Loads of profs and docs dissent from Darwinian "consensus"

[Knotted]

Well, I guess I was thinking a little wider than what might be considered 'pure' mathematics to indeterminacy, non-linearity, superpositions, Bare theory etc etc. I mean would you expect to hear a professional mathematician pronounce that 'in mathematics, everything must be this way or that'? What would they mean by it?

Well if we have a calculation that gives us a probability or a bound, then this calculation is still deterministic. I am taking a bit of a purist view, though. I think of mathematics as being about computation at the end of the day, and of course more applied sub-discplines have the messy real world to consider.

That brings me to a point about "everything". If "everything" is statements (thoerems etc.) in mathematics, then its difficult to say that mathematics is completely determined one way or the other - though you still get mathematical realists (and yes what do they mean it?). If we are talking about computation then pure mathematics should be completely determined (unless we are considering "para-consistent" mathematics, and not many do). If we are talking about the thinking of mathematicians, as gorski implicitly was, then what are we talking about? Getting results relies on heuristics, guesses, intuition and all these vague notions. The nature of the subject-matter does not determine the nature of the mind considering it. Now that's crude determinism!

 

[Fruitloop]

The only fundamentally muddled thinking here is yours and your buddies here, plus of course [just look at that!!!] Knotted... Ayayayyaaaaaayyy...

Fine, put Slovenian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, plus an awful state of my Russian and Byelorussian, Ukrainian and Czech, not to mention Slovak. Maybe a bit of Polish, too... And that's on top of Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian and any other combination of those... A'right?

So about the same then, although I win on geographical spread. And my English could still have yours for breakfast!

 

[Fruitloop]

Well if we have a calculation that gives us a probability or a bound, then this calculation is still deterministic. I am taking a bit of a purist view, though. I think of mathematics as being about computation at the end of the day, and of course more applied sub-discplines have the messy real world to consider.

OK, agree absolutely with all of this.

If we are talking about the thinking of mathematicians, as gorski implicitly was, then what are we talking about? Getting results relies on heuristics, guesses, intuition and all these vague notions. The nature of the subject-matter does not determine the nature of the mind considering it. Now that's crude determinism!

Indeed. Not to mention the relative truth-values at any one time of various ideas; axiom, thesis, conjecture etc, i.e. the synchronic state of a system at any one time that some philosophers seem to studiously ignore (which is not to denigrate the diachronic, genealogical understanding of how things come to be the way they are). No such binary oppositions here!

 

[Knotted]

The only fundamentally muddled thinking here is yours and your buddies here, plus of course [just look at that!!!] Knotted... Ayayayyaaaaaayyy...

Well a bit more Hegel then:
"Should that anxious fearfulness wish to remain always in unthinking indolence, thought will agitate the thoughtlessness, its restlessness will disturb that indolence. Or let it take its stand as a form of sentimentality which assures us it finds everything good in its kind, and this assurance likewise will suffer violence at the hands of reason, which finds something not good just because and in so far as it is a kind. Or, again, fear of the truth may conceal itself from itself and others behind the pretext that precisely burning zeal for the very truth makes it so difficult, nay impossible, to find any other truth except that of which alone vanity is capable — that of being ever so much cleverer than any ideas, which one gets from oneself or others, could make possible. This sort of conceit which understands how to belittle every truth and turn away from it back into itself, and gloats over this its own private understanding, which always knows how to dissipate every possible thought, and to find, instead of all the content, merely the barren Ego — this is a satisfaction which must be left to itself; for it flees the universal and seeks only an isolated existence on its own account (Fürsichseyn)."
(Emphasis added by me)

 

[gorski]

So about the same then, although I win on geographical spread. And my English could still have yours for breakfast!

 

[gorski]

K, so self-indulgent...

 

[Knotted]

Indeed. Not to mention the relative truth-values at any one time of various ideas; axiom, thesis, conjecture etc, i.e. the synchronic state of a system at any one time that some philosophers seem to studiously ignore (which is not to denigrate the diachronic, genealogical understanding of how things come to be the way they are). No such binary oppositions here!

That more or less brings us back to questions about evolutionary biology. When we talk about the function of an organ or a phenotype, we are not saying anything which is in some absolute sense true or false - is its function what it can be used for or is it just what it is used for, can we draw a line between the two? But this is no reason to jettison our use of functional notions. I think this is in part why biologists sometimes warn themselves of "physics envy".

 

[Knotted]

K, so self-indulgent...

I wouldn't disagree. But it does not let you off the hook.

 

[Fruitloop]

That more or less brings us back to questions about evolutionary biology. When we talk about the function of an organ or a phenotype, we are not saying anything which is in some absolute sense true or false - is its function what it can be used for or is it just what it is used for, can we draw a line between the two? But this is no reason to jettison our use of functional notions. I think this is in part why biologists sometimes warn themselves of "physics envy".

I'm think that lines can be drawn, but perhaps only situationally. In a way you can see evolutionary biology coming to terms with that sort of thing with notions like spandrels, exaptation and cooption etc.

Re: determinism, I'm a computer geek first and a mathematician (and a bad one at that!) as needs require. I'm always reminded of Watson's puzzled delineation of Holmes's areas of knowledge after their first meeting . So nondeterminism intrudes early on, even relatively far from the 'messy world' with which biologists are dealing. But then I guess from there mathematically you have powerset construction, complexity classes etc - we really are gonna lose everyone's interest....

 

[Knotted]

I'm think that lines can be drawn, but perhaps only situationally. In a way you can see evolutionary biology coming to terms with that sort of thing with notions like spandrels, exaptation and cooption etc.

I’m not sure I 100% understand what you mean by “situationally”. But I think these things come down to judgements. Ordinarily, if I said “the reason there is a draft is that the door is open.” Then in a sense this is not strictly true because there could be a draft with the window open. Its just assumed that this sort of consideration is ignored. This is a reasonable assumption – a common sense of judgement that we wouldn’t normally even notice. I think this sort of thing can run riot with notions of science being a singular method to get to the truth. But its not really a cause for great concern. I think this sort of concern is where Gould and Lewinton got a lot of there leverage in their spandrels paper.

Re: determinism, I'm a computer geek first and a mathematician (and a bad one at that!) as needs require. I'm always reminded of Watson's puzzled delineation of Holmes's areas of knowledge after their first meeting . So nondeterminism intrudes early on, even relatively far from the 'messy world' with which biologists are dealing. But then I guess from there mathematically you have powerset construction, complexity classes etc - we really are gonna lose everyone's interest....

On this last sentence, I think you have formulated an objection to it already. How we use mathematical techniques in practice is not a mechanical given. Just as drawing a line is not a given – think of the definitions (note the plural) of species.

I think that the worry we have is that there must be a science of concepts or a science of method before we can have empirical science. This is what underlies German classical idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling). But its also what Hegel dramatically breaks with. There is no duality of science of the empirical and science of logic in Hegel. This is a nugget worth rescuing. We should not start with philosophy and then move on to science. Wittgenstein in a very different way also undercuts this notion. If we are following a rule then it is meaningless to say we are interpreting the rule. Thought cannot be studied by an examination of logic. We have to put aside the idea that there are hidden philosophical assumptions in everyday language (what is it that is hidden?) And really the language of biologists when they are talking about functionality is really largely of an everyday sort of use, not a special scientific one. We do not have a line drawing method, but we can still draw our lines.

The point I'm trying to make is what does it mean for thought to be deterministic or otherwise? We can perhaps speak of behaviour as deterministic but there is no coherent way of even denying that with respect to thought.

 

[Jonti]

... because our thoughts rise unbidden; we do not decide to have a thought, we just have it?

 

[kyser_soze]

I think this thread has evovled into such a tiny environmental niche it will only take a tiny change in that environment to make it spark to life again in some new, vigourous form, or die like a butterfly that can only live in a 10sqm patch of rainforest...

 

[Knotted]

... because our thoughts rise unbidden; we do not decide to have a thought, we just have it?

No, its just we can't say what thoughts are in the same way that we can't say what the smell of coffee is. Of course we can say what is going on when we smell coffee - the chemical reactions and the processing in the brain, but this does not tell us what we recognise the smell of coffee to be. It is a problem of reference - we are definitely refering to something but we cannot say what that something is.

That sounds like a problem but its really a pseudo-problem. We don't need to say what the something is. Think of it this way - I know what the smell of coffee is and in saying that I am not talking about what is going on at a chemical level, but what this knowledge is I cannot say. That's not a problem. This sort of argument is often raised against cognitive science and artificial intelligence. I don't think its valid in this context. But I do think it shows that all philosophical problems are pseudo-problems.

What do we really know of Darwin's Malthusian argument? Only its logic, only the force of his words. The sensibilities and intuitions of Darwin can be reconstructed. But the thought lying behind the argument? We can't even even guess - to guess it is to give it a form which can't even exist. The analysis of thought is a wild goose chase.

 

[Knotted]

I think this thread has evovled into such a tiny environmental niche it will only take a tiny change in that environment to make it spark to life again in some new, vigourous form, or die like a butterfly that can only live in a 10sqm patch of rainforest...

I think it will die. I usually kill threads, despite trying my hardest to keep them alive. I just don't have the knack for controversy. We need gorski!

 

[gorski]

And I need to work on my thesis, the deadline is tight, some 10 days left...

It's the other way round, K, we can discern much better the thought patterns, if you will, not the "surrounding areas" which are strictly individual. You're on the wrong track completely... I prescribe a heavy dose of Phenomenology, for starters... Dilthey and so on...

 

[Fruitloop]

I’m not sure I 100% understand what you mean by “situationally”. But I think these things come down to judgements.

I mean exactly that

On this last sentence, I think you have formulated an objection to it already. How we use mathematical techniques in practice is not a mechanical given. Just as drawing a line is not a given – think of the definitions (note the plural) of species.

Yeah these things kind of evolve as I think about them, and I am as I said a pretty lousy mathematician,

I think that the worry we have is that there must be a science of concepts or a science of method before we can have empirical science. This is what underlies German classical idealism (Kant, Fichte, Schelling). But its also what Hegel dramatically breaks with. There is no duality of science of the empirical and science of logic in Hegel. This is a nugget worth rescuing. We should not start with philosophy and then move on to science. Wittgenstein in a very different way also undercuts this notion. If we are following a rule then it is meaningless to say we are interpreting the rule. Thought cannot be studied by an examination of logic. We have to put aside the idea that there are hidden philosophical assumptions in everyday language (what is it that is hidden?) And really the language of biologists when they are talking about functionality is really largely of an everyday sort of use, not a special scientific one. We do not have a line drawing method, but we can still draw our lines.

Absolutely! I guess partly I find Wittgenstein's route far more germane than Hegel's (some truth in Gorski's accusations maybe, although ironically I am not English, nor even entirely 'Western').

The point I'm trying to make is what does it mean for thought to be deterministic or otherwise? We can perhaps speak of behaviour as deterministic but there is no coherent way of even denying that with respect to thought.

Yeah this is indeed the nub of the issue. I am doing some more reading/thinking on the subject at the moment and will come back to it shortly. Meanwhile, more mundane matters are pressing.

 

[Knotted]

And I need to work on my thesis, the deadline is tight, some 10 days left...

It's the other way round, K, we can discern much better the thought patterns, if you will, not the "surrounding areas" which are strictly individual. You're on the wrong track completely... I prescribe a heavy dose of Phenomenology, for starters... Dilthey and so on...

Thanks for the recommendation. As you can guess I'm re-reading Hegel at the minute. I want something to shake my current thinking. Hegel's just reinforcing it.

 

[Knotted]

Absolutely! I guess partly I find Wittgenstein's route far more germane than Hegel's (some truth in Gorski's accusations maybe, although ironically I am not English, nor even entirely 'Western').

The most strikingly obvious problem with Hegel is the obscurity of his whole way of going about philosophy. The problem is putting everything into a system. But it has the advantage that when you get used to the system it actually becomes fairly easy to follow. It also becomes fairly easy to put aside the problems of his philosophy. What interests me most about Hegel is his attitude, rather than his tortured reasoning.

The philosophy of Hume and Kant is still the dominant outlook (in various postivist, neopositivist and deconstructionist guises). Think of when people say that the laws of nature are invented by us and projected onto nature. Think also of when people say that an idea works and that's all that matters.

What interests me is that this sort of attitude is much less prevalent in biology than it is in physics. Imagine a paleotologist who talked about a brontosaurus theory as not about a real animal that walked the earth ("we'll leave that question to the metaphysicists"), but as a tool for predicting the pattern of future discoveries of brontosaur fosils. Its absurd.

Hegel represents is a realist reaction to Kantianism. He talks about the urge to overcome the contradictions between our notions and the object of our notions. He rejects the idea that knowledge is merely an instrument. Of course there is the old Baconian idea that knowledge is power. But it isn't merely power that drives us to understand.

I've been reading Lee Smolin's book, The Trouble with Physics. I'm deeply impressed by Smolin. He's not afraid of realism, and he has tried to encorporate natural selection into physics in an attempt to resolve some of its antimonies. He does not have the answers but, I suspect, in generations to come he will be remembered as someone well ahead of his time.

 

[kyser_soze]

I want something to shake my current thinking. Hegel's just reinforcing it.

Then obviously you're not reading it correctly

 

[gorski]

Quite, Kyzer! As I mentioned above. Barking up the wrong tree, totally... Hegel is entirely concerned with that which is common [Spirit], which can be expressed and shared, as the rest of Mediterranean-Western-European tradition is concerned with [away from the individual of an individual, which is by definition outside its scope and interest, and towards the common, objective parts which we all have in common, insofar as we are Human].

 

[gorski]

Hegel represents is a realist reaction to Kantianism. He talks about the urge to overcome the contradictions between our notions and the object of our notions. He rejects the idea that knowledge is merely an instrument.

He is all about resolving the inner contradictions, tensions, juxtapositions, separatness and hitherto metaphysically given static nature of thinking in Philosophy [prepared and partially resolved in particular by Kant and Fichte] and reconciling "is" and "ought to" through practice, but essentially Philosophical "practice" in relation to his understanding of Humanity, which is finishing the process when the externalised Spirit comes back to itself at the end of its journey, as Absolute Spirit, through [his] Philosophy, realising the World as its own product/project [Historical Thinking, later on], resolving all those dialectical "oppositions" as the process of self-establishment of Modern Subject through appropriation and positing of one's own world.

 

[Knotted]

Quite, Kyzer! As I mentioned above. Barking up the wrong tree, totally... Hegel is entirely concerned with that which is common [Spirit], which can be expressed and shared, as the rest of Mediterranean-Western-European tradition is concerned with [away from the individual of an individual, which is by definition outside its scope and interest, and towards the common, objective parts which we all have in common, insofar as we are Human].

I agree. Let me be clear I am not saying that Hegel is doing away with thought. Its obviously the exact reverse! He sees thought in everything. Its not just shared spirit with others, its even broader than that. He sees it in our social structures and even in nature itself. Thought for Hegel is not confined to cognition.

What interests me here is that Hegel is making the error consistent. This is fantastic in its way. It undermines completely the subjective idealism of the empiricists and Kantians and rediscovers a curious idealistic realism. (Idealistic because for Hegel it is the "infinite" that is absolute whereas the "finite" is merely ideal).

 

[kyser_soze]

Quite, Kyzer! As I mentioned above. Barking up the wrong tree, totally... Hegel is entirely concerned with that which is common [Spirit], which can be expressed and shared, as the rest of Mediterranean-Western-European tradition is concerned with [away from the individual of an individual, which is by definition outside its scope and interest, and towards the common, objective parts which we all have in common, insofar as we are Human].

Roughly translated, does this mean:

Hegel , unlike previous MedWestEur philosophers, focussed on what ideas (if any) are commonly held, are part of what it is to be human (such as the notion that we are, as a species, explorers (of mind, body and universe)) and attempted to move philosophical thinking from the realm of the individual to the group

?

He is all about resolving the inner contradictions, tensions, juxtapositions, separatness and hitherto metaphysically given static nature of thinking in Philosophy [prepared and partially resolved in particular by Kant and Fichte] and reconciling "is" and "ought to" through practice, but essentially Philosophical "practice" in relation to his understanding of Humanity, which is finishing the process when the externalised Spirit comes back to itself at the end of its journey, as Absolute Spirit, through [his] Philosophy, realising the World as its own product/project [Historical Thinking, later on], resolving all those dialectical "oppositions" as the process of self-establishment of Modern Subject through appropriation and positing of one's own world.

So are you saying here that Hegel's philosophy is process rather than edifice, IYSWIM? A river rather than a lake, but a river that passes through lakes in on it's way to the ocean, and thence to the sky and back again to the mountaintop?

TBH, this is the kind of paragraph that gets my goat, because it's needlessly obscure IMV.

 

[Knotted]

He is all about resolving the inner contradictions, tensions, juxtapositions, separatness and hitherto metaphysically given static nature of thinking in Philosophy [prepared and partially resolved in particular by Kant and Fichte] and reconciling "is" and "ought to" through practice, but essentially Philosophical "practice" in relation to his understanding of Humanity, which is finishing the process when the externalised Spirit comes back to itself at the end of its journey, as Absolute Spirit, through [his] Philosophy, realising the World as its own product/project [Historical Thinking, later on], resolving all those dialectical "oppositions" as the process of self-establishment of Modern Subject through appropriation and positing of one's own world.

Its the 'reconciling "is" and "ought to" through practice' part that remains vague in the above. Although I don't disagree with anything you say, its this bit in particular which you have left open for interpretation. Hegel was very careful not to let an "is" become an "ought" in some sloppy subjectivist fashion. And its precisely those quotes that I have furnished you with that demonstrate this.

 

[Knotted]

So are you saying here that Hegel's philosophy is process rather than edifice, IYSWIM? A river rather than a lake, but a river that passes through lakes in on it's way to the ocean, and thence to the sky and back again to the mountaintop?

That's a perfect interpretation. Hegel's system is explicitly circular.
"The image of the progress to infinity is the straight line, at the two limits of which alone the infinite is, and always only is where the line — which is determinate being — is not, and which goes out beyond to this negation of its determinate being, that is, to the indeterminate; the image of true infinity, bent back into itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end."

The whole of what Hegel calls Science (there is no distinction between what we call "science" and what we call "philosophy") is organic and historical. It makes as much and as little sense to start from an understanding of the spirit as it does the empirical immediate.

 

[Fruitloop]

Its the 'reconciling "is" and "ought to" through practice' part that remains vague in the above. Although I don't disagree with anything you say, its this bit in particular which you have left open for interpretation. Hegel was very careful not to let an "is" become an "ought" in some sloppy subjectivist fashion. And its precisely those quotes that I have furnished you with that demonstrate this.

Yeah, that's precisely the bit that troubles me as well.

There is an interesting interplay of progress and recuperation in the history of phenomenology and sociology that includes Dilthey etc and goes on for at least half a century. A big early influence for me was the dramaturgical approach of Erving Goffman - apparently I also met him when I was three, although I don't remember clearly.

 

[gorski]

K, that is the basis of Marx's critique of Hegel's speculative position... How do we resolve these issues and in particular Hegel's statement that Spirit has come back to itself and that from now on there is nothing essentially Novel that can happen. Therefore, History has happened and from now on - nothing New is possible.

Marx thinks this is a terible prospect and struggles to get any meaning into our existence after Hegel, to keep the History going, as it were, to see which other possibilities there are...

That's the crux of the matter, of course...

 

[Knotted]

Yeah, that's precisely the bit that troubles me as well.

I think the motivation is similar to what motivates modern string theorists. Its need to unify everything into one system. If we have a system that deals with what is and another for what ought to be then this is just weak. It also leads to relativism. If a philosophical system merely justifies an outlook ie. it merely describes how things are understood (think Kant) then it makes no claim to be better than rival outlooks.

What Hegel is not doing is merging what is and what ought to be. He's showing how they "sublate" (Aufheben again) into one another. But the objectivity of actuality and the freedom of the spirit are sharply defined "moments" of his philosophy, he resists every temptation to water these down. However, in the "absolute" there is no distinction.

Of course all this language is dependent on the system. And the system building itself is responsible for this philosophy.

 

[gorski]

Hegel's system is explicitly circular.

Hegel's system is a spiral - a developmental spiral, to be exact - where the Spirit from the beginning of the journey is the same Spirit but now Absolute Spirit, enriched and aware of oneself, as well-travelled and infinite, sure... At the end of the journey, the end of the spiral [upwards], then reaches the very beginning, as it were, even though it sounds awkward.

Kojeve wrote about Hegel's notion of time, for instance. Bloch, too. Here, as elsewhere, Hegel is uniting, dialectically, different notions of time and resolving their issues, in his Absolute Philosophy. Circular notion of time of the Ancients [nature's paradigm of a beginning, the blossoming and withering away, back into arche], Christian notion of time [from an absolute beginning to an absolute end] and the modern one, also, as a never ending story, a progression, so to speak, of moments etc.

It has to be understood in the same manner, with the same impetus as the rest of his system.

 

[Knotted]

Marx thinks this is a terible prospect and struggles to get any meaning into our existence after Hegel, to keep the History going, as it were, to see which other possibilities there are...

I really don't think Marx was bothered about getting any meaning into our existence. What did Marx say about Darwin?

"Darwin's book is very important and serves me as a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history. One has to put up with the crude English method of development, of course. Despite all deficiencies, not only is the death-blow dealt here for the first time to "teleology" in the natural sciences but their rational meaning is empirically explained." Letter from Marx to Lasalle

Yes, Marx was critical of the "method of development". But notice that Marx is triumphant about the death-blow dealt to teleology. It removes meaningfulness of nature and in particular our nature. Live with it. Embrace it.