Questions on a system theory of physics

[Simon Adams]

I'm not sure whether we are aligned here or not. I would say sensory perception is half of the equation under idealism, and that our concepts (which are fundamentally shared with all humans) complete the equation to bring about a meaningful unity if they are the proper concepts for the perceptions. I like the way Steiner writes about it in The Philosophy of Freedom:

I will make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places one after the other. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line which is produced when a point moves according to a particular law. If I examine the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does. The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking.

It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking.

The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements.

It's interesting as the Steiner quote makes sense to me, but I'm not sure about your comment about sensory perception being half the equation, about this unity of concepts and perceptions. There is our indirect perception of 'the world' (the forms) via our senses, it's representation, whereby our interaction with it comes to us as an experience of an image, be that a visual image, a touch, taste smell, echo etc. Then there is our conceptual process where we take the direct perceptions and add a layer of meaning from our metacognitive context. I would argue that this is like our own recreation of the divine ideas which shape the forms in the first place, like a shadow of it. For artificial things like houses and chairs and cars, the shadow idea is effectively the same, but for most things it's our best guess of the real context of these things.

[AshvinP]

I'm not sure whether we are aligned here or not. I would say sensory perception is half of the equation under idealism, and that our concepts (which are fundamentally shared with all humans) complete the equation to bring about a meaningful unity if they are the proper concepts for the perceptions. I like the way Steiner writes about it in The Philosophy of Freedom:

I will make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places one after the other. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line which is produced when a point moves according to a particular law. If I examine the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does. The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking.

It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking.

The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements.

It's interesting as the Steiner quote makes sense to me, but I'm not sure about your comment about sensory perception being half the equation, about this unity of concepts and perceptions. There is our indirect perception of 'the world' (the forms) via our senses, it's representation, whereby our interaction with it comes to us as an experience of an image, be that a visual image, a touch, taste smell, echo etc. Then there is our conceptual process where we take the direct perceptions and add a layer of meaning from our metacognitive context. I would argue that this is like our own recreation of the divine ideas which shape the forms in the first place, like a shadow of it. For artificial things like houses and chairs and cars, the shadow idea is effectively the same, but for most things it's our best guess of the real context of these things.

[AshvinP]

I'm not sure whether we are aligned here or not. I would say sensory perception is half of the equation under idealism, and that our concepts (which are fundamentally shared with all humans) complete the equation to bring about a meaningful unity if they are the proper concepts for the perceptions. I like the way Steiner writes about it in The Philosophy of Freedom:

I will make myself clearer by an example. If I throw a stone horizontally through the air, I perceive it in different places one after the other. I connect these places so as to form a line. Mathematics teaches me to know various kinds of lines, one of which is the parabola. I know the parabola to be a line which is produced when a point moves according to a particular law. If I examine the conditions under which the stone thrown by me moves, I find the path traversed is identical with the line I know as a parabola. That the stone moves just in a parabola is a result of the given conditions and follows necessarily from them. The form of the parabola belongs to the whole phenomenon as much as any other feature of it does. The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking.

It is not due to the objects that they are given us at first without the corresponding concepts, but to our mental organization. Our whole being functions in such a way that from every real thing the relevant elements come to us from two sides, from perceiving and from thinking.

The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements.

It's interesting as the Steiner quote makes sense to me, but I'm not sure about your comment about sensory perception being half the equation, about this unity of concepts and perceptions. There is our indirect perception of 'the world' (the forms) via our senses, it's representation, whereby our interaction with it comes to us as an experience of an image, be that a visual image, a touch, taste smell, echo etc. Then there is our conceptual process where we take the direct perceptions and add a layer of meaning from our metacognitive context. I would argue that this is like our own recreation of the divine ideas which shape the forms in the first place, like a shadow of it. For artificial things like houses and chairs and cars, the shadow idea is effectively the same, but for most things it's our best guess of the real context of these things.

In the Steiner example, the concept of "parabola" is what joins with the perceptions of stone positions upon throwing to allow re-creation of the phenomenal unity of experience. That unity is itself a percept belonging to other concepts which can form a higher order unity, such as stone being thrown and hitting surface of a lake to cause ripples. Science, when done properly, is about tracing back the phenomenal unities to their necessary relations of ideal percepts-concepts. Those relations are generally called "laws of nature". Here is another excerpt which should clarify more:

Empirical science will have to ascertain how the properties of the eye and those of the colors are related to one another, by what means the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, and so forth. I can trace how one percept succeeds another in time and is related to others in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between percepts other than thought relations must of necessity fail.

What, then is a percept? The question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept.
...
What causes us to enquire into our relationship to the world is not the fanciful pictures of how different the world would appear to other than human senses, but the realization that every percept gives us only a part of the reality concealed within it, in other words, that it directs us away from its inherent reality. Added to this is the further realization that thinking leads us into that part of the reality which the percept conceals within itself.
...
The main point is that all the results of physical research, apart from unjustifiable hypotheses which ought to be excluded, have been obtained through percept and concept. Elements which are seemingly non-perceptible are placed by the physicist's sound instinct for knowledge into the field where percepts lie, and they are thought of in terms of concepts commonly used in this field. The strengths of electric or magnetic fields and such like are arrived at, in the very nature of things, by no other process of knowledge than the one which occurs between percept and concept.
...
LET us recapitulate what we have achieved in the previous chapters. The world faces man as a multiplicity, as a mass of separate details. One of these separate things, one entity among others, is man himself. This aspect of the world we simply call the given, and inasmuch as we do not evolve it by conscious activity, but just find it, we call it percept. Within this world of percepts we perceive ourselves. This percept of self would remain merely one among many other percepts, if something did not arise from the midst of this percept of self which proves capable of connecting all percepts with one another and, therefore, the sum of all other percepts with the percept of our own self. This something which emerges is no longer merely percept; neither is it, like percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. To begin with, it appears to be bound up with what we perceive as our own self. In its inner significance, however, it transcends the self. To the separate percepts it adds ideally determined elements, which, however, are related to one another, and are rooted in a totality. What is obtained by perception of self is ideally determined by this something in the same way as are all other percepts, and is placed as subject, or “I”, over against the objects. This something is thinking, and the ideally determined elements are the concepts and ideas.

[Simon Adams]

In the Steiner example, the concept of "parabola" is what joins with the perceptions of stone positions upon throwing to allow re-creation of the phenomenal unity of experience. That unity is itself a percept belonging to other concepts which can form a higher order unity, such as stone being thrown and hitting surface of a lake to cause ripples. Science, when done properly, is about tracing back the phenomenal unities to their necessary relations of ideal percepts-concepts. Those relations are generally called "laws of nature". Here is another excerpt which should clarify more:

Empirical science will have to ascertain how the properties of the eye and those of the colors are related to one another, by what means the organ of sight transmits the perception of colors, and so forth. I can trace how one percept succeeds another in time and is related to others in space, and I can formulate these relations in conceptual terms, but I can never perceive how a percept originates out of the non-perceptible. All attempts to seek any relations between percepts other than thought relations must of necessity fail.

What, then is a percept? The question, asked in this general way, is absurd. A percept emerges always as something perfectly definite, as a concrete content. This content is directly given and is completely contained in what is given. The only question one can ask concerning the given content is what it is apart from perception, that is, what it is for thinking? The question concerning the “what” of a percept can, therefore, only refer to the conceptual intuition that corresponds to this percept.
...
What causes us to enquire into our relationship to the world is not the fanciful pictures of how different the world would appear to other than human senses, but the realization that every percept gives us only a part of the reality concealed within it, in other words, that it directs us away from its inherent reality. Added to this is the further realization that thinking leads us into that part of the reality which the percept conceals within itself.
...
The main point is that all the results of physical research, apart from unjustifiable hypotheses which ought to be excluded, have been obtained through percept and concept. Elements which are seemingly non-perceptible are placed by the physicist's sound instinct for knowledge into the field where percepts lie, and they are thought of in terms of concepts commonly used in this field. The strengths of electric or magnetic fields and such like are arrived at, in the very nature of things, by no other process of knowledge than the one which occurs between percept and concept.
...
LET us recapitulate what we have achieved in the previous chapters. The world faces man as a multiplicity, as a mass of separate details. One of these separate things, one entity among others, is man himself. This aspect of the world we simply call the given, and inasmuch as we do not evolve it by conscious activity, but just find it, we call it percept. Within this world of percepts we perceive ourselves. This percept of self would remain merely one among many other percepts, if something did not arise from the midst of this percept of self which proves capable of connecting all percepts with one another and, therefore, the sum of all other percepts with the percept of our own self. This something which emerges is no longer merely percept; neither is it, like percepts, simply given. It is produced by our activity. To begin with, it appears to be bound up with what we perceive as our own self. In its inner significance, however, it transcends the self. To the separate percepts it adds ideally determined elements, which, however, are related to one another, and are rooted in a totality. What is obtained by perception of self is ideally determined by this something in the same way as are all other percepts, and is placed as subject, or “I”, over against the objects. This something is thinking, and the ideally determined elements are the concepts and ideas.

Okay I think I understand where you are coming from better now, and this seems like a fair understanding of things at one level. What I'm trying to distinguish is between the fuzzy partial versions of perception and conception, and that which lies beneath, the reality behind both. With perception, let's assume a Buddhist perspective, where there is a sense in which even the raw perception is clouded by automatically being distinguished from the perceiver.

More significantly, on the conceptual side, isn't there a distinction between the concepts we use, and some more absolute foundation? There is obviously a sense in which these concepts have a reality beyond the individual using them. In the example of the stone that is thrown, and forms ripples in the water, this "higher order unity" you talk of is clearly something we share, or we would not be able to talk about it. It doesn't matter whether two people read about this, two people saw this, or one person saw it and told another, there is a common immaterial reality to the concepts that goes beyond, and is independent from, the perception and the language (the method by which the concept was received). Now from an idealism perspective, these concepts (or ideas) exist in the minds of individuals, and this is extended into Mind at Large / subconscious in some way. I can even accept that in this realm you can have dynamic higher order 'concepts', call them 'upward' archetypes. But when you step back from more elemental concepts, such as shapes, or the way something like maths seems to be embedded in nature, from the way mathematicians often feel like they are discovering rather than creating .... even the very intelligibility of things such that we can conceptualise them, there must be some more absolute, "ideal" source. Like a fixed 'downward' archetype, be it a sphere, a mother, the number 5 etc.

Anyway I can't really express what I'm saying other than talking mostly gibberish. I even just tried to draw a diagram to explain, which hasn't worked out as I'd hoped. It seemed clearer in my head, but I want to put the form of weightless particles into the "natural laws" box, and it went downhill from there! But basically I was trying to show that you are creating a "unity" of the bottom two layers, whereas I see the actual unity as the top two layers (and the bottom layer just how it appears). If you ignore the fact that the diagram is not at all right, does it at least explain what I'm trying to get across?

[Shaibei]

Wonderful chart

[AshvinP]

But when you step back from more elemental concepts, such as shapes, or the way something like maths seems to be embedded in nature, from the way mathematicians often feel like they are discovering rather than creating .... even the very intelligibility of things such that we can conceptualise them, there must be some more absolute, "ideal" source. Like a fixed 'downward' archetype, be it a sphere, a mother, the number 5 etc.

Anyway I can't really express what I'm saying other than talking mostly gibberish. I even just tried to draw a diagram to explain, which hasn't worked out as I'd hoped. It seemed clearer in my head, but I want to put the form of weightless particles into the "natural laws" box, and it went downhill from there! But basically I was trying to show that you are creating a "unity" of the bottom two layers, whereas I see the actual unity as the top two layers (and the bottom layer just how it appears). If you ignore the fact that the diagram is not at all right, does it at least explain what I'm trying to get across?

Well that's usually the source of our confusion regardless of metaphysical paradigm - the need to posit some "absolute fixed source" that exists 'outside' of the accessible realms of perception-conception. If the World is not other than ideal relations between living beings that we can and do experience, in greater scope and clarity as we evolve, as under idealism, then what is the epistemic need for that non-experienceable, non-cognizable fixed entity which hovers 'above and outside' the World? The archetypal phenomenon are certainly real, but there is no fundamental reason to say that we cannot and do not experience them directly in the realms of 'lower' thought-forms.

[Simon Adams]

Well that's usually the source of our confusion regardless of metaphysical paradigm - the need to posit some "absolute fixed source" that exists 'outside' of the accessible realms of perception-conception. If the World is not other than ideal relations between living beings that we can and do experience, in greater scope and clarity as we evolve, as under idealism, then what is the epistemic need for that non-experienceable, non-cognizable fixed entity which hovers 'above and outside' the World? The archetypal phenomenon are certainly real, but there is no fundamental reason to say that we cannot and do not experience them directly in the realms of 'lower' thought-forms.

It seems to me that what we experience of the ‘primal’ concepts are always like a shadow or reflection of something unreachable. You can have moments of real clarity where you start to think you’re almost seeing it as it is, but it’s never it. It’s on the horizon, just out of reach. Even the most basic thing like a number. You can think of it as a numeral, or a word, or a quantity. I can feel that it’s something I know, but I can’t quite grasp it’s full essence.

Maybe that’s just me, and I have a fuzzy kind of intellect, or maybe there is a type of enlightenment where you can really know the fullness of these things. However from what I can tell, even those who have transcended the knot in individual consciousness, don’t suddenly have full insight in this respect?

[Simon Adams]

Wonderful chart

Thank you . It’s not really how I intended it, but maybe useful just to see what doesn’t resonate if nothing else.

[Lou Gold]

The latest science suggest there's something else behind it all.

"Have FermiLab Scientists Broken Modern Physics?"

[AshvinP]

Well that's usually the source of our confusion regardless of metaphysical paradigm - the need to posit some "absolute fixed source" that exists 'outside' of the accessible realms of perception-conception. If the World is not other than ideal relations between living beings that we can and do experience, in greater scope and clarity as we evolve, as under idealism, then what is the epistemic need for that non-experienceable, non-cognizable fixed entity which hovers 'above and outside' the World? The archetypal phenomenon are certainly real, but there is no fundamental reason to say that we cannot and do not experience them directly in the realms of 'lower' thought-forms.

It seems to me that what we experience of the ‘primal’ concepts are always like a shadow or reflection of something unreachable. You can have moments of real clarity where you start to think you’re almost seeing it as it is, but it’s never it. It’s on the horizon, just out of reach. Even the most basic thing like a number. You can think of it as a numeral, or a word, or a quantity. I can feel that it’s something I know, but I can’t quite grasp it’s full essence.

Maybe that’s just me, and I have a fuzzy kind of intellect, or maybe there is a type of enlightenment where you can really know the fullness of these things. However from what I can tell, even those who have transcended the knot in individual consciousness, don’t suddenly have full insight in this respect?

That's definitely possible, but then the unreachable something may as well not even exist for any human purposes. We can explain our spiritual nature and evolution through all the reachable ideal relations, and we will never reach the something which exists beyond those relations. We will always remain in Plato's cave.

We can also recognize that our experience of phenomenon like numbers is not the same as our ancestors. And we are the descendants of them, so whatever mode of qualitative experience was within them is also within us, although mostly dormant. All of that can change and I would argue there is good reason to think it has already started changing.