Month: April 2018

Form is Not Matter

entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

I have touched on this at other times, as here, here, and here. In the present post I am simply emphasizing the point more directly potentially for future reference.

If you receive an IKEA table in the mail, you have the parts that go to make up a table, but they are not yet put together in the form of a table. But very obviously, the form is not an additional part that you need to make the table. One does not say, “We need six parts for the table: the four legs, the tabletop, and the form of the table.” The form is something additional, but it is not an additional part. It is the “being put together as a table” that the parts require in order to be a table.

To say that the parts exist “in the form of a table” is also an informative expression here. One speaks as though “the form of a table” were a place, somewhat like Newton’s absolute space, in which the parts of the table exist together. This idea is helpful because just as Newton’s absolute space does not actually exist, so there will be analogous errors about form, as for example the idea that form is an additional part. Likewise, understanding the actual truth about place will help us to understand the truth about form.

Really and Truly True

entirelyuseless Metaphysics, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

There are two persons in a room with a table between them. One says, “There is a table on the right.” The other says, “There is a table on the left.”

Which person is right? The obvious answer is that both are right. But suppose they attempt to make this into a metaphysical disagreement.

“Yes, in a relative sense, the table is on the right of one of us and on the left of the other. But really and truly, at a fundamental level, the table is on the right, and not on the left.”

“I agree that there must be a fundamental truth to where the table is. But I think it is really and truly on the left, and not on the right.”

Now both are wrong, because it is impossible for the relationships of “on the right” and “on the left” to exist without correlatives, and the assertion that the table is “really and truly” on the right or on the left means nothing here except that these things do not depend on a relationship to an observer.

Thus both people are right, if they intend their assertions in a common sense way, and both are wrong, if they intend their assertions in the supposed metaphysical way. Could it happen that one is right and the other wrong? Yes, if one intends to speak in the common sense way, and the other in the metaphysical way, but not if they are speaking in the same way.

In the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Newton explains his ideas of space and time:

I. Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature flows equably without regard to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.

II. Absolute space, in its own nature, without regard to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Relative space is some movable dimension or measure of the absolute spaces; which our senses determine by its position to bodies; and which is vulgarly taken for immovable space; such is the dimension of a subterraneous, an æreal, or celestial space, determined by its position in respect of the earth. Absolute and relative space, are the same in figure and magnitude; but they do not remain always numerically the same. For if the earth, for instance, moves, a space of our air, which relatively and in respect of the earth remains always the same, will at one time be one part of the absolute space into which the air passes; at another time it will be another part of the same, and so, absolutely understood, it will be perpetually mutable.

III. Place is a part of space which a body takes up, and is according to the space, either absolute or relative. I say, a part of space; not the situation, nor the external surface of the body. For the places of equal solids are always equal; but their superfices, by reason of their dissimilar figures, are often unequal. Positions properly have no quantity, nor are they so much the places themselves, as the properties of places. The motion of the whole is the same thing with the sum of the motions of the parts; that is, the translation of the whole, out of its place, is the same thing with the sum of the translations of the parts out of their places; and therefore the place of the whole is the same thing with the sum of the places of the parts, and for that reason, it is internal, and in the whole body.

IV. Absolute motion is the translation of a body from one absolute place into another; and relative motion, the translation from one relative place into another. Thus in a ship under sail, the relative place of a body is that part of the ship which the body possesses; or that part of its cavity which the body fills, and which therefore moves together with the ship: and relative rest is the continuance of the body in the same part of the ship, or of its cavity. But real, absolute rest, is the continuance of the body in the same part of that immovable space, in which the ship itself, its cavity, and all that it contains, is moved. Wherefore, if the earth is really at rest, the body, which relatively rests in the ship, will really and absolutely move with the same velocity which the ship has on the earth. But if the earth also moves, the true and absolute motion of the body will arise, partly from the true motion of the earth, in immovable space; partly from the relative motion of the ship on the earth; and if the body moves also relatively in the ship; its true motion will arise, partly from the true motion of the earth, in immovable space, and partly from the relative motions as well of the ship on the earth, as of the body in the ship; and from these relative motions will arise the relative motion of the body on the earth. As if that part of the earth, where the ship is, was truly moved toward the east, with a velocity of 10010 parts; while the ship itself, with a fresh gale, and full sails, is carried towards the west, with a velocity expressed by 10 of those parts; but a sailor walks in the ship towards the east, with 1 part of the said velocity; then the sailor will be moved truly in immovable space towards the east, with a velocity of 10001 parts, and relatively on the earth towards the west, with a velocity of 9 of those parts.

While the details of Einstein’s theory of relativity may have been contingent, it is not difficult to see that Newton’s theory here is mistaken, and that anyone could have known it at the time. It is mistaken in precisely the way the people described above are mistaken in saying that the table is “really and truly” on the left or on the right.

For example, suppose the world had a beginning in time. Does it make sense to ask whether it could have started at a later time, or at an earlier one? It does not, because “later” and “earlier” are just as relative as “on the left” and “on the right,” and there is nothing besides the world in relation to which the world could have these relations. Could all bodies have been shifted a bit in one direction or another? No. This has no meaning, just as it has no meaning to be on the right without being on the right of something or other.

In an amusing exchange some years ago between Vladimir Nesov and Eliezer Yudkowsky, Nesov says:

Existence is relative: there is a fact of the matter (or rather: procedure to find out) about which things exist where relative to me, for example in the same room, or in the same world, but this concept breaks down when you ask about “absolute” existence. Absolute existence is inconsistent, as everything goes. Relative existence of yourself is a trivial question with a trivial answer.

Yudkowsky responds:

Absolute existence is inconsistent

Wha?

Yudkowsky is taken aback by the seemingly nonchalant affirmation of an apparently abstruse metaphysical claim, which if not nonsensical would appear to be the absurd claim that existence is impossible.

But Nesov is quite right: to exist is to exist in relation to other things. Thus to exist “absolutely” would be like “being absolutely on the right,” which is impossible.

Suppose we confront our original disputants with the fact that right and left are relative terms, and there is no “really true truth” about the relative position of the table. It is both on the right and on the left, relative to the disputants, and apart from these relationships, it is neither.

“Ok,” one responds, “but there is still a deep truth about where the table is: it is here in this room.”

“Actually,” the other answers, “The real truth is that it is in the house.”

Once again, both are right, if these are taken as common sense claims, and both are wrong, if this is intended to be a metaphysical dispute where one would be true, the real truth about where the table is, and the other would be false.

Newton’s idea of absolute space is an extension of this argument: “Ok, then, but there is still a really true truth about where the table is: it is here in absolute space.” But obviously this is just as wrong as all the other attempts to find out where the table “really” is. The basic problem is that “where is this” demands a relative response. It is a question about relationships in the first place. We can see this in fact even in Newton’s account: it is here in absolute space, that is, it is close to certain areas of absolute space and distant from certain other areas of absolute space.

Something similar will be true about existence to the degree that existence is also implicitly relative. “Where is this thing in the nature of things?” also requires a relative response: what relationship does this have to the rest of the order of reality? And in a similar way, questions about what is “really and truly true,” if taken to imply an abstraction from this relative order, will not have any answer. In a previous post, I said something like this in relation to the question, “how many things are here?” Reductionists and anti-reductionists disputing about whether a large object is “really and truly a cloud of particles” or “really and truly a single object,” are in exactly the same position as the disputants about the position of the table: both claims are true, in a common sense way, and both claims are false, if taken in a mutually exclusive metaphysical sense, since speaking of one or many is already to involve the perspective of the knower, in particular as knowing division and its negation.

Of course, an anti-reductionist has some advantage here because they can respond, “Actually, no one in a normal context would ever call a large object a cloud of particles. So it is not common sense at all.” This is true as far as it goes, but it is not really to the point, since no one denies in a common sense context that large objects also consist of many things, as a person has a head, legs, and arms, and a chair has legs and a back. It is not that the “cloud of particles” account is so much incorrect as it is adopting a very unusual perspective. Thus someone on the moon might say that the table is 240,000 miles away, which is a very unusual thing to say of a table, compared to saying that it is on the left or on the right.

None of this is unique to the question of “how many.” Since there is an irreducible element of relativity in being itself, we will be able to find some application to every question about the being of things.

Consistency and Reality

entirelyuseless Logic, Metaphysics, Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Consistency and inconsistency, in their logical sense, are relationships between statements or between the parts of a statement. They are not properties of reality as such.

“Wait,” you will say. “If consistency is not a property of reality, then you are implying that reality is not consistent. So reality is inconsistent?”

Not at all. Consistency and inconsistency are contraries, not contradictories, and they are properties of statements. So reality as such is neither consistent nor inconsistent, in the same way that sounds are neither white nor black.

We can however speak of consistency with respect to reality in an extended sense, just as we can speak of truth with respect to reality in an extended sense, even though truth refers first to things that are said or thought. In this way we can say that a thing is true insofar as it is capable of being known, and similarly we might say that reality is consistent, insofar as it is capable of being known by consistent claims, and incapable of being known by inconsistent claims. And reality indeed seems consistent in this way: I might know the weather if I say “it is raining,” or if I say, “it is not raining,” depending on conditions, but to say “it is both raining and not raining in the same way” is not a way of knowing the weather.

Consider the last point more precisely. Why can’t we use such statements to understand the world? The statement about the weather is rather different from statements like, “The normal color of the sky is not blue but rather green.” We know what it would be like for this to be the case. For example, we know what we would expect if it were the case. It cannot be used to understand the world in fact, because these expectations fail. But if they did not, we could use it to understand the world. Now consider instead the statement, “The sky is both blue and not blue in exactly the same way.” There is now no way to describe the expectations we would have if this were the case. It is not that we understand the situation and know that it does not apply, as with the claim about the color of the sky: rather, the situation described cannot be understood. It is literally unintelligible.

This also explains why we should not think of consistency as a property of reality in a primary sense. If it were, it would be like the color blue as a property of the sky. The sky is in fact blue, but we know what it would be like for it to be otherwise. We cannot equally say, “reality is in fact consistent, but we know what it would be like for it to be inconsistent.” Instead, the supposedly inconsistent situation is a situation that cannot be understood in the first place. Reality is thus consistent not in the primary sense but in a secondary sense, namely that it is rightly understood by consistent things.

But this also implies that we cannot push the secondary consistency of reality too far, in several ways and for several reasons.

First, while inconsistency as such does not contribute to our understanding of the world, a concrete inconsistent set of claims can help us understand the world, and in many situations better than any particular consistent set of claims that we might currently come up with. This was discussed in a previous post on consistency.

Second, we might respond to the above by pointing out that it is always possible in principle to formulate a consistent explanation of things which would be better than the inconsistent one. We might not currently be able to arrive at the consistent explanation, but it must exist.

But even this needs to be understood in a somewhat limited way. Any consistent explanation of things will necessarily be incomplete, which means that more complete explanations, whether consistent or inconsistent, will be possible. Consider for example these recent remarks of James Chastek on Gödel’s theorem:

1.) Given any formal system, let proposition (P) be this formula is unprovable in the system

2.) If P is provable, a contradiction occurs.

3.) Therefore, P is known to be unprovable.

4.) If P is known to be unprovable it is known to be true.

5.) Therefore, P is (a) unprovable in a system and (b) known to be true.

In the article linked by Chastek, John Lucas argues that this is a proof that the human mind is not a “mechanism,” since we can know to be true something that the mechanism will not able to prove.

But consider what happens if we simply take the “formal system” to be you, and “this formula is unprovable in the system” to mean “you cannot prove this statement to be true.” Is it true, or not? And can you prove it?

If you say that it is true but that you cannot prove it, the question is how you know that it is true. If you know by the above reasoning, then you have a syllogistic proof that it is true, and so it is false that you cannot prove it, and so it is false.

If you say that it is false, then you cannot prove it, because false things cannot be proven, and so it is true.

It is evident here that you can give no consistent response that you can know to be true; “it is true but I cannot know it to be true,” may be consistent, but obviously if it is true, you cannot know it to be true, and if it is false, you cannot know it to be true. What is really proven by Gödel’s theorem is not that the mind is not a “mechanism,” whatever that might be, but that any consistent account of arithmetic must be incomplete. And if any consistent account of arithmetic alone is incomplete, much  more must any consistent explanation of reality as a whole be incomplete. And among more complete explanations, there will be some inconsistent ones as well as consistent ones. Thus you might well improve any particular inconsistent position by adopting a consistent one, but you might again improve any particular consistent position by adopting an inconsistent one which is more complete.

The above has some relation to our discussion of the Liar Paradox. Someone might be tempted to give the same response to “tonk” and to “true”:

The problem with “tonk” is that it is defined in such a way as to have inconsistent implications. So the right answer is to abolish it. Just do not use that word. In the same way, “true” is defined in such a way that it has inconsistent implications. So the right answer is to abolish it. Just do not use that word.

We can in fact avoid drawing inconsistent conclusions using this method. The problem with the method is obvious, however. The word “tonk” does not actually exist, so there is no problem with abolishing it. It never contributed to our understanding of the world in the first place. But the word “true” does exist, and it contributes to our understanding of the world. To abolish it, then, would remove some inconsistency, but it would also remove part of our understanding of the world. We would be adopting a less complete but more consistent understanding of things.

Hilary Lawson discusses this response in Closure: A Story of Everything:

Russell and Tarski’s solution to self-referential paradox succeeds only by arbitrarily outlawing the paradox and thus provides no solution at all.

Some have claimed to have a formal, logical, solution to the paradoxes of self-reference. Since if these were successful the problems associated with the contemporary predicament and the Great Project could be solved forthwith, it is important to briefly examine them before proceeding further. The argument I shall put forward aims to demonstrate that these theories offer no satisfactory solution to the problem, and that they only appear to do so by obscuring the fact that they have defined their terms in such a way that the paradox is not so much avoided as outlawed.

The problems of self-reference that we have identified are analogous to the ancient liar paradox. The ancient liar paradox stated that ‘All Cretans are liars’ but was itself uttered by a Cretan thus making its meaning undecidable. A modern equivalent of this ancient paradox would be ‘This sentence is not true’, and the more general claim that we have already encountered: ‘there is no truth’. In each case the application of the claim to itself results in paradox.

The supposed solutions, Lawson says, are like the one suggested above: “Just do not use that word.” Thus he remarks on Tarski’s proposal:

Adopting Tarski’s hierarchy of languages one can formulate sentences that have the appearance of being self-referential. For example, a Tarskian version of ‘This sentence is not true’ would be:

(I) The sentence (I) is not true-in-L.

So Tarski’s argument runs, this sentence is both a true sentence of the language meta-L, and false in the language L, because it refers to itself and is therefore, according to the rules of Tarski’s logic and the hierarchy of languages, not properly formed. The hierarchy of languages apparently therefore enables self-referential sentences but avoids paradox.

More careful inspection however shows the manoeuvre to be engaged in a sleight of hand for the sentence as constructed only appears to be self-referential. It is a true sentence of the meta-language that makes an assertion of a sentence in L, but these are two different sentences – although they have superficially the same form. What makes them different is that the meaning of the predicate ‘is not true’ is different in each case. In the meta-language it applies the meta-language predicate ‘true’ to the object language, while in the object language it is not a predicate at all. As a consequence the sentence is not self-referential. Another way of expressing this point would be to consider the sentence in the meta-language. The sentence purports to be a true sentence in the meta-language, and applies the predicate ‘is not true’ to a sentence in L, not to a sentence in meta-L. Yet what is this sentence in L? It cannot be the same sentence for this is expressed in meta-L. The evasion becomes more apparent if we revise the example so that the sentence is more explicitly self-referential:

(I) The sentence (I) is not true-in-this-language.

Tarski’s proposal that no language is allowed to contain its own truth-predicate is precisely designed to make this example impossible. The hierarchy of languages succeeds therefore only by providing an account of truth which makes genuine self-reference impossible. It can hardly be regarded therefore as a solution to the paradox of self-reference, since if all that was required to solve the paradox was to ban it, this could have been done at the outset.

Someone might be tempted to conclude that we should say that reality is inconsistent after all. Since any consistent account of reality is incomplete, it must be that the complete account of reality is inconsistent: and so someone who understood reality completely, would do so by means of an inconsistent theory. And just as we said that reality is consistent, in a secondary sense, insofar as it is understood by consistent things, so in that situation, one would say that reality is inconsistent, in a secondary sense, because it is understood by inconsistent things.

The problem with this is that it falsely assumes that a complete and intelligible account of reality is possible. This is not possible largely for the same reasons that there cannot be a list of all true statements. And although we might understand things through an account which is in fact inconsistent, the inconsistency itself contributes nothing to our understanding, because the inconsistency is in itself unintelligible, just as we said about the statement that the sky is both blue and not blue in the same way.

We might ask whether we can at least give a consistent account superior to an account which includes the inconsistencies resulting from the use of “truth.” This might very well be possible, but it appears to me that no one has actually done so. This is actually one of Lawson’s intentions with his book, but I would assert that his project fails overall, despite potentially making some real contributions. The reader is nonetheless welcome to investigate for themselves.