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THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Tag Archives: Relational thinking

Learn The Language

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Process Philosophy, Relationalism, Whitehead

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algebraic reasoning, Relational thinking, Whitehead

To review a point I have made in the past:

  • A scientist is someone who engages in inquiry to discover new facts
  • An engineer is someone who engages in inquiry to discover new applications for known facts.
  • A technician is someone who engages in inquiry to maintain known applications.

We can add to this the mode of inquiry which characterizes philosophy

  • A philosopher is someone who engages in inquiry in order to discover new meanings, and fully understand old ones.

Philosophers aren’t alone in this latter form of inquiry, but as I am a philosopher that is what I am working from. (Arguably, the philosopher’s position is more generalized and abstract than, say, that of the novelist.) I highlight the above so that we may take a poke at that most maddening and obscure subject, the meanings of Whitehead’s terms, (mostly) in his philosophical works. Because you’ll never learn the thinker’s meanings if you do not first learn the thinker’s language. With Whitehead, this means two things. First, you must “get inside” the structure of the man’s thinking, a step the overwhelming majority of scholars have categorically refused to do. The second is that you must disabuse yourself of the notion that, just because Whitehead uses a term that you find familiar, Whitehead is therefore using that term in a way that is familiar to you. This latter is the part that really drives some people – most especially myself – absolutely bananas.i We’ll approach these in order.

Now, while the second issue can drive one over the edge, I will add that the first one is pretty frustrating as well. In point of fact, it really, really annoys me. I mean, it REALLY annoys me. Let me illustrate it with a non-Whiteheadian example.

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Nonverbal Consciousness

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in John Dewey, Relationalism, Whitehead

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Body Sense, John Dewey, Relational thinking, Whitehead

I recently went through major surgery. It was laparoscopic surgery, and involved five fairly small incisions, so in that respect it was relatively low on the trauma scale. On the other hand, the robotic instruments that went in through those various incisions removed two feet of my large intestine, from the right lower up to the right transverse section. Now, the large intestine in its unmodified, factory original adult condition is about six feet long all told. Nevertheless, one can say with some fairness at this point that my colon is now a semi-colon. In any event, the surgery went quite well, I’ve been home for well over two weeks now, with no pain and very little soreness to report.

Nevertheless, there is an ever-present awareness that my body has been cut into. I would not describe it as “acute;” rather it is more like an amber-tinged, quietly lingering sense of shock. One of the aspects of this lingering sense is that it is neither sub- nor un- nor pre-conscious. (Some philosophers have argued that the first two, at least, don’t even exist, and that the appeal to them by various psychiatric and psychological doctors is an error. This is not a topic I will explore, however.) Rather, the experience is a fully conscious one. But it is a consciousness that is entirely felt; there are no words attached to it until after I focus my attention fully upon the experience and begin to verbalize it via secondary and tertiary processes with respect to the primary experience itself. I’m characterizing this consciousness as nonverbal rather than as preverbal, because the “pre” suggests an ordering with respect to other conscious modalities that I am inclined to reject. So after saying a few more words about my own experience here, I hope to leverage that data to illuminate various philosophical ideas, mostly from Whitehead (of course) but not exclusively. Along the way, I also offer the following as my own little testament against toxic masculinity and its attendant infantilism.

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Part II: Re-enchantment Is Resistance

23 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic

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Relational thinking, Uncanny

Upwards of fifty years ago, the hard-nosed empiricist philosopher Bas van Fraassen wrote some words that have stuck with me ever since. I beg a measure of patience, because I am quoting from memory (my copy of the book is buried among 55 boxes in a pole barn). Basically, van Fraassen said this: “I can believe in witches and fairies; indeed, I may have met a few. But I cannot for all the world believe in a ‘set’.”i A “set” in this instance is a mathematical entity as in “set theory.” What van Fraassen the very hard-nosed empiricist is saying is that witches and fairies are objects of direct (and possibly personal) experience, whereas mathematical sets – which, mathematicians assure us, are surely among the most rational things in the world – have no such connection to experience. As such, “sets” have far less basis (in van Fraassen’s hard-nosed estimation) for anything like rational justification. And while van Fraassen’s empiricism would have been much improved had he gone radical – á la William James and Alfred North Whitehead – rather than following David Hume, his point is still well worth taking. If witchesii and members of the fae are supposedly “uncanny,” what in the hell does that make a “set,” even an “ordinary” one? (The weird ones get downright wyrd.)

Following up on the previous essay, I want to talk about our relatedness to the uncanny (which I’ll now treat as uncontroversially real) from a Whiteheadian perspective. The uncanny manifests itself in us. But if Whitehead is correct, then that manifestation takes two special forms: first there is the internalization of relatedness, in which we draw the uncanny into ourselves as part of ourselves, as how we realize our selves to ourselves. But secondly, there is the externalization of relatedness in which we pro-ject ourselves onto the world. These forms of relatedness will require spending a few words on the badly framed traditional question of “internal” and “external” relations; badly framed because it takes those relations as given rather than as processes in realization. At the very end, I’ll come back to the significance of this essay’s title.

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Part I: The Concrescence of The Uncanny

22 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic

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Relational thinking, Uncanny

This year of the plague has been a miserably difficult time for all of us. For my part, it has all but obliterated my writing and research which, given how others have suffered, is a rather small price to pay. I’ve not gone cold or hungry, and but for the one time when pipes burst, I’ve had running water. So I’m trying to push myself back into writing, and that push has got me toying with thoughts of something that is fun yet Whitehead related. So I’m going to deviate from the “standard” Whiteheadian brief here, and perform a two part divagation into an arena that is often left aside as an example of the “irrational”. Specifically, I want to dip a toe into the uncanny. I will explain in a moment my reasons for the previous two scare quoted terms. But first I want to say something about my own curiosity on the subject. Also, I would draw everyone’s attention to the irony that I begin this writing on “pi-day”, March 14 or 3/14. For the “irrational” number π, as we will observe, is disturbingly uncanny.

Night time, when shadows and substance blur into one another

My own little journey began – one hesitates to say “innocently enough” given the nature of the subject matter – on social media. With social distancing (which, in my case, includes an unpleasant measure of social isolation) I was shifting around for various available forms of online connections, and stumbled into a small group of writers, creators, and artists who focus their attention on folk stories, and folk horror in particular. We engaged in various asynchronous forms of sharing, but also in synchronous activities such as watch parties of old-school ghost stories freely available at various streaming services. Given the workings of my mind, I naturally began wondering about fitting such stories and ideas within Whitehead’s speculative philosophy.

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Relational Ethics

01 Monday Jun 2020

Posted by Gary Herstein in Ethics, Inquiry, Personhood, Relationalism

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Ethics, Personhood, Relational thinking

Time to take a break from my meditations on the year of the plague; life still goes on.

Ethics, especially as caricatured by philosophers who have written on the subject, has (the story goes) often been taught as a collection of rules “informing” the student about what the youth (invariably male, as was the instructor, up until the late 19th, early 20th centuries) should or should not do. In this picture of things, ethics (theory, if you will) was simply the ironclad apologia for the morality (practical, cultural practices) of the day. As noted, this is at least somewhat of a caricature, and if one turns instead to the pages of the great philosophers – specifically Aristotle, Kant, and John Stewart Milli, representing virtue, deontological, and utilitarian ethics, respectively – one can recognize that even as these thinkers morality remained rooted in the assumptions of their day, their ethics as written placed the emphasis not on lists of rules but forms of practical inquiry. This point was given explicit pride of place by John Dewey in the excellent part 2 of the Dewey & Tufts Ethics (the part where Dewey was the sole author), “Theory of the Moral Life.”

But while emphasizing the inquiriential aspect of ethical theory, another aspect of the subject matter – implicit in treating ethical theory as a mode of inquiry – deserves discussion. A simple prescription of static rules would actually suffice were it not for two things: ethics itself is not static, and the nature of that dynamism means that ethics is fundamentally relational in character. I’ll focus exclusively on the latter point here.

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Nonsense on Stilts

06 Wednesday Nov 2019

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

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Possibility, Process Philosophy, Relational thinking

The Washington Post had an article in their science section a few days ago announcing “Scientists are baffled: What’s up with the universe?” It is a welcome relief to see mainstream reporting paying some attention to the massive problems that absolutely dog contemporary gravitational cosmology. One more frequently encounters a breathless declaration that this or that latest “discovery” “confirms” the Standard Model of Gravitational Cosmology (“SMGC”),i yet which then goes on to announce that we’ll need a “whole new physics” to make sense of this new data. (This article from The Guardian is slightly more balanced than many of the sources that later picked up the same story.) But the deeply problematic nature of SMGC is not really news, nor are the issues mentioned in the WaPo article even the most directly pressing matters. An extensive review of many of these problems may be found in the newsletters of the A(lternative) Cosmology Group. While a serious measure of background in mathematics and physics is required to read the listed and cited papers at any level of comprehension, a person with a basic background in these topics will be able to follow the newsletter discussions themselves and gain a modest acquaintance with the issues.Stilts

There are yet other issues that appear where SMGC intersects with micro-physics, in the realm of quantum mechanics. Part of the problem is that the mathematical bases of these two realms of inquiry – which, in the case of SMGC, is Einstein’s general theory of relativity (“GR”) – are built around radically different and largely incompatible kinds of mathematical structures: quantum mechanics, for all of its peculiarities, is linear in nature, while GR is fundamentally non-linear. This unification of the macro and the micro levels continues to defy serious scientific efforts, but the emphasis here is most definitely on “serious.” Unserious – because blatantly unscientific – efforts have given us the “string theory” nonsense which, while mathematically clever (at least by some accounts) is empirically vacuous, and as such devoid of any actual scientific content. Indeed, string-theory is so lacking in any basic scientific standing that not only is it empty of any actual empirical content, it lacks even the possibility of such content. Philosophers being disdained by the gate-keepers of SMGC – persons such as Brian Greene, Stephen Hawking, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and Sean Carroll – one may also turn to the observations of scientists such as Lee Smolin and Peter Woit for confirmation of these statements. Continue reading →

Pressure. Cooker.

22 Monday Apr 2019

Posted by Gary Herstein in Personal History, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

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Process Philosophy, Psychology, Relational thinking

My limited, and very humble, cooking experiences have never involved a pressure cooker. However, I do understand a little about how they function and why they are used. For many dishes, it suffices to permit the steam generated by cooking to pass out of the cooking vessel, and permit the food to otherwise be finished by ordinary methods of heating. But some recipes require that the food be cooked in a more intense manner: the steam that might otherwise be released unused into the indifferent world are instead contained under pressure, and that pressure in turn forces that steam back into the food, to provide an especially deep, internal, and unremitting form of cooking. This is all just physics, lacking the resources and the motivation to attempt such recipes, I’ve no idea what the process or products actually look like. My motivation for mentioning it is quite different from culinary compositions.Pressure Cooker

Cooking is often used as a basis for metaphors for human psychology. For example, a person who is “fried” or “baked” is someone who is exploring better living through chemistry. “Scrambled” is great for eggs, but speaks to a chaotic and disorganized state of mind in a person. Steamed vegetables have a happy crunch, but a person who is steamed is likely to be poor company. So the effect on the person is often taken from the effect on the food, rather than our enjoyment of that effect. (Presumably, the vegetable derives no joy from being steamed.) But the usefulness of such metaphors is always limited, and sometimes just genuinely wrong. Such can be the case with pressure cooker images. Continue reading →

Meaningful Life

11 Tuesday Dec 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

≈ 1 Comment

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General Philosophy, Metaphysics, Relational thinking

It is easy to find meaning in life in general; any herd of halfwits with a few books of philosophy under their respective or collective belts can do as much. But is MY life in particular meaningful? That is a very different question. The short answer – which, as always, will require a lengthy explanation – is, “maybe not.” But that “maybe not” itself comes with an important qualifier: almost certainly not in the form you were expecting. Right there is the primer that starts the engine of existentialism sputtering in poorly tuned outrage; that, and my grossly mixed metaphors. Not to take too much credit, but the latter might be the more important factor …Dusk

Nevertheless, there are two terms in the foregoing that merit some initial attention because of the oft unattended distinctions they bring into play: the “general” and the “particular”. In the spectrum of reasons, these two modalities of qualification are fairly far apart. Yet a great deal of discussion around the vitally important topic of the meaning of life flounders precisely on problem of navigating between these two rocks – this Scylla and Charybdis, to abuse my metaphors even further – that aren’t even all that close together. Navigating between them ought to be as straight forward as understanding if one is in the Atlantic or the Pacific oceans. Yet I don’t recall ever seeing matters satisfactorily distinguished, which is (like as not) as much a sad commentary on my scholarship as anything. So prior to getting to matters of any real substance, I must spend a few words on the interface between logic and metaphysics, so as to highlight the overlap between metaphysics and facts. Continue reading →

Objects and Relations

19 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Process Philosophy, Relationalism

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Logic, Process Philosophy, Relational thinking

Let’s get (a little) mathematical. If you’re still reading, good for you!

I spend a fair amount of time reading various logic texts. Most of that time, these days, is spent on texts that are shared with a “Creative Commons” license, and are thus freely downloadable. This is for two reasons: first, I am deeply offended by contemporary text book prices. For example, Hurley’s logic book (you can look that up on your own) is around $100.00 for the more recent editions. Not as bad as Calculus text books, but certainly extreme when one considers that the material presented can be had for free from other sources. So, despite the overwhelming improbability of it ever occurring, I can’t stop myself from thinking about the scam inherent in textbook pricing, and thinking how I, as a would-be teacher, might better serve my students w/o bankrupting them.Venn diagram

The second reason is that I just really like the subject, and want to keep my nose in the books on this subject at all times. Like playing the cello, if you stop practicing, you lose whatever mastery you may once have possessed. (The cello analogy is in reference to the great Pablo Casals and the possibly apocryphal response(s) he gave to why he always practiced so diligently.) Since I am otherwise utterly penurious, my choice of texts to “practice” with are limited to what I can download for free. With respect to topics within mathematics, including formal logic, the range of materials is actually enormous, and the quality exceptionally good. One of these books is the Open Logic Text by the Open Logic Group (“OL”), licensed under Creative Commons international attribution 4.0. (I believe I have fulfilled my legal obligations in the forgoing; full .PDF HERE.) I very much approve of this text, and almost anyone but me would never have even the slightest critique to offer regarding its exceptionally comprehensive coverage of the topic in a readily understandable fashion. But I do have one criticism, one that pretty much no one but a Whiteheadian would ever think to make. And that is about their too sanguine opening about the centrality of sets, and their uncritical acceptance of an intransigently object structured thinking. Continue reading →

Internal/External

08 Saturday Oct 2016

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy, Relationalism, Whitehead

≈ 1 Comment

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Process Philosophy, Relational thinking, Whitehead

A little while ago I rather casually glossed the idea of internal and external forms of relatedness – worse yet, I did so in the concept of discussing Whitehead’s philosophy. This seems like a good time to flesh those ideas out a bit more, as they are interesting in their own right, and will also serve to illuminate another respect in which Whitehead’s process metaphysics differs from so much of the Western canon.entrance-exit

I have been arguing in two previous posts (with a minor political interruption along the way) that what a “thing” “is”, is a matter of how that “thing” relates to the world, and that those relations have a reality in their own right over and above being a merely parasitic way of talking about things and other things. This is a bold claim. Along the way, I’ll be using the terms “relations” and “forms of relatedness” pretty much synonymously. This is nothing to get excited about, simply an effort on my part to mix up my language a bit so that it does not become tedious from repetition. Continue reading →

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