Journal mburns's Journal: Handling Dichotomies 2
Getting some of these basic distinctions wrongly analyzed is fatal to any hope of doing the science of the cosmos right. So, let me explicitly position them according to my results.
Consider these would-be properties of being along with their opposites:
expressible,
self-referent,
metaphysical,
mathematical,
discrete,
relative,
symbol,
boundary,
whole,
existent,
possible,
logically coherent,
epiphenomenal,
classical,
willed,
designed,
causal,
falsifiable.
I suppose that Spinoza wins out here. He identifies the largest category as possibility, and writes that possibility implies existence as well. He was optimistic, though, in not realizing that logical incoherence was the main component of metaphysics; Derrida did get this right.
Metaphysics, as in Godel's argument, is defined as self-referent, and also as nonclassical and mainly incoherent. Let me assert that it should be seen by careful inspection that the logically incoherent part of metaphysics trumps and envelops the otherwise troubling poles of inexpressibility, nonmathematicality, impossibility and nonexistence.
Niels Bohr and language theorists do trouble themselves over the inexpressibility of nature, but the exact point of quantum mechanics as well as classical physics is the rich range of expression that it provides, even into the form of human language. Quantum mechanics is about self-referential physics, and is thereby part of metaphysics; it is the logically coherent and infinitesimal boundary of all possibility. By the principle of possibility (by those of contradiction and expression also!), quantum mechanics is an epiphenomenal symbolic transform from out of metaphysical incoherence. Things find expression according to their range of possibility!
So, classical physics (the different varieties) are all expressible, mathematical, logically coherent, and non self-referent. They are also epiphenomenal or partial symbolic translations of quantum mechanics. It follows (compare to Church's thesis) from their property of non self-reference, that they vary, and do not coincide, in their range of expression; none of them express all of physics. They may be continuous or discrete, symbolic or geometric, comprehensive or partial.
Taking the major scruples of philosophers: I really can not see anything inexpressible in what would otherwise be the range of classical physics, nor is anything nonmathematical there. Physics is not a free construction of the human designer, but is restrained in behavior by the mathematical theorems of the particular classical system selected for attention. And, these systems follow from the translations possible from quantum mechanics, as well as from their own possibility. But, human will is not sufficient to instantiate anything out of contradictory metaphysics as Derrida claims. Nor does design reliably operate from out of metaphysics; classical causality does not reflect back on its own design either.
Since these classical physics are derived from premises, they are not really falsifiable at all, appearances to the contrary!
--
Michael J. Burns
Too tight (Score:1)
The reasoning here is too tight - in fact too coherent, in the whole. I have been thinking about your posts on expression for several weeks, and I decided some days ago that it is too limiting. The classification is very, very strong. It is difficult to argue furhter, but there must be left room for extreme forms of imagination and forms of human action, such as empathy and intoxication, because, for example, these two latter forms of extreme imaginative mentalities cannot be back-sided . . . no mat
Re: (Score:1)
Classical physics is the realm of what humans care about, but it can not be liberalized to accomodate actual contradiction or self-reference without fatally diluting its nature. But, it can very well accomodate symbolism by human beings, even fiction and falsehood. Mathematics is extensible, I think on particular demand at least, to cover the needs of human language.
I know that you are striving for even more.