The ontological assumptions of science.

Please post your reference for any experimental evidence that an ontic reality does not exist. Do you honestly believe that the universe did not come into existence until there were observers to talk about it? Then where did the observers come from? How did they communicate before they invented photons?

How do fish and other non-languaging animals interact with the world if there is no ontic reality?

What is the functional value in claiming that there is no ontic reality, when we have to deal with the world as if it is really there anyway? Can observers create or change reality simply by agreeing on what is true? Do you know of any instances where this has been documented?

Why do people die in automobile accidents? If there is no ontic reality and the consensus of all of the victims, police, paramedics, doctors, and family members is that they should live, who got together and decided that they would die?

Setanta,


It is Joe who claims that Maturana says everything is "just words" !
Nothing could be further from the facts.

[Setanta] wrote:

Reality does not shift as paradigms shift

But that position is the epitome of "a priviledged one". Einstein himself overthrew such a theologally important position with his rejection of Newton's "fixed frame of reference". And he himself was obliged to concede his view of "reality" in the light of the failure of his challenge to QM with respect to "non-locality".

All "information" is subject(s) dependent. Note also that in a celebrated experiment by Asch, a subject would "mis-report" what he saw in a simple picture in order to conform with the staged reports of stooges posing as fellow subjects.

For example the "identity" (persistence) of "an animal" lies within its "organization" and not its "structural composition". An organism continuously exchanges and assimilates matter from its environment like a tornado exhanges debris and air molecules. For Maturana it does NOT exchange "information" because that presupposes a separate "cognitive system" to organizational assimilation of "matter". Thus Maturana takes a deflationist and behaviourist view of "thinking" and sees it as an epiphenomenon of "languaging" i.e. a covert physical activity (in our parlance).

Maturana bases his ideas partly on Prigogine's demonstration of the appearance of spontaneous structure in complex dynamic processes far from equilibrium.

(BTW You kept talking about (1) before (2) sentience, but even physicists have agreed that (1) time is (2) a psychological construct. Ergo "before sentience" is vacuous from the metaphysical position ).

My position is far more complicated than that. I cannot explain it to you in terms that you would understand. I encourage you to read all of the posts that I have ever submitted to this forum. Only then will you be able to understand my position.

So keep stubbing that toe by all means, and keep "bleeding it" to ease the discomfort !

It is interesting that most members of the censorship committee refuse to read the actual material.

Try googling "Maturana Prigogine".

Science
We as scientists make scientific statements. These statements are validated by the procedure we use to generate them: the scientific method. This method can be described as involving the following operations: (a) observation of a phenomenon that, henceforth, is taken as a problem to be explained; (b) proposition of an explanatory hypothesis in the form of a deterministic system that can generate a phenomenon isomorphic with the one observed, (c) proposition of a computed state or process in the system specified by the hypothesis as a predicted phenomenon to be observed; and (d) observation of the predicted phenomenon.
In the first operation, the observer specifies a procedure of observation that, in turn, specifies the phenomenon that he or she will attempt to explain. In the second, the observer proposes a conceptual or concrete system as a model of the system that he or she assumes generates the observed phenomenon. In the third, the observer uses the proposed model to compute a state or a process that he or she proposes as a predicted phenomenon to be observed in the modelled system. Finally, in the fourth operation he or she attempts to observe the predicted phenomenon as a case in the modelled system. If the observer succeeds in making this second observation, he or she then maintains that the model has been validated and that the system under study is in that respect isomorphic to it and operates accordingly. Granted all the necessary constraints for the specification of the model, and all the necessary attempts to deny the second observations as controls, this is all that the scientific method permits.
This we all know. Yet we are seldom aware that an observation is the realization of a series of operations that entail an observer as a system with properties that allow him or her to perform these operations, and, hence, that the properties of the observer, by specifying the operations that he or she can perform determine the observer's domain of possible observations. Nor are we usually aware that, because only those statements that we generate as observers through the use of the scientific method are scientific statements, science is necessarily a domain of socially accepted operational statements validated by a procedure that specifies the observer who generates them as the standard observer who can perform the operations required for their generation. In other words, we are not usually aware that science is a closed cognitive domain in which all statements are, of necessity, subject dependent, valid only in the domain of interactions in which the standard observer exists and operates. As observers we generally take the observer for granted and, by accepting his universality by implication, ascribe many of the invariant features of our descriptions that depend on the standard observer to a reality that is ontologically objective and independent of us. Yet the power of science rests exactly on its subject dependent nature, which allows us to deal with the operative domain in which we exist. It is only when we want to consider the observer as the object of our scientific inquiry, and we want to understand both what he does when he makes scientific statements and how these statements are operationally effective, that we encounter a problem if we do not recognize the subject dependent nature of science. Therefore, since I want to give a scientific description of the observer as a system capable of descriptions (language), I must take the subject dependent nature of science as my starting point.

You have a tendency to throw in made-up words (such as "languaging" and "thingers" and "structural coupling"), reference scientists whose work is not actually applicable to the subject, and throw out red herrings (or turtles) to divert attention from your failure to respond to direct questions. Setanta kindly reminded you of what the questions were. How about some answers?

Dear, dear.

My niece is an optician Joe. Maybe you should give her a call.