Philip Clayton - How Does Metaphysics Reveal Reality?

Some think metaphysics is ancient nonsense; others that it’s the bizarre occult. How does modern metaphysics contribute to our understanding of the world? It asks the most profound questions: what kinds of things exist? How does causality work? Sound too abstract? How about: does God exist? Are you a soul?

Philip Clayton is Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology. His previous teaching posts include Williams College and the California State University.

Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

[TheTroofSayer]

This outstanding episode resonates so much with my own thinking. The end point that I envisage for Philip Clayton's rationale is that beyond the astronaut's tether to the firm ship of reality (5:14), it must still make sense. It must *always* make sense, independently of whether or not one believes in God, soul, angels, etc. (relying on "because God" provides no get-out-of-jail-free card for the serious thinker).

4:54 - "What can you [the metaphysicist] contribute?"
Expanding on Clayton's "tethered astronaut" metaphor (5:14): A better understanding of the phenomenology playing out at the subatomic domain. Cube-root scaling to the subatomic domain releases matter from its classical (Newtonian) constraints (see Geoffrey West's book Scale, 2017, for the scaling considerations that relate). This implies a phenomenology, at the subatomic domain, which is more reminiscent of Jabberwocky than the billiard-ball metaphors that continue to persist throughout the logical-positivist narrative of physicalism.

2:10 - "A certain unknowability at the quantum level, which we expressed mathematically as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle."
*YES!* The phenomenology of the known versus the unknown. Hence my interest in the semiotics of CS Peirce (that guy again).

5:34 - "Is it some apprehension of a mind-like nature of reality?"
The mind-like nature of reality, if we run with Peirce, is primarily associative. The Feynman diagrams are an expression of the symmetries that cascade out from the void. Those symmetries, I contend, are probably associative.

5:47 - "Has a world of dead matter produced living mind?"
No. If we run with cube-root scaling and CS Peirce, the dynamic void and dynamic, associative mind are directly related. "Dead" matter is a transition state, absent of context, which resurrects into life when contexts draw upon matter's latent predispositions (quantum contextuality - Kochen & Specker, 1967, and Bell's theorem).

6:57 - "Are you telling me that we should use the scientific method to extend ourselves beyond science?"
I'd like to expand on Clayton's superb answer. My response to this question would be that we are not being scientific enough, when we formulate theories that are inconsistent with *all* aspects of reality. *Everything* must hang together, and if it doesn't, we are better off if we leave the question unanswered. A notorious, persistent culprit, for example, is entropy. It's ok to leave some questions unanswered, instead of prematurely asserting answers that don't belong. We need to return to Isaac Newton's "axiomatic framework" way of thinking to emphasize consistency across axioms.

All of this is imho, of course. I'm just a lowly engineer trying to unravel the contemporary pseudoscience masquerading as real science.

[larrywebber]

This was an outstanding episode. Thank you both!

[marlobardo]

The truth and beauty of metaphysics lies in always already both entirely transcending while remaining wholly immanent, embedded in the midst of that very meaning and being that make our being and knowing truly human. Metaphysics does so within both the unmanifest aspects of essence and the manifest aspect of existence as infinite consciousness experiencing an empirically discernible thus also finite [relative/particular] reality.

[mickeybrumfield]

Metaphysics comes to the forefront when we appreciate that we are finite beings trying to make sense of an infinite reality.

[Geo_Knows_Things]

Metaphysics still leaves the emerging questions (consciousness, uncertainty, randomness) unanswered. It seams Clayton suggests that reality is what you accept as truth; or rather, what the apostles and disciples of a belief proclaim as truth. And his justification for it is that science neither can answer nor allow answering them.
Btw, the Western scientific method is also driven by questions, not by hypotheses as Clayton says; however, it does not pretend to have answered everything; unlike methaphysics and other Eastern philosophies.

[krzemyslav]

The best philosophy can do is to try to put all facts together and find ideas that will make them work. In this sense metaphysics as a branch of philosophy reveals reality. For example it suggests that physicalism has a problem accounting for consciousness. And because of that our theoretical understanding of what reality is made of probably has to be expanded or reformulated. I'm waiting for solution, but it ultimately has to be based on observation of reality, not only on ideas.

[jasonbuksh]

A lot of words were said but no substance was spoken

[AAA-ww]

I never knew what people thought metaphysics was. 

However, I am not going by Greek nor academic definitions of metaphysics.

"They are incorrect".

As a painter, I must leave it to interpretation, or I would have written.  

As a poet would not spell it all out, it needs to be interpreted also.

Being a real metaphysician can not be achieved academically, studying only provides a language to be expressed.

"I am metaphysics, became a philosopher".
To provide the questions if asked!


Metaphysician philosopher

[bradmodd]

It's all metaphysics (to quote Chomsky) or consciousness, experience, observation is beyond metaphysics "is" an idea we built through induction. The physical may not exist, the experience exists but anything else but the experience is currently a theoretical induction. If the physical is experiencing us in the same way we are experiencing it then it might be part of a field of consciousness. Robert needs to grow a pair and talk to Bernardo Kastrup, he might be ""annoying" but he best articulates this theory.

[michaelwangCH]

The human brain is more than the sum of its neurons. The science-based knowledge after proven, it becomes deterministic information until we discover new evidence. But the human brain is built with purpose of learning and change, resp. the dynamic of change is its system itself. This is reason the human has to go beyond the knowing science to making new scientific discoveries and to ground the science in reality e.g. meta physics. - asking the uncomfortable questions "why".

[rxbracho]

Like others, I find this to be a very weak definition of metaphysics, staying within the reductionist confines of science. True metaphysics sees the world just as physics, but rather than explaining how, it seeks to glimpse the why. Pierce beyond the facts to the very essence of space and time. And, whether materialistic metaphysicians like it or not, consciousness.

[Azupiru]

By what metaphysics has Rabbi Tovia Singer determined (in only the past two days) that the Messiah is here?

[IsSocratesDead]

Absolutely amazing to see how someone, otherwise as smart as this, will tie themselves in intellectual knots, all in the effort to keep ancient, outdated, stale religious ideas alive in the face of modern science. “God is dead.” And it is now our job, and ours alone, to create beauty and meaning in our lives.

[rupesh_sahebrao_dhote]

DIFFERENT VIEWS ON WHY EXISTENCE ?

Advaita :- Hey Vishistadvaita you know I am pure consciousness and rest of this universe is just a illusion or dream.

Vishistadvaita:- Hey Advaita you know I am eternal along with Lord but somehow because of my bad decision I am engaged in this Maya or world and my duty now is to chant my lord's name so that I will not return back to this world and leave peacefully serving my Lord.

Advaita :- You fool...if you are eternal how come you don't remember because eternal doesn't change.

Vishistadvaita:- You too are fool ..Why are you getting trapped in your own dream. Dream something beautiful instead of Life and death or get out of dream right now.

Hearing the above conversation Buddhist said you both are fool... everything is zero or nothing...no world...no Brahman.

Then dualists came and they said you all are fools. God has created this and we just need to be slave of him. Let him enjoy life and death of ours .

Then came Science and said you all are fools. This Existence is just by chance or BigBang and it doesn't has any purpose.

All above philosophies are illogical and incorrect because it contradicts the premises on which it is taking out the conclusion. That is the reason, each one of them unknowingly or subconsciously contradicts other . Each one of them knows that the other party is incorrect but because of lack of knowledge they don't know How ? So they subconsciously think they are correct. They can't simply answer Why the Universe has to be the way it is ? Why it cannot be stable ?

Society is based on fear and hence you will never find the truth openly circulating.

Reality and Correct and logical philosophy is----

Existence and it's knowledge goes together. One cannot be without another. This Principle can be in reality only through eternal cyclic movement with division of subject and object in it.

😀

[rc]

reason and rationality can offer quite a leverage when employed for the right purpose...

[SRAVALM]

Imagine having a box of puzzle pieces, and trying to put them together, so acknowledging the relations, seeing the unity of all, the forms within the formless, the characteristics within the non characteristic, the very table as substratum the puzzle pieces depend upon, this very brilliance or intellect, the Divine light shining forth and through all things, reflecting That very Beauty and quality back, yet this enigma of wondering how it could all be, how....imagine that! That this is seen as a secondary thing or nonsense thing...

[buttegowda]

Pls read vedanta and upanishads, you will know the nature of reality

[ivanbeshkov]

Cats, apes, elephants, dolphins also have minds. Minds are not exclusively human.

[smezzourh]

This is by far the worst definition of metaphysics. Philosophy of science, for instance, is grounded in science because it is its very subject of inquiry. Metaphysics on the other hand must not. Because the very questions it deals with are not scientific in nature (being, god, ultimate reality...) so metaphysicians have to be innovative in this regard so they can come up with new concepts and new methods of problem solving... Philosophers are so afraid nowadays to say anything that "challenge" science and the scientific community... it's embarrassing.

[halleuz]

Perhaps logical analysis is metaphysics enough.