Robotic emotions

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80114 wrote:

Anyway - Gilder presents this idea that 'information pre-supposes a pre-existing intelligence.' He also argues that DNA actually encodes and conveys information, and that it is therefore of a higher order of being than dumb matter or even biochemical substances. I think it is a pretty good argument, but am quite willing to be shown I am wrong.

... I'm not sure that Gilder is saying that information presupposes a pre-existing intelligence here ... his argument seems to be more along the lines that in the beginning was the Word (information) ... but can that be the case? ... here is a quote from the article:

Quote:

Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them.

... to paraphrase: "Higher-level emergents depend upon a physical substrate for their very existence, but there are lots of possible physical substrates that could fit the bill and thus higher-level emergents are not defined by any one particular physical substrate." ... for example, you can embody a computation in mechanical switches, you can embody it in vacuum tubes, you can embody it in silicon ... in all cases, it is still that particular computation ... but remove all embodiment, and there is no computation ... can the same be said for information? ... and if so, doesn't that imply that information pre-supposes a physical substrate?

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@Exebeche,

Exebeche;80169 wrote:

Of course Einstein doesn't mean the same when he sais that information does not travel faster than light.
What he found spooky about entangled subatomic particles was that it appears as if information would travel faster than light in that particular case.

What if it was all just the same thing, just traveling along different paths to get from A to B? One could go directly from A to C or one could go from A to B and then B to C, and in the end, the latter takes longer but it is not time vectors it is speed vectors sorta-speak.

Exebeche;80169 wrote:

When atoms meet, the information they exchange about those electrons is very precise and reliable. Atoms don't suffer from uncertainty, they know exactly what kind of condition their partner is in.
If this information wasn't so determined there wouldn't be a planet earth.
As you can see, even though an atom doesn't have a mind to understand physics or count electrons it 'holds' the information in a raw physical way.

Maybe the certainty comes from there being a relative object we can relate to and distinguish what information (because the information being relayed back and forth is just analogical, right?) would be sent back and forth. That if the object itself, the realm, the static conditions for a set of local parameters were to itself become less tangible then perhaps the information is behaving in such a way as to emerge such an effect.

Perhaps the uncertainty comes from the inability for information to distinguish local parameters anymore. A perceiver would always perceive local parameters as an object, but information (of course I know it doesn't see) would only see that set of conditions.

The gradient/medium for the sets of conditions is too thinned out sorta-speak.

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@Smiley451,

[SIZE="3"]

Quote:

"Higher-level emergents depend upon a physical substrate for their very existence, but there are lots of possible physical substrates that could fit the bill and thus higher-level emergents are not defined by any one particular physical substrate." ... for example, you can embody a computation in mechanical switches, you can embody it in vacuum tubes, you can embody it in silicon ... in all cases, it is still that particular computation ... but remove all embodiment, and there is no computation ... can the same be said for information? ... and if so, doesn't that imply that information pre-supposes a physical substrate?" [italics added]

I think if you replaced 'defined by' with 'reducible to' it would be a better summary of the argument.

Well - this says that information requires a physical sub-strate in order to be transmitted; but the fact that the same information can be encoded in sub-strates of many types would seem to indicate that the information exists independently of the sub-strate, would it not? If it were simply a property of a specific sub-strate, then it would vary according to the medium. The fact that it does not appear to be a property of a substance, supports the idea that the information itself exists prior to the specific media. In other words, this seems a valid argument against materialist reductionism (or that intelligence is a property of matter).[/SIZE]

1 Reply

@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80236 wrote:

The fact that it does not appear to be a property of a substance, supports the idea that the information itself exists prior to the specific media.

... I'm not sure it does, any more than the fact that computation is not the property a particular substance supports the idea that computation itself exists prior to the specific media or any more than the fact that liquid is not the property of a particular atomic substance supports the idea that liquid itself exists prior to the specific atomic media or any more than the general case that any emergent X is not the property of a particular substance supports the idea that the emergent X itself exists prior to the specific media from whose collective dynamics it emerges ...

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@Smiley451,

Hmmm. Further quotes from the George Gilder essay:

Quote:

"? the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down "nested hierarchy," in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain. Thus, the higher levels can neither eclipse the lower levels nor be reduced to them. Resisted at every step across the range of reductive sciences, this realization is now inexorable. We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth. As the famed chemist Michael Polanyi pointed out in 1961, all these fields depend on chemical and physical processes, but are not defined by them. Operating farther up the hierarchy, biological macro-systems such as brains, minds, human beings, businesses, societies, and economies consist of intelligent agents that harness chemical and physical laws to higher purposes but are not reducible to lower entities or explicable by them?.

"Mathematician Gregory Chaitin ? has shown that biology is irreducibly complex?: Physical and chemical laws contain hugely less information than biological phenomena. Chaitin's algorithmic information theory demonstrates not that particular biological devices are irreducibly complex but that all biology as a field is irreducibly complex. It is above physics and chemistry on the epistemological ladder and cannot be subsumed under chemical and physical rules. It harnesses chemistry and physics to its own purposes."

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80263 wrote:

Hmmm. Further quotes from the George Gilder essay:

... key phrases in the quotes: "the universe is stubbornly hierarchical. It is a top-down "nested hierarchy," in which the higher levels command more degrees of freedom than the levels below them, which they use and constrain" and "It harnesses chemistry and physics to its own purposes" ... pull the rug out from under the nested hierarchy and the hierarchy ceases to exist ... remove the chemistry and physics that emergents constrain to their own purposes, and there is no realization of these purposes - heck, there aren't even any emergents ... none of this is reductionist - it's just a fact of emergence that the higher levels emerge from the collective dynamics of lower levels ... remove the lower levels, and there is nothing from which the higher levels can emerge ... so while it is true that computation, intelligence, life, etc., cannot be reduced to lower levels in the hierarchy (i.e., the lower levels cannot provide a complete explanation of the higher), it is also true that they would not exist without the lower levels (i.e., an absence of the collective dynamics from which life emerges means an absence of life) ...

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@Smiley451,

but the key point is, there are levels, and there is the emergence of different kinds of organisation that cannot really be reduced to the lower levels. So this is really an abandonment of the 'bottom-up' view of the development of life is it not?

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80305 wrote:

but the key point is, there are levels, and there is the emergence of different kinds of organisation that cannot really be reduced to the lower levels. So this is really an abandonment of the 'bottom-up' view of the development of life is it not?

Hello jeeprs,
you are too much focussed on this thing about reducibility.
I guess the reason is that you are used too discussing with nature science oriented people who have a more traditional kind of view (which is definitely the larger number). Those are typically reductionists and their arguments are based on the according idea:
"Reductionism can either mean (a) an approach to understand the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or (b) a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents." (wikipedia)
However the newer approaches of system theory claim right the opposite:
The whole is more than the sum of its parts. (This has nothing to do with esoterics.)
Remember what emergence means:
We talk about emergence when something (a phenomenon, system or its properties) appear spontaneously. Spontaneously meaning the appearance could not have been predicted from the properties of the system's constituents.
When you look at watermolecules even very precisely you will hardly be able to tell that they can appear on your kitchen window in shapes that look like flowers (this was a more familiar picture in former times).
Reducibility is somehow totally irrelevant for System Theory.

---------- Post added 07-30-2009 at 04:12 PM ----------

Holiday20310401;80208 wrote:

What if it was all just the same thing, just traveling along different paths to get from A to B? One could go directly from A to C or one could go from A to B and then B to C, and in the end, the latter takes longer but it is not time vectors it is speed vectors sorta-speak.

Hello Holliday

Your idea about the 'spooky' effect is certainly interesting. When i have ideas like that i try to adress it to Bones-O (who is earnig his money as a quantum physicist). I can assure you though that his answer will not be Yes or No. Wink

I don't want to go to deep into quantum physics, but it seems there are ideas of how the spooky effects can be explained.
On Das holografische Universum i found something very interesting, however it's in german, sorry.
It's exciting enough to start a whole new topic, that's why i would rather obstain.
As you can see we have been getting very far away from the initial topic already.
However i still consider the discussion about perception, mind, intelligence part of the topic 'robotic emotions' - you can not just want to talk about robotic emotions without taking all these aspects in account.
Any concept of artificial emotion has to be confronted with the concepts of natural emotion, including mind, soul, etc.

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80305 wrote:

but the key point is, there are levels, and there is the emergence of different kinds of organisation that cannot really be reduced to the lower levels. So this is really an abandonment of the 'bottom-up' view of the development of life is it not?

... it is an abandonment of a purely "bottom up" or a purely "top down" view of the development of life in favor of a feedback view of the development of life ... let's take one of the (arguably) four arisings of life on earth: organic (multi-cellular) life ... the material substrate of organic life is cellular life - it is the collective dynamics of living cells from which organic life emerges ... (and just like the fact that cellular life is not reducible to chemistry, organic life is not reducible to cellular life) ... so while (on earth) it is the substrate of cellular life that provides the collective dynamics necessary for organic life to exist, at the same time it is organic life that constrains the cellular life that supports it to exhibit, say, 210 different cell types from the same DNA (an unheard of number in the single-cell world, but that's roughly how many there are in the human organism) ... and so it goes: the collective dynamics of a substrate give rise to an emergent which constrains the substrate in ways that modify the collective dynamics which in-turn modifies the properties of the emergent which constrains the substrate in ways that modify the collective dynamics which in-turn modifies the properties of the emergent, ad infinitum in an ongoing feedback loop ...

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80263 wrote:

Hmmm. Further quotes from the George Gilder essay:
[...]We know now that no accumulation of knowledge about chemistry and physics will yield the slightest insight into the origins of life or the processes of computation or the sources of consciousness or the nature of intelligence or the causes of economic growth.[...]

I don't understand what is so important about this guy. The sentence quoted above proves him simply wrong.
Especially the origins of life are not only subject to biology anymore.
The concept of autopoiesis is in accordance with Erwin Schroedingers 'Thermodynamics of open systems' which is a term from his book 'What is life'.
Chemistry is just a particular kind of physics and biology is a particular kind of chemistry.
There's a rule in chemistry that sais:
A chemical reaction stops when all reactants are completely converted or chemical equilibrium is reached.
In a way however we could also say life is the only chemical reaction that doesn't stop.
You may call this reductionist however i see it from a different angle:
The only exception we know from that chemical rule is so special that a science of its own is necessary to explore it.
Who knows how many surprises are still to come from emergence?

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@jeeprs,

jeeprs;80236 wrote:

Well - this says that information requires a physical sub-strate in order to be transmitted; but the fact that the same information can be encoded in sub-strates of many types would seem to indicate that the information exists independently of the sub-strate, would it not? If it were simply a property of a specific sub-strate, then it would vary according to the medium. The fact that it does not appear to be a property of a substance, supports the idea that the information itself exists prior to the specific media. In other words, this seems a valid argument against materialist reductionism (or that intelligence is a property of matter).

Well, i certainly would not subscribe that intellligence is a property of matter.
In fact i am also not a friend of reductionism.
In the contrary.
However what i would subscribe is that intelligence can be created by the means of matter ...and energy, and information.
You may find the last one obsolete, however it's of course a major factor, that the matter (and energy) has to be arranged in a very particular way, so that it has intelligent output.
Let me say something more to information. According to Norbert Wiener information is a physical quantity, and according to Tom Stonier energy can be turned into information and vice versa (see 'Information and the internal structure of the universe', Tom Stonier).
Information is not a metaphysical entity that wether exists or not.
If your computer returns the number "2" as a result and information, this information does not have an existence that wether 'is' or 'is not'.
I have to admit that i find your way of thinking brilliant.
I was fascinated by this deduction.
It's too bad but the fact that the same information can be encoded in different substrates does not allow to deduct that the information 'in itself' exists independently. Again it's that ontological thinking about an 'existence' that leads into a dead end.
When you apply a physical force to an item such as you push a ball, the same physical power can be applied to the ball in many ways. Also you could apply the same force to any other item.
It does not mean that this force has an independent existence.

I feel kind of sorry that you have to fight so many attacks at the moment. (more 'arguments' than attacks of course).
It's a little bit much to reply to all of it.
It's just that i feel like some of these things cry for being answered.
Anyway i really like your brilliant way of thinking and especially your openness to new ideas.

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@Smiley451,

Oh Gilder is not important to me at all. I was just interested in this particular article. I have never read anything else by him.

But I think you're right, I am too focussed on this issue of reducibility, and for the reason you suggest. So it is good to find this much richer understanding based on systems and the like here in this forum and I thank you for it.

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@Smiley451,

Quote:

However what i would subscribe is that intelligence can be created by the means of matter ...and energy, and information.

I wonder about that. Maybe these things combine to create the CAPACITY for intelligence. Intelligence exists prior to any specific instance of it. (This is not my idea, only my way of presenting the basic metaphysic of the Western tradition. This is not a new idea at all.)

The thing about numbers (for example) is that you can't say whether they exist or not, independently of being counted. They don't exist anywhere in the world. They are also not just the product of the mind because they are given for all minds, and minds can have a greater or lesser grasp of them. So they are neither subjective (=produced by your mind) nor objective (=existing anywhere). They indicate, they are symbolical of, a reality of a different order, generally known in the Western tradition as 'intelligibility'. (Indeed it is a conundrum. It cannot be definitively proven, one way or the other. But if you look into it the theory of maths, you will find that many thinkers with far greater experience and training than I - my maths is rudimentary - are not able to definitively rule on the issue one way or the other. Some leading mathematical philosophers, for example Penrose, do apparently subscribe to this kind of understanding under the heading 'mathematical Platonism'. That is one of the reasons I find it interesting.)

Anyway, as with numbers, so also with information. The argument basically is, information cannot be said to exist without somebody to be informed! All the 'data' may or may not exist without any presiding intelligence, but it is not information until it is meaningfully related. This is the difference between data and information, isn't it? This all points towards some kind of Berkelian idealism, but I am still just thinking about it. I really don't know, and it may not be possible to know. At least I enjoy contemplating the ideas.

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@jeeprs,

... in looking at the universe from the dynamic systems perspective, the state space (the possible histories) is unthinkably huge ... the trajectories through the state space (the actual histories) are unthinkably minuscule in comparison ... that intelligence exists testifies to the fact that the universe has always had the capacity to create intelligence ... what it is mind boggling to consider is what else the universe has the capacity to create that has not yet (and may never be) realized in an actual history ... what fantastic things that are beyond our imagination shimmer out there in the unexplored vastness of the possible? :perplexed:

As for mathematical Platonism, I'm inclined to question the evidence for it ... for every axiomatization that is isomorphic with reality, there are a plethora of axiomatizations that bear absolutely no resemblance to reality ... in that light, the fact that some tiny fraction of axiomatizations are isomorphic with reality seems somewhat unremarkable ... (on the other hand, it could be said that the fact that any axiomatization at all is isomorphic with reality is rather remarkable).

That information (aside from the scientific senses Exebeche has described) cannot exist without someone (something?) to be informed does not necessarily point to some sort of Berkelian idealism ... it could also just point to the notion that information (again, in the non-scientific sense) simply did not exist until something which could be informed came into being ... (much like "food" did not exist until something that could eat came into being Wink

).

And I wholeheartedly agree with you that contemplating these ideas is fun! - thank goodness for this forum! :a-ok:

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@Smiley451,

Well the Universe could get by without breakfast, but it needed mathematical relationships to obtain from the get go! Smile

1 Reply

@jeeprs,

... if an atom collided with another atom, and there was no mathematician to watch it, would it make an equation? ... (don't mistake models of things for the real things) ...

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@Smiley451,

well that is the whole question about idealist philosophy. However what I think is happening is that idealism is morphing into 'constructivism'.

Here is a blog entry I wrote previously on the topic:

Quote:

According to evolutionary biology, homo sapiens is the result of about 4.5 billion years of evolution. For thousands of millions of years, our sensory and intellectual abilities have been honed and shaped by the exigencies of survival, through billions of lifetimes in various life-forms - fish, lizard, mammal, primate and so on - in such a way as to eventually give rise to the mind that we have today.

Recently, other scientific disciplines such as cognitive and evolutionary psychology have revealed that conscious perception, while subjectively appearing to exist as a steady continuum, is actually composed of a heirarchical matrix of millions of interacting cellular transactions, commencing at the most basic level with the parasympathetic system which controls one's respiration, digestion, and so on, up through various levels to culminate in that peculiarly human ability of 'conscious thought' (and beyond...)

Our consciousness plays a central role in co-ordinating these diverse activities so as to give rise to the sense of continuity which we call 'ourselves' - and also the apparent coherence and reality of the 'external world'. Yet it is important to realise that the na?ve sense in which we understand ourselves, and the objects of our perception, to 'exist', is in fact totally dependent upon the constructive activities of our consciousness, the bulk of which are completely unknown to us.

When you perceive something - large, small, alive or inanimate, local or remote - there is a considerable amount of work involved in 'creating' an object from the raw material of perception. Your eyes receive the lightwaves reflected or emanated from it, your mind organises the image with regards to all of the other stimuli impacting your senses at that moment - either acknowledging it, or ignoring it, depending on how busy you are; your memory will then compare it to other objects you have seen, from whence you will (hopefully) recall its name, and perhaps know something about it ('star', 'tree', 'frog', etc).

And you will do all of this without you even noticing that you are doing it; it is largely unconscious.

In other words, your consciousness is not the passive recipient of sensory objects which exist irrespective of your perception of them. Instead, your consciousness is an active agent which constructs reality partially on the basis of sensory input, but also on the basis of an enormous number of unconscious processes, memories, intentions, and so on.

And this can be seen as one way in which the perspective of idealism does indeed receive support from modern science. We might think of the universe 'out there', a vast space in which we are apparently minute and insignificant observers. However in this sense, it is a universe of our creation. The reason this seems absurd is because, I think, we have this idea that 'thought is something that goes on in our heads'. I don't think that is entirely correct, either. This also is a 'construction' - it is how we construe, or mis-construe 'consciousness'.

I think the best traditional realisation of this perspective is provided by Yogachara Buddhism, but it is also an underlying insight of many schools of idealist philosophy East and West. (I think, very probably, the best depiction of it in the modern era is A.N. Whitehead's but I have not studied it yet.) But it is all quite difficult to grasp, and there are many aspects that elude me.

The only take-away point I wish to make is that the naive sense of the universe just 'being there as it is' with humans as passive observers, is not really sustainable. And I think this is the view of 'metaphysical naturalism'. I think all the empiricist descendants of Locke and Comte and the like, all see the world this way. (Not only see it this way, but are emotionally committed to it being this way.)

Quote:

"A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." - Einstein.

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@jeeprs,

Paulhanke's statement about food is a somewhat genious argument.
It shows how something that 'is not' actually 'is'.
When the first life form appeared in the universe (no matter where and which) it might have depended on the existence of the molecule 'A' as food.
After this moment you could (theoretically speaking) have said food is something that 'is'.
Before this moment food was not something that 'is'.
However it (the molecule) must have been there for a long time already.
Because the development of life is based on an environment that is already pretty much established. If the environment is only a short term period, life will only be a short term period.
No matter how long this pre-existence of molecule A has to be for life to appear, we can definitely assume it has to be there before life appears (Anyway it's only a thought experiment).
Thus food has already existed before food was food.
This is not meant to start an ontological discussion.
The reason why i emphasise this point is, to show that the question wether or not something 'is' or 'not is' leads to dead ends and paradox. It's metaphysics.
With all due respect to the classical philosophers metaphysics has to come to an end.
Some of the most unresolvable philosophical problems like 'qualia' is about wether something 'is' or 'not is'.
It has remained unresolvable, and any attempt to solve it has lead to further questions.
We have to get rid of questions like 'from what point is information something that is'.
Just like it does not make sense to ask: 'from what point is food something that is'.
The word 'food' like all words is based on a concept. It makes sense in a particular constellation. I tried to explain this in a different thread: Is there something like a sunrise?
You can wonder if good and evil is something that exists. You can wonder if the sunrise is something that exists. All these questions only make sense from an anthropocentric (and/or personal) perspective.
What exists is the concept in your mind. That's where the idea of food exists. Or good and evil. Or the idea of exponential growth. Or the number 2....
The according link to read more about it would be Constructivist Epistemology .

Back to your post. You wrote:
"All the 'data' may or may not exist without any presiding intelligence, but it is not information until it is meaningfully related. This is the difference between data and information, isn't it?"
The problem is, that there is no consense about the term information.
The kind of information you relate to is what i described earlier as information with a functional significance, the second category.
This idea of information (and data) is pretty much common sense and reasonable.
However it's not based on THE definition of information.
Let me explain:
When you have a telephone book stored on two different CD's, let's say one CD has the names and the other CD has the numbers. When you install the software names and numbers get connected, however you loose one of the CD's. All that remains is a CD full of numbers. Is it data or information?
If we talk about the second category of information it's not information, it's just useless data.
However there was a guy called Claude Shannon who created a (widely respected) formula for calculating the amount of information a system has.
This formula is equivalent (or actually formally isomorphic) to the equation that describes entropy.
I don't want to go to far into the details but this means that the most meaningless information has the highest information content.
Such as a television screen that shows only noise (chaotic particles) has the maximum content of information as oppose to a clear picture.
Physicists like Tom Stonierdon't agree with this idea, however discussing it would lead to far at this point, i just want to explain that:
From one perspective you are right, that something is not information until it is meaningfully related (according to category two), however you are wrong because anything that can potentially be information has to be considered information (according to category one).
We would have to agree on a definition here. The common definition is pure marmelade.
After all physical information remains information.
When two atoms meet they exchange precise information about the electrons they have.
Wether or not there is anyone to interprete.

Edit: I have just seen you made a new post while i was writing. It looks like you have already anticipated some of the ideas i was trying to explain.
I guess the post about the sunrise fits this topic better than i thought.

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@jeeprs,

... when you boil it all down, our thoughts are remarkably alike Smile

... we both think that human beings are more than just passive observers - that we are active creators ... the only significant difference being that you come at it from an idealist perspective where intelligence, life, information, etc., have existed and been in (immaterial) operation since ground zero; whereas I come at it from a dynamic systems perspective where the universe is an engine of creation, first creating matter from energy, then galaxies, then stars, then life, then intelligence, with each new creation affording a whole new set of possibilities for the next round of creation ... we are all part of the universe; thus we are all part of the engine of creation ... what are we to create next? Wink

---------- Post added 07-31-2009 at 06:58 PM ----------

Exebeche;80609 wrote:

From one perspective you are right, that something is not information until it is meaningfully related (according to category two) ...

... and I think that's a source of confusion for folks like Gilder - when the scientists say that information is fundamental, folks like Gilder think they are talking about category two Wink

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@Smiley451,

Claude Shannon and Tom Stonier sound very interesting, although as soon as I see an article with equations in it my eyes tend to glaze over (I said my maths was rudimentary). I will accede to their superior knowledge of information theory, no question. However in some ways I am using the term to make a rhetorical point and I think it still stands.

I do see the sense in 'constructivism' and it is one perspective I am interested in. But I will never take part in a discussion which involves that ridiculous neologism 'qualia'. I would like to attach a large alligator clip to Dennett's earlobe and quiz him about what qualia he is experiencing.

Quote:

With all due respect to the classical philosophers metaphysics has to come to an end

Well that is like saying with all due respect to classical violinists, orchestral music has to come to an end.:listening:

In fact there are many skilled exponents of metaphysics - but very few of them are in philosophy departments. Metaphysics provides intelligible insights provided there is a willingness to undergo the requisite training. It requires a different level of perception to ordinary thinking and mathematical reasoning. It is nevertheless a practical skill and the reason it has died out amongst the western intelligensia is because they don't know how to practise it any more. This is why it is seen as a dead end. It was talked about for too long by many people who didn't have the practical knowledge to really understand it. In fact it is not metaphysics that is dying out, but the so-called metaphysical naturalism of the Enlightenment project and the soul-less individualism that it has engendered. People will still be talking metaphysics when 'qualia' have completely faded from the dictionaries.

Me, I learned my metaphysics from Vedantists and Buddhists. They have a metaphysic, and they know how to practise! There is not nearly so big a gap in India between classical and modern civilization as there is in Europe, and I thank heavens for that. It is through studying them that I have found a new appreciation for traditional Western philosophy.

I appreciate that these arguments I am putting forward are not currently accepted in many quarters, and I am not presenting them as 'The Truth'. But it is one perspective, a pole, so to speak, but one that has been overlooked and needs to be represented. In our zeal for 'objective truth' we have completely lost sight of the fact that reality is what you live, it is not - or not only - what you see through the Hubble telescope or in the CERN bubble chamber (Hubble, bubble...). Which actually gets us back to the very first line in your Copenhagen posting....

Besides, many of your questions about 'what exists' are actually not about what exists at all. They are about what is truth. It is astounding that these are different questions, but they are. You are indeed searching for the truth, and it is an extremely important thing to seek.

I referred in another post to this idea of 'Cartesian anxiety'. This is:

Quote:

Cartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since Ren? Descartes promulgated his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing separate from ourselves, should be able to lead us to a firm and unchanging knowledge of ourselves and the world around us. The term is named after Descartes because of his well-known emphasis on "mind" as different from "body", "self" as different from "other".
Richard J. Bernstein is recognized as having coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

Pretty good diagnosis of your sunset piece, huh?

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