Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[LadyForCamus]

Sorry...effed up my post first time around.

[LadyForCamus]

If you agree with the above; that the choice is totally arbitrary; then any criticism you hurl at material monism is completely vapid, especially if you are appealing to scientific evidence, or lack thereof.

Weighing evidence is GREAT use of your reasoning skills, so you're breaking your "rules" already if you are using it in this debate. Reaching a conclusion that idealism is a favorable alternative to materialism (or the charge that "mind is immaterial") based on a lack of scientific evidence proving otherwise is not only appealing to human reason, it's fallacious reasoning at that.

[Neo-Scholastic]

I think causality is another one of those thought structuring properties that Kant discussed at length. I don't know that one can get a rational handle on the nature of causality because it is a pre-rational notion. In short, we infer causality when we can build a story of physical interaction out of local events. It is an evolutionary short cut to picking out important relationships in the environment. We don't see causal relationships so much as construct them…

How would someone like a modern Kant be able to determine if some or all of his categories were based on innate mental instincts and not acculturation? If they are instinctual how would he or she know if those instincts reflect a necessarily intelligible reality? If they are mental habits conforming to someone’s social context, how could he learn to see beyond them? These are questions I have been pondering quite a bit lately.

With those questions in mind, I tend to ask myself if certain notions are self-sustaining or self-defeating. The assumption that on a fundamental level human reason cannot accurately reflect on itself and also that sense cannot, in principle, extract knowledge of reality – that stance – leads to some very dark places. Interior life deconstructs. Science devolves into magic. In the workaday world most people, me included, may not feel the corrupting influence of these ideas. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect those ideas operating under the surface of Western culture.

This suspicion of mine, which ultimately might prove unfounded, comes from my recent interest in the larger medieval folk culture of miracles and demons surrounding the Scholastic universities that cultivated and reinterpreted the most advanced ancient pagan thinkers. I’m trying to understand Scholastic philosophy on its own terms, through its pre-modern context rather than looking back at it through the lenses of either a modern mechanistic worldview or a post-modern world of deconstruction. As it applies to what I was saying earlier, I’m curious to know to what extent cultural narratives inform our perceptions of how the world works on the most fundamental levels. Maybe quantum curiosities only challenge modern narratives of causality, whereas they might have seemed perfectly normal from the perspective of a possibly earlier understanding of causality, one based not on mechanistic interactions but rather participatory engagement. If so, is it reasonable to recover pre-modern worldviews and adapt them to reflect current knowledge?

[The Grand Nudger]

You know, you might have to ask yourself whether or not your system of inference..the one you're using to make determinations about the inferences of others, is based upon innate mental instincts or acculturation as well.  There are and have been other systems of inference, in the world...apart from the western system...and the western system itself has been evolving over time. When you ask that question above, whether or not (and to what extent) culture affects it..by reference to medieval scholastics... who conceived of their body of knowledge as nothing -other- than an expression of and demonstration of their particular conception of god.....you might be onto something.

[Neo-Scholastic]

You know, you might have to ask yourself whether or not your system of inference..the one you're using to make determinations about the inferences of others, is based upon innate mental instincts or acculturation as well.  There are and have been other systems of inference, in the world...apart from the western system...and the western system itself has been evolving over time.  When you ask that question above, whether or not (and to what extent) culture affects it..by reference to medieval scholastics... who conceived of their body of knowledge as nothing -other- than an expression of and demonstration of their particular conception of god.....you might be onto something.

Indeed. For this reason, I try to pair my introspection with the question of whether the resulting insights are self-sustaining or self-defeating. And even not doubting the validity of that approach is dancing on the edge of the abyss. Still that seems to be the whole point, to not be consumed by the void of modernism or getting mired in a vicious postmodern circle.

There is some truth to your last sentence. No doubt the unquestioned notion of a transcendent spiritual realm did inform quite a bit of Scholastic discourse despite its pretenses. I now believe people should be careful not to consider their own culture as an intellectual apex or invalidate prior worldviews as savage, backwards, and unsophisticated. In point of fact, indigenous American and Asiatic cultures are complex and in their own way uniquely insightful. Similarly, I think it is a mistake to view Western folklore as simply ignorant superstition and not a product of an alien paradigm.

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not interested in reinterpreting old myths into Jungian archetypes or Campbell-like meta-mythology. Instead, I want to know what it actually feels like shed one worldview, immerse oneself in another, then come out on the other side with a worldview different from both - one that perhaps better maps out what it means to be alive here and now.

[Angrboda]

With those questions in mind, I tend to ask myself if certain notions are self-sustaining or self-defeating. The assumption that on a fundamental level human reason cannot accurately reflect on itself and also that sense cannot, in principle, extract knowledge of reality – that stance – leads to some very dark places. Interior life deconstructs. Science devolves into magic. In the workaday world most people, me included, may not feel the corrupting influence of these ideas. Nevertheless, I strongly suspect those ideas operating under the surface of Western culture.

My suspicion is that underlying such themes is an issue of control. We want reason to be self justifying and the world to be intelligible because only in the sense that it is are we in control of our fate. I think if anything is lying under the surface of Western culture it is a modern anxiety about control being an illusion. Perhaps this is a natural fear: man seeks to exert his dominance over the environment. But at the personal level, where a larger and larger proportion of the population experiences hardship day to day, the loss of a feeling or sense of control must surely be terrifying.

This suspicion of mine, which ultimately might prove unfounded, comes from my recent interest in the larger medieval folk culture of miracles and demons surrounding the Scholastic universities that cultivated and reinterpreted the most advanced ancient pagan thinkers. I’m trying to understand Scholastic philosophy on its own terms, through its pre-modern context rather than looking back at it through the lenses of either a modern mechanistic worldview or a post-modern world of deconstruction. As it applies to what I was saying earlier, I’m curious to know to what extent cultural narratives inform our perceptions of how the world works on the most fundamental levels. Maybe quantum curiosities only challenge modern narratives of causality, whereas they might have seemed perfectly normal from the perspective of a possibly earlier understanding of causality, one based not on mechanistic interactions but rather participatory engagement. If so, is it reasonable to recover pre-modern worldviews and adapt them to reflect current knowledge?

Well, I wish you luck with your project. It does sound like a fascinating undertaking. I'm a bit skeptical as to whether pre-modern conceptions of causality will have any such propitious effect, but I could be wrong. I tend to concentrate less on those areas where we have some degree of control over the content of our thinking, such as encultured ideas and worldviews and focus on those parts of the process which don't change. To that end, I see themes like intelligibility to be mostly gloss on the themes of how we arrive at our conclusions independent of culture and worldview. It reveals a world in which our lack of control is paramount. Is that a dark world? To me it just is, I don't make a value judgement on it. That probably reflects my Taoist beginnings. Is that an example of a pre-modern worldview being brought forward into the present? Perhaps. Or is it simply my own inherent biases revealing themselves? Hard to say. Maybe it's both.

[The Grand Nudger]

Please don't misunderstand. I'm not interested in reinterpreting old myths into Jungian archetypes or Campbell-like meta-mythology. Instead, I want to know what it actually feels like shed one worldview, immerse oneself in another, then come out on the other side with a worldview different from both - one that perhaps better maps out what it means to be alive here and now.

Been there, it's...... discomforting?  You keep waiting for the other foot to fall.  To wake up, as it were.  I vacillated back and forth between trying to rescue my old worldview in light of my new worldview, and now I look back on both and see them as equally flawed.  But I wonder....if I'll wake up tomorrow, and feel like I did in a or b, rather than how I do now at c. Shit really broke me at the time. I couldn't square a bunch of competing and contradictory propositions about myself and those around me, or our situation as a whole. I snapped....like a fuckin twig, lol. The context of all of this internal deliberation didn't help, ofc.

(childish patriotism and hero worship, cynical nco-manship that sees nothing but villains, and distant realism that can identify neither, btw)

As to voids of modernism, or viscious post-modern circles...what did you have in mind? What jumps out at you?

[bennyboy]

Benny, I'm okay with looking at materialism versus idealism as a philosophical choice but my question to you is: how do you suppose one should arrive at their choice?  I mean, by your own insistence we couldn't use reason to reach our conclusion because doing so would be appealing to the materialist assertion that such mental skills are a trustworthy method to arrive at truth, right?  If we can't trust our own innate capacity for reasoning in the first place, then the choice is completely arbitrary based on...I guess, which ever one you happen to prefer.  Yes?

Short version-- as an over-arching world view, yes, it's arbitrary, and substance agnosticism is one of my reasons for declaring as agnostic.

Long answer-- it depends on context.  I think a flexible and pragmatic person can switch perspective: choosing a material approach when building a bridge, an idealistic approach when dealing with say poetry, and an agnostic approach when dealing with the ultimate nature of reality.   

It's possible that reality is in what I'd call a modal superposition: it IS purely material, and it IS purely idealistic, and neither and both, depending on the way in which it's being interacted with.  Before I get wooed, let me say that I'm looking to QM for a clue that reality might be quite ambiguous and fluid, even in its "real" nature.

And this is a possibility that nobody here has discussed-- the possibility that due to paradox and trickery, reality might best be seen as being inclusive of options we consider mutually exclusive-- i.e. that we're all right in a sense, but wrong in that we lack the mental flexibility to really accept paradox as truth.

[The Grand Nudger]

Your "flexible approach" is the very definition of special pleading. Works for bridges, not for brains. QM won't tell you anything that isn't necessarrily materialistic. Unfortunately, QM has been turned into the Fountain of Woo.

[bennyboy]

Your "flexible approach" is the very definition of special pleading.  Works for bridges, not for brains.  QM won't tell you anything that isn't necessarrily materialistic. Unfortunately, QM has been turned into the Fountain of Woo.

That's really not a very good definition of special pleading.  There's nothing wrong with using a system of thought that works given a particular context, and abandoning in contexts for which it doesn't work. Given that you can't sensibly claim knowledge of ultimate truth, then you can stick with what is true in the context in which you're trying to operate.

As for QM, if by "necessarily materialistic," you mean "exists but has no volume, can be either a particle or a wave, can go back in time and correct its state to match what an observer did," then okay, but that's a pretty strained definition.

As for fountain of woo-- it seems to me anything you can't hit with your club is woo.