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Ctrl-F "regress" For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress

by baddox 10y ago

Ctrl-F "regress" For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.

ysleepy 10y ago
There are multiple paragraphs on it just above the Leibniz section (ctrl+f infinit). It comes down to, yes infinity (or any permutation (or DAG) of the universe of facts) for some facts. And yes that is not very satisfying. - But I think any techniques of cutting the chain at some point is arbitrary to some degree and not rigorous as an exploration of the problem.
vinceguidry 10y ago
I use the PSR all the time, I don't think that infinite regress causes any practical problems. I have adapted an ad-hoc set of primitives that I grounded on like five years ago. I call these the principles of context. They're hard to write about, believe me I've tried, but I've come to believe that any logical position can be analyzed and represented using contextual verses. I've identified six of them, topic, inverse, converse, reverse, obverse, whole. I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest. Any idea / position can be related to any other idea by passing them through intermediary ideas in these contextual verses. This is mostly what we do when we think. The PSR in this sense encapsulates the idea that there is no true discontinuities in the world, only mental blocks we impose upon ourselves. You solve the infinity problem simply by making infinity an idea that can be reached or gone through contextually. Regression itself can be seen as operating on the inverse of a particular idea.
- gknoy 10y ago
  > I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Sure. I'll start with an example. Take the United States. This is the topic, the verse in which the thing is the thing. The next step out is the inverse. What is the inverse of the United States? This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US. Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space. We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location. The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse. Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical. Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about. In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse. It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.
tbabb 10y ago
I did not deeply read the whole article because it's pretty wordy and a lot of air, but there is a point where it discusses Leibniz "solution", which was "therefore God". Basically the well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument in a slightly different cloak. He goes on to try and prove that there cannot be two identical things in the universe, which I guess he must have done before anyone knew about fundamental particles. In reality, it seems to me that if you want to develop a system of understanding you have to develop a set of axioms and accept them. And by Goedel's incompleteness theorem, your system cannot be a complete or exhaustive description of what is true.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jawns 10y ago
  > well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument If you mean that there are arguments against the Aristotelean concept of an unmoved mover, that is certainly so. But typically the term "discredited" implies a broad public consensus, whereas many people accept some form of the cosmological argument, which is related to the concept of an unmoved mover. To use your version of "discredited," we might say that both theism and atheism are discredited, merely because there are arguments against each.
  - jpttsn 10y ago
    1: there exists argument against X 2: lots of humans don't believe X Maybe there is a third kind of "discredited."
    - foldr 10y ago
      To say that an argument is discredited usually implies that there's a clear balance of expert opinion against it. That's not really the case with the cosmological argument, or with the (similar but not identical) argument given by Aristotle for an unmoved mover.
      - 10y ago
ykler 10y ago
Here is one example of how a regress of explanation can terminate. Suppose you and I are old friends who haven't seen each other in years, and we happen to run into each other while we are both on trips to Japan. The answer to the question, "Why did we meet in Japan?" is that it was a coincidence -- which is a kind of way of saying there is no interesting explanation of precisely this fact (though there will certainly be explanations of causes of this coincidence such as our respective trips to Japan). You might try to generate a sort of regress by asking, "Why did this coincidence happen?", but the proper way to answer this question is to say that there aren't really reasons why specific coincidences happen, as opposed to other possible coincidences that didn't happen, though by further study of the general nature of coincidences and of this coincidence in particular, we might come to a more exact appreciation of how "big" a coincidence it is. Now you might accept this example but say that the PSR doesn't apply to "everyday" facts like the one in the example but only at some more fundamental level of description. There is, perhaps, some precise configuration of fundamental particles that is the microphysical basis of the fact that we met in Japan, and is natural to explain the existence of that precise configuration of particles in terms of its causal antecedents -- the precise configurations of particles that existed earlier. If you simply accept determinism, as most Enlightenment philosophers did, you get a kind of PSR at this level. But of course there is a regress lurking here since you can try to follow the causes back to the beginning (and you can also get a problem about PSR by asking about the reason for the laws themselves that govern the causal relationships). At this "cosmological" level, most philosophers would probably accept something like brute facts, but there is undeniably something very offensive about this idea, and I guess a reason why Leibniz is interesting is that he really resisted it.
eclat 10y ago
Counterfactual Causation adresses that. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/#CouCauDep https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/...

by baddox 10y ago

Ctrl-F "regress" For me, with admittedly less than expert understanding of philosophical terminology and methodology, the obvious criticism of infinite regress is not sufficiently addressed.

ysleepy 10y ago

There are multiple paragraphs on it just above the Leibniz section (ctrl+f infinit). It comes down to, yes infinity (or any permutation (or DAG) of the universe of facts) for some facts. And yes that is not very satisfying. - But I think any techniques of cutting the chain at some point is arbitrary to some degree and not rigorous as an exploration of the problem.

vinceguidry 10y ago

I use the PSR all the time, I don't think that infinite regress causes any practical problems. I have adapted an ad-hoc set of primitives that I grounded on like five years ago. I call these the principles of context. They're hard to write about, believe me I've tried, but I've come to believe that any logical position can be analyzed and represented using contextual verses. I've identified six of them, topic, inverse, converse, reverse, obverse, whole. I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest. Any idea / position can be related to any other idea by passing them through intermediary ideas in these contextual verses. This is mostly what we do when we think. The PSR in this sense encapsulates the idea that there is no true discontinuities in the world, only mental blocks we impose upon ourselves. You solve the infinity problem simply by making infinity an idea that can be reached or gone through contextually. Regression itself can be seen as operating on the inverse of a particular idea.

gknoy 10y ago
> I can try to elaborate on these if there's interest As someone who asked "why?" all the time as a kid, I'd love to read your elaboration.
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Sure. I'll start with an example. Take the United States. This is the topic, the verse in which the thing is the thing. The next step out is the inverse. What is the inverse of the United States? This is where you need an organizing concept. I call this the whole. The whole is the topic plus the inverse of the topic. So if you're using the whole of all nations, you might say that the inverse of the United States is all the other countries of the world that aren't the US. Next step is the reverse context. The United States is a country, so the reverse would be everything that is not a country. As you can imagine that's a very big space. We now reach the converse. The converse is the part of the reverse that is the counterpart of the topic. To find the converse is the whole point of doing this kind of logic, and it requires some location. The part of the reverse that isn't the converse is called the obverse. So to understand what the converse of the United States is, find the United States-shaped hole in the the rest of the universe that isn't the United States. A good approach is to take the inverse of the United States and use it to "cast a shadow" on the reverse. This highlights the converse. Note that I used the word "universe" just now. It turns out that there's just no good word for the combination of the whole of a topic and it's reverse. Any word you use is going to constitute some kind of limitation on what it is. If you're spiritually-minded, though, it maps perfectly onto concepts like God, or the Source. In fact, I developed this whole scheme in order to better understand spiritual topics like what does it mean to be non-physical. Locating a thing's converse isn't easy and it requires delving into a lot of things that might seemingly have no relation to the topic, but will if you keep applying context logic to them. I'm going to just jump through the intermediary contexts to arrive at what the converse of the United States is. Not that it wouldn't be interesting but it just takes a lot of work to articulate. I told you this was hard to write about. In the beginning we assigned the inverse of the US to the other states of the nation, but that's not really the case. The real inverse is the people. The inverse of America is Americans. People have agency. Agency means you can change yourself to become something you're not. But you're not just changing randomly, you're directing it. The United States, being a collection of people, has agency of its own. Agency charts a path through the reverse, that path is the converse. It all seems a bit boring, but this sort of analysis is extremely useful for making sense of spirituality. What does it mean for something to be real? What are verses of reality? I can sit here and tell you what it is, but it's better to do the analysis yourself and have insights yourself. It's essentially a way to explore the world of ideas in a rigorous fashion.

tbabb 10y ago

I did not deeply read the whole article because it's pretty wordy and a lot of air, but there is a point where it discusses Leibniz "solution", which was "therefore God". Basically the well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument in a slightly different cloak. He goes on to try and prove that there cannot be two identical things in the universe, which I guess he must have done before anyone knew about fundamental particles. In reality, it seems to me that if you want to develop a system of understanding you have to develop a set of axioms and accept them. And by Goedel's incompleteness theorem, your system cannot be a complete or exhaustive description of what is true.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jawns 10y ago
> well-discredited "unmoved mover" argument If you mean that there are arguments against the Aristotelean concept of an unmoved mover, that is certainly so. But typically the term "discredited" implies a broad public consensus, whereas many people accept some form of the cosmological argument, which is related to the concept of an unmoved mover. To use your version of "discredited," we might say that both theism and atheism are discredited, merely because there are arguments against each.
- jpttsn 10y ago
  1: there exists argument against X 2: lots of humans don't believe X Maybe there is a third kind of "discredited."
  - foldr 10y ago
    To say that an argument is discredited usually implies that there's a clear balance of expert opinion against it. That's not really the case with the cosmological argument, or with the (similar but not identical) argument given by Aristotle for an unmoved mover.
    - 10y ago

ykler 10y ago

Here is one example of how a regress of explanation can terminate. Suppose you and I are old friends who haven't seen each other in years, and we happen to run into each other while we are both on trips to Japan. The answer to the question, "Why did we meet in Japan?" is that it was a coincidence -- which is a kind of way of saying there is no interesting explanation of precisely this fact (though there will certainly be explanations of causes of this coincidence such as our respective trips to Japan). You might try to generate a sort of regress by asking, "Why did this coincidence happen?", but the proper way to answer this question is to say that there aren't really reasons why specific coincidences happen, as opposed to other possible coincidences that didn't happen, though by further study of the general nature of coincidences and of this coincidence in particular, we might come to a more exact appreciation of how "big" a coincidence it is. Now you might accept this example but say that the PSR doesn't apply to "everyday" facts like the one in the example but only at some more fundamental level of description. There is, perhaps, some precise configuration of fundamental particles that is the microphysical basis of the fact that we met in Japan, and is natural to explain the existence of that precise configuration of particles in terms of its causal antecedents -- the precise configurations of particles that existed earlier. If you simply accept determinism, as most Enlightenment philosophers did, you get a kind of PSR at this level. But of course there is a regress lurking here since you can try to follow the causes back to the beginning (and you can also get a problem about PSR by asking about the reason for the laws themselves that govern the causal relationships). At this "cosmological" level, most philosophers would probably accept something like brute facts, but there is undeniably something very offensive about this idea, and I guess a reason why Leibniz is interesting is that he really resisted it.

eclat 10y ago

Counterfactual Causation adresses that. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/#CouCauDep https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/causation-counterfactual/...