User:KYPark/51a

Verse

We are free to think of anything. At one moment we think of the trees in the garden; at another, of the tomorrow's weather; at still another, of the past experience. These things that we think of, whether existent or non-existent, substantial or imaginary, true or false, may be said to be fairly stable in contrast to our free thoughts. The trees in the garden must be there dropping leaves, even while we stop thinking of them. Thus we can freely organize or map our thoughts upon this stable background.

Notes

realism	idealism
positivism	anti-realism
objectivism	subjectivism	Descartes, George Berkeley
externalism	internalism
World 1	World 2	Karl Popper 1972

Footnotes

Bates 2005

When information is defined here as the pattern of organization of matter and energy, there are patterns of organization that exist in the universe whether or not life exists anywhere in it. There is one shape and structure of a rock here and a different shape and structure of another rock there, whether or not any animals ever see the rocks. At the same time, once life comes along, it is useful for those living things to perceive and interact with their environments. How each living thing experiences its environment will have enormous variations and some similarities. My pattern of organization is not your pattern of organization, but, at the same time, we both live in the same world and may be responding to virtually the same things. The point here is that there are many patterns of organization of matter and energy; something going on in the universe independent of experiencing beings, as well as all the various perceived and experienced patterns of organization that animals develop out of their interactions with the world. All of these patterns of organization can be looked upon from an observer's standpoint as information; whether they are independent of sensing animals or are the tangible neural-pattern results of processing in an individual animal's nervous system. In this particular sense, both of what are usually called objective and subjective senses of pattern of organization are included in the definition as used here. (Boldface not original)
— Bates, M.J. (2005). "Information and knowledge: an evolutionary framework for information science" Information Research, 10(4) paper 239. Available at http://InformationR.net/ir/10-4/paper239.html

The objectivist and subjectivist (de re and de se) perspectives

Stonier 1997

Philosophical Preface
The present work is the third in a series designed to clarify the issues relating to the concept of information. The ultimate aim of these travails is to help develop a science of information. The first book, Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe, defined information in a manner parallel to the definitions which apply to energy: information, like energy, is conceived of as a basic property of the universe; and like energy, which is traditionally defined operationally as possessing the capacity to perform work, so information is defined operationally as possessing the capacity to organize a system.
What is being attempted in this series on information is to study a pattern of interrelated phenomena which extends through all of nature -- patterns which range from subatomic structure to the human mind and human society -- even to the abstract products of that mind and society: language and mathematics. This pattern consist of the manifestation of order, to a greater or lesser degree, in everything we perceive, create or conceive. This does not preclude the possibility of systems which lack order, but order appears to be a universal phenomenon, and wherever we look for it in our universe we find it.
This question of order in the universe has preoccupied philosophers for millennia. Aristotle considered order to be part of reality: the human mind, through the senses, discovers this order. In contrast, Immanuel Kant considered that order was a product of the human mind; it is we who order the universe. An intermediate position was afforded by Charles S. Peirce, the 'father' of semiotics. According to Peirce (1958), the universe consists of things which are real, that is, they exist whether we think about them or not. We experience the real directly. However, our ideas of the real are selective constructions based on our previous experience, history and purpose. It is thus that the mind constructs the order which characterizes our individual perceptions of reality.
The epistemological position in the present work (as in the previous two volumes) is as follows: regardless of whether human beings think about it or not, order does exist in the universe; more importantly, the presence of order is a manifestation of a more basic property of the universe, a property which we call information. This position in no way contradicts Peirce's position that, whatever order may exist in nature, our minds may superimpose our own mental order on top of the natural order. (pp. 1-2; the boldface not original)
— Tom Stonier (1997). Information and Meaning: An Evolutionary Perspective

Holism or synoptic philosophy

Winograd 1986

Heidegger rejects both the simple objective stance (the objective physical world is the primary reality) and the simple subjective stance (my thoughts and feelings are the primary reality), arguing instead that it is impossible for one to exist without the other. The interpreted and the interpreter do not exist independently: existence is interpretation, and interpretation is existence. Prejudice is not a condition in which the subject is led to interpret the world falsely, but is the necessary condition of having a background for interpretation (hence Being). This is clearly expressed in the later writings of Gadamer:
It is not so much our judgments as it is our prejudices that constitute our being.... the historicity of our existence entails that prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience. Prejudices are biases of our openness to the world. They are simply conditions whereby we experience something --whereby what we encounter says something to us. -- Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (1976), p. 9.
— Terry Winograd & Fernando Flores (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, pp. 31-32.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2sRC8vcDYNEC

Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hermeneutic circle

Hacking 1975

Some thinkers attack the problem of free will by distinguishing different notions of freedom or meaning of the word 'free'. In one sense we are free -- free enough for concepts of morality and responsibility to come into play. In another sense we are not free, and all that happens now is determined by what has happened earlier. According to this 'soft determinism', as William James called it, determinism is supposed to express a true doctrine in one sense of the words, and a false doctrine in another. Plenty of philosophers have argued that the problem about free will arises from what Hobbes called the 'inconstancy' of language. The same word, they say, is inconstant -- it can have several meanings. Even philosophers who argue for a simple determinism have to show that in their arguments the word 'free' is used with a constant sense, leading up to the conclusion that we are not free.
— Ian Hacking (1975). Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? pp. 4-5.

It is not that "free will arises from ... the 'inconstancy' of language" (Hobbes) but from that of inference mainly due to ignorance or lack of information. The more ignorance the more inference; the more information the less inference. That is, ignorance is the very source of free will.

No god may be free. He would do just what he should do. Similarly it is taken for granted that "what the old man says is always right." God should remain absolutely fair and disinterested. Then it would be useless to chant god's glory and ask him to forgive our unforgivable sin. A compassionate god must be partial, hence a fallacy!

Berlin

Berlin did not assert that determinism was untrue, but rather that to accept it required a radical transformation of the language and concepts we use to think about human life -- especially a rejection of the idea of individual moral responsibility. To praise or blame individuals, to hold them responsible, is to assume that they have some control over their actions, and could have chosen differently. If individuals are wholly determined by unalterable forces, it makes no more sense to praise or blame them for their actions than it would to blame someone for being ill, or praise someone for obeying the laws of gravity. Indeed, Berlin suggested that acceptance of determinism -- that is, the complete abandonment of the concept of human free will -- would lead to the collapse of all meaningful rational activity as we know it.
— Isaiah Berlin on: "Free Will and Determinism," in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berlin/#2.4

Schopenhauer 1818

"The world is my representation" is, like the axioms of Euclid, a proposition which everyone must recognize as true as soon as he understands it, although it is not a proposition that everyone understands as soon as he hears it. To have brought this proposition to consciousness and to have connected it with the problem of the relation of the ideal to the real, in other words, of the world in the head to the world outside of the head, constitutes, together with the problem of moral freedom, the distinctive character of the moderns.
— Arthur Schopenhauer (1818). The World as Will and Representation, Part I

Principle of locality

Local realism is the combination of the principle of locality with the "realistic" assumption that all objects must objectively have pre-existing values for any possible measurement before these measurements are made. Einstein liked to say that the moon is "out there" even when no one is observing it.
— Principle of locality