Karl Popper versus Thomas Kuhn

[charlatan]

@Aaron Thyne yeah, it seems to fit like a glove, it's just it took me some time to realize back in the day, mainly because I wasn't considering the extraverted-dominant types...but yeah horrible sensation, not nearly as much problem around Fe, etc. All the signs were there...
The covering all bases stuff is probably interplay with the enneagram-6.

 

[Ren]

@Ren that's an interesting question! There's a kind of foundationalist take on metaphysics, and then there's one on epistemic justification. I think the Theory of Everything as I commonly see it thrown about refers to things like string theory, which could find the 'ultimate building blocks' of nature and the ultimate laws they follow.
That smells to me of metaphysical foundations: that there are some properties on which all others supervene.

As opposed to the epistemic variety, which seems less related, which I think says justification kind of proceeds hierarchically from some ultimate foundation.

I think if you're a physicalist, maybe believing in a TOE in the sense of physical knowledge means you believe in a metaphysical foundation that's truly ultimate.

I think metaphysics, in some sense, can't avoid being foundational, but lately I've been getting into epistemological alternatives like holism/coherentism which are pretty interesting.

Have you ever come across the essay titled 'The Myth of the Given' by Wilfrid Sellars?

 

[Ren]

I guess TOE could be a theory which isn't foundational but holistic, in the vein of Quine.

 

[charlatan]

I think metaphysics, in some sense, can't avoid being foundational, but lately I've been getting into epistemological alternatives like holism/coherentism which are pretty interesting.

Have you ever come across the essay titled 'The Myth of the Given' by Wilfrid Sellars?

Haven't come across that, no!

I think one of the interesting challenges to this TOE stuff is this idea of an endless number of levels of laws -- that is, what if, just as physics is more fundamental than chemistry, there are simply more and more fundamental levels -- never a bottom-most one?

 

[Ren]

Haven't come across that, no!

I think you would find it interesting. It's the basis of an argument against foundationalism in epistemology. There is a nice summary of it here.

I think one of the interesting challenges to this TOE stuff is this idea of an endless number of levels of laws -- that is, what if, just as physics is more fundamental than chemistry, there are simply more and more fundamental levels -- never a bottom-most one?

I like this idea of no bottom-most fundamental level, but I'm afraid that it would look like an attempt to naturalise an infinite regress unless you were able to give an account (even a sketch) of what could be a level more fundamental than, say, physics. If you say mathematics, then what could be more fundamental than mathematics? If you just say "it's not impossible in the abstract", it just looks like a conjecture at best; if you say "what is more fundamental than mathematics may not be thinkable by human minds", then I would agree that it is a possibility but in this case, the TOE may not be able to account for it.

Also, why could TOE not be a purely physical theory? It could be construed as an attempt to explain how everything 'hangs together physically', which may over time be replaced by better explanations.

 

[charlatan]

@Ren couple things:

First, the idea of no bottom level does not at all require that the levels themselves every be anything other than physical: to capture what I'm going for, the analogy wouldn't be physical vs mathematical, but rather Newtonian physics vs quantum mechanics or chemistry vs physics (that is, more fundamental levels within physical science itself). The idea in physics is to hope there is some bottom level, say string theory, that tells you what the most fundamental constituents are -- however, there's a worry if you can keep splitting into finer and finer parts, so that, even if all of them are physicalist in nature, there's no final level like string theory ... there might be a string-2 theory that is more fundamental, and so on.

In fact, if the world turned out to be entirely physical and with a finite number of levels, it is child's play for me to cook up a world with further levels -- I really just need to write down another mathematical structure in which the physical world's 'final level' is embedded.
Part of the reason this is child's play is how thin a metaphysics physics gives -- where it's very closely determined by the mathematical structure.

Now, as to the question of whether there could be something below the physical, right now there's very good reason to worry that, because there seems to be virtually no other way to propose how to integrate the mental and physical (without severely deflating one or the other, which I think so far nobody has shown a plausible account of how to do) and since causal-closure considerations give strong motivation for avoiding dualism.
I think there are lots of accounts of more specific answers in the neutral monism or panpsychism type spirit (I favor the first so far), some version of which are not easily ruled out developed by philosophers as to what that more fundamental level would be, though as a factual matter, we're not in a position to know if any is the right account of our world yet.
So I do think sadly the reality really is that we might be more confident there's something further to be discovered than we are as to what the answer's form will be exactly.
(Some are pessimistic and actually argue we won't be able to find out, though I don't go that far yet.)


As a note, I don't have any reason to positively suspect neutral monism will involve infinite layers -- it was just a theoretical consideration to illustrate a specific way in which there may be no fundamental layer to metaphysics.... rather than something I think necessarily true of our world.
I don't conjecture what the final story is less because I think it's hard to imagine anything that could work and more because I just think they're all somewhat arbitrary shots in the dark at this current stage.
Of course I love playing with possible theories, but at this point I think they'd just be ways *A WORLD* with our mathematical structure might be; not speculations as to how our specific world plausibly might turn out -- I think what we're lacking is specific facts about consciousness or physics in our world that would help us decide among the competing monist theories.

 

[charlatan]

I should probably also add that if anything, it seems to me the thesis that there couldn't be more beneath the physical in any possible world would be much more ambitious (and not in a good way -- it seems quite rigid without a very profound argument), given the kinds of properties physics gives us are causal/mathematical -- I'd think one would basically need to argue that causal-mathematical properties are not all there are in our world, but also in any possible world, if one were to rule out possible worlds with something "underneath" what we know as physical properties.

That would amount to the ambitious thesis that causal-mathematical properties are not just all that exist in our world, but also all that exist in any possible world. Seems way, way overkill to me to assume that much.

And this is what's relevant to any version of the points I was making: whether one simply goes for infinite physical levels or whether the levels have different 'types' from one another/go more and more fundamental in some deeper sense.
Since, I was only going for challenges to the idea that metaphysics must begin with the idea that there is a fundamental level, not claiming at all that we have positive reason one way or another to suspect that our world in particular has such an infinite hierarchy.