mullins: Slides for us.
mullins: After Martin,
mullins: a few comments. Damon's going to make a comment or raise a question or two, and so is Charlie, and then we'll open the floor.
mullins: So go ahead, Martin.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay, let me, share… And then…
Martin Turkis Jr.: get this back, okay. Can you guys see the screen, the triadic from 2 now? Okay. Alright, so I'm gonna make this…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Oh, damn it.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, sorry.
Neal Fisher: This was in the same boat I was.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Alright, so, yep, thanks for coming, everybody. Good to see every…
Martin Turkis Jr.: One, a couple of you I haven't had the pleasure of meeting ever, or meeting in person, but it's nice to see your faces, Young Il and Damon and a few others.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So, I'm just gonna really make a few brief comments, and then interested to hear what, the respondents have to say. So, essentially, kind of what was my PhD thesis, or dissertation, and then turned it into the book.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I was trying to start from pretty uncontroversial takes on, you know, Polanyi's contribution to epistemology and his… his intention of… of turning out a post-critical philosophy, and that's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: That leads to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: One second… okay, there we go. That led me into getting into the metaphysical issues that are the focus of the project. So the first place in the book that I think I…
Martin Turkis Jr.: do something slightly different, though not radically different from people coming before, is… is I…
Martin Turkis Jr.: called his realism a Copernican realism. I was mostly drawing on, science and reality, the pretty late essay, and his,
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, set of works. And essentially, for him, rightly or wrongly, the kind of the key feature of Copernicus is that he accepted both philosophical theorizing from principles and also empirical
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, I guess, scientific in the contemporary sense, approach to… to getting that truth, so that…
Martin Turkis Jr.: acceptance of both of those routes to truth, are, I think, pretty… pretty…
Martin Turkis Jr.: central to his… to Polanyi's type of metaphysical realism, so I called that a Copernican realism, which isn't really in disagreement with what anybody had said before, but just a… perhaps a little twist on it. From there,
Martin Turkis Jr.: I lean pretty heavily on his… his…
Martin Turkis Jr.: writings about the ontological aspect of tacit knowing and the tacit dimension, and then I try to take that and run with it to a certain extent. And again, since we had the readings that Phil was kind enough to kind of select and put together, I'm not going to go
Martin Turkis Jr.: too much in depth so that I have more time for everybody else. But of course, comprehensive entities turn out to be pretty central, to where I go with it.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So where I think what I have to say gets a little bit more controversial for some people, but not for everybody, is… I want to argue that Polanyi is essentially a Platonist, though he…
Martin Turkis Jr.: may not have…
Martin Turkis Jr.: thought about it all that much, or been completely aware of it, maybe wouldn't have even agreed to that label, though he does, at the beginning of personal knowledge, say that he expects his… his project to be dismissed as, quote, outdated Platonism. And what I think is interesting, it's certainly not…
Martin Turkis Jr.: anything. It's not, like, the final word on anything, but it is suggestive that when he says that, he doesn't immediately say, but that's not what I'm doing. He just says, people are gonna dismiss this as outdated Platonism.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And then he just continues on his merry way. Doesn't bother to try to refute that, or say that's a misunderstanding. Again, that's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: just suggestive, not anything determinative of a definitive conclusion. But,
Martin Turkis Jr.: So, I draw on a classical scholar, Lloyd Gerson, Canadian philosopher, and he, he, he…
Martin Turkis Jr.: theorizes something he calls erplatonism, and kind of the hallmark of that is top-downism, he says, rather than bottom-upism. And I think Polanyi clearly falls into that category, with his…
Martin Turkis Jr.: talk of ordering principles as teleological directors. He definitely… Polanyi, that is, affirms the existence of uninstantiated universals, though I prefer the more platonic
Martin Turkis Jr.: term forms, and then I think his field theory, which is a little bit hazy and not completely worked out, tacitly incorporates all those elements, and so I try to go on and develop a little bit about what a post-critical Platonism might be like.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So I end up coming up with a…
Martin Turkis Jr.: tripartite scheme. There's a metaphysical hierarchy, and the rank on a metaphysical hierarchy is determined by the IFMs produced by the entity, the comprehensive entity.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Which… maps on pretty cleanly, I think, to the Iliadic principle, which is that something…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Gets its ontological status, or you can check out its ontological status by means of its causal power, causal efficacy, and that comes from
Martin Turkis Jr.: something that the Iliadic stranger in Plato's Sophist, argues. So it's often called the Iliadic principle, in a lot of different literature. The second part of the tripartite scheme is a flat ontology of comprehensive entities, by which I just mean that if something exists, it's a comprehensive entity.
Martin Turkis Jr.: If it doesn't exist, then I guess…
Martin Turkis Jr.: we don't need to worry about it. But anything that exists, I think, is a comprehensive entity, and talk briefly about what that is, drawing on Polani, and then working it out a little bit further.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Again, not all comprehensive entities have the same metaphysical richness. They have different kinds of causal powers. Some are more potent, some are less potent, some have…
Martin Turkis Jr.: relatively, you know, I guess, local power to affect local things. Others seem to have more far-reaching powers. So it's not that they're all equal.
Martin Turkis Jr.: in metaphysical terms, but they are equal in ontological terms. They all exist, is what that's getting at. And then finally, there's the mirrological hierarchy.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Of the relations between subsidiary particulars and the comprehensive entities or joint meanings to which they contribute. And I feel like a lot of times in… sometimes in Polani himself, and definitely in literature on Polani, I think 1 in 3
Martin Turkis Jr.: get confused, so, and actually, it was… I don't… I didn't see if Andrew Grosso came in, but something that… that Andrew said to me in commenting on a draft of a chapter is what actually kind of led me to being able to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: to distinguish those two, one from three, and so I'm very grateful to him for that. So really briefly, the comprehensive entity, I assume everybody kind of knows by heart, you know, Polanyi's take on that. So I look at the way he often…
Martin Turkis Jr.: oscillates between the term joint meaning and comprehensive entity. He uses them pretty much as synonyms oftentimes. And so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I…
Martin Turkis Jr.: more or less collapse them into one concept, for my purposes, and that seems to indicate to me that to exist is to have a meaning, to be is to mean. So entity and meaning I would take to be rough synonyms.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And then, as, well, let me just go to the next slide, actually. I put together this little,
Martin Turkis Jr.: somewhat weird diagram of a comprehensive entity. So the idea here is that the cone's the comprehensive entity, the joint meaning, which
Martin Turkis Jr.: draws its subsidiary particulars into its own being, right? In doing that, it's acting as a formal cause, right? It's reforming these other things into it, you know, we're taking in nutrients, a bicycle is…
Martin Turkis Jr.: harnessing, tailically metal and rubber and so on and so forth, or in some iterations, wood and metal, et cetera, et cetera.
Martin Turkis Jr.: concepts like wheels, etc. So it's acting as a formal cause in that sense, and then when it makes its…
Martin Turkis Jr.: IFMs, its impacts on the surrounding world, it's acting as a final cause. And of course, material and efficient causes are, you know, part of that process, but… but I'm more interested in the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: comprehensive entities as final causes and formal causes, so that's a little brief word on that. And then I also go on to argue that,
Martin Turkis Jr.: that, forms our comprehensive entities, too. So I use the same… the same image here, and, velocipede, if you're not familiar with it, it's the class of human-powered land vehicles with one or more wheels, so unicycles, bicycles, tricycles.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And it turns out a variety of other iterations all fall into that class.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So pretend that this is the form of the… of the, velocipede here. You could say, like, the… some of those subsidiary particulars would be unicycles, some tricycles, some bicycles.
Martin Turkis Jr.: amongst those subclasses, some would be actual, some would be potential. So, this could exist as a form, as a comprehensive entity, let's say at time t prior to the actualization of any concrete bicycles.
Martin Turkis Jr.: That still exists as a potential, set of relations that could
Martin Turkis Jr.: be instantiated when the proper conditions are met. And indeed, Polani says something very… almost identical to what I just said about… about the ordering principle of flames, and when they touch down and an actual flame ignites. We could look at that later, I have a slide with that quote.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But yeah, so that all of these different…
Martin Turkis Jr.: subsidiary details, actual and potential, they can get tailically harnessed in, doesn't affect the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: the… the overall entity, the overall comprehensive entity, or the form of the velocipede, when, say, a given type of tricycle becomes actualized and is no longer
Martin Turkis Jr.: quote-unquote, merely a potential, but is now both a potentiality and an actuality.
Martin Turkis Jr.: that there's still a continuity in the form, so that's really briefly a little bit about that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And, then I just found this fun, old-fashioned picture of a bunch of weird velocipedes that I thought could, you know, some that we wouldn't expect, right? You know, there's the different instantiations of a bicycle, you know, maybe this one here is one that I didn't expect, or a different type of tricycle here, so there are all kinds of interesting things there. But anyway, that's… I'll stop sharing, that's about all, and interested to hear what Damon
Martin Turkis Jr.: and Charlie and everybody else, has to say.
mullins: Okay, thank you very much.
mullins: Damon!
Damon Kutzin: Thank you, Phil, yeah.
Damon Kutzin: First off, I guess I want to thank Phil and the Polanyi Society for allowing me the opportunity to comment. I'll just quickly introduce myself, because I'm relatively new to the Society. My name is Damon Kutzen.
Damon Kutzin: I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in the History and Philosophy of Science department, and I'm working on scientific realism. So, this book really was very relevant for me and came out at just the right time, and was very helpful for situating the debates in Polanyi studies. So, thank you, Martin, for writing it at the right time.
Damon Kutzin: So, yeah, I have, sort of, I guess, a general, maybe, metaphilosophical question to start out the discussion.
Damon Kutzin: And so, as you lay out in the first selection for the reading for today, there's an emphasis in Polani's work on the interconnection of knowing and being.
Damon Kutzin: I think especially of the commitment chapter in personal knowledge, and about how we can only know things within a framework of commitment, and that
Damon Kutzin: The personal and the universal mutually require each other. And this talk of frameworks and commitments and the mutual intelligibility of the mind and the world seems like he places metaphysics in the realm of the knowing subject, or right within the horizon of the knowing subject.
Damon Kutzin: And I think in the second two selections of the readings for today, you kind of interestingly complicate this picture, in your sort of development of the notion of comprehensive entities, and so I'll quote for a second from page 139 of the second reading.
Damon Kutzin: You say.
Damon Kutzin: On my reading, then, Polanyi's terminology ought to be developed and updated to explicitly include a recognition that the meaning of an entity is a reference to its integrative structure, which just is its power of acting as a formal cause over its subsidiary particulars.
Damon Kutzin: We might even go so far as to say that this meaningful integrative structuring of the subsidiary particulars implies a sort of indwelling on the part of the comprehensive entity itself.
Damon Kutzin: On this reading, we are not the only ones who comprehend. The other entities are comprehensible because they are comprehensive insofar as they themselves comprehend their component parts.
Damon Kutzin: And so, I guess I'm curious how this, more capacious understanding of comprehension, as you put it, develops or changes Polani's… the role of the knowing subject in Polani's philosophy.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, can we speak of the formal and final causes of a comprehensive entity now without reference to the knowing subject's comprehension?
Damon Kutzin: Because I can imagine some Palanians, like, Marjorie Greene, for instance, protesting that this is minimizing the role of the knowing subject, and I think, like, another way to ask this question…
Damon Kutzin: is to put it maybe kind of bluntly, like, why should we go post-Platonic rather than post-Kantian in terms of, developing, Polani's metaphysics?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay, yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: No, great, great question. So…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean, it's kind of a big question, so let me
Martin Turkis Jr.: Take a stab at it, and then you could, you could, you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: try to refine where I'm going, whenever, whenever you'd like. So, I mean, so Polanyi, let's start the knowing subject, right? Polanyi…
Martin Turkis Jr.: talks about the continuum, right, all the way through, kind of, from lower life forms up, right? Hazardous striving, and that… that our powers of knowing are, of course, more sophisticated, more developed. We have language, which makes a big…
Martin Turkis Jr.: it gives us a big advantage in terms of the complexity of what we can do with those powers when compared, say, with an amoeba or something like that. But for Polanyi, it's pretty clear in personal knowledge that this is all a continuum, correct? Right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: And…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean, I actually remember that one of my dissertation advisors, was a Catholic priest, and
Martin Turkis Jr.: I remember at one point I was kind of emphasizing that, and he had done his own dissertation on Polani many years prior at the Vatican, actually, but he was sort of taken aback, or I could tell he was slightly put off when I emphasized that continuity at one point in a conversation, right? So that was something that…
Martin Turkis Jr.: from his perspective, it didn't… that kind of stuck in his craw a little bit. So…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I don't think that sticks in anybody… in any of our craws. I think everybody here is probably pretty comfortable with that continuity, right? So, what I see I'm doing is just extending that beyond what we would classify as living things. Just, like, to exist, so you could…
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, it sort of felt like one element was saying, you know, Polanyi is emphasizing the role of the knower and knowing, which was being neglected, at his time, right, in his historical context, so it was a necessary corrective.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But I don't necessarily think that's the ending point, so… and I didn't set out with that purpose, it was more just kind of tinkering around with the ideas of comprehensive entities, and actually some stuff that Phil Mullins had written about,
Martin Turkis Jr.: understanding and comprehension when he was writing about comprehensive entities, and then that sort of led me to say, like, oh, well, I mean, this doesn't determine anything, but this definitely would leave open, say, debates on panpsychism, on this, that, and the other thing. I mean, it's… again, it's not…
Martin Turkis Jr.: it doesn't close the book on anything, but you could start to think of, say, any comprehensive entity, whether you would consider it to be living or non-living, to be a knower of a kind. If knowing is indwelling, or is based on tacit indwelling of all these potentially unspecifiable, you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Subsidiary particulars, then that also turns out to be what it means to exist at all.
Martin Turkis Jr.: at different levels. Does that kind of make some sense? So I don't see it as de-centering the knower, it's just trying to take account of everything.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And it's sort of like glass, half full, half empty.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah.
Damon Kutzin: Yeah, I'll just, follow up with… I think that that makes sense. It would just… it seems like it would imply some kind of change also in what it means to know in Pawanyu's framework, or the role of commitment, for example, in knowing, because I… it's hard for me to imagine how, say, like, a non-living thing could be,
Damon Kutzin: I don't know, committed in the way that's required in tacit knowing. Or maybe that's not a requirement, but only a requirement for human beings,
Damon Kutzin: And, yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean… I mean, can I respond really briefly to that? I mean, I think…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I understand that, but… I mean, I think, and I can't recall passages, I mean, some people, like, you know, probably John or Phil could just call up from memory the appropriate passage, but I don't have that kind of saturation yet.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But, I mean, I feel like there is commitment there. I mean, take, like, an amoeba that makes moves to kind of adjust to the… where the best salinity level in its environment is. I mean, if it gets it wrong, it dies.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? That's the hazardous striving. I mean, I'm pretty…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I feel pretty confident that it's not having an internal monologue about that of any kind, right? Like, it doesn't have…
Martin Turkis Jr.: any problems with low self-esteem or anything like that, the way we might when we're considering, like, oh, should I apply for this job, or what have you, right? But nonetheless, it's engaged in hazardous driving, and
Martin Turkis Jr.: I think anytime that there's a hazard.
Martin Turkis Jr.: and you're… you have some kind of agential power that implies some form of what Polanyi's getting at with commitment.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: That's my rough sketch.
mullins: Thank you, Damon.
mullins: Charlie.
Charles Lowney: Okay.
Charles Lowney: Yeah, I want to thank Martin for his book. I think these are important topics, and I, like Martin, feel that Plato and Aristotle and Polanyi all go together really, really well, and that they can really
Charles Lowney: Transform our understanding of metaphysics.
Charles Lowney: I do have slightly different takes on some things, as Martin knows.
Charles Lowney: And, I guess we can… right, I'm more of an emergentist approach to this.
Charles Lowney: And Martin doesn't think that's necessary, but…
Charles Lowney: I feel that it's important for Polanyi, and It's also, important for Important for seeing how.
Charles Lowney: Different kinds of causes work together.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And the difference between.
Charles Lowney: The real and the actual, or the existent and the real.
Charles Lowney: And, I mean, I think we can look at this idea of comprehensive entities that Damon brought up.
Charles Lowney: In Polani, a comprehensive entity is an emergent system.
Charles Lowney: It's… it's something that,
Charles Lowney: has parts that work together in order to form something that's an identity that has new properties, right? And he started using it for living things, so Martin's answer to Damon about the amoeba is perfect, right? Because living things do have
Charles Lowney: this, this striving, they are comprehensive entities.
Charles Lowney: That might comprehend their parts, and autopoetic sort of living things are especially good at that, and do that.
Charles Lowney: Now, one of the things Phil did that Martin picked up on was ex… he saw that Polanyi expanded
Charles Lowney: the notion of comprehensive entity from living things to other things. He did it with machines. These were also emergent for Polanyi as well.
Charles Lowney: So, we have emergence, and I think it extends later on to include weekly emergent things, like flames and that sort of thing.
Charles Lowney: every… I mean, you can extend it further, but it's always in terms of a system.
Charles Lowney: system… With processes and parts.
Charles Lowney: So, to say…
Charles Lowney: you know, this is where I kind of, don't really get the metaphor of calling
Charles Lowney: the existence flat, right? Because comprehensive entities are bumpy, right? Bumpy, and they're hierarchical, one building on the other, building on the other.
Charles Lowney: Except in that, right, they express forms, and forms are flat.
Charles Lowney: forms.
Charles Lowney: exist, or they don't exist, right? In the sense of, well, Polanyi would say, maybe being existent or real.
Charles Lowney: Rather than necessarily actual. Right.
Charles Lowney: So, I think a comprehensive entity, to me.
Charles Lowney: Indicates something more in the realm of Potentiality and actuality.
Charles Lowney: And… and you have the forms that can manifest in nature, Being comprehensive entities.
Charles Lowney: Whereas forms more generally, some of them might manifest in nature, some of them might not.
Charles Lowney: You need the subsidiary conditions in place, the material and efficient causes in place.
Charles Lowney: In order for the formal and the tele causes to… become actualized.
Charles Lowney: Right? So, I would see a difference there.
Charles Lowney: And I would not think that… Material things that aren't… Living… Actually can comprehend themselves without
Charles Lowney: A gerrymandering of the language, kind of a playing on, sort of an ambiguity between parts comprehending into a whole, and
Charles Lowney: mental, epistemic comprehending, but I do see that, that…
Charles Lowney: We… when we comprehend things, right, we…
Charles Lowney: we have meanings on them that we cannot separate from the thing, right? It's entangled, so they are meanings as well, right? We can't…
Charles Lowney: We see forms in things, and we can't say that those forms are our own invention or psychological features. They're actually in the things.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah.
Charles Lowney: And, and to that extent, they are comprehended.
Charles Lowney: by the form, but it is through me that they are comprehended. I don't think they comprehend themselves.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Hmm.
Charles Lowney: And that goes into the idea of participatory reality, where it's our being in the worlds and our commitment in the world that manifests reality, both the reality of the actual things and the forms.
Charles Lowney: So, I'll leave it at that for now, and we can talk a little bit more about emergentism, or the difference between
Charles Lowney: Concepts, universals, and forms, and substantial forms, if we want to get into that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Could I ask a clarifying question? So, and kind of one of the last ideas you were sharing there, so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Were you indicating that, say, in a possible world where
Martin Turkis Jr.: Humans didn't arise. No creatures with kind of similarly developed noetic powers were to have arisen.
Martin Turkis Jr.: that then there… there would somehow be an absence of form, even though, let's say, all else, you know, kind of all else, roughly considered equal, right? In terms of development? Or did I misunderstand that, misinterpret?
Charles Lowney: That's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: It sounded like you were saying, essentially, our presence is necessary, to some extent, for the intelligible existence.
Charles Lowney: Yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Of anything else, but without necessarily kind of then… but still with, like, a slippage between being annoying. But I may have been misunderstanding, or may not have come out right.
Charles Lowney: Flippage between being and what?
Martin Turkis Jr.: and knowing.
Charles Lowney: And no one.
Charles Lowney: Yeah, that's… that's an interesting observation. I think…
Charles Lowney: When we… you connect being and knowing, right?
Charles Lowney: knowing and being. I guess it would depend on whether you are a panpsychist.
Charles Lowney: Or if you think that minds emerge in nature.
Charles Lowney: And if minds emerge in nature.
Charles Lowney: then there's something there, but it is not knowable until a mind apprehends it in a way. This is probably the post-Kantian thing that Damon was talking about, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: potentially knowable? Would it be potentially knowable? If mines are possible, like, on your view, right, with mines…
Charles Lowney: Would it be potentially knowable?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Potentially, if it's within the…
Charles Lowney: realm of feasibility that a mine could arise to.
Martin Turkis Jr.: To then comprehend the thing, in the sense you're saying, then… then would it… could we say it's potentially comprehensible?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Prior to time t, when the mind arises to comprehend it.
Charles Lowney: If it's actual, it's potentially knowable.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean, on my view on the larger thing, because I didn't mention, right? I mean, you know well, because you've read the whole book and commented on it, too, which was very helpful, but
Martin Turkis Jr.: that… that if something's potential, I take it to be a part of reality. It's… that clearly doesn't mean that it's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Actual.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Otherwise, why would.
Charles Lowney: Right. It's… its existence…
Charles Lowney: Right? And I think this is a big difference between Platonists and non-Platonists, in a way, right? Even people like Frege and my dissertation advisor, Jako Hintika, right? When you consider
Charles Lowney: Universals, concepts, generals is real, like C.S. Peirce does.
Charles Lowney: then, you are… you're saying there's a weight to possibility, that possibility has to be dealt with in a way… Jako Hintika's possible moral semantics, right? In order to understand anything, we need non-existent possibilities, so… so they play a part
Charles Lowney: Not only in epistemology, but in ontology for them, right? So… so this is the… the realism,
Charles Lowney: Where you want to say… but you still want to distinguish between
Charles Lowney: The existent, or the real, and the actual, don't you?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Well.
Charles Lowney: I mean…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Existent cover… existence would include the potential and the actual, and then.
Charles Lowney: erect, because they both exist in the sense that,
Charles Lowney: We can conceive of them, they are forms, even if it's a potential form versus an actualized form.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah.
Charles Lowney: Right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah. Yeah, so that would be the overall. The real is anything that's potential
Martin Turkis Jr.: if it's potential, then it could be actualized under the, you know, appropriate circumstances. And then within that, you distinguish between potentiality and actuality, but…
Charles Lowney: But the difference between potentiality and actuality actually takes place in the realm of nature.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean… It definitely takes place there, I don't know that it only takes place there.
Charles Lowney: If something is a form, either it's a form of the potential or a form of the actual, but it's not.
Charles Lowney: moving.
Charles Lowney: At what point in time do we have things evolve from one thing to another, from being potential to being actual?
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean… I mean, maybe so, I'm not… I would just… I mean, I'm agnostic on things now that I was probably not agnostic on 5 years ago.
Charles Lowney: Right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: So, you know, I mentioned, you know, I referenced in the article that was in response to, you know,
Martin Turkis Jr.: the responses to my book, the biologist Michael Levin,
Martin Turkis Jr.: And he's done… I don't know this research well enough to really explain it, but he's,
Martin Turkis Jr.: Done some research, apparently, where they've… they've…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Sort of noticed that even some algorithms where people thought that, you know, traditionally would think that everything in the algorithm is explicit.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? Will do some things that aren't explicitly in the algorithm.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? And he's opened all kinds of wild and woolly ideas about, you know, what could be…
Martin Turkis Jr.: some kind of a mind, right? I mean, he's interested in expanding what he calls the latent platonic space, not just to forms, but to minds, where if you…
Martin Turkis Jr.: actualize the right kind of, you know, physical parameters for the mind to touch down, then it touches down. And I don't know what to say precisely about any of that, but those kinds of… of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: findings.
Martin Turkis Jr.: make me a little bit more reticent to say, yeah, for sure, it's just nature. Because if it turns out that an algorithm could have what some people would call side quests that aren't explicitly in the algorithm, and then raises the question, well, why the heck would the algorithm
Martin Turkis Jr.: produce this, right? You could at least theorize a possible world with no material elements in which
Martin Turkis Jr.: There are algorithms…
Martin Turkis Jr.: actualizing things in non-material ways that would be both predicted by the explicit contents of the algorithm. I'm just… I'm just kind of spitballing at this point, does that make sense? But those kinds of spitballing
Martin Turkis Jr.: possibilities make me a little bit more reticent than I would have been 5 or 10 years ago, to just be like, you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: take some kind of hard Cartesian line and say, yeah, the mouse can feel no pain.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? you could do whatever you want to it. So I'm just a little bit…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Gonna… gonna not make any final calls on those sorts of things.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But, I did want to comment really quickly, and then whatever the directors want to do, more from Charlie, or love to hear from anybody else, but when I'm talking about a flat ontology, I agree with you, the… I liked how you called the structure of comprehensive entities bumpy, I think that's a great description.
Martin Turkis Jr.: the flatness is simply saying that there's, you know, for example, some takes on Aristotelian metaphysics would say that, hyomorphic, compounds are
Martin Turkis Jr.: primary substance informs our secondary substance. They're substantial, but they're less substantial than the primary, and so the flat ontology is saying, like, no, no, no, no, no, if it exists, it's a substance.
Martin Turkis Jr.: substances have the following structure, comprehensive entity, but you're right, the actual structure itself is bumpy, and then, of course, the different comprehensive entities have different impacts, causal impacts, and so there's a lot of bumpiness and hierarchy, you know, a hierarchy, the metaphysical iliatic hierarchy, and then, of course, there's the hierarchy, which creates the bumpiness I think you were originally referring to, the
Martin Turkis Jr.: mere logical subsidiary detail to joint meaning relationship. But, that's just a quick response. It may not be a satisfying one, most likely not, but…
Martin Turkis Jr.: That's how I'd respond to that, you know.
mullins: Why don't we open it up a bit, and we can always come back to Damon and Charlie and go further with this, but are there other people? Now remember, Gus and I don't have the vision of everybody at the same time, so you have to raise your hand, or push the button, or something like that.
mullins: Gus, can you see somebody who's got a hand up?
mullins: Dick Moody has his hand up.
richard moodey: Thank you. Can you hear me?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, hi Dick, how are you?
richard moodey: I wanted to make sure I unmuted.
richard moodey: a big difference that I see between… Polandi… And both Plato and Aristotle
richard moodey: is that Polanyi was an evolutionist.
richard moodey: I know that Marjorie Green thought that he misinterpreted evolution, but
richard moodey: Not so badly that he didn't have this idea, the basic idea that forms change.
richard moodey: Evolution is a… Involves changing the forms in which… by which species evolve from
richard moodey: You know, so that there's… there's… that whole tree of life kind of thing is a… is a… is a picture of changing forms.
richard moodey: And… As I understand both Plato and Aristotle.
richard moodey: they held that forms were unchanging, and one of the similarities between Aristotle and Plato was that Aristotle agreed with Plato in that forms were unchanging and eternal, that they're somehow
richard moodey: Fixed for all eternity.
richard moodey: End.
richard moodey: I like Karl Popper's idea that
richard moodey: evolution as… is a metaphysical research program as much as it is a theory. And so that I see the metaphysics that Polanyi, embraced as including that kind of idea of changing forms. I… and…
richard moodey: I guess I should quit.
Martin Turkis Jr.: No, I mean… Yeah, I… it's a… it's a big question. I don't… So, first, there is…
Martin Turkis Jr.: And there's a section in my book where I give some examples and kind of cite some other papers that list examples, right? Where Plato does seem to say that there can be certain sorts of change within the forms.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And, and also that the forms are both one and multiple at the same time, more clearly. And so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I don't… I see how that…
Martin Turkis Jr.: would present a problem from some perspectives. From my point of view, there'd be maybe perspectives where things have gotten…
Martin Turkis Jr.: maybe certain elements of different ideas have become a little bit overly ossified, and so that kind of becomes, like, the point of reference that that one doesn't want to change on, if that makes sense, right? So if it were the case that
Martin Turkis Jr.: Plato…
Martin Turkis Jr.: there was no room for, say, evolution within the theory of the forms, then I would think there would be something wrong with the theory of the forms, but,
Martin Turkis Jr.: I guess, one, there's, you know, I mean, there's a section in my response piece in Tradition and Discovery where I'm responding to a Neo-Aristotelian, and I'm essentially saying, I think there's room for both
Martin Turkis Jr.: Form is used by Aristotle, and form as used by Plato and Platonists.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? And so maybe it would be helpful to say.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I would probably want to characterize, like, a species as it's evolving through time, right? Just to prevent confusion, terminologically. Say, the morphology is changing, i.e, the substantial form
Martin Turkis Jr.: of these particular iterations are changing, just like there were lots of different velocipedes that still fell under the same stable concept. There were bicycles, unicycles, tricycles, you could orient the wheels thus, you could orient them thus. They still fall under a stable
Martin Turkis Jr.: unchanging rubric, but in terms of their actualization, right, you know, people are trying them out and saying, like, oh, it doesn't really work as well if you have two giant wheels here, let's try them, you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: in this orientation, and then they work it out, so there's… I see it as being a bit more flexible, but…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I definitely understand how various conceptions of what all, you know, not just evolution, but what Aristotle and Plato said kind of come down to us
Martin Turkis Jr.: And, maybe with some of the ambiguities or gray areas taken out of it, and then it seems like it's conflicting. I don't see it as being too conflictual, but…
Martin Turkis Jr.: It's a good question.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Dick, thank you.
Gus Breytspraak: Duane was, first, I think, in line, but now also Charlie and Stan and Walt, so, keep it… keep it relatively short if you can, Duane.
Duane Lookingbill: I'll keep it real short. I was just gonna ask about… Plato and Aristotle in Polanyi.
Duane Lookingbill: And I think he's addressing that, and it looks like I need to read a little bit more of what he's said in response in the TED, so I'll do that.
Gus Breytspraak: Okay, thanks.
Gus Breytspraak: Walt, I think. Or, no, Stan?
Stan Scott: Hi.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Can you hear me okay?
Gus Breytspraak: Yes.
Stan Scott: I,
Stan Scott: I remember talking to Martin way back, maybe the first paper he ever presented about form and field, and…
Stan Scott: at a Polani Society meeting and saying… and thinking.
Stan Scott: I see where you're going with this, that you are…
Stan Scott: Whether it's deliberate or not, I'm not sure, but what struck me about it is trying to restore some kind of
Stan Scott: intelligible, And, pragmatic, concept of of universals, Man of transcendence.
Stan Scott: that has been stripped away from Western culture.
Stan Scott: For 100 years, more or less, maybe more.
Stan Scott: And philosophy has played its part in
Stan Scott: And, you know, ignoring or, or…
Stan Scott: Or, or denouncing transcendence of any kind, so I, I, I think that,
Stan Scott: There is something, you know, to be said about, you know, the, universal,
Stan Scott: what Polani calls the universal, organizing principles.
Stan Scott: That are… that seem to be there prior to… To instantiation of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Martin puts it…
Stan Scott: eloquently in the book, I think. I'm a big fan of this book, in a way, but I see the use of Plato in particular
Stan Scott: as a little bit over… overstating the case in a non-emergent… I mean, the very terminology of Platonism
Stan Scott: Seems to,
Stan Scott: to dismiss emergentism, just in the general understanding of Platonism. And I think that what Martin is trying to do, what I see, Martin, you're
Stan Scott: at least what I get from it, what I resonate to most is
Stan Scott: Some kind of intersection between the experiential and the transcendent, and the experiential meaning the emergent, possibilities of…
Stan Scott: of everything. The way you elevate the idea of potentiality, to a reality.
Martin Turkis Jr.: to an actuality. A potential… something can be real, but only potential.
Stan Scott: In other words. And I see… I see a very… a kind of elegant argumentation in that direction in this book, so that's what I like about it.
Stan Scott: Anyone else want to comment about my sense of what the word Platonism means in the general philosophical
Stan Scott: vocabulary, and how Martin is using it.
Stan Scott: We'll stop.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Thanks, Tim.
mullins: Well, next…
Walt Gulick: Shall I say something right now? I want to pick up a little bit.
Walt Gulick: on, what Dick Moody said earlier.
Walt Gulick: And that is, Martin, you've talked about forms changing.
Walt Gulick: And I remember you've mentioned things like Eros and so forth.
Walt Gulick: But… but I don't really understand how that relates to a couple things.
Walt Gulick: You know, Mert's theory is a basis for saying how novelty occurs in the world.
Walt Gulick: How does… how does change and novelty come about?
Walt Gulick: if forums change, what's changing it? Where is the dynamism? I'm not really very clear about
Walt Gulick: How you're bringing that about in a…
Walt Gulick: Rather than just a kind of passing way. You know, I think a little bit about Whitehead, for instance.
Walt Gulick: Whitehead, of course, with eternal objects, has something very much like a formal theory.
Walt Gulick: But he brings to it also, the old,
Walt Gulick: A much more dynamic, kind of, agency to it.
Walt Gulick: In the world of living things, we can see where that agency occurs with amoebas, as you've talked about. I'm fine with that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But you want to extend it beyond the world of…
Walt Gulick: of living things, it seems like. And how does that all work? Where is the agency? Where… where is the dynamism?
Martin Turkis Jr.: No, good question, as always, from you, Walt. Also, you don't look a day older from when I first met you.
Martin Turkis Jr.: By the way.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And I look a lot older. I've gotten gray hair since then, so good on you.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, when my wife sees pictures of me from around the area, I met many of you. She says, oh my gosh, we're old now. So, so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Apparently, the dynamism is more active in my case than for many of you all, but .
Walt Gulick: My brain may be kind of stuck, that's all true.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But, good to see you. So…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I see what you're saying. I would agree that definitely in the book, I don't have any kind of carefully worked out
Martin Turkis Jr.: argumentation about the dynamism in the forums. They're kind of responding to Dick's question earlier, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: that was kind of all I could do to get what I… what I did done, done, you know, amidst all of the kind of hassles and responsibilities of life, but… but I think those would be good.
Dale Cannon: Additional, you know, directions for development.
Dale Cannon: tubes.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But I don't know if they would be satisfying to kind of everybody, you know, especially depending on the degree to which one is really tied into using the language of emergence, so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I can just happily translate almost everything that anybody says about emergence, who's really into emergence theory, into
Martin Turkis Jr.: vacillations between potentiality and actuality. Like, pretty much everything that anybody ever says, but it's emergence, like, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: came into this form from this other form. I shouldn't use the word form, right? But it shifted its modality, and now it's detectable
Martin Turkis Jr.: by these empirical means, whereas prior to that, it was only detectable by intuitive means, right? I.e, before any bicycles have been built, before any velocipedes have been built, people are thinking about it, hmm, like, can I do this?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? And when they do this, they're essentially…
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, kind of reaching into the other side of the actuality poten… they're… they're actualized, they're reaching into the realm of the potential, seeing potential relationships between forms, within forms, and then figuring out how can they instantiate it, right? And it's easy to see how that works when we've got
Martin Turkis Jr.: the agential character of the person doing it, right? But of course, that also, you know… you know, you could say, well, therefore the bicycle's emergent, and I could happily say, yeah, it's… now it's actual. I'm riding around on it before it was… there was a time when it was just potential, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: And it was potentially even before there was anybody considering its possibility and how to actualize it. So I understand that when it comes to something like
Martin Turkis Jr.: non-artifact coming into being, or these other, you know, so-called emergent properties. Without that active agent who's doing the arranging, it becomes a little bit…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Maybe more abstract, but… but it still works from… from…
Martin Turkis Jr.: On that shift in modality for me.
Walt Gulick: And what's driving it to change?
Walt Gulick: Beyond the agency.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, but beyond the 8… right, right. So, say, like, in the process of evolution or something, or…
Walt Gulick: Well, I'm thinking, let's think more cosmologically.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah.
Walt Gulick: How was that all occurring?
Walt Gulick: What makes it happen?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Well, I… jeez.
Martin Turkis Jr.: How come I have to answer that? I'm sort of joking, right? You know, I… Wha…
Walt Gulick: I mean…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I say the good. The good is driving it, right? Like, that there's some kind of a drift towards existence, right? I don't think it has to be conceptualized, you know, as a personified kind of a force, but there's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: there's a directionality or maybe a flow, and this is something that I don't really touch at all on the book, right? But just in the terms of this kind of conversation, you know, I mean essentially, like, yeah, why did the Big Bang happen? Why did it not happen?
Martin Turkis Jr.: it'll probably be difficult to get a lot of consensus on that… on that, but… but yeah, I do think that there's, I guess, a drift towards that, and then you'd have to kind of sort out, you know, well, what about entropy, and so on and so forth, and…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Lo and behold, all of a sudden, you're kind of back with Plato debating Heraclitus again.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And so, you know, I don't know if we'll be able to completely resolve that, but…
Martin Turkis Jr.: But I'm sure that's very unsatisfying, but… Yeah, it's a hard question.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean, but can I say, like, even take something like a lump of granite, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Like, those are elements that could be…
Martin Turkis Jr.: separated out, right? Over time, given entropy, you know, out in the weather, the granite's gonna break down, it's gonna shift its form, right? You know, to use old Platonic language, it's in the realm of becoming.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? So it's impermanent in that sense, and yet there it is for a long time, holding together.
Martin Turkis Jr.: It seems different from an amoeba, because it's holding together, doesn't have the same kind of… easily detectable activity.
Martin Turkis Jr.: that an amoeba does, once we can, you know, zoom in with a microscope or what have you, and watch it doing its thing, and…
Martin Turkis Jr.: figure out why it's going here rather than there. But nonetheless, that kind of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: hold that it has over its subsidiary particulars, as long as it can maintain it against the drift of entropy, seems to be a something, not a nothing, and it seems to me to be on the same continuum, right? With kind of, like, appropriate gradations built into it as the amoeba seeking its…
Martin Turkis Jr.: optimal salinity, or us, you know, doing everything we do. That's kind of the direction I'm trying to go in.
Martin Turkis Jr.: It's a good question. Hard question, as usual, from Walt.
Martin Turkis Jr.: You know?
Gus Breytspraak: Colin, Colin, and then, John.
Colin Cordner: Oh, sorry, thank you. Yeah, I'm just reformulating my thoughts as you're responding.
Colin Cordner: Martin, preamble by saying, it's like, I was… when I read your book, it was quite…
Colin Cordner: Interesting me. Interesting to me.
Colin Cordner: how you sort of put a lens on, you know, readings of Plato.
Colin Cordner: that suggested, I think fairly strongly, maybe you said it outright, that perhaps the forms,
Colin Cordner: If reading Plato could be understood as comprehensive entities, so using Piety to understand… to elucidate aspects of Plato which are a little bit obscure, or hard to get at.
Colin Cordner: coming from, like, a Cartesian civilizational background, right? That caused me to think back, well.
Colin Cordner: yeah, technically, he does… his characters do kind of say that in a sophist, the five primary forms are sort of, like, comprehending each other in a certain kind of way, they're all implicated in each other. Yeah, your usya, you know, being in the feminine declension, you know, stillness and motion.
Colin Cordner: And, sameness and difference, right? And they're all kind of intertwined, interacting with each other.
Colin Cordner: And I'm guessing, just kind of following on with this conversation, that that may even be a means of understanding what
Colin Cordner: the Iliac Stranger's getting at when he's talking about Duneis, you know, power, potency, right? Is that it's just a conceptual term to peg down this
Colin Cordner: complex interaction with these basic forms, how they're working themselves out over and over and over again in what we would probably now call a phenomenal world, right? So there's your motion, there's your change, there's your… both your impermanence and your impermanence, right? Your dynamic.
Colin Cordner: And how you kind of bring in that paradigmatic.
Colin Cordner: Cause, too, into the conversation in your footnotes, which is very helpful.
Colin Cordner: I don't know, how would you… how would you riff on that? Because I'm just kind of, like, having these things pop into my head right now.
Colin Cordner: At this very moment.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Oh, I mean… I mean…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I… how'd I riff on it? I don't know, maybe I would just copy it.
Colin Cordner: Copy it down.
Martin Turkis Jr.: and quote you in a paper or something like that. Yeah, no, that was great, because I hadn't… I hadn't, in my own mind, connected it to that section of the sofas, so yeah, I think that's a really insightful reading, so thanks for that, Colin.
Martin Turkis Jr.: But yeah, I think that that is the kind of thing that I'm… Moving towards.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So, thanks for putting a finer point on some aspects. That's definitely worth going back and rereading the Sophist and looking at that more closely.
Colin Cordner: Thank you. Well, I hope you write that paper so I don't have to. I'm… I'm pissed.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I was just gonna say, you're welcome to introduce.
Colin Cordner: Don't make me do it.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Don't make it? Okay.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I'll put it on the list, then.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And thank you, everybody, for having interest in, you know, reading… reading some of what I've written and everything. John's had his hand up for a long time.
Gus Breytspraak: Yes, John.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Always has hard questions for me. Yeah, it's been up so long that there's a whole lot more to say, or…
Jon Fennell: than I originally was thinking about.
Jon Fennell: Let me first say, Martin, I think what you could productively point to in relation to Walt's question, his challenge.
Jon Fennell: Is the ordering principle.
Jon Fennell: and… I want to add… One thing to that.
Jon Fennell: like everything else that Polani points his finger at that's a source of meaning.
Jon Fennell: We have to remember the role of the person in that meeting.
Jon Fennell: Okay? So it's not just that the ordering principle is out there and gave rise to whatever has happened. It's also the case that we, in perceiving the ordering principle, are participating in that
Jon Fennell: And actually making a contribution to the meaning that we are perceiving that is unfolding. Now, I'm going to come back to the ordering principle in a moment, because my original question…
Jon Fennell: was sparked… actually, it's not a question. My original observation was sparked by Charlie 15 minutes ago, maybe, when he suggested there might be a problem
Jon Fennell: for… the forms As a result of the fact of evolution.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I remember that's what Charlie said.
Jon Fennell: What struck me when I was troubled by that point is that… Could it be the case that…
Jon Fennell: evolution itself is a form.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Oof.
Jon Fennell: In other words…
Jon Fennell: Rather than the emergence of new species or something being a challenge to the theory of the forms.
Jon Fennell: It may be that due to the ordering principle.
Jon Fennell: that… Evolution itself is the… is the… is the actual unfolding of the form.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Another…
Jon Fennell: We're liable to be shipwrecked by something which should not be…
Martin Turkis Jr.: So… Yeah.
Jon Fennell: So, problematic. The… The emergence of these new forms
Jon Fennell: Is a product of a form.
Jon Fennell: Okay, now, now let's go back to the ordering principle.
Jon Fennell: That ordering principle And Walt kept asking, where… where is… where is the…
Jon Fennell: Where is the… the source of this… Of this momentum.
Jon Fennell: And I think the Polanjian answer is the source of the momentum is that ordering principle, okay?
Jon Fennell: But the ordering principle… to repeat what I said at the outset, that ordering principle is not out there all by itself.
Jon Fennell: we… this is the personalism side, right?
Jon Fennell: Without… without the experience and the appreciation of that ordering principle, for all intents and purposes, it wouldn't be there.
Jon Fennell: And so, so, I just want… well, I've said it all.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay, no, I… well, thanks for that, John. I… yeah, I love that I would…
Martin Turkis Jr.: wholeheartedly with you on everything until the very last phrase, where you said, for all intents and purposes, it wouldn't be there, but but yeah, that… I think that's a great… a great insight, so thank you for that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And of course, I mean, I draw pretty heavily in different places on,
Martin Turkis Jr.: your paper from… was it 2014 or 2017, where you're talking about Nagel's book, and
Martin Turkis Jr.: whether Polanyi's emergentism is reductive in Thomas Nagel's sense or not, so that was a big…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Help to me. Wait, where did… did John just disappear?
Jon Fennell: No, I'm still here.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Oh, okay, good.
Jon Fennell: I brought my hand down, I think that changed my stature, okay, but…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Thank you, John, I appreciate that very much.
Jon Fennell: Earlier, you flattered me, and perhaps Phil as well, by saying that we would immediately think of passages from Polanyi that would illustrate one thing or another.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Phew.
Jon Fennell: And I can't really take all that credit, but I… one passage did come to mind, And,
Jon Fennell: It's where Polani impersonal Knowledge says.
Jon Fennell: We are both the authors and the readers of the script.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Hmm,
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah.
Jon Fennell: And then he raises… it appears to be a… a,
Jon Fennell: a question… what's that? What do we call it? Questions that we don't really mean to raise?
Jon Fennell: He then immediately raises the question, were we not here, would there be no script to read?
Jon Fennell: And I think his answer is yes. There would be no script to read were there not somebody… were the… were we not here as authors of that script. So, apply that to the ordering principle.
Jon Fennell: And hence to the… to Walt's question, where… where does the momentum come from?
Jon Fennell: The momentum comes from this kind of joint this, this cooperation.
Jon Fennell: Between… We, as individual Creators of meaning, and the entities that we posit from which we find the meaning.
Walt Gulick: Well, let me just quickly respond. This is an interesting point.
Walt Gulick: Polani's ordering principle, he talks about towards the end of personal knowledge, Makes sense within a limited…
Walt Gulick: Rage, because he talks about it as the tendency of a system
Walt Gulick: To seek, lower and lower statuses of…
Walt Gulick: of, energy. I mean, it's a kind of a gradient. His principle is kind of a gradient thing.
Walt Gulick: But still, that doesn't answer the larger question of where that energy comes from, and how you understand
Walt Gulick: What's driving something towards a lower state of energy?
Walt Gulick: So, I guess I'm saying that the ordering principle doesn't do as much as I think maybe you think, John, but maybe it does. I'm raising the question.
Jon Fennell: It can do as much… it can do as much as we invest in it.
Jon Fennell: And if we invest nothing in it, it won't do anything.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So…
Martin Turkis Jr.: But one thing that occurs to me to say, well, and I didn't phrase it this way before, right? And Colin mentioned how in the book I didn't use the term paradigmatic cause, but I started using it as something that was part of the Neoplatonic
Martin Turkis Jr.: causal schema, which took Aristotle's causes and then added to it the paradigmatic causation of the forms. And I feel like Charlie should like this, because it's sort of like systems theory kind of language, right? But, yeah, I love John's idea of
Martin Turkis Jr.: Evolution as a form, but so the forms in their…
Martin Turkis Jr.: role as paradigmatic causes, they're like attractors.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? So that they touch down, you know, when the conditions are met, and so on and so forth, and so…
Martin Turkis Jr.: that concept of the attractor could be of some use there too, right?
Walt Gulick: Yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Like, potentialities want to be actualized.
Martin Turkis Jr.: In a sense, if they can, which of course kind of uses some sort of panpsychist-type language there, but
Martin Turkis Jr.: Different ways to phrase it.
Walt Gulick: And that's kind of where Michael Levin goes.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Oh, yeah.
Walt Gulick: Yep.
Walt Gulick: Good.
Walt Gulick: I don't know who's next, but Phil has had his hand up.
mullins: I think Charlie's ahead of me.
Charles Lowney: Yeah, well, while we're on the subject of dynamic systems and attractors, going back, way back.
Charles Lowney: to, Dick Moody's question.
Charles Lowney: this idea that, you've got forms in both Aristotle and Plato, that, are not…
Charles Lowney: Conceived in terms of, evolution. But Polanyi is thinking in terms of evolution.
Charles Lowney: And the idea, one of the things about emergentism is that
Charles Lowney: It brings back the idea of forms and telos in terms of dynamic systems.
Charles Lowney: In terms of the tendency for nature to fall into certain patterns, right? This is the geometry of nature, right? Terrence Deacon talks about, into a system, like a… into a whirlpool. You get it accidentally, but then it's got its form, and it's pulling everything in towards this, you know.
Charles Lowney: funnel-shaped thing. It's organizing its parts in terms of a form.
Charles Lowney: So you, you have, the emergence giving you a way of understanding Formal causes and tele…
Charles Lowney: Causes as attractors towards these forms.
Charles Lowney: You have these in nature, though, right? The idea that,
Charles Lowney: that forms change, I think, is… I think we've got to separate that out from the idea that… because I don't think forms change.
Charles Lowney: things change. Actual things move from potential to actuality, and they change.
Charles Lowney: And then you might say they changed their forms, but it's not the form changing, it's the thing…
Charles Lowney: Changing. But the form as a cause
Charles Lowney: is… is… that I would consider something like a substantial form for Aristotle, rather than…
Charles Lowney: A more broad form, right?
Charles Lowney: There are forms that we have and can conceive of that
Charles Lowney: aren't being actualized in the world because they cannot be in this particular universe. They're mere potential.
Charles Lowney: Rather than actualizable potential.
Charles Lowney: Well, I think emergentism brings in this idea that… that we… we are falling towards different…
Charles Lowney: sorts of unities, right? This,
Charles Lowney: gradient of potential that Walt was just talking about that's, that is described in terms of ordering principles.
Charles Lowney: And so there are those kinds of forms, but if all forms were…
Charles Lowney: the same, in a way, right? If we didn't have these ideas of habits of nature as being forms, which I think comes from Perse.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Huh.
Charles Lowney: There's kind of a distinction there between those kinds of forms and the idea of,
Charles Lowney: generals or universals as… as real, because they can…
Charles Lowney: instigate themselves in different ways, right? And nature does it one way, through nature, but we also…
Charles Lowney: Instantiate forms, like, potential forms, in terms of our actions and behaviors and our commitments.
Charles Lowney: So, I just think that there needs to be a distinction, perhaps, between a substantial form
Charles Lowney: and forms more generally for Plato.
Charles Lowney: And,
Charles Lowney: with substantial forms… even the notion of substance for Aristotle was based on an organism, so I think that's what I think.
Charles Lowney: Yeah. The idea of, oof.
Charles Lowney: Right?
Charles Lowney: organism system, sort of, as the kind of basic, actual blocks, building blocks of nature that are informed, right?
Charles Lowney: with… Potential that is actualizable in this universe, versus, kind of.
Charles Lowney: forms in general that might not be actualizable in this universe, but they have their own kind of reality, because we cannot distinguish their epistemic function from their ontological.
Martin Turkis Jr.: status.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, I would agree with most, maybe all of that, and the way that I…
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, maybe not entirely clearly would distinguish, but the Aristotelian substantial form, right? Kind of translating it into Polani's terminology, I would be calling that the joint meaning, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: But one of the distinctions that I point out between a lot of the neo-Aristotelian or contemporary hylomorphism, the way… and there are lots of different varieties of that, right? But,
Martin Turkis Jr.: in general, they will make a harder distinction between the substantial form and the compound, whereas Polanyi will…
Martin Turkis Jr.: call the entity itself its joint meaning. Like, he'll… he'll oscillate between those, like, the comprehensive entity itself, or that is to say, the joint meaning of the particulars. So there, it seems like…
Martin Turkis Jr.: the entity and the substantial form kind of get collapsed for Polani, which I'm okay with, but I agree with that distinction, right? That there's room for the substantial forms as it shows up, like the particular morphology and then the platonic forms having…
Martin Turkis Jr.: But they're related, right? And that was one thing that sometimes when you listen to certain… certain, certainly not all, but certain types of neo-Aristotelian thinkers…
Martin Turkis Jr.: they'll take a very hard line, and it's like, the substantial forms just kind of hang in midair, right? And then they will, you know, amongst these, you know, they're somehow supervenient upon this body that it has, and it starts to take on a kind of very dualistic
Martin Turkis Jr.: type of a tenor, certainly not all forms of contemporary hylomorphism are like that.
Charles Lowney: I think a Polani interpretation can…
Charles Lowney: give a better Aristotelian interpretation of that, where you have the organism itself as the substance.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Someone who.
Charles Lowney: To one level of it versus a lower level of it.
Charles Lowney: Yeah, that makes… that makes more sense.
Walt Gulick: Phil!
mullins: I'd like to, raise an issue that I think Vincent Colipetro raises up a bit.
mullins: It seems to me that, you might say that, in Polanya there's epistemology, and certainly that's absolutely central.
mullins: there is, something that we might call ontology, which I… I tend to think of Polonia, at least, as an ontological minimalist.
mullins: And, the evidence for that is that, really, it was only about 10 years where he,
mullins: uses that term, and he seems to use it very carefully, ontological referent, and that sort of thing, and he says, in tacit dimension at the beginning that it's a deduction from the other aspects of tacit knowing. And then, I think as Esther has pointed out, he doesn't seem to use it very much late, and if you look at personal knowledge, of course, the main two things that I can think of where he's
mullins: talking about Ontology is ontology of mind and ontology of commitment.
mullins: Now, there's the whole fourth part, which you might say the last three chapters are in some ways about ontology, but they're really about biology and knowing life and anthropogenesis, it seems to me.
mullins: So there's epistemology, there's a certain, what I would call a limited kind of ontology, but there's also something that probably should be called cosmology in Polanya. And it really does seem to me that much of what you are doing is
mullins: very imaginative cosmology, and I think that's good and interesting, and it in some ways enriches, perhaps, some of the things that Polanya was, was,
mullins: had a hint of, you know? I think in some ways, Polanya's emergence
mullins: Is, is an effort to, Probably do cosmology.
mullins: And I think what you would like to do, it looks to me like, is hook that up to Plato.
mullins: And I think people like, Color Petro want you to hook it up to people like Purse, you know, because Purse talks about things like, how do you get, how do you get,
mullins: from big buying forward, well, you have to talk about tendency, and then you have to talk about habit, and the development of habit is really where things, develop, so…
mullins: It seems to me that those are kind of interesting possibilities for you to develop some of the things that you are already working on.
Martin Turkis Jr.: No, I would agree, I mean, Walt mentioned Whitehead earlier, which, yeah, both Whitehead and purse, I haven't really read enough of to kind of meaningfully engage, but I have no doubt that there would be a lot there. And I certainly don't think that
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, that Polanyi has the only… you know, that Polanyi is the only guy from the 20th century, say, who was on to anything worth doing, or that this is the only… you know, what I'm doing with it is the only…
Martin Turkis Jr.: direction forward, but but yeah, I mean, I like those ideas as well. But one thing that has become clearer to me, or I… or at least I've become more, I guess, kind of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: convinced by it, right, is, some of the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: as it would be for everybody, right? I mean, the particular interests that Polanyi has, the things he does do and don't do, are to a significant extent, kind of conditioned by the particular
Martin Turkis Jr.: kind of contingent spot in, say, intellectual history that he's in, right? You know, what he's going to emphasize, what he's gonna not emphasize, and so as conversations move on, I remember Dale, asking me a question, through writing about
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, kind of like the banishment of formal and final causation, and I would say those are no longer banished.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? At this point, it's not that everybody's gonna accept them, but there's certainly plenty of different perspectives that get, you know, will get a respectful hearing from a lot of other perspectives that are taking those seriously, right? So some of the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I think… assumptions and biases that… that Polanyi was facing in his contemporary milieu have shifted
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right? And so then that can then free you up to be both, I think, faithful to his project and the direction as best we can kind of see where it was going, but then also emphasize some other things, right? That perhaps if he were to have emphasized, who knows what he thought in his heart of hearts, right? But that he just would have been really laughed out of court, right? Or something like that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So anyway, that's… that's an element of that, and somebody like a purse would be…
Martin Turkis Jr.: like that, too. I mean, even the questions about evolution, one thing, again, that I'm not well enough versed in the science to really comment on, but I do mention it, and…
Martin Turkis Jr.: In, my most recent paper is,
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, these kind of novel organisms that people like Levin and others are doing that are not the product of an evolutionary process, i.e. they don't touch the DNA, right? It's like a throat set, it could be any…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Any of our cells scraped out of our throats.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And there it is in a petri dish repairing damaged neurons, right? Who knew that your throat cell would do that if, sort of, set loose, right? Or the frog embryo cells, the xenobots that reproduce in a novel fashion, and so on and so forth. But if you were to look at their DNA,
Martin Turkis Jr.: it's just wild frog DNA, right? No changes. So those kinds of things are interesting to kind of think about, too, like, how…
Martin Turkis Jr.: obviously, that doesn't invalidate in any way, shape, or form evolution as the primary way that organisms shape themselves, right? Does that make sense? But it's… it's just an interesting additional layer of complication onto kind of a narrative that's… you know, I mean, still people…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Even though people have known about, you know, epigenetic effects for a long time, people still generally think
Martin Turkis Jr.: in a kind of a deterministic way about DNA.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Right, just like the average person on the street, like, that's… it's like all in the jeans, you know, kind of a thing. And so, yeah, all these things, I think, are relevant to kind of taking things in different directions, and…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I don't know, there's a lot out there. But I'm really appreciating everybody's thoughts and comments. I've written down some
Martin Turkis Jr.: Good ideas for future thought.
mullins: There were 3 hands up, but I can't remember whose they were.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I see Walt, Duane, and Dick, with hands up.
Walt Gulick: I think Dick… I don't know, maybe… I know, Dick, that was last. Dick was before me.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay.
richard moodey: Thank you. I have… a couple of comments on different things. There's been so much going on.
richard moodey: One of them is on tools.
richard moodey: And I like Martin's background of tools, because that helps me to remember.
Martin Turkis Jr.: We have some conceptual tools.
richard moodey: to think with now that Plato and Aristotle didn't. And one of them is the variation selection model that is used in evolutionary theory. You know, that there are random variations and then environmental selection. That's a tool of thought that we can use that Plato and Aristotle didn't have
richard moodey: Another tool of thought that we have now is chaos theory, and that was brought up
richard moodey: In talking about attractors already, but…
richard moodey: Chaos theory is a conceptual tool that we can use now to think about reality, and Plato and Aristotle didn't have that.
Martin Turkis Jr.: The other point that I wanted to bring up was the whole.
richard moodey: different conceptions of the ordering principle. If we take the Neoplatonists,
richard moodey: their idea of an ordinary Pittschool was a little bit like Everything is…
richard moodey: present in kind of… I use the analogy of the seed.
richard moodey: Everything is present in the one.
richard moodey: And then it unfolds. And so emergent is a pattern of unfolding potentialities that are there present in the one right from the beginning.
richard moodey: That's a different type of ordering principle than we have in evolutionary theory, in which the ordering principle now is not an unfolding, but rather random variations, most of which are unsuccessful, a few of which are selected by the environment to persist.
richard moodey: So… That's… Those are just… Two things that…
richard moodey: I wanted to get off my chest.
Charles Lowney: Is that Dwayne.
Duane Lookingbill: Yeah, just a quick, maybe, question. You, you mentioned, 11.
Duane Lookingbill: who I'm not familiar with, is he a biologist, or…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's…
Duane Lookingbill: My question is, In biology, in thinking in, biological terms, this… What you've suggested about
Duane Lookingbill: life and mind and language being spiritual, wholly spiritual. That when we're in this, we're already in the spiritual, we're not really…
Duane Lookingbill: reducing ourselves to material assumptions and mechanical processes. You didn't say that, but you suggested that. Is there someone else to read? Is there other people working in this same kind of
Duane Lookingbill: from two, distance, on life itself.
Duane Lookingbill: you know, we talked about metaphysics, someone mentioned metaphilosophical, I think we're really talking also about metamorphosis, but
Duane Lookingbill: Life itself is… It seems to be important in our moment of
Duane Lookingbill: A situational moment, whether you call it a crisis or not.
Duane Lookingbill: Is there anyone else you're reading that's…
Duane Lookingbill: I read David Bentley Hart, who, you know, starts out, you know, more in religion and writing, but covers this whole area, too. And, he mentions Rosen, and I just started to read
Duane Lookingbill: a book, Life Itself, it's called.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Hmm.
Duane Lookingbill: Is there anyone else that you would point us to, to sort of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean…
Duane Lookingbill: Extend… extend the metaphysics into… Yeah. I mean, I read David Bentley Hart.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Definitely. I mean…
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, in my book, I'm kind of responding… I respond to the neo-Aristotelians, I respond to some folks that kind of go under the moniker of the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: ontic structural realists, and, you know, some different… the neo-Aristotelians, I mean, I think all of those different…
Martin Turkis Jr.: camps, maybe, I think for your interest, less so the ontic structural realists might… might not be as much to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: And, you know, worth reading for you, but
Martin Turkis Jr.: I'm trying to think, is it Dennis Noble, and is it… does anybody…
mullins: That's just knowledge.
Martin Turkis Jr.: biologist.
Walt Gulick: Good.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, things like… things like that, right? But I'm certainly not an expert in those areas. I mean, I, of course, came across Levin because of my interest in Platonism, right? And I haven't gotten a chance… I just saw yesterday that he'll often post
Martin Turkis Jr.: videos on YouTube, so… so, you know, in the readings for today, there were some links to one YouTube video presentation by him, as well as a paper that I was drawing on, but
Martin Turkis Jr.: But,
Martin Turkis Jr.: he… I just saw that there's a brand new short video, I didn't have time to watch it before today, that's essentially saying, like, it's called something like, the Latent Platonic Space, like, Definition and a Research Program. So he, I mean, he's thinking of things not in terms of
Martin Turkis Jr.: kind of airy-fairy, speculative things, but he's actually looking to design experiments, so he says he wants to map it the way mathematical Platonists have sort of set up a map of
Martin Turkis Jr.: the mathematical platonic space, kind of relations of concepts, how they're unified. I don't know exactly how he's going to proceed to do that, but it'll be interesting to see. Yeah, so those are a couple quick ideas.
Duane Lookingbill: Thanks.
Walt Gulick: Yeah, I wanted to…
Walt Gulick: say several different things, including respond a little bit to what Phil said about ontology.
Walt Gulick: It's… it is the case that, it is later thought, Bellani did not say very much about ontology as such.
Walt Gulick: But I think he'd already dealt with that very thoroughly as a scientist.
Walt Gulick: I mean, he was involved in all kinds of…
Walt Gulick: Of experimentation and so forth, with the real world.
Walt Gulick: And, I think one thing that, Cola Pietro says that, kind of along that line, is that,
Walt Gulick: one thing I… he said, I get lost in your work, Martin, because I can't relate it to the real world very carefully. I think there are real-world things he talked about, for instance, the coral reef, and global warming, and things like that, that he can't connect to what you're doing. And,
Walt Gulick: that's his problem, perhaps, because I'm… I know there needs to be more reflective things, but it would be nicer if there were some connections there that were easy to make.
Walt Gulick: Now, I mentioned Whitehead earlier.
Walt Gulick: In terms of process, I find myself to be something of a process thinker, but not in a whiteheadian sense.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Okay.
Walt Gulick: Because Whitehead substituted good scientific understanding
Walt Gulick: Away, in terms of this metaphysical theory.
Walt Gulick: What do… what do actual entities and all those kind of things have to do with atoms and… I mean, it gets lost.
Walt Gulick: Science has given us a real basis for understanding the world and developing technology, and so forth, and…
Walt Gulick: you know, I don't want to get that lost in the process.
Walt Gulick: So I found myself disagreeing with you, Martin, about how you took, on Aristotle.
Walt Gulick: You said he doesn't explain concept formation adequately.
Walt Gulick: But it seems to me that a more… Kind of evolutionary approach.
Walt Gulick: showing how animals first understand the world, and they do that, I think, by
Walt Gulick: Our receptors give us, you know.
Walt Gulick: clear conceptual things happening in the world. At first, it's kind of a mystery, like the young baby, but after a while, certain things repeat, and we have memory, and you can start forming these concepts from the bottom up. You said, no.
Walt Gulick: It has to come from the top down, the kind of platonic thing, and so I disagree. I'm more of an Aristotelian that way. I think that this kind of evolutionary approach is really important to take very seriously.
Walt Gulick: So that… those are just some… Comments.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, can I… maybe I could briefly respond to that. So…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I mean, with Plato and Aristotle, and I'm sure lots of other thinkers too, right? But maybe more so with them, because they've had so much attention placed on them, and they've been around for so long, right? So there's so many views.
Martin Turkis Jr.: It was a little bit tricky, and probably not entirely clear, right? But I did, in revisions of the book,
Martin Turkis Jr.: try to delineate that there's… I mean, there's Aristotle.
Martin Turkis Jr.: and to some extent, we don't know exactly what he thought. There are all kinds of lost works, where, from reports, it seems that, you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: He was much more of a kind of a…
Martin Turkis Jr.: traditional Platonist, but then the stuff we have, there seem to be disagreements. There are all these different scholarly debates, right? But there's definitely, a version of Aristotle that you get in, kind of, Intro to Philosophy textbooks, and a version of Plato that you get in which, you know, on Universals and so on and so forth, they're… they're pitted against one another.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So… So, I'm not arguing that there has to be…
Martin Turkis Jr.: a strictly top-down, and this is already even in Plato and the Phaedo, that…
Martin Turkis Jr.: you know, I mean, using the platonic terms, right, the process of recollection is, in essence, bottom-up re-reaching of the concepts that are also there from the top down. So, for example,
Martin Turkis Jr.: And the example used in the Phaedo, right, is equality, the form of the equal, and you see two stones, or two sticks, and you realize, these things are the same, right? This would be the kind of thing that you're talking about, like.
Martin Turkis Jr.: a very early type of realization, not formalized in linguistic terms by a baby, we would assume is happening at some point. They're saying, like, this is the same as that, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: But you have to have access to the concept of sameness, of equality.
Martin Turkis Jr.: To be able to come to that, right? And to be able to recognize it, right? Because in a certain sense, when you're perceiving things, right, you're… you're recognizing the presence of X by means of sight, by means of taste, etc, etc, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: So you… the idea there is simply that there's no way to just…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Build the concept itself from the bottom up, but our…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Kind of mechanism by which we recognize that and are able to apply concepts is developed from the bottom up, but it also requires concepts that come to us from the top down.
Martin Turkis Jr.: For us to even get the process started. So that's why by the end of the book, right, I'm following the kind of Neoplatonist idea, where you have the forms.
Martin Turkis Jr.: which are, let's just call them the top-down concepts. And then the universals are our conceptual tracking mechanism, which we do develop from the bottom up. They're fallible, but they're also real things. But they're not the forms themselves, so that they're actually two different… two different kind of…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Metaphysical levels there, right?
Martin Turkis Jr.: that we're dealing with. And so that's why I end up capitalizing universals when it's supposed to refer to what Plato would call the forms, because that terminology gets quite confusing once you want to make that distinction. So I realize I'm not being entirely clear, but
Martin Turkis Jr.: But, there are some passages where I discuss it in the book, and then also in the article in response to, you know, Simpson and Colopietro and Graham Harmon and everybody else, and Dale,
Martin Turkis Jr.: I had found after
Martin Turkis Jr.: writing the book, a great statement of what I was just trying to articulate, but rather poorly, from an introduction to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: a translation of one of Porphyry's works, I think, is where I got a great statement of the,
Martin Turkis Jr.: the relationship of… between forms and then universals as a tracking mechanism. Anyhow.
Walt Gulick: So let me just say a couple things in response to what you just said, Martin.
Walt Gulick: Yeah, I think you're right. There needs to be some kind of way of recognizing similarity.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So…
Walt Gulick: Maybe that's an innate kind of, issue.
Walt Gulick: Now, is that the same thing as some of your great, your basic,
Walt Gulick: Forms, that those are innate within human understanding.
Walt Gulick: And if it's not,
Walt Gulick: What are the parts of a concept like goodness? You talked about the goodness of the con… of the universe, or pleasure, or all these basic words. Where do they come from? Are they innate?
Martin Turkis Jr.: Well, I mean, I don't think…
Martin Turkis Jr.: I guess it depends what you mean by innate, right? So, so… I think…
Martin Turkis Jr.: my hunch, right, you probably wouldn't agree, is when you say innate, you're getting at what Plato's getting at when he's saying you… you knew them from a…
Martin Turkis Jr.: You know, a disembodied… you know.
Martin Turkis Jr.: when you are a disembodied soul or mind or something like that, and you're in pure contact with the forms, I'm not entirely happy, I guess, with either Plato's way of describing that, or yours, right? But, but if…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, I think we do have access to them, so if that's what we mean by innate, right? Why do we have access to them? Well, because we're…
Martin Turkis Jr.: comprehensive entities, so we're in the mix. As far as I'm seeing it, like, that's what there is, right? And we do actually have these perceptual capabilities that are pretty sophisticated, but requiring
Martin Turkis Jr.: all of these conceptual categories for them to even work, so… But again, when you say they're innate, I mean, and I don't know all the research on this, right? But of course.
Martin Turkis Jr.: And probably, actually, Dick could tell us more about this, but you know, like, babies have to learn how to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: recognize background versus foreground, right? So, in one sense, it's innate, but it's also… it's not that innate. It's not like you just come out of the womb, hey, mom, what's up? And you already know who she is, and she's not the wall.
Martin Turkis Jr.: So, I feel like that… all of that can pretty… You know…
Martin Turkis Jr.: easily overlap with what Plato's talking about with the anamnesis, and the tacit dimension is, I think, of use here as well, of
Martin Turkis Jr.: of knowing, right? There's…
Martin Turkis Jr.: plenty of mystery there, but I think what's clear is you need these conceptual categories for perception to work, right? And we know that we get better at perception, we know how it can be tricked sometimes, and so on and so forth. And there's a bottom-up element, and there's also a top-down element, I guess, in those terms. That's how I would take it.
Charles Lowney: Let's just add that, for Plato, I don't think he was being literal when he talked about
Charles Lowney: Fair enough, yeah. In another dimension. I think it was just getting at that… that sense that when we… when we, discover them, right, discover the form in something, it's like it was always there. Like, it was there tacitly, and we had just brought it to light.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Yeah, to the.
Charles Lowney: Explicitly.
Charles Lowney: Yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: I agree, yep, that's exactly it.
Walt Gulick: real thing.
Gus Breytspraak: We are more than 5 minutes over, but Dale has had his hand up for about 15 minutes, so Dale, you better get in here.
mullins: We lost Dale?
Dale Cannon: Yeah.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Sorry, I just unplugged myself accidentally.
Gus Breytspraak: Oh, alright.
Dale Cannon: I just wanted to…
Dale Cannon: give an expression of appreciation to Martin in light of our whole discussion, to some extent, is the way,
Dale Cannon: Your book on reading it first off, and then discussions of it since.
Dale Cannon: have… Really brought a certain opening up of a field that we haven't had before, at least among
Dale Cannon: students of Polani.
Dale Cannon: And made the possibility of getting into and discussing freely
Dale Cannon: metaphysical questions that we really didn't have before, and I just want to say that that's kind of a… opening up a field that we didn't even know was there, or that it was possibly accessible to us before.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Bank?
Dale Cannon: It's much easier to do that now, as a result of what you're doing.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Thank you, thank you.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Appreciate it. Well, Dale was pretty… I mean, Dale and Stan and… Walt and Phil…
Martin Turkis Jr.: all of them, and then Charles, a little bit later on the, in the process, all read it, probably all of the book before it was a book, so thanks to…
Martin Turkis Jr.: All of them for lots of different comments, and…
Martin Turkis Jr.: critiques, and then plenty, plenty of other people. I mean, I remember John from the…
Martin Turkis Jr.: long ago, the San Diego conference, when I… you gave me your printed-out copy of the form and field paper, which became a chapter that I had written, and it… you'd written a ton of comments all over it, you know, I think it was, like, a 20-page paper, and so all of that kind of support was really, very…
Martin Turkis Jr.: Very helpful and very central to getting it done for whatever it winds up being worth.
Walt Gulick: And so I've added my thanks to you, Martin, just as Dale said. It's, you are creative.
Walt Gulick: I don't always agree with you, but you make us think, and that's great.
Martin Turkis Jr.: Well, thanks, Walt, yeah.
mullins: Keep up the good work. We are at the end of this hour. Let me just remind you that we have one more of these this year. Stefan is giving… the little paper's already posted.
mullins: And, I think it's on the 22nd, isn't it, Stefan?
mullins: So, please…
mullins: It's an interesting little paper and, should be fruitful to discuss. And maybe we'll put some of these things together for next year. If you have any ideas, please send Gus or me a note.
mullins: And maybe some of them can feed into this next Nishota. We've talked a little bit about that as a possibility. We might be able to have some things before the conference that are online that, then feed into the conference. But thanks again for everyone's, participation.
mullins: So, unless there's something else for the common good, I think we should, cease and desist.
Stan Scott: I think that…
Charles Lowney: I'd just like to mention…
Charles Lowney: For those people who live far away and want to come to Neshota, you should talk to us about possible travel funds, that sort of thing.