Re: path-dependence: a philosophical issue concerning time

Justintruth <truth.justin@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

I was just trying to point out that positing an objective history is
no different than positing a time space manifold or other object as
part of our "best guess" or "current theory" that "explains"
experiment.

I'll go along with that. But this objective history or space time
manifold is a mental construct that hopefully has truth value in
relation to the what happened past and supports effective
action. However, just because we posit a time line in thought and it is
useful does not necessarily mean that it exists as a real dimension
independent of thought.

The notion of the existence of the past is not necessary but can be
used in an objective model and when used is subject to the "standard"
methods of verification namely that it be in agreement with
observation and then it must meet the test of Okham's Razor.

I don't know that I disagree. It is often useful to posit a time line as
if it were real, or to speak of the "flow of time". But when it comes to
metaphysical questions such as I raised, often these presumptions only
block avenues of thought. That something is in agreement with
observation is today taken cautiously for a variety of reasons. One is
that our inferential hypotheses are underdetermined by observational
data; another is that today's scientific realism suggests that there's
more to reality than can be observed. If you are employing Okham's Razor
to justify a radical empiricism, I suspect you are out on a limb.

One of my starting points was that, while the past once existed, it does
not exist in the present, and so any trajectories in space-time are
reconstructions in thought that cannot refer to a real process that is
indepedent of thought. You seem to say that such a model can be tested
empirically, but that suggestion raises all kinds of difficulties, and I
suspect only proves that past events once existed rather than that the
trajectory is real (in the sense of Alexander's Dictum that it is
causal).

I was not aware that there were other criteria like "choherence" or
being "heuristic". I confess I did believe that it was just
correspondence with observation and then Okam's razor. I will try to
check out these other criteria. I never heard of them before you
mentioned them. I believe theories need "choherence" to even be a
candidate theory but I don't know that a theory being more heuristic
would give it an advantage over another theory? "Simplicity" perhaps?

A classic discussion is that of Imre Lakatos, "Falsification and the
Methodology of Scientific Research Programs", in Imre Lakatos and Alan
Musgrave, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge, 1970),
pp. 91-196. It is a good read and informative, despite its being old
fashioned neo-empiricist.

I might mention that coherence seems to have come up with Renaissance
neo-platonic mysticism, and so is essentially a subjective assumption
that has been warranted by scientific practice, but never proven. I also
might add that coherence is a function of our subjective frame of
reference. For example, a thermodynamic engine, in terms of direction of
change of entropy, is contradictory (interdependence of opposites),
although not so if we widen our frame of reference.

I skip over some remarks that, if I understand them correctly, I have no
objection to. On the other hand, if you imply that nothing is real if
not in principle observable, then you are distancing yourself from
traditional scientific thinking and even current philosophy of science,
which has become realist (unobservables are real).

Tachyons might indeed be viewed skeptically because they are
problematic, but how about gluons? They have never been observed nor are
likely ever to be. Nevertheless, there seem to be good reason to infer
their existence.

At any time it is possible to turn ones attention away from what
something is and consider instead the fact that it is. When one does
that he turns from the essential to the existential.

OK, understood. But you are raising a question in the philosophy of
modality, and that is not not to be undertaken lightly (the more you
think about it, the less you know ;-).

However, there is a kind of stability in reality that is pervasive so
much that for me to doubt that my car will be there is unreasonable.

I don't want to get hung up on this, but isn't the stability
(persistence) of your car in the lot simply an artifact of your daily
life? That is, the car will persist for a few hundred years until it
rots away. In cosmological time, it hardly persists at all; for a child,
it may have always existed; for you, you'll sell it in three years. The
feeling today is that change is essential to all being, and persistence
is due to special and temporary circumstances that need explanation,
such as offered by the causal theory of persistence.

If this stability were to break down, if experience were to be altered
such that I go out and there is no longer a car and then I turn and
there is no building out of which I came and then etc etc then the
basis for objective modeling would be eliminated. In this way the
basis of objectivity is a real aspect of the world and is based on a
kind of stability in its appearance.

Yes, your daily life depends on the appearence of there being some
stability in your world. But that, after all, is subjective, not an
ontological statement. You go on to give an example of quantum
mechanics, in which "naive notions of objectivity have broken down".
Well, yes, but is Heisenberg indeterminancy putting the question to
stability or is it putting the question to objective existence? I
suspect you mean the latter, for in this case, the observer becomes part
of the object under observation. However, that only leads to the
conclusion that reality prior to or independent of that observation is a
probability distribution, which in terms of scientific realism does not
cast its reality in doubt. While I'm inclined to represent the macro
world in terms of the actualization of probability distributions, I
believe I would be wrong to extend features peculiar to the quantum
world into the macro world.

I do agree that the idea that there is some "reality" "causing"
physical law is not scientific. The idea that there are real
scientific laws I do not doubt. But that they are self causing or that
something "in" reality "causes" reality seems to me to be ridiculous
and entirely unscientific.

While I agree with you about laws (they are only generalized
observations), you leave me beyond that point. For one thing, causal
explanation today is seen as only one kind of explanation ("why"), and
there are other kinds of explanation ("how"). In any case, everyone
seems to agree with you that laws don't cause anything, and the tendency
seems to be to take singular causation as foundational. But my point is
that non-causal explanations (self-causation) is not at all ridiculous
today. Yes, Bergson has taken a deserved beating for his vitalism, but
it seems that the basic idea that all things are essentially processes
is quite respectible today. I see this as arising from two presumed
facts: all system are in principle open to a degree; the universe as a
whole is decreasing in entropy.

A non- predictive scientific theory is unscientific as it does not
allow confirmation through future experiment.

I don't want to be rude, but no one has thought this for a very long
time,

Actually, that is not true as I have thought it recently and I am
someone. However, either way its no argument because whether someone
has thought something recently is not a good criteria for validity.

Touche ;-). What I meant was that the scientific community has not
assumed that for a very long time. Also, it is pointed out that much
actual science does not aim at prediction, particularly in the
evolutionary sciences. While weathermen do predict the weather on TV,
that's not the point of meteorology; it it were, it would be a shabby
science indeed for weathermen can only predict a few days, and often
they are wrong. The dismal record of their predictions does not
invalidate the science of meteorology.

I have no problem starting with current thinking but it seems to me
that all advances have come when one departs from current thinking
where it is wrong.

Of course.

I do not believe that "common sense" leads to an understanding of the
truth nor that what is "currently thought" is correct. I do not think
that current philosophy is "correct".

Agreed, common sense may not lead us closer to truth. However, when you
say a view is "correct", what do you mean? No one claims that any
current view is absolutely true, although hopefully closer to the truth
than older theories. As Peirce pointed out long ago, we approach but
never reach objective truth, but proceed by successive one-sided
approximations. If correct means an absolute correspondence between what
we have in our head and the world independent of conscousness, then of
course, you would be right to be skeptical. But to say that our partial,
imperfect, and one-sided "truth" are simply and entirely false because
they are not absolutely or completely true gets us into hot water
indeed.

--

Haines Brown, KB1GRM



.

Relevant Pages