John,

 

  As I said in my last email, you and I are not sharing the same definition/conception of the word metaphysics. Much like the term “consciousness,” the term metaphysics is very much open to debate and can refer to many different things.

 

  Consider that my daughter Sydney took a 101 Philosophy course and although four weeks of it were spent on “metaphysics,” the professor intentionally never settled on a definition. So the word is potentially very slippery.

 

  If you will recall, this listserve opened up with a very detailed examination of Stephen Pepper’s “World Hypothesis” by Steve Quackenbush. That was when Steve explored the root metaphors of Animism, Mysticism, Mechanism, Formism, Organicism, and Contextualism. The argument was that humans operate from frameworks that allow them to make sense of world. The full subtitle of the World Hypotheses book was: Prolegomena to systematic philosophy and a complete survey of metaphysics. That is, the “world hypotheses” were metaphysical systems. And that lines up with my definition. one’s metaphysical system refers to the picture or worldview one is offering. It does not refer to opinion versus evidence and logic.

 

  John, to my mind, you are a logical positivist and physiological reductionist. My position is that is your conceptual frame for the world and how you make sense of how it works. Your reply, “But it is based in logic and evidence, as opposed to opinion” is a non sequitur to me. I am simply pointing out that you have a conceptual frame/language game/map/system (and on and on) that you are “seeing” and trying to share.

 

  Final example. Joe M. and I submitted a paper on the concept of behavior as the fundamental concept in science. The conceptual ingredients that go into behavior are objects, fields and change. And we argued that object-field change are the fundamental concepts in science, starting with physics. These concepts were not empirically defined via measurement or testing. Rather, they are pre-empirical concepts that categorize the world. Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, and quantum mechanics use “object field change” as the fundamental conceptual ingredients to map complexity across time. In our language game, we were saying that a behavioral metaphysics underlies all of science. That did NOT mean we meant science was an opinion. Quite the contrary. We simply were saying that there were core concepts and categories that were pre-empirical (what we considered metaphysical) that went into the system of thought we call science. [A final note of irony: Near the end of working on the paper, I feared that the word metaphysics would activate the psychological defensives of scientists who read it, so we went ahead and changed the term to concepts and categories and now the term metaphysics does not appear at all in the paper J].

Best,

Gregg

 

 

From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]edu> On Behalf Of JOHN TORDAY
Sent: Tuesday, April 24, 2018 8:35 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: metaphysics

 

Gregg, so hope you don't mind, but I enlisted Bill Miller to help me understand why you and I have a difference of opinion regarding the meaning for metaphysics. His opinion is that psychologists assume that everything we think of is due to the subjectivity of mind, so of course by definition I am talking about a metaphysical opinion, not facts. I find that difficult to countenance because my career has been vested in providing the basic scientific data for the practice of evidence-based medicine (in contradistinction to the 'art' of medicine, which is metaphysics). My approach to evolution has been based on developmental physiology, founded on hypothesis-tested experiments from numerous laboratories around the world, a consensus having been formed for these data based on statistical metrics, i.e. that the data are statistically significantly different. So this, IMHO, is not metaphysics, it's physics, as I have intimated in my papers, showing the homologies between Quantum Mechanics and the cell. So unless you think that physics is also opinion, I don't get your way of thinking about my perspective as metaphysics. I had hoped that my science and theory would be adjunctive to your ToK, but not if what I am providing is metaphysics......So for example, I am reading Andy Clark's book "Supersizing the Mind" in which he explains disembodied consciousness. I think that what he is describing is a superficial understanding of what I am saying about consciousness as the aggregate of our physiology, as a reflection of the Singularity. So what Clark is expressing is analogous with explaining physics and chemistry without knowing Atomic Theory, in all humility.....your thoughts?

 

On Sun, Apr 22, 2018 at 10:06 AM, Henriques, Gregg - henriqgx <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

John,

  I appreciate that you want to get as far away from “metaphysics” as you can. I just want you to be clear that we mean different things by the term.

 

  To see my meaning, consider that you talk frequently about getting mainstream biologists “out of the box” of description after the fact (i.e., consequences of natural selection) and into the box of view life from its origins via first principles that allow for a mechanistic understanding more akin to the physical and chemical sciences.

 

The Alice in Wonderland-out-of-the-box-shift that you frequently refer to is, in my language game, referencing the metaphysical system (i.e., the ideas or conceptual framework) that functions to interpret the data. The mainstream biological “box” that you are fighting against is the metaphysical system, and, as you have experienced, it is a very powerful force 😊.

 

Best,
G

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