On 3 May 2017 10:47 p.m., "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
On 5/3/2017 2:34 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: Le 3 mai 2017 11:23 PM, "Brent Meeker" <meeke...@verizon.net> a écrit : On 5/3/2017 1:32 PM, Quentin Anciaux wrote: This an extreme reductionist view, i.e. if X is the fundamental ontology then only X exists. But that leads to nonsense: "If the standard model is fundamental ontology then football doesn't exist." But it's true, football does not exist in any ontological sense, and we are talking about ontology. So neither Sherlock Holmes nor Donald Trump exist. That's certainly a relief. What about ontology don't you understand? I don't understand why atoms imply that things made of atoms don't exist. Ok, this the heart and core of the disagreement. Noone is saying that things made of atoms don't exist and your saying this is just setting up an easy straw man for you to pointlessly knock down. So what do you suppose that Quentin and I are saying here? I'll repeat it. "Extreme reductionism" as you call it (and what other kind is there unless you believe in some form of causally effective top-down emergence?) is the search for the ontological building blocks of a theory which themselves will remain unexplained but in terms of which all other ontological composition will be understood. That at least is the ambition. So if we say that atoms are the building blocks then the claim is that everything else is to be understood as the interactions of atoms (this is meant to be illustrative only). So what then is the status in the theory of "everything else" if such entities are merely ontologically composite and consequently at that fundamental level indistinguishable from the interactions of their components? The answer (obviously) is that their "concrete" or substantial emergence is perceptual, or epistemological as we like to say here. I suspect the fact that some people find this so hard to accept is not some intellectual barrier to understanding, since the distinction is in fact rather obvious, but because of a distaste for taking epistemology as a fundamental determinant of reality. Of course when we speak of epistemology here it's not merely its final neurocognitive stages we should have in mind, but the entire process of epistemological emergence of perceiving subjects and their environments from the posited ontological basis. For this of course we need an adequate theory that takes both aspects and in particular their peculiar entanglement into account. And indeed it is only the ultimate explanatory success of such a theory that can justify the ascription of "existence" to anything above the level of the ontological base because, as you will recall, the whole point of the reductionist thrust is that this base is capable of explaining the evolution of its states entirely in its own terms, without any necessary reference to composition or emergence. I would esteem it a courtesy if you would address the above argument directly, as distinct from changing the subject in line with your preferred way of thinking, as I would truly like to know what you think is wrong with it. As Bruno says, a different argument is not the same thing as a counter-argument. David Brent -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
