[H]

I think the universe has events, and while the mathematical modeling is useful the actual events are better described via Aristotle's ideas of causation and entities having particular natures & causal powers.

Re: Intentionality, I think of it just as having Aboutness of Thought, as in Thoughts about the World. Given most of our cause-effect descriptions pre-suppose consciousness due to their interest-relativity it suggests there is something...interesting...going on there...

Yeah, I'd be willing to buy something like a "limit to math."

I'm just unclear if it could be that Intentiality could rise of things unIntentional.  Kind of how the "infinite" nature of language seems it could arise from, well, no language at all...

[sciborg2]

I think the universe has events, and while the mathematical modeling is useful the actual events are better described via Aristotle's ideas of causation and entities having particular natures & causal powers.

Re: Intentionality, I think of it just as having Aboutness of Thought, as in Thoughts about the World. Given most of our cause-effect descriptions pre-suppose consciousness due to their interest-relativity it suggests there is something...interesting...going on there...

Yeah, I'd be willing to buy something like a "limit to math."

I'm just unclear if it could be that Intentiality could rise of things unIntentional.  Kind of how the "infinite" nature of language seems it could arise from, well, no language at all...

Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.

But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...

[H]

Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.

But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...

And that is sort of a problem, because math and language are sort of the tools we are using to investigate.  So, if everything we find is a mathematical/linguistic answer, that makes sense, because we are looking at everything through a sort of math/language lens.

I mean, maybe, I don't know...

[sciborg2]

Yeah I think the issue of semantic determinacy is related to the challenge of providing causal accounts of Intentionality. And of course how is it that any clump of matter in the brain can, somehow, be about some other clumps of matter in the world.

But Causation is wonky enough without trying to suss out mental causation...

And that is sort of a problem, because math and language are sort of the tools we are using to investigate.  So, if everything we find is a mathematical/linguistic answer, that makes sense, because we are looking at everything through a sort of math/language lens.

I mean, maybe, I don't know...

I'd say Rationality / Intentionality / Subjectivity underpin our scientific investigation.

And science itself could be defined as the discovery of patterns through observation of change.

Can this yield knowledge of things-in-themselves, rather than relational structures? Seems unlikely since much of this investigation assumes both dynamism and stability so I don't see an answer to "Why don't the Laws of Nature change?".

To go back to the OP, math is useful modeling but its lingual limits - namely describing events through probability - is not an actual restrictive dichotomy [of randomness / determinism ] on Nature.

[sciborg2]

From Freya Matthew's Why has the West Failed to Embrace Panpsychism?

    "Consider, for instance, Newton’s laws of motion. If we are given Newton’s second law then we can indeed predict that a billiard ball will accelerate in proportion to the strength of the force applied to it, but if we have no idea why force and mass and acceleration are related in the way the law describes, we will not really understand why the ball behaves as it does. In other words, since this model of explanation leaves universals themselves unexplained, it ultimately begs the explanatory question. The illusion of explanatory power that attaches to this structure of inference from universal to particular emanates not from ontology but from logic, and reflects the fact that ‘the world,’ as it is re-presented in theoria, is organized not by innate ontological necessity but by the rules that govern propositions. These are rules of predication, consistency and inference, first and foremost inference from universal to particular. So the structure of theoria subtly follows the structure of mental doubling or re-presentation via the mirror of picture-propositions; in conformity with this, theoria orders these picture-propositions in accordance with the laws apposite to them, namely, the laws of logic, rather than discerning in reality itself the contours of any innate ontological necessity. In this way the world takes on the aspect of a rational order: in characterizing it as rational however we are in fact identifying the logical structure of the mental mirror rather than the structure of the world itself."

    "I would like to spell out in a little more detail how the conundrum of causation at the heart of science is a consequence, at a subtler level, of the mirroring maneuver at the base of theory. In this mirroring maneuver the mind, as we have seen, projects ‘the world’ as an idealized totality onto a kind of mental screen and in the process differentiates itself, in just the kind of way Kant detailed in his analysis of the transcendental unity of apperception, into a knowing subject, on the one hand, and the world as object or known, on the other. Since this object is, despite its world-content, mentally a passive construct of the subject, it will be understood by the subject to be, in an ultimate sense, inert. In the explanatory scenario of theoria, self-activity, and hence motive power, will always be intuited to lie outside the object. The object by definition, qua object, lacks the power of self-creation or self-animation. It will for this reason seem intuitively natural, from the perspective of the subject, to posit an external source of motive power for the world, a Prime Mover or, as secular substitute for such a Mover in science, a principle of causation, which is, as we have seen, a principle of coercion or force. The laws of nature are held in place by the arbitrary but coercive force of causation."

[sciborg2]

Just posting some stuff on Pedesis, the idea that matter can/does move in ways that are neither deterministic nor random.

The very idea of a purely random motion presupposes that it was not affected by or related to anything else previously, which presupposes that it was the first thing and before it was nothing, which is a version of the internally contradictory hypothesis of ex nihilo creation: something from nothing. The ontology of random motion claims that from pure disorder of discrete nonrelational particles comes high-level composite order. Given the high level of order and complexity in our present age, randomness is demonstrably not the case.

Pedetic motion, on the other hand, is not random at all, but instead emerges from and is influenced by other motions, just not in a completely determined way. Unlike randomness, pedetic motion is not unpredictable because it is not influenced by any other motions; rather, motion is pedetic precisely because it occurs in relation to other motions. It is the interrelation and mutual influence of matter with itself that gives it its unpredictable character. Over a long period of time, the pedetic motion of matter combines and stabilizes into certain patterns, synchronies, and relations, giving the appearance of stability and solidity, only to become turbulent again and enter into new conjoined relations.

Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion (pp. 73-74). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

=-=-=

Heisenberg thus showed that even at the quantum level, matter in motion is both relational and uncertain, or pedetic. Pedesis may be irregular and unpredictable, but it is not random. What is interesting about movement is not simply that it is pedetic, but that it is through pedesis and turbulence that metastable formations and emergent orders are possible. By contrast, the ontology of randomness is quite bleak. In a purely random ontology, all of matter would be moving randomly, and thus nonrelationally, at all times.


-Nail, Thomas. Being and Motion (p. 73). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

=-=-=

[The P]

This sounded a lot like Brownian motion.  I looked it up; I guess pedetic is the word kids are using for it these days. 

[sciborg2]

This sounded a lot like Brownian motion.  I looked it up; I guess pedetic is the word kids are using for it these days. 

He uses Brownian synonymously but I think he does need a new word since most people assume Brownian motion is inherently random and he wants to make a distinction between randomness and indeterminate-but-relational.

From an interview ->

Time Will Tell: An Interview with Thomas Nail

So, you don’t interpret the swerve in Lucretius as a random motion? No chance?

I am open to hearing evidence for an outside to the universe, but I have no idea what that would even look like. In part, because the universe is not a whole but an expanding and open process—just as Lucretius described in De Rerum Natura. I believe there is genuine novelty in the universe but we do not need to posit randomness to get that novelty. Lucretius says that matter is always in the habit [solerent] of swerving. There are at least two typical ideas of randomness neither of which Lucretius’ view could support. The first one is a radical randomness, or what Quentin Meillassoux calls “hyperchaos,” which is complete ex nihilo creation from nothing. Lucreitus is explicit that “nil posse creari de nihilo” [nothing can be created from nothing]. The second kind of randomness is the constrained definition randomness where there is a closed domain of objects and matter moves randomly within that. Again, Lucretius is explicit that nature is not a finite closed system—and so there cannot be randomness in this sense either. Something always comes from something relationally but creatively and non-deterministically.