David Nyman wrote:
> On Jun 19, 12:31 pm, Russell Standish <l....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
>> Interaction is in terms of fields - electromagnetic for most of our
>> everyday examples. The fields themselves are emergent effects from
>> virtual boson exchange. Now how is this related to sensing exactly?
>> (Other than sensing being a particular subclass of interaction)
>
> Please, spare me the physico-mathematical imperialism! You say
> "interaction is in terms of fields'". I think what you might claim
> more modestly is something like "there is a mathematical formalism in
> which interaction is modelled in terms of 'fields'". Fair enough. But
> implicitly the formalism is a projection from (and reference to) a
> *participatory* actuality which isn't simply 'mathematical' (pace
> Bruno - and anyway, not in the sense he deploys it for the purposes of
> COMP). And I'm not of course imputing 'sensing' to the formalism, but
> to the 'de-formalised participants' from which it is projected.
>
> 'Participatory' here means that you must situate yourself at the point
> of reference of your formalism, and intuit that 'thou-art-that' from
> which the projection originates. If you do this, does the term
> 'sensing' still seem so 'soft'? The formalisms are projections from
> the participatory semantics of a 'modulated continuum' that embraces
> you, me and everything we know. When you situate yourself here, do
> you really not 'get' the intuitive self-relation between continuum and
> modulation? Even when you know that Russell's 1-person world - an
> 'emergent' from this - indeed self-relates in both sense and action?
> If not, then as Colin is arguing, you'd have to erect a sign with
> 'then magic happens' between 'emergent' and 'reductive' accounts.
Sounds like the sign is already up and it reads, "Participatorily intuit the magic of the de-formalized ding an sich."
>
>> Sensing to me implies some
>> form of agency at one end of the interaction. I don't attribute any sort
>> of agency to the interaction between two hydrogen atoms making up
>> a hydrogen molecule for instance.
>
> Same illustration. 'Hydrogen atoms' are again just projective
> formalisms to which of course nobody would impute 'agency'. But
> situate yourself where I suggest, and intuit the actions of any 'de-
> formalised participants' referenced by the term 'hydrogen atoms' that
> are implicated in Russell's 1-person world. From this perspective,
> any 'agency' that Russell displays is indeed inherent in such lower-
> level 'entities' in 'reduced' form. This is a perfectly standard
> aspect of any 'reductive-emergent' scheme. For some reason you seem
> prepared to grant it in a 3-person account, but not in a participatory
> one.
>
> The customary 'liquidity' and 'life' counter-arguments are simply
> misconceived here, because these attributions emerge from, and hence
> are applicable to, formal descriptions, independent of their 'de-
> formalised' participatory referents. But you can't apply the
> semantics of 'sensing' and 'agency' in the same way, because these are
> ineluctably participatory, and are coherent only when intuited as such
> 'all the way down' (e.g. as attributes of 1-person worlds and the
> participatory 'sense-action' hierarchies on which they supervene).
So a hydrogen atom has a 1st-person world view, but this is more than it's physical interactions (which are merely part of it's formal description)?
Maybe so - but my intuition doesn't tell me anything about it.
Brent Meeker
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Received on Thu Jun 21 2007 - 15:24:19 PDT