The Anomalous

[Yazata]

I was asked the other day (on that other board that I've now decided to abandon) what I meant by 'anomalies'. (As in 'anomalous reports' and the associated philosophical questions about how one should respond to such things.)

CC just posted this, which sums it up rather well.

EXCERPT: [...] These accidents of nature were known as ‘prodigies’. A non-exhaustive list might include floods; rains of blood or body parts; miscarriages, human and animal; volcanic eruptions and earthquakes; comets, eclipses, and conjunctions of the planets; apparitions of armies in the sky; and beached whales. What united this Borgesian collection was its strangeness. Each of these phenomena departed from the ‘norm’, but not enough to be considered a true miracle. They occupied a middle ground between natural and supernatural: the preternatural.

In theory, prodigies could be explained by natural causes. But in creating them, nature wasn’t tending to business as usual...

So what I mean by anomalies are 'prodigies', unexpected things that violate our expectations of how nature behaves. UFO's, ghostly apparitions, religious miracles and all kinds of 'Fortean' phenomena would fit in this category.

Some 'prodigies'/'anomalies' might indeed have conventional scientific explanations. In fact, I would guess that the large majority do. But it might not be easy to produce such an explanation, since the prodigy might be the result of conventional scientific principles compounding in unfamiliar ways.  

But I'm inclined to speculate that a small number will resist conventional scientific explanation. That's because our current scientific understanding probably isn't the last word on how reality behaves and there may well be principles of nature or reality that the scientific community is currently unaware of that might make occasional appearances in people's lives.

This brings up the question of 'scientism', the belief that everything real is explainable by science or by the methods of science (whatever they might be). Many people loudly insist that they aren't adherents of scientism because they don't believe that art, literature, poetry or dance must necessarily be scientific. But many of them do believe that any physical phenomenon must conform to current scientific understanding in order to be real.

Some might loosen that a little and acknowledge that unknown phenomena might indeed be observable at the edges, at CERN, at astronomical observatories, or perhaps in quantum experiments. But they continue to insist that anomalies/prodigies can't occur in everyday life and it's stupid (and evil) to even think that they might.

[RainbowUnicorn]

I was asked the other day (on that other board that I've now decided to abandon) what I meant by 'anomalies'. (As in 'anomalous reports' and the associated philosophical questions about how one should respond to such things.)

CC just posted this, which sums it up rather well.

EXCERPT: [...] These accidents of nature were known as ‘prodigies’. A non-exhaustive list might include floods; rains of blood or body parts; miscarriages, human and animal; volcanic eruptions and earthquakes; comets, eclipses, and conjunctions of the planets; apparitions of armies in the sky; and beached whales. What united this Borgesian collection was its strangeness. Each of these phenomena departed from the ‘norm’, but not enough to be considered a true miracle. They occupied a middle ground between natural and supernatural: the preternatural.

In theory, prodigies could be explained by natural causes. But in creating them, nature wasn’t tending to business as usual...

So what I mean by anomalies are 'prodigies', unexpected things that violate our expectations of how nature behaves. UFO's, ghostly apparitions, religious miracles and all kinds of 'Fortean' phenomena would fit in this category.

Some 'prodigies'/'anomalies' might indeed have conventional scientific explanations. In fact, I would guess that the large majority do. But it might not be easy to produce such an explanation, since the prodigy might be the result of conventional scientific principles compounding in unfamiliar ways.  

But I'm inclined to speculate that a small number will resist conventional scientific explanation. That's because our current scientific understanding probably isn't the last word on how reality behaves and there may well be principles of nature or reality that the scientific community is currently unaware of that might make occasional appearances in people's lives.

This brings up the question of 'scientism', the belief that everything real is explainable by science or by the methods of science (whatever they might be). Many people loudly insist that they aren't adherents of scientism because they don't believe that art, literature, poetry or dance must necessarily be scientific. But many of them do believe that any physical phenomenon must conform to current scientific understanding in order to be real.

Some might loosen that a little and acknowledge that unknown phenomena might indeed be observable at the edges, at CERN, at astronomical observatories, or perhaps in quantum experiments. But they continue to insist that anomalies/prodigies can't occur in everyday life and it's stupid (and evil) to even think that they might.

...and so while cranking the lever, so did the deeds of man define the mechanism of that which held his bonds.
for all untold would not budge but for the minds eye that does not unsee the process that lasts eternal.
lift only that which can be percieved, for all shall know the tones of deaf ears beheft by laden journeys amongst the familiar trails of olden days.

[Magical Realist]

Further prodigies might include earth lights, such as those of Brown Mountain and Marfa, SHC's, live entombed frogs, rogue waves, twin coincidences, poltergeists, teleported objects, time warps, cattle mutilations, strange zones and vortexes (Bermuda Triangle), terminal lucidity, Bigfoot, unusual weather events, historical coincidences, ufos, etc. I allow a lot of leeway for what can happen in nature and don't presume we know all about whatever can happen. Given the right alignment of environmental factors--gravity, electromagnetic earth fields, the moon, solar events, the collective consciousness of humanity, and galactic line-ups-- any of these things may happen at any time.

[Syne]

While I'm no purveyor of woo, everything has its outliers. Those very few at the extremes of any bell curve. And while I'm critical of scientism, I do believe our first recourse should be to natural, scientific explanation. Or at least a healthy skepticism.

[Yazata]

While I'm no purveyor of woo, everything has its outliers. Those very few at the extremes of any bell curve. And while I'm critical of scientism, I do believe our first recourse should be to natural, scientific explanation. Or at least a healthy skepticism.

Yeah, I basically agree with that.

[C C]

[...] So what I mean by anomalies are 'prodigies', unexpected things that violate our expectations of how nature behaves. UFO's, ghostly apparitions, religious miracles and all kinds of 'Fortean' phenomena would fit in this category.

Some 'prodigies'/'anomalies' might indeed have conventional scientific explanations. In fact, I would guess that the large majority do. But it might not be easy to produce such an explanation, since the prodigy might be the result of conventional scientific principles compounding in unfamiliar ways.  

But I'm inclined to speculate that a small number will resist conventional scientific explanation. That's because our current scientific understanding probably isn't the last word on how reality behaves and there may well be principles of nature or reality that the scientific community is currently unaware of that might make occasional appearances in people's lives. [...]

In terms of its long-term survival, I'd deem a full-blown anomaly as not even corralled by future formulations or regulating generalizations (principles that supposedly constrain the world). Maybe "miracle" would be more applicable. Although once accepted, even those might still be penned within some statistical probability which can't set exactly when or of what specific character such would be -- just a rough period over which one of them would be expected to occur.

Undergirding this (or a pre-conditional denial of them) is the view that the universe is totally managed by global laws, and thereby anomalies are impossible (with respect to the latter not being merely the result of deficiencies in human knowledge or of the rules). Paul Davies believes the "laws of nature" thought orientation is a remnant view descended from monotheism.[1] Others contend that the conception of the cosmos as being rational or intelligible long preceded a divine, personal-like authority being the source (Plato, the Pythagoreans, etc), though not necessarily free of mysticism.[2]

Actually there's no need for "laws of nature" to be intellectual entities residing in some "space-less place" or abstract level. Or even as Davies' supposed non-transcendent alternative of "programs being run on the great cosmic computer".[3] This historic tendency of reifying regulating principles seems dependent upon the tradition of treating time as a literal process. In which the world is magically blinking in and out of be-ing every yoctosecond or subatomic interval so as to render changes in the world (that is, the belief that only "now" exists). With the laws being the governance that the process is conforming to. What maintains consistency between one moment and the next or over long sequences of moments -- prevents the process from being as crazy or unreliable as a dream.

But once getting rid of that constant procedure of annihilating the cosmos and re-conjuring it, and instead allowing those changes of time to co-exist, then the "lawfulness of the world" is instead just the repeated patterns of that higher dimensional structure or field -- or however a discipline wants to technically conceive / represent such a "co-existence of changes". The patterns in that framework can be abstracted as "formulas" that the changes seem to be adhering to (like the vastly simpler shape of a triangle being convertable to a geometrical description). But that structure / framework of the world's extended existence came first, rather than the symbolic stuff representing the claimed rules which manage it in the context of a naive or commonsense view of time (as an unfolding process).

Eternalism also doesn't eliminate the possibility of anomalies. Since the latter would still be events or circumstances which don't conform to any known universal law / principle of governance or normal expectation that humans have inferred from the extended concrete existence of the universe or potential multiverse (extended in the sense of beyond just its global state in this specious "now").

footnotes

[1] Paul Davies: [...] The multiverse theory certainly cuts the ground from beneath intelligent design, but it falls short of a complete explanation of existence. For a start, there has to be a physical mechanism to make all those universes and allocate bylaws to them. This process demands its own laws, or meta-laws. Where do they come from? The problem has simply been shifted up a level from the laws of the universe to the meta-laws of the multiverse.

The root cause of all the difficulty can be traced to the fact that both religion and science appeal to some agency outside the universe to explain its lawlike order. Dumping the problem in the lap of a pre-existing designer is no explanation at all, as it merely begs the question of who designed the designer. But appealing to a host of unseen universes and a set of unexplained meta-laws is scarcely any better.

This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe.

I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships. I propose instead that the laws are more like computer software: programs being run on the great cosmic computer. They emerge with the universe at the big bang and are inherent in it, not stamped on it from without like a maker's mark. --Yes, the universe looks like a fix. But that doesn't mean that a god fixed it

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[2] Dennis Overbye: Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.

David J. Gross, director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., and co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, told me in an e-mail message, “I have more confidence in the methods of science, based on the amazing record of science and its ability over the centuries to answer unanswerable questions, than I do in the methods of faith (what are they?).”

Reached by e-mail, Dr. Davies acknowledged that his mailbox was “overflowing with vitriol,” but said he had been misunderstood. What he had wanted to challenge, he said, was not the existence of laws, but the conventional thinking about their source.

There is in fact a kind of chicken-and-egg problem with the universe and its laws. Which “came” first — the laws or the universe?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

Dr. Davies complains that the traditional view of transcendent laws is just 17th-century monotheism without God. “Then God got killed off and the laws just free-floated in a conceptual vacuum but retained their theological properties,” he said in his e-mail message.

But the idea of rationality in the cosmos has long existed without monotheism. As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.

Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate from the University of Texas, Austin, described himself in an e-mail message as “pretty Platonist,” saying he thinks the laws of nature are as real as “the rocks in the field.” The laws seem to persist, he wrote, “whatever the circumstance of how I look at them, and they are things about which it is possible to be wrong, as when I stub my toe on a rock I had not noticed.”

The ultimate Platonist these days is Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In talks and papers recently he has speculated that mathematics does not describe the universe — it is the universe.

Dr. Tegmark maintains that we are part of a mathematical structure, albeit one gorgeously more complicated than a hexagon, a multiplication table or even the multidimensional symmetries that describe modern particle physics. Other mathematical structures, he predicts, exist as their own universes in a sort of cosmic Pythagorean democracy, although not all of them would necessarily prove to be as rich as our own.

“Everything in our world is purely mathematical — including you,” he wrote in New Scientist. --Laws of Nature, Source Unknown ... New York Times, Dec-18, 2007

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[3] Natalie Wolchover: [...In our universe...] the space-time fabric has a “de Sitter” geometry, stretching as you look into the distance. The fabric stretches until the universe hits a very different sort of boundary from the one in AdS space: the end of time. At that point, in an event known as “heat death,” space-time will have stretched so much that everything in it will become causally disconnected from everything else, such that no signals can ever again travel between them. The familiar notion of time breaks down. From then on, nothing happens.

On the timeless boundary of our space-time bubble, the entanglements linking together qubits (and encoding the universe’s dynamical interior) would presumably remain intact, since these quantum correlations do not require that signals be sent back and forth. But the state of the qubits must be static and timeless. This line of reasoning suggests that somehow, just as the qubits on the boundary of AdS space give rise to an interior with one extra spatial dimension, qubits on the timeless boundary of de Sitter space must give rise to a universe with time — dynamical time, in particular. Researchers haven’t yet figured out how to do these calculations. “In de Sitter space,” Swingle said, “we don’t have a good idea for how to understand the emergence of time.” --Quantum Gravity's Time Problem

[Magical Realist]

“If you had dared to suggest one hundred years ago that God and the devil were in cahoots, you would be invited to attend a barbecue in the public square, and you would be the barbecuee. But today it is apparent that the same force that answers some prayers also causes it to rain anchovies and is behind everything from sea serpents to flying saucers. It distorts our reality whimsically, perhaps out of boredom, or perhaps because it is a little crazy. God may be a crackpot.”
― John A. Keel, THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

[Image: 151839581.jpg]

[Yazata]

But today it is apparent that the same force that answers some prayers also causes it to rain anchovies... God may be a crackpot.”

You made me laugh with that one.

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In terms of its long-term survival, I'd deem a full-blown anomaly as not even corralled by future formulations or regulating generalizations (principles that supposedly constrain the world). Maybe "miracle" would be more applicable.

I'm starting to think in terms of different grades of anomalies.

The strongest anomalies would be the true unexplainables like you just described, the events that nothing will seem to explain now or in the future. One possibility might be a truly one-off event, a totally unique event with none other of its kind.    

The weakest anomalies are events that are surprising and definitely outside our personal experience, but still fall within the explanatory scope of existing science.

And in the middle might be events and observations that contradict existing theory and call for new physical principles to explain them. An example of that might be the anomalous precession of Mercury that seemed inexplicable to Newtonian mechanics but was consistent with General Relativity.

http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/N...ode98.html

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasized the role of anomalies in paradigm change.

http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/Kuhnhelp.pdf

[Magical Realist]

“Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

[Image: thehighstrangeness.jpg]

[C C]

I'm starting to think in terms of different grades of anomalies.

The strongest anomalies would be the true unexplainables like you just described, the events that nothing will seem to explain now or in the future. One possibility might be a truly one-off event, a totally unique event with none other of its kind.    

The weakest anomalies are events that are surprising and definitely outside our personal experience, but still fall within the explanatory scope of existing science.

And in the middle might be events and observations that contradict existing theory and call for new physical principles to explain them. An example of that might be the anomalous precession of Mercury that seemed inexplicable to Newtonian mechanics but was consistent with General Relativity.

http://physics.ucr.edu/~wudka/Physics7/N...ode98.html

Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions emphasized the role of anomalies in paradigm change.

http://faculty.vassar.edu/brvannor/Kuhnhelp.pdf

Yah, I like that. Refining the general concept of "anomaly" is a good idea. A lot better to have tweezers and other in-betweens as an option than just be stuck with a big grappling hook.

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“Its strangeness is, we might say, due to its very reality, to the very fact that there is existence. The questioning of Being is an experience of Being in its strangeness”
― Emmanuel Levinas, Existence and Existents

The "experience of Being" itself may be a significant part of the source of any strangeness. Humans can't help but subliminally (as well as downright aware of) conflate "be-ing" with experiential consciousness, since the cosmos as well as one's own individual body does not manifest by its mere existence. At least in the popular materialist thought orientations of contemporary philosophical naturalism and scientism. Those back in the 19th century got around that with their panphenomenalism[1][2], wherein the "showing forth" of qualities outruns the cognition / intellect of and dependence upon a brain.

Today's typical physicalist or "phenomenal extinctionist" -- who deems both personal thoughts and sensory evidence of the external world to disappear after death -- is still contradictorily entertaining that mind-less version of the universe as a manifested manner of existence in his/her private pondering of those abstract and quantitative representations of it. One needs shown or felt content to manipulate -- creative activity can't be accomplished with blankness and nothingness (or at least needed to confirm as occurring).

Experience itself might have a potentially anomalous association with neural tissue -- a lack of universally applicable principles or regularities that repeatedly bind the two in a precisely predictable manner. Despite the broad correlation of these phenomenal exhibitions to the cranial organ, there's no guarantee yet that at the discrete level specific manifestations will reliably correspond over and over again to the exact same patterns of biochemical activity, and not be variably realized by dynamic structures constituted of different "stuff" than neural tissue.

As well, the experiences that a brain is supposedly having can't even be detected by scientific methodology, or in that socially interactive public realm where the tests and scrutiny takes place. Only on the private or subjective side is the "evidence" presented / brutely given for such. With the very idea itself being an alien intruder from the get-go in materialist inquiry -- that matter at the macroscopic scale (whether organized as a functioning brain or anything else) can have an appearance on the outside that is radically different from the inside appearance. With respect to matter not even having an internal or intrinsic dimension in the physical sciences -- there are only the extrinsic relationships transpiring in space to work with.

Thus if left uncorrupted by psychological and cognitive disciplines that merely believe people when they claim to have or report the manifestations of consciousness (visual, auditory, tactile, etc)... Then experience should be demoted to a language-based "hallucination" that the whole of humanity is afflicted with (perhaps with evolutionary origins). Rather than being treated as "real or valid properties" which scientific equipment actually can't even detect. Researchers can only correlate the verbal babble about them to regions in the brain which cause a person to utter or write about such claimed experiences. They never find any "qualia" (or the subjective / internal appearances of the brain tissue / electrochemical processes).

Of course, in terms of commonsense the above is crazy in its own right. But that's the problem of this '"existence needs conscious experience to present and confirm it and human reasoning needs a prior in rank *invisible existence* to cause the conscious experience". There's some kind of craziness to deal with at either level of the tangled hierarchy.

footnotes

[1] panphenomenalism, 19th century --> From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology, from Erasmus Darwin to William James ... pages 121-122 ... Edward S. Reed (1997)

[2] panphenomenalism, contemporary --> Quentin Ruyant (essay, July 21, 2014): [...] Let me be more specific and draw on an example. I suggested that phenomenal aspects of consciousness could eventually be explained under a proper interpretation of physics. A possible such explanation could take the form of panpsychism: the idea that, somehow, all matter is conscious. In fact, by distinguishing phenomenal aspects from cognitive aspects of consciousness and relegating the former to physics and the latter to biology or psychology, we would have something like panphenomenalism: the idea that all matter is “phenomenal.” Anyway, in the context of either panpsychism or panphenomenalism, granting a particular role to phenomenality in physics, say, in the collapse of the wave function, does not amount to granting a privileged ontological status to the brain.

Perhaps panpsychism is implausible, but panphenomenalism fares a bit better in my opinion. Obviously, tables and chairs are not conscious. Following panphenomenalism, what they lack is not phenomenality (which would be a feature of their fundamental constitution) but cognitive abilities. Phenomenality without memory, persistence, information integration and a capacity for world and self representation is simply not awareness, or not full awareness — it is at best being transiently aware of nothing identifiable, without the very possibility of knowing that one is or was aware,nothing close to consciousness. I would readily grant this feature to electrons if it could convincingly explain some relevant metaphysical issue.

[...] I contend that the hard problem of consciousness, if it exists, is not a biological problem, but a physical one: it is just too fundamental a problem to be addressed from a biological perspective. Note that I don’t mean to deny that there are relations between phenomenal and psychological aspects, in the sense that certain cognitive states are correlated with specific phenomenal aspects, but explaining such correlations is distinct from explaining why there are phenomenal aspects to begin with.

Of course, no metaphysician denies that physics is of interest in the philosophy of mind. [...] for these authors metaphysics can still produce interesting insights about the physical “in general,” that is, whatever actual physics says. They seem to assume that the physical “in general” poses no important problem of interpretation apart from the well entrenched problems of classical metaphysics.

It seems to me that there is no such thing as “the physical in general, whatever actual physics says”: our conception of the physical changes with our physics. There is no point in reasoning on the physical without taking into account what our best current physics says about it. [...] --Is quantum mechanics relevant to the philosophy of mind (and the other way around)?

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