Haines,
I really don't have time to waste conversing with you if you are not going to read what I write. I don't think I misquoted you but if I did, I apologize. However, it was still relevant to our discussion or I wouldn't have put it there. Please read and try to pay closer attention to what I'm telling you. You read me selectively, make assumptions and draw bad inferences from things I say and then criticize me for your spurious logic.
You do seem to be genuinely interested, though, so I'll try to address some of the things I know you said right here. I will
bold them.
"I initially asked for a justification for your ontological category of "substance". If space is reified as an independent substance, does this not define "aether"? And yet you distance yourself from aether theory."
This is another of your misunderstandings. Even in the debate about space within classical physics the "aether" and "space" were not considered to be the same thing. I have never used that word as a substitute or consequence of the spatial substance I refer to. I don't have a "reified" view of space as some abstraction, concocted our of concrete particulars. I also did not call it "independent". I defined substance in my post here on 10-10-2014
"Substances are defined as being self-subsistent, meaning that they have an existence that is distinct from everything else. They are the basic units of ontology, the basic units of being. Because they are distinct, they can be counted using a system of natural numbers. You and I are substances on this definition, since we are both an identity distinct from every other thing. But we are composite substances, composed of smaller composite substances, which are also composed of smaller substances, all the way down to the most basic substances. The basic substances are the fundamental units of existence out of which everything found in the world is constituted."
I'll add now that I don't think space and energy (the 2 substances in this "
dualistic pluralism") exist independently of one another because it is their inter-action that explains the equations of quantum physics in an ontological way that is arguably better than the current epistemological approach assumed by most scientists.
If you want to question my views, please question the views I actually express here. I am making a complex, highly technical ontological argument that has specific premises, and conclusions that follow from them, according to an explicit inductive methodology called the empirical method. My argument begins in common sense and is designed to explain how and why the world does appear to us in this way. But the explanation goes far beyond what we find in our ordinary experience of the world. You can observe that in this carefully-worded definition of substance that takes us beyond even the commonly accepted conventions of philosophy, especially those of analytic philosophy. If you consider yourself one of those philosophers and think you are the only ones who have
,"the virtue of pursing cogent definitions for terms,....whatever real word "pursing" is supposed to be..., I believe my definitions are unambiguous and falsifiable. "Cogency" is a characteristic of inductive arguments that have
- true premises and are
- inferentially strong (meaning highly probable, likely, similar, etc.)
So you use of "cogent" is ambiguous when you apply it to the semantic meaning of an individual term. But, given your usage of "cogent", I'll say my definitions are cogent, despite the fact that you "
...didn't find them [cogent definitions] in [my] remarks. You didn't find them because you didn't read them in some cases.
"You gave the impression that you defend the ontological category of space on the basis of philosophy and common sense. "
I am attempting to do just that. But I've explained above how my argument is not just folk psychology or naive realism. I want to emphasize, though, that common sense is where we begin and where we finally end up, but, we hope, with a deeper understanding of what constitutes this common sense world that is our human,non-inertial reference frame. You might call common sense "pre-scientific" and I would be OK with that since my views only make sense in the context of modern science.
But that usage is a bit condescending and derogatory for my taste and I'll tell you why. Modern science began in the 1600's with Galileo, Newton and the rest, about 500 years ago. That's maybe 18 generations or so? Well, we have been humans, building cultures that enable our on-going reproduction, for about 40,000 generations. Common sense got us through the first 39,980 or so, almost all of it without any written language. It is also everything we find when we experience the world. Science is an idea, a way of thinking about things. But is is a special way in that we can leave the decision up to nature about which hypotheses best predict the future or explain things to us in an illuminating manner. That's whats make science empirical, to the extent that it is. But common sense is also empirical and refined enough to have produced modern science. An illuminating philosophical explanation should end up giving us a better and deeper understanding of this common sense world that we still inhabit.
"I inferred from this you meant it as a metaphysical rather than physical category."Again, another weak or invalid inference, depending on whether yours was an inductive or deductive inference. How would you define the difference between metaphysical and physical categories anyway?
"If your philosophical approach instead implied an objective idealism, I find that unintelligible."
It did not imply that at all. I would find objective idealism a difficult , if not unintelligible view, myself. Of course, I find your inference that I would hold such a belief based on what I've said equally difficult or even unintelligible. This is what I keep finding in your remarks, though: misrepresenting what I say as some ridiculous remark and then taking me to task for believing your misrepresentation!
"The common sense argument that because we experience things as separate, space must be an independent existent is why I brought up folk psychology. You did not seem to understand or agree with how folk psychology explains "common sense". I was trying to show why we can't infer ontology from common sense.. "
So I can see why you might mistake my view, as you characterize it, for folk psychology. But I think I've already shown here that I'm not trying to infer ontology from common sense. I am making an inductive inference that begins with common sense because that's all we could ever have to begin with, unless you want to admit some axiomatic or self-evident principle some super-intelligent philosopher dreams up from which we can deduce some sort of rationalist metaphysics that show common sense to be a mere appearance. We've been trying to come up with that one since Plato's theory of forms. I just prefer to try another approach: empirical ontology and metaphysics.
The fact that we experience things separately is not a sufficient warrant for believing that space is a substance. Rather, my argument is that to accept the hypothesis (assumption) that space is a substance offers a better way of understanding why the world appears to us as separate objects in three-dimensional space, as it does.
"...over the years I've always found David Bohm's arguments interesting, and I gather his "wholeness" has been construed as an aether theory. I don't see quantum vacuum probability fluctuations as an aether because I find it hard to reconcile them with the notion of spatial distance, but I suppose the case could be made. If you raised these or any other scientific reason to believe that space is an independent substance, I missed it."
Glad you mentioned David Bohm. I'm not that familiar with Bohm, so I found this video interview with him that seems quite relevant to our conversation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDKB7GcHNac
Glad you mentioned David Bohm. He is very interested in ontology, or what he refers to as the question about "the nature of reality" as opposed to Niels Bohr's view, which he initially accepted, that is based on epistemology. Epistemological philosophy says all we can discuss is our knowledge of reality... not reality itself. You seem like an epistemology guy to me, Haines, like all analytic philosophers. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.
Starting around 4:40 in this video, he begins a brief outline of his philosophy of science and relates it directly to his work in quantum physics. He describes how he came to reject Niels Bohr's approach and looked for a way to describe the actual processes that are measured and observed and implied by the mathematics of quantum physics. I'm struck by his ideas (5:47) about the implicate and explicate orders and the "movement" by which the implicate unfolds into the explicate order and the explicate enfolds the implicate order. This bears a strong resemblance to the distinctions I've made between the intrinsic and extrinsic properties of substances. Bohm is one of the few physicists who sees beyond the epistemological mindset of most scientists. If you follow me this far, I'll explain how I might differ with him, too. But thanks for introducing him into our conversation.
He does speak of space as something that is a part of reality as a whole. And he looks for a more holistic way of viewing the world than the fragmented, analytical approach of science and cultural criticism generally. These days we are all, culturally, post-modernists who deconstruct things into elemental, disconnected phenomena. Science won't talk about reality. They "leave that to the philosophers" for the more part. Of course, that means they simply dismiss questions about reality from the universe of their discourse as "unscientific". "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil", in other words. Bohm can see how entirely question-begging this underlying logic is.
If you watch that video and then get back to me, I hope you will see that you have missed a lot in what I've said so far.
I do appreciate your interest.
DCD