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author Henry S Thompson <ht@inf.ed.ac.uk>
date Thu, 22 May 2025 16:42:36 +0100
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81:e7fe2a64e502 82:9ca6db06a003
1 The unlikelihood of being able to ask these questions.
2 The fraction that is solid is tiny. The right size solid is to a
3 ... of measure zero, and then left arising there is another tiny
4 factor.
5
6 That doesn't pose a metaphysical problem for the project, because we
7 are those things, isn't it amazing that that 1/10^40 chance came good.
8
9 What we are left with we see two ways of trying to understand, the
10 romantic idealisation of science, that it will produce a causal,
11 bumpint-and-shoving picture on the one hand, the conceptions of the
12 religious sensibilities on the other. If you take the deliverables of
13 science seriously, none of the foundations of that romantic 19th
14 century view are tenable.
15
16 It is more unlikely than our mind can grasp. Measurement?
17
18 That there are limitations on what we can in fact understand _in
19 principle_ is itself very hard to get our heads around.
20
21 [HST primary-school vs. post-grad physics (it's OK to teach Newton to
22 kids even though it's false) and religion (it's not OK to teach
23 Christianity to kids)]
24
25 At the beginning of the GA text it says that contemporary science
26 actually runs rough-shod over the presumptions of primary-school
27 science, but there was a question as to whether the non-effectiveness
28 stuff just leads to a 'classical' embodiment view or goes further into
29 the territory I _claim_ for it, getting much closer to religious
30 sensibility territory. I'm going to just state that this stuff is
31 domesticating the territory of r_s: this is all still pre-amble.
32
33 What can we say if we step back and consider the world and our place
34 in it in the light of the new [e.g. non-effectiveness?] scientific
35 understanding,
36
37 Try to articulate the ontological and epistemolical theses and frame
38 them in such a way that they end up with "this may not be God, but
39 it's close enough"...
40
41 Wondering whether we should just try to do that, just rewrite the
42 paper, more clearly and more relaxedly, and just say that.
43
44 That does mean starting with a blank sheet of paper.
45
46 What stands between me and doing that, where are the lacunae?
47
48 Suppose I start with the unlikelihood, and try to build forward from
49 there.
50
51 [pause - HST: how does that get to e.g. non-effectiveness/deiexis/embodiment?]
52
53 Maybe part 1 is just the sheer unlikelihood
54
55 Part 2 is what, though, can we say about the world
56 And then, as best we understand it, 1st off differential equations have
57 turned out to be the framework that can best carry the expressions of
58 the regularities [that we encounter in the world], and in particular
59 something like quantum-field-theoretic vortexes...
60
61 There's also the question that given that each of us is a patch of that
62 [?] universe, what is it to know or understand anything, then the
63 Object book is relevant, registration and that story, the reification
64 of objects, registration in general.
65
66 And then there's this thing, which I think is the most urgent for me
67 to say compellingly and compactly, which is that if for example I
68 register something as an object, or I register [what did Strawson call
69 it, the instantiation of fields, "it's raining", "it's sunny here
70 now", the instantiation not of properties but of qualities]. But let
71 me talk objects.
72
73 There's this point which is fundamental to everything, that if I
74 register an object as an object, what I'm registering is not really
75 just the object, what I'm registering is a patch of the ineffable,
76 which I register _as_ an object, and I say "this is an apple", but
77 that [ has not done justice to the patch -- my _view_ is not
78 restricted to its appleness, but my attention, that to which I'm
79 attentionally directed, is what I'm registering as an apple. I
80 continue to look beyond, to look beyond, to be aware of the finitude
81 of the registration.]
82
83 The apple, as it were, is not the-patch-registered-as-an-apple. The
84 apple _is_ a full inenffable patch in all its glory---that which I have
85 registered as an apple. That to which I'm directed---the object of my
86 attention transcends its exemplification of all apple properties,
87 there's more to it than its just being an apple. And not just more to
88 it in the sense that there's more to all apples than their appleness
89 or what follows from their being apples, but more about this
90 particular apple than words can express. It's kind of as if one is
91 standing on a cliff overlooking the ocean at night and there's motion,
92 barely detectable motion, and I say "there's a ship moving slowly down
93 the channel" and you look too and say "yeah, I see". Both of us are
94 attentive to, attend to, that which we're supposing is a moving ship.
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