There are two kids of -isms that are releantly different in this context. Philosophical isms tend to be groupings of answers to questions. Political -isms tend to be set of policies or policy production mechanisms that synergise.
In the philosphical style concepts like “materialism” are supposed to be connected to questions like “Is matter sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” (with materialism corresponding to “yes” to this question).
In this passge
If we take the perspective of hardcore materialism, a statement like: “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” wouldn’t be a statement that can be objectively true because it’s teleology. The notion of function isn’t made up of atoms.
It reads as if it really meant “reductionism” which is connected to a question like “Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?” (with reductionsim corresponding to “yes” to this question). In another sense it might be referring to less philosphical and more worldviewy isms.
You could answer “Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” “No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.”. But you could also mean with “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” that you don’t mean “function” as an ontological entity. If you say a cardboard box has 6 sides you do not necessarily mean that in addition to the carton there would be non-paperic “side” entities extant.
That “function of the heart” is a sensible thing to talk about does take some philosophical stances. But those stances are not the narrow question about the sufficiency of matter. To those people that “that is quite reductive” is a negative assesment could answer “Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?” “No, there are aspects of reality that is not seen from the parts”. Reductionism and materialism are separate narrow philophical structures.
Some people do not mean the narrow philopshical question by “materialism”. With very many such narrow philopshical questions one can wonder whether there are takes that could have the answer combinations “materialism yes, reductionism yes”, “materialism yes, reductionism no”, “materialism no, reductionism yes”, “materialism no, reductionism no”. And with more narrow questions even more combinations. Some people understand “materialism” to be a kind of “its gears all the way down” approach to things. Off-course its small gears, off-course all hands no reflection. The trouble can be that different people can disagree what narrow questions are answered and which way by this more umbrella category.
These “wide” takes can be connected with a single approach or imagination answering multiple facets. From a certain meme base some entrant memes might seem so natural that they might be assumed to be obvious or unavoidable. But the trouble is when different meme bases disagree about the naturalness of this meme creep. So these wide takes are no longer connected by objectioficable unambigious logical connections. Rather it is a known and recognised psychological fact. A definition is not sufficient to express these. Ideally these could be collapsed back or atleast be compatible with the narrow philosophical detail.
Then there are the memes which are bound together because they form a niche of existence for its carrier. You say the leader is dear because you would get smacked in the face otherwise. You kick down people in order to keep them having enough resources to repel effectively. You think people should give money to the goverment so that the extensive programs of it exist. Thinking that people should give money to the goverment that you have bigger payout when you embezzel it is another similar niche. A big thing about these is that they will have to fit to the total context of the life where it appears. If you embezzel people you might be guilty of a crime. If you kick down on people you might be verbally harassed. It is hard to check for local validity of these policies as they so heavily depend that the larger system survives and makes sense. If you are already doing criminal stuff then an extra embezzelment has a clear infrastructure to neatly slide into. If tax funds suffer from big corruption then pleading people to pay more taxes is an uphill battle.
“Materialism” in this sense can mean “I ain’t going to church ever. And all those hippy sociologist HR types are stealing essential resources from actual hard sciences”. And maybe you are an aggressive secularist because you are a “gears all the way down” person, formation of the belief system which hinged on question of “Can I dispence all bits of ontology I don’t have math for?” which was decised by answer to “Is matter sufficent to constitute reality?”. But you could have a person whos main spiritual belief is that “god does not play with dice” who laments that 3-body problem is not solved in closed form but can only be numerically simulated who thinks that electron psychism is exactly correlated with energic constitution and therefore matter is a complete set for ontological purposes. “Materialism” is very freaking wide and both can trace their systems roots to the same narrow binary question.
So I really dislike -isms and always struggle to unmuddle where they are used. Thoughts are important schools are not. Gears are not broken but systems are. So I will give the even more radical advice “beware referring to schools of thought”. The equal and opposite of this advice is that if your head spins on complicated topics don’t miss the woods for the trees.
The claim “People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis.” has the interesting angle about symbolic and non-symbolic information processing. With artificial neural networks it is cleaner to see that they don’t have midsteps. To a large extent they just implement a function that gets refined point by point. Sure you could chain and apply them multiple times. But they also have the mode where they with a single activation produce their answer. Having a turing machine that never moves on the tape but just does one replacement of a starting symbol to a final symbol is a rather extreme one. We usually expect there to be a lot of reads and writes as the computation is “churned”. A conception where peoples thoughts are driven by some “internal language”, “saying words to themselfs” seems to be a churning process. Then the question arrises can all (significant) thought activity be captured with processes that are of this nature? All of propositional logic, existential logic, fuzzy logic would be just a different kind of churning process, but any systematic symbol dance would do. Is there any “single step dance”, like neural networks can do, in human thinking?
You could answer “Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” “No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.”. But you could also mean with “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” that you don’t mean “function” as an ontological entity.
Barry Smith created Basic Formal Ontology which is the central framework for ontology used in bioinformatics. Basic Formal Ontology does take the stance that functions are ontologically meaningful entities. It does take the stance that they are part of the ontological entities that make up reality.
Other big biological ontologies like FMA also have immaterial anatomical entities.
Part of why the work of Judea Pearl didn’t happen earlier is that materialism and reductionism are frameworks that held back science from studying non-materialistic ontological entities. There’s a lot of progress that happened in the last twenty years that was about moving beyond those frameworks and how they stifled science.
There is also the distinction of computer science ontology and metaphysics ontology. The linked opening suggests that BFO can be “instantiated” to be about a chemical, physical or biological system.
That seems to be a setup for a effective theory kind of scheme. Assume that you have a electric field while having the understanding that a electric field is a result and not a starting point of another theory ie quantum field theory makes vacuum buzzing mediate the influence of charges.
An effective theory can be ambivalent whether it is taken to be for the metaphysical existence. One take that the quantum fields are the only thing that “really exists” and there is no electric field beyond them. Another take is to “believe in electric fields” thats a a thing that “really exists”. An effective theory in essence goes “assume X” without being cornerned whether X is or is not the case.
BFO point seems to be that it should provide a representation for any existing thing and thus more int he computer science realm. So that all territorities have a map instead of being a special purpose map that can be used to map some but can’t be used to map others.
For metaphysical claims it is an issue whether an electron makes charge and spin exist or charge and spin make an electron exist. A scheme that just wants the representations straight is just happy that the things involved are “electrons, spin and charge” without making any claims about their relationships (while maintaining that such relationships should be expressible).
“function” as an ontological entity
tried to refer to the metaphysical kind of claim. As I am currently reading the Pearl advances are about allowing to talk about waving without anything that waves which is a representational improvement that allows for generalisations that do not get stuck on concretizations. Instead of going “assume that natural numbers exists” you go “assume that a group exists”
There are two kids of -isms that are releantly different in this context. Philosophical isms tend to be groupings of answers to questions. Political -isms tend to be set of policies or policy production mechanisms that synergise.
In the philosphical style concepts like “materialism” are supposed to be connected to questions like “Is matter sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” (with materialism corresponding to “yes” to this question).
In this passge
It reads as if it really meant “reductionism” which is connected to a question like “Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?” (with reductionsim corresponding to “yes” to this question). In another sense it might be referring to less philosphical and more worldviewy isms.
You could answer “Is matter a sufficient ingredient to constitute reality?” “No, matter is how it functions and there is non-matteric functioning and reality is made of functions, so matter is insufficient.”. But you could also mean with “One of the functions of the heart is to pump blood” that you don’t mean “function” as an ontological entity. If you say a cardboard box has 6 sides you do not necessarily mean that in addition to the carton there would be non-paperic “side” entities extant.
That “function of the heart” is a sensible thing to talk about does take some philosophical stances. But those stances are not the narrow question about the sufficiency of matter. To those people that “that is quite reductive” is a negative assesment could answer “Does understanding the details of reality capture understanding reality?” “No, there are aspects of reality that is not seen from the parts”. Reductionism and materialism are separate narrow philophical structures.
Some people do not mean the narrow philopshical question by “materialism”. With very many such narrow philopshical questions one can wonder whether there are takes that could have the answer combinations “materialism yes, reductionism yes”, “materialism yes, reductionism no”, “materialism no, reductionism yes”, “materialism no, reductionism no”. And with more narrow questions even more combinations. Some people understand “materialism” to be a kind of “its gears all the way down” approach to things. Off-course its small gears, off-course all hands no reflection. The trouble can be that different people can disagree what narrow questions are answered and which way by this more umbrella category.
These “wide” takes can be connected with a single approach or imagination answering multiple facets. From a certain meme base some entrant memes might seem so natural that they might be assumed to be obvious or unavoidable. But the trouble is when different meme bases disagree about the naturalness of this meme creep. So these wide takes are no longer connected by objectioficable unambigious logical connections. Rather it is a known and recognised psychological fact. A definition is not sufficient to express these. Ideally these could be collapsed back or atleast be compatible with the narrow philosophical detail.
Then there are the memes which are bound together because they form a niche of existence for its carrier. You say the leader is dear because you would get smacked in the face otherwise. You kick down people in order to keep them having enough resources to repel effectively. You think people should give money to the goverment so that the extensive programs of it exist. Thinking that people should give money to the goverment that you have bigger payout when you embezzel it is another similar niche. A big thing about these is that they will have to fit to the total context of the life where it appears. If you embezzel people you might be guilty of a crime. If you kick down on people you might be verbally harassed. It is hard to check for local validity of these policies as they so heavily depend that the larger system survives and makes sense. If you are already doing criminal stuff then an extra embezzelment has a clear infrastructure to neatly slide into. If tax funds suffer from big corruption then pleading people to pay more taxes is an uphill battle.
“Materialism” in this sense can mean “I ain’t going to church ever. And all those hippy sociologist HR types are stealing essential resources from actual hard sciences”. And maybe you are an aggressive secularist because you are a “gears all the way down” person, formation of the belief system which hinged on question of “Can I dispence all bits of ontology I don’t have math for?” which was decised by answer to “Is matter sufficent to constitute reality?”. But you could have a person whos main spiritual belief is that “god does not play with dice” who laments that 3-body problem is not solved in closed form but can only be numerically simulated who thinks that electron psychism is exactly correlated with energic constitution and therefore matter is a complete set for ontological purposes. “Materialism” is very freaking wide and both can trace their systems roots to the same narrow binary question.
So I really dislike -isms and always struggle to unmuddle where they are used. Thoughts are important schools are not. Gears are not broken but systems are. So I will give the even more radical advice “beware referring to schools of thought”. The equal and opposite of this advice is that if your head spins on complicated topics don’t miss the woods for the trees.
The claim “People have an extra-computational ability to make correct judgements at better-than-random probability that have no logical basis.” has the interesting angle about symbolic and non-symbolic information processing. With artificial neural networks it is cleaner to see that they don’t have midsteps. To a large extent they just implement a function that gets refined point by point. Sure you could chain and apply them multiple times. But they also have the mode where they with a single activation produce their answer. Having a turing machine that never moves on the tape but just does one replacement of a starting symbol to a final symbol is a rather extreme one. We usually expect there to be a lot of reads and writes as the computation is “churned”. A conception where peoples thoughts are driven by some “internal language”, “saying words to themselfs” seems to be a churning process. Then the question arrises can all (significant) thought activity be captured with processes that are of this nature? All of propositional logic, existential logic, fuzzy logic would be just a different kind of churning process, but any systematic symbol dance would do. Is there any “single step dance”, like neural networks can do, in human thinking?
Barry Smith created Basic Formal Ontology which is the central framework for ontology used in bioinformatics. Basic Formal Ontology does take the stance that functions are ontologically meaningful entities. It does take the stance that they are part of the ontological entities that make up reality.
Other big biological ontologies like FMA also have immaterial anatomical entities.
Part of why the work of Judea Pearl didn’t happen earlier is that materialism and reductionism are frameworks that held back science from studying non-materialistic ontological entities. There’s a lot of progress that happened in the last twenty years that was about moving beyond those frameworks and how they stifled science.
There is also the distinction of computer science ontology and metaphysics ontology. The linked opening suggests that BFO can be “instantiated” to be about a chemical, physical or biological system.
That seems to be a setup for a effective theory kind of scheme. Assume that you have a electric field while having the understanding that a electric field is a result and not a starting point of another theory ie quantum field theory makes vacuum buzzing mediate the influence of charges.
An effective theory can be ambivalent whether it is taken to be for the metaphysical existence. One take that the quantum fields are the only thing that “really exists” and there is no electric field beyond them. Another take is to “believe in electric fields” thats a a thing that “really exists”. An effective theory in essence goes “assume X” without being cornerned whether X is or is not the case.
BFO point seems to be that it should provide a representation for any existing thing and thus more int he computer science realm. So that all territorities have a map instead of being a special purpose map that can be used to map some but can’t be used to map others.
For metaphysical claims it is an issue whether an electron makes charge and spin exist or charge and spin make an electron exist. A scheme that just wants the representations straight is just happy that the things involved are “electrons, spin and charge” without making any claims about their relationships (while maintaining that such relationships should be expressible).
tried to refer to the metaphysical kind of claim. As I am currently reading the Pearl advances are about allowing to talk about waving without anything that waves which is a representational improvement that allows for generalisations that do not get stuck on concretizations. Instead of going “assume that natural numbers exists” you go “assume that a group exists”