[deletedthrowaway123456-deactiva]

Fixation is the way to death, fluidity is the way to life. This is something that should be well understood.

Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings

https://bookshop.org/a/12010/9781590302484

[polarsirens]

Reality shatters.

[thepursuitofunderstanding]

I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.

Virginia Woolf

[junglejim4322]

Be so completely yourself that everyone wants to kill you

[rxshil]

[rxshil]

[rxshil]

[rxshil]

[rxshil]

I. FREE WILL AND DETERMINISM

Kant took seriously the notion that the state of the physical world at any time flows directly from the position and momentum of its constituent particles at prior times. Any attempt to smuggle another kind of causality into that chain of events amounts to a “mental jugglery that only reads the conception of an end into the nature of the things.”

A disembodied soul was not, for Kant, a plausible answer. Nonetheless, although Kant considered the causal chains that sustain our knowledge of the world in space and time to be necessary, as he used his reason to pry open the linkages of spacetime, he encountered a roadblock there, an insurmountable impasse that would arise whenever human cognition would try to apply the logic of space and time beyond the limits of our ability to discern differences in space and time. Precisely there, at the most minute points of continuity between one moment and the next, Kant saw an antinomy rear its head.

On the one side, a perfectly mechanistic chain, with no room for willful intervention into the course of history. On the other, spontaneous freedom of choice, not only evidenced throughout history and every living moment, but also, Kant believed, required by the very nature of practical reason itself, a freedom inherent in the very acts of judging ourselves and others that lie at the basis of all social organization.

Each side could be flawlessly argued: every action in space and time has a cause, and nothing is spontaneous; or, any sequence of events must have an origin that is not caused, hence spontaneity must exist.

But like any antinomy, Kant could see that it did not arise from an error on one side; rather, the error lay in a failure to understand the basic structure and limits of human knowledge, and in our tendency to mix two ways of thinking about nature and the knowledge we have of it.

On the one hand, our very ability to discern the most minimal change entails that our observation span at least two moments and hence elude total absorption in the event being observed. Thus, as we delve into each individual link in the causal chain, we find it relies on any two elements being related by a third, a mediator whose intervention must slip out unnoticed for the chain to appear unbroken—just as the beads of condensation require the physicist’s theory to produce an electron’s path in a cloud chamber. >> free will/alien influence<<

On the other hand, even as our very act of analyzing the world seems to require it, we are unable to isolate that alien influence. No matter how deeply we dig into the spacetime chain, we will never find a link put there by free choice; we can never find a particle of consciousness, a material embodiment of soul. For us to register the moment of change from one spacetime cell to the next requires that there exist some anchor in the flow that can register differences, and hence a pivot from which to choose what to observe.

But try as we may, we cannot find that anchor and turn it into an object of our cognition. Faced with this antinomy between freedom and determinism, many modern scientists and thinkers have simply decided that one side, freedom, needs to fall out of the equation. If freedom conflicts with science, so much the worse for freedom. But this solution entirely misses the point.

The antinomy between mechanistic causality and freedom is rife throughout scientific thinking and practice, even among scientists who are unaware they are postulating freedom at all. Freedom implies choice, implies selection. By denying it to individuals in time and space, scientists and philosophers who profess to believe exclusively in mechanistic causality reintroduce it elsewhere, namely, at the edge of existence, in the form of that magical set of conditions that allowed us to emerge, evolve, and eventually observe the universe that birthed us.

In the case of the strong anthropic principle, this move is obvious, but it pertains to the weak principle’s concept of the multiverse as well, just more subtly. Because what is free will other than the presumption of something uncaused inserting itself in a causal chain? In the case of the anthropic principle, we remove that uncaused cause from within time and space, from within the causal chain, and place it outside time and space, before universes birth, so that we can say all initial settings give birth to all possible universes, and hence explain away the improbability of our existence. We implicitly imagine a choice of universes outside space and time awaiting their manifestation in spacetime to be tested out for their livability—much like a shop filled with differently sized suits waiting to be tried on.

[rxshil]

LEIBNIZ AND KANT

Kant’s system agreed significantly with Leibniz’s, Kant conceded. Specifically, both systems argued for a kind of harmony between the natural world and the moral one. The distinction, however, lay in how each thinker got there, and this distinction made all the difference.

For Leibniz the very reason we could trust the laws of physics was the reason to trust the existence of an ultimate moral law, for just as surely as God’s hand guided the one, it had to be guiding the other. The lawfulness of nature and of morality emerged from the programmer’s code, and all we had to do was read it.

>> order in the laws of physics causes us to trust in a higher natural order <<

Kant’s critical philosophy had upended this way of thinking for good. Nature’s ultimate lawfulness, the necessary link between cause and effect, the tendrils connecting genus and species—all of these could be derived as necessary presuppositions of our ability to perceive individual objects in time and space. They were aspects of our knowledge, to be sure, but also aspects with necessity and hence objectivity.

>> the natural order came from our ability to perceive it <<

Likewise, as we will see in greater detail in the next chapter, the ultimate freedom of the human subject to choose and the nature of its moral duty could not depend on any religious doctrine or earthly tradition, but was a necessary presupposition for a being who finds itself confronting moral choices, because a being that was truly unfree and merely adrift in the flow of causal connections could only ever do as it was inclined to do; the mere fact of being faced with choices required the postulate of freedom.

>> natural order :: subjectivity/free choice :: moral order <<

>> what makes an act moral or immoral is precisely the freedom we're endowed with to choose that act <<

So, harmony exists between the natural world and the moral one, between empirical judgments of causality and free moral choices, but only if one understands, as Leibniz had not yet, that this harmony flows not from a divine code but as a necessary condition of possibility of our ability to perceive and think about the movement of bodies in space and time and to make decisions in a social world.

[rxshil]

the ensemble of its elements conforms to its internal principle, the idea that guides it.

[rxshil]

III. LIFE-SUPPORTING UNIVERSE + ON WORKS OF ART

In this respect, our appreciation of artistic works provides us with a model for detecting purposiveness in nature. In artworks like Mahler’s symphonies, we recognize a masterful hand that had a reason for placing each note where it was. We know there is a purpose there, and we hear it as we progress through the symphony; we marvel at its perfection.

In nature we experience a similar marvel when we contemplate the towering oak that emerged from a tiny seed or realize that the movement of every massive object in the skies can be described and predicted by a few calculations.

But whereas in nature we are attracted by the sense of a guiding hand even when there is none, in art the analogy is reversed: we are attracted to products of a guiding hand where the hand itself has become invisible.

For a work of art whose artistry is too evident loses its ability to cause wonder; it becomes staid and predictable. In both art and nature, we see beauty in signs of purposiveness without purpose, natural artistry—but with an important difference. Whereas in nature we supply the artist, in art we supply the sense of its naturalness, that it was produced without evident artifice.

*

This structural analogy between the natural and the artistic both animates our appreciation of the products of the imagination and provides a standard for judgments about disputes of taste. The fact is, we do this all the time.

Let’s return to the example of a mystery novel. You make it through three-hundred plus pages, and the culprit turns out to be a character you’ve never met before with no connection to the story so far. Surprising? Certainly, but no one in their right mind would judge this to be an excellent way to end the story. Now let’s say that in the mystery you’re reading, each clue led so inevitably to the final revelation that you could see it coming a hundred pages before the end. Clearly that would be unsatisfying as well. In the first case you would be faced with a random occurrence, an unmotivated insertion into the structure of the novel that destroyed any sense of its coherence, its purposiveness. >> too random <<

In the second case, however, you’ve seen the author’s handiwork the whole way through; >> too predictable << it’s all inevitability with no surprise, all artifice with no naturalness.

Unlike with Mahler, our first reaction is that we could do that ourselves just by following a recipe. The result is a work of “art” that no one wants to spend their time on. Purposiveness without purpose is thus a model for making claims about the aesthetic value of works of art, since we find art beautiful if it exhibits a harmony as if it had arisen there naturally.

In this way it releases us from the conundrum of radical subjectivism, whereby all are entitled to their own opinion about a work’s value and there are no rational bases for arguing about it. The irony of such subjectivism is that while it sounds coherent enough (how indeed can I trump someone’s argument that, hey, this is beautiful because I find it beautiful?), no one in practice seems to believe it.

As Kant puts it, in matters of taste there is a real difference between saying you like something and saying that it is beautiful. In the latter case your statement implicitly demands concurrence, whereas in the former it does not.

Purposiveness without purpose provides an objective standard for arguing why one finds one work more beautiful than another. But purposiveness without purpose is also a model for understanding the appeal of scientific explanations of the natural world, since we are attracted by theories that reveal the harmony between specific observations and a general explanation as if that harmony had been put there by design. This fit between the knowability of the world and our ability to know it engenders aesthetic pleasure—not a fulfillment of personal benefit or the satisfaction of appetite, but the pure joy of experiencing, in a flash, how a single rule explains the functioning of seemingly disparate aspects of nature.

In a satisfying work of art, the ensemble of its elements conforms to its internal principle, the idea that guides it. Thus, when we come to the end of a mystery novel, the solution appears inevitable, although we couldn’t see it coming.

[rxshil]

𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑛 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑖𝑡

[rxshil]

II. LIFE-SUPPORTING UNIVERSE + ON BEAUTY

Here, Kant said, lay the harmony that the ancients had identified as the source of beauty. For when we perceive the chaos of data we receive about the world to be connected by an underlying unifying idea, we find that amalgam to be beautiful, harmonious, complete on its own. Our desire to explain further is disarmed, and we find ourselves enraptured in contemplating a scene that requires nothing more of us, something for which we need to supply no external purpose because it carries its purpose entirely in itself.

This is a feeling Kant believed we experienced in the presence of great art. As the conductor Marin Alsop once said about a symphony of Gustav Mahler’s, every note is there for a reason. Each of its elements is situated exactly right and couldn’t be elsewhere, hence the piece seems necessary, inevitable, yet in no way could we have come upon it on our own, in which case it would give us the sense of being hackneyed, clichéd.

Ancient philosophers were thus right in believing that we are attracted to and find beautiful those common principles that we discover underlying and unifying the bewildering diversity of nature. When Plato argued that we feel joy or pleasure upon discovering a mathematical rule expressed in nature, he touched on an essential faculty of our cognition that permits us to recognize and appreciate the purposiveness of nature—the purposiveness that expresses itself in the seed that grows to become a mighty oak, the purposiveness that seems to tell us this must have been designed this way.

While Kant agreed that we feel something is beautiful when we sense something like purposiveness in it, he believed the ancients erred in thinking such purposiveness was an essential aspect of nature itself. As he wrote, “In the necessity of that which is purposive and so constituted as if it were intentionally arranged for our use, but which nevertheless seems to pertain originally to the essence of things, without any regard to our use, lies the ground for the great admiration of nature.”

Key here is the phrase “as if.” The ground for our admiration, Kant insisted, lies not outside in the world but in our reason’s relation to the picture we make of the world. So powerful is the draw of that picture’s coherence that the ancients projected it outward into the world itself, transforming an inner sense of purposiveness into an actual purpose.

There is indeed purposiveness, structure, rigor in our picture of nature, Kant replied, but it is supplied by our own reason. Just as Kant showed that we must presuppose the existence of a whole, unified cosmos for our individual observations to cohere, even though we can never grasp that whole cosmos as an object, the harmony between parts of a system and its internal guiding principle is not an empirical fact that can be established for once and for all but a presumption necessary for deriving laws in the first place.

We cannot see the oak tree in the seed, and yet we also cannot coherently grasp how seeds develop into oak trees without imagining them as being guided by a final purpose throughout their growth. Discovering such harmony ignites in us a feeling of beauty, and we are driven to it—not only in works of art or the appreciation of nature, but in science itself. Indeed, the standards that scientists report as guiding their preferences—the preference for the economy of nature’s laws over their profligacy; the ideal of simplicity that guided science from Newton’s discovery of the laws of motion to Einstein’s gorgeous simplification and incorporation of gravity—make sense when we see them no longer as part of nature itself but as 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑤𝑒 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑛 𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒 𝑡𝑜 𝑚𝑎𝑘𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑠𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑖𝑡.

[rxshil]

i really love this TRA part that touches briefly on beauty: we find meaning/order/beauty in the world not because the world itself is meaningful/beautiful but because our subjective perception of it is.

even colors are made up entirely by our own biology. without us as observers, the universe will cease to be how we see it and yet it would still be the same.

our perceptions will die along with us, leaving the universe as this barren setting that only served as a stage for us to decorate it.

(unless it dies with us because everything is intricately embedded into each other.)

[rxshil]

I. LIFE-SUPPORTING UNIVERSE

• ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

The philosophical problem that emerged from the realization that our very existence as sentient beings owes a great deal to chance has led some scientists to what they call the anthropic principle. This principle takes two forms: a “weak” one that scientists often accept as likely true but not particularly mindblowing as revelations go; and a “strong” one that comes across to most scientists like a lot of hocus-pocus.

The strong anthropic principle also goes by the name of “design”—as in, to explain how something as wildly improbable as intelligent life emerged from such a potentially inhospitable set of possibilities requires us to presume that a being of vast power and intelligence planned it that way.

The weak anthropic principle, in contrast, simply concedes that, as improbable as it may seem that the universe emerged to support intelligent life, it would be more improbable for life to find itself living in a universe that didn’t support it.

While most scientists tend to harbor distaste for obviously metaphysical solutions such as presented by the strong anthropic principle, one cosmological theory that emerges from the weak principle has garnered some interest. This theory, known as the multiverse, posits that all possible universes in fact exist, and that our own is one in an innumerable set of universes of infinitely different sizes, shapes, and durations, each with its own set of laws and constants. If this were true, supporters say, it would solve the problem of the improbability of a life-supporting cosmos. As one proponent of this theory describes it, if you walked into a clothing store with only one suit on its racks, and it happened to fit, you would be rightfully surprised. If you walked into a store whose racks teemed with suits and one happened to fit, this would be considerably less surprising. The multiverse theory effectively turns a one-suit store into an infinite-suits store. Whether in its strong or weak versions, finding a suit that fits is a telling metaphor for the anthropic principle.

Either (2) infinite universes exist and our own existence selects for the conditions that support us, or a (1) single universe was created with purpose to sustain life.

To put it another way, either (2) we take an idea, namely, the mathematical models we have arrived at to explain the universe, and grant it the privilege of really existing in the form of the multiverse, or (1) we elevate actual reality to the level of the ultimate idea, namely, God’s plan.

*

[rxshil]

If Kant was saying anything, and he was certainly saying a lot, it was this: we are never concerned solely with what nature does; we are always speaking of what we know about nature. But Heisenberg grasped something else. Like Kant, he grasped what happens when we overlook that fundamental fact.

Kant’s realization of the role reason has in creating the image we have of nature gives us the key to understanding the relationship of scientific knowledge to our experience of beauty; it also helps solve one of the most perplexing mysteries of modern cosmology: how the universe evolved to support life.