On 11/07/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> I don't see that "relexive" adding anything here. It's just "existence" simpliciter isn't it?
Frankly, I'd be happy to concur. My account was to some extent a
recapitulation of the intuitive process by which I reached a view of
this entailment of 'existence'. So now (like the old story of the
mathematical lecturer) I can say with relief: "Yes, I was right - it
WAS obvious all along!" If this matches your own sense of it, that's obviously
OK by me. My experience nonetheless is that it doesn't match
everyone's, and that much confusion arises from this.
> So something exists and then....? part of it knows or learns about other parts of it. Is that what you mean by epistemic?
Ultimately, yes. The emergence of 'persons' and 'knowledge' I take to
be a long way up a developmental process that renders the appearance
of decomposing into structural or perceptual components subject to
perspective (i.e. who's looking at what). You haven't been terribly
much in sympathy with my previous expositions of this. But do recall
that my approach has been to attempt to clarify (for myself at least)
what the semantic implications of a particular 'theology'
might be, not to promote a TOE (god forbid).
> And this process of parts knowing about other parts follows some dynamical rules? What does "know" mean in this context? Does it mean "contains a representation of" or "has some information about"?
Something along those lines. My aim was not to explicate how knowing
comes about in detail, or how knowledge might be represented (either
task being of course quite beyond me) but to try to understand how
mental and physical descriptions might be correlated in a way that
made sense in terms of either account. The correlation would I guess
ultimately take the form of 'dynamical rules' for the domain in
question. I feel I have a better intuition about this now, but even
after my best efforts to share this I wouldn't expect everyone to
agree or even follow my line of reasoning (which may be just wrong).
> This process of "reflexive involution" is not at all clear. Can you give an example of something emerging by reflexive involution?
I used the term 'involution' on the model of 'evolution'. Since the
theology of the One proposes that all process is a 'turning in' of the
One, evolution becomes involution. The relevance of this is that the
'turning in', reflexivity, or self-relation is, as it were, the
epistemic access of the One to itself: an access that manifests as our
1-personal experience, and - the communal extrapolation of this - the
'physical' world. ISTM that this isn't very far from what Bruno is
proposing with comp (unsurprisingly as he takes Plotinus as a point of
departure), but I'm less sure (i.e. a lot more confused) about how
mental and physical aspects correlate. My working assumption has been
that they follow an essentially isomorphic trajectory, and that from
this we could recover mental and physical narratives that were each
justifiable in (something like) their own terms. But I'm quite open
to the possibility that this is terminally naive. You didn't seem to
find my previous attempts to express this very satisfactory.
> So in your conception there are things that exist, emerge from The One by some process, and things that don't exist, Torgny's universe that he defines by some specification. This seems close to Peter's position that existence is a brute property
As a matter of fact, I'd be reasonably content to go along with this.
I did feel that Peter's bare substrate was a fairly good approximation
to the One, and his insistence on 'real in the sense that I am real' I
feel is an implicit appeal to what I've termed reflexivity. Also,
Peter would from time to time try to get Bruno to concede that AR
entailed just this brute property, but the debate always seemed to get
bogged down. My own view is that any arithmetical realism postulated
to give rise to 'reality in the sense that I am real' has this
implication from the outset. But I don't want to start that argument
again.
> (quite contrary to the premise of the everything-list, but one that I'm glad to entertain).
For what it's worth, I really don't see that this is necessarily
contrary to the premise of this list. The proposition is that all
POSSIBLE worlds exist, not that anything describable in words (or for
that matter mathematically) 'exists'. My analysis is an attempt to
place a constraint on what can be said to exist in any sense strong
enough to have any discernible consequences, either for us, or for
any putative denizens of such 'worlds'. So I would argue that
non-reflexive worlds are not possible in any consequential sense of
the term.
David
>
> David Nyman wrote:
> > On 10/07/07, Brent Meeker <meekerdb.domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >
> >> I draw a complete blank when I read your use of the word "reflexive". What exactly do you mean? How would you distinguish reflexive from non-reflexive existence? Do numbers exist reflexively? Do somethiings exist non-reflexively? What is "self-reflexion"? What's the operational definition of reflexive?
> >
> > Sorry, I'd hoped this might emerge more clearly from my dialogue with
> > Bruno, but I'm happy to clarify further. The notion arises from the
> > semantics of a particular 'theology', e.g. that of Plotinus' One. The
> > One represents uniqueness and independency: broadly, that which is not
> > subject to prior causation. This is 'existence' conceived as primary
> > presence-to-itself; it is consequently 'reflexive' in the sense of
> > turning in on itself.
>
> I don't see that "relexive" adding anything here. It's just "existence" simpliciter isn't it?
>
> > Here we are speaking of 'self' not of course in
> > the sense of a 'person', but in terms of primary 'self-relation'. The
> > 'many' are conceived as emerging from the One by a process of what
> > might then be termed involution (borrowing from evolution). The One
> > stands here as the sole fundamentally ontic category; all subsequent
> > involution is epistemic. More poetically, but rather accurately, this
> > is how the One 'gets to know itself'.
>
> So something exists and then....? part of it knows or learns about other parts of it. Is that what you mean by epistemic? And this process of parts knowing about other parts follows some dynamical rules? What does "know" mean in this context? Does it mean "contains a representation of" or "has some information about"?
>
> >
> > In terms of these 'theological' premises, your questions might be
> > answered as follows:
> >
> > 1) How to distinguish reflexive from non-reflexive existence?
> >
> > Anything whatsoever, if it is to exist in any sense other than the
> > abstract, must emerge as a category by a process of reflexive
> > involution from the One. Consequently all 'existents' could be said
> > to 'exist reflexively'. Non-reflexive existence then equates to
> > non-existence. One might then wonder: what is the point of the
> > qualification 'reflexively'? The point is that it is an implicit
> > qualification, and consequently we may inadvertently delete it - by
> > abstraction - when we postulate what may 'exist', especially in the
> > 'all possible worlds' context of this list.
> >
> > For example, ISTM that as soon as one explicitly conceives a
> > 'B-Universe' - in contrast to Torgny's implicit assumption - as
> > having emerged by reflexive involution of the One, it becomes very
> > much harder to see how it could do so without 'getting to know itself'
> > in the process.
>
> This process of "reflexive involution" is not at all clear. Can you give an example of something emerging by reflexive involution?
>
> > IOW, the 'stuff' that seemed merely a peculiar
> > 'optional extra' in its implicitly non-reflexive (i.e. in a rather
> > literal sense, abstracted) conceptual form, can be seen to integrate
> > organically with the 'physical specification' through the epistemic
> > self-relation of the One.
> >
> > 2) Do numbers exist reflexively?
> >
> > An interesting question. Bruno, I think, might say that they do, or
> > at least that numbers and their relations can be used to mathematise
> > Plotinus' reflexive schema. I would say that to accept any such
> > mathematisation as a basis for our own existence, in some ineliminable
> > sense they must be held to exist reflexively. An intuitionist answer,
> > I guess, would be that they are abstractions of pre-mathematical
> > emergent categories of the One.
> >
> > 3) Do somethings exist non-reflexively?
> >
> > No, a something gets to be a something solely in virtue of being a
> > product of a process of reflexive involution of the One.
> >
> > 4) What is "self-reflexion"?
> >
> > Emphasis, I suppose. If reflexion is already self-relation, then
> > self-reflexion is merely an emphatic form of the same notion.
> > Redundant, perhaps.
> >
> > 5) What's the operational definition of reflexive?
> >
> > IOW what would one do to discover if something exists reflexively? I
> > suppose in the end this is empiricism. If it kicks back, it's
> > participating in the web of reflexive involution. If it never kicks
> > back, it may be just because it isn't. So I would say that the
> > B-Universe as conceived by Torgny isn't specified reflexively: i.e.
> > its putative properties are characteristic of situations imagined in a
> > form abstracted from reflexivity. For this reason I would claim that
> > it could never kick back: i.e. have any consequences, make its
> > presence felt, survive the cut of Occam's razor, etc. I could of
> > course be wrong.
>
> So in your conception there are things that exist, emerge from The One by some process, and things that don't exist, Torgny's universe that he defines by some specification. This seems close to Peter's position that existence is a brute property (quite contrary to the premise of the everything-list, but one that I'm glad to entertain).
>
> Brent Meeker
>
> >
> > Does this help at all?
> >
> > David
> >
> >> David Nyman wrote:
> >>> On Jul 6, 2:56 pm, Bruno Marchal <marc....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> It
> >>>> is a unexpected (by me) discovery that quanta belongs to that sharable
> >>>> first person view (making the comp-QM a bit more psychological than
> >>>> some Many-Worlder would perhaps appreciate.
> >>> Doesn't this strike you as perhaps consistent with what I've been
> >>> saying about self-relation, or reflexive existence? IOW, quanta - as
> >>> they appear to *us* (how else?) - exist reflexively. Comp, like any
> >>> 'TOE', is a "gods' eye view", and I've been trying to convince Torgny
> >>> that we shouldn't fool ourselves into mistaking such conceptions for
> >>> modes of existing. We may nonetheless ask - with great care - "what
> >>> might the consequences be if our situation were - in some (tricky)
> >>> sense - to look like this from a gods' eye view?" But this is a
> >>> (tricky, tricky) mode of enquiry, not a mode of existing.
> >>>
> >>> 'The One' is also a mode of enquiry (no less tricky, of course): it
> >>> seems to suggest that the mode of existing of both the qualia and the
> >>> quanta may be ineliminably reflexive: the splintering of a singular
> >>> process of self-reflexion. Self: because there is no other;
> >>> reflexion: because there is no other relation.
> >>>
> >>> David
> >> I draw a complete blank when I read your use of the word "reflexive". What exactly do you mean? How would you distinguish reflexive from non-reflexive existence? Do numbers exist reflexively? Do somethiings exist non-reflexively? What is "self-reflexion"? What's the operational definition of reflexive?
> >>
> >> Brent Meeker
> >>
> >
> > >
> >
> >
>
>
> >
>
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Received on Tue Jul 10 2007 - 20:52:57 PDT