.

 

You start with givens that you say are "all that we know" -- (1) that we are here (2) that we have certain ideas.  I think that we should know much more than what you call "all that we know."  At the very least we should know that those givens have been established, and in some manner established.  Your account does not leave room for a principle of establishment.  You leave the whole specification of human physiology and human mind, not to mention the physical laws, utterly unaccounted for.  Tychism, on the other hand, offers a principle of establishment.  It generates the range of possibilities from among which some particular law of physics will be established.  The living thing making a free choice generates the added factor that fixes law.

 

By more clearly understanding how scientific law is established, we can better know what it is and what relationship it bears to moral law.  I think we would see that moral laws and the laws of physics are continuous and not disjointed -- they are established by the same life process, the same love and the same chance.  Themis has both a moral and a material aspect to it.   There is no sharp line between facts and values, between the ideal and the material.  

 

It's "too late in the day" to change human physiology and the laws of physics, but it is not too late to intelligently reconstruct a morality that better serves that human life process.  You say that you "behave as you behave" and "cannot operate on the opposite assumption," but it's not too late to behave differently -- to boldly operate on different conjectures, physical and moral.  To try again, as we've tried in the past.  I think that this confidence and inspiration is probably the upshot of the doctrine of Tychism.  So go ahead, Disillusioned, try again to put yourself on the footing of Tychism and see where it leads.

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I want to be very clear. I have no issue with the notion that chance has its part to play. I'm just not sure that it is absolute chance. I'm not even sure I understand what absolute chance is supposed to mean.

 

I also understand that you accept that laws exist now. You just don't think that they have always existed, or that they have always had their present form. Fine. I can get behind that idea. What I don't get is why you seem to think that you have an explanation for how these laws have come about. Again, I accept that they could be the result of absolute chance, but I see no reason to conclude that they are. If the best thing that can be said for Tychism is that it offers a source of law, then I don't see how it is superior to deism, or other equivalent philosophies. I also have no problem with deism per se, but I'm not a deist. This is my current attitude toward Tychism as well.

 

If I've learned anything in my time away from religion it is that we atheists don't need to have anything in common philosophically. One can be an atheist and accept Tychism, or not. The role of chance must be acknowledged, but it need not be the type of chance that you seem committed to. It could be, but I don't think it must be.

 

When I say that all I know is that I am here, and that I have certain ideas, I am speaking of all that I can know for certain. I can reason my way to other things, but to do so requires assumptions and rules of inference. I've explained this before. I've been quite clear about how truth is established in my view. Moreover, I (generally) accept scientific knowledge. It may not be absolutely true, but it seems to work. So I'm a pragmatist, as far as that goes, and I do not leave the specification of human physiology or human mind unaccounted for.

 

I don't agree that moral law is established by chance. I believe it is established by humans, and that it is specifically not objective. True, chance has its role to play in the evolution of humans, but again, I see no reason to think that this is the absolute chance of Tychism.

 

I'm not sure that I have more to say on this at the moment. I will keep thinking about it, and if something helpful occurs to me I'll post again. Otherwise, I'm starting to feel as if we're going around in circles.

 

I do appreciate this conversation, and your patience and ideas. I have a lot to think about, and I've certainly learned some things already. I'm also not averse to continuing this discussion; I'm just not sure where it goes from here at the moment.

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Very well.  I was hoping the conversation would drift toward a discussion of the Baldwin Effect and whether it might be equivalent to Peirce's idea of agapism -- evolution by creative love.  Maybe that will be an entirely new thread.  Popper and Mayr have some interesting passages on the subject of the Baldwin Effect.  James Baldwin and Peirce were friends and co-authored articles for the "Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology."  The Baldwin Effect seems to bring William James's "Will to Believe" attitude back into the circle, even thought Peirce wanted to leave it out as "infected with seeds of death."

 


 

Let me just say that I remain unpersuaded that reality conforms to laws.  Certainly "the eye reads omens where it goes," but this does not mean that absolute chance is absent.  I've clearly explained what chance can positively offer us in terms of a principle of establishment, so I won't keep banging that drum.  Also, I am unpersuaded that moral law is less objective than the laws of physics.  You've made a spirited denial of Tychism, and for that I'm grateful.  The fact that I find myself unpersuaded after such response leaves me more confident than before.  I consider it proven.

 

As for what we atheists have in common, I hope that it is the commitment to the idea that truth is the goal of inquiry.  Without truth as an intended target, what we have is simply fake reasoning that will surely get us lost in the bullshit.  In order to reason it is absolutely necessary to possess such virtues as intellectual honesty and sincerity and a real love of truth.  Truth must be a target for reasoning worthy of the name:  "Science consists in actually drawing the bow upon truth with intentness in the eye, with energy in the arm."

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