Objectivism and science

[tadmjones]

Just laying there all the time gives you a lot of nothing to do but to think, maybe all they are are aware of is idea and they have yet to be conscious of the idea of differentiating between inner self and outer otherness.

https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2024/june/are-newborns-conscious.html

 

Edited September 9 by tadmjones
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[DavidOdden]

7 hours ago, Boydstun said:

I agree with Tad's statement that "For Objectivism to remain internally coherent it needs to be based in a materialist/physicalist metaphysic." And frankly, Objectivism needs to step out of the modern chronic focus (by humanities folks) of relations of world to mind at the neglect of relations of physical parts of world to other physical parts of world (outside our bodies and minds)

I don’t expect an answer from TMJ on this point, but maybe you can explain and justify the conclusion that “For Objectivism to remain internally coherent it needs to be based in a materialist/physicalist metaphysic”. I suppose that the answer in part has to do with the “modern chronic focus (by humanities folks) of relations of world to mind at the neglect of relations of physical parts of world to other physical parts of world (outside our bodies and minds)”. To start with, what does it mean, in physical terms and without reference to mind, to be “internally coherent”?

What is the essential characteristic of a philosophy being “based in” a particular kind of metaphysics? What, exactly, is it about Objectivist that you find to be lacking which you attribute to metaphysics? For example, long ago, there was a theory that there was an inherent property of things “heaviness” which might be the opposite of the quality “buoyancy”, which I take to be scientifically untenable. We now understand that “weight” is the result of a perceivable interaction between mass and gravity. Are you, contrarily, reifying this interaction and invoking “heaviness” that is inside heavy things?

[tadmjones]

By internally coherent I mean that a system would not produce any contradictions in any possible combinations of its elements. 

[DavidOdden]

Are you considering Objectivism to be a symbolic deductive system without a semantics? I'm trying to understand "would not produce any contradictions in any possible combinations of its elements". Then of course there is the matter of supporting your assertion as to what Objectivism needs.

[tadmjones]

I wasn’t proscribing any change in O’ism, I don’t think it can be changed as I think ‘it’ is the thought of Ayn Rand and closed in that sense.

 

[Boydstun]

In her epistemology seminar around 1970, Rand remarked:

“Actually, do you know what we can ascribe to the universe as such, apart from scientific discovery? Only those fundamentals that we can grasp about existence. Not in the sense of switching contexts and ascribing particular characteristics to the universe, but we can say: since everything possesses identity, the universe possesses identity. Since everything is finite, the universe is finite. But we can’t ascribe space or time or a lot of other things to the universe as a whole.”

Three years after those remarks, Rand put into published writing that her axiom “Existence exists” entails that the universe as a whole cannot come into or go out of existence. For her, this meant that from metaphysics (based in perceptual experience) we know that duration is applicable to the universe as a whole and that the duration of the universe is endless. Applicability of duration from a part of the universe, say, the start of our sun to its end, to the whole of the universe is an applicability fine with physics, just as the addition of the mass-energy of one cluster of galaxies to another cluster on up to a mass-energy of the whole universe is an applicability of a trait of a part to the whole universe fine with physics.

Rand remarked in her epistemology seminar that she used “Existence” pretty much like “Universe”. Go ahead, I propose, and just let Existence and all one’s talk of it being grasped implicitly before emergence of one’s conceptual, articulate level of consciousness, mean what we latter call physical existence or physical world. That is, Objectivism can smoothly be a materialism, where one does not mean what that term means in looking at the other eras of philosophy, Ancient or Scholastic or Early Modern, but as what we have learned today in the physical sciences.

There is a traditional distinction of positions I learned in my first philosophy course and which Rand would have known also: the distinction between materialism, idealism, and realism. That was a characterization of materialism as denying the reality of mind, idealism as denying the reality of matter, and realism as embracing the reality of both. My Thomist philosophy professor and Rand would find only that realism view adequate (we have another more usual use of the term realism, of course), but they mean very different things by saying they don’t deny the reality of mind. Highest human mind is not dependent on the organization and processes of the body for the Thomist, whereas for Rand it most certainly is. And a Thomist conception of God’s powers of understanding and willing do not require a physical world to be conscious of or move, an idea false by the lights of Rand’s philosophy. 

So don’t be bullied, Ayn Rand or anyone, into disowning materialism for our era as in the idea that the priority of existence over consciousness is the priority of physical existence over consciousness, due to an old loaded trichotomy of materialism/idealism/realism. (And don’t get derailed by thinking that modern materialism can only be Marxist or Behaviorist ontology [which were before our science of today].) Objectivism should be uniform in holding that the existence having priority to consciousness is physical existence, as well as the view that consciousness is a physical process arising in a living, physical brain, as mortal as that brain. That is a modern materialism (or physicalism, if you will). The physicality of consciousness can today be lain out by neuroscience as in the Grossberg book, and consonantly at the same time not lose the distinction of conscious mind and existents of which it is conscious, and it remain, in new light, that:

“Whatever the degree of your knowledge, these two—existence and consciousness—are axioms you cannot escape, these two are the irreducible primaries implied in any action you undertake, in any part of your knowledge and in its sum, from the first ray of light you perceive at the start of your life to the widest erudition you might acquire at its end. Whether you know the shape of a pebble or the structure of a solar system, the axioms remain the same: that it exists and that you know it.”

These axioms are not part of an ambition of logical atomism or specially enlisted premises for theorems, and the axiom that the concept of consciousness as awareness of existence is irreducible means not that greater understanding of the physical process that is consciousness cannot be attained by neuroscience, but that consciousness will continue as a primitive concept, valid in its relation to the other primitive concept and reality existence, together being continual touchstones for effective thought.

 

[Boydstun]

15 hours ago, necrovore said:

I disagree. As Peikoff has written in OPAR, the "existence exists" axiom subsumes everything that exists, whether physical or not. . . .

The physicalist Objectivist would deny there is anything but the physical and would think of the mental as a kind of physical thing, rather like the living is a kind of physical thing. This physicalist would dispute the idea that to deny the non-physical is to deny the mental.

15 hours ago, necrovore said:

. . . Whether Peikoff understands relativity or not has nothing to do with the axioms.

Correct. He may well have gotten straight later in life on what is the sort of relativity being examined in Special Relativity, and that would not suffice to correct the error of thinking that consciousness cannot be physical because then all existence would have to be understood as physical starting from one's first ray of light nor suffice to correct the error of thinking that a purely physical consciousness could not have the intentionality relation, the of-relation, to existents it discerns.

I should perhaps mention the rather obvious that regarding consciousness as something not physical yet as being a product and feature of the living brain (a standard Objectivist view) is inconsistent. Non-physicality of consciousness should repeat the fate of vitalism in biology.

Edited September 10 by Boydstun

[necrovore]

26 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

The physicalist Objectivist would deny there is anything but the physical and would think of the mental as a kind of physical thing, rather like the living is a kind of physical thing. This physicalist would dispute the idea that to deny the non-physical is to deny the mental.

I think the axioms leave unspecified whether consciousness has a physical basis or not, and I think it's correct that they leave it unspecified.

Peikoff says the axioms only cover what is known "to the gamut of the human race," so they should not require advanced scientific knowledge, and they should be apparent even to people like Socrates and Aristotle who wouldn't have advanced scientific knowledge of neurons and so forth.

A long time ago there was a debate (here on Objectivism Online) about a principle of physics called "locality," which is the idea that objects and forces have to come into the same physical location in order to interact. However, I pointed out then that "locality" is not a proper metaphysical axiom because it is not "obvious" but has to be worked out through science. Because the speed of light is so fast, a lot of phenomena appear non-local to us, so locality cannot be an axiom. This says nothing about whether or not locality is true.

You don't have to know how consciousness works in order to know that it exists. Further, you have to accept that it exists, in order to study how it works.

If consciousness has a physical basis, that could be an advanced scientific discovery (or a whole series of them), just like "locality," but it wouldn't be proper to make it an axiom.

Similarly, the conservation of mass-energy, though I think it has been pretty well established as true, should not be a metaphysical axiom.

Edited September 10 by necrovore

[Boydstun]

Not quite. One can know one and others are alive without any knowledge of school biology. One can know one is living by breathing, looking, sucking, mimicking, and discomforts. Later with language one can express that one and others are living and a stone is not living. Later one can learn that life is mortal, learn of the various systems in one's body, and learn that humans must produce in order to live. But it is the same referent ALIVE and sense of being alive all along the way.

(And when one comes to articulate distinctions such as thinking and running, in either case, in engaging in them, one will know directly they are living actions. Plato: "Are we going to say that it has understanding but doesn't have life? Of course not." Aristotle: "The activity of understanding is life.")

Rand spelled out a similar story concerning the referent MAN, and that is what she should have done concerning cognizance of the referent EXISTENCE as well. One never meant anything but physical existence when stacking stones or planting corn or watering corn or shucking corn or wrestling with another child. One had the ideas of not finding one's toy and forgetting to take off clothes before taking a bath, but nothing non-physical was implicated. Until one went to Sunday School or was otherwise instructed by religious adults, there was no non-physical existence in one's world; there was only one existence—physical. (pertinent also)

Rand thought that one's concept of the physical world is more advanced than one's concept of existence in general. A parallel error occurs in Aquinas in his view that the first object of the intellect, the proper object of the intellect, is being in general and not primarily physical being, even though knowing physical being is chronologically first. (I say "parallel" because Rand (good for her!) contracts the fundamental of ontology from BEING to EXISTENCE (actual or potential). That contraction is in the direction of the physical, matter of fact.)

To the contrary, I maintain that notion or concept of physical existence does not wait on either genetic or logical development out of a generalized existence that subsumes physical existence and existence possibly not physical. We begin with physical existence. World, self, and other are the one and only sort of existence then grasped: physical existence. Contra William James or Martin Heidegger, notion of physical existence is not genetically or logically preceded by anything "pre-ontological." Physical existence is our fundamental ontology, beginning to end.

I am not suggesting one set as fundamental axiom "Physical existence exists." I'm only saying that but for influence of religion, one would mean physical existence in the right axiom "Existence exists," and that physical existence is what one should mean.

Edited September 10 by Boydstun

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

Rand thought that one's concept of the physical world is more advanced than one's concept of existence in general.

I am in agreement with Rand on this point. One can be aware that ideas and emotions exist, and that they have specific natures, without being aware that they have an ultimate physical basis.

If that were not so, it would not be possible for people to make the religious error that you are complaining about, because the contradiction would be too obvious and too immediate.

1 hour ago, Boydstun said:

Until one went to Sunday School or was otherwise instructed by religious adults, there was no non-physical existence in one's world; there was only one existence—physical.

I think this is incorrect. There are many primitive tribes that have made up their own religions without having been taught those religions.

Part of Rand's genius was that she was able to establish the primacy of existence without having to go so far as to require that consciousness have a physical basis. All that is necessary to rule out religion is for consciousness to have an identity, and for us to make a few basic observations about that identity. Consciousness having a physical basis can be part of that identity, but that can come later.

[tadmjones]

Those contractions are the tighter wringing removing the ambiguities , a universe without ambiguity leaves no motive power or room for a creative force. 

[necrovore]

There is already no room for a "creative force" because there is no actual example of a consciousness that creates or controls existence. We can observe what consciousness does, and "creation" is not what consciousness does.

Bringing science into it too early ends up begging the question, because science is only possible if existence is independent of consciousness, which is to say, if consciousness is concerned with understanding existence (which is what science does) instead of creating it or ordering it around (which would make science unnecessary).

Objectivists reject God on the basis of metaphysics, which is sufficient. Then science later confirms that rejection. This is much the same as evolution being discovered before DNA (which then confirmed it).

[tadmjones]

Did you ever see Michael Levin’s ( of Tufts) xenobots? They created new organisms out of embryonic frog skin cells , weird amazing stuff. They exhibit novel behaviors without any genetic modifications. 
 

Obviously that is no proof of consciousness creating reality , but it does seem to suggest those organisms are somehow aware of their situation and adjust their game plan so to speak and seemingly without what is generally understood as the control mechanisms of genetic coding. 

[necrovore]

I was making an analogy; I was not suggesting that consciousness has anything to do with DNA.

[tadmjones]

I understood the analogy, I was just pointing to what seems like some non mechanical means that drives novel physical change. Almost like a creative force, which by some perspectives looks like would have to incorporate a recognition or awareness of situation in an ad hoc way. Like I said weird. which is ironic by etymology in that 'weird' can mean fate which is deterministic, lol.

[Boydstun]

8 hours ago, tadmjones said:

. . . I was just pointing to what seems like some non mechanical means that drives novel physical change. Almost like a creative force, which by some perspectives looks like would have to incorporate a recognition or awareness of situation in an ad hoc way. Like I said weird. which is ironic by etymology in that 'weird' can mean fate which is deterministic, lol.

Tad, I'd avoid thinking of new and adaptive behaviors from organismic structures as "creative" rather than as simply emergent life forms and behaviors from biological structures (old or new). A lot of biological behavior suited to survival in an environment may look as if it is action incorporating a recognition or awareness of the situation of the organism, but we have explanations from micro to macro of various behaviors of various kinds of, say, frogs.

And as far as I have seen, the structure of causality is that which is structure for all vegetative ends-fulfilling behaviors, which is indeed by (modern) mechanical means. There are indeed physical teleological causes at work in the vegetative behaviors of animal life (and in the tropisms of the roots and in above-ground sun-"seeking" of plants). I have concluded* it goes this way: The teleological process that brings me to the ability to walk and take up the gaits of trotting or running has it teleological end (human types of locomotion) as a constraint (formed by natural selection) in ontogeny, a constraint on efficient causes which, under those physical constraints, undergird and make possible the very teleological constraint under which they operate, themselves containing no teleology, no final causation. The teleological causes are real causes in these vegetative behaviors, such as the continued beating of my heart, and those causes are made possible by undergirding-causes, mechanical and themselves devoid of ends-directive causes.

This is a mechanical way in which the engineered-looking structures and their accomplished functions can come about and continue for the years of the animal's life. Aristotle proved correct to see natural final causation at work in such behaviors as real causes there, but he went wrong in taking such causation to be a fundamental type of cause in overarching supervision of efficient and material causes at work in all of nature. Like Descartes and Spinoza, Rand rejected the picture having final causality, natural or mind-of-God, operating in all of nature. She thought that only human intelligently directed behavior (and some related behaviors in higher animals) amounts to teleological causation. Other Objectivist scholars (Binswanger, Gotthelf, Lennox) insist that there is also real teleological causation at work at the level of non-conscious vegetative activities of animals (and this strengthens Rand's theory of value with its values for plants). I think the latter are correct, and that kind of causation is possible only with the "mechanical" undergirding of micro mechanical efficient causation (micro activities unknown until modern science of the last couple of centuries).

Edited September 11 by Boydstun

[Boydstun]

22 hours ago, tadmjones said:

Those contractions are the tighter wringing removing the ambiguities , a universe without ambiguity leaves no motive power or room for a creative force. 

To the contrary, I say it is not ambiguities, but contingency in intersecting causal streams that is the space for creative force. (pp. 159–62) That contingency in nature, both in our animal organism and outside us in surrounding nature, is a standing condition of nature necessary for our conscious engineering and condition necessary for the entry and continuance of life in the world.

The most important error in Leonard Peikoff's essay "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy", an error also in his early 1970's lectures on the history of philosophy (much of which is in the transcription Founders of Western Philosophy: Thales to Hume, is his treatment of the idea of contingency as only in the philosophic historical thread of contingency as in occasions of mind in the world, especially the mind of God. Because he omitted all discussion of the historical thread of contingency in nature absent any minds (he was tuning with Rand's idea that there is no such thing?), such as contingency as in Aristotle's or C.S Pierce's conceptions of it or in the conception I (and later, Gotthelf) formulated of contingency in nature, he avoids treatment of the type of necessity that is the contrast-class of that genre of contingency. That necessity is the necessity in natural laws with their mathematical expression. Thereby, Peikoff does not tackle head-on what is the distinction of logical necessity from necessity in mathematical laws of empirical nature. That is all right, in one way, in that it leaves good work for me these days.

Edited September 11 by Boydstun

[necrovore]

On 9/8/2024 at 9:21 PM, necrovore said:

The Sun as a whole is weightless because it's in free-fall (in orbit around the center of the galaxy).

I have been thinking about this entirely too much.

The Sun is indeed weightless in terms of the gravity of other objects, but it also has its own gravity. It would be possible to mathematically divide the Sun into parts, calculate the weight of each part under the gravity of the other parts, and then add up the weights to get the weight of the Sun under its own gravity. You could do the same thing with the Earth.

For example you could divide the Sun into a set of nested spherical "shells" where each shell has a weight which bears down on the shells beneath it. It has already been proved that the gravity inside a hollow sphere cancels out, so the weight of any shell would come only from the gravity generated by the shells inside it. (The gravity from the surrounding shells would cancel out.) The shells close to the center would weigh very little, not only because they are smaller, but because there is less mass underneath them, so there's less gravity, so there's less weight. In the end, you can sum up the weights of all the shells. There is an integral for this.

The actual math is not so easy because the density of the Sun (or the Earth) is not uniform, so the weights of the shells would not be a function only of their volumes and of the gravity coming from beneath them. Strictly speaking, the Sun might not even have uniform density within a shell, because of convection and the like.

The gravity on the surface of the Sun is supposed to be 20 times stronger than the gravity at the surface of the Earth, so the Sun's outermost shells would be very heavy.

I'm pretty sure that if you did that calculation with the Sun and the Earth, the Sun (under its own gravity) would weigh more than the Earth (under the Earth's own gravity).

So @DavidOdden is right after all.

[tadmjones]

Mass is a property and weight is a description of a relation between entities that possess mass. Calculate the mass of the sun or parts of the sun and you will be able to determine a mathematical description of its gravitational field in any context, but calculating its mass integrally and calling that result a 'weight' is self referential and breaks 'logic' , no ?

If not logic , then at least semantics, I still say mass is a more precise descriptor and a more scientific way to describe relations between the sun and the earth and the sun and the earth in separate contexts.

Edited September 15 by tadmjones

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

calculating its mass integrally and calling that result a 'weight' is self referential and breaks 'logic' , no ?

No. Integration (in math) is essentially just adding, so I'm calculating weights (of each part of the Sun) and adding them up to get a total weight. That's not self-referential and doesn't break logic.

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

I still say mass is a more precise descriptor

I'll admit that mass is more fundamental. An object's weight depends on the surrounding gravity (including gravity from other parts of the same object), but its mass is independent of its surroundings.

Still, my point is that the Sun could be said to have an internal "weight" after all, even though it's in free-fall around the center of the galaxy.

Edited September 15 by necrovore

[tadmjones]

But you aren't calculating the weights and adding them up , you are calculating the masses of sections and assigning a relationship from the part as it relates to a function of the whole.

[tadmjones]

Like I said , prior, my objection was nit picky in the context of the thread name. Anything in relation to itself is 'weightless' , as weight refers to a relation between entities. It's a semantic thing not a science thing, you are assigning number, quantifying, but that doesn't mean because both concepts are quantifiable that they are in every context, especially a scientific context, interchangeable.

[necrovore]

1 hour ago, tadmjones said:

But you aren't calculating the weights and adding them up , you are calculating the masses of sections and assigning a relationship from the part as it relates to a function of the whole.

No, I'm calculating weights and adding them up. Consider just slicing the Sun in half, right through the center. The left half would gravitationally attract the right half and vice-versa. You can calculate how much. That attraction would have units of force and would be weight. That weight is why the Sun doesn't float apart and why it has enough pressure inside to cause nuclear fusion.

That's also why objects (like asteroids) above a certain size have to be spherical (or an oblate spheroid if they are rotating), otherwise the internal forces from self-weight become too great for any known material to withstand.

45 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

that doesn't mean [] both concepts [] are [] interchangeable.

Of course not, they have different units. But as it happens the relationship is the same: the Sun has more mass than the Earth, and it also has more "self-weight" than the Earth.

(One other thing... it's sort of like I'm adding up the "absolute values" of the weights, because weight has direction. If you take the directions into account, if you look at X, Y, and Z components, then all the weights of parts of the Sun cancel each other out. But if you just want a sense of the magnitudes involved, you'd probably get the highest value by adding up the amount of weight that goes toward the center...)

Edited September 15 by necrovore

[tadmjones]

So what would be the units describing the weight of the outer shell of the sun?

[necrovore]

24 minutes ago, tadmjones said:

So what would be the units describing the weight of the outer shell of the sun?

Newtons. Lots of them.

From Wolfram Alpha, I got the following numbers:

Acceleration due to gravity on the surface of the Sun = 273.95 m/s²

Density of the photosphere of the Sun = 1.9x10^-4 to 0.062 kg/m³

Surface area of the Sun = 6.08x10¹⁸ m²

From this, you can calculate that the approximate mass of an outermost "shell" of the Sun one meter thick would be 6.08x10¹⁸ (m³) times (1.9x10^-4 to 0.062) (kg/m³) which due to uncertainty on the density could be in the range from 1.15x10¹⁵ to 3.769x10¹⁷ kg. So force is mass times acceleration, which gets you a range from 3.15x10¹⁷ newtons to 1.03x10²⁰ newtons. That's just the weight of the first meter of thickness, bearing down on the rest of the Sun beneath. Assuming my math is right.

Edited September 15 by necrovore