Simulating the World & Remodeling Philosophy (Session 6)

Hello and welcome to the sixth session already of Simulating the World and Remodeling Philosophy with Reza Negrestani. I'm going to pass the mic to him now. Thank you so much to you. Hello everyone. Again, apologies for those of you who didn't hear it. I was in a board meeting for News Center, hence the delay for 30 minutes. And if it is possible, we will finish today's session at 4.30. and of course I will recompensate that plus other

delays by giving you a couple of additional sessions as I mentioned those of you who have already taken my classes we try to cover as much as you know possible with regard to syllabus and the topics we were supposed to discuss. Anyway, so before I, if I remember correctly, Theo, there were two presenters for today, right? Yeah, I'm trying to remember who volunteered. Was it Sean, were you one of them? Yeah. Yes, and Artemis, I think.

Artemis, can you hear us? Yes, hello. No, it wasn't me for this week because I had some... Oh, okay, okay, yes, yes, yes. Sorry, my apologies. Yes. Okay, next week maybe because now I'm free. Who was the second person? and shall we go to the archive and get you? OK, so before hearing the presentations for today's

session and I continue with my talk, There were a few, there are actually a couple of discussions are being done by Joven and a couple of other people on the Google Classroom. Unfortunately, Joven is not here. I wanted to talk to Joven and the rest of you about his questions. Nevertheless, Adam also posted this hilarious that he has read the Scopey the Dog. Okay, how can you, Adam, can you brief us with regard to that and how you see the modeling and the scale problem

as we have been talking about? Sure, I can try and recap the text for everyone, I guess. I mean, in Scuffy the Tugboat, it starts where he's a toy tugboat and he played with in the bath of this kid. And then they take him out to play in the local river one day, this tiny little, not even a full river, like a little spring in the hills. and then he gets away from them and he starts just going downstream with bigger and bigger streams

and sees all of these different things. And the river gets bigger and bigger and more overwhelming as he's going down. And then they save him in this Deus Ex Machina, just as he's about to float out to sea. implausibly I always thought but implausibly so yes basically you know this whole story is essentially an allegory that Mark Wilson makes in his book Wandering Significance

an essay on conceptual behavior essentially this model comes back to the issue that we have been talking about the task of explication car nap modeling so on so forth so uh you know in the domain of universal concepts it is so easy to feel at home that oh you know i'm doing this like is exactly like the tub example You know, everything looks serene, safe. I am under the control of the concept, how the model is applied to the target system at a very kind of higher scale, you know, kind of a, you know, global scale.

And I can navigate my little toy boat in this tub. It's all good. But the thing is that once the protagonist of our story is introduced to a river, as Adam was talking about, where these rivers, so essentially it starts from a very, you know, kind of laziest stream of water. But as we know it, the stream gets turbulent. You have undercurrents, you have eddies, all sorts of these kinds of phenomena, messy physical phenomena,

in which simply that paradigm of modeling where the global scale, global scale model, global concept could be applied to the local phenomena is shattered into pieces. The navigation is not as easy as it was in the top, right? So this is exactly what we might call the scale problem in the sense that models obviously are a scale sensitive. they deal with resolutions assignment scope representational criteria so on so forth

within a specific scale and that a scale cannot be thought as something global that can be just applied all the way down or all the way up. That is just the top paradigm, you know. It's what Mark Wilson calls the classical picture of concepts or models. In the real world, however, models, we see that an engineer or a physicist deals with this problem. So you have some sort of idealized global model, and then you try to apply it to real messy problems

in the real world, and it just doesn't pan out. It just, you know, there is no similarity. There is no simulation. Parameters are all getting distorted. So what does it mean? What should we do as an engineer? By the engineer, I don't mean like technicians, really. I mean, like I'm talking about a philosophically informed engineer, a philosopher engineer, like what Carnap and Wilson understood. Well, this is because we are essentially becoming overambitious about the range of applications that our real models have with regard to a target system,

a real phenomenon in the world. And this ambition comes from eliding different scales of phenomenon under which we are basically, or not under which, different scales of a real phenomenon which we study them under a kind of a comprehensive umbrella model. So in order to overcome this problem such that the scuffy can actually navigate all these messy problems of turbulence, eddies, undercurrents, undertow, so on so forth in the river and doesn't become an orphan

in the sea uh we have to like an engineer philosopher see what does it mean to navigate a turbulent flow like such as river at different scales in fact for example you see turbulence is a concept and of course you can create a model according to a scale of turbulence You know, fluid dynamics, statistical mechanics, computational dynamics, so on and so forth.

Now, the thing is that, however, most probably the reason that Scoffie has this kind of predicament is because it assumes that navigation in the river can be approached by way of, as I mentioned, a comprehensive model or a global concept. And most probably this global concept is a classical paradigm of fluid mechanics, right? Where basically you have a series of differential equations which address all the problems that is happening in the river

from a top-down perspective, from what is observable in the river, okay? Well, of course, an engineer knows that this is not going to happen. Fluid dynamics, a classical version of fluid mechanics, doesn't answer the problems, intricate problems of how to navigate in a kind of turbulent environment such as this kind of torrential river. You need to have different models, different theories at different scales of what is happening in this phenomenon, namely the river. It's exactly what I mentioned with regard to a metal beam.

so at the level of macroscopic elasticity we can talk about the metal beam how it bends it's a strand so on so forth but of course if you put this metal beam into use in a real world for example in a region where earthquakes are quite prevalent like Japan or Tokyo you see that many formulations, many conclusions that you have driven from your initial description and model at the level of hardness one, simple elasticity at

microscopic level, don't hold up when there are some messy disturbations or perturbations happening which actually intervene with different scales of this local phenomenon namely a metal beam so to so a good engineer philosopher is the one who can basically forget about the comprehensive or umbrella option of concept of elasticity to the being all the way down across different scales and instead differentiate different

scale physical scales of this phenomenon and reinvent the concept of hardness at these different scales for each of which she should be able to come up with a new concept a new model and only that's way it is possible to design a building from such metal beams that can withstand certain kinds of disturbances just for example earthquake heat so on and so forth because if you were simply abiding at the level of hardness one, microscopic elasticity, and seeing the behavior of the metal beam as a physical phenomenon,

only in terms of that specific scale, your building would have basically faltered. It would have collapsed. Questions, questions. You know, I think that this is an interesting, you know, it's I feel like this is a problem you see over and over again in philosophy. Like, like, is it Leibniz, the worm in the blood, like the sort of, I mean, it is a problem of scale, but I feel like it's also a problem of like set theory and like what set are you in?

like what like worlding in a way like what what world are you in yes frame of reference frame of reference I would say Leibniz probably you know Leibniz idea award is a little bit again kind of like one of those philosophical over over inflation of the concept of the world essentially what What Leibniz is talking about with regard to such problems is that he's actually talking about the frame of reference. You always have to take into account the frame of reference. And that's it. I guess it's hard to distinguish frame.

Like, when is it a frame of reference issue versus like a scale issue? Or even something like the, I forget the name of the paradox, but when does a grain of sand become a heap of, sort of like a nomenclature issue? Yes, yes, yes. This exactly comes up in political theory quite often. I think I have mentioned this, or maybe not, I can't remember, sorry. Rob Lucas, I think I mentioned him. uh he's is a theorist of communization theory and you know he was he was part of the early communization theory end note and later he uh fundamentally diverged from that view

is essentially that the idea that when the grain of the sand uh becomes uh you know for example a brick in the wall so on so forth right and and you see that the of this is an allegory that comes up quite in communization theory, kind of very similar to what we are talking about under the rubric of the real subsumption. You see, at which point, so real subsumption is essentially this thesis that labor-productive relations are being subsumed in a very pathological sense being hijacked by the very social relations

which are produced by the system of capitalism, right? And in that sense, then at which point can we say we are in a capitalist system? But more importantly, if everything, including the individual, including the social relations, including the intersubjective relations, so on and so forth, all have been hijacked by the system of capitalism, then how can we really coherently think about capitalism? You see? It becomes a metaphysical totality. And here also we are dealing with certain kinds of metaphysical totalities which prevent us to think coherently about the target system.

So we just don't think about capitalism like Judith Barthar is not thinking about language because we can't think outside of language? No, it's essentially that the thing is that in fact this idea that we can always talk, think about capitalism, we can in fact diagnose and criticize, give a coherent argument of critique and also a prognostic critique how to move forward beyond the scope of capitalism of capitalism but that requires for us to understand that capitalism as it is understood for example in the communization theory or

for example like Nicklandian panorama of the capital as a singularity engine is that these are metaphysical totalities and metaphysical totalities are just very much like what Mark Wilson calls classical picture of concept. They are like flattened scale models. They are models that only have, are models and they all have this kind of a really strong impression on thinking and practice precisely because they have flattened the differences between different scales of phenomena uh it's just like basically uh you might say the

tub is really uh without over extending the analogy here is is is the system of the metaphysical totality which could be capitalism which could be a canonical global model classical concepts so on so forth the whole point is to cut across these kinds of metaphysical uh of inflation these kinds of uh metaphysical totalities which basically flatten the scales flatten differences prevent us to think about problems coherently. And this comes back to, those of you who took the Plato course with me,

this comes back to the ultimate idea of philosophy, which is, of course, also science. Plato in Phaedus, that the great butcher is the one who cut at the joint rather than splintering the bones. The joints are these different scales. So, we should think about problems at different scales. Otherwise, literally there is no way to think about problems coherently. Go on, Tio. Sorry. I was just going to ask, it seems at some level you have to, I mean, I guess one of the ways you might get around this problem is by saying that global concepts are, you know,

scratch them a bit and they turn out to be local concepts or something like that but global concepts themselves are necessary for the translation between certain scales so i guess the question i've been wondering is how do you uh deal with the fact that these global concepts are necessary for thinking but also are kind of misleading for thinking and that they have this kind of totalizing tendency which blanches thinking out i guess right i think that even in in that sense again you know now giving me uh basically the carnappian critique uh essentially this so essentially this as i

mentioned uh to andrew karis uh this is part of andrew karis critique of mark wilson and his um The idea that we can never have a tub, we can never have that kind of classical picture, and we always drift in that river, which requires different scales, different models, different fragmentations of concepts. with no hope for the global concepts that could be the top. Right? You have absolutely to read that book, by the way, the Scoffy, to get the proper allegory here.

So, yes, that I agree 100% with Mark Wilson at this point. another thing is that the kind of global concepts we require are not metaphysical totalities are not classical pictures of concepts these are what you might call to be concepts which from a historical perspective and historical perspective only can enable us to orient ourselves within certain theoretical or practical trajectories.

Like, for example, we discussed about the concept of gravitation, right? So obviously the concept of gravitation is a global concept, right? but it is not a concept that you might say is a classical picture precisely because the concept of gravitation in a historical context now that science has matured enough is already thought and explicated across different scales of what we mean by gravitation,

from the Keplerian equations to Newtonian to Einsteinian, so on and so forth, right? It is simply the idea that we have a semblance of a concept, which we think hold across different scales. For example, even though the Newtonian equations of motions, or gravitation for that matter, cannot be overextended to the scale of, for example, Einsteinian concepts of gravitation,

But nevertheless, we see from a historical perspective that equations of gravitation in Newtonian system create certain kinds of constraints for any work on gravitation that can be done afterwards. in a sense that Einsteinian equations of gravitations are responding, in fact, to the Newtonian idea of gravitation. And in that sense, this is the new global concepts, which can, of course, can be revised. But nevertheless, it is good to understand how these worlds, different frames of reference, can actually respond to one another

without... Einstein says that this is about something, other phenomenon, and Newton says that it is about other phenomenon. It's actually triangulate, optimize the link between them. So yes, the kind of metaphysical totality of the concept or the classical picture should be relinquished. By no means it should be retained. Like as I mentioned, what is life? but what is this? This is the most stupid philosophical questions that people ask. Or what is mind? What is consciousness? These are just parochial questions. They're pseudo-problems. These are metaphysical totalities. You have to explicate them. And only through explication

that you actually can retain a certain kind of concept of life in the sense that at various scales or various historical development of the concept of life, these concepts have retained, according to a certain set of astringencies or constraints, had to respond to the problems of one another. So I think, I mean, this is a lot of what the Karas essay was about, I think, because he really talks about I think two types of relationships between

different scale levels or different sort of models that you need to apply different parts of the domain to me so he talks about one case where there's like a universalizing case with the progress of science right and and I I think Newtonian mechanics to relativistic physics is a pretty great example of this, right? So Newtonian mechanics is still super useful as a special case of the equations in relativity, right? Yes. And that demonstrably, you know,

you can have a mathematical sort of special case relationship between relativity and newtonian classical mechanics right it's like well when this term is really really small that's just newtonian mechanic basically or when the velocity is sufficiently small so on or or for example the uh you know the the the movement of celestial bodies according to gravitational uh formula have been sufficiently idealized right right so and then you get that there's another sort of scale relation or like um modeling relation i feel like where it's much more of one is not a special case of the other

it's really that you know in this phenomenon viewed in this context of this scale you have a set of scientific regularities that can be supplied but at a different scale it's a totally different set of regularities and there's not necessarily a formal sort of mathematical relationship that you can make that one is a special case of the other it's really like it's a big river then you've got to use this set of you know fluid mechanics uh calculations and worries if it's you know a little bathtub then you need to use this set of differential equations

right and uh there's no relationship except the if then like for example think about the evolution of the natural sciences right from francis bacon to darwin they are both under the concept of natural naturalization pattern right bacon perhaps even hobbes and then uh darwin but you see that the kind of uh stuff that is going on in darwinian theory are fundamentally incommensurable at a level of explication with regard to the france Francis Bacon. But then isn't it the whole point that this is what basically you might think in terms of the paradigm shift

in the Koinean sense in the sense of theory dislodgement and in that sense then this is when you have to come up with a new global concept with a new kind of paradigm of global concept however the question that I am still struggling with is that so if we have merely navigated these local concepts, these local models across various scales and then we have noticed that the explication of the previous for example Bacon idea of nature to

Darwin's idea of nature is fundamentally different and they cannot be commensurated, then what would be a new concept, a global concept, and how can we arrive at it? That, to me, is still a little bit philosophically opaque. But of course, Darwin came up with it. The idea of nature was replaced by the idea of biology. There is no ideal nature anymore, as it was the case with Bacon. Darwin talks in terms of biology. So I think there's cases as well,

though I'm frustrated that I don't have one very readily to hand. But the where Sort of like there is no general theory. There's just a sort of implicit general theory that gets used which is which is really just an if-then statement between incommensurable models. So and it's just like I don't know In the ocean you have big waves and you need to use this wave model and in the bathtub you have this sort of situation and you need to use this. Laminart for rules, yes. And so you can say, I guess, that there's a very loose overall general model in that case,

which is just that series of if-then statements, essentially. Yes, yes, yes. No, I do think, yes. And again, comes back to this, but still, I need to think about it. It comes back to this idea of the Carnapian explication. So essentially Carnap, as Karos says, doesn't really, wouldn't disagree with Mark Wilson if he was alive with regard to that, you know, that you have this fragmentations of the model or the classical global picture into these different scales. And as soon as you have this scale differentiation, you can even have more scale differentiation to the point that literally you can have an infinite series of these kinds.

But the thing is that essentially this comes back again to what Karras says, that when we are talking about the question of a scale, we should understand that what we call a scale or local problems are not coming for free. they are in fact posited by virtue of some loose sense of a global concept just like what we were talking about Newtonian idea of gravitation and the Einsteinian one surely the equations are fundamentally different but nevertheless they are broadly speaking

within a scope a certain kind of scope they are talking about the relations between a phenomenon or a special case at one scale and a more general phenomenon at another scale and essentially to the extent that they are loosely speaking, trying by way of a global concept working around certain constraints and parameters which of course can be revised It can be said they are working under the supervision of a global concept, which ought to be explicated. Exactly like Bacon and Darwin, from a historical scientific perspective, they are both talking about the same thing.

even though by virtue of Bacon having a very classical picture of nature borrowed from his latest scholasticism, whereas Darwin having a more non-physicalistic notion, nevertheless, they are still trying to talk about a certain set of constraints. yes within that they are both talking about nature a global concept but the thing is that if they change the parameters

of their constraints moving from the classical picture of nature to the Darwinian picture of nature if they move these shuffle around and mess with them manipulate these constraints and relations too much, you might actually arrive at a new fundamental global concept, such that the new global concept replaces the previous concept, as in the case with Bacon, idea of nature, and Darwin, idea of biology. It seems like, say, you have this progression, or if we want to call it progression, we can just call it change from the use of global concept one to the use of global concept two, but to even talk about the...

No, no, no, I don't think so. There is no one global concept one to global concept two. The global concept is the link between certain local parameters that hold up between Bacon's idea of nature and Darwin's idea of nature. That's what the idea of nature entails. Yeah. Exactly like Newton and Einstein. Gravitation is only gravitation precisely in a historical sense of physics, precisely because there is a continuity of relations of certain kinds of problems, constraints, and astringencies which hold up between Newton's idea of gravitation and Einstein's idea of gravitation.

And gravitation is not as if it has been enforced all the way down to these different scales. Essentially, do you know what they are trying to do? Is that they are so, essentially, they are working in the framework of what Mark Wilson calls the drift paradigm. So you are only explicating local concepts across different scales. And then the global concept is really what you might call to be invariances within certain thresholds of certain problems which basically connect the concerns of one local sets of parameters or equations to another sets of parameters and equations in the Newtonian and Einsteinian systems.

But of course the threshold that now that that here the problem becomes tricky. The threshold for example imagine just like we were talking about Adam and there are so many other you know examples in the history of science. where we see that the explication of the local concept or model across different scales becomes extremely drastic. It increases so much such that the new local concepts can no longer be correlated with the previous local concept.

And hence it creates a point of incommensurability, a point of disconnection, where they both cannot be understood within a kind of soft global concept that would have correlated these sets of problems. And that's when usually a new global concept is invented. Biology is a really good example. Biology is a very good example in the history of natural sciences. Where the concept of nature, as understood by Aristotle,

the ideal concept of nature is replaced by the idea of biology. Okay, so before Sean presents his thing, let me just look at this sidebars and stuff. Ah, my apologies. So Jean-Pierre asked about Rob Lucas.

Yes, it is an essay. I don't know whether it's published or not. I think it's published, actually. It is called In-Out. In-arrow-out. The new title is, from what I have heard, it's called How to Educate a Child. How to Educate a Child. Child, OK. Thanks. Sure, so let me just... Linqa, would you be able to elaborate a little bit on your question?

You say, and we think global physical theories as analogical to metaphysic S. Is Lenka there? Lenka, can you hear us? I don't see it on the board. OK, if Lenka can, I mean, she can always elaborate

on that question. I think I understand what she's asking. It's just that I'm not sure. If you can a little bit elaborate on that question, that would be fantastic, very helpful on the Google Classroom if you are not available right now. Joven, it seems that you have been making a lot of philosophical troubles lately, which is fantastic. You say, but joints at different scales is identity, not difference. What do you mean by that? sorry i mean um it's the yeah it's the platonic thing in you that i want to

slap out which is you know what you think that all difference is reconcilable in some kind of conceptual identity which i understand because that identity is not you know dogmatic um but it but it doesn't but what you do in the end if you think about concepts in that way is that you still talk about identity you still talk about how things are but you don't talk about difference in the way in which it demands for you to talk about it so you raise the question difference of yes absolutely you see when plato in phytos talks about this allegory and of course

just because you know uh he brings a butchering metaphor here doesn't mean that you can cut make new differences cut identities at new joints just because there are only some you know many joints in a carcass. But you see, in Phidius, when Plato puts up this allegory, he absolutely is in fact talking about the intelligibility of that which it is. You see, Phidius is essentially about what you might call to be proto-science. And science is not caring about what ought

to be really it doesn't it just like that would be just conflation of facts and value essentially in five years and of course this with this allegory it is all about explication of what is what is right that's a different matter uh with regard to making ought differences yeah but we're talking about what is in the sense of the distinction isn't necessarily between what is and what ought to be but well yes the is of what is isn't that what we're talking about that we're talking

about how how the way in which we can understand what is allows us a better understanding of difference no no no no no no no no I don't think that this is this is how can you can you actually elaborate on why why you are in fact proposing such a thesis so how can uh uh you know uh explication in the order of is uh can allow us to uh basically uh elaborate the order of difference and by the order of difference

i assume that you are not talking about the order of difference in the is which is the order of identity or reference but you are talking about the order of difference with regard as a difference between is and out so essentially i think here you are using the word difference in two fundamentally sense trying to get the same conclusions out of them so there is an order of difference in a canon of philosophy in the sense that you are obviously explicating the order of is arriving at new facts about that which is, right, the being. Right. And then there is and that's also a difference

but then there is also a difference in the order between is and art, fact and value. That's a fundamentally different issue. Can you elaborate on the second part on the difference between fact and value? Yes. in the simple sense that Hume would have said if Hume was now had read Zeno Feminist Manifesto. Let's just entertain this thought experiment. So just because nature from an evolutionary perspective weeds out any species

that cannot engage in reproductive activities, this doesn't mean that we should not value gay rights. Right? This is a fundamental distinction of fact and value if Hume was alive today. Sure. I guess what I was saying with regards to difference in identity the understanding of difference is not the understanding of difference between let's say fact and value where we get to say what is and what isn't because in that sense that is something that's how do you say

it it's not contingent but it's just a decision or it's just a it's a thing that you you claim contingent it is essentially open it's in context exactly it's not yeah so but in it but what when i talk about difference and with regards to your question i'm talking about how how the way in which we understand difference comes back to the order of the way in which you understand how things are and i don't want to metaphysically no you know i understand i think i understand this so you see for example plato when he makes this allegory we should understand that he's not some sort of uh uh physicalist or

materialist person essentially plato is the the the the king of idealism right in the sense that you can only and he he he follows parmenides main injunction thinking and being are one now of course thinking and being on one uh have been misinterpreted quite heavily in the sense that we We, many philosophers, even in today, speculative realism, so on and so forth, I should not, I shall not make names here. They think that this just simply means that thinking and being, the distinction between the two is elided.

But no, that is not what Parmenides says if you read the poem on nature. All Parmenides says is that difference in thought makes a difference in being. Thinking is the designation of being. You cannot talk about being incoherently or at all if you don't have some sort of cognitive structure, right? And in that sense, yes, Plato would agree to that. that when we are talking about, for example, facts, these facts are not ready-made stuff out there that we just can salvage.

It is simply we have to make difference in thought in order to arrive at new facts, new ises, new ises. And this already actually has brought the question of difference with regard to the question of identity or reference with regard to facts. I think I'm in agreement with you, yeah. In a sense, we have a guest here today who is just listening. We were talking yesterday that this question also comes in German idealism.

So you get Kant and then you get critics of Kant. Hegel, Schelling, Fichte, so on and so forth. And the more you read about these controversies with regard to transcendental epistemology as put forward by Kant, it's essentially the majority of critics agree on this fact that in critique of pure reason, Kant tries to see the order of is, the intelligible order of is, what the world is. And of course the world is determines our positions in it and also our self-conception in it.

He sees this picture within the ambit of what can be called transcendental passivity. Even though the project of critique tries to show that there is no such a thing as sensory data and that these sensory data are in fact being organized by categories of understanding, concepts, so on and so forth, but to the extent that the relation between thinking urquinsis, cognition, and sensation has not been fully elaborated in a Carnapian sense or in a Mark Wilsonian sense.

You get almost a sense that ultimately cognition has no other job than to simply abide by the order of is, to simply discover new facts. But the thing is that many other German idealists later think of this as a transcendental passivity. They don't try to say that the transcendental project was wrong. They just think that Kant represents an instance of transcendental passivity in the sense of cognition. In one way or another, the differences in cognitions theoretical and practical are subordinated in the last instance to the order of is and to

to reverse the situation to to graduate from transcendental passivity to transcendental proactivity we must articulate how the differences in cognition can make differences in reality enrichment of reality cannot be attained unless and until we make difference in the realm of cognition yeah i don't think i disagree with anything i just i think i need to figure out where my genuine disagreement lies? Because I think I'm going to agree with everything you say so far.

Sure. No, I don't think that we have major disagreements. It's just that we are looking at some of the problems from different perspectives, or probably we are putting different degrees of accents on certain kinds of problems, which is fundamentally, I think, is important and looking forward. to your input. Anyway, Sean, with no further ado, please go on. I'm so sorry for taking so much time. you know it's super interesting i have to i'm trying to figure out how i might bring this conversation into the goodman um piece um so i'll try um so basically what i'd like to first do

is kind of give like a schematic overview of the piece and then raise some questions that i think I hope would be useful for the group in thinking about models and as well as returning to a question, Reza, that you raised last week about the distinction between naive realism and naive empiricism, which I think that Goodman's nominalist position is, I think, interesting. But yeah, I'll try to get to that question through a quick overview. So the Goodman piece is definitely positioned against similarity. He argues this because it's ultimately unable for him to solve philosophical problems. So he wants to place

seven strictures on what he sees as the pernicious re-manifestation of similarity when trying to solve philosophical problems. So for him, similarity can't distinguish between three things. This is the first structure. Similarity can't distinguish between representations and descriptions, iconic and uniconic symbols. And also real quick, I'd like to take a quick detour. I thought this quote, I shared this with Jean-Pierre a few weeks ago. In languages of art, Goodman describes a symbol as quote, a very general and colorless term. It covers letters, words, text, pictures, diagrams, maps, models, and more, but carries no implication of the oblique or the occult, which I think is a really interesting and useful definition of a symbol.

I think it's important to Goodman's approach to language. Okay, to return back to the first structure, Goodman argues that similarity can't either distinguish between realistic and naturalistic pictures. So basically, both a realistic and a naturalistic image might aim for similarity, but this doesn't really cut it for Goodman, because resemblance alone isn't representation. And I do think this is important to consider in the larger context. And this is the first time I've really ever read Goodman. I did some research online, but he seems to be interested in bringing problems to Hume's problem and trying to figure out how...

The group had it. Yes, absolutely. So I'll try to loop back to that as well. Okay, so basically, even if reference has been established between, say, two entities or objects or symbols, similarity is not enough for a symbol to be a representation. And then the second structure he places on similarity is that similarity for him is ultimately unable to group common types of things. So he looks at topographical forms, which again, I think is probably can be located in his reassessment of Hume's problem. um the third structure he places on similarity is that it can't ultimately account for repetition

um and this one was really interesting for me because for goodman there are uh criteria that can be established uh via theory that allow us to determine whether subsequent repetitions may be grouped under the same classification so for example like a musical score um we might have a frame of reference or scale like i'm trying to think about these terms as well but i don't want to reinstall similarity because I do think that Goodman's argument here is interesting when thinking about models and theory and their relationship. But in this sense, like the musical score would be the frame of reference that kind of unites the repetition of two performances of, say, like Beethoven's Symphony, I think is what Goodman refers to.

And I like how generic Goodman also refers to it. I don't think he gives a precise symphony of Beethoven. I think for him, what's interesting is that that frame of reference is what organizes the repetition between two things. And for him, similarity can't do that because, of course, let's say somebody performs something differently between two repetitions. There's all sorts of things that would just immediately shatter similarities, effectiveness. more details about musical example in the world in ways of world making where awesome make this example about different note musics for example seven notes or you know another note number of

notes where he thinks that this is not really a kind of what you might call to be similarity he thinks, it's just he categorized this kind of, you know, differences under a very technical term which I'm not going to talk about, but any person who is interested to further look into this, he actually categorized this kind of differences like in music. You can also get them in painting and also the history of science under the category of weighting or emphasis. Emphasis is not similarity. Yeah, that's interesting. The question of force, I think, is one that perhaps would

be interesting in this conversation as well. And then his fourth structure is that similarity doesn't explain metaphor or metaphorical truth. He has a few interesting, he calls metaphors elliptical similes, so essentially this like, right? Like if something is like something else. And for him ultimately similarity is not particular enough because it lacks the explanatory power for explaining what metaphor and metaphorical truth is. I don't, I haven't read the text that Rezi you just referred to or the language of arts text. I really need to read more of this because this is an interesting, I think,

definition. He describes metaphorical truth as something that can rearrange fields of reference according to misassignment. And so I was wondering if there's a way of maybe looping this back into an observation you made last week about counterfactuals. Yes, on the Persian horse example, yes. Yeah, absolutely. I think that that, yeah, an interesting potential link. And the other one, and this is, I think, what I referred to a little bit earlier, was that similarity, the fifth structure he places is that similarity can't account for deductive reasoning. So basically, Goodman, you know, says that predictions can't be based on what it was like in the past, although he nonetheless suggests that inductive practice might give grounds

for some canons of similarity. So there's a few interesting kind of moments I think of, I don't know how to describe it, I guess I want to say like porousness to a kind of rationalist understanding of transformation and revision in his own kind of like placement of structures, which I think is really interesting as well. The sixth one that he places on similarity is that similarities between particulars can't define qualities. So how essentially does one move from likeness between particulars to likeness among several? Basically, he comes down and says that dyadic similarity between two objects is ultimately not enough to accurately talk about similarity. finally similarity can't be equated with or measured by common characteristics

I think that this is ultimately like maybe one important thesis that he has is that similarity is variable and relative it's still too ambiguous even if you add specifying frames of reference it ultimately will become superfluous insofar as it alters the terrain of referentiality that one is working with so it can be a useful tool um a heuristic perhaps um but i think that yes um and so he wants to evacuate a similarity from the purview of philosophy because ultimately again to look back to it's unable to solve the problems represented i found it very compelling um i think that this is a problem specifically in the stuff that i'm interested in um theories of non-representational

or non-representational theories of language actually I think often shuttle in a kind of like you know shadow similarity whether or not it's made explicit I'd like to kind of problematize that specifically in like Deleuze's theory of difference in repetition actually which might relate to what we were talking about earlier with difference in identity so the questions I have are simple and they're still in progress so I would love to hear any ideas that anyone has, and hopefully they'll be generative for conversation. The first of which is, so Goodman's a nominalist, even though I think he has an idiosyncratic understanding of nominalism, which for him is that there can be no distinction between things without distinction of content,

which to me is, I mean, it's just interesting because nominalism, I feel like, shares a kind of rejection with naive empiricism, this rejection of universals, global concepts, perhaps. And so I wonder then where does Goodman's kind of like nominalist approach to language and his rejection and rallying against similarity fit into the question that you raised last week about the importance of kind of like parsing out some kind of continuity or tissue, connected tissue between naive empiricism and realism. And that was one question still totally in form.

The second one is the question about model analysis and theory, which I think, if I'm not mistaken, Theo mentioned a little bit earlier. I'm very interested in that question as well, as is like kind of understanding like the way that theory and modeling works, like can can you know the different things that they do their different roles as well as uh yeah um how can they link to their each other's revisions right exactly yeah and i think that models seem more interested in in the project of evacuating similarity um i mean sure there can be some moments of capturing a real world phenomena target phenomena but really it seems to be a more inductive process, and theory seems to be something else, something weird

and interesting as well. Anyway, that's what I had. With regard to the empiricism and naive realism, would you be able to come up with some sort of question on the Google Hangout so we can go over it? Absolutely. Yes, that is quite a very thorny issue. Superb. Thank you so much, Sean. really fantastic excellent excellent presentation please people jump in and you know ask questions from Sean or me so we can discuss the stuff with you yeah sure Mari Laurie, you're muted right now.

Oh, that's great. Thanks for listening to that. So I did a similar review because I didn't know what Sean was going to present. And since he already did this, I want to maybe propose that it would be really interesting I'm interested in particular to focus in regard to what we discussed last time on the third structure example, which is similar to what Fancy is also addressing in the discussion between model and theory, where he says we need it, because I think this is more interesting to philosophy of science in particular where experiments must be replicable in order to be considered, concluded or valid, but they actually are.

And what he says is we must have at least partial theory before we can replicate an experiment. So the model is always extricated and relevant to the theory. And I think in that case, Church's structure is very interesting. And with his example to music, I have a little pause here because I spent some time looking at the Robert-Composed music, supposedly. Sorry, could you repeat that? What music? The music composed by robots or algorithms, and you have to compare the human music with the robot. I studied music before, so I could always pick out music from humans because it isn't perfect. But what happens when the replication happens between different machines?

Is there then similarities redundant because they're composing in completely identical pieces? Or it's the same as with human production, just the type of error is not something that we can see. So this is in regard to the third structure, and I think the fifth structure is also quite interesting, because there he talks about predictive behavior, and I feel like a lot of the science that we're engaged in discussing right now, especially in regard to the future, is very much still situated around Morse law or rather like Morse predictive theory, right? Which is the bias that causes us to believe that all the events that have happened was a linear march towards progress.

And it's also the bias that causes us to accept that this is how it will continue in the future. And it would seem that work in the science is still dependent on this notion. And of course things, the progress was not linear, but irretrospectively it's always easy to make it look as it was. And then this cluster is, the similarities then being transferred into the future and how we model things in the future. And I think the fifth structure in that case is interesting to work, Reses said about Kant, and how if we in I think three lectures ago in Basing new concepts on the motions of what is not so okay I'm losing a trend of what I'm trying to

Arrive us. I think we'll just stop on these two questions because We can come back to other questions if we have time for that I also have some great I I probably don't have a good answer for your first question. And again, please, all of you, you should really understand that as we get old, we enter into something called dementia, whether we want it or not. So Mari, just please do post the first question on the Google Classroom so I can think about it. With regard to your second question, yes, this is actually the real bugbear here. And it's just not going to go away.

We have been talking about it for the past few courses, since the time of Plato course to Kant to philosophy of science course. So right. You see, essentially, there is one of the, so let me get back to the square one. Essentially, what we are talking about is that a model should have a semblance of similarity with regard to the real world, right? Such that the model is actually about something. something. Of course, we also talked about that it is not always required for a model

to be about an actual physical phenomenon, a target system. It can be another model. Nevertheless, the question of similarity haunts in both cases. You can talk about the similarity of a formal structure of a model, a set of equations, with regard to an actual phenomenon, or you can actually talk about, when it is about a model studying another model, a meta-model, about the similarity between the sets of problems that these two models share, right? So predictive processing, I mean,

or basically prediction, the problem of induction, for the most part comes when we are talking about similarity with regard to a model and an actual physical phenomenon. In the sense that in many cases, what counts as the criteria of similarity is essentially what you might call to be a singled out invariance. In the sense that this invariance, this regularity, this kind of pattern

would count as a bridge between the model and actual phenomena like I see that what whenever I touch the nose of my cat she pears after two minutes she bites me for no reason repeat the example. In invariably, it will lead to the same results, you know, biting for no reason. And the thing is that this count as a kind of invariance, as a pattern, a regularity,

which allows us to create a model for the behavior of cats under certain kinds of conditions. But here a problem arises, as Goodman suggests, with regard to his seven strictures of similarity. in the sense that if we establish similarity in accordance with these kinds of predictions based upon the past and present impressions, then surely we need to explain why is that we could arrive at such a

prediction such that we arrive at this kind of regularity which counts then as as a bridge, a similarity point of connection between our supposed model and the target system, the behavior of the cat. Well, obviously, this falls under the axe of Hume, or more broadly understood, the problem of induction. Just because something in the past has happened doesn't mean that it's going to happen in the future. In fact, there is absolutely no logical connection between what has been observed and what is not yet observed.

There is a disjoint union between them. essentially they are just like basically if you put them in a Venn diagram, the intersection between the two would be null, a void set. There is no connection between these two. So how is that we can actually make such claims? If the very premise upon which we have created a register of similarity is already problematic, such as, for example, this kind of predictive regularities. So a question for you, Reza.

Is this like the bootstrap problem in like financial markets or like the, that, I forget his name, but the blank swan guy. Nassim Kaleb? Yes. Or Eli Ayash. Yes, Eli Ayash. Okay. You know, the idea that, you know, I need to calibrate my model in that order to have a model, like I'm constantly calibrating my model with the real world in order to have my model. or is this related to real world calibration or not at all? Well, I would say that this is fundamentally deeper issue. The strictures of similarity, as put forward by Goodman

and Sean and Mari were talking about it, is fundamentally even deeper problem than Eli Ayash. Essentially, yes, of course, a model can be recalibrated with regard to the inputs of the world. no matter how that world be pure contingency, pure chaos. But what is really actually the deep problem is that how can we actually put the model with regard to a world? You need to have some sort of tissue between these two, between the model structure and the target system. And of course, for the majority of the cases, in the canon of the scientific modeling, this tissue that allows us to actually talk about model and the world correlation is similarity.

But then similarity itself is questionable. Especially interesting in regard to financial markets because most of it is now similarity between certain actions produced by machines. Right, right, absolutely, yes. But we have no idea what the hell they think, and they eat, what the hell the machine is thinking, and we have no access into your process. It's coming back to this idea, Mary, that I was talking earlier on, that you see everything that is going on in modeling, so surely you have a theoretical edifice, right?

And the model structure, which is the core of the model by which you interpret a certain kind of phenomenon, whether it's another model or it's an actual physical phenomenon, that structure is a subset of a theory to which the model belongs, right? but Mikey also talked about this in his presentation that in that sense if we are only talking about the model or model with regard to its explicit theoretical set of course everything will look right right it's just like if you are simply

working in the realm of newtonian mechanics many anomalies with regard to the motion of celestial bodies look to you as if they are confirming your model quite to the contrary you know and the same thing goes here you know the models and their theories self-verifying themselves precisely because what is here something is missing in the science of modeling and that I think that Weisberg absolutely does not talk about it one ounce and that's what I would like to plan about to talk about it with regard to toy models

it's the meta-theoretical assumptions so your model is a subset of your theory and your theory is made of certain kinds of theoretical assumptions right but of course such assumptions also requires metatheoretical assumptions which are implicit in the way that we use the theory, and particularly in the way that we use the model. So essentially, you might say from a Hegelian perspective,

if we were really going to go speculative about it, is that when you use a model, you are basically beating the forces of your theoretical unconscious. and the whole point is to attain the consciousness here of the metatheoretical assumptions that are not just behind the apparatus of your model but also behind the edifice and the structure of your theory. Otherwise, you are self-confirming, self-corroborating all the way down. The model always works. For some stupidest reason that we absolutely cannot explain from an epistemological

deduction perspective, it appears to us as if it was part of an evolution. You get this also these kinds of models of explanation in today's science like you know the reason because for example every time that I teach I touch fire my finger burns right which means that fire at such and such properties, and I shouldn't touch fire really. The same thing you can see parallels of this in all of this evolutionary biology stuff, Jordan Peterson, Dawkins, so on so forth,

where everything is talked about some sort of evolutionary biology as an epistemic right. but epistemic right is not supposed to be explained by recourse to some sort of evolutionary fundament in fact the evolutionary biology should be explained in things that are not evolutionary and that hence becomes epistemic and here we we see the same thing that our models just because they work doesn't mean that they are epistemologically sound. And then suddenly we catch up with the

forces of reality, like the stock market. It crashes, even though we have used all of these fantastic models. Why it happened? Well, because there are such things as the method theoretical assumptions that we never actually thought about. We were unconscious of them. They were the unconsciousness of our theoretical way of structuring our models. Theo, elaborate.

I'll just read it or I'll just restate it just because I'm not really sure how to elaborate it further. It's just there's this transition. It's not just in Kant, but I think Kant makes it really clear that the order of thought and the order of reality cannot be assumed to be the same. and I'm just not sure how you I don't know if that's a non-starter for philosophy or if it's it's if it's not a non-starter it's definitely a huge problem yes yes but what you see what you say there are two versions of what

you say. One version I would say that reality is not stable and we should not presuppose that reality is thus and so, right? And hence we have to mature our epistemic devices in the broadest possible sense to arrive at this fact. But there is also an inflated version of what you say in quantum me also uh uh in uh i would say even elia yash where basically reality as a presupposition uh is taken to be fundamentally chaotic

but how can you even think about it how can you even posit this that's just to me a a metaphysical caprice. It's like exactly like the way that in 1960s and 1970s Adam most surely knows about that. That, for example, in certain sectors of computer science and particularly, you know, formal learning, inductive formal learning, people were saying that, Well, you see, the principle of induction is simplicity, or comms, razor. And absolutely, the world as such, reality as such, is simple from a computational perspective.

But that is a metaphysical assumption. How do you know that? you are using computational, a structural idea of simplicity in order to explain the simplicity of reality. And then, by way of some sort of back-channeling, backdoor, you use the metaphysical simplicity of reality in order to corroborate the simplicity principle of your inductive method. But that is exactly what Hume would have called a Petito Principe, begs the question. It just begs the question. you have confounds the relation between premises and the consequences

yeah should be explained and that which explains i i'm uh in complete agreement i'm not convinced that the uh difference in order of thought and reality uh somehow just leads one to conclude that i don't know that reality is just madness or something like that but um i guess i'm more interested in the question itself if there's any way to pose that question such that it could be resolved um right and i i don't think there is right now but i'm just sort of beginning to think about it right now to nitty-gritty yeah

Yeah. Justin, OK, explain that. What would be that resolution be, according to Kills? I mean, I feel like that's really kind of just a summary of what the last class and this class has kind of been doing. But it's an endless sort of labor of an intelligence to continue to explicate. And even say how Sean just laid out the refining, explicating questions that are raised about similarity. It's unfortunate in terms of now we're dealing with like seven or eight layers of aspects that all need to be dealt with when we're trying to conceptualize how a model might be similar to an aspect of reality.

But it's actually beneficial. It helps us see all these different ways that, you know, of meta theoretical assumptions and everything's getting smuggled in. It's it's complicating, but it's actually helpful to continue to probe for all of those anomalies that basically like. The labor of looking for cracks in our global and local thinking and all the translation rules in between to keep. revising languages and exploring their consequences. I mean, it's like very reiterating, but that's kind of what it seems to come back to. Essentially what you are saying, please do correct me if I'm wrong, is that the resolution should not be thought

in terms of that kind of global concept, the global model, as if we are going to arrive at some sort of suddenly in a DIS, in a kind of out-of-blue manner, a kind of resolution which fundamentally answer all of our problems. The resolution is, in fact, to work through these complications and patch up the local cracks such that we can see possible new vistas, so new global concepts which again can be subjected to this kind of procedure

of seeing the cracks patching them up rinse and repeat okay good could i are global concepts are we using them as sort of synonymous for uh theory as opposed to model here no not not no no no i don't think so i would say that the global concepts we have um just the way that we have different grades of local concepts we have also different grades of global concepts so uh what you might call to be the classical global concept is like

the concept of hardness, right? Applied to different scales of a metal beam or the concept of, I don't know, let's say, the concept of life, right? So these are not what I'm interested in. I think that I agree that while we should actually be capable of to think about these problems, the concept, what is life, what is hardness, so on and so forth, but the application of such rigid global concepts,

which almost look like the old Prussian paradigm of universalism where a paradigm of politics is imposed upon everyone across the globe regardless of any sensitivity to where these people have come from, what their lives look like, so on and so forth. That I think that even though we need to think about them, but I don't think that the application of such concepts should be avoided. The kind of global concepts I'm actually interested in are more like,

yes, the global concepts which have been posited within comparisons, within the dimension of comparisons of different theories, like comparing Newtonian with the Einsteinian, such that within this comparison of two theories, we can basically coherently come up with a global concept such as gravitation. That's what I'm actually interested in. For me, so yeah, so essentially global concepts are theoretical concepts,

but they are not simply posited within the ambit of one particular theory. they are always in comparison with another theory. Just like Copernicus with Ptolemaic system, motion of celestial bodies. Kepler with regard to the Copernican. And of course, if we approach global concepts as points of comparisons between theories rather than simply fruits of particular individual theories, then we see that not only we can have global concepts as points of comparison, bridging,

but also we can have even more broader hierarchies of global concepts. Copernican revolution as Andrew Karras says Copernican revolution is also a global concept we see that there are certain kinds of correlations between what Newtonian problems trying to achieve what Kepler tries to achieve what Copernicus tries to achieve what Einstein tries to achieve and what Darwinian implication of biological theory imply within this ambit. And we can compare them and then talk about something like a Copernican revolution,

a Copernican paradigm. It's kind of like almost like the hierarchy of Platonic forms. Don't worry Lenka, I saw the sidebar. I will make a note of it and I will talk about it next session. Can I make a question? You got a little bit... Okay, sorry.

So I would like to make a more linguistic question, let's say, because my English is not my native language so I was wondering if the word similarity is different from the word resemblance. I mean if there is etymological difference and especially how can we use it in philosophy and around models because we usually use the word similarity for models but in the text of good one we saw also resembles I mean in my mind I have it like in the same meaning but I would like to clarify that you're absolutely right you're absolutely right so basically Tversky I mean we

are running out of time but that's what was going to talk about Tversky who was also in 1970s started to talk about the problem of similarity in modeling in terms of semblance. So in English, these words are kind of the same. You can quibble about the details. But in many languages, if you basically move across this expanse of natural linguistic resources, you see that actually these words can fundamentally mean different things, as you say, right? But that is precisely why someone like Carnap would say that

we should absolutely get rid of natural language at this point if we are going to truly, coherently talk about these problems, right? Because natural language, not only when I'm speaking English, These words are completely, totally vague, fuzzy, but also if we are going to compare the notion of the concept of similarity with the concept of similarity in, for example, Greek or Persian or any other language, not to mention that they can also have their own etymological clusters,

like with regard to semblance, resemblance, and so on and so forth. Literally, we absolutely cannot talk about anything. So this is one of the things that I actually think, you know, I'm so sorry to talk about this. I don't want to come off as a bad analytic philosopher, but this is why analytic philosopher was invented. One of the main missions of analytic philosophy, at least in the vein of Vienna Circle and Carnac, was that all of these kinds of concepts we are talking about not only are basically global concepts which are in their own right are vague and fuzzy,

but also within the framework of the natural language that they are posited they are even more vague right and hence with regard to other natural languages that other people use. So that's why there should be what you might call to be a project, which is a philosophical project, to move from the domain of natural language as such without actually dismissing it. But simply, it's a kind of like a transition, like an immigration.

You know, when you migrate from one world to another, you just don't dismiss the previous world. It's just that you are built across the bridges and you also remember what were you doing in that previous world. So essentially Carnap's prescription is this idea that we have to migrate from this natural linguistic resources in which such concepts are fundamentally vague by necessity to formal languages where we can finally initiate the project of explication.

reduction of vagueness at the level of a scale of such concepts precisely because formal languages allow us to finally despite of our use of different natural languages agree upon certain kinds of logical context logical connections which can shed light more coherently about for example the use of the concept of similarity within a formal system

heckling Okay, sure. Toy models. What are toy models? Brief answer. Toy models come in two varieties, a small and big. What are they supposed to do? Well, toy models are fictions. Literally they are fictions. They are like counterfactuals. hypotheses. Let's imagine that this was the case, even if it wasn't the case, right? Let it be

such and such, even if it is not such and such, so on and so forth. This is the principle of making a toy model. The thing is that toy models are usually considered to be explicit the metatheories. So we talked about this fact that a model structure is a subclass of a theoretical structure. But of course, a theoretical structure also requires a metatheoretical assumptions, which are always hidden at the level of both model structure and the level of the structure of theory. Like for example, I'm using, I'm Newton, talking about making such models like an

orary, which a concrete model shows the trajectories of celestial bodies, how they revolve around each other and then on a different level we are talking about newtonian mechanics where we use for example something like differential equations right but why are we using differential equations do we actually believe the differential equations are the most optimal ways of capturing the description and the structure of our theory and correspondingly our model,

well, if you say yes, then you are in the realm of explicit theory and implicit metatheory. If you say no to that question, you are in the business of explicit metatheory, namely a toy model where you are able you actually strive to tinker and toy around with for example different forms of mathematization rather than just differential equations of motion to capture the same or rather different structures and descriptions

that your previous theory have been providing you with. So toy models, as the name says it, in the first instance, it means that you are tinkering around with certain kinds of assumptions which are hypotheticals precisely because they are absent in your theoretical and model structure descriptions, right? For example, Newton didn't have different kinds of mathematical structures, right?

He didn't have something like the mathematics of chaos, you know, kind of a high order Riemannian geometry or topology. He only had differential equations. And of course, he believed that his theory is right according to such equations. and these models are right precisely because not only the theory supports it, but also the equations support it. But now imagine if we are going to the toy model. In the toy model, we entertain this idea that there can be a range of counterfactuals, mathematical structures, such that using such mathematical structure

or structures can fundamentally change how we see our theory and how we make our models. Tinker toy model. Exactly like, you know, the old... You're just like toying around. Toying around not with stuff that are available to you, but you are also imagining about what can be done with this set of Lego. You know, you can make from these simple primitives like Lego blocks, you can make a dragon or just if you are a well-behaved child, follow the instruction of the Lego kit.

Make, you know, a house and play the mommy and daddy. Right? but that that is not really the point of the toy model point point of the toy model is more like child who is imagining that oh i have these primitives theoretical primitives let me just toy around with them make new different worlds new different counterfactuals that might actually shed light about the structure of my model and the kind of modeling relations that I can make. So this is one explanation of the word toy in toy model.

The second one, it means that these toy models are not, in fact, about a real phenomenon. These are about other models and theories. essentially toy models hardly ever yes in some cases can be applied to real world phenomenon now this is one definition of the toy model there is also a different

definition of a toy model so what I gave you is a definition that is usually called in science of modeling a big toy model where you are basically playing around with the counterfactuals construct different possible wars such that you can look at the kind of actual world that you have made and talk about it in more details and you know results are these problems whereas so this is a big turmoil the small toy model is more like An extreme idealization of another model or a real world phenomenon.

Exactly like Thomas Schelling's model of segregation. Where so many details are taken out of the equation. And it creates a kind of fiction that actually allows us to think about certain kinds of invariances, which we couldn't talk about or single out properly if we were dealing with massive amounts of details with regard to your ethnicity, my ethnicity, my religion, your religion, the exact neighborhood, the color of our skin, so on and so forth.

We're talking about this with regard to Schellingmacher of segregation. All it requires is just a choice of preference, a utility function, and regional distribution, neighborhood. And then you see that, oh, segregation happens, even within that idealized, really idealized situation, That very, very idealized situation is an example of a small toy model. So you see the function of these two toy models are fundamentally different. The small toy model tries to come up by way of some sort of fiction, a useful pragmatic fiction,

to arrive at certain aspects which are useful. and they can be later revised, toyed around with. They can be updated, they can be plugged with new data, different features, so on and so forth. And then there is the big toy model, where you, in fact, start big. You are not talking about idealization or simplification. You, in fact, want to have everything. You want to have all these Lego blocks, make all sorts of worlds, possible worlds, like Arthur Eddington, where he said that sometimes it is important to think about actual from the perspective of the possible, even though the possible is not yet actualized.

Right? This is more like the big toy model. So I will go and talk about this more coherently with regard to different kinds of paradigms of explanation and modeling next session. I really suggest, so this is a very classical one, you know, it has certain kinds of details which are way too technical with regard to the application of toy models to physics,

particularly quantum mechanics and relativity. But it has a little bit of the first couple of pages. It has a little bit of nice, really nice commentaries on what toy models are in a kind of a big toy model universe or big toy models. It is an essay written in 2013 by Thomas Nyle Newbert. Let me put it here. Sorry, one second. called Toy Universe.

So you can start with that as a kind of reading material for the next session. Essentially, all toy universes are hypotheticals. They are in fact a category of what we will, I will talk about it and explain what it means actually, fictionalism in modeling. okay questions last questions the last complaints me again not complaints question

maybe this is going to be answered by reading the text but I'm just wondering in that moment don't we have I mean aren't we liberated from a specific call through toy models but you also mentioned toy models in science so maybe that is different yes toy model in science are essentially liberatory in the sense that it comes to a very particular philosophical problem uh which is not essentially at this point a philosophical problem it's a logical scientific problem in the sense that okay so we were talking about that that which is by itself doesn't mean

anything only the difference in thought makes a difference in being right you can only see different sectors of reality if you have managed to make differences in your epistemological systems in your logical systems, in your theoretical structuration, so on and so forth, right? Because reality is not just something that is out there we can access as a ready-made object. So in that case, toy models are more like these kinds of useful fictions, constrained fictions not fictions in a kind of literary sense

they are absolutely constrained you know theoretically constrained they are more like these useful fictions counterfactuals and hypotheses that allow us to broaden the scope but also diversify the notion of theory, structure logic mathematics so on so forth such that we can in fact enrich the very concept of reality. So this is how toy models work. It's like an allegory of this. You see, you know, when a child gets a Lego kit,

and the Lego kits usually come with an instruction for making a death star. you know in the Star Wars scenario so do you want to use that abide by the instruction as if this is the model of another model or actually a reality or actually you want to do something more exciting theoretically exciting by instead of making the Death Star model, Lego Death Star you put these Lego blocks together

such that you can make a dragon you can make a princess, a mermaid you know a car so on and so forth and all of these new models actually enrich your imagination of how possibly this model can relate to the world. You know, it's a kind of an enrichment model, an enriching model, rather than a representational model, whether direct or indirect. Anything?

Anything? Any last word? Or shall we stop at this point? And please do, as I mentioned, I completely forget all the time. Put anything that we were talking about and I didn't answer on the Google Classroom. classroom. Justin, go for the last question. I'm sorry. I meant for next week. I didn't know if you were needing... Oh, okay. Okay. So next week, next week, we are not going to have any presentation because we are a little behind. I'm going to start reading and going over...

Still, we haven't really talked about the way that similarity is being understood in the canon of scientific modeling in contemporary days. That's like 30 minutes. And then we will talk about fictionalism and toy modeling. And I know that Rob Lucas, apparently you weren't, I saw, whether Jobin or someone else said that they couldn't find Rob Lucas essay. Okay, I will put it on Google Classroom. If you promise, don't tweet about it or share it online. I'm not really sure whether it's been published or not.

Okay, excellent. Sounds good. All right. Thanks, everybody. I'm going to add the broadcast now. Excellent. Love you guys.