Originally posted by Obbe
If I imagine you shitting your pants would you recognize it as real?
Of course I would recognize it as a real thing. That image in your mind is some kind of network of associations in your mind and, objectively speaking, ultimately your brain. It had a causal consequence in the world, i.e. you typing that sentence, and me posting this reply, and everyone who will read it etc. Do you think it is a magic spark that generates some new "causal energy" into the universe?
It's not the
same thing as me physically defecating my pants, but it's undeniably real.
The idea you should try attacking is whether there is any cogency to the idea of a generalized, empirical, predictively useful description of these data structures.
I will respond to Lanny, and you should read the next section to understand the concept I will use in the subsequent section to address your next post.
Originally posted by Lanny
But to go off on a tangent that doesn't really matter a little bit, I don't think "everything is described by mathematical equations" really follows from naturalism. The meaning of emergent properties is that they're properties not possessed in component parts, or at a lower level. Like sure, maybe we can give a mathematical account of the physical components of a painting, but in doing so we aren't describing the artistic properties of that painting. Like maybe we can even reconstruct the artistic properties from the physical ones (although in the case of art we'd probably also have to consider a huge array of cultural systems) but that doesn't mean we have a mathematical description of art.
It's not obvious at all that we could write some kind of formula or function from physical descriptions of art to artistic meaning chiefly because artistic properties don't seem to be mathematical. There is no mathematical object to represent them, it's almost absurd to think of some art evaluation function which takes is an sub-atomic description of the mona lisa and produces "5212 artons" or something. That's not to say the artistic properties of a painting aren't emergent from its physical properties, simply that being able to mathematically describe properties does not mean being able to do the same same for emergent properties.
Sort of. Emergent properties are essentially "ways of looking at" the underlying physical phenomena (so to speak), where we (keyword "we") find some kind of interesting or relevant regularity.
To run with painting example, lets say it is a pointillist painting of a sheep: if you look close with your naked eye, you might see the dots. But as you walk backwards and start exposing your mind to the more complete portions of the total data set, your brain gets the appropriate conditions to make the appropriate associations. Then you start seeing some meta patterns, then shapes, then associations to projected shapes of real objects, and with it, a comprehension of the depiction of the sheep. There is no discrete point where the painting becomes real. This "framings" don't exist in any fundamental aspect of nature. But it is real to us because we exist in a context where we can frame these patterns or regularities in a particular way. So the examination of the artistic properties of a painting, for example, would be more like a topic within the study of the position of humans within the context of nature at large.
It is erroneous to posit some more universal, underlying metastructure of meaning or information to the painting; it simply happens to be meaningful in your ontology and your ontology is very widely shared amongst humans like yourself, but even then, not universally so. For example, Deregowski's 1972 "Pictorial perception and culture", regardless of how you interpret the specifics of the work, it is clear that even the associations formed regarding the same visual information isn't universal.
But more importantly, neither the painting nor the atoms of the painting, or even the fact of its own existence, exist in the ontology of the light bulb you might be using to view the painting. And the lightbulb does have a private ontology... but only because we exist to create the idea of an ontology of anything, and the lightbulb fits the criteria, and so does the beetle, and of course so does man. We could say each particle has its own very simple ontology; it doesn't know anything, it's ontology is simply how it interacts with other particles. I'm using the word "ontology" for lightbulbs and particles here like Dan Dennett applies "umwelt" to non-"living" things, it's sort of the "world of" a particular thing. A particle doesn't need to know anything, it is simply bound to operate under a certain domain of function, and that is its ontology. It has energy, velocity, a vector, and an ability to interact with other particles in a specific way.
The question of the artistic properties of a painting come down to how we come to have our own ontology (which we could roughly sum up as consciousness), with all its subjective aspects, and how the painting fits into our ontology as we operate in the world.
On the assumption that our ontology as a whole cannot be reduced to the facts about physical phenomena, I first would contend that we
can reduce it to facts about the ontology of the constituent physical phenomena. This process occurs entirely within our own ontology, it's not an objective act yet. You can do it with simpler objects in a very straightforward way: for example, I can perfectly explain the ontology of a weighing scale through the ontology of everything that goes into producing an output on the LCD.
Then next, the question becomes how
we have an ontology at all out of purely physical facts, and that problem remains unresolved. Fortunately we don't need to devour the problem whole to show that our experiences do have physical bases, we can do it in small pieces. We can easily see some of the fundamentally physical foundations and limits to the qualitative content we experience. For example, whether you resolve the image of the sheep or a noise of dots is entirely contingent on how many elements of the painting can reflect photons in such a way as to reach your cornea without distortion, which could roughly be stated by the position of your eyes relative to the painting, factoring in the way the lens works. Furthermore if I then ask you which one you see, to give me an answer, you would pulling an idea directly out of your consciousness (you need to actually possess the
idea of the sheep or dot there) and putting it into the real world, where it will have a causal effect on me. Presumably your body and brain obey the laws of physics and energy is conserved. So it seems undeniable that there is a physical explanation for how our ontology is constructed.
Even if you want to resort to epiphenomenalism, then you would still need to explain how despite the fact that your body can produce the word "sheep" in a semantically appropriate context from a completely physical process, you can still deny that it can do so for that same information structure in your mind.
So you are making a category error in your example: no examination of the painting will yield its artistic meaning, because that does not exist in the painting. The meaning is created in your brain, as a way to process the information it receives from your eyes. A beetle looking at the same painting with the same visual framing might associate nothing with it at all. If I were to make a perfect mathematical model of your brain, I could almost certainly "decode" the artistic "meaning" of the painting to you. Of course that would not break into further semantic terms; the semantic terms are the human talk, and they must ultimately reduce into something that can be produced through non-"meaningful" processes, otherwise you don't even begin to approach how they can exist. I can't meaning from the art because it's not in the art, and it's not likely that the formulation manifest image is inside the manifest image, which is where the scientific image is nested.
Originally posted by Obbe
Do you believe any particular moral system is objectively more correct than another?
Sure. Egoist philosophy abstracts away the need for a fully physical, mathematical model of morals by just treating each individual moral agent as a black box. This is how we can construct, for example, social contracts. Again, this is an emergent phenomenon based on a larger scale view of the interaction of smaller systems, and egoism can simply be an easy big picture model for whatever small picture stuff happens behind the scene. This is the same way that we use fluid dynamics to model the behaviours of fluids as some kind of contiguous, infinitely malleable objects rather than modeling every single particle interaction, even if fluids are composed of atoms. Egoist morals don't exist out in the world, they are a human construction, but neither do "fluids"; that concept only exists in the human mind, as an abstraction of a bunch of tightly packed, weakly cohesive particles. Egoist morals do the same for social phenomena, by simply picking out the common element for every agent in society; their own individual, self interested agency. That's it. We can work with that.
