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Langan was right!

#1
Ostronomos Offline
State-recognition syntax recognizes the states of a given system known as reality and its parts. The quantum state is part of a seamless whole known as the universe or reality within reality, itself, appropriately termed self-containment.
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#2
Ostronomos Offline
The reality we live in a self-cancellation of opposites in a 2-stage process. It is computational. Where objects from remote locations may effect or influence each other and this cannot be explained by Classical theory. God is a mind that processes information on reality and communicates itself in the form of the laws of Physics. This mind is reflexive. In other words, reality is reflexive and self-processing. The laws are read/ write information by this mind and syntax and content exist in a mutually recursive relationship.
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#3
Yazata Offline
(Nov 9, 2017 12:38 AM)Ostronomos Wrote: Langan was right!

State-recognition syntax recognizes the states of a given system known as reality and its parts. The quantum state is part of a seamless whole known as the universe or reality within reality, itself, appropriately termed self-containment.

This thread belongs in 'Alternative Theories'. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with physics, chemistry or mathematics. It looks to me to be unsupported metaphysical speculations, expressed in pseudo-technical language, with the word 'quantum' dropped in like a magic pill to make everything 'scientific'.

Frankly, I'm not especially interested in Langan or his ideas.

You know Ostronomos, if you are interested in metaphysics, you really should be studying metaphysics as academic philosophers understand it. Forget Langan, at least for now. (You can come back to him later if you want to, once you have learned the issues and the vocabulary.)

Here's a decent recent introductory survey of metaphysics that I've purchased. It addresses basic logic for metaphysics, Quinean ontological commitment, abstract objects (like mathematical objects), material objects (mereology etc.), critiques of metaphysics (the positivists etc.), free will, time, modality, persistence and causation.

https://smile.amazon.com/Metaphysics-Int...etaphysics

Quote:Langan was right!

About what? How do you know he was right?

Quote:State-recognition syntax recognizes

'Syntax recognizes'? Syntax is just a set of rules. They might apply to various things, but if we start saying that the rules 'recognize' what they apply to, we seem to me to be importing unjustified psychologism and anthropomorphism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax

Quote:the states of a given system known as reality and its parts.

That seems to collapse language, "system" and "reality" together. That's a huge metaphysical speculation. There may or may not be something to it, but it needs argument to make it plausible.

Quote:The quantum state is part of a seamless whole known as the universe or reality within reality, itself, appropriately termed self-containment.

That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
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#4
Zinjanthropos Offline
Isn't reality one of those things that wherever you are, it's always with you? If I could travel to another dimension, it's still my reality I'm experiencing? Even if I believe I've figured out a way to be with God, who may for all intents be trapped in the Quantum world, when I'm there my reality is there also.
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#5
stryder Online
Moved to fit the realm it belongs.

Metaphysics to me is an autists adaptation of how they consider the world works. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a bad thing, it's actually an attempt to communicate and think about things that those that can communicate do. In some respects occasionally there is actually commonality in what attempts to be conveyed and even the occasion that something an autists metaphysical output can lead to a domino effect in another area/field.

The human mind is as you I'm sure are aware, a super-computer, however it isn't necessarily compiled with the rigid structure, syntax and format that we assert with computers. Instead it's left with what we class as consciousness which attempts to process whatever inputs we are given, cross reference them in what ever way we feel they fit and then attempt to output them in communication to others, even if that communication comes across as word salad.
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#6
Syne Offline
I'd be hard-pressed to even call Langan's stuff serious metaphysics. It seems to assume an epistemology without ever justifying it.
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#7
Ostronomos Offline
Stephen Hawking was in favor of an evolving universe, and this is compatible with an evolving God. As the universe evolves in time, we change.
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#8
Yazata Offline
(Nov 10, 2017 12:46 AM)Syne Wrote: I'd be hard-pressed to even call Langan's stuff serious metaphysics.

I wouldn't call it serious metaphysics either. Not in the academic sense. But it does look like his speculations about what reality is like at its most fundamental level.  

Quote:It seems to assume an epistemology without ever justifying it.

Right. That's why I call it 'speculative'.

The thing with Langan is that he's hard. He's almost impossible to follow. And that appears to be entirely intentional on his part, given his use of idiosyncratic vocabulary of his own invention and the most abstruse technical terms lifted from multiple fields. If he was half as smart as he claims to be, he should be able to explain himself better.

He doesn't really want to do that. What he's succeeding in doing is creating the impression in some of his readers, probably none of which really understand what he's saying, that there may (just may) be some new and valuable idea hidden in all of it. Readers can't rule that possibility out conclusively since they don't understand him. That gives him a faint aura of potential plausibilty, while keeping him confined to the crankish fringes.

As for me, I'm not motivated to put in the huge effort necessary to try to understand him. (It might be a fruitless task if there's nothing there.) I don't see anything that looks like it will be of much value to my own metaphysical curiosity. (I'm much more oriented towards the ideas, problems and conceptual vocabulary of conventional academic metaphysics.)
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#9
Yazata Offline
(Nov 9, 2017 10:27 PM)stryder Wrote: Metaphysics to me is an autists adaptation of how they consider the world works.

One could say the same thing about all of science. I mean, just look at theoretical physics. These people think that the squiggles that they write on chalkboards give them some deep and special insight into how reality functions. From the perspective of somebody untrained in it, it's just strange, involuted, socially isolating and bizarre.

I conceive of metaphysics as an investigation into the most basic assumptions that we employ when we think about things like physical reality or natural science.

For example, what are logic and mathematics? Science certainly seems to presuppose them and relies on them heavily. But what are they? How do human beings know about them? Why does nature seemingly conform to them? (And how can we really be sure that it does?)

What are physical laws? How did they originate and why are they what they seem to be instead of something else? What justifies the belief that they hold true universally?

What are physical objects? What about them is substantial and what isn't? What does 'substance' mean? How are substances distinguished from properties and relations? Should those distinctions even be drawn?

What happens when complex wholes are composed of parts? Can our understanding of all complex wholes be reduced without remainder to understanding their constituent parts and the principles that govern those parts? Or can new and unpredictable kinds of reality emerge from increasingly complex structures? (Life and mind might arguably be examples.)

What's causality? How should we conceive of it and can we explain it?

Time is exceedingly mysterious. What are the past, present and future and why do they seem so different? How should we understand persistence through time and through change? (Which gets us back to substance again.) How should we understand the passage of time?

What are possibility and necessity? How do they interact with logic, mathematics and thought? Do unrealized possibilities have any kind of physical reality? (Quantum physics' 'two-slit' experiment can be interpreted as suggesting they might.)  

My point is that these are all reasonably obvious questions about reality that don't seem to me to be strictly scientific. Instead, science presupposes particular kinds of answers. I don't see that as wrong exactly, since some of these questions are probably almost impossible to answer and if science had to wait for a satisfactory answer, it wouldn't get anywhere. Sometimes our initial preconceptions are modified in the light of subsequent scientific results in kind of a feedback loop.

This does contribute to my slight persistent skepticism about science and its attendant scientism. Proponents of the latter (such as we see over on that other board) never seem concerned or even interested that their whole wonderful edifice is constructed atop a whole set of unjustified and often unexamined initial assumptions. There's a lot of hostility to the very idea of examining them. But if any of those assumptions ever shift, the whole structure might come crashing down or at least need significant reconstruction.
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#10
Ostronomos Offline
(Nov 10, 2017 05:20 PM)Yazata Wrote:
(Nov 9, 2017 10:27 PM)stryder Wrote: Metaphysics to me is an autists adaptation of how they consider the world works.

One could say the same thing about all of science. I mean, just look at theoretical physics. These people think that the squiggles that they write on chalkboards give them some deep and special insight into how reality functions. From the perspective of somebody untrained in it, it's just strange, involuted, socially isolating and bizarre.

I conceive of metaphysics as an investigation into the most basic assumptions that we employ when we think about things like physical reality or natural science.

For example, what are logic and mathematics? Science certainly seems to presuppose them and relies on them heavily. But what are they? How do human beings know about them? Why does nature seemingly conform to them? (And how can we really be sure that it does?)

What are physical laws? How did they originate and why are they what they seem to be instead of something else? What justifies the belief that they hold true universally?

What are physical objects? What about them is substantial and what isn't? What does 'substance' mean? How are substances distinguished from properties and relations? Should those distinctions even be drawn?

What happens when complex wholes are composed of parts? Can our understanding of all complex wholes be reduced without remainder to understanding their constituent parts and the principles that govern those parts? Or can new and unpredictable kinds of reality emerge from increasingly complex structures? (Life and mind might arguably be examples.)

What's causality? How should we conceive of it and can we explain it?

Time is exceedingly mysterious. What are the past, present and future and why do they seem so different? How should we understand persistence through time and through change? (Which gets us back to substance again.) How should we understand the passage of time?

What are possibility and necessity? How do they interact with logic, mathematics and thought? Do unrealized possibilities have any kind of physical reality? (Quantum physics' 'two-slit' experiment can be interpreted as suggesting they might.)  

My point is that these are all reasonably obvious questions about reality that don't seem to me to be strictly scientific. Instead, science presupposes particular kinds of answers. I don't see that as wrong exactly, since some of these questions are probably almost impossible to answer and if science had to wait for a satisfactory answer, it wouldn't get anywhere. Sometimes our initial preconceptions are modified in the light of subsequent scientific results in kind of a feedback loop.

This does contribute to my slight persistent skepticism about science and its attendant scientism. Proponents of the latter (such as we see over on that other board) never seem concerned or even interested that their whole wonderful edifice is constructed atop a whole set of unjustified and often unexamined initial assumptions. There's a lot of hostility to the very idea of examining them. But if any of those assumptions ever shift, the whole structure might come crashing down or at least need significant reconstruction.

Yes. Unrealized possibilities exist as ideas of a non-physical substance such as fiction. Mathematics and logic are nothing other than reality. And science is building upon its initial assumptions to achieve superb coherence and thus reality. Where superb coherence would afford us predictability via the absence of chaos by knowledge about reality. A self-inclusory mapping.
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