The following are my thoughts after the recent internalism session of fis,
just completed. They were formulated after re-reading the various postings
-- and, of course, they reflect my own point of view.
I begin by noting the standard scientific viewpoint on the world -- the
dichotomy between a system and its environment, both seen as from outside
by a 'third person', giving us an 'epistemological cut' The system may be
viewed as a' black box' in interaction with others, or it may be opened up
so that we can look inside, and describe it as a smaller environment for
its components and constituents. (Here we have the basis of the scale
hierarchy perspective.)
Some of our members have taken internalism to be discourse about the
contents of black boxes, discussing them just as one would do with a
(larger) system of black boxes in their environment. But this is all from
an externalist perspective. Such discourse invariably takes place in a
global present tense, often translated into equations describing
relationships and dynamics, and this emphasizes that the behaviors
described contain no surprises; nothing new is generated within the
externalist perspective once a model has been well corroborated by
observations. Before and after are equally well known, given the bounding
and initial conditions. And a system is described as if it can be assessed
simultaneously at any locales whatever from a third one. This is positive
knowledge.
What, then, is internalism? At present it is the attempt to model a system
as if from inside. We might do this with the Universe, for example, taking
as an important clue the finite speed of light, which would in fact prevent
simultaneous communication between distant locales. But, in fact,
cosmology and cosmogony are carried on 'as if' we were outside the
Universe, looking at it as a third person -- even watching light
trajectories creating 'event horizons' for its inhabitants in different
locales at the same time.
Internalist approaches involve removing certain constraints, including, e.g.,
(1) Global simultaneity is dropped. The world is sticky, all communication
is lagged.
(2) Globality itself is dropped; actions take place at locales which are no
longer constrained by 'cosmological principles' -- boundary conditions are
all unique, and so events can lead to surprising turns. Nonequilibrium
situations can be considered.
(3) Contingencies are not all corralled by statistics, and so produce
individuation / evolution. Because of this, kinds of entities no longer
remain uniform, and this can impinge upon dynamics.
(4) Description is no longer restricted to the third person's present
tense. Action, for example, is taking place in present progressive time.
But all of this could be envisioned externally. And, indeed, current
internalist discourse is done using tried and true externalist discourse.
Still, the picture generated is very different from the traditional
scientific one. We are at a locale. There is no inside / outside
dichotomy. The system senses changing pressures, resistances and
affordances (but does not infer a boundary; there is no epistemological
cut) impinging upon its habits and tendencies, and it reports in present
progressive tense as it manipulates its felt situation in order to make a
next move -- which cannot be deferred or the world would come apart. [The
brain (not the mind) of a player in a fast competitive game like hockey is
in a state, perhaps, somewhat like this.] There are in this picture no
details that would reveal it as a particular kind of system -- the
internalist predicament is universal. A tornado and an amoeba and a human
being are all in the same situation. The classical universality of
objective observation is replaced by a subjective universality of
situation. Positions at coordinates, distances, momenta and rates, growth
and stages of development are all absent, and comparisons are
inconceivable. Acceleration might be inferred from impetus, but there is
no commensurability between externalist and internalist reports. It might
be that the situation within a quantum wave function would be something
like this, and, perhaps that is where science first encountered
internalism. The meditative state of mind, discovered long ago, is
somewhat similar except that it is quiescent, while the internalist
situation is endlessly active.
Finally, this description using classical discourse is unsatisfactory, and
does not allow for any change whatever. It is my intuition that a logic of
vagueness will need to be developed before internalism can become a
bonafide discourse on its own, giving results that might have some use.
Vagueness is an unstable condition, and is always being reduced to a more
definite condition. Based on this, one might envision the development of a
locale from a primal vagueness toward an ever more definite embodiment,
perhaps passing through stages recognizable as equivalents to tornadoes,
and on into organismic condition, but, since this process would be
generative, we could not know what might evolve. That is, the internalist
condition would be a starting point, with many possible conditions to be
generated out of it.
I realize that in this summary of my impressions I may have departed from
Koichiro's understanding of internalism, and this gloss should not be taken
as representing his views fully (or accurately).
I have been making an emended transcript of the internalist session, which
may take me some time to get finished. When it is, I will post it to list
as a pdf file.
STAN
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Received on Tue Apr 12 21:12:55 2005
