OK. I'm going to take a more combative tone, here. Please don't take my tone to mean anything other than a desire for the dialectic. I _really_ very much appreciate your and everyone elses' posts.... If I didn't, I wouldn't take the time to be combative. ;-)
Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-07-10 09:48 AM: > Owen is correct that Wittgenstein would not necessarily be our ally > in such a project, since he seems to have come to regard philosophy > as nothing more than a tool for its own destruction. . > > His aphorism, "That of which we cannot speak [clearly?] we should > pass over in silence" cuts so many ways. Well, first off, who gives a &@$&* what Wittgenstein would think? He's a dead white guy and no more relevant to the modern world than Marx. [grin] Of course, having said that, I completely agree. The reason I try not to use the word "emergence" is because it's almost entirely useless, precisely because people cannot speak about it. They try (and try and try and try and try... and try some more) and fail. Philosophy is for the living. Let the dead people rest in peace. > But I do think that you and I and others may have contributed to his > contempt by failing to articulate where we have made progress and, in > particular, where the arguments of one of us has improved or > corrected the argument of the other. Or perhaps, even, to reveal > problems that we have uncovered that we now find insoluble. It would > be interesting to make a list of points of agreement between us on > the subject of emergence. OK. I'm game. But I'm not sure what we agree upon. I think "emergence" is a largely useless concept. You seem to think it's (largely) useful. Thus spake Nicholas Thompson circa 09-07-10 12:41 PM: > And, although you don't point it out, you have caught me in an > important inconsistency. In a sense, you have demonstrated yourself > to be a more faithful New Realist (cf EBHolt) than I. I have been > wanting to argue with you that the kinds of properties we are talking > about are "out there", and I have been warding off what I saw as > your implication that emergence is [merely] in the eye of the > beholder. Ditto organization. In thus polarizing the argument, I > have missed the possibility that something can be BOTH in the eye of > the beholder (i.e. the result of how one looks at something )AND in > the thing itself. This is the New Realist position and you > articulate it beautifully below. While I appreciate the praise, it is unwarranted. I'm not steeped in any philosophical tradition... even if it is "new". [grin] My preference for considering both the object and the subject in any context is based on my modeling and simulation work. It's rooted in the difficulties I've had constructing useful simulations. Granted, I've had to beef up my rhetoric in order to traffic with academics; but I regard that rhetoric as "sugar" that's added to sweeten the medicine I have to deliver. That medicine is summed up in the following: "We don't know sh*t." And anyone who claims to know something is either lying or deluded. The best we can do is try to be clear about what we've _done_, how we went about doing it, and what we subsequently speculate. And part of being clear is to admit that we don't know anything. We are awash in ignorance. Arrogance abounds. Good scientists and engineers always seem to (ultimately) agree with me. It's best to keep accurate logs; but beyond that, everything is fuzzy and indeterminate. > NST===>But don't you agree that confusion could reign in any > discussion in which the discussants carried two such radically > different definitions of the term? <===NST Yes, I do agree. But that's not saying much. Confusion reigns no matter what is said. The miracle of communication is the illusion that it exists. The best you can achieve is similarity in your actions, regardless of the wacko stuff that goes on in your mind. Method, not words, is the name of the game. > NST===>Precisely! But I would warn you away from the > subjective/objective distinction here because your way of putting it > does not correspond to the way most people use this distinction. > Most people (I would guess) think of subjective as fallible and > objective as infallible. On your view, truth about the world is > conjured up by the interaction of an observer (subject) with the > world. <===NST Thanks! I take your warning very seriously. Because I don't tend to keep track of where I learned something, who said it, why they said it, where it's successful and where it fails, etc., I'm very fragile to changes in context. It's funny. I'll say almost the exact same thing in, say, a pub in the evening at a conference as I say in during the conference proper. And almost invariably, I get agreement in one setting and violent disagreement in the other... with no regularity between which one elicits [dis]agreement. -- glen e. p. ropella, 971-222-9095, http://agent-based-modeling.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
