Perhaps it would help (since I think I’ve lost you as well) to relate this all back to the original question: is all levels reducing down to a common lowest level a priori logically necessary? My contention is that it’s possible to reduce the levels, but not logically necessary—and I support this contention with the fact that we don’t necessarily collapse the levels in our reasoning, and we can’t collapse the levels in our imagination. If you weren’t disagreeing with this, then I’ve just misunderstood you, and I apologize.
There are at least 3 ways for anti-reductionism to be not only clearly consistent, but with some plausibility, true—in the sense that there is empirical as well as conceptual evidence for every position (This is connected to a quote I posted yesterday):
Ontological monism: The whole universe is prior to its parts (see this paper)
No fundamental level: The descent of levels is infinite (see that paper)
“Causation” is an inconsistent concept (I’m one free afternoon and two karma points away from a top-level post on this ;)
Perhaps it would help (since I think I’ve lost you as well) to relate this all back to the original question: is all levels reducing down to a common lowest level a priori logically necessary? My contention is that it’s possible to reduce the levels, but not logically necessary—and I support this contention with the fact that we don’t necessarily collapse the levels in our reasoning, and we can’t collapse the levels in our imagination. If you weren’t disagreeing with this, then I’ve just misunderstood you, and I apologize.
There are at least 3 ways for anti-reductionism to be not only clearly consistent, but with some plausibility, true—in the sense that there is empirical as well as conceptual evidence for every position (This is connected to a quote I posted yesterday):
Ontological monism: The whole universe is prior to its parts (see this paper)
No fundamental level: The descent of levels is infinite (see that paper)
“Causation” is an inconsistent concept (I’m one free afternoon and two karma points away from a top-level post on this ;)