[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

JA: I have frequently, all too frequently for my taste, had the experience of
    starting out on a problem from the standpoint of where I happened to be
    anchoring the skiff of my transient POV at the time, say, in the quay
    of "formally intensional proof-theoreticism" (FIPT) that all the world
    knows on more familiar terms as "glasperlenspielism", only to discover
    as I persisted on the problem, heedless of where my dinghy an sich might
    be drifting, that I had gradually become an apostate to my former faith
    and a born-again convert to the opposite point of view, in this case,
    say, "materially extensional model-pragmaticism" (MEMP).

HP: From this post and your previous posts you often appear to have moved from
    one apostasy to another.  I wonder if you are tacitly applying either-or logic
    to images and metaphors.  If you often find yourself, "an apostate to my former
    faith and a born-again convert to the opposite point of view", ask yourself why
    you feel apostasy is necessary.  Why not have faith in many images since all
    images are fragmentary images?  All textual descriptions are also fragmentary.
    Natural language is almost all metaphorical or analogical, that is, every
    statement is true in one sense and false in another.

Well, yes, of course, that is more or less the moral of the story.
I chose to narrate it in an overly melodramatic fashion this time,
but I think that I make my attitude more straightforwardly patent
in my more formal expositions.  Still, there is a point to laying
it out this way -- and besides lampooning the intense enthusiasms
of my former selves -- because there is in actual point of fact a
certain inescapable degree of complementarity to the way that one
sets up the apparatus of one's intentional attitude for the sake
of orienting toward a potential object or in order to carry out
a chosen objective.  I did not invent the XORable character of
our inexorable embeddedness in Nature.

HP: We have no universal or certain way of proving or judging the validity of
    images or natural language metaphors because the creative inquirer usually
    chooses his images and metaphors precisely for their suggestive, enigmatic,
    or paradoxical power.  Many meanings expressed in natural language can only
    be understood metaphorically as a "coincidence of opposites" (Nicholas Cusanus).

HP: That is why we need formal languages.  Unlike natural language that cannot escape
    its established metaphors and conventional meanings, formal mathematical statements
    can be proved, just because they have no (or minimal) extrinsic meaning.  One has to
    fully appreciate this to understand Einstein's concise assertion:  "Insofar as the
    propositions of mathematics are certain [provable] they do not apply to reality,
    and insofar as they apply to reality they are not certain [not provable]." 

HP: Bohr's more elliptical statement about natural language also expresses Cusanus's
    coincidence of opposites:  There are simple truths whose negation is false, and
    there are great truths whose negation is also true.  Of course, by "simple" Bohr
    meant literal, and by "great" he meant metaphorical.  [A logician would worry if
    this is itself a great truth, instead of considering what types of truth Bohr
    meant by "simple" and "great".]

JA: Now, all of us here are supposed to be sensitive to the
    themes of complementarity and relativity that developed
    as physics become a "reciprocant observational science" . . .

HP: Remember, "observational" is only half the physics story.  The other half is
    the Glasperlenspieler with his mathematical toys.  These two make up the left
    and right sides of the Hertzian diagram.

My invocation of Hesse is a wry bit of irony,
since the formalists who use seek to invoke
his benediction of their games rarely get
the drift of his own more subtle irony.

JA: Somewhere along the line between my readings
    of Bohr, Dirac, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohm,
    and that whole crew, it got impressed rather
    deeply on one of my younger selves that there
    is a complementarity or a trade-off between
    the causal and spacetime pictures of things ...

HP: Quantum theory is a rather formal special case.
    But metaphorically, in all cases our pictures (images)
    are framed (we even call them conceptual frameworks) and
    we cannot look at all pictures at the same time and place.
    What Cusanus, Hertz, Einstein, Bohr, and I are talking about
    is how natural language frames and mathematical frames (or
    semantic frames and syntactic frames) must be displayed together
    to create an empirically verifiable exhibit.  [Physics exhibits
    cover only a very restricted type of experience, but it claims
    to exhibit universal pictures for that limited type of experience.] 

JA: It is precisely because I care about achieving basic conceptual frameworks
    in which the many-splintered facets of reality can be redintegrated into
    sensible and intelligible perspectives on the world as a holos that I
    find the standpoints of most dedicated isms to form such annoying
    and frustrating obstructions to this integration.

HP: Trying to integrate the non-integrable is as frustrating as trying to
    unscrew the inscrutable.  Some pictures must be exhibited together, but
    separately.  For example, all microscopic physical laws are precisely
    expressed mathematically and they are symmetric in time (reversible).
    Macroscopic laws are just as precisely expressed mathematically but 
    they are not symmetric in time (irreversible).  To understand any
    physical system we need both pictures in the exhibit (since all
    measurement is irreversible), but logically they cannot be put
    in the same frame.

Yes, but there are many things that were whole before
we began to disintegrate them in our minds, and there
are many rather obvious ways to integrate aspects of
phenomena that are not even being tried, on account
of the preveiling influence of reductive thinking.

What I have been saying all along is that achieving
a whole picture of something is very often possible --
non-trivial but possible -- just as soon as people
quit buying that old panacea from Descartes that
2-dim projections, taken one at a time, suffice.

HP: This is the case for many common pictures and conceptual frameworks (sometimes
    labelled as -isms):  chance and determinism, continuous and discrete, particle and wave,
    finite and infinite, hardware and software, observer and observed, nominalism and realism,
    brain wetware and consciousness, and so on.  Zeno was troubled by using only the discrete
    picture, but not Aristotle ["That which moves does not move by counting"].  Historically,
    there have been many metaphorical and analogic exhibits that combine each one of these
    complementary pictures.  Fashion often favors one exhibit over another for a time,
    but for every case there is still no long-term consensus on which frames make the
    best exhibit.  The only consensus in physics (since Galileo, or even Cusanus) is
    that one frame must be mathematical.

You have conveyed the image of rogue's gallery.
Very entertaining, if you can just forget that
the bloody rogues pictured were earnestly set
on destroying each other while they yet lived.
I have made full concessions to aspectualism,
but if we are going to talk seriously about
isms, we have to observe how their exponents
behave in real historical and sociological,
if not to mention in logical terms, and not
just describe the way that we wish it were.
I am not required to figment a hypothesis
in order to notice what actually happens.
And something there is about an ism that
just won't suffer its anti-ism to live.
I began the experiment of looking into
a standard source to cite a variety of
standard statements of opposed isms,
and the first thing I discovered is
that any ism notable enough to get
its name in the Who's Who Of Isms,
bears beneath its cloak the dagger
of an explicit denial of validity
for its opposite number.  Now you
and I, with our fuzzy brains, can
parry both sides of the dual, maybe,
but if I desire to build computerized
tools for assisting with real inquiry,
then something here has just gotta give.
I know this from having tried sufficient
samples of all those easier ways to do it,
all those ways that everybody always knows
will do the trick, until they actually go
out and find out why things are otherwise.

Jon Awbrey

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