The Ontological Tyranny

Felix, I think I’ve refuted much of what you’ve proposed… I can see you dont want to address that but to prevent this thread from becoming a home for statements without justification, let me repost some of it:

When one scientist corroborates the findings another, and those findings support of a tested model, then it strengthens confidence that the model more closely corresponds to reality.

All we can know is that a working scientific model creates a reality.

[i]As Hawking and Mlodinow point out in “The Grand Design”, a model is good if it meets four criteria:

It’s elegant;[/i]

Subjective valuation, negation of objectivity, of “reality”

It contains few arbitrary or adjustable elements;

Because we must be certain that we understand everything about something before we can accept that it exists

It agrees with and explains all existing observations;

This has never been the case for any scientific law, so this is an empty point

and it makes detailed predictions about future observations that can disprove or falsify the model if they are not borne out.

Pertaining strictly to observations of occurrences of which the favored model allows interpretation

We select the best models based on their validity, reliability, predictability, and perceived match to reality.

But it has to be the reality that we want to be real, the reality over which we can exert the maximum control. Our measure of control over reality determines what is its “true nature”.

Even though there is no POV outside of our brains, we are justified in believing in reality, and that we can come closer to knowing it through science even though our models aren’t perfect.

And we refuse to draw conclusions from the fact that this reality we think we are gaining understanding of seems to suffer, change and even perish under our attempts to understand it. Apparently, reality is just not significant to itself for us - only our control is.

I myself don’t know Reality. But here’s a thought on the above:

To me, the human organism is extraordinary in the way the trillions of cells have a closed sytem of cooperation, predictability and (physical) problem solving. These are some fine ingredients of a type of reality. A reality that operates despite our intellectual understanding and without our intervention. It does not work at our will and pleasure. It acts spontaneously to respond to a challenge. It is innovative and it operates in a clearly defined fashion.

Now, perhaps it is a natural neuronal activity in the brain to form groupings of cooperation from sensory input in an effort to create ‘reality phenomena’ that brings together the body with its surrounding environment in order to ‘live’ in harmony with what the senses detect. This, of course, is not the Reality we are talking about though.

The problem with man is that he has been subjugated by the thought culture which has an immense hold on him and which has created the notion of the self in him. This precludes the living organism’s interacting with nature. That is to say that the self has separated man from nature and the natural scheme of things. Thus man with his self-centeredness leads a duplicate life as a hypocrite, leading himself eventually to diminish in quality.

Jacob—Sorry i missed you.

Does your statement correspond to something in the real world or merely to a reality of your own creating? If it is the latter than it is self refuting.

Yes there is a subjective element to that. But, the simplicity prescribed by the ever popular Occam’s razor is part of that criteria. It is the quality that evokes the response, "I should have thought of that! Why would you prefer inelegant theories?

This appears to be an unjustified assertion. We don’t necessarily know everything about anything. We can subject our observation to other tests of validity, reliability, predictability, and perceived match with other observations.

It has been enough the case to make predictions upon which the internet functions via which we are communicating to name but one example.

Favored models do change based on empirical support viz,. Newton’s=>Einstein’s for example. Thomas Kuhn has denied the more radical subjectivist interpretations of his theory of scientific paradigm shifts. He admitted that scientific development is a “unidirectional and irreversible process,” which means that later scientific theories do make improvements on previous ones.

Has science never uncovered what we don’t want? Model dependent realism doesn’t claim that any model perfectly capture the true nature of an object. It admits our understanding of object is no better than the model or models that produce the most valid reliable results. “True nature” is an ultimate goal toward which observations approach via mutliple measures and refinement and/or replacement of the model.

I agree science may be described as controlling knowledge. As such, it has had postive and negative consequences according to my POV. However, science is a self-critical process that can lead to course corrections.

Some dispute the scientific idea that the ability of a theory to predict and control nature proves its truth. It merely proves that we can turn this crank and get the right answers in a certain area. If you restrict yourself to these areas, your theory naturally appears unassailable.

So, science looks at the idea of Reality, then seeks a … what? … unity with it? Understanding of it? Okay, lets say we attain that, then what? All the build up and excitement is over. We’re back to square one … now what do we do to satisfy this endless thinking that there has to be something more purposefull and meaningful with our lives than what there is?

It’s as if we want change (reasons for which may include something to happen to consciousness to bring about high levels of enlightenment), but the traditional approach of scientific investigation says, ‘We have to capture within the analyzation process constituent parts and examine methodically.’ The scientific approach puts a hold on the flow of energy that is also part of the life of the human functioning.

It’s not all thought, knowledge, intellect, … abstractions that have no element of life energy in them. That energy is something that cannot be captured or understood. It defies methodical examination. All we can do is link certain independent events that we can sense, group and test and call this a theory, a philosophy, or a story of some imposed significance.

I mean that scientific testing and verifying includes bringing into existence of occurrences, not just active interpretation of […] as occurrences.

Because science, as all systematic thought, is based on a strict sense of aesthetics, of observable value. The judgment is purely human, nothing to do with a hypothesized “world-in-itself”. If such a world exists at all, then science draws us further away from it by our deepening projection of our aesthetic sense into it.

It is putting it a bit strong, but in general, observed phenomena are rejected as illusions when there is no scientific ground to explain them. This tells us only that we trust our aesthetic sense to reveal to us what can exist.

I don’t think that the science behind the internet agrees with all existing observations.
It is an establishment of relations of certain types of observations isolated in a created context.

This is what I meant when I said that all that can be said with certainty about science is that it creates reality. The existence of the internet is not a proof of any postulated nature of the universe, it is just a proof that establishment of certain isolated contexts allow for certain manipulations of to bring about new realities.
What we may learn from this only pertains to the nature of our own observation - that it allows us to change things when we concentrate it on artificially isolated contexts.

But that is only logical, since what we call science is always based on what has before been called science. Einstein used Newton to arrive at his own theories.

There are plenty of knowledge-systems that do not corroborate, or are not corroborated by what we call science, and to these, the above does not apply. They are dismissed as quackery even if overwhelming empirical evidence supports them - they cannot be considered true because they do not rely on the favored premises.

It has never explained something over which it did not subsequently have control.
That is it’s way of uncovering - isolating a context in which it can predict and bring about predictable results.

I personally do not think that “true nature” has a connection with power to predict very specific events in a hermetically isolated context. If there would be such a thing as true nature it would be found by not isolating contexts, but keeping the context for interpretation as wide as possible.

I don’t think that it knows how to be self critical, because for that it would have to understand that it is not observing and describing objectively, but is projecting and manipulating.

It is corrective of itself in terms of content, but not of perspective. It has never included its perspective in its findings. It is impossible to scientifically theorize like that. Which seems to be why it has been in a deadlock for a hundred years now - on a certain level, nature simply doesn’t corroborate this perspective anymore.

Based on its powerful belief in its own objectivity, science assumes that the contradictions it runs into are embedded in reality, instead of allowing the simple and quite feasible thought that the assumptions on which scientific method is based may at one point conflict with what we actually observe.

The demand for repetition of the same thing over and over again is the demand for permanence. Such permanence is foreign to nature and its unique creations. Thought’s demand for permanence is choking life and distorting perception. That kind of thinking sees itself as not just the protector of its own continuity, but also the continuity of how the life interacts with nature. Both are utterly false.

Scientific thought is an interloper, which thrusts itself into the affairs of nature. It has a profit motive, directing the activity of nature’s creations to get something.

It seems that some sort of radical change must take place, but without the interference of will.

If the realization (that we are disturbing nature) occurs through no volition of yours, then that’s the end of it. You will have no need of stopping it, of changing the situation at all. You don’t want to. You just go through it and what comes of it is the natural expression of life and reality. It does no good to question reality. Question, rather, your goals, your beliefs, and assumptions. It is from them, not reality, that you must be freed. These pointless questions you are asking will disappear with the automatic abandonment of your goals.

I’d say with a greater conception of will.
A wider, less lineair/singular type
a net of will spanning the globe, providing coordinates for balanced all round growth of humanities self-conception.

I see this web as the spirit of music. In the spirit of Nietzsche’s earliest work, which was pointing into a different direction than his latest, I would not hesitate long to identify this Form as the ultimate, the only objective science I believe in.

All arts are related in lesser ways to the same kind of objectivity - aesthetics without the aim of usefulness. A science far purer - because more honest as to what it is - than what we normally call science.

It is a different use that follows unintended from an aesthetics that is established for the sake of it being aesthetic, than what is aimed at by aesthetics for knowledges sake.
Music can be interpreted as useful, but it will be useful to a different purpose than knowledge of the workings of matter.

No science has proven to be as powerful an inducer of both exalting and uniting drives as music. Most exalting drives are isolating, most uniting drives are abasing, but music is able to exalt beyond this dichotomy. This comes with a price - introspection. Listening to it, we have to recognize our experience as a reality. Science allows us to ignore this up to a certain point. (A point at which we invented string-theory…)

What beautifully simple creatures we are. There is hope for us.

What about rhetoric? Is rhetoric not aesthetic? Isn’t rhetoric tonal and fluid? Doesn’t it have direction? Or is it not an art with usefulness? Or is rhetoric an art at all?

What about poetry? Literature? Theatre? Are these art or are they aesthetics “without the aim of usefulness?”

It is an art, in as far as it is aesthetic.
But it is not of the same order as music - to begin with it needs language, which is not only selective to culture but more importantly conceptual, therefore indirect, misleading. Music can not mislead - it is what it is, it does not signify something else than the experience of hearing it.

I think that Aristotle approached rhetoric as certain producers approach music as a product, making it so that it works on the absent minded listener. It is a low artform.

Actually I said that music is aesthetic without the aim of usefulness, aesthetics for aesthetics sake. Art. Art can be useful to a purpose, but if the purpose is prior to the sense of aesthetics, it doesn’t work.

Due to time constraints I can only respond briefly.

That is, no doubt, part of it.

I agree it’s systematic, and human but it is also objective, just as your statement above purports to be. As far as drawing away from its object, it wouldn’t work or would work less well if it did.

No disagreement here.

I don’t know about this. Got any examples?

Again, can provide examples. I may agree with you.

I agree with this.

That makes sense. The true nature would be the thing as it is in itself anyway. That may potentially inexhaustible anyway and therfore never fully disclosed.

I think there is recognition of perspective in quantum physics.

Hawking seems to recognize the limitations of objectivity in his formulation of MDR. No model is perfect or final. I think a realism which recognizes it’s limitations is at least as good as other world views.

Felix - no problem in being concise. I just have a lot of time on my hands and I take some comfort in the idea that philosophy requires unrestricted leisure…

I’m claiming that everything that is done to come to know scientific law is manipulation. Either only teleologically based selection of ones own perception and interpretation or that as well as manipulation of the observed matter.

I agree that I am doing the same (I am trying to establish fact), but not that I am objective. Just consciously subjective. A fact is a fact to someone, not to itself or to “existence itself”, neither of which seem to exist.

But it’s object is not objectivity, but control. More precisely: the the type of understanding that amounts in a certain kind of control over a certain kind of object: one of the ones that can be understood in strictly physical terms, literal objects.

“Existence” is not an object. Since “The Universe” and “Existence” are mutually inclusive, we can not understand the universe as an object either.

Still we try and scientists comes up with a lot of nifty inventions. We like our tools so much that we try not to observe that the laws we used to make them turn into fictions when we use the tools to look deeper.

Technology contradicts the subject matter. We are trying to catch a tiger with a pair of spectacles, sorry for the awkward metaphor - discrepancy between reach and expectation. What do we think we are studying? We can’t be seriously thinking that w’re studying anything but the context of our perspective.

Behavior training, weaponry, the state, banking, mass-production machines, wheels on rails, conception of past and future, nucleair fission and fusion, whiskey, cigarettes, strawberry-syrup, genetical engineered caviar, cars, digital chat-rooms… I think you probably misread me there.

Every racial region has at least one control oriented system of ontology. The question is what they seek to control. If I understand anything relevant at all, Western sciences most serious competitor pertaining to fields that are relevant to Westerners is the Oriental understanding of energy. This is experience-based. Man is used as the measure, we study the universe according to man, and man according to the universe so revealed. It is an honest feedback loop, and it works. Energy can be generated by intention breath and motion, and can be known and manipulated by introspection. Telepathy is extremely common to many, and know well to me, and many a science exists on how to exploit this. Voodoo, for example.

Of course this is all quackery if one is not a voodooist, but this does not mean that one cannot be voodooed into a depression, or astrologically understood and thereby successfully manipulated by the ones in control of this science.

We can either say that or that it doesn’t exist at all. We know that it is constantly suggested anew as perspectives are born.

Or - and this is the only possibility to redeem science without calling it subjective, the universe is actually created or coincidentally come to be shaped according to the measure of man, so that we may know it. But even if this is the case we would do best to study our own energy, experience and perspective to come to know the cosmos and it’s true laws. If the universe is formed in a way that can be understood by man, then we have been looking in the wrong direction when we were seeking objectivity.

What I’m saying here suggested by a lot of people these days, but nobody seems to know how to draw any consequences from this or make any scientific progress. I’ve been hearing this quantum-processor rumor for 15 years, but not recently anymore. I am curious - I think that we should be able to influence the processing telepathically. Or actually that this is unavoidable and that may be what’s causing the delay.

I applaud Hawkins realism. Of course he has to consider how useful a model is as well - this seems a reasonable compromise between intellectual clarity and usefulness.

Yes. It seems we can’t get around the possible contaminating effect of our own inquiries. Our speculation about a world free of our manipulation seems to be useful. So an objectivity that recognized it’s own tentativeness would pass the pragmatic test.

The problem is how to combine the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world with such person and viewpoint included. While we do not wish to deny our own particular viewpoint, we are also aware that our particular POV is limited and we aspire to conceive of the world as a whole. This tendency has resulted in untenable metaphysics on the negative side, but it seems to be necessary as an impetus to truth seeking.

If that is true of scientific investigation per se, it doesn’t have true of scientific investigators or those who reflect on science. I’m not saying that science strictly defined is the only kind of knowledge or the only path to it.

What I want is a unified world view be it subjective or objective. What I get is an interplay of the two, popping back and forth like the gestalt of a visual optical illusion. As unsatisfactory as this may be, it seems to be the only way I can take into account my entire field of sensibility and understanding without foreclosing in extreme subjectivism or objectivism.

I don’t know much about your examples but I get your general point. The arts, music and literature are modes of rationality and knowledge, broadly speaking as well.

Right and that is valuable as a goal if nothing else.

Right we don’t have an adequate anthropology yet.

What I’m saying here suggested by a lot of people these days, but nobody seems to know how to draw any consequences from this or make any scientific progress. I’ve been hearing this quantum-processor rumor for 15 years, but not recently anymore. I am curious - I think that we should be able to influence the processing telepathically. Or actually that this is unavoidable and that may be what’s causing the delay.

It seems that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics i.e. that objective reality, independent of any observer, doesn’t really exist, led to postmodern belief that theory isn’t concerned with what is but solely with what we can say about it.

Yes. Regardless of their theoretical preferences, reasonable people often end up at some form of pragmatism.

It seems we have found a lot of common ground. I would isolate this as the central issue:

Indeed, so that’s what philosophy should be looking at. Let me rephrase the above:

IF the universe as a part of which man exists, happens to be of a nature that allows man to understand it completely, this says precisely as much about man as it does about the universe.
In order to attain such knowledge then, man can only expect to find it by studying his own cognitive power directly, as irreducible, and not to reduce the powers to products of these powers. Products such as conceptions of cognition-as-resulting-from things man has conceptualized by his cognition.

The above scenario applies equally if the universe does not happen to be of a nature that allows man to understand it completely. In either case, what man can know about the universe is determined by the limits of his cognitive powers. What should be studied to advance knowledge of thought, and indirectly scientific conception, is the limits of cognition as cognition, not as chemistry of the brain. Logic is so far the only terrain where the west has found a solid grip on this matter. But we would be stupid to think of this as the only form in which cognition can be modelled.

What I want to do is think the horizon of my own understanding. From the subjective side “I” seem to be at once free and finite. From a more objective view I am embedded the very world I seek to know as it is in itself. What I am able to understand depends on the relation between myself and the rest of it. My capacity for understanding seems to be only partial because it depends on my constitution. Much of the way the world is may be constitutionally beyond my reach. I may be "self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference” as Hofstadler put it. But I could just as well be contained in a world at least some of which I may conceiving objectively as it is. If one of these ways are the case for all people on this planet, other intelligent beings with a different POV might presumably be in the position tell us how we are actually contained in the world.

We may perceive some of it trans-subjectively, that is not to say objectively. Objective understanding is hermetically sealed off from actuality, since we simply are built to interpret. No other perspective could provide us with objective understanding as this would imply that none of our subjective, bodily faculties of forming knowledge conceptions would be at work in creating this understanding. What we understand is necessarily a function of what we are. The more we are alike, the more we will understand in the same way.

Calling what we understand objective is to assume that all possible intelligences necessarily understand the way we do, if they would not be blind. This is indeed the assumption of science.

They are in the position to give us ideas, to influence our personal interpretation of our being-in-the-world. That is all, I think. We all choose different models in the end, fitted to what we are.
I think that the “ultimate truth” as far as truth gets ultimate is to be seen if we observe the model of reality a given person develops to the backdrop of what we know of his life. In studying how subjectivity gives rise to notions of objectivity. In this sense we can also understand science. Disinterested subjectivity gives rise to mechanistic objectivity. A very particular, even odd perspective rises from it, powerful enough to annihilate the planet, not even close to powerful enough to explain the conditions of its own arising. It’s just a technique, and an interpretation of the world aimed to make it accessible to that technique.

Right trans-subjective agreement is a putative means of achieving greater objectivity. But I think trans-subjective view intends to point beyond itself toward ultimate objectivity.

Yeah, it’s the view from everywhere or nowhere.

Perhaps ultimate objectivity “exists” only as the black background in a gestalt with every actual POV with which it is contrasted. As such the ulitimate is contentless. Even so it is phenomenologically like an encompassing ground or abyss from which known model or theory emerges. If nothing else, awareness of the ultimate in this sense shows up the limitations of every would-be totalizing model or theory.

I still say that it points to greater subjectivity, away from objectivity. Precisely because it points.

I’d say the view from a specifically human perspective, but understood as if it is from everywhere.
Thus, misunderstood, which means misleading us as to what it points out.

I think the model or theory emerges in the interplay between subjective desire to control, and the suggestion of an objectivity that may provide means to control. What is brought forward from the black backdrop (the unknown - the non-subjective) is that specific aspect of whatever may exist that answers to our subjective angle.

Jacob–OK. So is your position that the objective way of looking at things is hypothetical or speculative and that it is a subset of our inescapable subjectivity?

I think that the perspective is very real, but that it follows in all of its conditions from what we are capable of isolating.

It is nothing we should be calling objective, but rather a set of increasingly stable notions bound to deeply subjective conditions. Consider for example the imagination necessary to picture Earth orbiting the sun. How could a knowledge requiring imagination be objective?

Unless our imagination was given to us from God as an instrument that has nothing to do with our own animal, conditioned functions of survival, but is objective, a magic window of Truth, we could not think of any product of it as unconditioned, objective.

However:

-science is a consistent reality within the sphere of human imagination.
-science grants us certain powers of manipulation.

Therefore:

-the type of power which science grants us is inextricably linked to our imagination.
-the the aspects of nature over which science grants us control, are the aspects that have formed our imagination.