On treeness of Oak1, and other things

[Little Idiot]

R1 is how things work not why.

O.K. having figured out that R1 is how things work, not why, then we can go on.
I agree that 'how things work,' R1, does not depend on a metaphysical position or tha lack of one.

Hmmm..... I would question that. The categories for both R1 and R2 seem a little restrictive to me, in terms of an epistemological picture. At the very least, I would suggest R1* and R2*.

P.S. Did I miss anything important in the intermission? ;-)

Yeah I think I went too far with eliminating the why things work but I'm not sure. Seems we could ask why the barn is down and answer because of the tornado.


What do you mean with the *?

Then, if we include the 'how' and the 'why' in R1, I think that leaves us with R1 that can change when our metaphysical understanding changes.
Which is, I think what we were talking about - not sure why its important to your model that (as you originally said) R1 does not change with our metaphysical model.

Quoted below;

Why is this important? Well. 1. I am claiming that neither R1 or R2 would be any different with ANY metaphysical position or indeed without one. Idealist or realist or cluelessist, the data is there, we all use it, we all agree on it in general, and it is a reality of it's own. ( I use the word reality in it's barest R1 sense )

[SpeedOfSound]

I agree that they are restrictive definitions, but lets see what SoS has in mind for them. After all he's defining them in this way for a purpose, I assume.

The idea is to identify a clear subset of knowledge that is common amongst us all. Things we can know with some great certainty yet without complete certainty. These are things that are empirically verifiable. Science or R2 is a rigorous and formal extension of R1.

An example might help. In R1 I declare the wall solid stuff because I can't pass though it. R2 takes a look and says that the wall is mostly empty space but you still can't pass through it. So in R1 you had a slightly wrong idea about solids. So you may have to modify how you think about it by R2.

We still talk about solid walls and we are warranted to do so. Yet R2 has told us something new about solids.

This is a very rich example that shows something very interesting about beliefs and I would like to get back to it a little later.

R2 however certainally will change dependent on the metaphysical position; the observed data will be the same, but the conclusion drawn from the data may be different. And since R2 consists of conclusions supported by data, R2 is different.

Science can't change because of your beliefs. The body of knowledge and the evidence are not changed. The conclusions drawn from science are of a different nature than what you are talking about. I think you are talking about a hypothesis and I hardly see why we would call one of those things metaphysics.

[SpeedOfSound]

Then, if we include the 'how' and the 'why' in R1, I think that leaves us with R1 that can change when our metaphysical understanding changes.
Which is, I think what we were talking about - not sure why its important to your model that (as you originally said) R1 does not change with our metaphysical model.

Quoted below;

Why is this important? Well. 1. I am claiming that neither R1 or R2 would be any different with ANY metaphysical position or indeed without one. Idealist or realist or cluelessist, the data is there, we all use it, we all agree on it in general, and it is a reality of it's own. ( I use the word reality in it's barest R1 sense )

Why and how in R1 can have the same level of justification as the word solid, without metaphysical belief. I don't think you are going to make a case that 4 year-olds do metaphysics are you?

Daddy why can't I run through the wall?
Because it's solid son.
How can I get to the other room?
You can use either a door or a saw son.

This is all R1 physics. Not Meta.

[SpeedOfSound]

Here is why I brought up treeness and R1/R2. It is a consistent wibble point of philosophers to talk about the reliability of our brain representations and the senses. From a simple statement about how science has found that our sense can be wrong the leap is made to doubting all of R1/R2.

Yet, even idealists put on their pants and walk around trees using R1 knowledge and they microwave their food with the fruits of R2.

So I want to establish a level of agreed upon validity of this physical world that we have knowledge of.

Do You understand that?

[Little Idiot]

I agree that they are restrictive definitions, but lets see what SoS has in mind for them. After all he's defining them in this way for a purpose, I assume.

The idea is to identify a clear subset of knowledge that is common amongst us all. Things we can know with some great certainty yet without complete certainty. These are things that are empirically verifiable. Science or R2 is a rigorous and formal extension of R1.

An example might help. In R1 I declare the wall solid stuff because I can't pass though it. R2 takes a look and says that the wall is mostly empty space but you still can't pass through it. So in R1 you had a slightly wrong idea about solids. So you may have to modify how you think about it by R2.

We still talk about solid walls and we are warranted to do so. Yet R2 has told us something new about solids.

This is a very rich example that shows something very interesting about beliefs and I would like to get back to it a little later.

It is indeed a good example.
I understand what you are saying, in a broad sense that our scientific understanding improves the understanding of our ordinary experience.
What I would suggest is that R3 would be an interpretation of our understanding by R1 and R2, this would be our metaphysical understanding. Maybe you dont like R3

R2 however certainally will change dependent on the metaphysical position; the observed data will be the same, but the conclusion drawn from the data may be different. And since R2 consists of conclusions supported by data, R2 is different.

Science can't change because of your beliefs. The body of knowledge and the evidence are not changed. The conclusions drawn from science are of a different nature than what you are talking about. I think you are talking about a hypothesis and I hardly see why we would call one of those things metaphysics.

Science can change because of the beliefs of the scientist. Einstein was convinced that his general theory of relativity demonstrated a finite time, a creation and therefore a creator. His R3 was based upon his R2 understanding. But also his R3 understanding coloured his R2.
His famous words 'God doesnt play dice' is an example; he found the whole quantum probabilty idea to be wrong based on his R3, yet despite being such a genius scientist as he was, time showed him to be in error.
Also, Bohr derived much of his R2 by reference to the oriental R3; his principle of complementary opposites' for example, came dirrectly from the 'yin and yang' (he said so himself). Again, his R2 was influenced by his R3.
Einsteins science was positioned against for example entanglement, while Bohr's was in favour of it, not because of observation, but because of R3. Only later was there emperical data to show which of the hypothetical's was closer to emperical fact.
While it is true that emperical fact determines right hypothesis from wrong, it is also true that much of science forges forward on hypotheticals based on R3 BEFORE emperical observations are possible. Such as the Wheeler thought experiment refered to in the last thread, where an observation today determines an event in the distance past, for many years it remained a hypothetical, only later being demonstrated.

[SpeedOfSound]

I agree that they are restrictive definitions, but lets see what SoS has in mind for them. After all he's defining them in this way for a purpose, I assume.

The idea is to identify a clear subset of knowledge that is common amongst us all. Things we can know with some great certainty yet without complete certainty. These are things that are empirically verifiable. Science or R2 is a rigorous and formal extension of R1.

An example might help. In R1 I declare the wall solid stuff because I can't pass though it. R2 takes a look and says that the wall is mostly empty space but you still can't pass through it. So in R1 you had a slightly wrong idea about solids. So you may have to modify how you think about it by R2.

We still talk about solid walls and we are warranted to do so. Yet R2 has told us something new about solids.

This is a very rich example that shows something very interesting about beliefs and I would like to get back to it a little later.

It is indeed a good example.
I understand what you are saying, in a broad sense that our scientific understanding improves the understanding of our ordinary experience.
What I would suggest is that R3 would be an interpretation of our understanding by R1 and R2, this would be our metaphysical understanding. Maybe you dont like R3

R2 however certainally will change dependent on the metaphysical position; the observed data will be the same, but the conclusion drawn from the data may be different. And since R2 consists of conclusions supported by data, R2 is different.

Science can't change because of your beliefs. The body of knowledge and the evidence are not changed. The conclusions drawn from science are of a different nature than what you are talking about. I think you are talking about a hypothesis and I hardly see why we would call one of those things metaphysics.

Science can change because of the beliefs of the scientist. Einstein was convinced that his general theory of relativity demonstrated a finite time, a creation and therefore a creator.

You can call it R3. Even though we have left the reality life raft at that point.

What's this shit about Einstein being a theist? Got proof?

[FedUpWithFaith]

There is a massive amount of information in our minds and in our libraries that I separate into R1 and R2.

R1 is the common sense stuff that we all have by the time we reach puberty. It helps us pull up our pants and find our mouths.

R2 is the extension by rigorous science to further clarify this information. We use reason and logic and empirical data to do so. Though you must note that I am making no claim yet as to the what or the where of reason and logic.

Treeness has mappings in both R1 and R2. It gets a little dicey in R2. A botanist will have a far different experience of treeness than us pedestrians.

Why is this important? Well. 1. I am claiming that neither R1 or R2 would be any different with ANY metaphysical position or indeed without one. Idealist or realist or cluelessist, the data is there, we all use it, we all agree on it in general, and it is a reality of it's own. ( I use the word reality in it's barest R1 sense )

2. R2 has shown to us that we can be very wrong in R1.

I agree with your model 'R1 and R2' as you describe.

I don't, and I think building arguments upon it as you guys are doing is going to go nowhere fast.

R1 is very problematic. We could have a thread on what common sense is and you haven't really even bothered to define it. You have muddled both conscious and subconscious forms of heuristic and intuitive decisioning with both innate and learned pattern recognition into it.

R1 is a melange that should be separated out into the conscious vs. subconscious and innate vs. learned forms of pattern recognition and heuristic or Bayesian reasoning (and possibly many other forms).

In another post ID, you said "treeness" was a property of trees. I think I could argue that treeness is really a property of our minds to categorize things. The trees couldn't care less. In fact, much of what enables people from all over the world to recognize trees, though they may have different words for it, is due to subconscioius pattern recognition capabilities we take almost completely for granted.

R2 is fairly sound but perhaps it should be broken up too. Higher-order "conscious" reasoning based on logic and reason can tell us even more about trees if it leads to science. It can also lead to shamanism ascribing to the tree the roots of life etc. Not all of that has to be malarkey. We also have an aesthetic sense about trees. Where does that fit in? But science is an empirical tool that was developed long after mankind recognized treeness and believed many things about trees that turned out to be supported scientifically as well as other conclusions that have not been supported by science. Science can deepen our understanding about the nature of trees. But do you think wer'e any better at recognizing treeness than our ancestors were? I doubt it.

This argument is just like the classic "when is a chair a chair" argument. Let's say you went to another planet and saw something that looked just like a tree. What about it would be essential for you to define it as a real tree? Does it have to have DNA? Does it have to photosynthesize? Does it have to have roots? I think you'll find, at the end of the day, the matter rests on human interpretation alone.

[SpeedOfSound]

Science can change because of the beliefs of the scientist. Einstein was convinced that his general theory of relativity demonstrated a finite time, a creation and therefore a creator. His R3 was based upon his R2 understanding. But also his R3 understanding coloured his R2.
His famous words 'God doesnt play dice' is an example; he found the whole quantum probabilty idea to be wrong based on his R3, yet despite being such a genius scientist as he was, time showed him to be in error.
Also, Bohr derived much of his R2 by reference to the oriental R3; his principle of complementary opposites' for example, came dirrectly from the 'yin and yang' (he said so himself). Again, his R2 was influenced by his R3.
Einsteins science was positioned against for example entanglement, while Bohr's was in favour of it, not because of observation, but because of R3. Only later was there emperical data to show which of the hypothetical's was closer to emperical fact.
While it is true that emperical fact determines right hypothesis from wrong, it is also true that much of science forges forward on hypotheticals based on R3 BEFORE emperical observations are possible. Such as the Wheeler thought experiment refered to in the last thread, where an observation today determines an event in the distance past, for many years it remained a hypothetical, only later being demonstrated.

I use intuition all of the time to create hypothesis. You want to call intuition metaphysics?

It's the Penrose discussion again. In another forum I said this:

I think the word physical has become as intractable as our words for mind and experience. In a discussion on rationlia with LittleIdiot he was talking about a theory of Penrose that the universe expanded until it didn't care about time anymore and then simple became a Bigger Bang. Penrose intuits that the black holes left over from the previous would account for the granularity of the new universe and be therefore detectable. LI claims that this is some proof of metaphysics and I claim that it is just stranger physics.

The idea of physical matter is a common sense idea and it helps us to not get bumps on the head. In a slightly modified quote from the old non-ergo, yes matter is mostly empty space but you ain't a fucking neutrino.

But I guess we have extended the word to mean what physics tells us about the stuff we live in but have some of us missed the memo?

The hypothesis must be empirically tested or it is shit. It isn't R2 until it satisfies some criteria.

1. It has to be falsifiable.
2. It has to not be shown false, yet!
3. It has to be a plausible model building upon other knowledge in R2.

The hypothesis that there are Great Blue Bunnies in the sky fails #3.

Now on this god and science thing. I pray to god and talk about god ALL of the time in AA meetings. I get the same shit from my buddies who know I'm an atheist. Bevis n Butthead "heh,heh you said 'god'".

In the context of certain conversations it is a word, a little like solid, that describes some aspect of humanity. It doesn't make me a theist anymore than uttering 'Powdered bat wings' makes me a witch.

[SpeedOfSound]

I don't, and I think building arguments upon it as you guys are doing is going to go nowhere fast.

R1 is very problematic. We could have a thread on what common sense is and you haven't really even bothered to define it. You have muddled both conscious and subconscious forms of heuristic and intuitive decisioning with both innate and learned pattern recognition into it.

Yes. we could break this up until we had an entire encyclopaedia on epistemology. How long would it take me to get LI to agree with all of that? Another 2000 fucking years? Want to have a crack at it?

In another post ID, you said "treeness" was a property of trees. I think I could argue that treeness is really a property of our minds to categorize things. The trees couldn't care less.

No. Minds would not have developed the neural nets to recognize any category if that category did not have some substance outside of the mind. Are you telling me that trees don't have trunks and branches until I classify them?

[SpeedOfSound]

Higher-order "conscious" reasoning based on logic and reason can tell us even more about trees if it leads to science. It can also lead to shamanism ascribing to the tree the roots of life etc. Not all of that has to be malarkey. We also have an aesthetic sense about trees. Where does that fit in?

You fail to understand that what I am trying to do for the moment is to leave the mind out of it. There are things that we can agree on without getting into the entire complex of mind. What you are suggesting is why these conversations go nowhere. The broad strokes are not brushed in so there is no basis for anything but wibble.

Now. You are welcome to tighten up R1 if you understand what I am after here.

[SpeedOfSound]

Then the nature if this data must be mental if it is to be known by the mind?
Doesn’t the sceptical view point more towards some form of idealism,
since empiricism is based on sensory data,
which is ultimately unreliable,
and probably the nearest thing to a certainty we have regarding this data
is that it must be able to interact with the mind of we humans, i.e. is mental.

scientific understanding of perception shows how the mind plays an important role in perception,
past association and assembly of different senses into a single experience of the physical world.

A reasonable balanced scepticism probably ( I don’t intend to try to prove idealism in the OP) leads to the conclusion that if the world is only known as a mental experience, if it is to have any significance, it must be at least partly on this basis. If we wish to suggest the physical world is data-based, then this data is mental in nature.

This is what you get without trying to separate things a bit.

[Little Idiot]

Then, if we include the 'how' and the 'why' in R1, I think that leaves us with R1 that can change when our metaphysical understanding changes.
Which is, I think what we were talking about - not sure why its important to your model that (as you originally said) R1 does not change with our metaphysical model.

Quoted below;

Why is this important? Well. 1. I am claiming that neither R1 or R2 would be any different with ANY metaphysical position or indeed without one. Idealist or realist or cluelessist, the data is there, we all use it, we all agree on it in general, and it is a reality of it's own. ( I use the word reality in it's barest R1 sense )

Why and how in R1 can have the same level of justification as the word solid, without metaphysical belief. I don't think you are going to make a case that 4 year-olds do metaphysics are you?

Daddy why can't I run through the wall?
Because it's solid son.
How can I get to the other room?
You can use either a door or a saw son.

This is all R1 physics. Not Meta.

OK.
It is not metaphysics, thats clear enough.

Are you trying to rule out everything we know as not meta physics to say 'see? no room for metaphysics'

[SpeedOfSound]

Then, if we include the 'how' and the 'why' in R1, I think that leaves us with R1 that can change when our metaphysical understanding changes.
Which is, I think what we were talking about - not sure why its important to your model that (as you originally said) R1 does not change with our metaphysical model.

Quoted below;

Why is this important? Well. 1. I am claiming that neither R1 or R2 would be any different with ANY metaphysical position or indeed without one. Idealist or realist or cluelessist, the data is there, we all use it, we all agree on it in general, and it is a reality of it's own. ( I use the word reality in it's barest R1 sense )

Why and how in R1 can have the same level of justification as the word solid, without metaphysical belief. I don't think you are going to make a case that 4 year-olds do metaphysics are you?

Daddy why can't I run through the wall?
Because it's solid son.
How can I get to the other room?
You can use either a door or a saw son.

This is all R1 physics. Not Meta.

OK.
It is not metaphysics, thats clear enough.

Are you trying to rule out everything we know as not meta physics to say 'see? no room for metaphysics'

Yup.

[SpeedOfSound]

Heh. I couldn't resist. I just want to be clear what ISN'T metaphysics.

The senses being unreliable is not metaphysics.

[Little Idiot]

Here is why I brought up treeness and R1/R2. It is a consistent wibble point of philosophers to talk about the reliability of our brain representations and the senses. From a simple statement about how science has found that our sense can be wrong the leap is made to doubting all of R1/R2.

Yet, even idealists put on their pants and walk around trees using R1 knowledge and they microwave their food with the fruits of R2.

So I want to establish a level of agreed upon validity of this physical world that we have knowledge of.

Do You understand that?

I understand you want to establish a level of agreement, and I am OK with that. I am a bit unsure about why we need call it R1 and R2 to do so...but I will go with it if your leading me somewhere.

I have never denied the experience of the physical. As an idealist, I do indeed prefer to wear pants.

I just say my metaphysical position is that the experience of pants is a mental experience, and as a sceptic we have no way to know for sure there is anything non-mental causing the experience - this is how I first entered idealism - to jump in saying the physical is not mental is NOT a proper sceptical position, it is actually a dogma, or at best an assumption. I have argued this point since my first posts in RDF in the matter thread (if you recall).

Do you understand that; to assert the existence of a world independent of mind is unestablished, an assumption.
Do you understand why I say its a sceptical position to question the posibility and factuality of such a world.