Macrobius' Theory of Everything

[Macrobius]

http://beer.weremight.com/forums/showthread.php?10365-Macrobius-Theory-of-Everything

MRE ('Clancy') said this in the Shoutbox today -- I saw it, but was too busy to answer. It is a very reasonable question and now that I have the time I will answer it.

Today 09:59 AM] Most racist person eva: have you discovered the unified theory yet, Macrobius?

Why yes. Here is a tl;dr sort of outline of it:

1. In order to understand anything, scientifically, you need the Realist Theory of Knowledge (RTOK). This theory preconditions and precedes our understanding of Logic, and its role in Science. We can take Aristotle and Aquinas, and Moderate Realism, as a starting point -- not for reasons of 'philosophy' or religion (though Catholics might wish to do just that), but as an expedient for Science. This is a somewhat Relativist statement -- that if you accept Western Science, you ought to accept Aristotle and Aquinas, at least provisionally, if and only if you are also a Modern Scientist. One can critique Modern Science, or contest Western views of Religion and Metaphysics, but those activities *amount to the very same thing*.

2. Modern Science can be understood, in this Classical Aristotle-Aquinas mode. See the Philosophy of Jaap Bax ( http://metafysica.nl -- note there will be an annoying pop up, but the site is very interesting). I build on his framework, and perhaps add some insights he lacks, as he is not a scientist. In particular, he explains Darwin's theory of Evolution in a way that accords with Aristotle. My contention is that there was an Aristotelian revival, early in the 19th century, coming primarily from Scotland and Holland, then spreading to France and next Prussia, which created our modern 'Scientific' world view. The generation of William Whewell was crucial here (see discussions with 'Gedanken' at the Phora, or at link below).

3. In the context of this Aristotelian world view, which is 'Essentialist', the 'essence' is (de?)constructed as the low dimensional dynamical relation that describes the 'time evolution' of the system. I mean these terms in their proper sense in Modern Physics. In the Path Integral formulation of physics, this relation leads to a dynamical description of the system in Lagrangian or Hamiltonian terms. This follows from an extremal principle ('The Principle of Least Action'). Of all the 'configurations' of 'system state', statistical mechanics shows that the path of system evolution is the most probable.

4. Bax also takes Bohm's interpretation of quantum mechanics as central (and so do I). In addition, I note the work of John Sidles and his group at the University of Washington, showing that the linearity of 'Hilbert Space' is a mis-step, and that in fact the World *as we know it* is non-linear. See slideshow here: http://faculty.washington.edu/sidles/ENC_2011/ -- this gives me a solid connection to the theory of computability, by the way.

5. An important result is that 'pulsed neural nets' are capable of simulating all four cases of non-linear system dynamics: http://previousdissent.com/forums/showthread.php?9811-The-Oregonator -- typically a PNN in the real world works on several different length scales, and can have different 'stylised behaviours' at different scales simultaneously. This means that 'quantum phenomena' can be visible in the mesoscale world -- for example in Economics, or on the Internet -- while simultaneously being 'classical' non-linear systems. This is, in fact, observed to be the case in the world.

Thus, 'the world', in a Scientific sense, is best understood as a non-linear system, exhibiting classical and quantum characteristics (as you like), and in particular showing Natural Law that results from dimensional reduction, following various 'paths' subject to non-linear dynamics.

6. An interesting speculation is that of Conformal Field Theory -- equivalent to Anti-De Sitter Space -- which suggests the world in which the non-linear systems act is complex and two-dimension (perhaps describable by Quaternions?) and that the third dimension is a 'holographic illusion'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence

More: http://beer.weremight.com/forums/showthread.php?8489-Mind-Opening-Books (thread by Gedanken)

[Kodos]

Wasn't the rise of modern science due to the work of men who rejected and rebelled against Aristotelianism and Thomist scholasticism?

[Macrobius]

Wasn't the rise of modern science due to the work of men who rejected and rebelled against Aristotelianism and Thomist scholasticism?

Nope. Not unless you believe that Sir Isaac Newton, who believed Physics was mechanical, like Descartes and also the Atomists said, but that Chemistry was the True Religion (Hermetic Alchemy) and identical with the very best ancient and hallowed interpretation of Unitarian Protestantism, as exhibited in the Masonic Temple of the Universe, was a full-fledged 'Scientist' instead of a brilliant but somewhat cranky pre-Scientific philosopher. Modern Science as we know it does not pre-date the era of the French Revolution.

[Kodos]

Not unless you believe that Sir Isaac Newton, who believed Physics was mechanical, like Descartes and also the Atomists said, but that Chemistry was the True Religion (Alchemy) and identical with the very best ancient and hallowed interpretation of Unitarian Protestantism, as exhibited in the Masonic Temple of the Universe, was a full-fledged 'Scientist' instead of a brilliant but somewhat cranky philosopher.

Couldn't he be both, and im fully aware of Newton's obsessions with the occult, alchemy, and that he probably would be considered insane in the modern world...

Still lots of brilliant people are insane...

[Macrobius]

Couldn't he be both, and im fully aware of Newton's obsessions with the occult, alchemy, and that he probably would be considered insane in the modern world...

Still lots of brilliant people are insane...

The word 'Scientist' was coined by William Whewell (see the wikipedia article, if you must). Newton was a 'Natural Philosopher' (Principia == 'The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy' for the title in full). Scientific equipment in the 18th century was known as 'Philosophical Apparatus' -- the University of Pennsylvania owned some, for example, to instruct its students in Natural Philosophy.

Modern Science in the academic sense was consummated at Oxford University, via a departmental merger of Natural Philosophy and Natural History -- distinct subjects before then. The University of Berlin was the first to divide its Physicians faculty into 'Physics' 'Chemistry' and 'Biology'.

Your reading of history is anachronistic, and was developed in defense of Liberalism and Whiggery in the early 1800s. All political parties love to believe their heroes believed exactly what they themselves did, and attribute their own beliefs to them. In our case, we like to call Newton a 'Scientist', despite the coinage of the word (and the concept) post dated him by about 75-100 years.

[Kodos]

Whiggery in the sense of what era, restoration era Whiggery (favoring the exclusion of James II) or later.

[Macrobius]

Whiggery in the sense of what era, restoration era Whiggery (favoring the exclusion of James II) or later.

I'm talking 1820s. It was pretty retro by then -- the Protestant Supremacy of 1688 was dismantled in 1832, contemporaneous with the rise of Modernism as we know it (free-thinking liberalism of the Bourgeoisie, alongside Modern Science). See the historian J.D.C. Clark on social history of 1688-1832.

[JJ Cale]

Macrobius
Theory of Everything . . .

And if you thought that was thick getting through wait to here his theory of nothing. Mac, take it away.

[PsychoStick]

Wasn't the rise of modern science due to the work of men who rejected and rebelled against Aristotelianism and Thomist scholasticism?
I only know the mathematics side of Aristotle.

They rebelled against silly statements like:

'It is possible for a finite object to come into contact with an infinite number of objects in a finite amount of time because any object that is finite is infinitely divisible and is in contact with itself.'

That means that I am in continuous contact with the infinite because I am in contact with my self, or because I'm touching a bar of steel that is infinitely dividable.

But many of the mathematics of Aristotle have been disproved, just as someday many of Einstein's theories will probably be disproved. Who can say what we will know for a fact a thousand years from today?

[Macrobius]

The history of 'how Modern Science came into conflict with Aristotle' is complex. The primary influence was various competing strains of Platonism in the early modern era -- you've doubtless heard of 'Humanism'. What may be less well known is (1) the sequence of thinkers Marsilio Ficino, Pico de Mirandola, and Giordano Bruno, who developed a radical strain of Platonism very much opposed to late Medieval Scholasticism. And (2) the Ramist school, of which the most prominent member in the 17th century would be Descartes. This tradition drew on something called a 'Method', which looks suspiciously like the (Platonic inspired) system of Raymond Lull. Bruno also had a 'Memory System'.

The idea behind a memory system is that you can memorize various signs and symbols, and then recombine them arbitrarily, generating and systematising all knowledge. (This should remind you of how letters are permuted in certain kinds of Cabbala). This theosophical notion was the primary competitor for the Aristotelian/Occamist logic of the schools, and is the direct progenitor of Early Modern philosophy and specifically physical ('natural') philosophy.

Newton's 'interest in the occult' is not, as Kodos alleges, some sort of cranky hobby of a great and otherwise orthodox mind. On the contrary, it was the central feature driving the physical and mathematical world view. This would have been more obvious in the very early 17th century, before the Thirty Years War (which began with the destruction of the protestant state in Bohemia -- which was allied with Great Britain). At that point, the Rosicrucian movement went underground, but it is still obviously an influence in the Royal Academy. In Newton's time, it is less obvious because he has to hide his true viewpoint from public scrutiny, given the fatal consequences of one's Religion in that century.

Newton's anti-Aristotelianism was important because he was opposing his Protestantism and his version of the Occult on the one side (he considered Protestantism the exoteric and correct expression of the latter), to Catholic Trinitarianism on the other. He obviously had to take a stand against the Schools, which were Aristotelian in 'method' and seminaries for what he considered a False Religion.

It might be nice propaganda to say he was a 'Scientist' first, and dabbled in Protestant heterodoxy and Alchemy in a cranky way, and that since he was on the side of Good, Truth, and the British Flag and William of Orange, he just happened to oppose Aristotle because Aristotle just happens to be full of it and needed a solid debunking, followed by a good pudding and a round of 'God Save the King'-- but that view is historically incoherent.

Polemics aside (and Newtons followers did not immediately sweep 'into power' in either academia or 'the scientific world' -- if you believe such a thing existed before 1750)-- no one discarded Aristotelian logic, and it was still taught, and indeed Scholasticism in various forms continued to be taught, in Britain until the mid-Victorian era. The revolutionary contrast, in Logic, would be the Scottish 'Philosophers of Mind' ('The Commonsense school'), and Mansel and Veitch, vs. thinkers like Whewell, Whately, Mill--not to mention more famous names from the 19th century scientists.

Darwin *was* the Scientific Revolution. Not Copernicus, not Descartes, not Kepler, not Newton.

To state my thesis more clearly (to some), start with Alasdair MacIntyre's 'Three Traditions'. What I am asserting is that the gap between the Aristole-Aquinas tradition, as synthesized with the Augustinian Platonic critique, call that 'strand #1' -- the traditional Christian world view in the West -- with strand #2, the Encyclopedists, who peaked with the 9th and 10th editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica, were much closer than protrayed in MacIntyre's 'Trilogy'. However, under the German influence, and the cutting edge in Britain that received the Scientific Revolution that began to bear research fruit in Prussia with the founding of the University of Berlin, the Encyclopedist school moved decisively away from Aristotelianism, at which point it found it convenient to adopt the now quite retro anti-Aristotelian jargon of Newton and his followers. Until that time, the 'Newtonian movement' had been primarily external to the Universities -- carried on, in fact, largely by Huguenots, and in the setting of the Methodist chapel, and among amateurs interested in Physics and Chemistry.

[Man of Ash]

Mac, doesn't the anti-Aristotelian thread go back at least to Ockham? Isn't that the patrimony that modern science claims for itself?

[Macrobius]

Mac, doesn't the anti-Aristotelian thread go back at least to Ockham? Isn't that the patrimony that modern science claims for itself?

Occam's summa totius logicae was still the standard logic text in British universities, in the mid 17th century, so if Newton were opposing 'Aristotelian Logic' (and he was), he would have been specifically opposing the teaching of Occam.

At the end of the century, a summary of logic was written by the Mathematician Wallis, and later a shorter version by Henry Aldritch -- both in Latin of course, which was the language of Oxford books. Reading this latter text was still a nominal requirement, to fulfill instruction in 'Dialectics', at Oxford in the 1830s. Mansel, whom I mentioned above, wrote a commentary with such extensive footnotes, so that you don't need to know Latin well to make sense of it (that was presumably the point as a teaching crib and work of scholarship):

http://books.google.com/books?id=-yICAAAAQAAJ

This text shows that late Medieval logic tradition, with a scholastic commentary (influenced, now, by the German Critical scholarship -- damn that's a lot of footnotes). This is what scholasticism, as a shared schooling for Christians, Protestants and Catholics, looked like, at the time an interest in it was finally removed from the University, and the 'Baconian/Newton' movement 'won'. Which is to say a bit less than 200 years ago, not 500.

Institutional support for scholasticism was removed in the 1830-1850 time frame. So this really is a late survival. Mansel, linked above, was a student of Sir William Hamilton, Bt., the last of the Scottish Common Sense school. He was succeeded by Veitch (http://www.scottishphilosophy.org/johnveitch.html). I can't say I've tried to trace successors in this school in the 20th century. I suppose there must have been a few, given Scotland's nationalist interests. [ADDED: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Elder_Davie seems to have been the last].

The reason Occam was never replaced is that the Henrician Reformation in England destroyed the 'elementary school system' that fed the Universities. Britain was at the forefront of 'late Medieval Science' (one must distinguish scientia from the neologism 'scientist' and 'scientific') -- with Occam and the 'Oxford Calculators' or Merton school. However, by the removal of the supply of new recruits, these efforts collapsed and England had to bootstrap its educational system. This was done when Edward VI founded 6 grammar schools -- together with the 'public' schools, these managed to produce about 400 university qualified students a year during the Elizabethan era, which had to cover all three of the professions.

The anti-Aristotelian logic school is usually, in Britain, named after Bacon, and Newton and all scientifically minded philosophers are broadly located in it as well. This evolved in an 'educational vacuum'. Bruno visited Oxford. John Dee was remarkable for his time. Bacon is essentially Dee's successor, and Hobbes was Bacon's amanuensis and Latin translator, as well as an enthusiast and popularizer of Cartesian geometry and 'mechanism'. British scientific efforts were clearly short handed and playing catch up to the continent in this era -- the progress from Bacon to Newton is remarkable, and the name 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment' may not be entirely ill given.

As one trained as a professional scientist, when I look at my field, I have difficulty seeing Descartes or Newton as 'fellow scientists' in the same sense as Maxwell or Rumford. The attempt to retread late medieval anti-scholastics who dabbled in occult, alchemy, and crank educational theories, is an exercise in political propaganda in the interests of the British ruling class, post 1688 and post 1832. It is an exercise that *requires* ignorance of the language of communication used, of the actual views of the persons alleged to be scientists, and of the intellectual history of those views.

There are certainly many 'scientists' if you like to call them that, doing novel experiments and good work in Experimental Natural Philosophy, both before and after the dead period created, inadvertently I suppose, by the English Reformation. However, there is no particular reason to call the post Reformation philosophers 'scientists', and the pre Reformation ones 'vain philosophers', unless you think Roscrucianism and Ramism are somehow particularly 'scientific' in the sense of Darwin and Maxwell. I don't. That view would make Modern Science just one school among many, and nothing special or revolutionary at all. The world we live in was determined by a decisive shift in mentality, that occurred about 200 years ago.

Aristotelian Logic (and many elements of scholasticism in general) were not decisively rejected in the Protestant universities, until the era of Pierce, Whewell, and Mill. This creates a problem for propaganda: one can point to scholastic interpretations of the US Constitution and Federalism, in terms of Law, and using concepts shared by Protestant and Catholic thinkers as non-controversial, for example. They were taught in the schools and part of the obvious background of interpretation -- ignorance of which leads to anachronistic and forced interpretations of American Revolutionary politics. Pointing this sort of thing out is extremely inconvenient for those who would deny there is no 'religious content' to the United States political system. The uprooting of the late Medieval system in the United States did not occur until the 1860s, and it was very traumatic and revolutionary.

[Macrobius]

I spent a bit of time clearing away the historical and political baggage, because I want to get to the heart of the claim -- that an Aristotelian (essentialist, teleological) interpretation of Darwin, or any other theory of the 'Reign of Quantity' method of Science, is possible and desirable. Desirable that is in my relative sense of 'if you take Modern Science at face value, you ought to interpret it in the sense of Aristotle and Aquinas':

Responding to Arcturs at The Beer Barrel: http://beer.weremight.com/forums/showthread.php?10365-Macrobius-Theory-of-Everything&p=54053&viewfull=1#post54053

Manimal writes:
[Today 08:37 PM] Manimal: macro, what is this business about accepting aquinas "if and only if" you are a modern scientist

So, I said: if you accept Western Science, you ought to accept Aristotle and Aquinas, at least provisionally, if and only if you are also a Modern Scientist.

I am construing 'Western Science' broadly -- as something present in the medieval period and not just after some 'Scientific Revolution', and Modern Science as what is certainly present from the early 1800s on (and contestably present since Copernicus or Kepler). So, the claim is that if you have a Western philosophical and scientific oriention (which most of us do), that implies:

Modern Science iff Aquinas-Aristotlean interpretation

First, the if direction, which is somewhat trivial: most persons nowadays who champion Aristotle's philosophy and/or the Scholasticism of Aquinas -- typically Catholics at Catholic Universities, and often followers of Gilson or Maritain -- will usually not want to deny Modern Science, either factually or as a method. Consequently, they tend to pick out the parts of Aristotle and Aquinas that are historically contradictory of Modern Science, and keep the 'softer' or more theoretical parts. So this direction is not particularly controversial.

The only if direction: if you are a Modern Scientist, you ought to accept an Aristotelian or perhaps scholastic interpretation of Science. The heavy lifting here is done by Jaap Bax at the link given. To prove this, one has to set up an interpretation of Modern Science that is both plausibly scholastic and Aristotelian, and simultaneously doesn't do too much violence to Science itself, as we currently understand it. If one finds such an interpretation, then it doesn't really matter if the working Scientist chooses to *ignore* the mapping. Whatever he does, and correctly does, is translatable into the alternative vocabulary. The translation gives a broader interpretation of his efforts, and insights that he may or may not value. It serves to tie his efforts down to an intelligible philosophic tradition, and does not make a hash of all past intellectual history by rendering it inaccessible and incoherent, for no good reason.

It should be clear, now, that my assessment above in the 'if' direction was over-optimistic: I am not standing shoulder to shoulder with those who insist on a 'Christian Humanism' that joins Modern Science and the Aristotle-Aquinas tradition by leaving the Modern Science unaltered, but providing a somewhat emasculated context for it -- a sort of 'metaphysics of the gaps'.

Instead, each of the two sides is required to give a bit: Modern Science, which in and of itself is just a formalism capable of multiple interpretations without explicitly committing even to the meanings of the words [certainly, the quantum mechanical part is that way] -- receives a definite metaphysical interpretation. For its part, Scholasticism becomes non-arbitrary, since it is required to make definite commitments in Physics, which is refutable in a 'non metaphysical way'. Philosophy doesn't become what it used to be before Kant and his followers split off the Metaphysics, with the aim of giving Empiricism free scope (and rendering Religion, Politics, and all other post-Physics subjects immune to Science, hence 'safely' conservative of the existing order....)

This is, clearly, a bit of a press fit.

I will add there are two obvious issues to explore here: First, why do I mention Aquinas? when the received scholastic tradition is 'Nominalism' (that is, a later elaboration of Occam, who was a Conceptualist, not a Nominalist). That is, even if Occam is vaguely Aristotelian, he cannot be equated directly with Aquinas, who was 'out of favour' even among Catholics until the time of the 'Second Scholastic' (Cardinal Suarez).

Second, what does one do with 'essentialism' and 'teleology' and 'vitalism' -- the first two were reject by Darwin, and the last was rejected by Modern Science, early in the 20th century.

[Man of Ash]

Mac, thanks for the detailed expositions. I think these questions get at what I was trying to ask:
I will add there are two obvious issues to explore here: First, why do I mention Aquinas? when the received scholastic tradition is 'Nominalism' (that is, a later elaboration of Occam, who was a Conceptualist, not a Nominalist). That is, even if Occam is vaguely Aristotelian, he cannot be equated directly with Aquinas, who was 'out of favour' even among Catholics until the time of the 'Second Scholastic' (Cardinal Suarez).

Second, what does one do with 'essentialism' and 'teleology' and 'vitalism' -- the first two were reject by Darwin, and the last was rejected by Modern Science, early in the 20th century.
That is, even if the tradition up into the 1800s is Scholastic in method, it is apparently not Realist in metaphysic - so I wonder what this historical fact adds to the claim that a Realist Theory of Knowledge should undergird Modern Science, which seems to have been trundling along adequately (from the Scientist's point of view at least) on a Nominalist basis, for some time now. Is the point here that Nominalism provides an inadequate metaphysical basis for Logic (upon which Modern Science still relies), and that we not only need to reclaim the Scholastic method for the sake of logical coherence, but also to bring that tradition back to a more stable, Thomist onto-epistemological basis?

I also had Darwin in mind, as his theory seems to finally canonise Nominalism (necessitating a total ad hoc redefinition of genus, species etc.). I haven't managed to make sense of that Dutch website yet though - I'm still working on, oh, the first sentence of the first point in your OP. So, if you wouldn't mind giving us the gist: how can Forms or Essences relate to the unpunctuated genetic flux depicted in Darwinism?

[Transcendentally Challenged]

Its suprising not to see Francis Bacon, the father of the protoscientific method, mentioned here, along with his complete denial of adequate place for any philosophical system (even despite his great respect for Aristotle) in the New Organnon.

Or Gadamer's extremely well written article "What is Truth?" which pretty much outlines why modern science has broken its ties with Antiquity in the main object of pursuit - of its understanding of truth. For Antiquity, veritas is but adaequatio intellectus ad rem, while for science the main thing is not about this unconcealed connection, but repeatability at any given moment, hence the central point of modern science is not truth but actual method of attaining truth, the method itself becomes a centralized and unified organnon and truth itself disappears replaced strictly by authenticity.

[Macrobius]

Its suprising not to see Francis Bacon, the father of the protoscientific method, mentioned here, along with his complete denial of adequate place for any philosophical system (even despite his great respect for Aristotle) in the New Organnon.


Quoting myself above: The anti-Aristotelian logic school is usually, in Britain, named after Bacon, and Newton and all scientifically minded philosophers are broadly located in it as well. ... John Dee was remarkable for his time. Bacon is essentially Dee's successor, and Hobbes was Bacon's amanuensis and Latin translator, as well as an enthusiast and popularizer of Cartesian geometry and 'mechanism'. British scientific efforts were clearly short handed and playing catch up to the continent in this era -- the progress from Bacon to Newton is remarkable, and the name 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment' may not be entirely ill given.

Your point that there is the Aristotelian tradition and the Baconian one, and that they are at odds, is well taken. The conclusion I draw form this is that Early Modern Science is a kind of Rosicrucianism, and less 'scientific' than say the Merton school. I am locating the Scientific Revolution at the point modern Scientists have institutional control of the field, which is after Kant and Laplace (to choose a Prussian and a Frenchman representative of the *novel* outlook). The native British tradition was retroactively 'sanitised' by the Revolution, to give it a bit of history -- not unreasonably, but certainly disingenuously as the propaganda was repeated and fewer people had any contact at all with the pre-Revolutionary period, and the propaganda ceased to be just a 'spin' on what they knew, and became the *only thing* they knew about the past.


Or Gadamer's extremely well written article "What is Truth?" which pretty much outlines why modern science has broken its ties with Antiquity in the main object of pursuit - of its understanding of truth. For Antiquity, veritas is but adaequatio intellectus ad rem, while for science the main thing is not about this unconcealed connection, but repeatability at any given moment, hence the central point of modern science is not truth but actual method of attaining truth, the method itself becomes a centralized and unified organnon and truth itself disappears replaced strictly by authenticity.

Thank you for the reference -- I have not read that article. My first point, insisting on RTOK is meant to re-assert 'All men by Physics [Nature] desire to know...' Moderate Realism as a metaphysics depends on the Realist Theory of Knowledge, and implies a Logic different from modern Symbolic Logic, which has a different (non-semantic) purpose -- that is, it does not have meaningful explanations of reality that are true (true judgments), as its matter.

ADDED: yes, the central issue for Modern Science in its somewhat defective current form is that it has replaced *definition* with *description* -- the latter is merely a verbal description of repeated patterns (successful modeling). This is of course why modern Logic tends towards *syntax*, ('Formalism') not semantics (Truth -- essential Forms).

Part of my 'press fit' is to insist that Modern Science is to add the semantics (interest in Truth and Knowledge) back into the Formalism, by identifying what in the formalism is, precisely, the Essence (ousia) of the 'system' or 'organism' or any other formally organised Integral Totality under consideration.

The answer I give to this is the Dynamical Law that governs the (non-linear) system's evolution, what in Physics is called 'Equation of Motion'. I am explicitly identifying the written equation of motion with a sign that *designates* (references, in the logical sense) the Real Definition

To summarize: the mathematical equation of motion *is* the Aristotelian Form (Species) of the system. More precisely, it is a conventional sign pointing to the Real Form conjoined with the system, mathematically expressed. Thus, when Darwin writes down a differential equation governing the population of a sort of animal, parameterised by a 'fitness coefficient' or whatever, that equation is the Species and the Essence of the system, or even more precisely a sign of its Essential Form. [A 'Form' is the logos of the essence -- the equation (forumula) points to the Form, and the Form, or Species, is related to the Essence as a logos, or rational explanation, of it.]

Darwin's attempt to replace Species and Form fails, because he simply switches the meaning of terms around -- he identifies 'species' with the Quantity of a population, which is an accident and not even a 'substantial form' of the genus. Secondly he does give a stationary equation of motion to the totality under consideration (a population in a given environment, classified by gene frequency), and thus he does give a substantial form after all -- answering ad rem to a different question.

[Macrobius]

Mac, thanks for the detailed expositions. I think these questions get at what I was trying to ask...

Yes, I had your question in mind when I wrote that, and signposted my intent to deal with the issue.

That is, even if the tradition up into the 1800s is Scholastic in method, it is apparently not Realist in metaphysic - so I wonder what this historical fact adds to the claim that a Realist Theory of Knowledge should undergird Modern Science, which seems to have been trundling along adequately (from the Scientist's point of view at least) on a Nominalist basis, for some time now.


Let me first preface my remarks with two copouts:

1. The standard description of Modern Science emphasises the hostility of Science to Aristotle, by which Occam's Nominalism must be *specifically* meant, so it is a bit harsh to set a burden of proof (that is, of refuting of the proposition) that modern Science would be better served by Nominalism than Moderate Realism. On its own account it rejected the former, and the latter would better serve it on any reasonable account, if it must be forced to have one or the other.

Answer: None the less, I have deliberately placed myself in this particular wrestling hold because I intend to slip out of it, as a way of evading the conventional propaganda about Science, and putting it to the sword. Nominalism, I would say, had very little influence on the development of Science, and less in Scotland than England -- it is not necessary for Science to follow scholasticism *historically*. In fact, the most obvious products of Nominalism (say, the philosophy of John Locke) had very little practical effect on Science at all -- no working scientist I know feels it necessary to read Locke to understand the Scientific Method. Hardly Descartes, even. And Newton, to the extent he is known, is known 'in translation' say of Maclaurin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Maclaurin) or Desaguliers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Theophilus_Desaguliers).

My historical assertion that Aristoteleanism was the proximate cause of the Science of the early 1800s, is based on an Aristotelean revival in the generation of Linnaeus, the French 'histiological' school, and the Scottish Enlightenment -- none of which as *causes* were decisively Nominalist, compared to the fossil survival of Logic teaching among the Scots and (about a century earlier still) the English.

My point is that the late historical survival of Occam's work shows that his opponents *didn't* have institutional control, nor was the medieval system substantively overthrown until a very late date. Modern Science thrived in a Platonist and Alchemical setting (Cambridge, the Cavendish), and later benefited from an Aristotelian revival and infusion of Aristotelean and post-Aristotelean thought from the Scots and Dutch. Nominalism may well have been decisive for Protestant Theology, say, but it had comparatively little effect on early Modern Science.

(A final point is that I haven't really discussed Universals at all -- a lot of Occam's Logic is simply shared ground and technical, and the points he actually makes about Conceptualism are extremely technical, and presuppose a mastery of Scholasticism to understand.

Here is Bax: http://www.metafysica.nl/wezen_univ.html

In saying this, I do not mean to minimise the role Nominalism played in forming Cartesian thought, and the impact of the latter on British 'scientists' as regards 'mechanism'. Accidental historical paths are not the same as saying Darwin is or can be *essentially* Nominalist. But even if he is, we may correct him.)

2. The Bax website (which *is* dense in that it assumes both a technical knowledge of Scholasticism and of Bohm, which is educationally improbable, however desirable that might be -- no one arrives at that state routinely, and it assuredly takes effort and multiple attempts to master over several years!) ... but as a cop out Bax addresses first Nominalism then Moderate Realism in the 5th section of his website, which is on Logic:

http://www.metafysica.nl/nature/

[[ADDED: this page is perhaps a bit more perspicuous: http://www.metafysica.nl/nominalism.html

The Nominalistic critique could persuade us to replace the Substance-Accident Structure (of every genuine being), by (just) a bundle structure -- a bundle of qualia (= determinations) inhering in a "bare-particular", i.e. every being is a (further and finally) determined (i.e. concrete) individual, but it is a being consisting solely of determinations (qualia), without these qualia being received by a carrier, a subject, or a substrate.
But, in fact (as will be shown) this critique leads to a replacement of the Substance-Accident Structure (of every genuine being) by an Essence - Accident Structure, equivalent to a Dynamical Law - System State Structure.
]]


Is the point here that Nominalism provides an inadequate metaphysical basis for Logic (upon which Modern Science still relies), and that we not only need to reclaim the Scholastic method for the sake of logical coherence, but also to bring that tradition back to a more stable, Thomist onto-epistemological basis?

Partly -- you've basically got what I'm saying. Remember that I was careful to relativise my argument -- *if* one believes Modern (Positive) Science, *then* one should accept Aristotle and Aquinas. Naturally, I have left open an escape hatch, that *if* one accepts *Traditional* Science (in the sense, say, of Guenon), then one need not do so -- as an Orthodox Christian, I do not want to be backed into necessarily supporting Scholasticism, in the face of Palamas or Gennadios Scholarios! Guenon, of course, criticises even Aristotle and Plato, and has no use for 'philosophy' at all -- and neither do many of the Fathers.

Also, some Orthodox have occasionally suggested that the Franciscans, such as Bonaventure or Duns Scotus (or Occam!) *corrected* the introduction of Aristotelianism by a return to more traditional Christian 'philosophy', with an even more suitable metaphysics -- ironically, using Augustinian sources, which is all they had, but which sufficed for the effort. MacIntyre handles this issue elegantly, by pointing out how Aquinas integrated Aristotelianism into into the 'traditional' (that is Orthodox or near-Orthodox) scholasticism. (Greek scholasticism dates from the 2nd century A.D., and its Latin analogue from the 11th, with many antecedents among the Irish and Celtic Brits, of course).

We Moderns, who live in the West, must none the less come to terms with Science and Western notions of it! If we claim to do otherwise, we who live in a technological, science-dominated society are but hypocrites. Thus, the importance to us of Aquinas -- we might not choose him as a Theologian, but as Scientists we must respect the relative health of metaphysics!


I also had Darwin in mind, as his theory seems to finally canonise Nominalism (necessitating a total ad hoc redefinition of genus, species etc.).


I would say that Darwin makes a *logical* mistake (in Occam's system or otherwise). He confuses description with definition, as I mentioned in an addendum to an above post. This is precisely HiddenImam's comment, that modern science is concerned with describing regular patterns, not with investing them with 'Truth' that we can 'Know' by adequating our Intelligence (dianoia) to Reality. This doesn't mean his theory can't be saved, however.

Darwin, of course, treated all animal life at the level of organism, as a single 'species' -- it is only in populations exhibiting variation of the One Type of protoplasm, with accidental variations in frequency in a given environment, that he introduces his notion of the fit surviving -- that is, to wit, numerically, after the manner of the Reign of Quantity. This is clearly inferior, but we can assign some meaning to it, by pointing out that it is a Dynamical Law (nomos), governing the number of the species, and therefore a Substantial or Essential Form, at a collective level.


I haven't managed to make sense of that Dutch website yet though - I'm still working on, oh, the first sentence of the first point in your OP. So, if you wouldn't mind giving us the gist: how can Forms or Essences relate to the unpunctuated genetic flux depicted in Darwinism?
A key element in Bax' thought (which he takes form an earlier philosopher, Van Melsen, is the 'Species-Individuum Structure' (SIS). About this, at the link on Nominalism above, he says:

According to Nominalism it is only individuals that exist in Reality, and these individuals are different from each other in every respect. However some of them look like each other and are placed in a class by us. So here it is out of the question that there could be any Essence, which repeats itself in an exact way, by being distributed over the individuals of that class, and becoming thereby in each separate case itself individuated. Expressed differently : The Species-Individuum Structure only holds approximately, but, by the way, enough to form the basis for scientific induction (See the Essay on The Species-Individuum Structure). Hence there would be no genuine Substance-Accident Structure, because this structure also presupposes such a possibility of exact repetition.

Now, by locating the individual animal in a *population* and enumerating that population, Darwin has in fact introduced a Species-Individuum structure -- where the species is now a differential equation governing the quantity of individuals. This is an anti-Nominalist move. Darwin dodges the issue of Nominalism by side-stepping the question of whether *this* animal is a healthy member of its own species, whether qua a biological organism, it functions according to design. (Aristotle also makes the Designer, the Demi-urge, a *virtual* or quasi being, not a real one, by the way).

To state it differently: it is true that a Darwinian 'species' has fuzzy boundaries, but the primary source of uncertainty in predicting a count of a population of animals in a specific environment [which makes the dynamical principle 'fuzzy'] is *not* ambiguity or arbitrariness of which animals correspond to which phenotypes and where the boundaries are, but the stochastic process of animals getting eaten. In practice Darwin 'bootstraps' off the Aristotelian Linnaeus anyway.

In any event, the Darwinian Nomos, the underlying stationary principle of scientific law in the face of change and flux, is the *count* of animals, governed by a law related to their fitness. In statistical mechanics, an appropriate relationship might be the Malthus-Verhulst equation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

(Yes, *that* Malthus - previous mention at the Phora: http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=63491)

To tie this argument together: *if* you believe Modern Science is 'True', then you ought to believe that the essence of being Human is to be governed in Nature (and Quantity) by the Malthus-Verhulst equation, a Mathematical Sign of the Dynamical Nomos governing the maximum population of human object-instances on Earth -- given at the last link. This is, to be sure, an Aristotelian Substantial Form, as asserted, and does not directly contradict Aristotle's and Aquinas' metaphysics -- it does not undo Essentialism, and does not banish Teleology. If you find this construction improbable, however, then you may wish to reject that aspect of Modern Science, and accept that the Substantial Form of humans is, pace Darwin and per Aristotle, the individual Rational and Animate Soul.

[Macrobius]

It is high time this thread had a short post that is easy to understand. ;)

I'm going to define a few terms from Greek Mathematics, to make the Science clearer:

A logos is a ratio of two numbers. The Greeks tended to think of rational numbers ('logos numbers') as physical magnitudes -- line segments. The 'ratio' of two line segments is the number of times you have to multiply the length of the short one to get the larger.

They only allowed themselves units of a single line segment -- which they called 'monads'. Obviously, sometimes you had to multiply both line segments by numbers to get longer line segments that are integral multiples of the monad ('unit').

A is 5 monads long: <----->
B is only 2 monads long: <-->

<----- | -----> = 2 x 5
<--|--|--|--|--> = 5 x 2

2 x (5 monads) equals 5 x (2 monads), because the composite line segments are necessarily equal in length. Thus, the 'commutativity of multi-plic-ation' ('wrapping around many times') has geometric consequences, clearly.

The ratio of the 5 monad segment to the 2 monad segement is 5:2. 5:2 is the logos of segment A to segement B.

If we have an equation in *our* physics:

10 Volts = 5 Amps x 2 Ohms we can rewrite this equation, trivially, in the Greek fashion, since dividing every number by 1 yields the same number, and the equation is still true:

(10 Volts / 1 Volt) = (5 Amps / 1 Amp) x (2 Ohms / 1 Ohm)

This highlights the fact that our 'compressed' notation really involves two separate concepts:

10 = 5 x 2 [an equation of dimensionless numbers that have no physical magnitude]

1 Volt = 1 Amp x 1 Ohm [this is a definition of 'units', and shows the 'dimensional analysis' of the original equation -- expressed *solely* in terms of the underlying 'natural monads', or 'physical units'].

Although we write both the magnitudes and the units *next* to each other formally, in the abbreviated notation, the expanded notation makes clear that the 'dimensionless numbers' used by Physics are, in fact, all rational numbers, as every result of an operational measurement must be. That is, our equation if it involves 'units and dimensions' at all, involves *ratios* of physical magnitudes to monads, which ratios are the logoi, or forumlae, hence the name we give to the abbreviated form.

Furthermore, the arbitrary rule that you were forced to memorise and believe (without justification, but you did it), and the wierd 'cancellation rule' you had to struggle to understand, until you learned by behavioural conditioning just to do it and shut up so you got your gold star, and which only applied to multiplication and division but no other 'operations' at all! -- is in fact justified by the second equation. Our concise equations are twinned, and are really *two* equations, divided by each other -- or better a single equation involving solely measurable logoi.

Of course, the Greeks understood the whole thing makes no sense at all, except as a formalism. Physical magnitudes are *always* logoi -- otherwise we would have to face the absurdity of what it means to 'multiply' physical magnitudes. Numbers are one thing, and magnitudes are quite another! It is only the geometrical construction with monads that makes sense of the whole thing.

Now, it came as quite a shock that *some* physical magnitudes cannot be ratios of any sort of monad -- this is why Euclid's Geometry has *two* theories numbers. The second, by Eudoxus, gave the Greeks a theory of Logos-measurement that did not run into the problem with irrationals. This theory (Euclid, Bk. V), applied to both rational and irrational numbers.

So much, then, for Rationality. Let him who is ignorant of Geometry, enter into the matter no further.

[Macrobius]

[Today 07:53 PM] Arcturus: macrobius, why do you think that modern scientists should accept that god created the universe?

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=23970

I'll add that the Wheeler model is very interesting, in light of Sidles.

Back in the day, I asked myself... what does Quantum Mechanics say that ultimate reality is? Everything in Science is an approximation, and what *really* exists, QM says, is a grand Wave Function of All Being, of which every theory we have is a crude approximation. Either, we simplify the Wave Function of All, or we compute a 'Scattering Matrix' that describes the outcome of every possible and conceivable experiment from it.

And what, might you ask, is this glorious construct? Well, it is a *single point* in Hilbert Space. Everything else that is, was, or ever will be is a mere shadow or projection of the One Point that Rules Them All. A point, of course, in Hilbert Space.

Now, what Sidles teaches us is that 'linear space' with its Parmendean Wave-Function-of-All ('The One'), is in fact a Myth.... My faith is devastated.

[Macrobius]

Right on cue, there is an interesting result on the interpretation of quantum mechanics that is getting some discussion in the cyberpress:

http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?t=78061

Quick link to commentary: http://mattleifer.info/2011/11/20/can-the-quantum-state-be-interpreted-statistically/