quetzalcoatl wrote:This is a specific instance of the knowledge gaps (and conceptual gaps) that plague the various scientific disciplines. There is no obvious or smooth continuity between particle physics (for example) and biochemistry. Certain disciplines, like economics, only have a notional connection with reality.
In our limited understanding, we choose a small subset of the world to study and then cut it up into smaller chunks, until it seems to make some kind of sense. The borders of these knowledge 'islands' seem fuzzy and ill-defined. Worse, our maps of understanding are tailored to the specific area of study and aren't usually transferable in any useful sense.
@Victoribus Spolia has a valid critique of emergence, but the critique applies equally to using religion to fill in the knowledge gaps. The two forms of knowledge don't intersect in helpful ways. It's just religious handwaving to replace that scientific handwaving of emergence - nothing is gained.
It's also more than a little disingenuous to criticize emergence on the basis of a lack of reductive mechanism. Causation, even at a reductive level, is fully as illusory and ill-defined as emergence.
It is a significant crisis of the sciences that they have become so fragmented into so many specialized fields that they do stand unintegrated and independent of one another.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/les-treilles-talk.htm1. I think the problem which we have discussed about the unsatisfactory nature of the concept of ‘levels’ is the same question which arises from the ethical consideration of the place of neuroscience: it is not ‘levels’ inscribed in objective reality which separate the sciences, but rather the limits to the efficacy of the forms of practice which characterise each of the sciences. We ascribe the laws inherent in these forms of practice to the nature of the specific kind of things which we cognise through these forms of practice.
It seems that human beings all have a healthy disposition to regard the objects of experience as objectively existing things or entities. People are not born epistemological relativists or constructivists, we are born realists. But Fichte had a point; in the beginning there is just activity and the constraints that the world places on that activity. We learn to recognise these limits on our own activity as other people and objects. But the kind of things populating our world depend on how we ‘operationalise’ the concepts and questions presented to us within the terms of our own discipline. However, what happens is that rather than operationalising a concept to give it a precise meaning within a given system of activity, we reify our activity as objectively existing things. So to any given form of practice there corresponds a class of objectively existing things of which the world is deemed to be composed. So long as we recall that practice (activity) is both objective and subjective, individual and social, then there is nothing subjectivist or relativist in this observation.
We are all human beings and we talk to one another, we breath the same air and rely on each other in the same world economy; so our worlds are not mutually exclusive like in some relativist nightmare. As ordinary human beings we share most of our activity and agree on the identity and nature of most of the objectively existing things that populate our world. However, the division of labour, such as the division of the sciences, reflects itself as belief in different kinds of things populating the world.
We rationalise this disagreement about the nature of the things populating our world by means of the concept of ‘levels’, and the correlative concept of ‘emergence’. The underlying objective basis for this division of the world into different levels is the division of labour. This does not negate the fact that emergence is a valid concept, but it is a concept which can mislead; like God, emergence may act as a cover for lacunas in our understanding. Consciousness is not an ‘emergent property’ of neuronal networks, but arises on separate bases, only one precondition for which is a functioning human brain.
If we are interested in overcoming this rupture of our shared world into mutually exclusive ‘levels’, with an inexplicable ‘emergence’ covering over the gaps, then we have to go to the underlying division of labour and the opportunities for practical collaboration across its boundaries.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/spirkin/works/dialectical-materialism/ch01-s04.htmlTo artificially isolate the specialised sciences from philosophy amounts to condemning scientists to finding for themselves world-view and methodological guidelines for their researches. Ignorance of philosophical culture is bound to have a negative effect on any general theoretical conclusions from a given set of scientific facts. One cannot achieve any real theoretical comprehension, particularly of the global problems of a specialised science, without a broad grasp of inter-disciplinary and philosophical views. The specialised scientists who ignore philosophical problems sometimes turn out to be in thrall to completely obsolete or makeshift philosophical ideas without even knowing it themselves. The desire to ignore philosophy is particularly characteristic of such a trend in bourgeois thought as positivism, whose advocates have claimed that science has no need of philosophy. Their ill-considered principle is that "science is in itself philosophy". They work on the assumption that scientific knowledge has developed widely enough to provide answers to all philosophical problems without resorting to any actual philosophical system. But the "cunning" of philosophy lies in the fact that any form of contempt for it, any rejection of philosophy is in itself a kind of philosophy. It is as impossible to get rid of philosophy as it is to rid oneself of all convictions. Philosophy is the regulative nucleus of the theoretically-minded individual. Philosophy takes its revenge on those who dissociate themselves from it. This can be seen from the example of a number of scientists who after maintaining the positions of crude empiricism and scorning philosophy have eventually fallen into mysticism. So, calls for freedom from any philosophical assumptions are a sign of intellectual narrowness. The positivists, while denying philosophy in words, actually preach the flawed philosophy of agnosticism and deny the possibility of knowing the laws of existence, particularly those of the development of society. This is also a philosophy, but one that is totally misguided and also socially harmful.
It may appear to some scientists that they are using the logical and methodological means evolved strictly within the framework of their particular speciality. But this is a profound delusion. In reality every scientist, whether he realises it or not, even in simple acts of theoretical thought, makes use of the overall results of the development of mankind's cognitive activity enshrined mainly in the philosophical categories, which we absorb as we are absorbing our own natural that no man can put together any theoretical statement language, and later, the special language of theoretical thought. Oversimplifying the question a little, one may say without such concepts as property, cause, law or accident. But these are, in fact, philosophical categories evolved by the whole history of human thought and particularly in the system of philosophical, logical culture based on the experience of all fields of knowledge and practice.
Knowledge of the course and results of the historical development of cognition, of the philosophical views that have been held at various times of the world's universal objective connections is also essential for theoretical thinking because it gives the scientist a reliable yardstick for assessing the hypotheses and theories that he himself produces. Everything is known through comparison. Philosophy plays a tremendous integrating role in scientific knowledge, particular ly in the present age, when knowledge has formed an extremely ramified system. Suffice it to say, for example, that medicine alone comprises some 300 specialised branches. Medicine has "scalpelled" man into hundreds of little parts, which have become the targets of independent investigation and treatment.
It results in incredibly smart yet stupid people, because they have great content of knowledge in one area which then shapes their speculative attempts to understand other areas not by their own content but by generalizing the methods which are valid in the limit of their discipline.
Where people in one discipline are afraid to step beyond the artificial bounds drawn by that discipline and tend towards speculation despite the knowledge being available.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Brandom.pdfBut a theory of concepts which pays no attention to the social and psychological existence of concepts is untenable. But this is exactly what Brandom does. He laments, in the final section of “Reason in Philosophy,” that cognitive psychology has not investigated whether the development of concepts in children replicates his hierarchy of the complexity of concepts. Well, why not spend an afternoon with a child psychologist and ask? The development of concepts in children has been studied, and not only do children not replicate Brandom’s schema, but there are very highly developed theories of the development of concepts which demonstrate different genetic processes. If Brandom thinks there is reason to believe that the development of conceptuse in children should mirror the structure of their semantic complexity, perhaps the way concept-use actually develops would give him cause to reconsider the significance he attaches to this hierarchy of conceptual complexity? Would it give him cause to reconsider his whole theory of concepts? He says that it is ignorance on the part of psychologists that they have not investigated the basis for his philosophy in psychology, but isn’t it more reasonable to look to ignorance on his own part that he has developed a schema for the development of concepts without taking the trouble to enquire as to how it actually happens?
The problem of the origin of concepts in social formations and Brandom’s lack of interest in investigating this origin is even worse than his lack of an active interest in ontogenetic development. In “Articulating Reasons” there is one line in the whole book touching on the societal origin of concepts. In the context of pointing out that virtually every sentence is unique, he says: “The linguistic community determines the correct use of some sentences, ...”. How? He does not seem to realise what a problematic statement this is. There is a vast literature on the topic of the social origin of ideas, and the social conflicts tied up with the process of meaning-determination. But Brandom is either uninterested or unaware of these issues, systematically taking “society” to be a homogeneous and integral whole. And on the basis of his own failure to enquire into the origins of meaning, he simply takes concepts as given data.
As noted in the first quotation, the solution is how one integrates the different fields that come so close to touching one another so often but don't.
It's clearly not that the world is reflective of this analytical division and independence of levels as much as it simply reflects the way we've organized the intellectual division of labour to investigate the properties and nature of reality.
The analytical approach is a wealth of empirical content and understanding, but it binds itself up in the inability to necessarily synthesize itself beyond certain limits. Where I don't think the distinction between doing say biology and psychology should be erased, that is something we've gained thanks to analytical thought. But we may end up with pseudo-problems that abstract pieces from the whole and then wonders how they relate to one another when at our theoretical foundations we presuppose their separation.
Like a cartesian dualism of a souless body and a bodyless soul, or universals existing independently of being instantiated in individuals.
The problem itself being the result of forgetting the forest and seeing only the trees.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/phylogeny.htmNeuroscience already knows that the numerous components of a scenario are processed by distinct neuronal structures which transform various kinds of material interactions and experiences into neuronal form, and has posed for itself the various ‘binding problems’ of how these diverse components of a scenario are ‘put back together’ in a single perception. And yet perception of the whole ‘gestalt’ is evolutionarily prior to the perception of the individual ‘components’ (such as colour, movement, shape, spatial distribution, etc.). In fact, perception of ‘gestalts’ precedes self-consciousness in evolution; animals perceive episodes without those perceptions being ‘brought together’ and presented to any kind of self-consciousness. So even though the posing of the problem as one of binding is intuitively compelling to us self-conscious individuals, it would appear that it is more a problem of differentiation, of how the brain is able to differentiate the various aspects of a scenario from the whole. And of course the explanation for the various processes of differentiation is well-known: the brain has a known variety of specialised structures which make these differentiations possible.
Starting from individuals to the abstract which don't contain in them the particularly of what is universal, instead operating with pseudo-concepts/abstract universals rather than
concrete ones.
https://ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Roots_of_CHAT_in_Hegel.pdfHegel differentiated his idea of ‘concept’ from the abstract generality of formal, metaphysical thinking as follows:
(1) The concept is generally associated in our minds with abstract generality, and on that account it is often described as a general conception. We speak, accordingly, of the notions of color, plant, animal, etc. They are supposed to be arrived at by neglecting the particular features which distinguish the different colors, plants, and animals from each other, and by retaining those common to them all. This is the aspect of the notion which is familiar to understanding; and feeling is in the right when it stigmatizes such hollow and empty notions as mere phantoms and shadows.
But the universal of the notion is not a mere sum of features common to several things, confronted by a particular which enjoys an existence of its own. It is, on the contrary, self-particularizing or self-specifying, and with undimmed clearness finds itself at home in its antithesis. For the sake both of cognition and of our practical conduct, it is of the utmost importance that the real universal should not be confused with what is merely held in common. ...
The universal in its true and comprehensive meaning is a thought which, as we know, cost thousands of years to make it enter into the consciousness of men. ...
The distinction referred to above between what is merely in common, and what is truly universal, is strikingly expressed by Rousseau in his famous Contrat social, when he says that the laws of a state must spring from the universal will (volonte generale), but need not on that account be the will of all (volonte de tous). Rousseau would have made a sounder contribution towards a theory of the state, if he had always kept this distinction in sight. The general will is the concept of the will: and the laws are the special clauses of this will and based upon the notion of it. (Hegel, 1830/1867, §163n, S. 507-509)
...
The ‘abstract generality’ referred to above by Hegel, Vygotsky aptly called a ‘pseudoconcept’ - a form of abstract generalization, uniting objects by shared common features, which resembles conceptual thinking because, within a limited domain of experience, they subsume the same objects and situations as the true concept indicated by the same word.
The world isn't so fragmented, but if we're careless in our means of abstracting from it, then unconscious to our own thinking, we will fall into limitations and errors for a lack of self-aware logical thought.
And it is indeed the case that to arbitrarily transcribe one schema and knowledge outside it's context is a dangerous endeavor and is the error of many who make their discipline's methodological means a metaphysical position/world view.
To be so careless with the origins of a concept can lead to illusions on the nature of some object, a dissonance between form and content.
Although this is sometimes necessary that we don't yet have the adequate form for the content and must grasp things with our inadequate conception of it before we finally develop a new one, an abstract notion from which the new stage of a science can reinterpret its empirical facts in light of it (ie Einstein's theory of relativity sublating Newtownian physics).
To which causality isn't a particularly necessary concept to making things intelligible in that the height of causality is reciprocity.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/works/determinism.htmHegel showed that causality is extremely limited in its explanatory capacity, because the invocation of causation leads to an infinite regress. Efficient causes are always of interest, but a phenomenon is only understood when it is grasped as a cause of itself (a causa sui), that is, the relevant process is seen to create and recreate the conditions for its own existence. But even then, explanation often takes the form of Reciprocity of cause and effect. Hegel (1831) grants that “to make the manners of the Spartans the cause of their constitution and their constitution conversely the cause of their manners, may no doubt be in a way correct,” but still explains nothing. But Reciprocity is as far as Causality can go. The understanding of a process as a cause sui means grasping it as a concept and usually incorporates an investigation of its origins and development. Vygotsky has pioneered such an approach to Psychology.
I've experienced this a few times myself, where I unconsciously tried to place something as a primary cause and the other as an effect, leading to an infinite regress in which each one was both cause and effect upon one another. If one is too attached to the concept then we end up in an infinite regress or an infinite loop.
As stated, emergence as being a simple observation that things seem to get more complex as no more insightful than saying God created something in such a way is of course just a limitation of understanding much of the time. It's a place holder until it is known, God of the gaps and that, but it shouldn't be mistaken for having any content in itself that does explain a thing. To actually ask the specifics of a concept always reveals whether someone has any actual content in mind or whether it's just an empty stand in for not knowing.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics