Re: Reality of Abstractions

Hi there!

I have struggled with much of what you have written. Your sentence fragments might be better expressed if they were clearly stand-alone sentences, or your list was in more simple point form. But this is largely my problem, I suppose. That said, I'll do my best to understand as well as I could...

On 06/02/2013, at 22:58, "hibbsa" <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> By far Reality of Abstractions is my favourite BoI chapter,
> 
One of mine too. My "take away" is that this idea of "abstract things are real" is neither dualism in the Cartesian sense nor monism in the Spinozistic sense. The abstract stuff is not altogether separate from the physical stuff. Indeed the opposite. Abstract "stuff", like knowledge, is instantiated somewhere physical...and yet it is not itself something physical. Knowledge cannot be said to be "just" atoms moving through the void "just" obeying the laws of physics. To understand how atoms move through the void while obeying the laws of physics you have to understand high level explanations. In order to explain anything you actually invoke abstract stuff - which is real.
> particularly
> Deutsch's treatment of the layering or levels of abstractions as when
> interrelated.
> 
> Purely for their pertenance to what I will be wanting to say (i.e. why
> this post ) I illustrate some strands Deutsch said or I picked up maybe
> mistakenly
> 
> - that in some sense, different manifestations of the same explanation
> (in terms of explaining the same thing) can exist on different layers.
I'm not clear on what this means. My guess is that you mean something like: the same explanation can be instantiated in many different ways. So for example it can exist in the mind, in a book, or in a simulation in a computer. Is that right?

> 
> - Apparent paradoxes resolved by layering in which explanations are
> simultaneously the same yet different.
This, I do not understand. I do know that physical reality contains no paradoxes. Isn't that true? Paradoxes arise because there is some limitation in our explanations. "This statement is false" and such things - how are they resolved? Explanations which are "simultaneously the same yet different" could be a paradox, I suppose. Is this in BoI somewhere? I couldn't find anything.
> 
> - Speculative / personal-intuition of what means the whole 'stack' or
> 'spectrum' of layers or levels of some interrelated thing
> 
> ------as the true or complete or objective form of an explanation of
> some thing
I do not know what this means. I know that the philosophy underpinning FoR and BoI is realist. So that is a commitment to an ontological reality. As for "complete"...form of explanation: well we never get to complete, do we? Or if we do, we cannot know. The whole point of infinite progress is we can never "complete" our quest for knowledge.

> 
> ------all the properties described or inherent in the levels and
> relations between them

Which part of the previous stuff you have written does this fragment connect to? As it is, it seems to contain a verb and an object with no subject. I'm unsure about it...
> 
> ----- -e.g. commonalities, regularities, upward/downward inheritences,
> emergences, convergences, divergences)
I'm not sure what that means either. Again, the full sentence written out in full, connected perhaps by clauses and commas rather than in this list of fragments might help comprehension. Or, indeed single sentences separated by full stops. 
> 
> [Note: just to say again that all the above essentially for illustrative
> purposes....to help you recall and visualize Deutsch's arguments in that
> chapter, faithful to your not my level of understanding]
I really liked the argument, in that chapter, against reductionism (and holism) and the strange "moral overtones" invoked by scientists (or otherwise) that suggest science "should be" one of those. I think that is a key part of this chapter too.
> 
> AND NOW MY BUILD UP QUESTIONS.
> 
> Q1: Is the extent the objective existence of an explanation on or across
> objectively real layers or levels (of reality) dependent/proportionate
> with the extent, depth and reach overwhich it is an explanation of
> objective reality?
I do not understand the question. Maybe someone else does and could help. I'll ask some questions about your questions:

By "objective existence of an explanation" do you just mean "an explanation"? After all, explanations are real, right? What other kind of existence could they have? Only subjective? I think, fwiw, there is indeed such a thing as subjective existence which is just as real as objective existence, in the ontological (what reality consists of) sense. I'm unsure if this is what you mean by objective though. So let's say you're talking about an explanation written down on piece of paper. Let's say, for argument's sake, it's general relativity in a book.

Now this explanation "on or across objectively real layers or levels (of reality)" - does this mean that the explanation (book on general relativity in my example) exists in many universes? In other words, it is an example of how knowledge gives some structure to the multiverse? General relativity, the explanation, exists in many universes. Yes. Indeed its physical instantiations aren't just books but would also include technologies that have arisen, and exist because of general relativity. So GPS and similar technologies: where they are found in the multiverse, there is, to use your words, " the objective existence of an explanation on or across objectively real layers or levels (of reality)". Layers I have trouble with. If you mean: both minds, books and technologies like GPS systems, th
 en that's correct. And we expect minds, books and technologies containing the explanation of general relativity to be more common in universes that are the future of our own.

Is such an explanation, like general relativity, "proportionate with the extent, depth and reach overwhich it is an explanation of objective reality"? I think: yes.

So if I have interpreted your question correctly I think the answer is yes. But I interpret the question to mean something like: are true explanations more common (i.e have higher measure) in the multiverse than particular false ones? Yes.

Overall, false explanations are more common but for any given false explanation, their measure in the multiverse will be less common than true ones. For example, we expect that more people in the multiverse know about quantum theory than know about how Apollo carries the Sun across the sky. 


> 
> Q1: Does all of this apply to philosophical explanations? Does the
> PopperDeutsch philosophy exist on objectively real layers of abstraction
> to the exist the philosophy 'touches' (describes, is, navigates,
> reflects, etc) on objective[ly true] reality? Both in its whole and in
> its parts?
Yes. Because knowledge can only grow in the way Popper and Deutsch explain, people will gradually learn this. It will gain more and more of a prominent "structure" in the multiverse. We will notice its *physical* effects on larger and larger scales across time and space and throughout the multiverse. Ideas like justificationism will decline and so will stuff like Kuhn's idea about the framework, and so too will astrology and homeopathy, etc. What is closer to true, works better. What is false, will be discarded. Because it will turn out to be more and more useless as better and better (truer and truer) things are discovered.
> 
> LEADING TO MY ULTIMATE QUESTION:
> 
> If a component of the Deutsch Philosophy, say regarding Foundations
> 
You mean his rejection of foundations?
>  or
> the Conjecture or Refutation (or as a pair), can exist
> 
> on multiple
> objectively real levels,
> 
I'm still unsure what you mean by "levels". Can you provide an example of a specific explanation or philosophy that exists on "multiple objectively real levels"? Tell me what the explanation is and what two possible levels it exists upon.

Also, can you clarify what objective means? And what real means? And so what objectively real means? Does it differ from how these words are used in FoR or BoI?

What I am getting at it is whether you think there are subjectively real levels. If so, what are examples of these?
> and if each level can differently manifest that
> same explanation, then does its significance/importance/application to
> the 'human condition' also apply differently by level?
I don't understand this, of course...because I'm still not sure about "levels".
> 
> If that is so, doesn't that mean that:
> 
> - the level of abstraction that poppper applied the philosophy he had
> corrected, was one or a subset of a larger potential set, thus a choice
> requiring its own explanation. Unless....
All philosophies are explanations and all require explanations. It's infinite in all directions. Even if we do not have an adequate explanation yet...that's good! More progress is required, then.

Also, yes, epistemology is part of a set, or class, of other explanations, which are false. For example there is the false idea of JTB and there are "guesses and criticisms". They are both part of the set of "ideas" or perhaps even "philosophies". One is true. One is false. The set of true ideas will always be smaller than the set of true *and* false ideas.
> 
> - popper analysed and reapplied the corrected philosophy at the same
> level of abstraction conceived by the early pioneers of science at the
> time of their attempts at philosophy of science. But then...wouldn't
> that equivalence require an explaination also?
I think the answer is yes. I am hedging with the "think" because I am not at all confident I understand the question. Can you rephrase this and perhaps provide a concrete example? Thanks!

Brett.

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