On the transition from non-life to life
as an offshoot to a conversation on the Donald Hoffman and Conscious Realism thread:
Quoting apokrisis
@apokrisis
The first sentence of the quote above is the part that intrigues me. It would resolve the main problem that I currently hold: the evolution of life out of non-live. OK, so you hold that consciousness is not substance but rather that some vague matter/info/stuff is; I uphold the converse. Not that this observation is newsworthy for either one of us. Still, last I recall, we can both agree that life and non-life are qualitatively different.
By the way, on a conceptual level I can already account for this becoming, sort of; something along the lines of: physical reality is informing us that we (awareness in general) once upon a time ;) were for the most part all equally driven toward the grand finale of perfection (your Heat Death; my boundless awareness); then some of us deviated from this egalitarian course/heuristic and began to favor ego over selflessness, thereby taking on greater and greater degrees of negentropy and, thereby, power to do as one pleases relative to other; now we’ve gained enough awareness via negentropy to once again consciously discover which courses are right and which are wrong; and so, here we currently are. OK, you’ll hopefully note that while maybe having a teeny bit of poetic merit (a kind of “the fall” attitude)—and, while remaining accordant to the overall metaphysics I uphold—it’s still a far cry from a satisfactory explanation of how life evolved from non-life … this on the physical plane which we both in large part prioritize.
[So as to not seem self-contradictory, an explanation as to my prioritization of the physical: To my mind, the physical plane is the closest communal proximity that all co-existent agents hold to the grand finale. It deterministically (again, derived teleologically) constrains our various freewill intentions to a set of possibilities that we all abide by (e.g., nature says: thou shalt not act out one’s fantasies of flying off of tall cliffs/buildings through the flapping of hands lest one fall and loose one’s identity to this world … kind of thing). Otherwise expressed, physical objectivity is the closest, self-organizing, representational proximity we corporeal beings presently have to metaphysical objectivity (wherein perfect unity of being occurs); and, indeed, we are causally tied into it as agents via body/brain-mind-agency causal factors. Details aside, in practice this construct closely resembles Leibniz’s concept of “the best of all possible worlds (…yet arrived at … crappy though it may sometimes be)”. So, in short, from where I stand if one cares about wanting to help actualize the grand finale, one’ll then in part, and in due measure, care a great deal about the health of the planet/the physical/our material sustenance (Mother Earth, as some call it)—if for no other reason, then as a logical consequence of one’s chosen, very-long-term goal.]
Thing is, there’s a bridge that I have a hard time traversing. I’m very set on affirming that life and non-life are substantially different, with the difference being that of awareness. What I’m considering, though, is the possibility of there being an underlying factor to both non-life and life—one that would yet be present in the final end—which when held in large enough degrees forms the gestalt of a first-person point of view as can be defined by perception and perceiver (no homunculus). Here, there’s yet a duality, as you might call it, between the ontically real “agency” and the information that, despite its causal influence upon agency, is nevertheless an illusion which vanishes in the final end. Though this is from my interpretation, I believe you’ll find it parallels your own: in the Heat Death you uphold, information as we know it, together with all natural laws as we know them, all causal processes as we know them, etc., vanish, leaving instead … well, that’s your territory.
So, for example, how may a proton then be stated to hold such an quasi-awareness&agency?
I get that it interacts with context and thereby is like an informational point of view. But what does a proton hold which is likewise held by atoms and, in turn, by inanimate organic molecules, that—upon placing such molecules together in the right combination—results in the autopoietic gestalt/holon of an individual, prokaryotic awareness … one that is itself endowed with some minimal degree of top-down causal ability and, thereby, with the property of life (this property lacking in the proton, the atom, and the individual organic molecules)?
[For those who deny that bacteria hold any awareness and some minimal degree of freewill, the transition nevertheless happened somewhere along the way toward being human; I pick at this level for my own reasons … As for myself, I’ll not here again debate where the transition first occurred, nor on whether reality is all determinist v. indeterminist. Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency.]
Quoting apokrisis
The infodynamic closest equivalent [to awareness as a first-person point of view] might be agreeing that every material event or degree of freedom is like an informational point of view.
[...]
But this is a metaphorical rather than literal description. The having of a point of view is not about awareness as such (awareness not being a substantial thing). [...]
@apokrisis
The first sentence of the quote above is the part that intrigues me. It would resolve the main problem that I currently hold: the evolution of life out of non-live. OK, so you hold that consciousness is not substance but rather that some vague matter/info/stuff is; I uphold the converse. Not that this observation is newsworthy for either one of us. Still, last I recall, we can both agree that life and non-life are qualitatively different.
By the way, on a conceptual level I can already account for this becoming, sort of; something along the lines of: physical reality is informing us that we (awareness in general) once upon a time ;) were for the most part all equally driven toward the grand finale of perfection (your Heat Death; my boundless awareness); then some of us deviated from this egalitarian course/heuristic and began to favor ego over selflessness, thereby taking on greater and greater degrees of negentropy and, thereby, power to do as one pleases relative to other; now we’ve gained enough awareness via negentropy to once again consciously discover which courses are right and which are wrong; and so, here we currently are. OK, you’ll hopefully note that while maybe having a teeny bit of poetic merit (a kind of “the fall” attitude)—and, while remaining accordant to the overall metaphysics I uphold—it’s still a far cry from a satisfactory explanation of how life evolved from non-life … this on the physical plane which we both in large part prioritize.
[So as to not seem self-contradictory, an explanation as to my prioritization of the physical: To my mind, the physical plane is the closest communal proximity that all co-existent agents hold to the grand finale. It deterministically (again, derived teleologically) constrains our various freewill intentions to a set of possibilities that we all abide by (e.g., nature says: thou shalt not act out one’s fantasies of flying off of tall cliffs/buildings through the flapping of hands lest one fall and loose one’s identity to this world … kind of thing). Otherwise expressed, physical objectivity is the closest, self-organizing, representational proximity we corporeal beings presently have to metaphysical objectivity (wherein perfect unity of being occurs); and, indeed, we are causally tied into it as agents via body/brain-mind-agency causal factors. Details aside, in practice this construct closely resembles Leibniz’s concept of “the best of all possible worlds (…yet arrived at … crappy though it may sometimes be)”. So, in short, from where I stand if one cares about wanting to help actualize the grand finale, one’ll then in part, and in due measure, care a great deal about the health of the planet/the physical/our material sustenance (Mother Earth, as some call it)—if for no other reason, then as a logical consequence of one’s chosen, very-long-term goal.]
Thing is, there’s a bridge that I have a hard time traversing. I’m very set on affirming that life and non-life are substantially different, with the difference being that of awareness. What I’m considering, though, is the possibility of there being an underlying factor to both non-life and life—one that would yet be present in the final end—which when held in large enough degrees forms the gestalt of a first-person point of view as can be defined by perception and perceiver (no homunculus). Here, there’s yet a duality, as you might call it, between the ontically real “agency” and the information that, despite its causal influence upon agency, is nevertheless an illusion which vanishes in the final end. Though this is from my interpretation, I believe you’ll find it parallels your own: in the Heat Death you uphold, information as we know it, together with all natural laws as we know them, all causal processes as we know them, etc., vanish, leaving instead … well, that’s your territory.
So, for example, how may a proton then be stated to hold such an quasi-awareness&agency?
I get that it interacts with context and thereby is like an informational point of view. But what does a proton hold which is likewise held by atoms and, in turn, by inanimate organic molecules, that—upon placing such molecules together in the right combination—results in the autopoietic gestalt/holon of an individual, prokaryotic awareness … one that is itself endowed with some minimal degree of top-down causal ability and, thereby, with the property of life (this property lacking in the proton, the atom, and the individual organic molecules)?
[For those who deny that bacteria hold any awareness and some minimal degree of freewill, the transition nevertheless happened somewhere along the way toward being human; I pick at this level for my own reasons … As for myself, I’ll not here again debate where the transition first occurred, nor on whether reality is all determinist v. indeterminist. Again, the intended theme here is how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency.]
Comments (772)
Then, we can all be invited to the Nobel Ceremony, and we'll finally meet in person.
Meet with apo? OK! His system already claims to resolve this transition ....
I get your point, though. But why not try to philosophize on a philosophy forum? X-)
This, what is suggested to be a little leap, is actually one giant Whopper of a Tale. Any reference to any mind-trait (e.g. information), is just more obfuscation combined with sleight of hand. To only way science gets away with it, is by saying it very quickly and not waiting for any hands to be raised in object.
This miracle of chemicals developing awareness is in every sense of the phrase a Tall Tale. It was nice viewing the video on the other thread where at least a few academics are brave enough to declare that this Emperor is Buck Naked.
On the one hand, there’s a lot of science this and science that in our culture. Trouble is that it’s mostly duckspoken by folk who look upon science as an authoritative regime, a kind of Ministry of Truth or, better yet, a type of Kafka’s Castle, which is the only way/path (yup, attempting religio-dogmatic connotations here) toward an attainment of absolute truths in this world. Bullocks. Worse, a gross and horrendous insult to the long history of thinkers that have held the otherwise noble title of “(empirical) scientist” [and hey, male and female, btw]. One of the pinnacle reasons for this is an absurd misunderstanding of epistemology that is then projected, with extreme error, upon the empirical sciences: that they in any way, now or ever, purport to discover absolute truths. Many an average individual will then cry’s out, “but if science won’t supply my absolute truths of what is, what or who will?” This can get deep into culturally habituated mindsets regarding epistemic givens. He who knows absolute truths is the authority all bow down to, right? This may be so for some, but not for those of us who don't subscribe to authoritarianism. In hindsight, Bacon might have done better to say “Understanding is Power” rather than knowledge. For one reason, we all fully well understand that there is no such thing within time and space as “absolute understandings”. But staying on track with the issue of science: The empirical sciences, as much as they rely upon various maths and systems of logic, are all, without exception, inductive. Period. Yet it is this very plasticity to the scientific method which has brought about its many, many, great achievements—its non-authoritarian authority, so to speak.
Generally speaking, any basic course in the philosophy of science will illustrate as much regarding the basic notions of the empirical sciences. Any so called scientific article which ends by declaring a given conclusion to be “proven” is sheer quackery. A conclusion can only be supported—this, at best (given our modern systems of quantitative appraisals of evidence), by a probability value of 0.000[?]. Hence, even in the best of times, there can yet be a 0.01% chance of the results of any given experiment being wrong.
And, btw, from previous readings of your posts, I fully agree with you that the empirical sciences need to be independent of monetary interests in order to be integral. It’s about minimizing bias, not kissing the behinds of those who give you money with hope of increasing their company’s stock-value, and this so that you may continue making a livelihood so as to put food on the table for the kids (which, if explicitly is needed, tends to greatly increase bias—both in what one researches and in the conclusions that are then produced and published … which, in turn, if this trend progresses, will make what was once science into a hollow shell at best, a propaganda machine at worst ). Still, the scientific method is not the culprit here.
Quoting Rich
I in a substantive sense agree with this. It’s easy to then declare myself a panpsychist of sorts, but the truth is that my current gut feelings (which can always be wrong) find a sharp division between inanimate identities and animate ones; logically, I’ve no idea how panspsychism would work. This is what I’m diggin’ in the dirt for. What attribute would an inanimate identity hold that, though not itself being the awareness of life, could be logically presented not as a divide but as a continuum.
Apo’s approach, though physicalist, resolves this continuum. Now, traditionally neither he or me have significant issues with sharing our outlooks online. So I was interested in the prospect of sharing a cordial exchange of ideas. Who knows, maybe it’ll amount to something; maybe it won’t. (And, of course, no limits on who can exchange ideas.)
The so-called scientific method only exists in textbooks. It has no counterpart anywhere in the world whether in academia or industry. Science had morphed into part goal seeking for monetary benefits and party religion promising people some hope for their utopian dreams (cancer cures are right around the corner and robots will be doing everything while we ball in the sun.). It's really instructive to observe how science has become quite a religion in its own right with adherents who embrace it for the same reasons any religion is embraced, a combination of money, hope, and social benefits.
Quoting javra
Bergson is the go to person for great insight into these ideas. Stephen Robbins in his videos on YouTube does a great job in elucidating on some of Bergson's thoughts. Rupert Sheldrake also takes a partial cut at it.
In so far as the difference of life and inanimate, you can think of the differences as moving in different directions in regards to entropy, inanimate being some decaying aspects of what was formerly life. Call it life's waste product. Interestingly, the preeminent architect Louis Kahn described inanimate matter as the waste of light. Similar ideas. Light is an important phenomenon to study weekend considering the nature of life. All spirituality revolves around life.
Any physicalist is necessarily going to imbue human characteristics or traits into any fundamental
idea. The only alternative is the "it just happens miracle". Whitehead developed a process philosophy but still he needed an impetus so he instilled a God or creative force in his philosophy. It is inevitable. There is a need for some impetus. Bergson called the impetus the Elan vital.
The simplest form of life would need several components which alone might happen by chance, but would have to link up in just the right way, also by chance, more or less all at once. A life form needs a template. Life on earth uses DNA and/or RNA. The life form needs machinery of some kind to build itself and carry out making a copy of the template, and cutting the copy off. In order to have all this machinery, it needs yet another piece of machinery -- it's exterior package.
I can sort of imagine chemistry getting more complicated, but for more complicated life-chemistry to form stuff that could snap together, stay together, and make something more or less alive, seems to be on the outside of possibility. It seems like the ur-life form would have to pop into existence, rather than crawl into existence.
On the other hand, I don't want to invoke an exterior agent -- God, for instance, or some sort of cosmic will.
Solutions?
Well, as I was saying, imposing instead bias upon scientist due to monetary reasons pretty much corrupts that whole scientific ideal of impartiality/objective. This, though, is a people interacting with people issue; not a methodology issue.
Do you know of a better means of figuring out what occurs in our phenomenal/physical world in a way that is minimally clouded by hearsay, personal tall tales, and, sometimes, power seeking deceptions?
Quoting Rich
Thank you. I'll try to check these out
... bury our heads in the sand and consider it a done deal philosophically?
:)
OK, bitter. I get the desire to prohibit discussion on this. I'll for now obligingly bugger off.
Unless it is possible to divorce people from science, then the scientific method will remain a textbook concept. The politics of science are overwhelmingly biased toward money making thus making it goal seeking. No way around it.
Quoting javra
The process I use is direct experience which is cross-referenced against many, many references from many disciplines. I look for patterns. Bohm described it as solving paradoxes by seeking differences within similarities and similarities within differences. As a result, I have developed my own system of living my life.
I think there are two attitudes to those who possess absolute/objective truth. Those who's religious feelings are conceptualized in terms of knowledge will indeed view the scientist or perhaps the philosopher as a priest. If the highest human potential is the know truth, then the knower is the "Christ" we should imitate or at least admire.
But the scientist can also be viewed as a specialized organ like an eye. The eye is the tool of the "I" we might say. What I wants from the "eye" is knowledge as a means to secure its true object of desire, which is perhaps a life with a certain shape and rich with feeling of love or at-home-ness or dignity, etc.
Science has won its prestige via accuracy. If a black box made accurate predictions or spit out plans for technology that got us what we want reliably, we would learn to trust that black box without understanding it. But isn't this the same inductive principle that science uses to test what are fundamentally creative leaps into interpreting sense-experience differently. As Hume noted, this isn't even strictly logical. We just can't help ourselves. We return to what has worked. We expect what has come before. We can't say why and it doesn't even work us up that we can't say why.
Anyway, we probably couldn't worship the black box. Our images of the divine tend to be human. But it's interesting that religion is often framed in terms of knowledge or accurate beliefs. This makes it a sort of untestable or pseudo-science. On the other hand, it is testable as lifestyle, but (sociology and politics aside) only on a personal level ultimately. We might say that the notion of "one true religion" is a denial of substantial human variety. If there is one "cure" or "secret," then we must be all the same in some fundamental way. (I don't think it's this simple.)
I would start by reminding that I would see consciousness as a process and not any kind of "stuff". You do think of consciousness as a stuff - substantial being - and so you automatically try to understand my position in the same ontic terms. For you, the critical question becomes what sort of substance am I talking about - aha! Information. Or (vague) matter. Or something (some thing).
Quoting javra
Again you just translated the discussion into substance terminology. Where I would say we might agree on a difference in process, you say we might agree about a difference in quality - a particular property of a substance.
Quoting javra
It is plausible that when all possible wishes are taken into account, a generalised shared world emerges as the baseline to that. That is also the logic of the "sum over histories" approach in quantum mechanics. The Universe can be understood as emerging from an ensemble of possibilities where the vast mass of those possibilities will self-cancel away, leaving behind only the commonalities that are uncancellable.
So if we average all "desires" or "acts" in a world where the possibility of turning right is matched by the possibility of turning left, then the shared outcome is a world where what is left uncancellable is the symmetry of being poised between two options.
The story works for either a mentalistic or physicalist metaphysics.
Quoting javra
This indeed seems a critical problem for your approach. You are wanting to assert that awareness is basic, and yet it only emerges eventually.
So one solution to that is panpsychism - saying that awareness was always there, just dilute and not properly organised to be a structured state of experience, a point of view.
The other would be to turn causality on its head and make finality retrospective. In Hegelian fashion, the world is called into being by the desire that is its own end.
Panpsychism is in fact pretty reductionist - back to primal stuff with primal properties. And the idea of retrocausality is something even physics is having to contemplate, as in Cramer's transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics. Experiments like the quantum eraser show how the future can act backwards to affect events in the past - or at least something that "causality violating" must be the case.
So for both the mentalistic and physicalist ontologies, the alternatives boil down in similar fashion.
Quoting javra
The way you describe it sounds too much like the Cheshire Cat's grin. Once more, you are reifying the process of acting agentially - behaving like a self in form a point of view - as then this thing of "agency". Your claim becomes that an abstraction is left as all that exists. Knock down Oxford University and its essence still persists, hanging over the cleared ground as a real substantial being.
The Heat Death is a more subtle concept because it is in fact a process that never stops, yet becomes eternally unchanging. Differencing still goes on, but it ceases to make a difference. You are left with the same process producing now only the simplest possible outcome.
Quoting javra
This is the advantage of a semiotic approach to physicalism. We can now define the bridge as the epistemic cut between - as Pattee puts it - rate independent information and rate dependent dynamics.
So as soon as proper internalised semiosis occurs - as soon as there is a modelling relation - there is life and mind in some formally-defined degree.
For a bacteria, this sign-processing may be terribly simple. The mechanics of what is going on is completely transparent. A bacterium with a flagellum - a wiggling tail - connected to a chemo-receptor, can swim along a gradient of food scent.
So long as the receptor is signalling "yes", the molecular motors spin the tail, a collection of strands, one way. The bacterium is driven in a straight line towards its heart's desire. Then if the receptor's switch is then flipped the other way - no chemicals binding it, causing the receptor's molecular structure to change shape due to a simple alteration in the balance of its mechanical forces - then that in turns signals the flagellum to rotate in the other direction. The bundle of strands untangle and no longer push the bacterium in a direction. It now tumbles about randomly - until it again happens to pick up a scent.
The point is that if we actually look at the ground level of life, there is just no mystery. You get intelligent behaviour due to semiotics. A mechanical chain of events connects information to action as a hardwired interpretive habit.
This epistemic cut is a small trick. But having got established, it can be scaled to be as large as you like. The modelling relation has no limit on its complexity. Physicalism just doesn't have a problem explaining intelligent behaviour. There is no explanatory gap when it comes to semiosis as a model-producing process. The gap arises only once folk start treating the process as something further - an ontological thing, or substantial state.
Quoting javra
One can't because the dualism is baked in by the chosen terminology. It becomes a word game, not a reasonable inquiry.
Panpsychists do often just say that it is the special structure of nervous systems and brains - whatever that is - that explains why you get the step up.
So there are two explanations - both of which ape what physicalism itself would suggest.
The first is the idea that if you concentrate things in some fashion, you get a spontaneous phase transition. Condense vapour and you get liquid water. The physical situation (which is completely unmysterious) can be offered as a metaphor to suggest a rarified "mental stuff" might do the same, suddenly changing state at a certain threshold to coalesce as a located first-person point of view.
The other then is that the information processing structure of organisms is what does the trick - just as it does for information processing physicalists. So now the panpsychism piggybacks on the informational explanation rather than the dynamical one.
You can see where this is heading....whatever seems the right answer due to the success of physicalist modelling can be held to be the secret sauce of panpsychic mechanism too.
The mental never in fact explains anything. It just sits there demanding its explanation.
Let's count the number of traits of the mind that this statement attributes to a soup of chemicals:
1) We
2) look
3) mystery
4) intelligent
5) behavior
6) events
7) information
8) interpretative
9) habit
With this little trick of imbuing the mind into a thick group of chemicals we get ..... the mind! Now how did a soup of chemicals come by all of this human characteristics? Well, it took a long time. Simple and straightforward. One only has to buy into talking and self-aware chemicals that miraculously decided to start creating things.
How does mind turn into quanta? How does quanta turn into energy? How does energy turn into solid matter? It doesn't! It is all the same. The mind simply interprets it differently depending upon characteristics (e.g. vibrational frequency). Thus the equivalence as one turns into another. Very simple and such a paradigm doesn't require chemicals desperately trying to survive by all of a sudden working against entropy nor does it require chemicals to start arguing among each other.
Everything we experience is of minds creating together.
Where was "the mind" said or implied?
I have no problem at all if you understood me as talking about mindfulness as the concrete action of modelling the world in biological fashion.
And where was "a soup of chemicals" said or implied? Clearly I was emphasising the structure not the matter.
So you are just making the newbie error of reifying a process as a thing. You want to criticise me for believing in my fundmental stuff rather than your fundamental stuff. And yet my actual argument is against that kind of naive metaphysics entirely.
No where ... except every other word. Imbuing chemicals with a mind has become second nature. What was that again? They signal "yes"? In Morse code maybe or maybe semaphores? That would be an interesting question on a college exam: how do chemicals signal yes to each other? Answer: with a wink of an eye.
I sometimes wonder how many students notice this little sleight of hands but are too scared to question it because they want the A.
Very odd.
Unconsciousness (blackout, dream states, death?) would appear to be a state where access to memory had been impaired, sort of like a TV set that no longer can get a transmission signal. It certainly feels like Will (the Elan vital) has gone yet it can spark to life again once access to memory is restored. It is an extremely interesting phenomenon, yet almost nothing is written about it in any philosophical literature.
One can say this is the transition point.
Very queer, you mean. Dude, whilst I appreciate you comment, no worries. In the words of someone or other, “there are no solutions, only problems”. Or am I getting that backwards?
Anyways, I’ll take a breather from the forum for the time being. Freewill, don’t you know.
The difference between life and non-life is quite distinguishable in the extremes, as when we compare a rock to a human being. As we move further back in time, back to where the distinction isn't so clear, we find objects that have the features of life and non-life, like truffles which is more than a rock but less than a mushroom. Just like everything else, the boundaries are blurred when we get at the root of it. The same can be said about the differences between man and ape when we begin to look at the origin of man.
"At what point can we say that the precursors of man become man himself?"
-Jacob Bronowski in the Ascent of Man
I deny that bacteria hold any conscious agency as they have no nervous system, much less a central nervous system. Conscious agency does happen along the way to being human. It is the difference between having a basic nervous system, like a nerve net in starfish (no conscious agency) and a central nervous system (conscious agency) where the brain is the place where the sensory information comes together into a whole experience.
What is the role of "because" in the above sentence?
Does Is it refer to empirical implication or to linguistic definition?
Good question. Given the following tentative definitions:
1) Conscious: fully responsive and fully aware.
2) Responsive: receptive and/or reactive.
3) Aware: sensitive and perceptive.
4) Sensation: the mental experience of interoception.
5) Perception: the mental experience of sensory stimulation.
6) Interoception: the reception of a physiological stimulus by an internal organ which transmits neural signals to the brain.
7) Sensory Stimulation: the reception of a physical stimulus from the environment by a sense organ, which transmits neural signals to the brain.
If bacteria do not have a brain and sense organs, is there any point in trying to devise an experiment to test the hypothesis?
What about the reverse question:
Since a living human has a functional brain and sensory organs, is there any point in trying to devise an experiment to test the hypothesis that a human is conscious, given the fact a human is *by definition* said to be conscious in virtue of possessing a functioning brain and sensory organs?
Another good question. Answer: No.
But since it doesn't cost much to establish the fact that not only conscious, but also semi-conscious and non-conscious human mind-body conditions exist, anyone is free to conduct their own empirical investigation: simply observe that people can be awake, asleep, or in a coma.
I agree.
It's obvious to me that plants and bacteria are at least responsive to their environments. But are plants sensitive in that they have mental experiences of interoception? Is it an empirical or conceptual question? Can you devise an experiment that is capable of testing that hypothesis (i.e., plants are sensitive, as defined)? If not, isn't it a conceptual question?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-green-mind/201412/are-plants-entering-the-realm-the-sentient
I wonder how this affects veganism?
But if the answer is No, in virtue of consciousness being reducible to a cognitive-behavioural definition, then "consciousness" is nothing more than a linguistic convention.
Hence the sentence "a functioning brain is aware" is analytic, and therefore meaningless, and everyone is free to invent their own definition of "awareness", irrespective of observed matters of fact.
I would say that sentence is meaningless because I connected awareness with mental (i.e., mind) experiences, not with brains. In any case, you are correct that "everyone is free to invent their own definition of", not only awareness, but any other term. Do you have another definition of consciousness that you would like to propose?
Thanks for the link. Javra has mentioned similar research in previous posts. I'm not sure whether the explanations offered are analogous or metaphorical with respect to animal psychology.
Is the type of information being "acquired", "processed", "integrated", and "transmitted" by plants (i.e., chemical and electrical signals) the same type of information which animal minds acquire, process, etc. (i.e., concepts and models)? In other words, do plants have minds which are analogous to animal minds?
If plants are conscious, my psychological definitions No.6&7 need to replace "brain" with another term. Any suggestions?
There are similarities in the differences and differences in the similarities. These are what we are observing. The mind travels many paths. Analogies work to a certain extent, but only to a certain extent and then we embrace the differences. Heraclitus called this life energy, the Lagos, Daoism calls it the Dao, and Bergson calls it the Elan vital. It is the creative force that permeates the universe.
Is this your definition of consciousness? And is it a panpsychist conception?
Definitions aren't labels. What is "the creative force that permeates the universe"?
If so, do you have an answer for the OP (i.e., "how one can logically go from inanimate matter to conscious agency")?
If one asks me is there a reasonable way to explain how life pops out of a salad of chemicals, I would say no and there doesn't seem to be any overriding reason why one should pursue such a line of thought since accepting mind as it explains everything quite adequate and is in conformance with every day experience. It is only when the goal (no-mind) takes precedence over actual experience (I have a mind) that things get convoluted. As usual, such goal seeking can be correlated with the availability of funding. It more or less becomes a career onto itself. There is a huge amount of economic incentive to embrace no-mind.
Fair enough. Thanks.
So, just to clarify: it's "mind" which is "the creative force that permeates the universe"? And do all living organisms have minds, or only some?
All life can be considered a manifestation of this creative force and one can observe the expression of this creativity in its innumerable variations. Each variation of life shares similarities and differences.
"Human's cannot be in possession of emergent spiritual qualities that aren't already present in someway in so-called 'inanimate' matter"
A materialist smashes the rock and replies
"This rock wasn't conscious since it lacked sensory receptors, a nervous system and wasn't self preserving"
Is this really a dispute over objective facts, or is it merely a rhetorical exchange of subjective behavioural preferences?
How are metaphysical disagreements different from disputes over the best flavour of ice-cream?
Panpsychism is the best theory for the emergence of not just intelligence, but life itself. Everything would make so much more sense if only there wasn't life doing cartwheels across the front of the lecture theatre.
How to understand the emergence of consciousness is just by understanding emergent order through heirachy (thanks Apokrisis). A rock may not have the same type of sentience a living creature has, but that's just a reflection of the type of society the atoms have built. The atoms themselves are teaming with life.
In resolving conceptual questions, fact should be the starting point for Philosophy. It is the remit of Science, not Philosophy, to establish fact. The remit of Philosophy is to determine concept coherence.
The OP poses a conceptual question, presupposing that relevant facts have not been established.
So, in order to progress the OP:
1) Have any relevant facts been established by means of empirical investigation? If so, what are they?
2) If not, what are the relevant metaphysical concepts, and which one(s) make(s) sense?
From this:
1) What are some examples of conscious behaviour?
2) Is there criterial evidence of consciousness in anything other than animals?
3) What is the efficient cause of conscious behaviour?
In that case, if a perfectly content panpsychist imagines everything to be alive, and a perfectly content behaviourist imagines everything to be dead, and a perfectly content dualist imagines a duplication of entities, why should a third-party philosopher assume that there is a transcendental fact-of-the-matter that determines who is 'correct'?
Consciousness (or what I prefer Creative Mind) behavior is the movement (will) toward organization and evolution (learning).
There are all manner of gradients in such a movement in all forms of life. Without communication it is impossible to create an unbiased (human oriented) definition, though some claim to be able to communicate with other forms of life.
Organization and creative evolution stands in sharp contrast to decaying matter, which still demonstrates some aspect of spontaneity (the probabilistic decay) but can no longer in itself organize. However, it is possible for such decaying matter to once again spring to life when it falls into the wellspring of life as a nutrient.
That which is self-organizing and creates.
Photons (Light) have long been considered the essence of Spirit, that which sparks life.
With a little practice, one might learn to observe the differences and similarities between that which is creating and that which is being used to create.
I give up, why? Seriously, I don't understand the question.
I agree that defining consciousness on the basis of conscious animal behaviour introduces bias, because there are many other forms of life.
I'm not a biologist, so must defer to others to determine whether or not your proposed definition of consciousness (i.e., creative mind) and conscious behaviour (i.e., the movement/will toward organisation and evolution/learning) comprehend all forms of life.
A philosopher needs skills in observation, pattern recognition (the detective work), and intuition.
I'm only saying that questions about "life" and "death" and of the existence or non-existence of "other minds" are skin-deep without metaphysical significance, because the definitions of these concepts reduce to society's emotional responses to observed behaviour, and were only invented for the social needs of society.
An abortion advocate doesn't feel empathy towards a fetus, hence by definition the fetus isn't conscious for the abortion advocate.
A pro-lifer feels empathy towards the fetus, hence by definition the fetus is conscious for the pro-lifer.
If there aren't any community-independent criteria to settle the matter one way or the other, then why should we think that there is a mind-independent fact of the matter about whether a fetus is or is not conscious?
Thanks for the explanation. However, it sounds a bit reality-independent to me.
As you appear to be, I am confused by Javra's response to your post. I thought it was responsive and moved the discussion forward.
On the other hand, I don't understand why you'd think that a transition from non-life to life is "outside of possibility." In our search for life on other locations other than Earth, we may find out that it happens all the time. That would be my guess, although I have no evidence to back it up.
I do not think it is outside of possibility. I believe it is not only possible, I think it happened. What I was trying to say clearly is that "I don't know how it could happen". Maybe somebody else knows how, but I don't.
I doubt there's any big mystery to it. My money is on life beginning because of some mundane physical or chemical process that we just haven't identified yet.
Are you saying that science does not know how life started? I think you're right, but so what? Science does not know the cause of many things. I don't see that as a criticism or a problem. The scientific method is a process for finding out things we do not know.
It's germane, given the topic. Any number of insoluble problems might be solved "one day". The idea that this is something that science might solve "one day" already embodies assumptions about the kind of issue it is.
I'm not sure if we are agreeing or disagreeing. As I said to BitterCrank in an earlier post, I think it is likely that the life began as the result of relatively mundane physical and chemical processes. Unsolved is not the same as insoluble.
Without a shred of evidence to support such an assumption, one can classify this as faith - which is fine as long as it is understood that this is all that science offers. At least it provides insight into the nature of faith: unremitting hope followed by a strong belief.
Sure! It's just a matter of finding The Right Stuff! Give me the atomic table, and lab, and I'll show you how simple it is. So likely as to be almost trivial.
not
But in 100 years, it has narrowed down the options vastly. Which can't be said of any other approach to "knowing".
Perhaps you ought to read some up to date account, like Nick Lane's books, before making such pronouncements.
If you don't find his team's theory of abiogenesis convincing, you are of course free to tell us why.
Another approach might be the 10% tithe.
Hope and faith spring eternal.
Of course, we can save ourselves a while bunch of money and simply acknowledge the obvious that consciousness is fundamental.
How did my "I think it is likely" turn into your "unremitting hope followed by a strong belief?" My thoughts come from two sources 1) In the absence of other evidence, I admit a preference for explanations based on simple processes operating under ordinary conditions and 2) I have read discussions of self-organizing minerals and speculation that these could have a role in the transition from non-living to living. Those speculations seem plausible.
How do you know it's not? Why wouldn't it be? Why would you expect that a common phenomenon of nature such as life would have to have an exotic explanation?
What someone needs to observe is some chemicals sitting on a beach miraculously springing to life to a chorus of Hallelujah. At some point, after spending $hundreds of billions, we have to step back and acknowledge what a monumental waste of money this experiment had been, and use the money when it can do the most good: providing healthy food to people who need it.
Yes, it's a good point. Its a bit like a forest for the trees way of thinking though. For me the question is why are they doing that? Why are atoms forming molecules forming cycles and systems?
Again forest for the trees. By skipping over intentionality or directional design and simply observing what you can measure, you miss the whole show.
But we're not talking about a Beethoven symphony. We're talking about physical, chemical, and biological processes and how they relate to each other. In what way is that not a scientific question?
That's where I disagree.
Nothing wrong with faith but I guess it is difficult for some to acknowledge it, because science is all about evidence even when there is none.
Such is your faith, because there is zero evidence of this.
I didn't "skip over" intentionality, I reject it because there is no evidence for it or need for it. Why complicate a simple understanding with unnecessary decoration?
Evidence of what? Are you denying that life is a physical, chemical, and biological process?
For example, we may ask "Why did the train start moving?" It was because the wheels turned on the track. They turned on the track because the pistons drove them. The pistons drove them because of steam pressure from the furnace boiling the water. The fire in the furnace was caused by burning wood. Problem solved. That explains how the train started to move, but not why. It started to move because someone released the breaks and pushed the throttle forward. Intentionality is not needed for how, but it is needed for why. If you don't ask why then current theories will fill you with understanding.
Explain please. What in my statement do you disagree with?
Science cannot answer why and I don't care why. How is what matters and what I want to know.
Surprise! Someone doesn't share your faith. But that is the way life is. Some have this faith and others that. You have faith that life miraculous springs from chemicals. Poof! Others have faith that Gof created life. Chemicals vs God. It's a standoff.
Me? I believe mind created both of these stories and the accompanying faith.
You didn't answer my question. Are you denying that life is a physical, chemical, and biological process?
It sounds like you already know. Atoms self-organised into molecules, molecules self-organised into cycles, cycles self-organised into systems, complex systems self-organised into cells and cell groups. Cell groups self-organised into tissues, tissues self-organised into organs, organs self-organised into organisms. Whalla, here we both are.
Life is fundamental. Those terms you use are scientific labels for different types observations of life.
Let's not forget quanta self-organizing on its own. Now that it's a bit of a chasm to cross, scientifically speaking.
Do you understand what we're saying T Clark?
Good point and question.
Can the OP be reduced to an hypothesis, such as:
1) Life evolves from non-life, or
2) Inanimate matter creates conscious agency.
Assuming the hypothesis makes sense by definition (which is doubtful in the case of the two examples provided above), can an experiment be designed to test the hypothesis?
If not, the OP poses a conceptual, not empirical, question.
Did you click the link and read the article?
Quoting Wayfarer
The simplicity of a lipid.
Quoting T Clark
This argument goes two ways. It is impossible to have a simple understanding when the thing to be understood is complex. The "simple understanding" is necessarily a misunderstanding when the thing is complex.
Quoting T Clark
Have you never considered the non-physical, immaterial aspect of life, all those things in your mind which are immaterial?
But it's those very processes that then culminate in symphonies and every other human cultural artefact.
And It's the very simplicity of life that makes it hard to fathom. Even though single-called organisms are 'simple' in comparison to animals, the degree of complexity involved in metabolism, reproduction and cellular mitosis in such simple things, are orders of magnitude more complicated than anything observed in inorganic chemistry. (One of my younger relatives failed medical school because of the difficulty of organic chemistry.)
Furthermore the preconditions for the formation of organic life to form go back to the lifecycle of stars, the collapse and death of which are the factories for carbon, heavy metals and indeed most of the existing matter in the cosmos ('we are stardust'). So if you try and pinpoint the 'origin of life', the causal chain that gives rise to it seems to begin at the origin of the Universe itself (which then is one of the implications of the 'anthropic principle').
And the complexities involved in understanding all of those questions are such that it would take years of study across many different disciplines to discuss them coherently. One of the books I once tackled on the subject was [url=https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192821474/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_tai_hpNVzbSB3DN6M] the cosmological anthropic principle[/URL], an immensely detailed and encyclopedic volume. And all in the attempt to understand the 'simplicity of life'.
Even thenm this is still being understood from only one perspective, namely, that of the natural sciences. And that perspective carries philosophical implications, which many of its enthusiasts are unaware of. Hence the bromide, hey it's just simple physics and chemistry.
Now you're being needlessly contentious. You know I didn't say that self-organization of minerals is what caused life to begin. I said it was a plausible explanation, i.e. it sounds like it could be true, not that it is. I don't know how the transition from non-living to living took place.
I read an evaluation of the monkey/Shakespeare scenario somewhere. The conclusion was that all the monkeys in the world typing for as long as the universe has been in existence would not produce even just Hamlet.
No, sorry.
Here are the steps that seem likely to me.
I think all these steps are at least potentially empirically testable.
I didn't realize it was a link. Now I've read it. Here is my (unfair) summary. If you take the chemicals required for life and dump them in a beaker, life will never form. Therefore, "The appearance of life on earth is a mystery. We are nowhere near solving this problem. The proposals offered thus far to explain life’s origin make no scientific sense."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, maybe. Here is the equation for the Mandelbrot set - z(n+1)=zn^2+C. You've seen the picture - swirly circles with points that turn out to be more swirly circles off into the infinitely small. I don't know crap about fractal mathematics, but sometimes complexity us underlain by simplicity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, but we are talking about an historic event, a fact - the time the first non-living matter became animate. It happened sometime about 3.5 billion years ago. The matter changed in ways that were physical and chemical to become biological. Matter, energy, cells, organisms - these are material things I deal with everyday. Why do I need to consider non-material factors? I'm willing to if you give me a reason.
Exactly! But until we find life on other worlds, we'll need to do the best we can with what we have here.
This "likely scenario" is predicted on some fantasy of what the mind must be. But if course it all seems reasonable if one doesn't ruminate on what is precisely being proposed. It creates a new category that subsumes the miraculous.
Sorry. I don't understand your objections.
Without testable hypotheses, Science only contributes relevant established facts to the problem space.
And I suspect that the only contribution Philosophy will make is to determine that the OP is incoherent. The two hypotheses I was able to extract from it seem to be self-contradictory, to wit:
1) Life evolves from non-life.
2) Inanimate matter creates conscious agency.
To put it another way, all chemicals who are trying to prove there is no mind would have to extinguish all consciousness and then miraculously bring it back again without a mind being involved in the process. This is the hypotheses.
Do you figure the chemicals are up to the task? I imagine they could pull off this second miracle if they really wanted to prove to themselves that everything was material. My chemicals don't believe in miracles but yours does, so wishing them the best of luck.
What a fantastical description of life and mind.
I've never denied the existence of the mind. I'm still not clear on your objections.
Now, all we have to do is wait until all mind is extinguished and then see if it once again spontaneously emerges from some soup of chemicals. In a way it is like the Second Coming and with enough patience we'll have the answer.
In the meantime, the idea that such a thing happened and will happen again is fantastical, and reserved for those with great faith in the ability of chemicals to magically come together, create a mind, and then start arguing among themselves (such a viewpoint is minimally great science fiction) - and of course without any purpose. It is quite literally greater than a miracle, and reserved for those who can believe in such a tale.
You are of course welcome to as are all those who believe in miracles. It's at least that since there isn't a shred of evidence to believe in such a story. It is all faith based. Faith is something that seems to be part of life.
It's possible that consciousness has evolved independently twice in the history of life on Earth. Among vertebrates, several animals other than humans may be self-conscious, including dolphins, crows, and mynah birds. There is also speculation that octopuses, with completely different nervous systems, may also be conscious of themselves. It is my understanding that the most recent common ancestor between octopuses and humans was a worm that lived more than 500 million years ago.
So maybe it doesn't take a miracle. Maybe consciousness is a common landmark on the landscape of life. Maybe not.
Ixnay with the aithfay.
But, faith is part of life and you have yours. I hope it gives you some insight into why others have their own.
Why do you describe this event as "non-living matter became animate"? Why would you not describe this in the way that biological science actually understands it, as the coming into existence of living matter? When you describe it in the appropriate way, then the question is where did living matter come from, not how did inanimate matter become living. And since we know that there is an immaterial aspect of life, which is exemplified by the creative faculty known as free will, it is very easy to answer the question. The living matter was created by the immaterial aspect of life.
But I don't think you'll listen to me. You cannot fathom the immaterial, so you'll keep asking the impossible question to answer, how matter changed from being inanimate to animate. It's impossible to answer because it didn't happen. So you won't ever ask the real question, the interesting question of how living things create matter, because you're afraid of the immaterial and will not face the reality of the immaterial. Do you know how plants create matter from energy in photosynthesis?
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make - "non-living matter became animate" vs. "the coming into existence of living matter."
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well, no. We don't know that there is an immaterial aspect of life. You believe that but I don't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I do listen to you, I just don't agree with you. Why is that hard to understand. I don't think the question is impossible to answer. What will you do if it is? When you say "immaterial" do you mean God? If so, why not say it? Why would you think I'm afraid? I don't think you are. We just disagree. Why do you need to attribute negative motivation to my disagreement with you?
Now, if one gives this soup a name God, we have exactly the same Biblical Genesis story but at least we have some intelligence and purpose by way of God. In either case, one needs to have faith in their belief.
So, putting these two stories side by side, and understanding there is no evidence whatsoever to favor one story over an other, just pure unadulterated faith, which story is more plausible. I favor the Biblical Genesis over the Scientific Genesis just on the basis of how thoroughly fantastical is the Scientific Genesis story. It requires too much faith for my taste.
For a laugh, can you find a recent paper from the field of abiogenesis which makes such an out-dated claim?
I mean it has been 65 years since Miller and Urey produced some amino acids by zapping a flask of methane, ammonia and other basic compounds with "primordial lightning".
So is 1952 really when you last checked out the literature? :-d
The mind is constantly creating new things. You see, Miller and Urey have minds. But science would have us believe it magically just happens. That some lifeless matter spontaneously bursts to life, mind and all. Now, repeat the above experiment without any minds involved and observe what happens, for as long as you like. I'm saying that God is far more plausible. Of course the most plausible is that mind created it v all, just as Miller and Urey did it in the lab.
Everyone needs to really ruminate over the scientific Genesis story. I mean really digest it fully. There is no tale ever told that is more fantastic.
All this indicates is that I know something which you don't, so you're excluded from the "we" in my statement. Do you know about the existence of ideas and concepts, and how these things are immaterial objects? Suppose I describe to you a project which I will do tomorrow, a box I will make, out of wood. The idea of the box exists, as described, but the material box does not. Do you agree that the idea of the box, the immaterial form of the box, as the plan or blueprints, exists prior to the material box itself.
Quoting T Clark
Actually, you seem to be having difficulty understanding, as is evidenced by the following:
Quoting T Clark
Consider these two statements, and let me explain the difference between them.:
1) Non-living matter became animate.
2) The coming into existence of living matter.
The first implies that there is a change to something which has continuous existence, matter. Matter changes from being inanimate to being animate. The second does not necessarily imply such a continuity, it implies a beginning of something. The thing which comes into existence (begins), in the second, is living matter. In this second statement, the living matter may or may not have come from already existing matter. So when you choose statement #1, as your description of the event, you already exclude in a prejudiced way, the possibility that living matter came into existence from something other than pre-existing matter.
Quoting T Clark
Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you, but you had disclosed your prejudice.
Yeah. But you don't appear to have a clue about what science claims.
Chemistry might well regard "a soup" to be in a lifeless and mindless state, as that would be talking about some chemical mixture at equilibrium. But chemistry can also model the emergent or self-organising behaviour of systems that are not at equilibrium. Or even better, are active dissipative structures.
So your basic ignorance of the facts of science are just going to keep tripping you up in these discussions.
Sure, as long as there is a chemist around all kinds of things can be created.
But this is not what science is pushing. They want us to believe it all happens without any chemist being necessary. They want people to have faith that the mind is completely unnecessary and is simply a by-product of this Grand Vision of Spontaneous Everything. Needless to say, the granddaddy of biological Spontaneous Everything is the astronomical Spontaneous Everything otherwise known as the Big Bang.
So, in a nutshell, It Just Happened. This is the Grand Theory of Science. Ok. Now, who among us shares this faith?
Now, do you have faith or do you actually have some evidence for Spontaneous Everything?
I'm not insulted, I just don't understand why you have to attribute negative motivation. You say "prejudice," I say "belief." Why do you take our disagreement personally? You came to a place where you know people will disagree with you. I'm sure it's one of the reasons you come here.
You seem to be lost as usual. The question was about the transition from non-living to living. So how to get from chemistry to biology.
If you have some specific criticism of current abiogenetic thinking about that, now would be the time to air it. So far you are only parading your ignorance on what is actually being suggested.
I take everything personally. I am a person, that's reality, the way it is. If I were a rock, I wouldn't be able to take what you say at all.
But none of that shows that this means that living organisms are simply chemicals, or that the laws of their development are only physical laws. After all organisms embody a level of self-organisation from the very beginning which is absent in crystals or stones. They seek homeostasis, they reproduce, grow, and act in order to survive. None of those attributes can be described in purely chemical or molecular terms, in my view - something else is manifesting, which directs the formation of matter towards its ends. That is why 'semiotics' invokes signs and linguistics - because it needs a higher level of description than that provided by the fundamental sciences, to even begin to be realistic.
The perspective I would like to bring to bear is this. When the Origin of Species was published, there was huge cultural pressure to divest culture of religious accounts of creationism and to put the field on a scientific footing. There were many prominent intellectuals and movements who were invested in that. Naturally it was assumed that the scientific account would be factual, where the religious account was superstitious myth. Naturally also many of the advocates of the religious account played right into that dynamic. This has continued right into today's culture wars over evolution.
My view has always been to accept the scientific account of evolution on face value, but also to question its real meaning. I think there is a great deal read into evolution on the basis of motives which themselves are not always conscious or transparent. And that manifests, among other ways, in the easy acceptance of abiogenesis as providing an in-principle foundation for the idea that living beings are purely material in nature. It is always flourished as the kind of ultimate trump card in debates over evolution and spirituality - well, we now know that life started on a purely material, chemical or physical basis.
However I think that is far from clear, and may never be known. After all nobody was around to see it, and recreating the 'basic state of matter' via the LHC has thrown up massive conundrums, so recreating the circumstances which gave rise to DNA 3 billion years in the past, seems like an enormous stretch to me. For now, the acceptance of abiogenesis seems very much an article of materialist faith. Whereas I am inclined to believe that life comes from life, that there simply is no way to cross the barrier from the merely molecular to the truly biological, not at least on the basis of what we know understand.
I know there's a lot of technical literature that I don't know, and will also acknowledge that my position is tendentious, i.e. I don't want to believe that life has a purely material basis. But at this time, I don't feel too threatened by the state of the art. For every Francis Crick who wants to use biology to show that man is purely material, there will be an equally biologically adept Francis Collins who begs to differ. And I'm OK with that.
No. If science were arguing for "spontaneous everything", it would be offering a concrete model. You would have something you could actually critique (although you would also have to read up on it).
But I realise you just love making a noise about holographic this and quantum that. It sounds kind of science-y and deep, doesn't it? :-}
So you may claim to be "good with" your holographic-this and your quantum-that - your usual new age babble - however that counts for nothing. It is not an argument, merely a profession of faith.
I don't argue with faith. When faith pretends to be science, then there is a problem.
The Spontaneous Genesis of Everything is pretty much the core of the whole scientific Genesis story and runs through all disciplines other than physics, and at the end there is nothing but faith. Just like the Black Holes achieve loves to talk about, science sucks in everything (especially money) and nothing comes out. Just lots of hope.
Again, you are showing your basic confusion about the epistemology of science. Like any exercise in rationality, it starts by treating any grounding supposition as ... a supposition.
I realise this may be an unfamiliar concept to you.
There is not one shred of evidence supporting the It Just Happened Theory of Everything. But like every religion, it's hard to shake the faith of the adherents. Religion, is religion, is religion.
But it didn't just happen. And there are now many "shreds of evidence" that constrain speculation about how it did happen.
As you say, religion is religion. And new age babble is new age babble even when it is furiously incanting "holographic quantum interference projected mind field hologram".
Truly laughable. Don't tell me you are going to call upon God? Or maybe the Mythical Laws of Nature that guide everything. No, let me see. There was a biologist in a lab smack dab in the middle of the Big Bang that started it all. Genies are a possibility. Everything except the mind. Never a mind.
Nah, nothing that silly. Why don't you share with the world your story of How It All Happened. The story of how the Big Bang created everything and then everything just came together and created everything. Not even a child would find this story the least but interesting or believable. But then again, it is just a story.
Now to remind you again, the OP is about the specific question of the transition from chemistry to biology. Biology says the answer is just add semiotics to dissipative structure. And over the past decade - with rapid advances in our ability to do experiments at the nanoscale of molecular biology - what this means has become pretty precise as a hypothesis.
Now what were you saying about projected mind fields again? It's oh so fascinating. Everyone will try not to laugh.
Life and consciousness itself might be an illusion created by a superfluous energy state in the senses (a boundary breach).
Hi Apokrisis, could you outline the abiogenesis arguments that have influenced you the most in your thinking please.
Check out Nick Lane's The Vital Question. He makes a good case for alkaline hydrothermal vents.
You start with a chemical situation that has all the right ingredients. A porous vent with a flow of warm akaline water, high in CO2, low in oxygen, running into a mildly acidic ocean. Then ferrous oxide in the spongey rock acts as the catalyst. Dissociated hydrogen reacts with CO2 to produce methane via the redox steps of formate and formaldehyde, presuming the ocean on the other side of the thin vent pores is acidic enough to be the proton donor.
These very special chemical conditions - which would also have been common in the early Hadean era sea - thus creates an organic starter fuel in concentrations millions of times greater than normal. You have a factory of organic chemistry, a natural dissipative or energy releasing gradient with complex molecules as the waste products.
So you are halfway to the basic metabolic set-up of life. And now proper organic machinery that can "eat" methane - turn it into the kind of crud that makes cells - is energetically favoured as it removes methane and lets the vent produce more.
Actual cells only have to internalise this existing chemistry by forming a vesicle - and lipid waste does this spontaneously in water. Then adding a membrane protein that can act as a sodium pump, exporting sodium ions to create a source of protons (hydrogen ions) flooding in the other way.
So the argument is that a naturally occurring feature - an alkaline vent - is already doing basic organic metabolism. Only a few minimal additions are needed to encapsulate it and take it to another level.
Life begins when there is the first semiotic step - a membrane pump protein dedicated to maintaining a metabolism sustaining flow by kicking out enough sodium ions, using the energy being released by the consequent redox reaction.
Unless the factual content of biology is distinguished from it's unnecessary interpretation as involving objective intra-physical representations, i predict this thread will go nowhere.
What is first needed is a discussion as to why semiotics doesn't collapse into subjective idealism or solipsistic verificationism, a discussion which could potentially benefit from a close comparison of pierce's semiotic pan-psychism to both standard materialism and Berkley's idealism.
I can see why you're drawn to this idea, particularly that the removal of the product that allows the reactants to continue to flow, sustaining the energy gradient. Of course though the reactants would have continued to flow, it just establishes the gradient.
I have some points for you to consider though that I will formulate as questions in the hope you can provide more insight. Perhaps a clearer understanding of the Hadean era sea on my part would help resolve these issues.
Quoting apokrisis
1. The methane eaters are enzymatic in function. Are they proteinaceous enzymes or simple organic compounds that convert to another compound after eating the methane?
Quoting apokrisis
2. Where did the phospholipid bilayer (lipid waste) come from and how did it entrap the methane eaters (is it just a hydrocarbon without phosphate)? Were there not methane eaters outside of the vesicle as well?
Would not the vesicle already by formed because of its hydrophobic nature prior to encountering the methane?
3. The pump is a Na+/H+ exchanger? Is it Active or Passive transport? If it's passive, then the driver for the exchanger would be the proton gradient I'm assuming if the vesicle drifted into the vent region? Again proteinaceous in structure? If it's active transport, then what is powering it? ATP?
4. Just to elaborate on the last point the direction of movement of the ions was Hydrogen in, Sodium out?
5. How did the 'pump' get in the vesicle bilayer? Where was it being synthesised in large enough quantity for it to not be a randomly occurring polypeptide? If there was a base RNA, where did the nucleic acid concentration come from? Were there ribosomes involved?
This leads me to my next question:
Quoting apokrisis
-What type of crud? Hydrocarbon chain
Thanks for sharing these ideas with us all Apokrisis, if you're unable to answer the technical questions its no reflection on the theory, only that I personally would like more information.
nothing whatsoever if this was a science thread purely concerned with the language-game of biology. But i thought this was a philosophy discussion concerning consciousness and hence representationalism.
Of course. People have been making up stories from the dawn of time. Most stories have Maker, since intelligence, involved in the creation of everything. But science is alone on creating a story, without any evidence whatsoever, that It All Just Happened, because the primary goal of science is to eliminate the Mind from everything. The shear chutzpah of such a story is breathtaking. That people actually have such faith in it and repeat it is mind-blowing.
So you just have this mix of chemicals that all of a sudden is "dedicated to maintaining a metabolism". What's more it is "kicking out stuff"" and "using stuff" and all kinds of things. Science had miraculously, with a single sentence created an intelligent mind.
Who needs evidence when it is so much easier to use words. Science cute when it comes to its sleight of hand. Tell me, it's this the famous "selfish gene" or i did you just make it up yourself? This "dedication" you speak of, It just Happened" right or was it just made up because you need to insert the miracle of self-organization some where?
I can see how it all just happened Rich, I can't explain the why with such massive entropic gradients against it, life not only held its own, but flourished, with each new boundary being breached until the creation of the organism.
But even if I could explain how the entropic gradients were overcome, how life managed to breach boundary after boundary, I still can't understand what intrinsic properties must be present in the very essence of matter and energy that allows the whole game to be played this way anyway- to allow new properties to reveal themselves layer after layer after layer.
As to the mind, I don't spend a lot of time on it, but can see how it could be a perplexing and fascinating problem.
Until I read the book though, I have a lot of problems with the theory.
Let me give you a different story. You see you have a group of chemicals and they all got together, he is hands, and began to sing, You Gotta Have Heart. That's the gist if the scientific story. What a bunch of hogwash. Lacks any intellectual honesty and is totally goal seeking: No Mind! Just proteins that are "dedicated to using and kicking out stuff". This is the kind of stories that Sheldrake and many other philosophers object to and why Shekdrake calls it the Science Delusion.
It's simple. The chemicals get together and become "dedicated". After that It All Just Happens Naturally.
The question is exactly how fantastic a story is one willing to accept to eliminate the Mind. One way or another, no matter how many big words science makes up (and this is totally limited by their imagination and the funding they receive), ultimately their explanation is and has to be, It Just Miraculously Happened".
Please provide a synopsis. If we're lucky, the thread may tolerate a close comparison. Otherwise, we are left with a dispute "over the best flavour of ice-cream."
There you go, I knew there was a reason. The anti-entropic gradient of dedication.
I don't have too many problems eliminating the mind though. I can eliminate my senses one by one until I am left with empty space and thoughts manifested by humming neurons. Maybe I'm missing something.
Ah! A change of story. Chemicals have morphed into an informational mechanism that milks. Isn't a mind required to create information and for milking? No matter, transforming chemicals into humans is easy when all you need is a few words.
Any other stories you wish to share?
One doesn't have to have any background in science to read any of these books. All you need to do is look for the first sentence in the book where chemicals become "dedicated". It's right there where the miracle begins.
Double talking is all about using big words and talking fast in such a way that people can't trap the misdirection.
Information is Mind. Only in your world does a tube of sulfur process information. Any philosopher can easily point out the Science Delusion. Every explanation from science must have it. Mind has to be hidden somewhere, whether it be selfish, dedicated, milking, kicking, or information processing.
At least Whitehead was intellectually honest and not trying to hide Mind somewhere in some verbs and adjectives.
The Story
The human body just miraculously all came together. All it is self-made machine. Yes, the molecules began to talk to each other, and look at each other, and love each other, and argue with each other and at times they would hold hands and sing to the Lord. Oh yes, that Mind. That is just an illusion. As for this story, it is just part of the Science Delusion.
With respect to life being an emergent property, the question I would raise is this: in every instance of living organisms, life seems to direct the process. There is everywhere, always, and on every level, purposive activity which is directed at the ends of homeostasis, survival and reproduction. Part of what this enables is evolutionary development, i.e. the gradual or even sudden diversification of forms into many diverse types, which act symbiotically.
The problem I have with the theory that this is a consequence of 'entropification' is the complete absence of any acccount of intentionality from that process. That element of intentionality is what, I think, we are looking for, because in its absence, the claim appears to be that this is 'something that just happened'. Why it happened is left out of the account - it happens from sheer physical necessity, along with an element of chance; as Jacques Monod says in his famous book of that name. Actually even to ask 'why' is probably regarded as a retrograde question.
That is why I think some kind of orthogenetic theory must provide an answer: that universe indeed possesses an innate tendency towards evolutionary development. But it is just that kind of tendency that naturalist accounts wish to avoid.
I provided the following general definition of life in the "What is Life?" thread (participants included Apokrisis, Javra, Metaphysician Undercover, and Wayfarer): The condition extending from cell division to death, characterised by the ability to metabolise nutrients.
Perhaps this needs to be modified to include creative power?
But among all of this story telling, there is a real mind and a real purpose. Science had become a mass marketer of drug chemicals. The $trillion pharmaceutical industry depends upon people buying into this story - that they are just some chemical machines that can be fixed by other chemical machines using chemicals. That is why Big Pharm is everywhere now - in educational institutions, in government, in NGOs, it is ubiquitous. It funds everything that suits its purpose and goals. But dehumization has its costs. Tens of thousands - maybe hundreds of thousands are being killed by pharmaceuticals every year and it is being done with impunity. As for the health of humans, it is retrograding:
http://www.newsweek.com/unhealthy-food-choices-contribute-one-five-deaths-globally-665957
"The findings also showed that while people are living longer, more years of their lives are spent being sick."
It should also be noted that the U.S, which is by far the biggest user of pharmaceutical chemicals among developed nations has the absolute worse life expectancy. This is a direct result of the Science Delusion. Science it's different when it crosses the ocean. It is not merely a philosophical parlor game. This is literally about life and death.
To me it’s a complex issue (which I’m still taking a hiatus from for the moment). Wanted, though, to clarify the terminology you’ve expressed: a dead thing, by all common definitions, is a thing that once was alive. The main theme of this tread is not how life can follow death but, rather, how life can emerge from non-life/inanimate things.
Taking a more vertical approach: Think of an individual cell, like an ameba for example. One of its lipids, on its own, is not alive (nor dead; it is merely non-life). The same applies with all of its individual molecular components (which, as an interesting aside, can all in due measure be stated to hold particle-wave duality). How then does the unity of the living ameba as identity emerge from the structures of its non-life components? Again, it is to me a complex, and not yet resolved, issue.
:) Yea, I guess you could think of it that way; but then these tails we tell/create latter on serve as the bed we made and need to sleep in/partake of, so to speak.
As one obnoxious post put it we are just a "molecular machine."
Agreed.
As it happens, new tales are always being told. Helps out when the enslaved too have a voice.
As regard this thread, I was referring more to the uni-versal tale/logos ... to make my previous post clearer
The simple answer is the semiotic one. When we talk about that x factor, we are talking about the information that regulates the molecular dynamics and so represents the higher purpose, design and intentionality that gives an organism a recognisable global identity.
An organism is a memory for a structure with a direction. The chemistry of life has the special quality that it is constantly on the verge of falling apart. It only hangs together when energy flows through it in the right direction.
This is one of the little surprises of nature that lay folk find it hard to get their head around. The ordinary expectation - the one that comes from being machine-makers ourselves - is that the foundations of systems must be solid and fixed. You can't build an engine from parts that are right on the verge of disintegrating the whole time.
But life is the opposite. Key structural components like microtubules have a half-life of about 10 seconds. They fall apart, and then - given the right energetic nudge - reform. Only the core informational machinery itself - DNA - has stability. The rest is selected for its instability - as being fundamentally unstable is the trick that allows for informational control over that stability. Instability opens the door to being regulated - pointed back in the right direction - by the higher purpose of an organism.
So this is the big secret of life. Unstable molecular foundations are required to allow stable informational identity to be the one in control. The less able the parts are to maintain an identity, the more the identity becomes something that must be held as a semiotic habit up at the level on which information is being accumulated.
For my part, a very nicely expressed thesis of what biological autopoiesis consists of. I find nothing here to contradict.
Not that this resolves what life shares in common with non-life that is a continuum rather than a plank-scale-like distinction of quality/attributes … but again, I for my part will let this issue rest.
The guy is a creationist. So he would say that. No doubt he is well-intentioned but his reasoning is pretty faulty.
For instance, he says it is a problem that there are thousands of possible lipids that self-assemble into vesicles. It is a general property of these asymmetric molecules with hydrophobic and hydrophilic opposite ends. So which one got life going exactly? It's a great big research mystery as there are just so many for nature to choose from.
It's comical really. In contradiction of what you write, exhibit A is that nature seems so over-exuberant when it comes to spontaneous membrane forming that it makes it hard for any scientist to decide which are the 999 out of a thousand lipids that can't claim to have got life started.
Tour pulls the usual creationist trick. Imagine the world as the sterile laboratory of the synthetic chemist where everything has been pulled apart and kept well away from anything that might let it react or develop a structure.
I think it was like a first day trick in my organic chemistry class that the lecturer got out the pure metalic sodium stored in oil to stop it spontaneously combusting in the atmosphere, scrapped off a slice so we could all watch it burst into flame.
So this is reductionist science at work - nature disassembled in a fashion so humans can put it back together by careful construction.
But that isn't nature. As I described with alkaline vents, you have a real world where entropic gradients are already set up and ready to go. You have a working contrast between hot akaline water one side, cool acidic water the other side. A source and a sink of hydrogen ions.
For a lab chemist, this is a nightmare. His laboratory is already on fire! :)
But for nature, this is an unstable reaction with an inherent dissipative direction that just needs some controlling information to keep it burning. So any first small steps that add stability to the events taking place in the vent will be selected for. And then the next steps is for enough stabilisation to be added for little cells of this metabolic activity to break off and survive as islands of "vent gradient" in the open ocean itself.
It's not rocket science.
Tell me more about how chemicals share information. Do they have little brains?
Where's the difficulty? The molecular dynamics of non-life is ruled by the laws of thermodynamics. There are a lot of reactions that are energetically favoured but mostly don't happen as they have to get over some entropic hump. Then life has the information that can construct the machinery - like a helpful enzyme - that gets them over the hump.
So it is all the same chemistry. All that changes is information enters the picture to change the observed frequency of some particular enthalpic reaction.
Biophysics finds a new substance
This looks like a game-changer for our notions of “materiality”. Biophysics has discovered a special zone of convergence at the nanoscale – the region poised between quantum and classical action. And crucially for theories about life and mind, it is also the zone where semiotics emerges. It is the scale where the entropic matter~symbol distinction gets born. So it explains the nanoscale as literally a new kind of stuff, a physical state poised at “the edge of chaos”, or at criticality, that is a mix of its material and formal causes.
The key finding: In brief, as outlined in this paper http://thebigone.stanford.edu/papers/Phillips2006.pdf , and in this book http://lifesratchet.com/ the nanoscale turns out to be a convergence zone where all the key structure-creating forces of nature become equal in size, and coincide with the thermal properties/temperature scale of liquid water.
So at a scale of 10^-9 metres (the average distance of energetic interactions between molecules) and 10^-20 joules (the average background energy due to the “warmth” of water), all the many different kinds of energy become effectively the same. Elastic energy, electrostatic energy, chemical bond energy, thermal energy – every kind of action is suddenly equivalent in strength. And thus easily interconvertible. There is no real cost, no energetic barrier, to turning one kind of action into another kind of action. And so also – from a semiotic or informational viewpoint – no real problem getting in there and regulating the action. It is like a railway system where you can switch trains on to other tracks at virtually zero cost. The mystery of how “immaterial” information can control material processes disappears because the conversion of one kind of action into a different kind of action has been made cost-free in energetic terms. Matter is already acting symbolically in this regard.
This cross-over zone had to happen due to the fact that there is a transition from quantum to classical behaviour in the material world. At the micro-scale, the physics of objects is ruled by surface area effects. Molecular structures have a lot of surface area and very little volume, so the geometry dominates when it comes to the substantial properties being exhibited. The shapes are what matter more than what the shapes are made of. But then at the macro-scale, it is the collective bulk effects that take over. The nature of a substance is determined now by the kinds of atoms present, the types of bonds, the ratios of the elements.
The actual crossing over in terms of the forces involved is between the steadily waning strength of electromagnetic binding energy – the attraction between positive and negative charges weakens proportionately with distance – and the steadily increasing strength of bulk properties such as the stability of chemical, elastic, and other kinds of mechanical or structural bonds. Get enough atoms together and they start to reinforce each others behaviour.
So you have quantum scale substance where the emergent character is based on geometric properties, and classical scale substance where it is based on bulk properties. And this is even when still talking about the same apparent “stuff”. If you probe a film of water perhaps five or six molecules thick with a super-fine needle, you can start to feel the bumps of extra resistance as you push through each layer. But at a larger scale of interaction, water just has its generalised bulk identity – the one that conforms to our folk intuitions about liquidity.
So the big finding is the way that contrasting forces of nature suddenly find themselves in vanilla harmony at a certain critical scale of being. It is kind of like the unification scale for fundamental physics, but this is the fundamental scale of nature for biology – and also mind, given that both life and mind are dependent on the emergence of semiotic machinery.
The other key finding: The nanoscale convergence zone has only really been discovered over the past decade. And alongside that is the discovery that this is also the realm of molecular machines.
In the past, cells where thought of as pretty much bags of chemicals doing chemical things. The genes tossed enzymes into the mix to speed reactions up or slow processes down. But that was mostly it so far as the regulation went. In fact, the nanoscale internals of a cell are incredibly organised by pumps, switches, tracks, transporters, and every kind of mechanical device.
A great example are the motor proteins – the kinesin, myosin and dynein families of molecules. These are proteins that literally have a pair of legs which they can use to walk along various kinds of structural filaments – microtubules and actin fibres – while dragging a bag of some cellular product somewhere else in a cell. So stuff doesn’t float to where it needs to go. There is a transport network of lines criss-crossing a cell with these little guys dragging loads.
It is pretty fantastic and quite unexpected. You’ve got to see this youtube animation to see how crazy this is – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-uuk4Pr2i8 . And these motor proteins are just one example of the range of molecular machines which organise the fundamental workings of a cell.
A third key point: So at the nanoscale, there is this convergence of energy levels that makes it possible for regulation by information to be added at “no cost”. Basically, the chemistry of a cell is permanently at its equilibrium point between breaking up and making up. All the molecular structures – like the actin filaments, the vesicle membranes, the motor proteins – are as likely to be falling apart as they are to reform. So just the smallest nudge from some source of information, a memory as encoded in DNA in particular, is enough to promote either activity. The metaphorical waft of a butterfly wing can tip the balance in the desired direction.
This is the remarkable reason why the human body operates on an energy input of about 100 watts – what it takes to run a light bulb. By being able to harness the nanoscale using a vanishingly light touch, it costs almost next to nothing to run our bodies and minds. The power density of our nano-machinery is such that a teaspoon full would produce 130 horsepower. In other words, the actual macro-scale machinery we make is quite grotesquely inefficient by comparison. All effort for small result because cars and food mixers work far away from the zone of poised criticality – the realm of fundamental biological substance where the dynamics of material processes and the regulation of informational constraints can interact on a common scale of being.
The metaphysical implications: The problem with most metaphysical discussions of reality is that they rely on “commonsense” notions about the nature of substance. Reality is composed of “stuff with properties”. The form or organisation of that stuff is accidental. What matters is the enduring underlying material which has a character that can be logically predicated or enumerated. Sure there is a bit of emergence going on – the liquidity of H2O molecules in contrast to gaseousness or crystallinity of … well, water at other temperatures. But essentially, we are meant to look through organisational differences to see the true material stuff, the atomistic foundations.
But here we have a phase of substance, a realm of material being, where all the actual many different kinds of energetic interaction are zeroed to have the same effective strength. A strong identity (as quantum or classical, geometric or bulk) has been lost. Stuff is equally balanced in all its directions. It is as much organised by its collective structure as its localised electromagnetic attractions. Effectively, it is at its biological or semiotic Planck scale. And I say semiotic because regulation by symbols also costs nothing much at this scale of material being. This is where such an effect – a downward control – can be first clearly exerted. A tiny bit of machinery can harness a vast amount of material action with incredible efficiency.
It is another emergent phase of matter – one where the transition to classicality can be regulated and exploited by the classical physics of machines. The world the quantum creates turns out to contain autopoietic possibility. There is this new kind of stuff with semiosis embedded in its very fabric as an emergent potential.
So contra conventional notions of stuff – which are based on matter gone cold, hard and dead – this shows us a view of substance where it is clear that the two sources of substantial actuality are the interaction between material action and formal organisation. You have a poised state where a substance is expressing both these directions in its character – both have the same scale. And this nanoscale stuff is also just as much symbol as matter. It is readily mechanisable at effectively zero cost. It is not a big deal for there to be semiotic organisation of “its world”.
As I say, it is only over the last decade that biophysics has had the tools to probe this realm and so the metaphysical import of the discovery is frontier stuff.
And indeed, there is a very similar research-led revolution of understanding going on in neuroscience where you can now probe the collective behaviour of cultures of neurons. The zone of interaction between material processes and informational regulation can be directly analysed, answering the crucial questions about how “minds interact with bodies”. And again, it is about the nanoscale of biological organisation and the unsuspected “processing power” that becomes available at the “edge of chaos” when biological stuff is poised at criticality.
It's actually a lot more complicated than rocket science. Rockets are simple.
Quoting apokrisis
That's not what the article says, though.
I googled James Tour, he denies being creationist, but he has been associated with The Discovery Institute. And I don't much like them. So I guess he does have a creationist axe to grind.
But I think the question still remains. The cardinal point of any living structure is that I manifests purpose, right from the very first. There has to be that purposive action for anything to be regarded as an organism, as distinct from a mineral. That intentional ability - not conscious intention, but the ability to adapt in pursuit of the goal of survival - that is unique to living forms, is it not? And that is what seems a cardinal difference from anything in the inorganic domain.
Quoting apokrisis
Downward, from what? Upward, I presume, is from physical constraints - the laws governing the interactions of particles. What imbues symbols with the power to exert 'downward control'?
Yep. That was the joke.
Quoting Wayfarer
I googled him too. His line is that he is a messianic jew who thinks it is important to read the Bible every morning and meditate on its meaning. He doesn't hear God literally speaking to him, but he is very aware of His presence.
So at least he is honest about the axe he is grinding. He has strong motivation to read the state of the science a particular way.
Quoting Wayfarer
Isn't that what I'm arguing? It all starts when the ontically distinct thing of information enters the world. Or rather, semiosis and "sign processing". A molecule becomes a message when it material aspects are no longer what is causal. Instead it is the function that is being executed in the name of some higher organismic purpose which is the thing.
A cell pore is just a protein switch. You can explain how it opens and shuts due to the critical instability of its mechanical arrangement of electrostatic bonds. It just wobbles back and forth for "no good reason at all" so far as any materialist can see. Indeed, a materialist would chuck such a flaky bit of machinery in the bin as being fundamentally useless.
But for a living system, that complex molecule exists to perform a function. It is informational in the sense that it performs a crisp logical operation. Shut or open. Them's your sharp choices. And so now the further thing of "choice" is an ontological reality of the world.
So the material world is already busy entropifying. It already has that global thermodynamic goal. That is how the Cosmos exists and persists. It keeps running down the hill by expanding and cooling.
Then the biological world seems to change the game by suddenly expressing a negentropic desire. It wants to live and survive. It gets this idea in its head of being an organism.
However while that is true from a particular point of view - the usual one that evolutionary theory use to tell its story from - it misses the larger point of view which is the grand thermodynamic one.
Now it can be seen that life and mind simply accelerate entropification locally. For some reason, entropification has got held up. Negentropy has arisen by accident in the form of the barriers preventing quick entropification. And so life and mind can get going as more purposeful and designed structure that knows how to fulfil the Second Law's desires.
So life's desire to exist and persist is a sub-goal - a negentropic one that subserves the global entropic one. The fact that it is the very opposite seeming kind of goal is exactly what you would expect if it is to be the complementary or mutual direction of action.
If accidental negentropy has arisen in the Cosmos - like the way fossilised plankton got trapped as petroleum in ancient sedimentary rock - then what could be more fitting than purposeful negentropy arising as the matching response. Entropification which got locally deaccelerated can be locally reaccelerated again.
Indeed, just as we humans are doing for those languishing fossil fuel stores in our valiant bid to waste them all to heat in great big planetary-scale burst.
Of course you will protest again that life on earth can't be so pointless and futile as all that. You feel that being human must have some special significance.
But my argument allows humans to invent their own meanings if they like - so long as they are intelligent enough to understand the constraints that have formed their nature so far.
Thermodynamics only sets the ground conditions. Within that space, we can freely choose what to do. Literally nothing is stopping us.
We do have a choice over climate change and ecocide for example. But also, that choice seems quite polarised in our debates about the issue.
Either we can be hair-shirt greens and say we have to cut down to 100 million people living off permaculture in harmony with whatever scraps of traditional ecosystems remain. Or instead, we can trust to the exponential wonder of technology, the glory of the Singularity, to make a safe transition to our next evolutionary step.
I've always been a greeny, but it is honestly a tough call. Life delights in presenting us with polarised dilemmas - the 50/50 choices that maximise the information content of existence. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, etc.
A bit of a diversion in the argument it might seem. Yet really, I'm still talking about the same metaphysical issue. Everything turns out to be dialectically poised in existence for good reason.
So if you are puzzled that the Universe seems to be torn between two purposes - entropy and negentropy - well really they are only the complementary aspects of the one (pansemiotic) process needed to bring existence into existence itself.
I stress semiosis here because the basic idea was recognised by idealists like Schelling and Hegel - as their complementary intellectual response to the Newtonian-inspired Enlightenment realists. But Naturphilosphie and the like didn't get down to the basic infodynamic mechanism like Peirce managed to do.
So this whole thread and the many others like it want to force a hard binary choice. Either brute materialism is right or religious-style idealism is right. By now it should be obvious that - socially - each needs the other as its "other". Our culture is divided sharply because the dichotomisation of our metaphysical choices is the mechanism that drives metaphysical advance (or intellectual negentropy) itself.
But in the end, the bigger story is how the two extremes thus created can find their resolution, their synthesis. That is where naturalism or systems thinking comes up through the middle.
Although no-one ever notices because you still have two cultures at war producing their vast clouds of hot air, or waste heat. Entropification always wins.
Oh yeah, and also 'Tour holds more than 120 United States patents plus many non-US patents.[36] He has more than 600 research publications,[37] with an H-index = 119 (100 by ISI Web of Science) and i10 index = 484 with total citations over 67,000 (Google Scholar).' But I guess the former outweighs the latter, right? You want to be careful about the kinds of aspersions you're engaging in, though.
Quoting apokrisis
The overall aim of which is: to hasten the heat death of the universe. Of course, we can entertain yourselves with other ideas whilst so doing. So it's not really ontically distinct.
It's not lumpen materialism, but it's still materialism, insofar as the overall principle is physical, namely, entropification, which just happens to throw up apparently meaningful things, like people, in the process.
Whereas I am sure there is an implicit dualism in the 'epistemic cut', which remains outstanding, which Howard Pattee frankly acknowledges in that paper on the physics and metaphysics of biosemiology.
I think your model is very much what would be needed to simulate life. But it doesn't have much to say about the actual problems of philosophy, apart from deflating them or subjectivising them.
Jeez, I gave Tour points for being upfront and honest about his metaphysical prejudices. I then pointed out the obvious flaw in his reasoning. Thousands of workable lipid options make abiogenesis more comprehensible, not less.
Deal with my actual answers, don't just divert.
And yes, any number of research patents and papers in his field of synthetic chemistry don't outweigh faulty arguments motivated by a metaphysical prejudice.
Quoting Wayfarer
It's stronger than "just happens". I said - as a metaphysical opposite or complementary thing - it would count as "meant to happen". It is another necessary fact. We can only know entropy to be a metaphysical thing because there is its metaphysical "other" from which it can measure its own existence.
Of course, if we are just speaking from a human point of view, I can agree that you are objectively right if you want to argue our entropic contribution to the Cosmos is infinitesimal, while our negentropic significance seems way out of scale.
The amount of actual entropy produced by human civilisation hardly registers in the big picture. Who cares if some random planet has a sudden temperature rise of 3 or 4 degrees?
And when it comes to negentropy, we might well be the most complex, intelligent, and creative beings ever to exist in the Universe - or at least until we went 'poof' after the short, bright flare of an anthropocene.
So yes, I am certainly a physicalist - a naturalist seeking immanent explanation with no spooky substances of any kind. And that rules out traditional notions of material substances as well as immaterial ones, as you know.
But it doesn't matter how often I remind you of such subtleties, you will still want to lump me as "other" - the necessary move to make some variety of idealism come out as right for you.
Again, I am neither idealist nor realist, materialist nor dualist.
One has the choice. Either remain trapped eternally in the standard "philosophical" culture wars - the WWE of reductionists and theists thumping chests and banging heads - or find the very small door marked exit. Walk through and discover the third option that is naturalism, organicism, systems science.
Of course this all only points in the direction of life, and says Life could be that'a'way. It does not demonstrate 'life'. So, I think a key approach at this point is to find examples of molecular and cellular interactions that do not make sense in terms of cause and effect, while also scrutinising the thermodynamic claims about life a lot closer - If we can find an apparent sentience beyond the chemistry the table is turned once more.
The sentience of the mind is a strong fallback position as Rich has highlighted, but I also think there is plenty of stuff to work with lying around in the world of molecules and cells. It should be noted that the idea of the mind as a holographic field was first proposed by noted Quantum Mechanist David Bohm.
One such example that might constitute evidence of a sentience would be the organelle called mitochondria inside eurkaryotes. This is commonly thought of as the battery of the cell. Theory has it that the mitrochondria, who have their own genetic code (mitochondrial DNA, as opposed to nuclear DNA), invaded our cells, but our cells trapped them in a process known as endosymbiosis.
So we all have symbiotes inside us! Because these symbiotes have their own mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA), this means that they should be free to multiply inside us like a virus. The thing is, the expression, replication and maintenance of mtDNA is :
" Expression, replication, and maintenance of mtDNA require factors encoded by nuclear genes. These include not only the primary machinery involved (eg, transcription and replication components) but also those in signaling pathways that mediate or sense alterations in mitochondrial function in accord with changing cellular needs or environmental conditions. " quote
: our cells stole their machinery and enslaved them.
That was a good post.
Looking further into entropy and living systems I see there is no net positive gradient toward life afterall. I must have misunderstood what was being suggested. The lowered entropic states (the bonds and concentration gradients) come at a higher entropic cost. The environment is simply flushed through the container to achieve a cause.
There is always some magic hidden in any materialistic research explanation of life. There has to be, because there is nothing there.
In one breathtaking leap we go from some soup of chemicals to "humans inventing their own meaning". So you have chemicals, which satisfy Big Pharm (which pretty much determined academic curriculum nowadays) and then out of no where you have humans inventing meaning?? to make it digestible for those who are experiencing life as it unfolds. What is missing from the materialist-scientific description of life is one iota of intellectual honesty. It is a game of hide and seek. Where is the mind injected in this paper?
Ultimately it is only a packaged story designed to satisfy the intended readership - usually to raise some money. Always, we are almost there.
So having a religious view amounts to a prejudice, but having an aversion to religious philosophy does not.
I think the philosophical and historical issue that underlies this particular matter, has to do with what constitutes a 'naturalist explanation'. Due to the history behind the question, there are certain kinds of ideas, and certain kinds of understanding, that are tacitly prohibited by so-called naturalist explanations. One of the factors that seems has to be ruled out, is the notion that there is any kind of intentionality in the creation and evolution of life. Life has to be understood as 'self-generating', for ideological reasons, not for empirical reasons. Or rather, if life is seen as something that is not self-generating, or as something which can't be understood in terms of the physical sciences, then that undermines the very basis of empiricism itself; it inevitably suggests some manner of vitalism, which is the kiss of death to naturalism. That's what is behind the dismissal of anything that could be seen as 'spooky'.
A question I have for naturalism is this: what would be an empirical test for orthogenesis? ('orthogenesis' being any theory variations in evolution follow a particular direction and are not merely sporadic and fortuitous.) In the past, I have said that evolutionary processes tend towards producing greater levels of self-awareness; I was told there is 'no evidence' that this is the case.
Thomas Nagel suggested, in his book, Mind and Cosmos, that there might be some kind of universal telos towards the development of life and mind. This idea was one of his most despised. It seems that there is a strong cultural predisposition to the notion that life must be essentially fortuitous, and the universe essentially meaningless, as a presupposition of science. Whereas I think it is more a presupposition of the kind of culture that produced this kind of science. I think it is a presupposition which is impossible to either validate or refute on the basis of what science is considered to be, because it's essentially a metaphysical presupposition, one that lies beneath science, and therefore dictates what ought to be taken seriously by scientists. Ultimately, it is no more supported by science, than the opposite.
Creationism and Buddhism.
Interestingly, Buddhism doesn't have a dog in the creationism fight. The reason why, is that 'the origin of the world' never played a big part in the Buddhist religion. (It's there, but it's kind of apocryphal.) As far as Buddhists are concerned, the life we experience is solely the result of the kind of karma we have created, and also a result of ignorance, i.e. our inability or refusal to see the reality of the human situation. However it's interesting that Buddhist scholar Bikkhu Bodhi observes that the notion of 'fortuitous origins' - that the life we have is a result of chance - is the view of 'the vast majority of Western people, who believe it is supported by science'. This has ethical consequences - ultimately because what we do, or don't do, doesn't actually matter in the end, because we arise out of nothing, and return to nothing. So long as we obey the law, seek self-fulfilment and meaningful relationships, there is nothing beyond that to aspire to. However, even that kind of secular philosophy of 'Eudaimonia' seems a tall order for many people. And in any case, in the end, it doesn't matter, because nothing can matter; 'what matters' is simply social convention, a human invention.
Yep. There is a world of difference between a prejudice and a hypothesis. One accepts measurement, the other strives to avoid it.
Quoting Wayfarer
Nope. Metaphysical reasoning leads us to crisp either/or hypotheses. Then those alternatives can be weighed.
So either existence is self-generating, or ... the other thing.
And actually, the other thing doesn't even make rational sense. Talk of divine causes or transcendent being collapses in the usual familiar fashion. It becomes in the end just another way of saying "I don't know what makes existence self-generating, so there must be something more".
So we would pursue a story of self-generation and see how far it gets us. As science has demonstrated, that is a huge way indeed.
Maybe your creating God had some choices about the strength of a handful of natural constants. You often trumpet that as the best evidence of "the crisis" of modern physics.
But a God free only to change a few physical parameters - pick one universe out of a multiverse of other options he didn't invent - is not much of a creator really.
Quoting Wayfarer
But that is hardly my position is it? I argue that entropy and negentropy are two sides of the one coin. The essence of pansemiosis would be seeing that the Heat Death of the Universe is just as much a state of exceptional order as disorder.
There is nothing spiritual about this view to be sure. But dualism is precisely what is being rejected here. Again, the two-ness of matter and symbol is a mutually formative deal. It is the third thing of their interaction which is the process making a world.
And where the hidden dualism lies- the Cartesian theater you wish to avoid. @Rich was right. Sleight of hand. I don't even have a stake in the game. In fact, I WANT it to just be physicalism with some overriding theory- but the sticky situation of hidden Cartesian theaters keep arising.
You constantly change the goal post. My guess is you are in the camp that thinks a newborn has no internal sensation (inner experience) because they have not learned distinction (between sensory nuances like "green" and "blue") etc. But you already moved the goal post from qualia in general to some particular qualia (i.e. green, blue, etc.).
If all you have is a hammer.....
Quoting apokrisis
...in a culture, a vast number of whose inhabitants have no sense of purpose whatever. They're literally killing themselves for want of purpose. (They do have good surgery and medicine, I'll grant that).
Quoting apokrisis
Which might even - shock, horror - amount to an admission that there is something we don't know. The very fact that the nature of life and mind might elude the quantitative sciences ought to suggest simply a sense of humility, although I know it's a big ask.
Quoting apokrisis
It is, though. You just said, up-thread, that humans are capable of 'devising their own meanings'. But the 'meaning' you see in 'pan-semiosis' doesn't really express any meaning, other than the running-down of entropy; 'negentropy' is a kind of sleight-of-hand of dumb stuff, appearing to be smart, so it can get to non-being that much faster :-)
Do I really have to walk you through the reasons why semiosis or a modelling relation is not representationalism all over again?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Nope. Still in the same place. It's just you tumbling randomly in space that makes it look like they dance about.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In fact what makes me think that is a lack of cortical connections in the newborn brain. The wiring hasn't even grown.
It takes time for the newborn brain to form its discriminatory circuits. We can tell that from EEG recordings. Early on, a stimulus creates generalised firing. The brain reacts much the same to any environmental source of energy. Then the firing of individual cells starts to correlate with an ability to make perceptual discriminations. The brain does get specific and consciousness thus becomes a high contrast qualitative state. We can definitely be seeing red as we are not seeing green, etc.
Nevertheless semiotics is a step in the right direction. But the other shoe has yet to drop.
But you are speaking for those who don't even have a hammer....only an axe to grind.
Quoting Wayfarer
That misses the point. You don't even have a hypothesis. You just have a belief that you claim as knowledge. Yet it is a belief that falls into the class of ideas that are "not even wrong" as there is no method to fix that belief in a formalised fashion. The belief is merely a habit - an accident of social circumstance.
If you are brought up in Yoruba or Salt Lake City, it is pretty predictable how you will think existence works. That doesn't seem a very secure way of fixing your beliefs, does it.
Quoting Wayfarer
In the end, fuck humility. Or rather I like a method that builds humility in formally in agreeing it is "only testable models". Then it become possible to say my model fucks your model. Check the numbers.
Quoting Wayfarer
I get it. You still need me to be the "other" of Scientism so your New Age mysticism can seem the good guy here by comparison. It's just rhetoric not argument. But rhetoric is fun too.
These are your wishful binaries that must be projected on to Peirce. I get it. We must divide ourselves into opposing camps. We must be team materialism or team idealism. Peirce becomes one more team mate to squabble over.
At a rhetorical level, perfectly entertaining. Just don't mistake it for proper philosophical discussion.
Whenever I'm told to read a physicalist paper on this topic, the only thing I look for is the phrase or word, (they are constantly changing) that slips mind into the thousands of words that surround it. Information, symbols, signs?? These are all a product of a mind! A computer doesn't contain information, it contains on/off switches designed by a mind. It is the mind that creates information from these on/off switches.
There is absolutely no way to get around it, somewhere, somehow, in any physicalist paper describing life, mind miraculously appears somewhere. The only way to avoid this miracle, is to make mind fundamental and irreducible. It may be hard for physicalists to swallow, but anyone who embraces their own mind readily accepts this. I have no problem recognizing my mind as me.
Well, it does undermine the very basis of empiricism. Is that what you mean by "ideological reasons?" It's more a methodological reason. Science can only deal with things that are falsifiable in a scientific context. Although I come from science, I recognize it is like that old joke - I lost my keys. Where? Over there. Why are you looking for them here? Because the light's better.
On the other hand, that's a choice that makes sense to me. I recognize that a deity could have created this universe by fiat 27 years ago and could come back and fiddle with things any time she wants, but that's not how I see the world. I see it as continuous with my own experience over the last 65 years. The universe seems pretty consistent. Science seems to work pretty well. I'm comfortable here. But I'll throw it all away in a second if I'm given a reason. I would love to.
Love the confused thought process. Materialists can't explain mind and idealists can't explain matter. You substance dualists really deserve each other. Go at it, boys!
A Christian ought to say that that's not the point of their faith. It's not 'proposing an hypothesis' in the sense of a falsifiable, abstract description of how particular things will behave under given conditions. The point of a Christian life, I would have thought, was to live in relationship with the organising principle of the Cosmos, although I admit, that is not a particularly Christian way of expressing it. Nevertheless I would like to think that this is what they mean.
Karen Armstrong gives an excellent account of how Christianity made a fatal mistake by trying to present itself in terms of the natural sciences, from the late medieval times. This is when it was common to believe that scientific discoveries 'shewed God's handiwork'. This was a sword that cut two ways. It's a long and detailed argument, presented in her book,
Case for God.
Quoting apokrisis
RIght! Either get with the naturalist program - or you're a shamanist! And I'm accused of 'dichotomising'!
Quoting apokrisis
Speak volumes, don't it.
Here's the thing - given the order we observe, we can explain a great deal. But we can't explain the order. That is a serious and important point.
Shamanism is an example of getting with the program. That was the point.
You are standing up for uncritical belief. And when that doesn't give answers, you say the "humility" of not even trying should be good enough.
I think I get what Wayfarer is saying. Empiricism these days addresses only the materialist notions of that which can be perceived through the physiological senses + logic/maths; is, in a way, itself at times a kind of placeholder for materialism, implicitly at least.
However, I grew up on the empiricism of, first and foremost, David Hume - a very different basic understanding of what empiricism entails. Given this background, here, to me, there's a potential convergence between the methodology of modern science (e.g., falsifiability) and the very old-time foundations of empiricism as interpreted by the philosophical skeptics (a kind of falsifiability applied to logic tempered by experience, including various inferences as applied to experience itself). Well, I'm showing my own partialities.
I don't have anything to definitively prove here - it would also be a different topic than that of this thread's. Just wanted to say that the philosophical skepticism of someone like Plato and his Academia can, as methodology, be rather complimentary to the methodology of the empirical sciences. Both hold as foundation an absence of obtainable absolute certainty; both seek justifications for greater strength of conviction. And, in a sense, both are founded upon inductive (with today's concepts, also abductive) reasoning.
Basically, for what its worth, imo, its not the methodological reasoning that would be undermined, but the very metaphysical foundations upon which today's global community is, for the most part, materialistically built.
Au contraire, this is all an example of where you draw your lines, of the division you see between the naturalist, which to all intents is 'things which science can explain', and then all the boo-word metaphysics that you think belongs to anyone who questions naturalism. I am not uncritical in the least, I have a post-graduate degree, I work in a demanding technical field, I integrate thoroughly with technological society (sometimes too well, I glumly think). But you have this clear border or boundary, which every time it is questioned, produces a predictable response of sarcasm and dismissal. If you wanted to take seriously the opportunities provided by interactions such as these, you would do well to consider that.
(Y) You get my drift.
For me, it has always seemed that the scientific assumptions - processes operating today are the same as those that have been operating forever and at comparable rates - are the strength of the scientific method. Generally, I buy into those assumptions, but I recognize it takes a leap of faith. It seems to have worked out pretty well.
I guess that sets up Hume's problem of induction. Based on induction from historic behavior, I believe that induction from historic behavior provides a good guide to understanding.
Why a leap of faith? It's the very conclusion that inductive reasoning would result in – and it, as conclusion, would remain true and untarnished until in any way falsified … this by something that would then hypothetically point toward what is even closer to (absolute) objectivity.
If I interpret you right, it doesn’t seem like this process of induction poses a problem for you. As it doesn’t for me. Though it’s a problem for those that want absolute certainty, neither was it a problem for Hume.
But is it still materialism when the "belief" is epistemically grounded in the logic/maths? And the physiological senses are relegated to the job of simply reading a number off a dial?
To be a materialist is to believe in the reality of substances. Stuff that exists in some brute fashion and has inherent properties. Dualists are just believers in two kinds of material - a matter stuff and a soul stuff. Panpsychists believe in the one kind of material, but with two kinds of inherent properties.
Science - especially where it is clear about its epistemology - just says it is all models. We construct qualitative concepts that we then seem to be able to quantify in some useful way.
So if physicists mention entropy, or information, or energy, or quanta, or particles, what is really going on inside their heads?
The lay-person thinks of it as being a claim about "the existence of real substantial being". But really, the words become just placeholders to talk about some observable invariance of nature.
"What is energy? It's this quality the Universe seems to have. Something is conserved as something also changes. I can see a metaphysical contrast between what seems invariant - fixed and solid - in a situation and what is merely contingent, the bit to which we would instead attach some particular number to quantify its degree."
That is all in the end a physicist can say about the Universe. One can see what is generally symmetrical or invariant about experienced reality in relation to what is then the contingency of its possible symmetry breakings - the range of particular ways the invariance can be particularised.
If a physicist is really pushed (and I am talking about the metaphysically informed ones, of whom there are plenty) then the question of "what is real?" does become pretty Platonic. A particle is a point. Unless we consider it as a string, or a loop, or a knot - each of those conceptions speaking to some different set of symmetries or invariances that seem to explain the symmetry breakings we actually then measure.
So any usual notion of "material" goes right out the window. The image left in the physicist's mind is of a pure mathematical object. And then even the object gets chucked out as what the mind's eye "sees" is really all the possible rotations and translations that are the set of possible actions such an object would have. The mind's eye is left only with the ghostly kinesthetic play of pure relata.
This is why you need a mathematically trained brain to understand metaphysics from a truly scientific point of view. Materiality has been left far behind to be replaced by mathematico-logical conceptions. Nothing is left of the Cheshire Cat except its grin. Or in this case, a sense of some structure of invariance which can also only be broken with certain moves. You can bend and fold and twist. Those relations then tell of the heart of existence - the reason why it exhibits "materiality" in some well-behaved and measurable way.
And no matter how many times I say the opposite, you will trot this nonsense out.
There are three camps here. The reductionist, the idealist and the naturalist - natural philosophy being the systems approach that both accepts the reality of all four Aristotelean causes, and sees them as part of the one world.
So reductionism rejects the reality of formal and final cause.
Idealism - if it follows its own logic - rejects material and efficient cause. Or it is forced to dualise them.
Naturalism accepts all four causes and sees them as complementary aspects of the same reality. Semiosis is then the metaphysics that cements the deal by explaining the "how".
Being a natural philosopher, I of course don't in fact accept a hard boundary between metaphysics and science. They are different levels of the same discipline. The theory and the applied.
But never mind, go back to accusing me of Scientism. That way you can be in the right by standing on the other side of the dualistic divide.
But notice I didn't disagree with you regarding the idea of learning making the distinction occur. It is you who have placed a strawman. Pay attention to what I'm saying rather than purely reacting to stock answers.
Quoting apokrisis
Here again, you completely bypassed what I was saying. I said that you are moving the goal posts from qualia in general to distinct qualia. I already agreed that distinct qualia are created by learning (i.e. perceptual discriminations), but I did not agree that qualia itself was not there in some fashion as an event that is occurring. In other words SOME event of internal aspect is occurring to the newborn, even if not the one we are familiar with as discriminatory perception. There is some internal aspect of what it is like to be a newborn. Your major problem is replacing the HARD PROBLEM with EASY PROBLEMS and then constantly dodging the real question when it goes back to it. The result is that now we have semi-absurd answers like newborns do not have inner sensations.
The underlying metaphysical underpinning of science is the assumption that things are as they have always been and will always be. That's the leap of faith. I have no problem with it. Stephen J. Gould wrote - "In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." He was speaking in particular about the scientific support for evolution, but it applies generally. So, putting our faith in uniformity is a bet, but why not?
Really interesting and really well written, but I think you are talking about yourself and not "the physicist." Just a look at the arguments about the interpretation of quantum mechanics shows that physicists are just as tied to a vision of a material world as the rest of us.
The question I place – to myself if not others – is whether or not these mathematics (and in theoretical maths, many disperse systems can be fathomed) are themselves constrained by something that is absolute objectivity (for lack of better terms) or, alternatively, themselves encompass the very notions we hold of absolute objectivity? Stated differently, are the maths themselves representations of something deeper that is – only allegorically stated - immovable or are the maths that go beyond the mind’s eye reality itself? Hence, for example, is that which is referred to by 0 and 1 – however codified by us - the reality itself, or are these referents universally applicable representations that both stem from a deeper reality which is impossible to represent? (most definitely not via relations)
It’s where I disagree with Nietzsche: his proclamation that there is no (absolute) truth. This even though I agree with him in that we as quantifiable beings cannot be aware of what this absolute truth is.
If it seems to you that I’m talking nonsense, please let me know. No worries whatsoever. But if not, on a metaphysical level of contemplation, are the foundations of mathematics (regardless of how universal and elusive to the mind’s eye) the foundational reality to you? Or do they, in a sense, emanate as very abstract, manifested representation of a deeper reality that cannot be itself represented?
I believe this is what differentiates us at root: I believe this deeper reality is real. It is the telos that I make mention of, and it is not a Heat Death.
And notice I was disagreeing with you that general qualia precede particular qualia. What precedes is vague qualia. It is differencing rather than difference that gets things started.
This may seem a technical distinction, but it is basic to Peircean logic and semiotics.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Again, you are stuck with only two possible categories - the general and the particular.
The Peircean or systems approach is about having three categories, with vagueness or firstness as the undifferentiated from which generality vs particularity arises.
So all this talk of goal post shifting is simply that you don't understand that I am speaking from a different view of metaphysics. It is why you keep searching everything I say to find evidence of the dualistic sin of representationalism or Cartesianism.
If I am trying to bypass something, it is that underpowered system of metaphysics. ;)
Because observations indicate that everything is continuously changing. Nothing is constant and this includes all of science.
"Scientists behind a theory that the speed of light is variable – and not constant as Einstein suggested – have produced a model with an exact figure on the spectral index, which they say is testable."
http://www.futuretimeline.net/blog/2016/11/29.htm#.WcM1TjYpBSA
Symmetry maths is absolute in its invariance under transformation. So it is a dynamical and emergent "absolute objectivity". And there is likely the key difference.
It is normal to think of the absolute as the fixed and unchanging. But this flips it the other way. The absolute is that which change cannot change. All change is absorbed into what emerges as the limit on change itself.
Quoting javra
It's trickier than that. If the mathematical object is an image of a limit, then it is the only thing which can't in fact really exist. A limit is the line that bounds the reality. It stands as the place where reality is aiming for and can never actually reach.
We are used to this in the maths of infinities, or concepts like instantaneous velocity, or the paradoxes of Zeno.
So it is pretty Platonic. A circle is the image of perfection. Rotational invariance pictured in the limit. And nothing real could be so perfect. However it is also free to try to approach that unbroken symmetry as closely as it can.
So yes, in the mathematical imagination, we do just take the limit and see an object emerge from the cloud of all its possible "imperfections". We can recognise the symmetrical figure towards which everything else now stands as a "striving tendency".
And I agree, mathematicians mostly don't take a more dynamical view. Unless they are working in higher topology and imagining how spaces or manifolds emerge from the naked possibilities of actions - the kind of stuff they are talking about with bundles or sheaves.
But in mathematical physics, emergent limits are the go. A successful theory of quantum gravity has to be like that. Classicality is what survives because all the quantum weirdness has averaged itself away somehow.
Quoting javra
Again, they would be real limits. And so unreal in being what material being can't reach. But also they would be considered causal, and so real in that sense, if your notion of causality itself is reframed in terms of constraints (or interpretive habits, as Peirce would put it).
So zero and one are names for particular limitations. One is perfectly individuated being. Zero is perfect absence. A constraints-based metaphysics says you can both approach either of these limits with arbitrary precision, and also you can never reach them. A residual uncertainty or spontaneity is simply what constraints-based thinking takes for granted.
So you can reify zero and one, treat then as actualities rather than regulating limits. But I am speaking for the metaphysics which flips that on its head. Now zero-ness and one-ness are wherever we arrive once we start to judge that any difference (or uncertainty) makes no actual difference.
I agree this seems an uncomfortable position to take perhaps. You want something definite at the heart of the matter. And Platonism seems to give you that - the perfect triangle that absolutely exists. Something is wrong if that perfect triangle is simply the emergent image of a host of imperfect triangles - triangles that just look close enough not so that their imperfections subjectively cease to matter.
The Platonic triangle promises you reality because its perfection is seen as the cause of all the actual material world's imperfect attempts. And then my talk of emergence says it is just an a-causal ghost ... like consciousness, the epiphenomenal smoke above the factory. What a disappointment. We were nearly there.
But as I say, a constraints-based metaphysics like Peircean semotics let's you have your cake and eat it. The ghost is causal. Because it real does have consequences.
This can't really be seen when talking about triangles - the creatures of plane geometry. But in nature we are talking about actually emergent situations. And so we are talking about universal objects such as vortexes, fractals and other natural geometries. Self-organising structure. Real symmetries and real symmetry breakings.
So yes, another level of distinction making here. The forms of classical geometry are how we imagine symmetry and symmetry-breaking in a frozen world of linear geometry. They are a good starting point, but they arise in a realm that is devoid of all dynamism. The paper is flat. There is no temporal or energetic dimension, no interaction, being represented.
But modern symmetry maths is so powerful at representing physical reality because its throws away everything but pure permutation. It is all action and no backdrop. Then out of that you get the structure that survives every attempt at self-erasure. The hard limit on unlimited change.
Quoting javra
My honest answer is that the form of existence looks like it can be completely explained by mathematical concepts. Plato was right in that sense. Reality might not be composed of tetrahedrons and other Platonic solids, but there just are structural necessities that we are picturing when talking about symmetries - the hard limits on unlimited change.
So complete success possible on that score. There can only be leptons and quarks because they are the simplest of all possible ways to break the symmetry of unbounded possibility.
But then, on the other hand, that leaves a fundamental mystery. Formal cause we can tick off. Material cause becomes the unexplained. We know there is actually a world that expresses these irreducible forms, but still there is also this fundamental notion of "action". We end up having to take that bit for granted in some fashion.
So there is a deeper reality it would seem - the vagueness that is the boundless Apeiron. A sea of pure formless fluctuation.
Of course I also am happy to have a go at explaining that too. There are ways to reduce that mystery as well. But my point is that the formal side of the equation looks very hopeful - in a way that it didn't need to. Symmetry principles may yield our physicalist "theory of everything".
But I am admitting (or it is what I always say) that the corollary is that this metaphysics depends on the matching notion of "unlimited action". And the existence of that would be a final "why anything?" kind of mystery.
However, also note how the metaphysical question itself has been transformed from the usual "why not nothing rather than something?" to now "why not everything if anything?". And we at least have the answer to that fundamental question. A state of everythingness already mostly cancels itself out to nothing. Unbound action or change must result in the structural invariance which is the indifference of a symmetry.
And that is the bottom-line of the last 500 years of highly successful physical and cosmological theory. Discover nature's hidden symmetries and you have something objectively fixed against which to then measure the way everywhere we can see has been left symmetry-broken in some fashion that is a difference that makes a difference.
In fact Einstein, Poincare, and others have described as best they can the way they thought problems through. The literature on mental imagery and creative thought is something I've studied. So I'm not pulling it completely out my arse here. :)
You can also see all this in the advance of mathematics itself. The story has been about all the concrete stuff you can throw out to get to the next level of abstraction. You get from geometry to topology by throwing out all "actual distances" and just imagining "naked spatial connections". Then higher topology is where you get to as you throw out every concrete notion of a space you can manage.
There is no credible way to explain the rise of molecules to the extent needed for life. There is no credible way to explain their amalgamation into cycles, and then from cycles into systems, and then from systems in cells and cell groups and so on.
Each new level that appears, locks in the level beneath it, maximising its efficiency, securing it against the randomness of the environment. If there were a gradient in this direction for life, then a lot could be explained. We could envisage buckets over-flowing into more and more, larger and larger buckets. That is why I think we should be looking for a life force - a physical law that explains the gradient.
The fact is we don't have it. We have directionality, which is like intentionality, especially when the choice is against thermodynamics.
Beyond directional intentionality however, there is another layer, and that is the layer of apparent sentience. And to this point I bring up once more the mitochondria who had its genes stolen.
What fascinates me about the mitochondria I referenced earlier is that the battle occurred in the pitch dark. The chemically formed cell doesn't possess the sentience to know that there is a physical body inside it. The story is that a foreign cell (a mitochondria) invades a eurkaryote. Chemicals go crazy. In the end, rather than killing the mitochondria, the very exact part required for reproduction of the mitochondria is deleted from the mitochondria and appears in the nuclear DNA of the cell. WTF
--Chemistry would have an awfully hard time explaining that based on reactions.
There are many examplars of this type of sentience - What is it? The complex emergent semiotics of the system?
This is nothing like the story. The clue is in the word "symbiosis". The deal was mutually beneficial. It worked because the waste product of one was the fuel of the other. Together, both multiplied fruitfully because a division of labour made multicellular life possible.
The mitochondrion (or ancestral bacterium) lost the need for a lot of its genes as it was now safely tucked inside the host archaeon. It only retained the genes most critical for regulating its highly volatile respiratory activity. So the proteins needed to maintain control were kept close at hand. Then the other less time-critical genes could migrate be part of the DNA in the central nucleus.
Thus all can be explained by constraints of metabolic efficiency and genetic evolvability. The relationship was mutual. The genes landed up in the best places. And you will be home to about a quadrillion mitochondria. Things did not pan out so bad for them.
Hi Apokrisis, nice try, but your explanation falls a little short for me. Come on, you can do better than that.
Quoting apokrisis
It was now safely tucked inside? Was it? I think you've glossed over a bit there. It is true that the nature of the relationship became symbiotic, but I can assure you it was not through the pleasant exchange of ideas.
A replicating lifeform inside another lifeform will kill it, cold.
Quoting apokrisis
That was a very smart decision. When did it come to this decision? Before or after it killed the host? It simply said, 'You know what, stuff everything except respiration. I'm going to destroy my ability to regulate my own cell division and maintain the health of myself, and I sure hope that I can figure out a way to keep surviving in this new environment, whatever it may be". Is that the reason that it decided to devolve when it had been doing so well?
Quoting apokrisis
Could they? How did they come to that arrangement? Enterprise bargaining? The blind mitochondria said to the blind cell, "I don't know what the hell you are or where the hell I am but here comes some genes. Catch."
Quoting apokrisis
I see.
Well it was nice knowing you then. Goodbye to you and the 100 trillion bacteria living mostly symbiotically in your gut. And the vast variety of retroviruses hijacking a ride on your DNA.
Quoting MikeL
Did you miss the key point? The host was a handy supply of its food. While it was a handy source of energy for its host. So the situation was SYMBIOTIC. :)
They went together so exactly that they created a whole new evolutionary era. All their fellow microbes were left in the dust. In 4 billion years, the other guys have shown no essential structural change.
But with their new super-powerful respiratory mechanism, the symbiont duo could swell to become single cells 15,000 times larger. And then become the vastly radiating variety of body forms that is multicellular life.
I'm not sure what your definition of a successful marriage is. But that must be a once in a planetary lifetime lucky break.
Quoting MikeL
This is a bit of smart alec reply given the realities of bacterial and archaeon sex. Look up how it works some time. Life at the microbial level is a genetic free for all. Cells are always throwing gene kits in each other's direction.
An individual E.coli only has room for 4000 genes. But it floats in a gene pool - a metagenome - of 18,000 genes that it can pick up as it needs as food sources change and a different kind of digestion might be needed, or whatever the environmental challenge happens to be.
You seem to be trying to extrapolate backwards from the highly regulated world of multicellular organisms to the open air orgy that is the microbial world. Fortunately evolution itself was going in the other direction.
Although I disagree with Apokrisis, this problem you pose of why the mitochondria survived the engulfment of the cell without being destroyed or destroying it is simply natural selection. The mitochondrial ancestors that destroyed the host cells clearly never made it as a symbiotic partner. The mitochondrial ancestors that were able to be destroyed by the host partner cells also never made it as symbiotic partners. However, mitochondrial ancestors that had the mutations that allowed for them to not reproduce but continue to survive in the cell, and the cells that had the mutation to allow the mitochondria to stay and provide its energy were selected for as they did better at survival than other cells that did not have this advantage.
So the vagueness of the newborn = the newborn has no inner sensations? There is nothing of what it is like to be a newborn in your view? Again, that seems extreme.
Even granted this (which is a big granted), you have not explained how the connections "emerges". It's green because it's not blue is not explaining the experience just the causes. Again switching the hard for easy in a just so story.
Well there's inside the body alongside our cells and there's inside the cell itself. The bacterial flora of our gut are not inside our cells, unlike the mitochondria. And if any of those retroviruses hitching a ride decide they might just pop out and see what's happening, guess what?Quoting apokrisis
I agree that the host was a very good supply of food that the host cell had intended to use for itself. The mitochondria also provided energy for the cell, however, I think that some tweaking may have been needed here before they got it right. In the meantime you have a replicating cell that has invaded another replicating cell and is consuming it's resources. Not so symbiotic. Not yet.
Quoting apokrisis
Wow, you've skipped right to the end of the story.
Quoting apokrisis
The megagenome is interesting and you might have me there. I'll have to check it out.
In the meantime you have one cell membrane bound organism inside another cell membrane bound organism - What happened here? Did the mitochondria extrude its genome through its own cell membrane, (essentially throwing it away) have it get entangled with the host genome, somehow re-capture it's genome (lucky it hadn't floated off in the ocean)? And then in this seemingly lucky (for recapturing the genome it flushed out of its body) event suddenly find out that it was not so good after all, for in the recapturing of it's own genome processes it failed captured any of the host genome while also unfortunately losing the genes most critical for its own survival.
But not to worry because then the DNA of the host cell begins producing the promoters and transcription factors required for the mitochondria to survive (before the mitochondria does actually die of course - so within one generation unless it is assault of a mitochondrial army against the archaeon which could be feasible [ramping up the probability index for you there]).
So the happy ending for this chaotic disaster is the perfect regulation of the health of the mitochondria and the division of the mitochondria by the host cell, in exchange for energy it learnt to use. Not bad. Chalk one up for nature.
Quoting apokrisis
You're right, it was a bit tongue in cheek. I was just playing with you. Great to get your ideas, they always make me think.
Quoting schopenhauer1
If the mitochondrial ancestors had a mutation that didn't allow them to reproduce, guess what? No mitochondria. The assertion is that just by chance a mitochondria that will soon perish off the face of the earth because it can't reproduce drifts into a cell, that rather than killing it in fact has the capacity to allow it to reproduce and maintain it's health? That's one hell of a happy coincidence.
How about we just say the host cell snatched it out of the mitochondria? Seems so simple my way don't you think?
It is part of the human evolutionary story. They have to come out with brains half grown to fit through the limits created by a bipedal pelvis. At birth, they are still sprouting new cortical cells at the rate of a million each minute.
On the other hand, I held my baby daughters minutes after they were delivered. There was no doubt they had sensations. What I would question is your assumption that they had an "inner" quality, or that they were in any way distinct.
You see it is you that is wedded to a Cartesian theatre. You can't conceive of mind except that it is already like that. A space with a self watching a parade of definite sensations. But a baby has only the vaguest notion of a self separate from a world. It doesnt even have hands it controls.
So yes, the traditional Jamesian blooming, buzzing, confusion is as apt a characterisation as any.
If given enough time, there is probably a ratcheting factor. Where perhaps only one step in the mutation allowed for a slightly smaller reproduction rate (mitochondria that reproduced still but provided energy), died out quicker than the cell next door that had an extra mutation that allowed for the mitochondria not to produce on its own by transferring DNA functions to nucleus. This secondary mutation provided a much quicker selection rate and outlived its only slightly improved cousin who probably died out rather quickly compared with the cell that had the secondary mutation.
I guess if you slowed the reproduction rate down for the mitochondria so it matched the host cell..... still, no need for the swap. The host cell has control and it has taken that control from the mitochondria. Interesting thoughts though Schopenhauer.
But where you depart from Aristotelianism, is that in his system, there is still a place for the Contemplation of the Good, which remains a hint of, or points towards, the immortal. The mind of the philosopher finds supreme repose in the contemplation of the Ideas, which are immortal.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's not the very fact of explanation that I'm objecting to - it's the purported explanation being that the reason for life is the quickest route to non-existence. Worldly existence is not the portal towards a higher life, but a temporary diversion on the way to non-being. Life really doesn't exist for any reason, it is simply perturbations in the overall tendency towards maximum entropy. So ultimately, any 'reason' which Apokrisis' philosophy offers is subjective i.e. dependent on what I decide, what I designate as real or important. He has acknowledged this earlier in this thread.
My tentative understanding is that the whole rationale of the spiritual life is to 'awaken to an identity as that which is not subject to death'. That is communicated differently in different traditional and philosophical systems. In Christianity, it is the idea of Life, capital-L - a sense of awakening to the 'life of the spirit', which is nowadays, and lamely, understood in a rather 'pie in the sky' sense of being 'going to heaven when you die'. But properly speaking, the life of discipleship is living in that light, whilst still in ordinary existence. Of course, there is also a sense in which this is a hopeless quest, an utterly quixotic undertaking. But one has to persist, regardless.
The reason is sounds like nothing or a non-explanation to you, is because you have no comprehension of it, as we're both products of a culture which is devoted to undermining such an understanding. It's just that some of us are resisting, and some are complacent.
It sounds here that you admit there is inner sensation however vague. What we do not want is simple analytic statements of a=a. We know that experiences have their physical correlate. But simply repeating the physical correlate as an answer to why there is inner sensation is not an answer. Again, that is just saying a=a.
Quoting apokrisis
No one is debating that part.
Quoting apokrisis
No one is debating that the newborn experience is much different. The hard question is what is the nature of the experience of this blooming, buzzing, and confusion. It is there nonetheless, even in its primitive, very vague form. What you cannot do is get something from nothing like so much fiat. Saying "Green is not blue is not red" and therefore emergence of experience is only explaining how distinctions are created not how there is a sensation in the first place.
You said earlier:
Quoting apokrisis
Well, again the "interaction" and "process" is "something" a phenomena in and of itself which must be explained as it is. The interaction is happening in this event called experience. What is that as opposed to simply naming its constituents?
The logic of it is that it would be more like getting something from an undifferentiated state of everythingness. Vagueness is not nothingness but unrestricted potential. The newborn's problem would be a state of experiencing that is too much going on to the slightest stimulation.
So if you want to imagine a vague state of sensation, it is like a blooming, buzzing, confusion. Maybe like getting tumbled in a heavy surf, but without yet any sense of self as well as just sensory noise.
This sounds good, but what does it say that it is founded on logical paradoxes?
We have to live as if the passing life were the eternal one. It is a hopeless quest, yet we must persist.
Maybe paradox is a necessary characteristic here that you can explain? To my mind, these kinds of contradictions - if actually compelling - contain within them their own resolutions. They speak to the third thing of some balance.
It could be that we are inevitably seekers after meaning. And even though that is ultimately quixotic, that is still who we are and thus what we must do.
It isn't a crazy way to be until we stop to think about it - as that negentropic bent in us is evolved. But once we stop to think about it, it becomes crazy as we are now aware we could be doing "other".
I think this is the existential truth you are expressing. If we are always looking, then there must be something to find. Otherwise why the heck are we always looking? And can we actually continue the habit of looking knowing there is nothing to find? Can the habit itself fill a void despite its ultimate futility?
This is where the sleight of hand occurs. Somehow, somewhere, something called natural selection emerges. It is not the end of the sleight of hand, but it permits others down the road. One by one, human traits (e.g. selection) are buried somewhere in the explanation. Where is this natural selection coming from? From around the cell? From within the cell. It's somewhere, it is guiding, and it's persistent, and it's repetitive. Very much like the mind.
It is absolutely mandatory that traits of the human mind are introduced in where explanation. The reason is because it actually is the mind that is doing it.
As the story builds, the introduction of mind traits becomes more and more egregious as you are highlighting in your discussion, but it is acceptable because we have already established that chemicals can be viewed as little minds.
So there is an experience of sensory noise you at least admit. What is this experience (not what are its constituents of interactions)?
Related is what I asked but you did not address earlier:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think the paradox comes from the fact of different perspectives. That is after all the difference between a paradox and a contradiction.
That 'looking' can also be interpreted as an awareness of lack. We are seeking something, because we're aware there's something lacking, or missing, but can't say what. That in any case would be the Buddhist analysis. Our sense of identity is unstable, because it's based on an idea of solidity and permanence that we actually lack. So we're continually trying to fill that sense of lack - mostly through the drive for power, possessions and relationships. The religiously-inclined will pursue it through the idea of 'union with God'.
So in Buddhism, the training is about learning to understand that constant craving to be, or not to be - either trying to affirm ourselves as beyond death (which is called eternalism) or as being non-existent (nihilism - the latter is the more common).
The 'middle path' of Buddhism lies in rejection of what is called 'extremes' through the understanding of emptiness, ??nyat?. So I suppose you could say, here Buddhism deals with that sense of lack by teaching you to understand its origin and meaning.
In any case, I think the upshot of that is the re-integration of the self at a higher level of understanding. From the viewpoint of the ego, it's annihilation (which is the meaning of Nirvana). But it's not simply non-existence or non-being - the tathagatha (the Buddha) embodies as way of being which is beyond being and non-being, neither existent nor non-existent.
Obviously that points off to another thread (or even other forum!) but is one response to the question.
Well, I may find the hard problem relatively intractable at this point, but if I can explain it by answering the questions with easy problems, I will. In other words, problems related to why some biological trait occurred have a well-known process of explanation through biological processes. Natural selection is simply the name for differential reproduction survival rates among a range of differences amongst a population. So in this case, it makes sense that cells benefited from mitochondrial invasion and thus survived better. Those with a mitochondrial invasion where the nucleus regulated aspects of its reproduction perhaps improved its survival rate even more.
This is an observation after the fact. It is not causal onto itself.
Literally, in your example, the observation of a mind is made the cause.
As I said, the sleight of hand gets more and more egregious as the story grows more complex, but the essential aspect of the trick is to slowly develop agreement between the storyteller and the listener that chemicals have the properties of mind. This is how magic works. The audience is slowly drawn into the trick.
True. Is there a "what it's like aspect" to cells? Perhaps yes. However, if you are asking "Why did this trait appear?" I can easily say, a mutation occurred and it became stable as time went on and it was able to reproduce and survive at a longer and faster rate than other organisms without this feature.
Now, does mind need to exist for other things to exist? That is a bigger question, but this is a very specific one and can be answered in the framework of things already existing. Thus, this falls into the realm of easy problems and not the hard problem.
The 'epistemic cut' implies a dualism between matter and symbol and so implies a duality.
The idea of 'soul stuff' is nonsensical, but it comes from the reification of the notion of 'being'. The original Aristotelean term that was translated as 'substance' was 'ouisia', which is much nearer in meaning to 'being' than 'stuff'. And what's the difference? 'Stuff' is an object of perception - something separate from us, something we can objectively measure or interact with. 'Being' never appears to us, because it is us - we are 'being' (i.e. 'human beings'). So if I were to ask 'what is the nature of being', then I'm not asking a question which is amenable to objective analysis at all. There is a lot of portentous waffle about such questions, of course, but that doesn't mean it's not a real question. As Thomas Nagel puts it in his book, Mind and Cosmos:
The Core of Mind and Cosmos
I’m here addressing differences, not agreements. We may, and me thinks most likely will, choose to yet disagree. But so I may, hopefully, better elucidate the root difference between us on a metaphysical scale:
First off, once again, my realm of expertise is not that of maths. I don’t intend to purport otherwise. Still, I know enough so that the contents of your latest post to me are readily understandable to me – albeit, not in the “shut up and calculate” sense as regards the specifics. To each their own fields of interest.
As to the metaphysical issue:
You choose the Apeiron as the deeper/est reality: “boundless/formless fluctuation”. I so far further interpret you as expressing that one day all shall be Apeiron once again, aka end in a Heat Death. Correct me if needed.
To the extent I’m correct in so interpreting, the Apeiron then serves as the final telos.
Yet, in nevertheless yet holding “fluctuation”, this notion is not one of perfect symmetry.
The final telos (for there are innumerable more proximate teloi) is for me one of perfect symmetry. I think, thus expressed, you may then understand why I also at times state it is technically ineffable / inexpressible (if one seeks accuracy of expression), and impossible to represent via ideas, notions, etc., for none would accurately and fully correlate to its reality. (I don’t deny this correlative aspect of truth)
While it is true that for me this final telos is also, in part, that of absolute metaphysical objectivity (impartiality, hence fairness, hence justice) of which we are all (freewill-endowed) subjects to, absolute coherency/harmony/lack-of-conflict/peace/love (which brings about coherency, harmony, lack-of-conflict, etc.), absolute beauty/sublimity (which, complex as this topic in itself is, in part draws us to the unknown), and absolute selflessness of being, it is also true that—while inductively knowing, or at least believing, it to so be—I for logical reasons also know/uphold that what “it” in fact is is impossible to conceptualize, accurately represent, etc. (for technical metaphysical purposes, by anything that is endowed with selfhood; hence, by any psyche: be it ant, human, or (hypothetically) deity). Still, it, by definition, would likewise also need to be a state of perfect symmetry.
I don’t place this state at the metaphysical beginning, in part, because it is of no personal concern to do so.
At a metaphysical level, to me this end-state is not idealized but actual and obtainable. I’m not here addressing awareness of it, nor alignment with it, nor some kind of mystical vision of it, etc., but, rather, obtainable as a final state of being … which, maybe needless to add, prior to this is always in a state of becoming.
Again, focusing in on our differences:
To keep things relatively concrete and particular, the referents to the symbols of 0 and 1 are then, to me, in a sense, Platonic universals that emerge from this perfect symmetry’s reality in conjunction with the plurality of beings—quantifiable things (as becoming)—that occur. The referents to 0 and 1 are then (very intentionally so stated) more eternal/immortal than the referent to far more complex and context-specific mathematics that hold 0s and 1a as axiomatic givens. Though, upon eventual and contingent obtainment of this final end-state of perfect symmetry, the referents to 0 and 1 too will vanish.
[As to thermodynamics, different debates can ensue. Including those of: is information equivalent to energy? And: can information be created and nullified/erased, such as within the very center of a black hole? Different tangential topics, though.]
Back to the basic concept, though: The maths to me—again, in a simplified sense—emerge from this perfect symmetry as telos, which is itself a non-maths reality (again, not an idealization which is metaphysically impossible to obtain/actualize; but, rather, a metaphysical reality) ((I think we can both understand that minds, within this point of reference, are maths)). Whereas, to you, as far as I so far understand you as saying, this deepest reality of perfect symmetry is itself one of maths.
My contention is that the maths applicable to the physical world will work regardless of metaphysical outlook chosen. For instance, I so far know of no modern maths not in some way reliant upon the referents to 0 and 1. These two referents, then, can be explained to be both via they notion of the Apeiron you uphold and the notion of the factually ineffable final telos of non-maths, which I've previous expressed via its various faces (including that of perfect symmetry).
Why shouldn't richly structured modelling feel like something (and largely unstructured activity with no self concept feel like pretty much nothing to no-one)?
I don't recall you ever said why.
No. The Heat Death for me would have to be an eternally determinate state. It would have a fixed spatiotemporal structure and a minimal presence of energetic action. So unlike Anaximander, there is no dissolution back into the Apeiron.
The Apeiron is generative potential and the Heat Death is a self organised or emergent finality, an enduring habit. So here I am switching to a Peircean view.
Quoting javra
In my scheme, the Heat Death is a perfectly crisp or definite state of symmetry, while the Big Bang arises from a perfectly vague state, or a symmetry of utter indefiniteness. So the change is a transition effected from the vaguest existence to the most definite existence. It is a change from a state of unlimited disequilibrium to one of universally stable structural equilibrium.
The telos is then not a glorious higher purpose but simply this tendency which is pointed in the direction of the Apeiron becoming maximally its own "other".
Time, space and energy differences (definite actions) all must co-arise as part of this trip towards "absolute other". Anaximander still had to take time, space and energy for granted at the start of things. That is why his Apeiron still sounds pretty materialistic or substantial.
Quoting javra
Once you start to talk about human notions of telos - The Good - then for me, that only arises along the path from the Big Bang to the Heat Death.
It turns out that the Big Bang couldn't achieve its end directly. Instead of expanding/cooling as a simple bath of light - pure radiation - it had its own secondary story of a Higgs field symmetry breaking which switched on gravity for particles that could feel the field through their mass. A lot of crud condensed out of the radiation to become heavy matter that lagged behind events. A gravitational symmetry was broken and you had a secondary action of massive particle falling together as clouds, stars and blackholes.
This was a major negentropic event - a backwards eddy against the general entropic flow. All the stars and black holes will eventually re-radiate that lagging mass back to radiation. But in the meantime, the stage is set for further levels of material complexity feeding off this gradient. ie: material structures like us.
So in my scheme, humanity is part of an interesting detour taken by a relatively small part of the original formless radiation bath. You could say that the great condensation of gravitating, sub-lightspeed, matter was a cosmic negentropic accident. And that then set the scene for complex material structure - like stars and humans - with the negentropic purpose of re-entropifying that matter, returning it to the general cosmic flow, as quickly as possible.
So my view is formed by looking at what we actually now know about the story of the Universe (and of course there is more to learn).
I can see how you may then apply the same metaphysical logic as me to the world as it seems from a very human-centric point of view. It does make dialectical sense that if our existence seems defined by its extreme self-centredness (not meant in any pejorative way), then the "other" of that - the obvious destination in terms of a radical change - would be a state of selfless being.
The particularity of selfhood is an extreme case of broken symmetry. That is the same story in my scheme too. There is nothing more negentropically a sore thumb sticking out in the Universe than a human self. And so the "other" of that would be to dissolve selfhood back to where it came from (back to entropy for me), or alternatively (for you) dissolve it forward to a state of pure selflessness.
So in terms of our differences, we likely agree on a dialectical understanding of cosmic history, but I would see humanity (and all its values or meaning making) as at best the culmination of a side detour to the big trip, while for you, it is the starting point for that big trip. Make sense?
Quoting javra
I think this is where it gets tricky for you. If selfless being is truly the cosmic goal, then some kind of maximal or ultimate state of selfish being had to be its origin. We are talking about the journey that becomes possible because there is space between two complementary metaphysical limits on being.
So you would have to say more about this origin - this state of absolute selfish being - to justify the dialectical logic of your argument. (Just as you rightly push me to answer "well what is vagueness, what was there just before the Big Bang?".)
Quoting javra
My semiotic approach is based on these being equivalent at a foundational scale. If each is a complementary mode of action, then there is a starting scale at which each is the same size as the other.
I guess this is a dual aspect theory of matter (as opposed to a dual aspect monism of mind). :)
We know that at the Planck scale, information and material degrees of freedom become the same thing. Our measurements in term of Shannon entropy, or epistemic message uncertainty, equates to our measurements in terms of Gibbs free energy or countable physical degrees of freedom.
This is a profound fact that has given rise to the notions of event horizons, holographic principles, black hole radiation, and all the other good stuff of recent cosmology.
So modern physicalist theory already has a new foundation based on a measured equivalence between two complementary notions of entropy (and negentropy). It makes "no difference" whether it is regarded in terms of epistemic uncertainty or ontic degrees of freedom. The one maths encompasses both points of view. So we are in fact measuring the "subjectivity" of the Universe as much as its "objectivity" now. Physics has been turned upside down because it is a legitimate question: what does the Universe know about what is going on?
Quantum mechanics will hopefully be rewritten by this quantum information approach. We can make sense of quantum uncertainty as being due to the semantic impossibility of the Universe asking two opposite kinds of question of the same spatiotemporal locale. It can't enquire after variables like location and momentum simultaneously as each query requires its own separate and mutually incompatible point of view.
Quoting javra
I'm puzzled here because your scheme would have to resolve the Platonic issue of how mathematical form might be itself related to the greater thing of The Good. If we are talking about beauty, love and truth as the ultimate telos, pure selfless being, then there is a gap to fill in when linking The Good back to mathematical forms.
In my own physicalist take, the summum bonum is a dissipative thing - the ultimate constraint which is to take the shortest path possible. The maths of metaphysical strength interest is the maths of symmetry breaking and dissipative structure. And that maths is an expression of the Least Action principle which is so central to physical theory.
So I accept the intuitive correctness of Platonism - some ultimate principle of "goodness" which then results in the more specific mathematical forms - but I can give a physicalist reading of that in dissipative structure terms which map to what modern science is discovering.
I don't see how you can do the same. Your version of The Good - if it is selfless being - has no necessary connection to the kind of maths (the 0 and 1 that is the omega and alpha of algebra) which you think is fundamental.
(And I don't mean to diss algebra as - another important fact since Descartes - algebra and geometry themselves turn out to be complementary modes of reality description. Any understanding derived from the one can be translated into the other.)
So anyway, to the degree that you are making a Platonic argument here, you would need to be able to flesh out how your summum bonum principle entails anything mathematical in terms of "pure structure". I'm sensing you appreciate the difficulty of making that connection and that is why you want to move on and treat The Good as essentially non-mathematical after all. And that then begs the question of why you want to claim any connection in the first place.
A systems thinker of course has to be able to wrap formal and final cause together in some satisfactory fashion. Platonism had some suggestions, but in the end, mostly paints over that crack in its logic.
It implies a formally exact complementarity, which is a very different (triadic) thing.
The reason matter~symbol works, and mind~body doesn't, is that we have fundamental physical theories of the relation between physical degrees of freedom and epistemic degrees of uncertainty. I just explained that above - the equivalence of Shannon information and Gibbs/Boltzman free energy.
So it is a dichotomy that works. We know how to measure it as a physical reality. We can convert it to bit, and back again. This has become an insight of fantastic power.
And as I've mentioned with considerable enthusiasm, biophysics has now discovered in the past 10 years how this works for life and mind. There is an obvious reason now why - at the quasi-classical transition zone of the nanoscale - bio-semiosis and neuro-semiosis could take off. Again a unit of biological information and a unit of biological work (the two sides of Pattee's epistemic cut!) are zeroed at that scale for reasons that are just physically transparent (once you understand the physics).
This is huge. As big as DNA. Science has come through for us once again.
In fact, I don’t conceptualize selflessness to be the other relative to self. Rather, in tune with many an Eastern understanding, I conceptualize selflessness to be a core aspect of any (minimally, sentient) self—regardless of how selfish in intents it might be. (Eastern understandings such as that of Brahman, or of Nirvana as emptiness that is being, or of Akasha [which, in similar fashion to other Eastern cultures, can connote sky / ether / vacuity / void … again coming back to emptiness … though, not in contrast but in accord, sometimes connoting “heavens” ]). We as this … Akasha, I’ll for now call it … are formed via the information that surrounds (both materially and mentally); and, as Akasha, hold our top-down causal ability upon mind and body via intentions of goal manifestation. Hence, the obtaining of absolute selflessness is not the obtainment of other but, rather, the obtainment of our fundamentally true selves unperturbed by anything that ratios / divides or partitions / binds or contains or limits. [all this not to convince but to clarify]
Quoting apokrisis
Placing this (or any other) end-state at the beginning is not in any way needed for the metaphysics to hold. Metaphysically, the more divided we are as individuated Akasha the more chaotic the total system becomes; the closer to the end-state of absolute selflessness (by this or any of its other expressions) we become the more orderly--more deterministic--the whole becomes. Theoretically, what prevents us from actualizing this end-state is our fear of being metaphysically, technically, devoid of a self, is our fear of an ultimate unknown … this though we know it to be, for example, the ultimate conclusion of a universally perfect love (again, love as process removes divisions, inclinations toward self(ishness), etc.). It’s a death/end of all ego--though not of being, not of the Akasha which is the very essence of us as conscious agents--and this can be quite unnerving to all of us in own ways.
So metaphysically, no ultimate beginning is required to be known for all else to hold. Epistemologically, no such metaphysical ultimate beginning can be confidently affirmed in any universal manner.
Physically, then, as a derivative understanding, the beginning of our physical universe (as we know it) could, for example, be explained in manners in tune with the stated metaphysics thus: given the unknowns of dark matter and dark energy, despite the universe currently expanding, it is yet conceivable that at some future time it will begin to contract. Fast forward to a cyclical model of the universe. Our current universe started as a near-but-not-quite obtainment of this endstate of absolute selflessness (conceived of in physics as the volumeless gravitational singularity) say, due to some aspect of all Akashas deviating from the end-state just enough to cause lack of homeostasis as regards the whole … this leading to a “Big Bang”, a starting from scratch with the same determinate end-state in place (I also hold that this telos as end-state is a determinate facet of reality as we know it).
As regards the metaphysics, there is no “must” in the universe being such that is conforms to a cyclical model. It only happens to me my present favorite approach to this issue of physical (again, not metaphysical) beginnings. And yes, it’s a personal bias.
Quoting apokrisis
As I previously stated, all that you mention are facets (faces) of the same underlying given as telos, one such facet being that of perfect symmetry.
In a slightly more drawn out argument for the same, it’s not the telos itself that results in mathematical (as well as other) universals but the telos in simultaneous conjunction with multiple … again, for lack of better terminology … Akashas, always in plural till the end-state is obtained.
What this system does is not a focusing on maths, quantifications, and measurement but, rather, on what you for now seem to be taking for granted: the very nature of differentiable identity and, hence, quantity (regardless of how mathematically abstract, this still holds).
At the end of the day though, thank you for a further explanation of your own model. It seems like we for now can continue agreeing to disagree on the metaphysics while agreeing on numerous more immediate things.
but outside of engineering and technology, what does it mean existentially? what is the place for 'the immeasurable?'
I read this as magic. Just stir in some semiotics, (the capacity to communicate), and bingo, you have a living being. Where would this semiotics come from?
The trouble with you anti-materialists is that you don't even appreciate the self-organising wonder of nature's materials. How does energy ever find the substantial stability of "coming to rest" in some form?
I can't believe you guys take the passivity of matter so much for granted. You just want to rob material nature of all its beautiful and profound mystery. It's just dirt and gunk to you lot.
It is. The secret sauce of the recipe is buried in 10,000 words hoping that no one will find it or notice. Everything single research paper supporting materialism follows the same recipe. Thousands of words with one magic one - Abracadabra.
So it's either take it for granted, or claim that it comes about by magic (take some dissipative structure and add some semiotics)? I choose neither of these.
Or, alternatively, there's something fundamental that neither of you are getting.
Quoting apokrisis
It is, without mind to animate it, or appreciate it.
Incidentally, the etymological root of 'matter' and 'mother' are the same.
Quoting apokrisis
Horkheimer, The Eclipse of Reason.
I've stated why many times. You cannot get experience from fiat. Emergence of physical phenomena from physical phenomena is part of the easy problems. Emergence of mental phenomena from physical phenomena is different based on the fact that mental phenomena is actually needed to observe the rest of phenomena. It is that which needs to be in order for other things to be known. Without the knower, there is no known.. (whether it actually exists without the knower is a different question, so no this is not solipsism or Subjective Idealism necessarily).
To then claim that pansemiotics DOES claim to have a knower and a known all the way down is a sleight of hand, as mental and physical (according to YOUR physicalism) CANNOT be of the same substance with a dual aspect. There can be signs, referents, signifers, etc. in the physical, but no mental phenomena in the mix already. Thus we are back to the problem of physical can emerge other physical but how does physical produce EXPERIENCE (MENTAL)?. Well, when we have theories of "just so" like "blue is distinct from green which is distinct from x, etc. etc." we are discounting that the originary vague sight phenomena has to be there in the beginning before the connections/distinctions of person/world interaction even takes place. So the cart is put before the horse in your theory as the vagueness (however indistinct) is still something which needs to be there for the distinction to arise.
This "epistemic cut" you tout is very vague in itself and is never really satisfactory an answer for why the experiential (mental) exists beyond the material constituents. The FACT is, experience- this qualitatively different mode of existence, is so different than other properties (charge, mass, etc.) and processes (e.g. thermodynamic events) because it is indeed the backdrop for which all the others are ONLY known. All other phenomena are only known through the MAP, while THIS property is known directly through the territory of inner experience. It doesn't matter, by the way, whether this inner experience "distorts reality", but only that there is a direct, first person, "what it's like" of being rather than a "that which is observed".
So you avoid my question as usual.
Are you saying information is "just physical phenomena"? How does that work in your ontology?
Again then, why shouldn't a modelling relation with reality not feel like something? Information or matter alone doesn't have reason to be feeling like something. But to form a lived model of the world - one where informational possibility and material circumstance are in close and pragmatic interaction - just does seem as though it should feel like something.
Can you tell me why it wouldn't?
Note the language.
I then thought of a virus (I went from bacteria to bacteriophages and plasmids). One possible explanation that I will hand to you is that the early mitochondrion might have had features of both a virus and a bacteria. It may have tried to hijack the host cell's DNA to replicate itself and got caught.
Even so, the how a virus does what it does in terms of assemblage order etc is another (perhaps more managable from your perspective, dilemma).
Do you know what has started springing to mind though, starting with my drive to work this morning?
Something that may be a junction between chemistry and life - Operant Conditioning. You know Skinner - and how by controlling when you drop pellets you can get a chicken to cluck three times, flap its wings and spin around on the spot.
The Life/God approach is top down. We can start with the sentience of the mind and work down through consecutive levels of sentience, or we can start with chemistry and work up through consecutive levels of chemistry- with the drawback that chemistry is acting anti-entropically and does not create mind. AND both theories miss each other on the way up and down. One takes the stairs and the other takes the elevator.
Operant conditioning has intentionality and can probably be described in terms of your semiotics. Finding the link between the two may be the key to unravelling this whole thing and finding the missing link - a central unifying theory! :) .
You have everything backward, as I've told you on numerous occasions. "Energy" according to it's conceptual structure is necessarily the property of something. It is commonly understood as a property of matter. You cannot abstract the property from the object which it is a property of, to give it independent existence without invoking some form of dualism.
You are claiming that energy is prior to matter, but this is just the nonsense of the idea that there could be an activity without something which is active. It is nonsense because "activity" is a concept which requires that there is something active, or else it's just an abstract concept, which has not been applied to describe anything active.. If your claim is that the concept of "activity", or "energy" is prior in existence to the thing (matter) which is active, then you need to support this idealism with some ontological principles. And this leads to dualism
You have two distinct forms of information in your description. You have information within the dissipative structures and you have information within the semiotics. There's a big gap between these two, because in "semiotics" information is a property of matter, and in your "dissipative structures" information is supposed to be prior to matter. Because your attempt is to conflate these two distinct conceptions of information, you have left yourself no idea of what "matter" even is. It's just some vague thing which emerges as "necessary", necessary to assume, in order to account for bodily existence. But it's not really necessary because it just emerges as random chance. And that's all nonsense, because as I say, you have it backwards.
WHAT is this feeling in the first place? That is the hard question. You can keep pointing back to the map but all you are saying is a=a. It is analytic. It isn't SAYING anything other than what the physical constituents are. You will always have the problem of a dualism. Emergence only works when it is physical phenomena producing other physical phenomena. It is all MAP. The subjective/first person EXPERIENCE (what it "feels" like) is metaphysically different in that it is the thing which observes the map. It is the territory, so to say. WHAT is this territory? Well you keep pointing to the map, and we are no longer in map-world, we are in territory world.
I will also point here to a very well-written response close to mine from another poster:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Good job, @Metaphysician Undercover
Once the act is exposed, the magician will never acquiesce. After all magic is his livelihood. It is up to the audience to shake its head and walk away knowing it was only an act of magic.
Besides death, one can be sure of one thing in life, that before death there was life. This, above all else, one can depend. It shall never be otherwise.
The only thing huge here is your ego. All hail, Science. Are you mad?
You believe in physicalism because it complements other aspects of your worldview, and yet refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of other beliefs and worldviews. So, why should anyone think that your beliefs and worldview are legitimate? Because they conform to the current majority opinion of the natural science community (i.e., an argumentum ad populum)?
In case you hadn't noticed, or more likely refuse to acknowledge as an inconvenient fact, Psychology and Sociology are sciences which investigate phenomena that are not physical.
Cue: retaliatory scorn, ridicule, condescension, browbeating, bullying, obfuscation, evasion, and other responses which typically accompany a lack of coherency (in spite of copious amounts of irrelevant data, scientific terminology, meaningless metaphor, and biased interpretation).
"B. F. Skinner was one of the most influential of American psychologists. A behaviorist, he developed the theory of operant conditioning -- the idea that behavior is determined by its consequences, be they reinforcements or punishments, which make it more or less likely that the behavior will occur again. Skinner believed that the only scientific approach to psychology was one that studied behaviors, not internal (subjective) mental processes."
I don't put any stock into claims that theories have been discredited. I like to see what works. A behaviouralist approach to physchology has many merits and may be a back door into mind. If we can find the back door we can link mind with semiotics and take a big step closer to clearing up the mess of the transition from non-life to life.
Human beings are a species of animal. When I look around I find no unique difference that separates us. I see our splinter skill of reasoning, and the application of that reasoning, but animals have splinter skills too, not just us.
I see the full repertoire of emotions in animals. I can communicate with them in a sentient way.
How are people different to animals in your opinion?
H Sapiens has language, rational thought, builds technology, and is quantifiably and qualitatively different to any other type of creature in all of those regards. This is just one of the dogmas of moderniism, that humans are no different to animals, but it's a patent fallacy.
Oh, and Skinner didn't believe that the mind is real.
Just because I like his ideas doesn't mean I'm going to dress up as him and run around. A good idea is a good idea if it fits the situation well. I think Operant Conditioning deserves another look in relation to semiotics, and working out the kinks so that those of us who wish to can connect it to mind.
I think the greatest failure of the modern world, or perhaps the human world, is the belief that we are superior to animals. We are born into a world (souding a bit Matrix like here) that is disconnected from nature by the constructions of the generations before us. Constructions that have arisen out of the complex reasoning that is our splinter skill. Other animals can fly, some can use echolocation - we don't naturally have those things.
Animals are pets, things in a zoo or on a nature doco. But if you watch closely the nature clips, especially on YouTube, you will see a complex order out there driven by mixed emotions and drives and heirarhy. If you pay attention to the animals you pass on your daily jog, you will see the sentience in them. Apart from reason and applied reason, there is nothing I can see that separates us.
Can you give an example that is not based on reasoning or applied reasoning to support the idea that humans being no different to animals is a patent fallacy?
It is not a back door. Quite simply, it is teaching the cellular minds and the bigger minds (Sheldrake's moronic resonance forms) new habits or new ways of seeing things. It requires lots of patience and repetition to change habits (which is one way to look at philosophical inquiry). If there is a fundamental problem with Skinner's approach is that it makes it to mechanical and goal oriented. Change takes creativity and patience, after all there are lots of cells that need to learn something new and work together in a new way. Athletes will attest to this.
Also, feel free to drop semiotics whenever you get bored with it. It is just a little mind dressed up with a new name.
So, when you suggest not a back door, do you mean no door or front door?
Yes. It is all mind.
It is important to understand the process of being accepted and getting ahead in academia - no mind! For this reason, rather strange and esoteric concepts such as operant conditioning, semiotics, etc. are introduced by researchers, so as to avoid the use of the word mind. As I said elsewhere, it is a game of hide and seek. Mind is always there, but the word is verboten. If you use it, then no tenure! In academic research materialism = career. Unless you are seeking some tenured position or some acceptance by materialist, feel free to use mind whenever it seems appropriate. After all, it is us.
Now, we know that Operant Conditioning, a branch of psychology - the study of the mind (just to emphasise the point), looked at these cause and effect behaviours through the lens of psychology - so there is an important link. We are now up to the level of the mind in explaining the transition from non-life to life.
The final nail then is to bridge behaviour and mind and we will have a working model.
Yes, there the the mind. Don't allow yourself to be conditioned not to use it. :)
Quoting MikeL
There is really no hurdle, it is simply the mind. The only hurdle is trying to come up with a phrase that replaces the word mind, and then of course hiding it in thousands of words of meaningless sentences. Just use the word, and simplify your life. Or you can play the game of hide and seek. It's up to you. I'm a pretty straightforward guy when it comes to life.
Not a phrase, an explanation that unites.
I take your point on its all mind, or life force. That is not in dispute here. The fact that these happenings are occuring in the face of Thermodynamics is powerful testimony. It is the driving force.
So now, the exciting journey is to track the emergence from what seems like inanimate matter to what we know is our own mind. What are the steps along the way? How does it all unfold? How does mind do it?
There is nothing to unite. It is a unity. Matter can be considered decayed mind. Mind is fundamental.
There are many interesting things to discover in the world, mind isn't one of them. You can hide mind away if you wish can and then look for it, but after awhile it gets too repetitive and boring. That is why chess was created.
Discovering music, dance, etc. may be far more interesting. Still, hide and seek is also a nice game.
I agree. The goal is not to unite atoms with mind per se, but rather shine a light on the unity so we can understand it in a new fascinating way. For me, at least, shining the torch around and trying to link things that might not appear to be linked at first glance is exciting. Working on the project with other minds is great fun.
It's the exploration and discovery of it I love. Once the story is fully known, my interest level plummets
Quoting Rich
Talking about these ideas is my art, music and dance, all rolled into one. :)
.
Yes, but if you wish to be creative, then you have to be creative - and very patient. Creativity takes time. In a way replacing one word with 10,000 words and then inviting people to find mind within that morass is creative - by the people who are doing the seeking.
Bergson had an enormous intuition which took him many decades to develop and from that came some fascinating new ways to look at the creative mind. That is creativity.
To ungarble this, the story is that there is indeed the two things of semiotic information and dissipative degrees of freedom in my approach (which is also the mainstream information theoretic view, so not some personal theory).
The semiotic information acts causally as the constraints on substantial being. In Hylomorphic terms, it represents the top-down formal and final causes.
Then the physical degrees of freedom are the bottom-up material and efficient causes.
Substantial being emerges as the third thing of their interaction. As hylomorphism argued long ago.
So while I appreciate your attempt at parody, it failed by not understanding what it hoped to mock.
But you go curiously silent on the question of why wouldn't a lived neural model of the world feel like something?
Hmm.
In case you hadn't noticed, my physicalism is semiotic. So as science, or indeed metaphysics, it starts from psychology and sociology.
I'm not sure why that makes you so angry. You claim to be a fan of semiotics yourself. Did you want to be the only one, or something?
Have you looked at this challenge to Landauer? Odd coming right on the heels of this.
Let me see if I've got this straight then.
Quoting apokrisis
If I understand correctly, substantial being exists only as the result of constraints. So semiotic information must be prior to substantial being, as the cause of it, or else you are assuming some constraints which are prior to semiotic constraints, which are responsible for substantial being which is prior to semiotic constraints. I assume the latter is your position, because you asked me about matter coming into existence from energy. I take it that this matter constitutes substantial being which is prior to semiotic constraints.
Quoting apokrisis
Wait a minute, now I'm confused. Substantial being emerges from the interaction between material and efficient causation. Isn't substantial being necessary for, and therefore prior to both of these? There cannot be matter without substantial being, nor can there be efficient causation without substantial being. So unless you've figured out a way to reverse these brute facts, I think you should reconsider what your saying. In the case of material cause, how do you propose that there is matter which does not have substantial existence? In the case of efficient causation, what could possibly be the cause, or the effect, if there is no substantial existence?
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not attempting to mock, or parody, I am only pointing out to you how you have your ontological priorities reversed. You ought to take a good look at what is being pointed out to you by myself as well as others, and address the problems which are extremely evident in your metaphysics. Whether it is your approach, or you are just copying from "the mainstream information theoretic view" is irrelevant. These problems render the approach completely untenable without substantial restructuring. You ought to be able to justify the principles which you espouse, and if not, you should recognize that this is a problem.
Should we really be assuming physical causation as a valid assumption at all? Perhaps the issue is more about that which is perceived and that which perceives and not so much about the assumptions you posit which assume a host of fallacies.
Molecule (a construction of atoms without purpose) --> Molecule (same molecule, but serving a function [open-close the ion channel])
We can now talk about purpose and intentionality and behaviour. The process can still be explained in the cause-effect terms of chemistry.
For those who are interested:
https://www.academia.edu/3848148/Holoinformational_Consciousness_An_Extension_of_Interactive_Dualism_with_Anticipatory_Parameters
Taking yet in consideration the basic mathematical property of holographic systems in which the information of the whole system is distributed in each part of the system, plus Bohm’s holographic quantum physics data, and the experimental data of the holonomic theory of Pribram, we propose that this universal interconnectedness could permit us to access all the information [35-37] codified in the wave interference patterns existing in all the universe since its origin. The quantum-holoinformational nature of the universe interconnects each part, each brain-consciousness, with all the information stored in the holographic patterns distributed in the whole cosmos, in an indivisible irreducible informational cosmic unity [38-40].As a consciousness exercise, analogous to Einstein’s thought experiments, we could compare this universal informational interconnectedness with the following metaphoric quotations from various spiritual traditions:
As above so below (Alchemy).
All that is outside is inside (Upanishads).
The father is inside us (Christianity)
. As in the earth so in the heavens (Christianity).
This universal interconnectedness could be perfectly understood as a Cosmic Holographic Consciousness.
Agreed, that the idea is very simple and simplistic. Chemicals are coming to life and are working together each with its on functions. It's just assembly line of little humans. This is not a bridge. It is a giant leap of fantasy. I believe this is called anthropomorphism. In your story, you are bringing chemicals to life, step, by step simply by attributing aspects of consciousness to chemicals. It's simple because all you need are nouns, adjectives and verbs.
1) The claim is that Landauer's Planck-based limit was violated, and yet still, it is not zero cost computing. Energy still has to be expended to erase a bit of information. So less energetic cost is not no energetic cost. Landauer's principle stands, even if his calculation of the limit might be faulty.
2) Then there look to be possible concealed costs in the circuit set-up. It is an odd semi-analog device where the inputs are electrostatic forces and the output is the degree of bending in a bit of metal.
So one concealed cost could be wear and tear on the bending metal. Eventually it might break from mechanical fatigue, or melt due to heat build up in its metallic bonds.
3) Then the other loophole would be that the bending of a metal cantilever as the output is an analog response which has to be converted into a digital input by being "read correctly" by the next metal cantilever in the chain.
I wonder if instead of an entropic cost, this means there is a steady information loss. Being analog and so continuous, no two "reading the output" acts might be exactly the same. It would be hard to rule out some environmental effect that causes the next metal cantilever to react fractionally before or after the "proper degree of bending" had been achieved.
So maybe a whole bit is not being reliably propagated in this hybrid set up. There is a steady information leakage which means less energy would have to be expended to erase "a bit".
My money is still on Landauer being right. It was such an elegant result.
You are asking about how the pieces came together in the assembly line. I have no idea whatsoever. We know they are together though. The closest thing to a reasonable idea I've read was that some RNA also possess enzymatic function. There would need to be inequalities in the initial environmental system - gradients/motive forces that can drive anti-entropic processes. This would be the vents. You would need a ready supply of atoms, preferably ions to keep the wheel turning. But I agree it is still a big hole that needs to be filled.
Quoting Rich
You're asking about self-awareness. Is it emergent or is it in the channel? Well, I can't tell you, probably emergent as semiotic complexity layers upon itself. I don't see much chance of a voltage-gated ion channel saying to to a depolarising membrane, I'm going to sit this one out.
But what we can see is that chemistry will cause it to open and close, AND it is serving a purpose AND the purpose is more important than the structure. This links across now to biology.
We also see the purpose becoming more intentional as we move up through the layers. Intentionality and behaviour can be explained by psychology - Operant Conditioning would fit best.
After Operant Conditioning we are at mind level, ready to burrow in.
More than this, I am asking how they (the chemicals) got the notion that they have function?
I know you understand the notion of function because you have a mind. I know how the chemicals in your story began to have functions, because your mind have it to them. The flight of fantasy is when chemicals out of no where understand the concept of function.
Your story, is the story if all of materialism: All you need are words to describe chemical reactions as if they are little human minds, the classic one being the "selfish gene". Notice, in the research paper I linked to, consciousness is fundamental. In doing this, the author doesn't have to fake it as materialists do.
Having studied operant conditioning way back when, I'm afraid I can't share your enthusiasm.
Operant conditioning is such a simplistic approach you could learn everything that matters in a week. It talks about frequencies of observed behaviour when circumstances are either "rewarding" or "punishing". You the experimenter determine what counts as a behaviour and then sit back and count the frequency as you find ways to make the reinforcement either a clear cut "reward" or "punishment" situation.
It was bloody crude. A drop of milo for positive reinforcement, an electric shock to the feet for negative reinforcement. If you had an uncooperative rat, the lab technician would change it for you. Or maybe starve it a bit longer the next time.
So yes, there is semiotics of course. But it is you as the experimenter ignoring everything complex that might be going on in a real rat to interpret a push on a lever as a sign of the rat's mental state. As a sign relation, it is as crudely reductionist as it gets. And the whole point of Behaviourism is to dismiss any real interest in the complexities of cognition. It avoids having to say anything about the rat's point of view on life - the semiotic relation which explains its view of the world.
So as an experimenter, it is not behavioural frequencies that tell us anything about "mind". We want to be able to model organisms in terms of their functional cognitive architectures. What are the processes going on inside their heads?
Or again, what are the semiotic processes?
I know, that's a curly one, that up to now I have been ascribing to the features of the force that is driving the process anti-entropically - a force innate within the atoms. Perhaps this also needs more thorough investigating.
The short answer to your question though is that they chemicals don't need a notion that they have function because there is a cause and effect process. It is, I agree, for descriptive purposes that we ascribe function to them. Giving function to form allows us a mental shorthand method of understanding the processes that are occurring. When we understand that the function of this interaction is to move an ion from A to B we can look at the surrounding environment and see if it supports that assumption.
When we find that the functional hypothesis is supported, that there appears to be purpose to the action, that it is not random, then we can say we have a workable model of understanding (just like your 4n spinning cube).
As we all know it is an extraordinarily complex cause and effect environment that bubbles away, and I believe that the key to understanding it is to reduce it as well as inflate it.
The best I can reduce it at the moment is to say, like Apokrisis says, the system is constrained. That is a key feature. It constrains itself. It reduces its free energy. The other part is that it builds. It is not just a dog chasing its tail, but more like a growing hurricane, continually drawing in the environment into its constrained system, causing the system to layer.
It's called consciousness.
No materialist paper has ever been written about consciousness without injecting consciousness into matter. Look for one that describes consciousness using equations and only equations. Or better yet, an actual laboratory experiment that demonstrates the chemical recipe for consciousness. None exist. All you have are lots of words describing chemicals as though they were little human beings. That is the extent of the materialism description of consciousness. Lots and lots of new, 10 syllable words.
Behaviouralism though must include the mind, even if doesn't want to - because associations are being formed in the mind and choice is being made based on those associations. An animal/system incapable of associating the stimulus with the reward will never understand nor grow in complexity. The bird chooses to eat the pellet because it doesn't want to get zapped, or because it wants a treat.
I understand the crudeness of the results. A causes B is not the mind, but it is a window into it. As complexity layers, more weightings can be placed between A and B providing uncertainty. The weightings may come intrinsically from the organism or extrinsically from the environment.
What I am I not seeing?
Constraints on "material potential". So there has to be something to act on. Then the question becomes what is the least kind of action that can be imagined? This is what leads to modelling the "prime matter" as simply a vagueness or "unbounded fluctuation".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. It arises from constraints on a vague material potential (that thus become the concrete degrees of freedom of the system because there are those limits that produce some distinct variety of substantial being).
So in terms of the four causes, it is formal/final cause constraining vague potential to produce definite material/efficient causes. The causal loop is then closed as these material/efficient causes must be of the right character to re-construct and perpetuate the global state of constraint.
Hence why Peirce's system logic is said to be irreducibly complex. It has to be understood as one entire developmental whole.
No, I answered you. You just fundamentally do not get the hard problem. WHAT is this "feel like something" you talk about? I already said earlier: WHAT is this feeling in the first place? That is the hard question. You can keep pointing back to the map but all you are saying is a=a. It is analytic. It isn't SAYING anything other than what the physical constituents are. You will always have the problem of a dualism. Emergence only works when it is physical phenomena producing other physical phenomena. It is all MAP. The subjective/first person EXPERIENCE (what it "feels" like) is metaphysically different in that it is the thing which observes the map. It is the territory, so to say. WHAT is this territory? Well you keep pointing to the map, and we are no longer in map-world, we are in territory world.
In other words, "feel like something" is its own phenomena that must be reckoned with. You never do, so therefore you always avoid the hard problem. You refer to it as the map, and never deal with it head on as this "other thing" which is the actual "feeling like something". WHAT is this "feeling like something". Explain the territory, not the map. In map world, everything is a map. But clearly, first-person "feels like something" experience is not just map but has this "feels like something" (experiential quality). What is this? Not what are its constituents in map world, but what is experience?
That it is not a window into a functional understanding of cognition. Quite deliberately, it doesn't go there.
Of course even Skinner couldn't be satisfied with not trying to go further. He did later try to extend to cover associative or Hebbian networks. But he started from such an underpowered position that it had about zero influence. If you want to understand the mind in terms of Hebbian networks, Hebb had already made a better start.
Operant conditioning is still employed for behavioural training. It is important to slot machine design for instance. Or crude forms of psychotherapy, like desensitisation to fears.
Well I suggest such an empirical basis and ask for an honest response. Why is a brain's lived modelling relation with the world so sure not to be experiential? Doesn't modelling seem like it might be experience creating?
You take fright at this question as you realise how much you have to lose from an honest answer.
Because I'm bored with you dodging the hard problem and de facto "copy and pasting" your past responses by regurgitating them. Again, I said thus:
In other words, "feel like something" is its own phenomena that must be reckoned with. You never do, so therefore you always avoid the hard problem. You refer to it as the map, and never deal with it head on as this "other thing" which is the actual "feeling like something". WHAT is this "feeling like something". Explain the territory, not the map. In map world, everything is a map. But clearly, first-person "feels like something" experience is not just map but has this "feels like something" (experiential quality). What is this? Not what are its constituents in map world, but what is experience?
What say you?
Perhaps not, but it is a rudimentary understanding of cognition. Like I said, the bridge may be out between behaviourialism and mind, but the disagreement is occurring at the front door of the mind and not the cells. it is a much narrower stream to ford than a model of non-life to life that is all chemistry or one that is all mind.
Slot machines are so much like cells.
What do you think is thinking? Do you ever spend any time observing your mind at work? Right now it is trying to figure out how to bring chemicals to life. I guess it is a way of killing time.
The layers of cognition, being stackable in nature, have created a limited power central command that floats over parts of my thoughts. Today this power (I) has decided:
I have opened the box of enjoyment, now that my basic needs of food, rest, shelter have been met, as well as my less basic but still important needs of doing the washing, doing the dishes tidying the house. Truth be told though, even during these tasks, I let the anticipation of discussion filter in. They are not hard containers that separate these actions.
Inside my box of enjoyment I have much to choose from. The one with the greatest weighting at the moment is this forum. I have other boxes I can draw from to bring things into this work space: some knowledge, of varying degrees of understanding, I have the tool of logic that I am going to bring into it. I have the problems that have been posed by yourself and others that I want to try and solve.
I will then output the result of this enjoyment to a mind file or to the computer screen or mostly likely both and await the next input from the screen while also running logic through the existing arguments, looking for connections.
The stimulus for my actions is this forum. For years, with few (except recently my brother, and occassional friends) to discuss my ideas with, they fell dormant and I have not paid them any serious attention. They kept popping up though, intrinsically - some mismatch of a sorting algorithm, but only recieved a passing eyeroll from myself.
It's not a way of killing time, but it is a reflection of how I've weighted my time.
I looked up Hebbian networks: Cells that fire together wire together? That is a neural explanation for the emergence of cognitive patterns and not at all useful in understanding the emergence of life - unlike Operant Conditioning.
Just because Skinner fell on his face trying to bridge to mind, doesn't mean there is no bridge to mind, it just means Skinner's bridge was made of sticks.
Through observing behaviours we observe the output of minds. The more behaviours we study, the more we can ascertain with a high degree of certainty what is ocurring inside the mind.
The man who sits down and sobs, is probably sad. The one who leaps up and starts hugging people, is probably happy. We can increase our certainty by looking for the input which may have caused this: The woman who dumped him, the lottery draw he was watching on TV.
So too, the cell that suddenly upregulates the expression of a glucose receptor may be in a low glucose environment or be expending lots of energy. (output: glucose receptor up, input: low glucose)
When glucose levels fall below a certain level the cascades that are normally initiated when glucose binds to a cell receptor decrease. This means that secondary proteins that are normally bound up in the cascade are now more likely to participate in reactions involving the creation of glucose receptors.
It is sentience, it is behaviour, it is semiotics, it is chemistry.
Just saw this.
Well, I would argue that the issue of causation is first and foremost metaphysical. As to causation on the physical plane, who would for example deny that the motion of one billiard ball hitting another causes the other to move?
It’s quite the topic, though. Obviously, I don’t believe causation is limited to efficient causation.
Similar to the entropy equivocation (thermodynamic-information) devised by von Neumann and Shannon:
Just substitute "semiosis" for "entropy" and "everything" for "thermodynamics" in von Neumann's quote, and hey presto, voila: pansemiosis. It's magic, or better yet: HUGE !
It occurred to me that an early ribosome may well have been working bi-directionally, using proteins to make RNA strands and using RNA strands to make proteins. Perhaps ribosomes made the DNA we use today.
I did a search and found that ribosomes have indeed been implicated in the Origin of Life process and that they may have created proteins independent of any RNA, which is another interesting angle. Here is the extract from this page:
Evolution of the ribosome
The ribosome in three-dimensions shows us that the exit tunnel was a central theme of all phases of its evolution. The tunnel was continuously extended and rigidified. The synthesis of non-coded peptides of increasing length conferred advantage as some reaction products bound to the ribosome. The ribosome sequentially gained capabilities for RNA folding, catalysis, subunit association, correlated subunit evolution, decoding and energy-driven translocation. Surface proteinization of the decoding ribosome was one driver of a more general proteinization of other biological processes, giving rise to modern biology. The ribosome spawned the existing symbiotic relationship of functional proteins and informational nucleic acids.
OK, so I understand that you assume two distinct types of constraints, the constraints which act on material potential causing substantial being, and semiotic constraints which act on substantial being. This is what you just told me:
Quoting apokrisis
Can we deconstruct the conflation of "formal and final causes" here to assign "formal" to one of these types of constraints, and "final" to the other? Would you agree with me, that the constraints which act on the vague material potential, which account for substantial existence in the first place, are formal causes, and the constraints of semiotics, since living beings act with purpose, are final causes?
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, "causal loop" is an appropriate expression because you have just described a vicious circle. First, you said that "constraints on vague material potential" become (or I would say "cause") substantial being. But then you say that this constraining produces "definite" material causes. So we need to sort this out. If material cause refers to vague potential, we cannot reintroduce "definite" material cause, because "definite" implies formal. So either material cause is vague and indefinite, or it is definite, but if the essence of material cause is to be vague and indefinite, as I understand "material cause" then to say that it becomes definite is to say that it becomes not itself.
Can I assume, according to my distinction between formal and final cause, made above, that formal cause, acting on material potential produces further formal causes, which act on material potential to produce further formal causes, and that this activity is what we commonly call a causal chain of efficient causation? Now, the concern of the op is, how does final cause, or semiotic constraints enter into this process?
Quoting MikeL
This is what I am trying to understand, how does semiotics provide this pivotal point? To me, it appears like nothing other than the assumption of God, or as the atheists would say, magic. We had non-semiotic activity occurring billions of years ago, prior to the arrival of life on earth, then magically semiotics (and life) occurred. If we assume that semiotic activity occurred prior to life on earth, and is responsible for the original shaping of material potential into substantial existence, then this is no other than assuming God as creator of substantial existence.
Although biosemiotics appears to accept the notion of final and formal causes, it doesn't appear to accept the related role of prime mover or first cause, which is assumed by Aristotelian philosophies. So it's the 'bootstrapping' process that purportedly gives rise to the first self-replicating molecules which is at issue. The physicalist explanation of this development are the 'dissipative structures' discovered by Prigogine which are said to provide the basis for the development of life sans any kind of transcendent intelligence.
I don't see how "bootstrapping" is an appropriate term here. To assume bootstrapping is to take a physicalist premise and begin with this prejudice. What is necessary first, is to demonstrate that this is actually a case of bootstrapping.
There is a huge gap between a Prigogine dissipative structure, and a semiotic system. So much so, that these two are fundamentally different, because the capacity to understand and use symbols which is essential to semiotics is missing from dissipative structures. The proposition that a semiotic system bootstraps itself into existence from a dissipative structure, could be ridiculed if it was proposed as a scientific principle.
Hi Metaphysician,
I find when thinking about semiotics it is best not to ascribe it the properties of a force or anything else. It is simply a way of reporting. It is possible not to use semiotics to explain what is happening as well. The chemistry gets extremely complex in all directions so fast though, that it is impossible to keep track of. By invoking the idea of semiotics we can ditch the detail of chemistry and look at what is occuring in terms of an emergent phenomenon. I gave the example earlier of the ion channel.
[quote="MikeL;107404" ]The cell that suddenly upregulates the expression of a glucose receptor may be in a low glucose environment or be expending lots of energy. (output: glucose receptor up, input: low glucose). It is upregulating to ensure supply ---- a semiotic explanation
When glucose levels fall below a certain level the cascades that are normally initiated when glucose binds to a cell receptor decrease. This means that secondary proteins that are normally bound up in the cascade are now more likely to participate in reactions involving the creation of glucose receptors.[/quote] ---- a chemical explanation.
The higher we go the more impossible it becomes to explain chemically - although it most probably can be done. There would come a point when even semiotics is too complex, which is why I suggested we look to psychology in terms of cause and effect principals, which were investigated by Skinner when he did Operant Conditioning.
I don't feel that semiotics actually addresses the how it happens at all, which is why I suggested the ribosome might be involved, and highlighted things that other people have deemed necessary such as concentration gradients etc.
The apple has many molecules inside them. They have 'constraints' on them because they have lost entropy when they were bonded or double bonded. They can't kick about freely anymore. When we break the molecules down for food (or burn oil) we break the bonds thus dissipating the trapped energy. Of course life will try to use that release of energy to power its own building processes (that is how it is able to manifest its negentropy) but inevitably there will be loss out of the system.
I think that represents what he's saying, but there was a lot of philosophy talk in there too and references to things which I've not read up on yet.
Apokrisis initially suggested that based on a book he was reading life might have originated near volcanic vents because they would provide a ready source of reactants, the right pH, and a concentration gradient needed to force negentropy. The theory lacked a lot of necessary detail though.
Google 'pansemiosis bootstrapping' and see what comes up ;-)
Apokrisis:
I have really appreciated you input on this thread and also on "Why Can't the Universe be Contracting?" I've put "Life's Ratchet" on my reading list and I'm going back to reread some of your posts on this thread.
@apokrisisI guess no answer.
I also read Life's Ratchet on apo's recommendation and it's excellent. There is relatively little about information** in it, and nothing I recall about semiotics, but the explanation of how the thermodynamics works is fascinating. Gets a little deep in the weeds on transport molecules, since I think that's what Hoffman spends a lot of his time doing, but worth powering through.
Once you can picture a kinesin binding an ATP to clamp one foot to a track, allostery causing the back foot to hydrolyze its ATP, and then relying on thermal motion to get the back foot to its new position -- wow. The combination of consuming free energy and "capturing"-- putting to use rather than resisting-- energy from what Hoffman calls the "molecular storm" of randomly moving water molecules, it's extraordinary.
** ADDED: But some nice stuff about regulation, which is, as @MikeL has been noting, what we're often looking to do with information.
I was about to say that myself. Yes that's irony.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I found an article on the web - "The Algorithmic Origins of Life," by Walker and Davies, which I enjoyed, but need to read again at least once. Are you familiar with that? Is that what you are talking about?
Have not read.
Hoffman talks about Maxwell's demon and Landauer. But my memory is that a lot of the discussion of RNA, DNA, ribosomes, etc. is just focused on how they work. It seems like there should be another chapter or two to put some pieces of the puzzle together, but I guess that's because the idea here is to show what life is, rather than how it arose. It's not really intended to be a brief for abiogenesis. I'll probably check out Nick Lane's book, but I'm already reading four or five books, so it'll have to wait.
Enjoy Life's Ratchet.
Hmm, seems like nothing, how telling. Why did apokrisis call this the "the mainstream information theoretic view" then?
But anyway, your question to me has already been answered. The reply is that it is a flawed question in that it is a dyadic semiotic framing of things and not a triadic one.
The metaphor of maps and territories of course in reality demands the third thing of "an interpreter" - a further habit of interpretance. The map itself is the physical sign, the symbol, the information that connects the interpreter to the world in terms of the interpreter's own interests.
You will of course immediately jump to the presumption that the interpreter is now the conscious part of the whole equation. You won't see how this is just a continuation of a substance monism that you feel forced to impose on any framing of the issues.
But there you go. You are stuck with a particular habit of interpretance. I can offer you a better map, but you are only going to insist again on holding it upside down and complaining you don't get it.
I think what schopenhauer1 is getting at is that this interpreter, however conceived (else, we wouldn’t hold any conceptualization of it), is itself only an inference of the map in your current system. It’s reality is not evidenced to be real metaphysically - i.e. is not evidenced to be in any way the real territory - but is inferred/deemed real, when logically addressed via noncontradictory reasoning, only as an entailed consequence of a map - which, as map, includes within it the concepts of both territory and interpreter. Hence, it’s all map sans metaphysically evidenced reality of any territory.
So the explanation of life back a decade or two was focused on genetic information and metabolic reactions. At school, we all had to learn a bunch of chemical equations like the Krebs cycle. Now there is this third intervening level of mechanical organisation.
That is a huge realisation in terms of the metaphysics of life. No one was predicting that ATP production would actually involve a proper little rotating spindle device. That is just so outlandish.
Hoffman's book also makes it clear how just the tiniest, simplest scrap of mechanical structure can have outsized impact at the nanoscale. And that is key to the abiogenesis issue. It is much less of a step from nonliving to living than we imagined.
Nick Lane's book then comes from the other side and talks about how - with alkaline sea vents - the nonliving world closes the gap to make it a much tinier leap than we ever previously imagined. In terms of a chemical soup (with no biological machinery), there can be a dissipative energetic process in full swing.
So biological machinery can then just hop aboard a ride that is already going. It doesn't have to invent a metabolism de novo. It just has to offer that metabolism some extra degree of stability. And so it is easy to see evolution happening. Nothing needs to be created. All that is asked for is regulation. And natural selection is all about that kind of whittling away what doesn't work.
The standard complaint about natural selection is that it can't be creative. It is a constraint that can only remove possibilities. And biologists fully realise that.
Now we can see that if the nonliving metabolic cycle already exists, all the first life had to do was take away the possibility of that metabolic cycle collapsing.
It all adds up to a revolution in abiogentic thinking. Just 10 years ago, the answer seemed as though it must be some kind of RNA world hypothesis. The thinking was all focused on how a coding mechanism might have spontaneously appeared in some autocatalytic fashion (RNA being able to function as an enzyme as well as a memory). But now the first step looks far simpler. You just need a protein that wants to curl up and act as a physical gate - a sodium ion transporter.
The obsession with explaining feels is a hang over from dualism. If you think the Hard Problem is central, you are still stuck in the metaphysics of a different era.
We know substance dualism can't work in any sensible causal fashion. So just move on. Quit banging your head against that particular tree. Try on a triadic picture of the issues for a change.
The key thing the Peircean view does is deflate the notion of a mysterious witnessing self. Instead we just have a habit of interpretance - which at its core involves a running, or emergently-constructed, self vs world distinction.
So the self exists only like a whorl in a stream. It is not a substantial thing - a first person witnesser floating above the whole show. It is simply a state of organisation that emerges within an embodied flow of action. In regulating the world, there is then selfhood or autonomy.
We can see this quite simply from falling asleep or lying inside a sensory deprivation chamber. The ego dissolves as soon as there is nothing doing. There is nothing more to account for but the fact that an ego is what appears because of a particular kind of semiotic interaction where interpretance - an entropic modelling relation - is what is busy going on.
No rushing stream, no backward whorl either. The Hard Problem really is that simple.
Well, I’ll try to make myself clearer: When addressing aspects of our concrete reality, for example, are we founding things on the metaphysical reality of our experience (what it feels like to be aware (including of this and that) – this as one metaphysical reality that is a constituent of the total metaphysical reality) or on an abstract theory composed of what we take to be abstract, universal maths?
If on the former, the maths too—via which we quantitatively measure, and which you use to appraise physical reality—will be cognized due to the foundational metaphysical reality of experience. They will be a tool, but not the metaphysical reality of awareness to which the tools are of use (including those that occur on Platonic planes of mathematical reality).
If on the latter, than both our notion and awareness of experience will themselves be byproducts of an abstract maths whose axioms and conclusions can logically be as malleable and replaceable as would be the whims of a deity. (with no metaphysical reality being here established)
Needless to add, while we may agree on many facets of the physical, this is a metaphysical disagreement. For you to project this and that label on “my” perspective would be just that: projections of your own conceptualizations. But yes, that I find awareness (and not homnculi) to be metaphysically real then definitely precludes me from assuming the labeled of a physicalist.
Yep. Remember that a dissipative structure is organisation produced by environmental constraint. All the information involved is just how the world around it is organised.
Then a living system internalises that information. It takes control for itself by being able to build its own environment. That starts just by building a membrane with ion pores that can create a proto-cell.
So yes. Two quite distinct situations. And that is the mainstream understanding. Only the second is explicitly semiotic - an autopoietic point of view based on an informational machinery.
Pan-semiosis is then a further speculative metaphysical project where dissipative structure is also understood as a generalised sign relation. It connects to the mainstream of current physics now that it has turned productively from talking about reality in terms of particles to bits of information.
Rich has illustrated how deeply confusing this turn is for traditional metaphysics. The holographic principle now makes it sound like information - as some kind of magical stuff - paints a representation of reality on some outer surface, then a universe of matter particles flying about is some kind of projected illusion.
As usual, the map of the territory is being confusedly treated as itself the new territory. We are back into the dualism of representationalism that pushes the question of interpretation into homuncular infinite regress.
So the way out of this observer problem that dogs the metaphysics of physics is the same - the triadic observer-including modelling relation. That is where pansemiosis comes in. Semiosis can apply to physics too. But there is still a big difference between semiosis based on an epistemic cut and internalised points of view, and semiosis without that coding machinery, simply an environmental structure which creates some generalised, or universally coherent, point of view.
So for me, the question is what then concretely limits the inherent dynamism of "existence". And that is where maths (of symmetry) comes in. There are universal mathematical structures we can describe that are the invariant and necessary features of nature as they are the limits that must eventually emerge. Chaos has no choice but to throw up certain eternal regularities even in its attempts to be as unstructured as possible.
No. Our difference dwells in justification for that which physically is. On what do you base your justifications that "everything fluidly emerges"?
It appears to me that the sentences and the overall story is being presented in lieu of any evidence. Now as for the story itself, I find it pretty incomprehensible, which may actually be intended. I can't tell. But any time I see consciousness bring defined as a relation and then declaring the Hard Problem had been solved, I begin to suspect I have found the sleight of hand once again.
So, question - where does mind enter the scene? Presumably not until very late in the piece, as h. sapiens has only existed for a minute sliver of time relative to the duration of the Earth, let alone the universe. So whilst matter and energy have presumably existed all that time, mind is a very recent arrival, isn't it?
So mind is a journey of open-ended semiosis. You are doing the usual thing of treating it as a static, already fully substantial and realised existence. Hence you have a whole lot of questions about nature that make perfect sense within your paradigm and are incoherent - not even wrong - within mine.
So my story can't see any necessary end to the development of mind. It just sees a pragmatic limit in terms of what we know about the entropy balance sheet of the Universe. Minds, as negentropy, exist only by earning their entropic keep.
By the same token, mind enters the picture right from the start. As soon as there is the vaguest speck of semiotic mechanism in play.
I can see that is just as incoherent within your paradigm as what you assert is within mine. I only have the advantage that my paradigm is thoroughly supported by scientific investigation. Yours is the view from comparative religion.
I can't make you change your paradigm. You have to want to do it fo yourself.
X-) OK, your joking with me by stating the superficially obvious. Good one.
Do you know of reason due to awareness OR do you know of awareness due to reason? That's the metaphysical question.
Very general terms are the hardest to define. All you can do is point to various domains of discourse which use the term in recognisable ways. But to explain that in any depth, would be a diversion into philosophy of mind, which is a large topic in its own right.
Quoting apokrisis
No, what I asked was when 'mind' entered the picture. And your answer was:
Quoting apokrisis
Which was when? Right at the outset of the Universe? Pansemiosis seems to imply that even the so-called 'laws of physics' are language-like, that in some sense 'representation' must have been part of the early universe as well. So that implies that mind is not a product, but a causal factor. Seems to me you can't have it both ways.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, I think it's more a matter of your view being supported by the kinds of ideas that the natural sciences are prepared to consider. Other schools of philosophy proceed according to different principles.
Check out anthropology and this vaunted Western sense of self - which really became crystallised as a the foundational myth of Socrates - is a reasonably new thing.
So I am careful to make a distinction between the usual conflated notion of consciousness as being inherently introspective - a view in which the self is already being seen - and an "extrospective" awareness which is the biological, pre-sociolinguistic, experience of the animal mind.
An animal just is a self. It is always acting from a selfish first person point of view. It sees a world, an umwelt, in which it's self is implicitly represented, not explicitly represented. It doesn't see itself experiencing that selfhood in a second order recursive fashion like we all learn to do.
Even the Hard Problem acolytes dismiss self consciousness as an easy problem. Anthropology and developmental psychology can explain it in mundanely comprehensible fashion.
So it is biological level extrospective awareness that is the scientific mystery. And then that is in turn already much less of a mystery because extrospection would produce a different kind of "feeling".
Schop, Wayfarer and the rest just presume an explicitly felt sense of self is intrinsic to consciousness. That is then the reason why they can't get their heads around an explanation which targets what it would feel like for "self" to be only an implicit and "unobserved" aspect of the flow of an umwelt - experience as an animal experiences it.
So just the experience or interpretance relation, no ghostly experiencer or interpreter.
You think yogis don't know this?
That awareness is formed (in part) by in-form-ation is a sidetrack from what I asked. I'll state the same differently: do you justify the ontic presence of reasoning/maths/logos via awareness OR do you justify the ontic presence of awareness via reasoning/maths/logos? Of course reality is a perpetual conflux of both, but that's not the question.
You repeatedly seem to treat awareness as a homuculus and then decry that other do so. That's not what this metaphysical issue is about. And yes, its largely about epistemological justifications of what is in fact ontic - this where one form of knowledge is that of knowledge by acquaintance / experience / awareness.
But maybe we're currently at a standstill here.
A definitions based mindset is itself anti-pragmatic. It is key to the philosophy of science that definitions arise out the measurements that seem to make sense. Understanding emerges out of pragmatic interaction with the world. You can't impose understanding with some formula of words.
This is a basic fact of how language works. Any sentence is open to multiple interpretations. So if - like Galuchat - you develop an obsession with "the right definition", you have already lost the game. Understanding involves mastering a skill, a habit of thought, that reliably sees you always popping out on the right side of any particular speech act.
Definitions become a waste of breath if your goal is truly to arrive at some new state of understanding. You have to be able to live the words, not merely recite them as some kind of reverential incantation.
I see, but when you said mind only appeared in h sapiens, you seemed to have something specific in mind. I would like to know how it was, and why it is confined to humans.
Quoting apokrisis
The experience or relation (relation had already been delivered as consciousness) without an experiencer.
Works fine, except everyone experiences things in life. Not only does everyone experiences, but they also have memories of the experience! Or one can say they experience the memories. In all cases, the mind is experiencing and learning in the first person. There are no chemicals bumping into each other aimlessly, looking for hot dogs to eat, and watching the Game of Thrones. The mind is experiencing, experimenting, and learning from it all. There is real intention. I hope the the end of the chemical story isn't that the chemicals create an illusion that they are experiencing eating hot dogs because really there is only the experience (without the chemicals actually experiencing, or whatever).
I know that is bullshit as I've had close involvement with parapsychology research for instance. Science can afford to be open minded because it works. And sometimes investigation shows there really is nothing significant to report.
Parapsychology research is not at all what I had in mind, but it's significant that you assume it must be the kind of thing I'm talking about.
The aim of the question I asked Apokrisis, was to ascertain if he really does have a physicalist view of mind, which he claims to have. The view that mind is a product of evolution is, after all, the mainstream view in our day and age. So I asked the question, when does mind enter the picture, and the answer was, 'right at the beginning'. So I'm trying to pinpoint what 'mind' means, if it has been there 'right from the outset'; and it seems obvious to me that this has metaphysical implications which don't really fit within the naturalist paradigm.
Read this column - it touches on all these issues.
The reason why Peircean semiotics impresses me as the most developed model of systems causality is because it turns things around. Epistemology also turns out to be ontology.
So semiotics starts off simply how humans (and lifeforms generally) make sense of the world. Then - ontically - the claim becomes that the Cosmos itself arises by the same "reasoning process". This is the pansemiotic hypothesis that Peirce dubbed objective idealism.
So for you, the world must be strictly divided into our epistemic view, and the ontic reality beyond.
Maths then sits in some curious Platonic realm. The philosophy of maths is torn over the question of whether maths pre-exists human thought and so is a realm to be discovered, or instead humans just construct convenient fictions. Maths is all a product of our contingent invention.
So for you, you speak for the conventional either/or framing. Either maths is an epistemic construction or a Platonic ontic reality. Them's your only two rational choices.
And I am taking the much more radical Peircean step of saying epistemology is onotology. The Cosmos is a form of mindfulness as much as a composition of materials. Maths then is the invariant structure that cannot help but emerge as the limit on chaotic or vague dynamics.
That is, the particular maths which centres on symmetries, or the groping after the maths of "pure invariance".
If you may remember, when you asked me the question, I was able to give you a one sentence, coherent, easily understandable definition. The c rain is because I understand the question and have an answer that makes sense to anyone who has experienced like.
Mind is the force that is creating novelty, experimenting (willful intention), learning (awareness and memory), and is thus evolving. It is not chemicals that are evolving, it is the mind.
If you want to talk about yogis, I've only read the biofeedback research. So I know that science is happy to research these things. And it is possible to learn to control the autonomic nervous system - the involuntary smooth muscles of the body.
But then no one is that amazed by toddlers eventually learning not to shit their pants. I guess it's all context.
Quoting apokrisis
pragmatic
adjective
dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.
Quoting apokrisis
It is true that word games are a waste of time, but definitions are the cornerstone of understanding. Otherwise you get the type of protracted arguments that have defined most of this thread with people talking at cross purposes because nobody truly understands what the other has said.
To say we minds only 2600 years ago were simply linguistic minds, not mathematically formed or logical is something that requires me to ask how you could make such an outrageous claim, or more pragmatically, to ask how you would define mind.
Maybe I'm being too complex for your tastes but I've explained a thousand times that I am working on two levels here.
There is good old ordinary semiosis which would just be the biology of the epistemic cut. Life and mind begin as soon a molecule can function as a message. And that is a physicalism based on information and dynamics.
Then the more speculative metaphysical project is the Peircean one of pan-semiosis where the Cosmos itself is understood as an interaction between information and dynamics.
You could have one without the other. So life and mind only needs to begin on Earth some 4 billion years ago in a hydrothermal vent. Or we could talk about how the Big Bang was semiotic in marking the first moment that differences could make a difference.
Material events - as in particle interactions - could start definitely happening and result in a developing temporal history. And that could be described as "mindful" in a theoretically useful fashion. Semiosis gives us a particular tool - an irreducibly triadic metaphysics - that allows us to formulate a new physicalism to replace the old reductionist one.
Q: What's the name of a Greek skydiver?
A: Con Descending
You’re trying to corner me by assuming me to hold perspectives that are easy for you to argue against.
Remember the old forum? That whole evolog business? Discussions about the episteme of the time coinciding with fossil finds, and the like. Point is, this too is a world view wherein epistemology is not metaphysically fully divided from ontology. But it gets complex, right? Especially when strangers to this perspective tend to perpetually succumb to the aberrant irrationality of solipsism. To end this story, I do happen to hold this view, as always - that of epistemology being a kind of opposite side of the same coin to ontology - but I’ve become rather shy about expressing it as openly as you’ve just done.
You’re still sidetracking the metaphysical issue, though. To use your words, “epistemology also turns out to be ontology”. OK, we’re both well informed enough to not ask the ridiculous question of “whose epistemology”. My question to you nevertheless remains: can there be epistemology sans awareness (quite importantly, entailing the awareness we all know to be via the experience of being first-person points of view)?
If not, the ontic presence / reality of awareness is the primary justification to all that can be rationalized.
Right! So, for the purposes of arguing against the lumpen materialist, you can pull the 'representation' card. But when challenged as to what it is that is representing what, and to whom - why, nothing! Just a 'theoretical construct', a Cheshire cat grin, which all us dumb simpletons aren't intelligent enough to fathom.
That kind of awareness would have to be sociocultural - Peirce's community of reasoning thinkers.
So epistemology only exists in the form you mean - rational inquiry - if you grant the ontic reality of social level mind.
We each individually then become shaped by that culturally evolved habit - and rather assume we just are born as reasoning linguistic creatures. Even without words and the conceptual structures they encode, we would have the necessary ideas in want of expression.
So the ability to divide the world conceptually into first person and third person point of view - the fundamental epistemic cut of modern metaphysics - is not something that would ever arise within biological level individual consciousness.
It is an epistemology that emerged at a higher level than that particular level of awareness, even if it is the habit that now shapes all us who have been brought up educated to think that way.
To truly learn something new, the structure of the brain must change, which requires some certain conditions to maximize the ability for new connections to form, and in any case, we lose plasticity as we age.
Math is simplification, the highest end abstraction, into bits, or quanta to maximize the amount of information one can deal with, as normally conclusions and systems are better representative, or more predictive, the more information they're based in.
How do you justify its presence?
Do you need a reasoning based on personal awareness? Or can you justify it without any personal awareness?
[Edit: this isn't to disagree with the notions of habit which you endorse]
Maybe you should slow down and actually think all this through some time, not just pile in in desperate and defensive fashion.
Huh? It forms awareness - biological, in the flow, extrospective awareness - into considered, rationally structured, introspective awareness.
You just did the usual thing of treating awareness as a substantial state - "personal awareness" - when I have explained that as the interaction between two levels of semiosis, the biological and the cultural.
Thanks for explaining what understanding is. I prefer to pop out on the wrong side of a speech act, so long as my logic has taken me as far as it can go. If I'm right, how boring. If I'm wrong, my logic can be improved and there is personal growth.
The only time I don't want to be on the wrong side is when it has to do with morals.
Do you have any comment on this or my other post to you?
If you believe in levitating monks, present the evidence.
No point just promising me that you can upturn my arguments by suddenly presenting the supernatural abilities of those steeped in the exotic mysteries of the east.
Get on and show us what you got. Leave the really poor puns out of it. Flames that lame aren't even entertainment.
sub-stance: that which allows things that stand to so be (yea, there's some allegory to etymology sometimes)
What can I say, you can in the same breath deny the presence of substance while affirming the triadic relation as the substance.
And yes, that is the metaphysical issue. Is awareness or something physical (triadic relations included) the sub-stance that allows other things to stand. [BTW, awareness devoid of telos is not something coherent (as I see it); so, by awareness, I do find a) other information-bound awareness (i.e., selves), b) a real telos, and c) interactions in-between entailed.]
But, hey, we're turning round, and round, and round, and, for now, going nowhere. I'll agree to disagree for the moment.
Sorry, didn't notice any questions that you may have asked me.
I understand that certain people have an agenda to eliminate mind for specific reasons. But given that you don't have an agenda, can you explain what precisely intrigues you about this story of chemicals that react in such a way to desire to eat hot dogs without experiencing it? I can't even begin to take it seriously from any perspective where it be philosophical, scientific, it straight hard core sci-fi. Among all the verbiage I find nothing, literally nothing. Is this some sort of game of who conjure up the best tale of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table? Without a clear agenda (this I understand), why would anyone spend any time with this?
I didn't see any questions for me, but I'll check.
So I will just remind that I am happy with the idea that the personal exists because what else is it that I might hope to explain as being the emergent limit of a bio-social semiotic process here?
There has to be an I that experiences the power of his beliefs in terms of their measurable outcomes.
Or at least, that is the emergent structure one might observe in the blood and flesh creature successfully navigating its world via developed habits of interpretance that minimise the entropic uncertainty connecting his intentions to their results.
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not trying to upturn your arguments, so much as put a different perspective. Notice that as soon as the mere hint is made that the answers might lie outside your conception of 'Peircian semiotics' then immediately it is assumed that I'm arguing for 'shamanism and supernatural powers'. Then when I point that out, you say that I am 'dichotomising'.
As it happens, the sole reason I mentioned yogis, was as a response to your point about the 'socially-constructed nature of awareness'. My point is, disciplined introspection, such as that practiced by yogis, perfectly reveals the artificial or constructed nature of conscious awareness. This has been understood for millenia. Yet your representation of it is such that, this wasn't even understood until science comes along and points it out.
In the Buddhist understanding the constructive nature of consciousness is understood as 'vijnana'. That understanding was arrived at purely through disciplined introspection. Some of your sources, such as Maturana and Varela, were highly conversant with those modes of understanding. But in any case, not everything is a construction, a vikalpa. 'There is, monks, that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated, that which is unconstructed. Were there not that which is unmade, that which is unfabricated, that which is unconstructed, there would be no escape from the made, the fabricated, the constructed.' But that is out-of-scope for third-person science.
Quoting apokrisis
Of course all the idealists would support such a statement as this, but when pressed, you seem to withdraw it again.
This systems approach is as old as Aristotle's hylomorphism. So no need to sound so put upon in a discussion on metaphysics,
Substance in a process philosophy view is an emergent limit on individuation. So yes, it is irreducibly triadic. It is the meat in the sandwich. You have formal/final cause and material/efficient cause in interaction. Substance is the emergent result of these two sources of cause - constraint vs potential - arriving at some steady state of balance or equilibrium.
Each side goes at it until the changes don't start to make a difference anymore and things look solid, or at least static enough to become a ground of further developments.
But my view is that kind of thing is the most exquisitely artificial kind of practice of all. It is wildly unnatural. It takes introspection away from being just a pragmatic habit of social self-regulation and treats it as mystic experience.
I'm sure I already mentioned to you that I had zen training from a Buddhist monk as a kid living in the East. That was when I became personally clear that eastern mysticism was just as much bullshit as the western kind. I concluded it was simply mad posturing to mediate under the tropical sun when all you could hear was the cloud of malarial mosquitoes forming over your head and starting to make their buzzing descent.
Of course you won't agree with me there. But the idea of the stilled and wordless mind is against the neurocognitive facts.
(Or rather you will execute another bait and switch because you won't ever really make your own case, just carp about mine.)
That is because the idealists want support for a substance ontology. Semiotics is about a metaphysics of emergent process.
The short answer, for me at least, is yes. It is a game for me to see if we or I can come up with the best story of how chemicals brought themselves to the coffee table. It's as simple as that and it's great fun.
For me, it's the ultimate rubix cube. On the one hand we have those dumb little atoms bobbing around senselessly, and on the other we have the people who like to experience eating hotdogs.
There is a disconnect as we all know between those atoms and that person who smiles at the sunset and somehow feels fulfilled. The disconnect is huge.
Semiotics makes sense. A lot of sense. Although the fine details may disagree, on the whole it's just another way of saying explicate order or emergent properties. I think that by taking this shorthand approach we can quickly get out of the bog of biology and move into or close to the mind, and then we can have at it.
Of course there has been no substantial evidence presented at all in this thread that attempts to explain the first steps in life - the emergence and arrangement of the particles into a cell or why a system would continue to maintain a negentropic state after the removal of the initial gradients.
I don't want to eliminate the mind permanently, quite the opposite. I'm just not quite ready to turn my mind to the mind as an abstract philosophy though. My feeling on the matter is that to see the mind's true state and function, you must first remove it and see what happens.
The problem I have with saying life is all mind, is that there is no concept there that I can explore. Nothing to manipulate and turn around and examine in terms of biology. It doesn't acknowledge that we are made of atoms and molecules and cells that have organised themselves. Mind is not a path to understanding life in this instance, it's more like a get out of jail free card. I come away dissatisfied.
I also have problems understanding what is meant by mind. There are many features I can think of as mind that I think I would stand a really good shot at explaining biologically (neurologically) or through the idea coding (which is semiotic language).
In regard to your difficulty understanding why this is relevant for investigation or even real, I would ask you to hold in your mind what was mentioned in your OP about the spinning cube and how it can be perceived differently at different speeds. I would also point out Explicate Order, which you directed me to in one of your talks - the emergence of patterns etc.
It may be that the universe is just oscillating matter fields which we read as a holographic projection. But what the holograph is constructing for us is this world of atoms. It's natural to want to play with them and figure out how they all go together. There is pattern in the building of life.
I have the converse problem that you have Rich, I can't see how mind explains anything. How should we investigate it? What should we investigate? What are your definitions? What is the world that you are trying to show us, Rich?
I thought so. I believe it is like this for many others as well. I actually have so many other things I am doing and would like to do in my life, that I am primarily looking for truly new insights that allow me to have a better grasp of nature.
Thanks for your forthright reply.Quoting MikeL
To understand this, it is necessary to put a philosophy to practical use:, e.g. health, relationships, value system, sense of life, etc. Then one understands Why Philosophy? Otherwise, it does become just another game that one can play in lieu of Rubiks Cube or chess. Living the last 35 years of my life in a very healthy state without any need to see a physician (or scared into seeing a physician) is a direct result of my my very real and practical philosophy. One that I truly embrace and use. It is not a game for me not is it a career. It is me.
Just to respond to that, it is through directed games such as this one that fundamental truths (at least to satisfy our own logic) can be discovered and new insights revealed.
My understanding of philosophy and theories is that it is an indulgence of the imagination based on inconsistencies in our world view. It allows us to examine these through the lens of examples, stories and sometimes mathematics, but it is a game, not a creed. I am happy to jump from one side to another and argue just as strongly.
If you play chess, you will understand that a player does not calculate each possible move in some equal manner. Based upon experience and intuition one quickly narrows down possible moves into a few candidate moves otherwise a single move can take a lifetime. This idea that chemicals evolved in such ac way that they have to eat a whole bag of potato chips and then bemoan it because of the weight they gained is equivalent to moving my Queen to a square where it can be taken by a pawn. It is so bad, that it can be immediately eliminated.
But if one doesn't care about these things, which is perfectly permissible, then one doesn't care. However, there have been great practical rewards for me by understanding nature. Ditto for the Daoists.
That's right, its a crazy thing to do, but it can be understood logically. The immediate satisfaction of eating the chips outweighs the possible future result of putting on the pounds. It is only when the immediate satisfaction is satisfied that the much lower weighted future consequence remains.
Quoting Rich
Sorry, Rich, I've missed your point again. Care about what things? I was following your chessboard analogy until the bag of chips. If you can back up to the chessboard again and take another run at it, I would appreciate it.
I personally wouldn't want to spend any part of my life investigating how chemicals got together to sing in a choir out of tune. Maybe if I was trying to come up with a new sci-fi genre.
Life evolved exactly as you observe. Life experiments, learns and changes and follows many, many different paths. Just observe. It's all there.
But I observe it evolving logically. If someone stands on a tree branch that is too thin, it will break, they will fall.
Arguing over the premise doesn't discount the logic between the premise and conclusion. It is not false logic, just a false premise. Logic may not lead to truth, but it leads to insight. Insight leads to a relative truth when we reflect it out against the world and get the right echo back. Relative truth leads to predictions which lead to a stronger truth in our frame of being if proven true.
Quoting Rich
Would I be right to say that this is the crux of your argument? That sentience is denied by logical progression? There is no choice is everything is a consequence?
You have to keep observing. The world is a wild West show. The best place to get a bird's eye view of human nature is Central Park on a Saturday afternoon, or better yet, a political rally.
I really don't have any arguments, since that is not my game. Just relating my own observations of life and seeking interesting new observations.
Yes you do. :)
I do understand what you mean by creativity expression in the world. No two people are alike. I am still not clear on the reason for you position though that the truth should be a creed and not a game. Not to worry, its good to get a diversity of creative opinion.
Perhaps you could explain this, because it appears to be the missing link which serves as the foundation of your metaphysics. How are sign relations inherent within a dissipative structure? I can understand how dissipative structures are interpreted and understood by observers through the means of sign relations, but how would sign relations be inherent within the dissipative structure itself?
Quoting apokrisis
OK, so this is the issue I have. How do you interpret a common inanimate dissipative structure as having a semiotic mechanism at play?
Quoting apokrisis
So, point to this scientific investigation which provides evidence that a common inanimate dissipative structure has semiotics at play.
Quoting apokrisis
What this really indicates is that life is much more complicated than earlier imagined, not the opposite.
Quoting apokrisis
Au contraire. This indicates that the step from non-living to living is much bigger than previously imagined. The levels of animated mechanization go far deeper then previously imagined, and as we delve deeper and deeper, that mechanization is seen to diverge further and further from the inanimate (unmechanized) at the same level.. People used to think that the mechanics and biogenesis of mitochondria was fascinating, but now these are seen as just the tip of the iceberg.
Quoting apokrisis
I think that what you are saying is that since there is a vast realm of unknown, at the micro level with respect to the inanimate, and a vast realm of unknown at the micro level with respect to the animate, we can class these two together, and say that they are similar, each unknown. But this is not a real similarity, it is just an unknown within our minds.
Quoting apokrisis
What name would you assign to that thing which would take away that possibility, "soul"?
Quoting apokrisis
Oh we know this eh? We know it because our prejudice tells us that dualism ought to be avoided. Therefore we ought to conflate formal cause and final cause, as you do, because to properly distinguish between these two and produce a real causal understanding of reality would undermine this prejudice.
Quoting apokrisis
I've repeatedly told you that your position is backwards. You seem to recognize that now, with this statement. Why attempt to maintain a backward metaphysics? And why would you think that a metaphysics which "turns things around" from accepted metaphysical principles is the most developed? All this really does is compromise strong, consistent metaphysical principles in order to make them consistent with mistaken theories.
I said they were external, not internal. That would be the difference. The water of the river knows which way to go because a channel carved over time points the way downhill.
There are no hidden mysteries here. It is quite prosaic. Until you get into foundational physics with its talk of holographic event horizons or wavefunction collapses.
My concern is that there is a huge downside for everyone, even for those who don't buy into these empty views of life. It's tough to avoid the consequences of this tidal wave fed by economic interests. For many, it is a nightmare that they would like to wake up from. I talk to these type of people every day and they just want it to go away.
A bit late of a reply, but I actually have very little problem with that kind of spiritual understanding of life. Power to you if you want to believe in it. But what I don't understand is why you continually invoke this understanding to say that, as a consequence, science cannot explain abiogenesis. I mean, what is the fundamental conflict between understanding life as arising naturally, while being a matter of 'discipleship in spiritual light'? I mean, the two understandings of life seem to occupy such different planes entirely that they don't even seem to be trying to 'explain' the same thing. The conception of life at stake in each seem entirely unrelated to each other. So your hostility to a naturalist account of abiogenesis - even if you want to subscribe to the spiritualist understanding of life that you do - is somewhat puzzling to me on a conceptual level. Even though, yeah, I get it, you have a kind of visceral reaction to the idea of anything to do with 'naturalism'. But it is warranted here, conceptually? And if so, why?
The question keeps arising about when the personal comes in, where the potency and significance of the individual goes, because it genuinely is entirely evaporated in simplistic general, external, objective accounts of history.
So this is the semiotics of dissipative structures? The water sees the channel as a symbol, and interprets the meaning of this sign as "go this way". By what method does the water interpret the meaning of the sign? By what force does the water empower itself to go where it wants (where the sign tells it to go). Do you think that the water has the capacity to decide not to follow that sign? What if the water saw conflicting signs, how would it decide which one to follow?
Quoting apokrisis
Is that a joke? It looks like pure mysticism to me. You're just saying that inanimate things have a mind by which they interpret signs, and decide to do what the sign tells them to do.
Quoting StreetlightX
Don't you see this as a big problem though? If you and I are referring to completely different things when we use the word "life", then how can we have any understanding of each other? We could each cling to our own meanings, and diverge further and further apart in our respective misunderstandings, or we could sit down and try to determine the correct conception. Platonic dialectics.
Quoting StreetlightX
If Wayfarer apprehends the naturalistic approach as incorrect, then the argumentation is warranted. Two people can be different, and we can respect each others differences, but in relation to conceptualization, differences become inconsistencies which produces incoherency. So if we do not take the time to determine the correct and the incorrect in conceptualization, we remain divided in misunderstanding, and "the concept" is incoherent. The cost of respecting each other's differences, in relation to concepts, is incoherency.
First, on one level, I'm completely on board with the notion that the literal 'genesis event' was a lightning or comet strike. I'm pretty sure that's how life on earth might have started, perhaps augmented by other such events over hundreds of millions of years. But that still is quite compatible with the notion of God 'breathing life into the clay'.
What the motivation behind the exploration of abiogenesis generally is, is that this is something that can be understood on the same level as crystal formation - a matter of chemical necessity, something like a chain reaction, which then just happens to give rise to the 'Darwinian algorithm' - and, here we all are!
Francis Crick, Jacques Monod, Daniel Dennett, and many other biochemical materialists of that kind, regard this as the be-all and end-all, the final understanding of the nature of life and mind, the ultimate triumph of the naturalist project. It is, consciously or otherwise, the attempt to banish any idea of creativity or intentionality from nature; everything is a consequence of dumb luck (as if that actually amounts to an hypothesis!) It is the ultimate 'brute fact' of existence.
This is, as Thomas Nagel said in his 2012 book, the basis of 'neo-Darwinist materialism' which is the backbone of materialist thought on the subject - hence my repeated reference to the abstract of his book:
I see the emergence of life in terms of something novel, namely, the appearance of the subject of experience. Seen this way, the evolution of life is the unfolding of a hitherto-unrealised dimension of existence - conscious experience as a mode of being. That, in my view, is what various forms of creation myth attempt to re-tell, with greater or lesser degrees of success.
Obviously, the ancients didn't know what science has shown to be the literal, physical truth of the matter, and traditionalists have to adjust their thinking accordingly. But I don't believe the scientific discoveries do necessarily undermine their worldview, unless they are interpreting religious metaphors literalistically. Hence the conflict is between religious fundamentalism, which is clinging to biblical literalism, and scientific materialism, on the other side. And they have a lot in common.
But always, on these forums, the de facto view is that now we know that abiogenesis is a final truth about the ultimate nature of life. A lot of people simply take that as established scientific fact, when it isn't.
Dehumanization is ugly and it is more than worrisome that only religious institutions are speaking out clearly against it. How can such ugliest go unchallenged in secular institutions, given that it is just a fabricated story with no evidence whatever to support it? What exactly is going on here? I use to raise my hands in objection all the time in class. I didn't get As but I preserved my self-respect. Great genocides always begin with the Big Lie becoming acceptable and repeated.
Can't you see the link between creativity, purpose, and intentionality?
Signs (i.e., representations) have meaning, hence; semiosis is the processing of semantic (i.e., attributive*) information; not mathematical, physical, or biological (i.e., predicative*) information.
"Information" and "semiosis" have become equivocal terms, and are used by apokrisis in a manner which attempts to validate a physicalist worldview (which I alluded to here).
Whereas, ascribing semiotic attributes to anything other than a psychophysical organism is a category error.
*Floridi, L. (2010). Information: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
All science needs to do nowadays is fabricate a story, use some sleight of hand, call it a done deal, and start teaching it in public schools. No scrutiny in secular institutions. The story is now used in lieu of any evidence. Then it is up to religious scholars (is isn't going to be any secular institution) to pour through the thousands of fabricated words to find the sleight of hand.
The fundamental problem it's that stories are now being substituted for evidence and still called science. No one in academia, other than lone voices such as scientists like Sheldrake, is calling science out. It is a travesty.
Aside from what you say, that this is mistaken attribution, the point I'm trying to make to apokrisis is that this false attribution gets us no further in terms of ontological principles. All one does with this type of approach is push back the sign reading capacity from the conscious mind, to DNA and other micro elements within the living body, and finally to the inanimate and the basic foundation of substantial existence. At this point we are faced with apokrisis' conclusion that semiotic principles are responsible for bringing into being substantial existence. Therefore we are forced to assume something outside of substantial existence, which reads the signs in the first place, causing the coming into being of substantial existence. Whatever it is which reads the signs in the first place, it cannot have substantial existence.
So all that this approach does, is push the question of what is it within the human mind which gives us the capacity to read signs, back to, and prior to, the beginning of substantial existence. Now by the principles of this approach, we are forced with the conclusion that whatever it is which gives us the capacity to read signs, it is necessarily something which transcends substantial existence.
This is an unreasonable approach because it renders the capacity for reading signs as something unintelligible. Instead of the dualist approach which allows that this capacity has real substantial existence, and therefore it has intelligible existence, it designates the existence of the capacity for sign reading as unsubstantiated and therefore unintelligible.
Ultimately either the intelligence (e.g. reading signs, and much, much more) is either ascribed to Natural Laws (aka God) or the chemicals themselves. Science offers nothing else. The words used may change but the the actual trick always remains the same.
The same trick is used in genetics. A few proteins are peeled off and voila, they form in humans, antelopes, ants, or whatever. The details are shunted aside as an homework assignment.
"It" either reads the signs, or creates them (thinking of the creative power of Hoffman's conscious agents); a conscious agent, or agents, which transcend(s) substantial existence. From a psychological standpoint, that makes sense because that's what human beings do: create things (albeit, in a temporal manner).
In apokrisis' ontology, the "it" which reads signs or creates them, bringing substance into existence, is a feature of the vague infinite potential of matter, as substantial existence emerges from the infinite apeiron. But this infinite apeiron, or prime matter, as Aristotle demonstrated, is an unintelligible principle.
In relation to substantial existence then, we can follow the principles of Aristotle's cosmological argument, and apprehend the necessity of assigning to this "it" (which reads signs), substantial existence, creating an ontology of substance dualism, or we can adhere to the physicalist's assertions that prime matter is something real, thus leaving the "it" which reads signs as unintelligible within the infinite apeiron of prime matter.
You aren't going to be able to follow this as you are insisting on a mentalistic reading of anything I say. But anyway, the river channel is an example of history acting informationally. A whole bunch of individual erosive events in the past add up to tell a story about which way to go. The current flow of water doesn't interact with that past directly, in some material fashion, but it does interact with that past indirectly in seeing the current state of the channel as an informational constraint on its possibilities.
So this is a Bergsonian metaphysics if you like. Or at least what he was on about with his cone of memory. :)
Constraint = information = history. It is the difference between background and foreground, context and event, when it comes to analysing causality.
Then why this is not just metaphysics, but physics, is because science knows how to count both contextual information and material entropy in the same coin these days. At the Planck scale, the two kinds of "construction material" are equivalent and inter-convertible.
This duality allows for powerful new mathematical ideas, like the holographic principle. We have a second way of describing - and more importantly, measuring - reality. We can now get exact results that relate the contextual causality of global constraints to the efficient causality of local material events.
If you don't follow modern physics, you likely have no idea how important this new approach is. But it is why fundamental physics is attempting to rebuild itself on thermodynamic principles like entropy, dissipation and emergence.
One doesn't have to label this pan-semiotics. Physics calls it information theory, holography, thermal, etc.
But also, there is the usual confused variety of metaphysical interpretations of what the discovered duality of information and matter might actually imply. Some folk have taken off with ideas like digital physics - the belief that reality is a literal computation of some kind. Others talk as if the informational boundaries, the event horizons, are the new fundamental reality and all the material events they encode on their branes or holographic surfaces are just now ghostly fictions.
So the new physics works. And its metaphysics is up for grabs, just as was the case for quantum interpretations.
My view is that Peircean pan-semiosis offers the best metaphysical framework for interpreting what this new physics is actually struggling to say about reality.
So you can scoff at the triviality of the river in its channel example. But instead, why not think about it carefully. All those little bouncing H2O molecules knocking off one another. And then the mysterious invisible hand that is their collective past. The events of the moment are being shaped by the information which represents the context of a history. But also each molecule has the chance to rewrite the history of the river bed.
You have two levels of action to account for. Plus the further fact that they form an interaction. Modern physics has the mathematics to formalise these accounts. Peircean semiosis provides the generalised triadic metaphysics which offers the best interpretation.
But if you prefer the idea that reality is a hologram, or a simulation, go for it.
What you are missing is that it is the triadic causality of semiosis that pan-semiosis is generalising.
And I think you don't really get that aspect of Peircean semiosis. This is not surprising if your knowledge of semiosis - as a metaphysical structure - has been shaped by the "Turku crowd". They were pretty mentalistic in understanding semiotics as a theory of meaning making. They weren't working at a level of absolutely abstract metaphysical generalisation.
It was US hierarchy theorists who could appreciate the mathematical bones of Peirce in this fashion.
Peirce himself clearly felt his semiosis applied at the physically and cosmologically general level. He was a scientist - summa cum laude in chemistry at Harvard - so was up with the thermodynamics of his era.
So to the degree that you accept Peirce's triadic scheme, as opposed to Saussure's dyadic one, then it simply can't be a category error. Peirce himself said it wasn't.
I agree. 'information' is given as a fundamental explanatory category, in the same sense as 'matter' or 'energy'. But 'information' has many meanings, it is not as if there is a unitary thing, force or power called 'information' which serves a role analogous to (say) 'the atom'.
Quoting apokrisis
but wasn't this because he regarded [i]mind[/I] as fundamental? He wasn't dualist - didn't regard mind and matter as fundamental - but whatever it is that underlies phenomena is nearer what we understand as 'mind'. Otherwise, how could there be signs?
I see this as the obvious problem. We are talking semiotics, which implies semantics and meaning. You appear to be assuming a type of semiotics which doesn't require mental activity. I want you to explain the basis of this assumption to me, otherwise how can I interpret what you say in any way other than mentalistic?
Quoting apokrisis
So, this is a good example. How does the water "see" the channel as informational constraint on its possibilities? I can understand how you, as a human being with a mind, can understand the channel as informational constraint on the water's possibilities. But to project this understanding onto the water, to say that the water understands the informational constraints on its possibilities appears like a mistaken attribution of the interpreting, and understanding, of information. You don't really believe that water "sees" or understands the informational constraints on its possibilities do you?
Quoting apokrisis
There is a very big difference between the principles of physics, and what you are claiming. Physicists recognize that they are the ones seeing the world as information, they do not claim as you do that the inanimate matter of the world, such as water, sees the world as information.
Quoting apokrisis
This is not a good metaphysics to pursue because it misses the essence of intentionality, "telos", which involves a view toward the future, anticipation. You claim the possibilities involved in the activity of H2O molecules are constrained by history, and this is probably a true way of looking at things. But it is a mistake to claim that this is a semiotic activity because the description lacks the essence of semiotic activity, which is carried out for the sake of bringing something into existence in the future. Semiotic activity involves anticipation of the future. Being constrained by history, and having anticipation for the future are two completely distinct things. Water is constrained by history, the living being anticipates the future. This is the difference between formal and final cause which you will not cease to conflate. Unless you can demonstrate how being constrained by the past, and anticipating the future, are one and the same thing, the conflation is completely unjustified. But I think that by not recognizing this difference your metaphysics entirely misses the mark.
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You miss the point. Information was given rigorous mathematical meaning by Shannon. It was defined in terms of message uncertainty or information entropy. So a physical result was derived from psychological argument.
And yes, it is obvious that Shannon information in fact stripped out the semantics so as to wind up talking only about its physical signs. He created a universal way to count bits. What any bit meant became absolute general - or rather, it just stood for a 1 or a 0, a yes or a no, a presence or an absence. It stood for a bare metaphysical strength dichotomy - a difference that makes a difference in the most absolute possible fashion.
Thus having stripped out semantics from a theory of information - or reduced that semantics to its ultimate abstract form - information then allows science to build semantics back into its descriptions of nature in controlled and explicit fashion. Useful models are possible.
You have to understand how science builds its tools to understand the metaphysical implications of the new scientific results that then follow.
To protest that "information has many meanings, some of them very colloquial or mentalistic" is missing the point.
it was defined in the context of there being information - a signal - to be sent and received. What is an example of that in a world where there are no senders and receivers, where there is nothing to signal? What are examples of information being encoded and transmitted in a lifeless world?
but if nobody knows it, it ain't information. or more precisely, it doesn't encode anything.
The door to your cage or conceptions has been opened. But you don't have to walk through it if you prefer the comfort of the familiar.
You believe consciousness to be itself a universal property of nature, well fine. Stick to that. Don't for an instant explore the alternative of deflating consciousness by understanding it in terms of a universal semiotic process.
NASA has funded SETI for decades, and nothing has been found. And what are they looking for? Structured information, something that indicates life and mind has arisen somewhere else in the cosmos. it only occurs where there is life; the cosmos, to our knowledge, lacks that. What is the secret sauce? Something only known to Peirce?
The point is eluding you. That is something different. I've explained myself endlessly. Time for you to do some work in understanding better.
Stop thinking about this as humans feeling mentally informed. And don't even start thinking about it computationally as the reading and writing of memory states.
Semiotics is about information as the bleeding differences that make a bleeding difference in the real world, even the lifeless real world. A bit has physicalist meaning as a sign of things to come. :)
No external interpreter is required. Reality arises as interpretance. The historical context points possibility towards its free future. Then history is created by that possibility making up its mind.
Why does an atom decay? Do you think you can answer that in causal terms using regular materialism? Do you think mad woo like Rich's or whoever's idealism can do the job?
And yet you belly-ache like buggery just because I dare to apply Peirce's careful generalisation of a psychologically-derived tale of causality. And point out that it is science as the duality of matter and information is now a formally exact, formally measurable, deal.
Mate, either catch up with the 21st century or leave me alone.
Better yet, stop thinking, period. That is the only way the trick works.
Apparently, the answer to the OP is to give up on the idea that there is life. Problem solved.
21st century dehumanization.
Huh? They are the two faces of the same thing. Surely that is obvious? To be constrained is what results in being left with a more focused point of view.
It is the desire for negentropy that needs to be explained now. Life should wind down after the initial concentration gradients are exhausted. Instead life actively seeks new reactants to sustain its reactions.
There is a prompt that arises when internal reactants drop below a certain point, much like the coming on of a fuel light. It makes me get out of the chair and go to the fridge. A lion will go out onto the plain to run down the gazelle. A tree will turn its leaves toward the sun and grope with its roots through the soil.
Aside: I could not care less if this is not discussed by Pierce or is not the focus of semiotics at all. It is my question.
That's your great mistake, how you conflate final cause with formal cause, as if they are two facets of the same thing. Past actualities, which are the constraints on present existence, are fundamentally different from future possibilities, which are the freedoms of present existence. We relate the two to each other through the assumption of present existence, but that they may be related to each other does not make them two faces of the same thing.
And, the fact that present existence is just an assumption, though it is one which is necessary to make in order to have this relationship, indicates that the constructed, or artificial, relationship between these two, is itself unsound. Therefore the assumption that past actualities and future possibilities are two faces of the same thing, is equally unsound.
The assumption is of a "being", or "existence", at the present. It is made sound by designating us, human beings, oneself, as this "being" at the present. When the assumption of a being at the present is made sound in this way, then past actualities, and future possibilities are assigned the name "reality" by this being. However, they are understood to be independent from the being, and not two faces of the being. To model reality as two parts of one being, at the present, is a mistake, because it disallows the possibility of an independent reality.
That has nothing whatever to do with Shannon's laws about information transmission.
Quoting apokrisis
What 'difference' does it make when a star explodes, exactly? When a landslide occurs? None of that conveys any information; none of it signifies or represents anything. Sure you can gather information about such events, but the events themselves are not information.
The whole point of Shannon's work was about transmitting actual information, something that has meaning. If it was just about transmitting white noise, then what would have been the point of the analysis?
The notion that anything whatever that happens is information, is too broad a definition.
Quoting apokrisis
You meet argument with insults, again.
Constraints remove degrees of freedom. And the degrees of freedom not removed are then those that must be expressable. It's not rocket science.
So a very important thing to conceptualize I think is the drive of the entire system, road and all, to find more reactants. That in itself seems anti entropic without a coupling to entropic movement.
Silly me.
Quoting Wayfarer
That comment sums up how little you understand about the subject.
As life developed though the reactants became more constrained - inside a piece of fruit or another fish - enter the age of predation. But how do we explain it?
As I understand it, 'semiosis' is taken to be central to this, because the processes which are central to living organisms are more 'language-like', or sign-like, than they are like either mechanical, physical or chemical processes in nature. In that sense, proteins and so on encode, represent or signify the features of an organism. There is a fundamental differentiation between the code and matter in which it is embedded. There's nothing like that in inorganic nature, save for in situations of high instability and complexity and the like, which are the purported point of origin of complex molecules.
Living things embody an order, and that order is also able to reproduce, maintain itself, and even evolve into new forms. It has been said that DNA is basically 'LifeOS'.
At issue in all of this is the origin or source of that order. Some argue that the presence of that order is an indication of a designer - this then becomes a species of design argument. Naturalism wishes to show (as I understand it) that this order is a consequence or expression of the same order which underlies everything else in nature, i.e. there is no fundamental discontinuity between the order you see in living organisms, and the order in atoms or solar systems. In naturalism's eyes, any kind of 'ID' argument is something close to Nazism, voodoo, or black magic.
No, freedom and constraint only actual exist in relation to something else, a thing which is either free or constrained. Otherwise you are just referring to a concept. Degrees of heat or cold only have reality in relation to something which is either hot or cold. You are trying to assign reality to the abstracted concept "degrees of freedom", with disrespect for the fact that this only has meaning in relation to a thing, a being, which is having these degrees of freedom taken from it.
Once you give reality to this thing, the being, then freedom and constraint can no longer be considered as two faces of the same thing. They are completely different aspects of the world. Freedom comes from a different source than constraint does. They are only two faces of the same thing within the concept which opposes them as the negation of each other.
I brought up earlier about the ribosome. I think it is key. Nowadays the whole affair of DNA transcription, translation and replication is tightly controlled. The ribosome is key to changing the code of the DNA into the protein by marrying up nucleotide sequences with amino acids and sewing the amino acids together.
But if we impose bi-directionality on this effect, we could also have amino acids encoding 3 nucleotides and then another amino acid coming along and the ribosome sewing three more onto the chain. Bidirectionality means that at these 6 nucleotides that encode 2 amino acids are also being transcribed, and we get the emergence of a record on one end and a protein at the other, but emanating from a position central to both.
Where we have code, we have the start of language, we have semiotics.
So the story is .... triadic?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Except a backwards triadism that relies on brute fact monism rather than emergence...
Sounds legit.
Shouldn't use that word, 'created', I'm sorry. Nothing is created by anything, that's either disguised theism, or anthropomorphism. And the other thing is, nothing can 'evolve from something' until the means of evolution exists. Evolutionary theory assumes that DNA exists, it doesn't account for the existence of DNA. The existence of DNA is what has to be accounted for. To be fair, Apokrisis knows more than anyone here on that subject, having published books on such topics. But I still think it's fair to say it's an open question.
A drop of rain falling on a puddle creates ripples. If there are many drops of rain and many ripples, they may evolve into small waves. That is all I meant when I used those words.
Doesn't my ribosomal explanation account for the existence of DNA?
Quoting Wayfarer
That's great we have an expert in the house, but it doesn't make your logic or my logic any cheaper. Let's not sit quietly by the camp fire and be passive absorbers of others wisdom, let's exchange ideas with them and challenge it too and see if we can all learn from each other - which I think we are doing.
I don't even dispute that necessarily. My question is "what" is this "experience"? You use the word emerging like a parlor trick. You have not addressed the issue of what this illusion of mind is that "emerges" other than being self-referential to its constituents. You answer it with things like there needs to be an "interpreter" which just sounds like some form of background experiencer has to be there in the first place. Wow, sounds suspiciously panspychic, and you knew I was going to say this because that is exactly what it sounds like. Just because the background interpreter needs symbols and signs as it learns and gets more complex, doesn't mean that there isn't "something" there, interpreting in the background, according to your OWN schema. You cannot escape it. Either first person experience exists in the equation or there is a dualistic nature to reality. Unfortunately, you don't get that your triadism collapses into a dualism, despite you really really wanting it not to.
If its been a while since you looked at it, this is a great link to explain what I mean. Jump to 3:15
Start by answering honestly why a modelling relation with the world wouldn't feel like something. On what basis can you simply presume that?
Isn’t your triadic system one of pan-modeling-relation-with-context/the world? If I’m not extremely mistaken in so appraising, then why would a lepton, for example, not hold feelings - given that it is this triadic relation that in your system explains the "what it is like" of human feeling? Why would information, as information, not hold feelings? This must be wrong, though. It leads into nonsensical conclusions.
How might we explain a leap to that from a disintegrating system?
Biosemiosis is an actual modelling relation. The information, the constraints, are internalised to construct a point of view.
Pansemiosis is then more general. The information, the constraints, are environmental. The point of view in operation is external and so highly generic - just the state of the cosmos at some point along its historical development.
This bloody huge difference is why I wouldn't say leptons have feelings. There is no reason to think they form a point of view or have any autonomy. They are the products of a generic cosmic sign relation, not the authors of particular located points of view.
This article explains the formation of lipid membranes in eurkaryotes, which is not that helpful, but if we understand that a molecular cycle in the ocean could be attaching transmembrane proteins while others are synthesising a lipid string, it makes a more sense.
However this step could not occur until the Protein-Ribosome-DNA connection had been sorted.
So evolution now must race against the balloon popping universe that provides reactants to form the protective features such as reinforced cell walls that allow survival. Once again though eventually the reactants would run out... which is why we need our photosynthesisers to enter the scene.
OK, yes, but in your view bio-semiosis must emerge from pan-semiosis (e.g., not the other way around at some grand scheme of things; this where “bio” signifies “life”, which I acknowledge to loosely interpret as being “the presence of a first person point of view, aka awareness”). Other than things being such that our awareness-based knowledge does indeed illustrate—to the best of our knowledge—that life followed non-life, why must biosemiosis emerge from pansemiosis when rationally analyzed?
This is the part that I initially hoped you held a cogent grasp of when I started this tread.
Did you really ever follow what I said then. You keep coming up with questions I've already covered.
Pansemiosis is about the fundamentally of thermodynamic purpose. And biosemiosis is entrained to that cosmic goal. It is required (if it is possible for it to be) by the need to break down blockages to entropy's great flow.
So I hope you now suddenly remember another part of the argument which I've so frequently presented. Maybe even an apology will be forthcoming, seeing you have chosen to join the insulters? :)
Catching the sleight of hand in this trick was way too easy.
Quoting apokrisis
It appears the story has now been extended to include God.
You've covered them by placing the cart before the horse: better spelled out, maths before awareness ... then by explaining awareness via maths, you feel justified in using observations to model your system in what logically amounts to ad hoc explanations of why things must be.
An observation; yes, made by one who is nevertheless fallible and proudly knows himself to so be. Not an insult, and certainly not an apology.
I didn't know your theory included cosmic propose.
Again, you aren't really listening. Peirce begins with an examination of human reason - epistemology. And then pansemiosis argues ontology - existence itself - also shares the same self-organising logic.
Further - all thought/all reality being irreducibly complex - making your argument in terms of "cart before horse", or "chicken before egg", simply betrays a Procrustean need to make all argument conform to the mode of reductionist analysis rather than holistic understanding.
You want a sequential story of cause and effect. But this is explicitly a triadic developmental story. I know you will be starting to understand when you yourself think "cart before horse" is a nonsensical kind of issue to be complaining about.
This surfacing would not have been easy though. Entropy would have had a field day with the temperature and pressure. It is hard to believe a smooth spectrum of temperature or pressure, let alone of being able to evolve to process light into sugar.
There would have been a 'dead zone' life would have had to pass through on its way up. One way around it is to invoke a mass migration of life upward so that canabalisation can sustain life.
The other problem would be buoyency. How would they now be able to float upward where before they were clustered around vents? Vacuoles? Modern cells actively extrude Na+ to create their concentration gradients. Extruding Na+ would reduce buoyency though.
What might be interesting to investigate is if this cannot be used as a motive force for a cell. A sudden opening of Na+ channels would cause a massive influx of Na+ increasing buoyency rapidly causing inflation through the strata of the ocean. If this rate of inflation was greater than the subsequent rate of deflation once the Na+ was extruded again (perhaps through an oceonic pressure difference), we would have a mechanism.
The OP was fine, and it seems like we are all rapidly converging upon an agreement that there is cosmic purpose. How do you feel about this as a fundamental theory of life? I'm actually good with it.
As if by Magic, being born of the Air, a creation, a substance having mass, an entity, born of Nothingness, the ether, results in an affect rather than an effect.
Original, First Cause, being an affect rather than being an effect, there being a
single direct material cause of the existence of Everything.
0/1 being the mathematical formula, the equation, that allows for the Existence of Everything, giving an explanation as to why something rather than nothing.
Nothing, A Singularity of Zero-0, having no numerical value, must be transfigured, converted into a Singularity having relative, a numerical value of One-1.
Once transfigured, going through a metamorphic transition, process, a Singularity
of Zero-0 is converted into the First Singularity to have relative a numerical
value of One-1, said Singularity of Zero-0 is reborn a Singularity having a relative,
the numerical value of One-1, evolves into “The Reality of First Cause.”
The Reality of First Cause being the single direct material cause, as in the butterfly
effect, the single direct material cause of the System of Chaos that has made manifest
the Heavens and the Earth, the Universe, Something, the Reality of Everything
that exists in the material sense of the word.
This is an interesting revelation.
We can imagine an organism growing like a ball until the problems of waste removal and nutrient supply become too constrictive (before a circulatory system). At this point, similar to embryogenesis, some type of cleavage may need to happen or the outer most cells will have to bud off and form their own clusters of cells.
This of course is a primitive reproduction of the organism.
The revelation I stated at the beginning occurs because evolution, survival through time, is not directional in the sense of purposeful. It is based on the constraints of the present. A need to trust only self in the creation of the colony and a need to bud due to critical physical constraints.
I don't know, "WHAT" is this "feel like something"? You presume a non-dualism when right here is admittance. There IS a feel like something. What is THAT? You can't run to the idea of illusion as you are going to have to explain THAT then. More a=a. I can agree with you all day that modelling relations have feel like something aspects to it. That is not the hard problem. The hard problem is WHAT is the feel like something?
Finally. That being so, case closed.
It's backwards because it doesn't rely on emergence? As I've demonstrated to you, over and over again, in a multitude of different ways, emergence is untenable because it relies on an unintelligible premise. This renders the entire approach as unintelligible.
If that's your method for judging an ontology, by relating it to the concept of emergence, then it's no wonder that your metaphysics is so upside down. You need to apprehend emergence as fundamentally flawed, and this will not come about until you get a good grasp of some basic metaphysical principles.
What emergence claims is "we cannot understand what happened, so we'll just say that what happened is unintelligible, and claim that the unintelligible happened." This is the real problem with Peirce's philosophy which gives ontological status to vagueness, it allows one to claim that there are things which are impossible to understand, things which are unintelligible. Allowing the unintelligible into your metaphysics as a fundamental principle, is an act of a quitter. It is to say "I cannot understand it so I'll assume that it's impossible to understand", it's ontologically vague. But if the untintelligible (vagueness) is adopted, and employed as a premise, then it renders all the conclusions which follow (emergence being one), as unintelligible.
I am hoping that someone can summarize this theory of life emerging from non-life so I can bookmark it for future reference in other threads. The highlights for me are that:
1) Thermodynamics has purpose.
2) There is a Cosmic Goal.
3) Intelligibility emerges from chemicals.
4) Chemicals feel things.
5) Chemicals communicate with each other with signs.
Basically everything has a mind and purpose except humans.
Not the existence of it, but the fact that it works. How DNA came about, what caused it to exist, is what is at issue.
By the way, I don't have a 'religious background' other than to believe that what can be known through the physical senses, is not all there is. I certainly don't believe in creationism of any kind, but I do believe that the effort to avoid any kind of religious concept of life is one of the drivers of naturalism.
Incidentally, still no further explanation of what Claude Shannon's paper has to do with atomic physics.
You are ridiculous. You don't even understand the fundamental question. You missed the target. It wasn't whether I can agree if modelling conditions "feel like something". Again, we can talk all day about constituents. WHAT is the feels like something? That case is definitely not closed as you have yet to either grasp the importance of the question or are dodging it.
I would say it is a cross between panpsychism and the Biblical Genesis story of God infusing life into Adam, where chemicals are the stand-in for humans. There is a subtle form of chemical worship in the theory which contrasts nicely with other similar theories that worship technology.
Clearly it is the feels like something! :P When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. So if you ask what is an apple? I can answer in terms of other things: a fruit, red, etc. Of course none of those independently are what an apple is. To a certain extent the debate between you isn't only about metaphysics, but also about what you mean when you each ask the questions you ask.
From The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism, Nicholas Guardiano Department of Philosophy Southern Illinois University Carbondale, my underlines.
The question this leads to is, would C S Peirce have described his philosophy as naturalistic or physicalist in the current sense? Presumably not the latter. From the review of Paul Forster's Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews):
I believe that here, the notion of these 'general and abstract entities as reals' are essentially a form of the Platonist eidos, which whilst modified by Aristotle, were never rejected by him.
In respect of the immortality of the soul:
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Synechism, my underline.
Finally we come to Peirce's conception of 'agáp?-ism', where ' agáp?' is the self-sacrificing love associated with early Christian teachings:
1. Peirce, C. S. (1893), "Evolutionary Love", The Monist, v. III, n. 1, pp. 176–200. Reprinted also in Chance, Love, and Logic pp. 267–300, Philosophical Writings of Peirce pp. 361–74.
2. Peirce, C. S. (1870), Review of Henry James, Sr.'s The Secret of Swedenborg, in North American Review 110, April, pp. 463–8, Google Books Eprint.
The other point that should be considered is that Peirce says that 'nature forms habits'. The unavoidable implication is that nature has or is mind. In this respect, there is convergence with Rupert Sheldrake's (maverick) theory of 'morphic resonance'.
With respect to the naturalistic vs idealistic tension in Peirce's writings,
IETP
Obviously a variety of interpretations are possible, however note that many current adaptions of Peirce assume the 'hard-headed scientific Peirce' but eschew the 'idealistic and metaphysical Peirce'. However when it comes to theories such as pansemiosis which purportedly provide a purely naturalistic or scientific account of the origin of life, the question ought to be asked, would Peirce himself have agreed with or endorsed this form of naturalism? Does it stand, in the absence of the idealist metaphysics which he thought underwrote it? Is his notion of 'matter as effete mind' something which contemporary naturalists ought to accept? And, if so, does this mean that naturalism is now tending towards idealist philosophies, as many physicists (e.g. Eddington, James Jeans, Schrodinger, Heisenberg) have argued?
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Wayfarer
In attempts to compliment you post, I think it should be remembered that C S Pierce was never privy to Georges Lemaitre’s hypothesis that everything could be mathematically traced back to a single point (the beginning of the Big Bang cosmological model from which the model obtained its pejorative term of “Big Bang”), nor was he aware of all the epistemological criteria that since then followed, which is used to nowadays substantiate this model as depicting an ontic fact. (We often forget, it is only a model of what might have been.) In essence, using Pierce's model of objective idealism, the effete mind of his time did not yet organize into forms that contained this, then non-existent, information.
Focusing in on the quasi-meta-physical* implication of this Big Bang model, that something emerged from (what for all technical purposes is) nothing, would Pierce then have viewed this awareness-evidence supported, mathematical model of the Big Bang as nullifying his metaphysics of objective idealism? Or, conversely, would he interpret this Big Bang model and all the empirical evidence since then acquired for it as only one, itself yet evolving, aspect of the ever evolving effete mind he explains via his objective idealism?
To my understanding, this difference in answer gets to the root of whether he’d today become a triadic-relations physicalist / naturalist or, as I very much believe he would, remain a non-physicalist, remain an objective idealist.
It would result in the same thing from all practical purposes of everyday life; it would however make a big difference as regards the ontic nature of being.
* Though itself an issue of possible contention, I say “quasi-meta-physical” because one cannot address the ontic reality of the metaphysical by basing one’s epistemology regarding what is in what one intuitively knows to be the realities of the physical (regardless of how concrete or abstract these might be). From the metaphysics of Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, to list only three of the long since gone guys, so doing would certainly be understood to be a self-contradicting enterprise. The ontic reality of the metaphysical is in a top-down relation to the ontic reality of the physical, not the other way around; else there would be no “beyond-physical”. This, then, includes the metaphysical issue of whether or not something can emerge from nothing, again alluding to what the Big Bang model of cosmology implies.
"I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolu-
tionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of
mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned
idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially
deadened mind."
From this, I observe:
1) Peirce favored labeling his papers as Laws, apparently enjoying the additional gravitas.
2) Cosmology is the product of chance (tychism). He favors the naturalist "it just happened" approach to science. A convenient and all encompassing explanation for pretty much everything and anything that science has no explanation for.
3) First came Mind and then came Matter.
For my taste, very muddled but juxtaposes nicely with the current scientific point of view, that everything just happened, with the big exception that Peirce places Mind ahead of Matter in evolutionary growth. Current naturalist thinking apparently puts Matter first with the additional observation that Cosmic Purpose is sort of hovering around ready to strike at the soul of chemicals. I think this is the story. After this, chemicals just start communicating with each other as any normal chemical might, about their feelings, emotions, dietary preferences, favorite sports team etc.
WHAT is experience as opposed to its constituents. If you read the thread from the beginning and other ones between me and apokrisis, it should be apparent.
Edit: For the record, I kind of resent your style on here. You come into my conversations and appear to troll my answers. I can't put my finger on it. I can debate apokrisis all day and I'm fine with that, but your style seems meant to provoke it seems. At least that is my reaction, and I rarely get that from other members I disagree with. Just food for thought on your style.
That's right. The Hard Problem has bite because in the end, causal explanations (about anything) rely on counterfactuals. You can believe the answer is A because you believe the answer isn't not-A.
And so when you make the question about the cause of some totality - like "the Cosmos", or "the Mind" - then there just is no not-A permitted by the question. Or rather you get the ridiculous answer that the only alternative is "not". Existence arose out of nothing. Mind arose out of nothing.
Talk about qualia has the same formula. Why is green green? Why is the scent of a rose like the scent of a rose? The question form itself fails the counterfactuality test. There just is no comparison possible as green is always green. And it still would be as far as I'm concerned even if it were to switch to bleen. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)
Aristotle made the same point. Talk of causality is always a question about a reason for a change. Without counterfactuality, the game doesn't even get off the ground. The question you are asking is not really a question if you the questioner fail to provide a reasonable counterfactual basis for it.
The burden is on Schop to show why he is asking a good question ... if he now again denies that the question was answered.
Then to repeat what I've said about a Peirce-style organicism a million times, it does provide you with a critical extra counterfactual resource when asking questions - another dimension to standard metaphysics. It may not eliminate the problem here, but it is a further way to minimise it, to shrink it as small as we know how.
That extra resource is the (still pretty Aristotelean) notion of vagueness. So Peirce stood for a developmental metaphysics in which all things originate in a state of ultimate vagueness (or Firstness). Then by a mutual or orthogonal act of separation - a dichotomisation, a symmetry-breaking - you get a fundamental opposition arising. And from that dyadicy of a bare relation - a now crisp distinction that gives you your requisite either/or - you can develop further to the third thing of an interaction that hierarchically goes to equilibrium over all possible scales of being. The vague (as a formless chaos) becomes the crisp (a structured and law-like state of affairs in which change becomes minimal).
So this is a tale of how emergence and process can lead to the kind of deadened world we observe - a Cosmos nearly at its Heat Death doing nothing but entropifying. And thus - counterfactually - life and mind can be understood as "other" to that. We are distinguishable from our context by our negentropic qualities.
Semiotics is then a further part of this developmental story in both being the triadic logic of the metaphysics - the vague to crisp tale of developmental organisation just described - and also the particular story of the mechanism, the modelling relation, which accounts counterfactually for life and mind.
So to deal with both of philosophy's hardest problems - what is existence?, what is mind? - Peircean semiotics calls on the further metaphysical resources of the vague~crisp to get us further down the road towards an intelligible reply. Vague vs crisp is another source of counterfactuality to motivate the framing of the questions.
And vagueness is in fact defined logically as a perfect lack of counterfactuality. Peirce said vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. Crispness is thus the opposite - where the counterfactuality has developed to a point we might consider it absolute.
This is all very neat. Logic - the way we can ask definite questions - has just been extended in formal fashion so that it can safely talk about the indefinite. We can begin our metaphysical conversation even before counterfactuality arises - as the emergence of counterfactuality is what semiosis fundamentally explains.
This is not so new. Anaximander did it at the dawn of metaphysics with his much misunderstood tale of existence's emergence by symmetry-breaking from the Apeiron.
Indeed, something similar is the basis of most ancient wisdoms. You have the Judaic Ein Sof, the Taoist Dao, the Buddhist dependent co-arising, etc.
And of course - if you can get past the Scholastic misrepresentations - Aristotle was striving towards the same with his Hylomorphism. His "prime matter" was a logical attempt to vague-ify the basis of being.
So when it comes to asking the most interesting open questions - why mind? why existence? - the search is for some position of counterfactuality that can make those questions seem more sensible. And a Peircean developmental logic, one that is rooted in a notion of vagueness, a complete lack of counterfactuality, is the bold new metaphysical approach that deals directly with this very issue of counterfactuality.
That is why he summed up existence as "the universal growth of reasonableness". Such a statement sounds very mystical and is open to obvious misinterpretation. But that is why you actually have to study and learn the new logical notion that lies behind it.
Darwin believed in God. So did Newton and Einstein. Thus it makes no difference if Peirce believed in God.
That is the splendour of the scientific method. Eventually any superfluous mental scaffolding falls away to leave the naked physicalist reasoning. Talk about stuff that can't be measured - stuff that is not being talked about counter-factually - dies its death. It becomes classed as the "not even wrong".
The purity of scientific reasoning is the most marvellous realisation one can have. All the nonsense of life just falls away. One can penetrate to the core of the mystery that is existence. An idea as powerful as semiosis is giddy with beauty.
Grubby religious beliefs are to Peircean metaphysics as porn is to real sex. ;)
The first essay I mentioned, by Guardiano, discusses the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Peirce as depicted in a series of essays in a publication called The Monist. Emerson was something of a fountainhead of wisdom in the American literary tradition, and was also deeply interested in Vedic religion, one of the factors that lead him to break from the Church. I think the influence is that Peirce's 'primordial firstness' which precedes everything that exists, is influenced by Emerson's conception of Brahman. But there is huge scope to Peirce's writings on such matters, far more than can be summed up here.
Quoting apokrisis
And you get snarky when you think you're being accused of scientism, when surely that's the gospel you're preaching, bro' ;-) Anyway, pointless to argue, obviously.
Sure its annoying that you can't be consistent. But since you are really just accusing me of being relentlessly reasonable, I can't complain.
I'll just remind - and you have to be reminded as frequently as a goldfish circling its bowl - that my "scientism" is systems science and not good old fashion reductionism. I am an organicist, not a mechanicist. I am about full four causes explanation, not just bottom-up atomistic construction .... etc, etc.
I'd define snark as an effort to be unpleasant in a way that rides rough-shod over the facts of the matter. Whether you are extremely forgetful, never really understood, or merely desperate to regain the ideological upper hand, I can't tell, and don't really care.
But the fact remains that I am not applying the same metaphysics as your totems of Scientism like Dawkins and Dennett and Krauss. So your snarky comments just undermine any credibility you might have hoped you have established here.
Oh good. Then please explain to me again what the origin of 'downward causation' is - what are the 'final causes' towards which living beings are striving? What final aim are they endeavouring to realise? It seems the only 'final cause' that all is tending towards, is indeed the 'maximisation of entropy' - which I personally think is quite hard to reconcile with the Aristotelian and Platonic ideal of 'the good contemplating itself in eternity'. I think Peirce retained that element of the Western idealist tradition, whereas it seems to be absent from your interpretation of systems science. But I'm happy to be corrected.
Incidentally I will always acknowledge that your attitude is very different to the lumpen materialism of Krauss et al. You're streets ahead of anyone like that. I have already said that I think the whole movement towards biosemiotics is a consequence of recognising the failures of materialism. So my criticisms of their kind of reductionism, which is highly influential in today's culture, are not about your systems science. But when you elevate science to the only valid avenue of knowledge - that is what I mean by 'scientism', because that's what it actually does mean. My references to other cognitive modes are invariably met with vitriol - you show no understanding of it, other than to tell me you got trained by or as a Zen Buddhist and it's all nonsense, or something along those lines.
I can understand this possible relation between Pierce’s “primordial firstness” and the Vedic Brahman. Thanks for the info.
To be frank, via my own philosophical skepticism based understandings (yea, kind of like those of Plato’s Academy, but different), I can hold my own till the cows come home that there is no way of justifying any belief regarding whether or not existence has a metaphysical beginning – never mind what kind of metaphysical beginning it might have had if it indeed had one. Lots of words to say: to my best current reasoning, nobody can know if existence ever had a beginning.
In Vedic tradition, Brahman is the end aspired for, a state of being that has always been, awaiting, without which there would be nothing which can stand. There’s a bit of a cognitive jump to then thinking that this Alpha and Omega of Vedic tradition, so to speak, once existed of itself in manners devoid of anything standing. To me, it, in a way, would parallel the fallacy of thinking that, once, there was only Nirvana … from out of which then emerged (via some variant of efficient causation, no doubt) all our cycles of death and rebirth via dependent originations. No Buddhist in his/her right mind could ever entertain such as thing without laughing … which, I believe, can be viewed as one reason for the Buddhist schism from Hinduism. Of course, this together with disagreement on the homunculus notion of self which Hindu tradition - at times - makes itself, arguably all to easily for Buddhists, prone to.
Musings that could all be disputed (save for the lack of justification in upholding a metaphysical beginning, I strongly contend) - given despite my limited knowledge of the cultural topics at hand. But again, thanks for the shared info. I haven’t read anything by Emerson yet. Nice when you find new readings to look forward to. I’ve placed The Monist on my list.
So justify those cognitive modes in reference to my explanation of my cognitive mode.
I've highlighted the centrality of counterfactuality to metaphysical-strength reasoning. How are you going to reason employing a mode that rejects counterfactuality? That rejects measurable facts in other words. How are you escaping falling into the class of metaphysical explanations that is formally "not even wrong"?
You are welcome to challenge me with your alternatives. But you have to do more than name them here. You have to argue for them ... well, counterfactually. :)
Peirce's view of science was very expansive - it blended into many aspects of his thinking which would not, I think, be regarded as 'scientific' by many today. That was the point of the extended quotes I provided.
First off Ein Sof is a Kabbalistic-specific expression which is far closer to Zen Buddhist notions of emptiness (interpretable as absolute selflessness, and not nothingness) than that of the processes of becoming you've mentioned.
Secondly, you hold a long history of degrading them mystics / spiritualists while you then go ahead and use their own notions to support your views. Can you clarify why?
Nobody knows as usual. This Mr Nobody sure seems one heck of a smart guy.
It is always just so easy taking the sceptic's position isn't it. "I don't believe you yet. Tell me again. Nope, still not believing you." Etc, ad infinitum.
Anyway, the Peircean answer - like other ancient wisdoms - is that if there was a beginning, it would also have to be the opposite of a determinate event, the product of an efficient cause. It would have to instead be a beginning that was some form of ultimate vagueness or state of indetermination.
Rather like a quantum Big Bang indeed. Why did the atom decay right at that moment? We now have physical models that say efficient cause evaporates when you get down to the fundamental level of material events. We have to start thinking less conventionally, more holistically, about causality.
So now there is a happy coincidence between the physics and the metaphysics. And why - actually understanding the metaphysics - would we not see it is more than just some coincidence?
Yes it must be baffling. I acknowledge all the efforts in the same obvious direction and yet also criticise those efforts to the degree they remain mystic and unformalised.
I'm also a constant critic of Peirce, don'tcha know? The ability to be self-critical like this - to highlight flaws so as to keep improving on the understanding - is such a rare thing. Outside of a scientific training.
So if you want a mental image, it is a chaotic sea of fluctuations. A maximally confused host of actions in "every direction", and thus expressing "no direction in particular".
Constraints then emerge to regulate this chaos, give it form, bring it into a state of relative peace and order - an equilibrium that persists.
So start by switching out the image of a nothingness and bringing in an image of a seething directionlesss everythingness. Then start to subtract the concreteness that that imagery appears to demand.
I agree it ain't easy. But that is also how you get your head around mathematical conceptions of symmetry, or physical conceptions of quantum path integrals. With practice, you start to get the required level of abstract intuition.
But also, at the end of the day, any kind of "picture in the head" is not the point. The scientific method accepts that the final judge of all conceptions is not "how convincing it feels to my imaginative powers" but "is this idea publicly useful as a system of theory and testing?" - a modelling relation or interpretive habit.
It is hard to reply if you insist on being ridiculous. Anyone who ever came up with a powerful metaphysical view was reasoning from experience of the world.
Do you think it would be possible to have clever thoughts about existence if you are blind, deaf and dumb?
So you are asking what causes vagueness? Apart from a lack of crispness?
What bit of my account of counterfactuality and the legitimacy of causal questions did you fail to get?
Even think why it is so important to you that I remain "other" to the ancient wisdoms you quite like. Why do you treat that as the ultimate disaster here? Why don't you look for the possibility of a friendly connection in that fact? What could you have been missing in our discussion so far?
But hey, if we've suddenly departed from common semantics, so be it. Till some next time, then.
Actually it's intuition.Quoting apokrisis
Now you are really showing your true colors.
Is this the mystical Cosmic Purpose?
Quoting apokrisis
Precisely, how is "It just happened" useful in any fashion other than to continue the mythology that science has an answer?
Funny, I had Helen Keller in mind. So that would answer that. Trying to address the metaphysical here, though.
That's right, so you are assuming as a premise, the existence of something whose nature is such, that the thing is unintelligible. Not only is this blatantly unphilosophical, but it is demonstrably a mistaken premise.
In the logical process, we proceed from premises which are of the highest degree of certainty toward an understanding of things which we have a lower degree of certainty about. The premise "X is unintelligible", cannot be known with any degree of certainty because this would be self-contradicting. To know that X is unintelligible is to know X, and knowing X means that X is necessarily intelligible.
So the premise that X is unintelligible can be interpreted in no way other than as the statement "I do not understand X". This says nothing about X itself, it says something about the intellect which is trying to understand X. Therefore it is always a mistake, wrong, incorrect, to posit as an ontological principle, the existence of something unintelligible. If something appears to be unintelligible, then we ought to assume that the intellect attempting to understand it is deficient. If it could be proven that the thing actually is unintelligible, this would constitute knowing the thing, rendering that conclusion as false. Therefore it is impossible to prove that a thing is unintelligible, and wrong to assume that a thing is unintelligible.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the mistaken premise I refer to. It is fundamental to emergence theory, and is nothing other than the statement of "I don't understand it therefore it is unintelligible".
Quoting apokrisis
You grossly misrepresent Aristotle. He analyzed the concept of "prime matter" and by means of the cosmological argument he demonstrated that the existence of prime matter is logically impossible. You'll find this in his "Metaphysics" Bk 9".
Quoting apokrisis
This is "the unintelligible". And. it is the assumption which Aristotle firmly and decisively refuted with the cosmological argument. Here's a summary of that argument. It is impossible that there ever was such a thing as pure potential without limitation, because if there ever was such a thing as pure, infinite potential, there would always be pure infinite potential, because it requires something actual to actualize any potential. If there is something actual, then it is impossible that there is pure infinite potential. What we observe is that there is something actual, therefore it is impossible that there ever was pure infinite potential. Simply put, the proposition of pure potential without limitation is denied as impossible, by the fact that there is something actual.
In my own opinion, no she wouldn't. My stance's justifications are inductive ... meaning to say, not of deductive logic. The nature of experience having a lot to do with this.
But that's not the point. The point is WHAT is experience? You at least have to admit of the dualism of the constituents AND the "Feels like" first person perspective. THAT is the dualism. Whether you call the feels like aspect an illusion or not, the illusion HAS to be accounted for to solve the hard problem.
Sigh. I said totalising questions have no resources by which they can be answered. So eventually we arrive at brute fact. "There is existence," is all we can say. Proper counterfactual questions no longer exist.
So that is the negative conclusion. I'm sure you will pounce on it gleefully as an admission that thus nothing has been said at all here. Any argument I made lacks its factual - or rather, counterfactual basis - and so must be "inadequate" to the question you still insist on asking. The question that has no answer as it ain't actually a question.
Sigh. The way you folk keep circling back to that burning need for efficient cause absolutism. If there is an effect, there just has to be a reason. As soon as any terminating concept is named - like vagueness - off you must go again.
So stop and think. We can't totalise. But we can safely dichotomise. We can work our way towards the most fundamental of metaphysical-strength counterfactuals.
I've explained how some traditional "dichotomies" like mind~matter don't work. They are merely broken dualisms rather than formally mutual divisions - definitions that meet the requirement of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive".
Mind and matter just speak to different and unrelated varieties of substance - real stuff and soul stuff. Plato and Aristotle already took metaphysics down below the level of "substance", revealing it to be the emergent hylomorphic product of formal and material causality.
And Peirce of course heralded the modern re-conception in terms of information and dynamics. The symbol~matter dichotomy. This works as the source of the mutual exclusiveness is there in plain sight. Material dynamics is all about dimensionality. Signs then exist at the limit of dimensionality, They are what is left once physics has been removed from the equation as much as possible. They are what must arise as a new concrete possibility once dimensionality has been constrained as a possibility - shrunk to a zero dimensional point.
It would be worth re-reading my lengthy post on the biophysical basis of biosemiosis. The physical zeroing of dynamics - the convergence of many varieties of energetic process at the quasi-classical nanoscale - is another spectacular proof of this fundamental insight.
But anyway, the point about the vague~crisp is that it arises as the limit of our metaphysical inquiries into the question of "why existence?".
We can't answer the question in some monistic fashion - A caused B, and that's that. It is already accepted that existence itself is a brute fact because it is a totalising question bereft of counterfactuals (well, no one has imagined a good one so far).
But as a positive metaphysical achievement, we can say that we pushed the limits as far as was possible. And my argument - the one I say many ancient wisdoms share, even if in groping, informal fashion - is that the vague~crisp defines that epistemic limit best.
However if you can argue against that, go for it.
You know Helen Keller wasn't born that way? And she always had the senses of touch, taste and smell.
No, the point is WHAT IS IT NOT? If you can't provide the suitable counterfactual, you ain't got nothing, buster.
Hardly.
One can say that Mind exists, and that's that. And Mind feels and that's that.
But not the physicalist! No they are categorically claiming that Mind came out of No-Mind. That life emerged of no-life. No-life is the physicalist starting point (unless it gets to uncomfortable, and then Cosmic Purpose is helicoptered in). That is the OP's question. How did Life come from no-life? The physicalist staked their own starting point. Interestingly Peirce smartly places mind before matter. He knows what he is doing.
So do you know how this miracle occurred? If not, then we stop at Mind exists. It is the physicalist that have to show how something occurred out of nothing otherwise we have no life, no mind. Or alternatively, they can take the universally applicable, "It just happened", which would be the vague-crisp that has suddenly become the foundation of the physicalist explanation of life.
It was a quantum mind field projection bit of trickery by the big daddy hologram up in the sky. Or something like that. Can't actually remember straight.
But I saw the YouTube clip on it by some guy who builds banking software. And he wasn't even wearing a tin-foil hat. He had to be legit.
The thread was rather long but I enjoyed it. Can we invite Dennet to the forum to explain the selfish gene? I bet we get lots of vague-crisp from that discussion.
Your answer of "vague~crisp" does not answer the question that you replied to … unless it is to explicitly say that the metaphysical beginning is unknowable. This being the very position I hold which you first chose to argue against. (This in manners that were less than cordial seeming. I won’t splurge on the details but, hell, we’ve all got our moods. And no, no apologies on my part.)
As to your notion of dichotomies with relations in-between being everything in terms of existence:
You have a rather important dichotomy to existence: that of conflict v. harmony. Some of us emotive people can interpret the same as hate v. love. Some of other folks can interpret it as states of chaos v. states of order. It doesn’t much matter how the processes are interpreted here; nor at what levels of existence they're addressed; the two processes of becoming remain the same.
I say that, while conflict (between gives) is impossible devoid of harmony (minimally, within the givens that conflict) the opposite does not hold metaphysically. Harmony can occur in the absence of all conflict. This is not a “crispness” that requires both dyads to be. In the latter form, the given of harmony / love / order can exist just fine in the complete absence its opposite – to not even address any relation in -between. This, again, metaphysically. (Granted not given some presumption of a known initial firstenss but given existence as is in current forms.)
For now, I’ve little doubt that you will disagree. But this would lead us into, maybe, more fertile grounds of debate.
I for now have to take some time off for myself. I’ll check back on this tomorrow.
Mmm. Still not getting it even when it is said explicitly?
It is epistemically fundamental - I take it as true - that questions no longer have answers once they become totalising and lack counterfactuality.
But then you are seeking some ontic certainty despite that explicit epistemic caveat.
So I say no go. That is simply brute fact argument. You are presuming a truth that has no means of test. You have gone beyond epistemically reasonable metaphysics. Sorry to have to be the one to break this bad news.
Then returning to what I'm saying, I'm saying - epistemically - we are safe in talking about the emergence of existence right after the earliest moment that its symmetry in fact just broke.
So vague~crisp does that. We are dealing already with a developmental process busy growing. We are in the game now in a measurable fashion.
This won't satisfy ontic absolutists. They will cling on to their ability to appear like sceptics, opposing any explanation even though they are now - at this level of rarified questioning - operating without the oxygen of proper counterfactuals.
You can't stop folk talking even when what they say is just nonsense. But you can show that it is nonsense when they can't pose their scepticism, their endless questioning, in grounded counter-factual terms.
The inquiry of "why existence", when asked, is quickly exposed as nonsensical. The real metaphysical inquiry asks "why is there what there is, rather than something else". And emergence, from the random symmetry-breaking of pure, infinitely vague potential, is not an intelligent answer.
Wanted to pop in to say this, unforgiven as it might be.
I'll get back to the "logic" of it all tomorrow. Hell, maybe.
I suggested you focus for a change on why ein sof or dependent co-arising might be something shared here. But it is your choice to see only divisions.
But that's the point! It exists qua its own phenomena. There is no counterfactual as there is just feeling-like-something, the territory that you keep missing for the map. Perhaps that's when you know you hit territory and not map :D.
Yep. Anaximander confused the heck out of folk as the only recorded scrap of his actual words talked about cosmic justice vs injustice. Heraclitus likewise talked about this unity of opposites - flux and logos.
So that is what I cash out when talking about constraints vs freedoms. A system is the necessity of both in balance.
When it comes to the science of social relations - sociology - we see the same story playing out at a higher level. What is fundamental to a natural notion of a social system is that it is the successful balancing of two necessary oppositions - co-operation and competition.
The main difference here then is you want to add some further twist - another metaphysical dimension to your analysis. And that is based on the opposition of good and bad, or some such deontic distinction.
So my position would be deontically neutral. Neither competition nor co-operation would be inherently either good or bad. It is their balancing act that counts. And even that resulting outcome is not inherently good or bad in a Platonic "the Good" way.
As a natural philosopher, nature just is what it is and doesn't have to answer to transcendent values. Existence has no further moral dimension (although culturally we are free to construct a morality that pragmatically works for us in terms of achieving an optimal balance of competition and co-operation).
But I get it that for you existence does probably just have this inherent value. It is fundamental and so top of your concerns in any discussion we might have.
So I can recognise the legitimacy of adding further dimensions to our metaphysics that go beyond the simple-minded reductionism we all complain about. I've just argued again for the vague~crisp distinction of anyone taking a developmental position on ontology. And so your choice to defend a deotological axis of description - if that is what you are doing - is both a valid epistemic move in my view, yet one that I of course contest vigorously on ontological grounds.
Quoting javra
Ah. There you see where now I would disagree even epistemically. Nothing can be spoken of intelligibly except counterfactually. Harmony makes no sense as language, as proposition, unless not-harmony refers to something more solid than just "whatever not might mean".
That was the problem of the Platonic good - especially right through all Christian theology. Evil has to exist to make sense of goodness. And yet the existence of evil, or worse yet, its deliberate creation, does not compute. How could a God of perfect love and harmony allow the stain of Satan to come into being?
Theology tries to say the paradox of that formulation is somehow resolved in Hegelian fashion by making the re-establishment of perfection at the end of Earthly time somehow a fact that reinforces the concreteness of God's purity.
It doesn't fly logically. But that is what happens when theology becomes the sound of one hand clapping - the notion that only one half of a dichotomy is "true", the other necessarily "false".
So I would say you are fooling yourself in not actually even granting yourself a deontic dimension anchored securely at either end by the complementary notions of good and bad, harmony and strife, order and disorder, heaven and hell.
Metaphysics works because it got the hang of proper dialectical argument. Theology retreats from that at its peril. Or rather, retreating form the fray is the only way theology, tied up in its paradoxical knots, can survive.
(I don't mean all theology. A lot of it has flirted with proper systems thinking. The re-discovery of Peirce was certainly led by religious scholars.)
It's like you have zero comprehension skills. Don't just claim counterfactuals are irrelevant to facticity. Demonstrate how that is an epistemically credible stance to be taking.
The fact that there is a feels-like-something along with the modelling. The feels like something is the flipside/inner quality whatever you want to call it. It is not the map of the model, but the actual modelling itself processing from the inside. But "what" is this inside? That is the dualistic nature of the problem.
Have a go at supporting the counter-factual - that there is the kind of modelling relation the human brain has with its environment and that that feels like ... nothing?
When is that the case?
If you are dead or in a coma, for example, there is no modelling relation. But when you are in a lived and active engagement with the world, what supports your claimed counter-factual here?
Not seeing it. (Hey, another counter-factual!)
But this goes beyond counterfactual to what is. Experience is a phenomena. What is the phenomena of experience? Your insistence on counterfactuals here makes no sense because you are constantly looking for a map in a question of metaphysics. What is existence? It is the feeling of experience- BEING the model, NOT OBSERVING the model. Being the model has this experiential quality that is somehow NOT primary to the constituents but EMERGES into its own thing. How is that not a dualism? You cannot get out of it be referring back to the constituents and ignoring that its emerged (into something different.. which you never explain other than referring back to the map).
We could be here forever and you won't get the first bit of it. In my metaphysics, the constituents emerge too. The global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom.
This is holism here. There is no point you trying to understand that reductionistically.
In context of the experiential self, how does that translate? Sounds all map.. Local degrees of freedom? Is that the experience? Why does green "feel" like something and is not simply non-feeling communication.. well it emerges.. Well what is that emerging that is no other except in this modelling relation. Experience is never really excavated.
Sorry that this still doesn't answer your Hard Problem for you. But you haven't even decided if green is a concept, an impression, or even the interaction of the two. You are not even taking baby steps away from a rigid substance ontology.
Concepts/impressions don't live in a vacuum. They have the quality of being experienced by an experiencer. Thus cart before horse. Or perhaps simply more map no territory.
Ah, up pops your "experiencer". Because of course if you have experiences, then an experiencer is there already just waiting for his Cartesian theatre to roll. It's "logical" says the simple-minded "cause an effect" reductionist.
Talk about horse and cart.
When it comes to getting semiotics, its like you are trying to play Blind Man's Buff and everyone has left the room. Vainly your outstretched fingers grope for something to clutch hold of.
So far I've seen plenty of experiencers in your model, but they are hidden. There is emerging. There is interpretant. There is degrees of freedom. There is triadic relation modelling. All of these are kind of like place holders for "and experience happens", which is essentially saying a dualism exists. The dual aspect of the inner experience accompanied by its observable phenomena of constituents by the very thing that is experiencing. You don't have to give up your modelling to be a dualist, it is simply saying there is a dual aspect- one of the observable (the modelling) and other of the process happening (experience). The process happening is qualitatively different, though it may be composed of the same constituents and can be mapped like other physical constituents. However, the dual aspect remains.
Of course you have. That is how conception works, remember? It shapes your impressions. You always feel like you find what you are looking for if you look hard enough.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or maybe they're not. Maybe they are how we might label aspects of experiencing. Maybe that's how we talk structurally about a process.
For you its all reified nouns. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs. But I can see that ain't happening.
Verbs like Cosmic Goals, thermodynamic purpose, and constraints. Whitehead called all this God in his process metaphysics.
"Whitehead saw God as necessary for his metaphysical system.[114] His system required that an order exist among possibilities, an order that allowed for novelty in the world and provided an aim to all entities. Whitehead posited that these ordered potentials exist in what he called the primordial nature of God."
I've been reading up a bit on the formation of carbon chemistry at the year dot, and have to say that while we might be able to get to nucleic acids and amino acids at a stretch, we're not even close to explaining DNA - and once we get inside, holy crap. I'm working toward a post just on that alone.
Not really. I accept its process philosophy basically. It is you who accuse I propose otherwise. However, I do also claim the "shocking" idea that the process has an inner aspect. According to you, accepting that there is inner experiential qualities of (at least certain) processes is somehow antithetical to your theory. Also, reified verbs aren't much better than reified nouns. Process occurs but the process is not the experience any more than the regions lighting up in an fMRI is the experience of green. It may be the physical processes but not the experience itself. The experience itself is "something". That something has to be analyzed for what it is in itself, not how it can be mapped mathematically or logically. Your assumptions just don't allow you to excavate the experiential aspect.
But this is beside the point. Everyone experiences with a mind. Either one moves ahead and explores it or in simply shunts it aside as some illusion for the sake of expediency. As for me, my experience in this world is as someone experiencing and creating. This is what I am exploring because I am interested in the nature of life.
Personally glad you added Heraclitus into the mix here. If you’ve ever read his fragments, his notion of “Zeus” is to my notion of what I’ve so far termed the telos of “unbounded awareness” as Anaximander’s notion of Apeiron is to your notion of vagueness. This being another, although maybe trite, way of illustrating the differences (rather than agreements) in our current structures of metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
You’ll notice I made no judgement call as to whether conflict or harmony is good, or as to which would be bad. Think in terms of Nietzsche’s meme of “beyond good and evil”. Slay Nietzsche’s dragon as Nietzsche’s lion by slaying each of its scales of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not”. When you’re done, you’ll understand that this is about meta-ethical values, and not about any authoritative other telling you the “truth” to what is “Good” and what is “evil” – or alternatively, to what is right and what is wrong. We’re currently conflicting—I do hope you’ll laugh at the specious conclusion that, therefore, we are both evil. Gee, what would a debate forum be without all the evil-folk so defined as evil due to conflicts of opinion? Rather, in my system, primary focus is always placed upon end-states to being-as-awareness that is always in a state-of-becoming.
This is the portion missing from your system which brings about that extra layer which we sometimes term “ethics” but which I gather is nowadays better addressed as the philosophy of value-theory. Not an unimportant aspect of metaphysics, considering. And, to my mind, you cannot coherently obtain it if you insist on the only ontically real end-state being that of a Heat Death. This in the metaphysics I endorse is one variant of what I’ve so far termed “the nonbeing endstate of awareness (which is not identical to the identity of self)”, and I do look upon it as an ontically illusory endstate. Of course, you are far more interested in explaining the nuts and bolts of the physical – while I’m far more interested in explaining what the different types of reality that can be are, including that of physical objectivity and of metaphysical objectivity – and your system of metaphysics works best in terms of the physical aspects which you seek to explain.
To my mind, it would be nice to try to converge the two systems, but the current problem is, we justify our two systems in drastically different ways … although we both start with a kind of epistemological vagueness, to use your terms.
To me – and no doubt the arguments will persist on this – you seem to reify epistemological vagueness into a sub-stantial Apeirion and then proceed to make conclusions with use of this Apeiron as a premise. The way I go about things is by building up from foundations of optimal firmness (crispness) and then using these resultant conclusions of optimal firmness as foundations for further enquiry. Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; my system starts off with awareness as ontic, brute, fact. To illustrate, I can find no justifiable (via awareness, reasoning, or both) counterfactual to the proposition “the first-person point of view holds presence when in any way aware”. This lack of currently known counterfactuals does not then make this experience-based proposition an “unmitigated certainty”, for one cannot prove that at no future point in time will there ever be discovered such counterfactuals – and, thereby, demonstrate the proposition to be perfectly devoid of all possible error. But, because no counterfactuals can currently be found for it, it does make it a second-best type of certainty, an “unfalsified certainty” I’ve termed it (an inductive/abductive epistemological process of reasoning that nicely conforms to the scientific method’s principle of falsifiability, apropos). I’ve mentioned this not because I seek argument on the matter but so as to not appear so obtuse in what I’ve previous expressed.
At the end of the day we both for the most part agree with C S Pierce’s ontology. For my part, I wouldn’t mind debating these differences between us once I’m finished with reediting the entirety of my notes, this so that we may better exchange notes. But, due to the constraints of life, it’s bound to be some years before I finish doing so.
So, if it’s OK with you, maybe we can defer our basic metaphysical disagreements to some other future time. Plenty of other things to debate/talk about as far as I’m concerned. If not, I’m all ears.
Hardly. My question to you is how is that not explained (in at least some tentative fashion) by agreement that a modelling relation with the world seems the kind of process that simply ought to "feel like something".
Even just a crude "picture in the head" representationalism, says there is something inner. There is the outer world and the inner picture of it. The problem is that representationalism is homuncular. It sets up the expectation that there is still "an experiencer" required to look at the pictures.
The modelling relations view aims to get past that in the fashion of ecological, enactive or embodied theories of cognition. Or Peircean habits of interpretance.
First, human consciousness needs to be deflated. We have to see that self-consciousness - the further habit of self-regulatory introspection - is a socio-linguistic skill. The ego, the self, is a verbal concept which we learn to apply. The "experiencer" is now a social-level selfhood, a view of our biological self taken from an externally anchored vantage point. We learn to view our actions, our behaviour, our "animal" urges, our accomplishments and acheivements, as if from a third person point of view - the generalised judgement of our family, peers, betters, and indeed entire cultural milieu.
So that social self is still a result of semiosis. Our cultures have some idea of the right way to be a human. And that becomes a constraint "we" learn to apply to our behaviour. In the Western romantic/individualist tradition especially, this social self becomes reified as an actual being living inside our heads.
Anthropology finds that simpler tribal cultures know right from wrong as simply being about how they would be judged if their actions were visible to their peers. But the Western way has been to make right and wrong a property of "the self". Sin and saintliness are properties of an inner soul. The third person social point of view gets internalised as part of the general modelling relation with the world.
That is why the psychology of modern man is so complex and existentially fraught. We live life through society's eyes. Our heads are crowded places with complex decisions. We find ourselves being pushed about by a confliction of selves. That is, "we" wind up in the middle between the social super-ego and the biological id, as Freud put it.
So first there is the socially constructed sense of self that worms its way into our heads to structure our experience. This illustrates how "points of view" are semiotically constructed. When we talk about "the experiencer", we are really talking about a system of constraints that kick into organise the flow of action.
We may personalise that machinery - call it "a self". But really it is just a machinery of constraints that reliably kicks in to focus action. It is a habit of interpretance. And that then contrasts with the individual novel acts of interpretance which may be how we form a point of view from one monent to the next. So every state of impression is some particular point of view in which an experiencer vs experience dyad is formed. It is another fleeting state of orientation in which we imagine an external or detached angle that makes "personal sense" of some particular state of the world.
Now I'm getting on to the biological level of semiosis or selfhood.
It just is the case with neural modelling that a discrimination between "self" and "world" is core to the process. If I am chewing, I have to have a constant sense of what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. Confuse the two and it is painful. So right at the foundation of perceptual processing, there is a self/other discrimination that starts the show.
A "self" is implicit in working out constantly where the boundaries of our bodies and their intentions, their capabilities, lie. And then, from the same computation, the world - as everything "other" to that - is also implied. The world exist for us not because it is there, but because we understand it to be there as that which brutely resists our wishes and interests.
This is what an embodied approach to cognition is about. What comes first is neither self, nor world, but the unbounded and so vague experience of the infant. It is only as habits of interpretation are built up that we become practiced and secure at making an automatic, subconscious level, running discrimination in which there are the two things of a self and a world. We divide things into the experiences of what is "out there" and the experiencer which is "in here". Self and world co-arise as the definite categories of experiencing.
So the "experiencer" is revealed as a processing habit. There is no "I" at the fundamental level. But I-ness is what arises in conjunction with other-ness. We get a reified notion of there being a homuncular experiencer, an inner witnesser and willer, along with an equally reified notion of "the world" as a place of brute physical facticity.
So a good theory of mind is one that can track the semiotic reality of how both self and world co-emerge via a modelling relations process. They are both "inner" - as Kant argued. Which leaves the third thing of actual world outside, the thing in itself.
And Peirce then turned that into a more concrete formalism - a triadic description which correctly sees that what is going on is a habit of interpretance that forms for itself the signs by which it responds.
The fact that we can talk about "the self" and "the world", and find that meaningful in terms of knowing what to usefully do next, shows we have indeed reified these things as the signs that are needed to anchor acts of interpretation.
If my elbow knocks over the crystal display in crowded shop, I can immediately determine who is to blame. Well, at least I will know the grounds of the complicated debate that must ensue in my head. Was it me being clumsy? Was it my troublesome id acting out deliberately? Is it is the shop's fault for crowding its wares and almost ensuing an accident like this would happen? Maybe the shop is even being sly and deliberately setting customers up for costly breakages?
A whole host of third person points of view. Pick one as the correct first person experience of the situation.
In fact I am trying to avoid the usual substantial take on the Apeiron, just as I am of Mind.
But also, I am a physicalist in that I accept the scientific evidence that consciousness is emergent from complexity. It is not a simple. We know that because there is such a clear explanatory connection between brains and behaviour for a start. Drink and you feel drunk. It becomes foolish after that to deny mental states are not supervenient on material ones.
So to talk about what could be "the fundamental" - the foundational vague potential - we have to reason via whatever we know to have popped out of it emergently. And that boils down to the duality of matter and form (according to our founding metaphysics). So there must be some kind of materiality, as well as some kind of organisational structure, present in the Apeiron - at least as its unexpressed potential.
That is the argument that leads back to the notion of the Apeiron as a sea of chaotic fluctuations. Actions with a direction.
Of course, that is already "too much" in terms of an actual vagueness. But also, it seems the least possible form of definiteness. A bare action with a direction unrelated to any other is a nothing really.
It is like standing on top of a fog-bound mountain and stabbing a finger as if towards a path. It seems a meaningful event, yet it just ain't without a larger context that can make it so in relational fashion. Pointing in any other direction, in any other way, would have been just as good at that first moment.
So yes, hylomorphic substantiality is what emerges. And that is then how vagueness must be modelled or understood. We can roll our imaginations back to the very first breaking of its symmetry by the most meaningless possible fluctuation, the most relationless relation between a material action and a formal direction or organisation.
Talk about the Apeiron will thus always have to carry an air of substantiality. But the Apeiron is then formally the vague limit to substantiality. It is the boundary to reality, not itself a further state of reality. That is the subtle further bit of the story.
Quoting javra
My system starts off with symmetry-breaking and hence there must be some duality from the first moment. If there is awareness, then there must be equally also its "other" - however that is then correctly conceived.
As argued, mind and matter just don't pan out as that dichotomy. This is obvious from all the problems that bedevil ontic dualism. There is just no way to see each as the cause of the other in interactive fashion.
But another dichotomy - constraints and degrees of freedom, or information and matter - does have that intrinsic complementary machinery. We can translate from one to the other in a way that shows they are causally related. Each crisply exists to the degree its "other" is absent. The metaphysical relationship is not one of opposition or negation but instead of the inverse or reciprocal. The symmetry-breaking is not one that just brutely exists, but one that has to develop with the fullness with time.
Quoting apokrisis
Here, you confuse awareness with awareness-of. In most, if not all, aspects of life—heck, even in all aspects of out of body experiences, where one to entertain the possibility of such occurrence—our awareness always consists of some awareness-of. It is awareness-of that in-forms us as selves, gives us as conscious agents form. We as selves are different due to the differences in awareness-of which, in part, includes: our perceived contexts of physical environment (our own bodies are, in part, perceived as self via physiological senses such as that of proprioception), our memories experienced at any given time, our moods, our thoughts, our percepts of that which is internal to our own minds (like in the imagined taste of freshly cut lemon), and so on. And yes, from here on out, of course, there’s self and other/world as a requisite dichotomy. Nevertheless, what you seem to be missing from the terminology of Ein Sof (and related terms from other cultures) is the very plausible (at the very least, quite fitting to all works in which it is mentioned) metaphysical interpretation of the intended referent being that of awareness sans awareness-of. This awareness sans awareness-of, however, is stated to be obtainable by many in many cultures via things such as meditation; though not maintainable, other than a maintained awareness of this being the foundation of all that can and does stand. Naturally, there can conversely be no awareness-of sans awareness.
But, I figure, we’re getting too spiritualizational-like (my sense of humor) in using terms such as Ein Sof, this being the Kabalistic term for the ground of all being, out of which the Kabalistic tree of life emanates.
Still, wanted to clarify this different metaphysical perspective—relative to that which you hold—which is likewise rather ancient, and very wide spread to different cultures. Of course this metaphysical slant cannot be evidenced via physics, awareness of which already entails there being some awareness-of; only via metaphysical means. And yes, I already know, we disagree on whether awareness could hold presence in the absence of awareness-of.
I must have missed something big! All I remember was the phrase Thermodynamic Purpose being invented out of thin air. Granted there were about 1000 words surrounding this little sleight of hand, but no amount of words is going to hide that obvious trick. I believe it came right before the other offering of "Cosmic Goal". It's easy to explain things if all you need is words. How about, a "Romantic Cell" or a "Hungry Gene" or better yet, the "Yankee Fan molecule"?
As for Peirce, he had no ontology that I could find other than "tychism", which for the uninitiated is another manufactured word to take the place of "I don't have the foggiest idea, it just happened!" After that it is easy for Pierce. Mind just happened and Matter happened from Mind. But no need to go any further than that. I guess "It just happened", can be considered an ontology, but hardly an interesting one. What is interesting is the number of big and manufactured words it took for him to say it.
Not missing, but explicitly rejecting.
Although I'm certainly also sympathetic to the idea that all differences disappear as we work our way back to vagueness.
So we are both arguing from opposite sides of the fence. In the end I am speaking in a physicalist register, you (I assume) an idealist register. But I agree also that "in the end", experience is what is epistemically primary (for us). Dasein, Firstness, or whatever term one uses. To talk about grounding experience in the world is the beginning of an explanation. But we never transcend the limits of the fact of being grounded in .... not mind, or even awareness, but whatever is experience as vague being.
So there is something to meditation and other such ego-shedding spiritual practices even within my scheme. I am indeed talking of vagueness as physics. I have the explicit project of pan-semiosis where even "the world" is organised by a "mind-like" process - both world and mind being recognised as labels we apply to an experience thus divided. So pan-semiosis is ontically idealist to the extent it is not brute realism (and reciprocally, not brute idealism to the extent it its realist).
However, in terms of experience itself, as we can discover it to be, then shedding structuring thoughts and returning to some bare ground of "just being" is a legitimate project from the idealist side. I guess that was exactly what interested me a long time ago when I was getting started.
I did spend a lot of time investigating actual phenomenology - uncovering the fact that the organised mind is a busy place, and so how it could be relaxed back into a generalised nothingness, a vagueness, by zoning out, or a floatation tank, or that point where one falls asleep, or what it is actually like in the depths of deep non-dreaming sleep.
So I say Zen is bunk because of the notion that it is a self-mastering path to personal power. I realise that also there are varieties of Zen. The particular one I encountered at 10 was all about martial arts. It was about centering the mind so as to be able to muster strength and speed in action. And I thought sod that as the mosquitoes descended. Finding that kind of mental focus is not difficult in a sports situation. It's practical training. No need to dress it up with transcendent significance.
But then being able to still the mind - or rather empty its attentive foreground so as to allow a background natural restless manifest - is a useful trick when having to be creative in your thinking. You have to be able to strip away existing mental organisation, go back to a vaguer mental state, and catch the novel ideas or associations that flower.
So in a pragmatic way, understanding this about the mind is a useful thing. The ability to control our experiential vagueness has value, even if it is not of transcendent significance (no deontic dimension).
You do seem to want to defend the crisp existence of bare awareness - the generalised state that is about nothing in particular, and thus quietly, restlessly, about potentially everything.
And I would say something similar, but with different emphasises because of my own interests. It is the restless potential - the everythingness rather than the nothingness - which would lie at the end of my naturalist phenomenology.
So the Zen I criticise (which you may rightfully say is a caricature in speaking of the Westernised new age take) is wrong in making nothingness the goal. Somehow even the inkling of thoughts and urges must be stilled to the point of not existing. And this impossibility is why you might get a smack over the head from the Zen master, or spend a lifetime never achieving this idealised state.
My view - which fits with the neurology - is that the whole point of foundational mental being is to be a rustle of a billion possibilities. You need the mind as a sea of fluctuations - a Peircean Firstness of flashes of uncontexted thoughts and bare sensations - to then have some Tychism or creative spontaneity to shape up into an organised structure of awareness-of.
Definitely saving this for the summation of this thread. Physicalism at its most poetic.
Still you ramble on...
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm sorry to have to be so blunt, but sometimes when a person is so trapped by unreasonable self-conviction that the individual is doing or saying irrational things, it is necessary to grab that person's attention and say "Hey, you are acting irrationally!"
Well, it's quite clear that I explained in very explicit terms how your backward approach is irrational, and you had no reply to that.
Either the post is there or it is not. I think it's there, and you had no reply. And that's legit.
I see no problem in presuming the "ground of being" to be instead the "limit of being". Indeed, that is what makes sense given that I am talking about emergence and challenging a brute existence based ontology.
If intelligiblity is what arises, then the foundational limit to that developmental trajectory is "the unintelligible".
Sure, the story picks up at the first inkling of intelligibility. The whole epistemic approach is internalist or immanent. But that is the bleeding point.
We actually have to start from the "subjectivity of our being". And we can't hope for some transcendent leap to a God's eye point of view of the facts - the Kantian thing in itself. So internalism - a la Peirce - is just good metaphysics.
Happy now?
No. I'm not happy, this is exactly the position which I criticised in my post, and you still haven't addressed my criticism. You've just restated your position which premises "the unintelligible" as an ontological principle. You haven't addressed my argument against this, which demonstrates that this is an irrational ontological principle.
It is irrational because the thing posited as "unintelligible" cannot be known to be unintelligible because this would mean that the thing is known and therefore intelligible, so the principle would be self-contradicting. If it appears to be unintelligible, but is not known to be unintelligible, then it is most likely a defect in the intellect which is attempting to understand it, which makes it appear to be unintelligible. Then it would not be the nature of the thing itself which makes it appear to be unintelligible, so it would be wrong to call it this. Either way, it is wrong to have an ontological principle which posits the reality of "the unintelligible".
Quoting apokrisis
This is the impossibility, right here in a nutshell. It is impossible that intelligibility is what arises. Pure random unintelligible infinite potential cannot give rise to intelligible constraint, because this would mean that it negates itself. What it is not, in absolutism, must be already within it, in order that it could negate itself, and this is self-contradictory. Can pure, absolute randomness suddenly become ordered? The order must come from somewhere. But if all there is, is pure absolute, infinite disorder, then there is nowhere for it to come from.
Err, yeah. That was the point. The self-negation of unintelligibility (the constraint on chaos) is what Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness" is all about.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Back to efficient causes, hey? Good luck with that.
Boggles the mind why you then bring up notions such as that of the Ein Sof to support your metaphysics. Could easily confuse others as regards what your positions are, don't you know.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, but your sympathies as regards the metaphysics are clearly misplaced—regardless of our potential agreements on the physical and on the here and now. And these conversations have clearly not been about the physical relations between brain and mind.
This telos of “unbounded, selfless awareness” I’ve made mention of is in no way about “going back to vagueness” … just as a human’s awareness is not more vague respective to that of an ant’s but, rather, a greater magnitude of harmonized awareness that is far less bounded by the logos which surrounds and which, as individual lifeform, is far more capable of producing and restructuring the surrounding logos toward the ends which it seeks. The metaphysical telos of unbounded awareness is one of infinite, perfectly harmonized awareness—one of absolute love, some may say—unrestrained by logos. It is only this aspect which makes it an ultimate unknown to any of us body-endowed beings of awareness (as well as to—if one chooses to entertain such things—angels, deities, etc.) At any rate, not one of vagueness.
Right, as I demonstrated in that post, if this is Peirce's ontology, it is mistaken. And, it is the mistake of emergentism in general.
If you had a die, which could roll any number between one and six, and you knew that you could keep rolling forever and the outcome of each roll would be an equal possibility of every number between one and six, why would you believe that at some point some constraints would emerge? It's an irrational belief because it's contrary to what we already claim to know about the die..
That is what you claim when you posit an apeiron of infinite possibility, then say that constraints emerge. Can't you see the irrationality here? You claim to know the apeiron as infinite possibility, then say that constraints emerge from this, as if constraints could emerge from the possibilities involved in rolling the die. Come on, what makes a mind like yours, which normally thinks in a clear and rational way, choose such a clearly irrational ontological principle?
Quoting apokrisis
I never said "efficient cause", I assume final cause,.
When you assume a material first principle, as you do, then some form of active cause is necessary to bring about change. But you assume that the constraints just magically emerge out of the infinite freedom of material potential, as a symmetry-breaking. And this is completely irrational.
To some, it may seem too simplistic to describe current scientific theories about the origins of the Universe and Life as "It just happened", but if one takes the time too peel away all of the manufactured words and ideas, and the fog of verbosity, "It just happened", is all that is left. To masquerade the emptiness of the explanations, words such as tychism, and other poetic and pseudo-scientific phrases as invented out of thin air. All to avoid the easily understood phrase"We don't have the foggiest idea".
But it doesn't stop there. It continues on and permeates all of neuro-biological scientific literature, that whenever something doesn't fit or make sense, science conveniently calls upon its "It just happens", explanation of the world, ignoring, marginalizing, or ostracizing any idea that doesn't fit into it's highly biased physicalist view if life. As a result, understanding the nature of the mind/body and maintenance of its health is severely impacted. This is the major practical issue.
Oh yes. We in fact add the constraint that maximises our uncertainty over which number will turn up by throwing it in a way that is as if we don't care. In any dice game, that is the rule - the principle of indifference. And thus a constraint that emerged at the dawn of dice games so as to make them even intelligible.
We know from observation that the intensity or power of awareness goes with the complexity of the modelling, the complexity of the neural processing, taking place so as to give an organism its first person point of view. To then argue that awareness would reach some even higher state by becoming unbounded from such located structure is a logical nonsense. It is not an extrapolation from the evidence.
A notion of universal mind makes no sense because the prime quality of being sharply conscious is to be in a most particular state of minding. Awareness-of, in your terminology.
Individual brains can then also be defocused, inattentive, even vigilant - norepinephrine-tuned in terms of noise~signal firing threshold so as to be standing ready to pick up events coming from any direction. All explicable in information processing terms.
But that just reinforces the fact that a memorable intensity of experience is due to the moment to moment development of highly particularised states of information. To posit an oceanic state of disembodied love, a cosmic awareness, is unsupported romanticism. Yes, a popular idea in culture. But not one that reasoned inquiry supports.
Quoting apokrisis
I think behind the different religious formulations of such ideas, there is an intuition of reaching an actual state beyond death, i.e. immortality (e.g. here). From the perspective of the ordinary person, and even from the perspective of science, which is basically the ordinary mind given extraordinary powers, this in unintelligible. Granted it is also not at all well understood even by the many followers of the religions themselves, and is therefore depicted in various cultural forms and beliefs. But I do think the state of 'sama-sambuddhasa' (perfectly realised enlightenment) is real, not reducible to various forms of psychologism or evolutionary-grounded illusions, at which point the individual realises him/herself as being in some essential manner, beyond death. There are comparable expressions in various cultural traditions, such as Christian Platonism, or the Vedanta - which is not to say they're all the same, or that they all mean or are talking about the same thing. What they are talking about, is a difficult thing to discern, and takes a fair amount of study to understand even in literary, let alone experiential, terms.
Quoting apokrisis
More the case that it's something philosophical naturalism has a strong vested interest against.
What if, instead of a die, you take Buffon's needle? You can throw a needle on a paper and after a while you can deduce Pi from doing so. As with a die there are a lot of constraints already in place to make this happen but I don't feel it's to dissimilar. So is there some new constraint suddenly? Did it "just happen"?
And about that "it just happens", maybe it might be more conducive for scientific folk to say something like: "we don't know how it happens". Still, I feel the route to find out what's going on lies in evolving further and not in claiming some higher order principle is already knowable ..just not in the way we are used to know things.
Cool. So perhaps you can sum up what "mind" then means in Peircean terms. What actual ontic commitments follow?
Do you think he is actually idealist, dualist, panpsychic, or what? Is reality immaterial for him? How is mind defined for him? Is it disembodied reason? Is it a substance, an awareness field, something else?
Quoting Wayfarer
But if you find the same states of oceanic feeling or religious ecstasy can be the result of temporal lobe epilepsy, or drugs, or magnetically induced stimulation, what then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurotheology
The paper I was reading, describes him as an 'objective idealist', i.e the universe is in some sense possessed of awareness. I would have thought it was necessary for there to be memory, in some sense, for nature to form habits at all, which is how he sees physical laws.
It's not that far from panpsychism, however the term hadn't been devised at his time.
Not as 'substance' as he rejected Cartesian dualism.
The Wiki entry on 'objective idealism', which mentions Peirce amongst its proponents, says 'Objective idealism accepts common sense realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things).' Would you concur with that? Earlier you did say that in some sense mind has been here all along.
Quoting apokrisis
You can have momentary realisations that are utterly real, but they are very rarely stabilised. But that is how a lot of 60's people ended up studying Buddhism - it was a very well-worn path. Only fools try and reach a stable realisation through artificial means (although, there are always plenty of them.)
//ps// - Jill Bolte Taylor - 'Stroke of Insight' - example of a catastrophic stroke inducing an experience of 'non-dual awareness'//
We justify our metaphysics differently. To keep things as simple as I can (skipping the justifications for the following conclusions):
As I’ve previously tried to mention, the “what it is like” of this endstate can only be incomprehensible to any self-endowed being. It, in fact, is the only endstate to awareness that is, as endstate, intuitively incomprehensible—all others being intuitively comprehensible to us. Compare it, for example, to the nonbeing endstate to awareness; who doesn’t hold an intuitive comprehension of what this would be? The other two, by the way, are a stability-of-self endstate and a control-over-other endstate. The hypothesis being that, regardless the specifics, we always intend toward one of these four endstates or, more commonly, a conflux of two or more of these endstates … and interact with others that do likewise.
To be clear, the endstate of “unbounded awareness” isn’t justified by its comprehensibility to us (for emphasis) self-endowed beings. It is, I believe, thoroughly justified—but not proven—in the sense that “all roads lead to Rome”; in likewise manner is it conceivable / imaginable as endstate: for example, what would the metaphysical grand conclusion be to an ever closer proximity to harmony/love/unity/order of awareness? What else but a perfectly selfless awareness/being? Yes, there is intrinsic choice between which of the four imaginable endstates of awareness is in fact the ontically real endstate; this because none can be itself definitively proven to be ontically certain; all that can be asserted with unfalsified certainty is that one of the five endstate alternatives (here the four endstate scenarios + the scenario of there being no endstate to awareness whatsoever) will in fact be ontically real—hence, will in fact be the metaphysically objective endstate scenario of being (thus being real regardless of subjective appraisals or intentions as to whether or not it is).
You may notice that this places the metaphysical above the physical … since the physical, in this model, results from a plurality of Akashas (to use the terminology I’ve previously used) in perpetually changing relations to these various endstates for Akasha (all endstates being illusory save for one). And yes, the physical (which we all know darn well to be rather complex) then in turn limits, or bounds, what Akashas can do via physical causations, including that of brain-mind relations, genotypes, etc. … which (when cutting corners) can be stated to result in individual selves that hold awareness-of.
Again, though we can both thoroughly relate to Pierces conclusions of objective idealism, this metaphysics I uphold is nevertheless not one of physicalism.
At the end of the day, it is only one more philosophical view to add to the rest of them. But it nevertheless is the philosophical view that I uphold.
The other point I wanted to come back to is this: I see Peirce as an inheritor of ideas in the Western philosophical tradition, one of which is 'nous', a seminal term in Platonist philosophy which became deeply embedded in Western philosophical discourse (and, interestingly, is nowadays vernacular for pragmatic wisdom, 'he has nous, that bloke', which is not altogether inapt.)
In any case the quotes I provided earlier, were about this facet of Peirce's thought - to which your response was 'so what, he believed in God, so did Darwin, Newton and Einstein'.
But that is beside the point. The point I was making, is that Peirce's metaphysical view, which was descended from a theistic tradition, does allow for the possibility of a kind of cosmic or global mind, which is an aspect of the idealist tradition in philosophy. But it strikes me that this is the very thing you wish to get rid of at all costs, whilst still retaining all the 'triadic metaphysics' and the other aspects of Peirce's thought that is congenial to your particular project.
Yes. And I am asking you to define what that might actually mean - in Peirce's view especially. What does such a statement commit to you in ontic specifics.
If you think Peirce is a panpsychist for example, support that. Does he anywhere say that fundamentally consciousness is a universal property of material being?
Peirce seems very concerned with the idea that existence is somehow bound up with "the universal growth of reasonableness". Hence the emphasis on interpretation and habit. But where is the "self" - the experiencer of experiencers - in his metaphysics? There seems no particular ontic commitment to that coming through in his writings.
Quoting Wayfarer
Yes. He really did, didn't he. A big clue, surely.
Quoting Wayfarer
That is a poor summary of what Peirce proposes. Peirce argues that even the material world emerges (via semiotic reason as a universal process of constraint-formation).
So that Wiki entry makes a distinction between objective and subjective idealism. And objective idealism is suppose to accept the reality of a material world, yet reject a naturalism where mind then emerges from that material world.
But Peirce was arguing for a "total emergence" naturalism. So in the beginning, there is neither matter nor mind in any useful concrete sense. Everything that comes to exist arises because of sign relations.
There are, I agree, some big inconsistencies about this. Peirce equivocated about Firstness. Sometimes he described it in very physicalist language, sometimes very mentalist. He was working his way to an abstract logical description - his unfinished logic of vagueness - and also, late in life, he took a definite religious turn of mind that coloured his writings from yet another direction.
So you can keep triumphantly waving this one little phrase - "matter is effete mind" - and yet my question to you is show that you've really understood what Peirce was saying, and how that evolved even over the course of his life (in response to how his life was going).
Quoting Wayfarer
Again, the fact that these states of "heightened disembodied blissful sense of complete insight" can be mechanically stimulated must produce something more than this casual shrug of the shoulders if you are being honest.
My efforts to understand what Peirce is saying have mostly been prompted by my effort to understand what you are saying. I am not expert in either, but I do think there is a discontinuity between them. His 'primordial firstness' is, as I said, rather Emersonian in character, and Emerson was the point of entry for Eastern spirituality into American letters. But as I have said, and as Javra has said, the place that the 'second law of thermodynamics' plays in your system, is a major problem I have with it. I think it amounts to a kind of 'deification' of physical law, the substitution of an invariant physical constant for the 'invariance of the eternal' in earlier Western thinking - so whereas for Emerson (and Peirce) it might have been something like Brahman, for you, it's physical necessity. And there's a world of difference in those two. In fact I think there are clear historical reasons for that, arising from the Enlightenment. That, I understand, will be a major point of difference, and I am not going to try and present 'counterfactuals', other than to note that there certain ideas that trigger overtly hostile and dismissive responses from yourself, i.e ideas that sound 'religious'. I get that, that is why I have been staying out of this thread.
Quoting apokrisis
Not in the least! The Indian attitude to religious experience is completely different to the Western. The very fact that you can have a momentary realisation is not at all shocking in the East, whereas, in the West, the whole idea of spiritual experience is deprecated and corralled according to religious dogma. So there is a natural suspicion of any such experiences in western culture. This is a really revealing comment:
Quoting apokrisis
The equation of religious beliefs with porn, even if in jest, comes from the fact that the modern, Western attitude to religion, is very like the Victorian attitude towards sex. It is kind of a cultural taboo, something that sensible folks are not supposed to think, hence, 'dirty'. But that's very much, again, a product of the peculiar history of religious thought in the West. But that's well and truly another thread. And, hey, I probably won't continue for the time being, I'm on holidays in the US with wife, she is very pissed off with me bashing away on forums, so if I don't reply again for now, that's why ;-)
Always better to go to the source:
Peirce, Law of the Mind
"I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolu-
tionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of
mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned
idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially
deadened mind."
As for Schelling:
"In the System of Transcendental Idealism Schelling goes back to Fichtean terminology, though he will soon abandon most of it. He endeavours to explain the emergence of the thinking subject from nature in terms of an ‘absolute I’ coming retrospectively to know itself in a ‘history of self-consciousness’ that forms the material of the system. The System recounts the history of which the transcendental subject is the result. A version of the model Schelling establishes will be adopted by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Mind. Schelling presents the process in terms of the initially undivided I splitting itself in order to articulate itself in the syntheses, the ‘products’, which constitute the world of knowable nature. The founding stages of this process, which bring the world of material nature into being, are ‘unconscious’."
For those interested in Eastern Philosophies, this is very close to Daoism.
But apokrisis' position goes a lot further than "it just happened", with the assumption of apeiron and infinite potential. When potential is conceived of as infinite, then it is impossible that there is any constraints, or actuality. When there is nothing actual, then it is impossible for anything to happen. So the notion of infinite potential is somewhat deceptive, because it implies that anything is possible But apokrisis refuses to accept the other side of the coin, and that is that if there is infinite potential, then every actuality is impossible.
The point of the die example is that constraints do not emerge, they change, so that a new constraint comes into existence from an already existing constraint. So if you are rolling a six sided die, with numbers one to six, it would be a mistake to think that if you rolled enough times you might get a zero, or a seven, without changing the die.
Quoting Gooseone
In a realm of infinite potential, apeiron, there is by definition, no constraints whatsoever. To think that in a world of infinite potential, a constraint might just pop into existence through some form of symmetry-breaking or something like that, is like thinking that you might suddenly role a seven on a die with numbers one to six. It is an irrational thought, something which is logically impossible.
Quoting Gooseone
Don't you think that if a higher order principle could be discovered by a more evolved living creature, that higher order principle must be already in essence knowable? We are all evolving living beings, and knowledge advances. No one knows when the higher order principle will be found, but we must keep striving to find it, and this takes effort. But if we posit as a first ontological principle, that the foundation of being, existence, is itself unknowable due to some sort of vagueness, then we will not be inclined to make the effort to find that higher order principle, assuming that such is impossible due to that inherent unintelligibility.
Agree. There is all kinds of whipsawing going on. First we have something resembling Pierce's global mind as you describe and then we we have the denial of all such. At least Peirce was consistent, as apparently was Schelling. If one wants a reasonably consistent view, at least Peiece presents one, though it all begins with chance then mind then matter. Daoism would say it begins with Mind and just forget about the chance.
It should also be noted that Whitehead also had to include his version of God in his process philosophy. There is no getting away from it no matter how much effort is put into hiding it.
But you've got a problem, Rich, if you don't understand what you read. :)
So: "tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth"
It seems only a minute ago that you were being snarky about Tychism. And perhaps you haven't even stumbled across its complementary of Synechism yet?
And note here that it is both nature and mind that arise as the semiotic "taking of habits". It is neither mind arising out of (material) nature, nor vice versa. Instead it is a triadic story of both emerging from tychism (Firstness, vagueness, spontaneity) and arriving at their constraining limit (the continuity of synechism or inveterate habit).
Quoting Rich
Yep. There must be some reason Peirce found Schelling's Naturephilosphie both a historical inspiration, yet also rather in need of fixing up.
Schelling did have a similar take in many ways. And Schelling scholarship likewise raises the further question of "which Schelling?" as his arguments evolved and changed over his own lifetime. But Schelling was more clearly idealist as he did not put semiotic/universal methods of reasoning at the centre of his thought. But then who else was a foundational logician like Peirce in the history of metaphysics (besides Aristotle)?
Googling for quotes doesn't replace scholarship I'm afraid.
If constraints don't emerge for material being, then provide me with a die that is five or seven sided. Why is six-sidedness a limit on this kind of materiality? Are you not in fact free to change the number of sides composing a regular solid? How could any limit exist in advance of our free potential to tile a volume with regular faces? Surely God at least would be able to ordain the real possibility of a five or seven sided die?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. That is the definition. That is also why I call it the limit of definite existence.
As soon as you have any dimensionality - on free action in some number of particular orrthogonal directions - you also have the complementary fact of constraints on the resulting geometric possibility.
From as soon as you have 3D flat space, five and seven sided dice are an impossibility. And six sided dice a matchingly definite possibility.
That is why Apeiron is not strictly a "ground" of being but its " lower limit". Go in that direction and crispness loses its crispness to become vague. The Apeiron would be the pure vagueness that then "doesn't exist".
Nope, you have a problem. For heaven sake's the title of the essay is "The Law of the Mind". He explicitly refers to mind (the word physicalists bite their tongue on) and then goes on to refer to matter as dead mind. This puts mind as primary. Then the final nail in the coffin is his reference to Schelling, fully embracing his idealism. He never comes close to saying that all is physical and mind magically emerges from matter. He had too much intellectual honesty for that.
I think we may have a bit of revisionism going on here. The quote is directly from Peirce's Law of the Mind which is probably a better source than your incredibly biased interpretation.
I don't mind inconsistency in a philosopher's writing. Many start writing when they are young, and if they maintain an open mind, their thoughts will develop. So what appears like inconsistency is quite often just the free mind attempting to understand reality.
Quoting Rich
Many philosophers will start out with a grand ambition of producing an ontology which excludes God. But as the difficulties emerge, it's found to be not an easy task.
Quoting apokrisis
As I said, constraints change, but to posit constraints coming into existence (emerging) from an absolute lack of constraint is nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
Dimensionality is itself a constraint. A "3D flat space" is a constraint. Why do you suppose that 3D space comes into existence from infinite possibility? This is what is at issue here, we can always ask, "why is there what there is instead of something else?". And this is a respectable philosophical question. But when you posit infinite possibility you deny that there is any answer to that question, and this stymies philosophical investigation.
Err yeah. The word gets said. :-}
And now we are doing the big boy thing of reading a whole sentence all in one go.
The critical part of that sentence is: "...tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth..."
So you get what is being said now? The regularity that we call mind is also an emergent product of (semiotic) growth, like the regularity we call nature.
If constraint begets constraint, then what begat the first constraint?
Oh I forgot. Must be God. :’(
Define emergent product without having a hidden dualism (i.e that which constituted the product and the product itself).
Sure, there is Mind. It evolves as a product of growth (learning). And then it leaves behind dead matter. Bergson said the same. Good ole Mind. Right there evolving. I'm sure you would have preferred Matter, but unfortunately it is Mind, in the title and in the paragraph. No way to erase it.
Peirce avoided magic by stating the obvious.
Well that was what I was saying.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
As that is itself an emergent geometric constraint on infinite dimensional possibility.
3D space has special properties that make it the only thermally/energetically stable arrangement. It is only 3D space in which the strength of interaction dilute according to a log powerlaw. Force weakens with the square of the distance. In less dimensions, interactions would be too strong. In more, they get weak too fast. So 3D is a special Goldilocks state of dimensionality - stable enough that it out persists other possible arrangements.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. We have to allow anything could have been possible and yet something particular is what survived all attempts to constrain it, supress it, or eliminate it.
So the answer is that what exists is what worked in an evolutionary sense. That is what Peirce and a developmental metaphysics is all about. You don't need a creating hand, a prime mover. Possibility itself will eliminate its own variety just by trying to express its every alternative at once. That is the essence of constraints-based causal self-organisation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Nope. It pats you on the head and points you in the direction of the better alternative you've been ignoring.
What again? And were you meaning without the explicit dichotomy - the bleeding "apokrisis" that I even choose as a user-name? >:O
Huh? Some inside joke, but not sure what you're getting at.
As soon as someone shows me the way around this problem, I'm fully prepared to ditch the idea of God. I don't want to believe in God, and I never did want to believe in God, but this issue demonstrates the necessity of God, so I am stuck with this. Of course we can dump God and choose an irrational ontological principle, like you do, but I prefer to keep my wits. So, I'm still seeking a logical alternative, and not about to succumb to your irrationality. That's why I keep impressing this point on you, perhaps you can help me come up with something better. To no avail though, because you're already convicted.
Quoting apokrisis
You still don't get it do you? Possibility doesn't do anything. It is not actual, it cannot do anything, by definition. To talk about possibility doing something, itself, is simple contradiction. Something actual must actualize any particular possibility. If this were not the case, then all possibilities would automatically be actualized, all the time, and there would be no difference between "possible" and "actual". That is really the issue with MWI of QM. See how this premise leads to irrational ontological principles?
Quoting apokrisis
I sure as hell haven't been ignoring this alternative. How could I? It's rampant all around me. That it's the better alternative is clearly false due to the fact that it is an irrational option.
In physics, we have got used to considering possibilities as "virtual particles". So the possibilities we can count - as in quantum mechanics - are also "actual" in a special way.
This isn't empty metaphysics. We can actually measure the physical contribution that a cloud of ghostly possibilities adds to any physical property. It is why the vacuum has an irreducible zero point energy, why the magnetic moment of the electron has an added quantum correction.
So I'm not making shit up. Our most accurate theory of nature forces us to take a constraints-based, sum over histories or path integral, view of material being. We can count the effect that unlimited possibility has on the actuality we then measure.
If there is a God, he designed this system we observe. And it is constraints-based self-organisation all the way down to the Planck limit.
Your alternative account - a classically-inspired tale - is experimentally proven as wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well MWI is just an interpretation of these proven facts. It is one way of preserving the kind of classical metaphysics you also hold dear. Just as you say you have no choice left but to believe "God did it", so MWI-ers say they have no choice but to believe every virtual possibility must then be something really happening in some other actual world (or mumble, mumble, another branch of the infinite wavefunction).
Again, a logic of vagueness is the way out of this metaphysical impass.
I can agree with that but the issue here is the knowing. People adhered to the law of gravity by sticking to the ground before we started to share theories of gravity or even gave it a name, I see no issue to call such a previous state unintelligible / vague, I don't take that as a hard limit on what we can know metaphysically in the future. Inclinations, making efforts, for all I know they could also be something we will have a very different understanding of in the future, just like we did in the past.
I have not seen you do it but some people tend to create false dichotomies where they claim to be pointing at the moon and others are looking at the finger doing the pointing. Experiencing and / or knowing beyond the 'mere' human capacity we are now endowed with seems to me to be a form of wanting to have your cake and eat it to. Even so I do think it's more fruitful to say "I don't know" instead of "It just happens" when an explanation is starting to resemble a metaphysical final cause.
These possibilities are derived from a particular actual state which is constructed in the laboratory, or wherever. The point is that any set of possibilities is dependent on the actual state which produces them. Each constructed state of "vacuum", or whatever state is produced in the lab, has possibilities which are proper to that constructed state. This is completely different from the claim that the universe emerged from an infinity of possibilities which is not dependent on any actual state. That is the claim which is irrational.
Quoting apokrisis
The constraints based view of nature leads to an infinite regress of changing constraints. You seem to avoid the infinite regress by assuming an initial condition of infinite possibility (no constraints) where constraints magical emerge. That's where you're making shit up.
Quoting apokrisis
No, actually no one has experimented with my "classically-inspired tale". Scientists, just like you, are uninterested in it.
Quoting apokrisis
There's a big difference between the two interpretations of reality. Giving actual existence to logical possibilities is irrational due to inherent contradiction, assuming "God did it" is naïve but not irrational.
Quoting apokrisis
Assuming vagueness as a starting point is just another way of assigning actual existence to logical possibilities, and this is irrational. It is not the way out. Assuming God, as an alternative actuality is the way out. But physicalists, like yourself, seem to have a deep fear of God, and will posit any of a vast number of irrational principles in order to avoid what is logically necessary.
It's fine to say "I don't have the foggiest idea", but that is not what is happening here. What is being suggested is that out of nothingness matter magically sprung (the Big Bang), and out of matter Mind magically sprung. That is not vagueness. That is a a pretty definite mythology born out of a specific goal to obliterate the notion of Mind.
Peirce wove a different story from vagueness. For him, first came tychism (chance), then came Mind, and then came Matter. From Vagueness anything can spring since we are just manipulating words into sentences and sentences into stories, depending upon the biases of the story teller.
And the Daoist story was first there was Mind.
What is happening is storytelling is replacing evidence in science. Metaphysics is something else. And if someone takes the metaphysical stance that Mind burst out of Matter born out of a surrounding universe of Constraints, Purpose and Goals, well that's OK. It's just another transposition of the external story of God who provides Purpose and Constraints. It is nothing new. Scientism is just another religion masked with a new set of words and dogma.
In this case, the vast Infinite along with Thermodynamic Purpose and Cosmic Goals have been called upon as the new God. It's a reengineering of the oldest mythology. Somehow, someway, intent and purpose had to be introduced into any Genesis story.
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/03/26/521478684/mind-matter-and-materialism
"The trouble comes when materialists claim the reduction of consciousness to matter is "what science says." Nobody needs me to point out that the relationship between mind and matter (i.e. mind and brain) remains a cutting edge and contentious topic in philosophy and science. That means you can't just state that mind is purely a biological phenomena as if it were a scientific fact. In fact, that statement is a really a metaphysical stance. It's an assumption. It's the beginning of the argument, not the end."
"So, in the end, it's all about being upfront about our metaphysical biases and their limits. As philosopher Roberto Unger and physicist Lee Smolin put it, our job in thinking about the world is to "distinguish what science has actually found out about the world from the metaphysical commitments for which the findings of science are often mistaken."
Metaphysical commitments are fine. We all have them. But when it comes to quantum physics and what it tell us about matter and materialism, we must work hard to distinguish what's solid ground and what is swamp."
That's not my interpretation of the current consensus, a consensus which (to my mind) states that the big bang is the point where the known laws of physics break down and things become "unknowable". Similarly the "something from nothing" has also been described as the vacuum of space not being as empty as previously thought. It's not as if all scientists are fundamental reductionists or something.
Personally, I find it likely that mind does indeed emerge out of matter, even though science cannot explain fully how life springs from inanimate matter I don't feel the need to invoke some sort of elan vital to make it happen, I don't see why there needs to be an equivalent of such a force when it concerns minds.
No, but you do need to invoke some faith that "mind just happened", because that is all there is. Faith comes in many forms and when it is part of one's belief system, it simply has to be acknowledged.
Those who place mind (or Elan vital) as primary, do not need to invoke such faith, because mind was always there and still is here exactly as we experience it.
That doesn't follow, I said I find it likely that mind emerges out of matter. The faith I have is the progress which will be made in understanding the subject better in the future. Saying "mind just happened" is a caricature of the complexity which lies beneath what is already known about human cognition.
Also, placing mind as primary is a form of faith in my book, not something with which you can claim you are not invoking some form of faith.
So a foetus develops, the child is born. We kind of know that another mind just happened due to the growth of a nervous system, don't we? Or do you have evidence to the contrary.
Is this the new story that the mind pops out of the nervous system? It keeps changing. I thought it was the child of Cosmic Goals and Thermodynamic Purpose, couple with an Infinite Possibilities.
I love stories as much as the next person, but even the Greeks kept their mythology pretty much straight.
This is specifically your faith. One can equally say, I find it likely that God created the universe. There is no difference other than the belief of one is different than the belief of the other. Problems only arise when materialists claim that science is on their side. That science says we are just chemicals. Using science as a shield for a faith.
Oh that's right. All reality is a mind field projected hologram.
Just give a straight answer. Is the new born mind (a) the result of the development of another infant nervous system or (b) a projected mental quantum hologram just like Bergson-Bohm said?
You've told us your story, remember. Have you suddenly lost faith in it after all? That's good to know.
I can't understand your principles. You seem to be saying that when people can't understand something, then it is correct for them to say that this thing is unintelligible. Would a child in grade school, who can't understand algebra be correct to say that algebra is unintelligible? Would someone in high school be correct to say that university level physics is unintelligible. I would think that "unintelligible" refers to something which is impossible to understand, for any intellect
Do you not see that there is a difference between something which appears to be unintelligible because you do not have the capacity to understand it, and something which is unintelligible because it is impossible for any intellect to understand it? If you accept that there is such a difference, then consider the problem which arises when something appears to be unintelligible. How are you going to determine whether the thing in question just appears to be unintelligible because you do not have the capacity to understand it, or whether it is impossible for any intellect to understand? Suppose you ask others, and no one seems to have the capacity to understand it. Does this justify the claim that it is impossible for any intellect to understand it? I don't think so, and that's why it's always wrong to designate something which you do not have the capacity to understand, as unintelligible.
I was under the impression that the context in which Apo used the term "unintelligible" had more to do with how things would be if brains weren't perceiving stuff. (As opposed to those who feel there is something 'higher', like knowing without a knower, awareness being really 'REALLY' special, etc.)
Not to get into the: "If a tree falls into the forest....bla bla", but for now I find the whole concept of intelligibility a human thing. Things might exist and the way this stuff behaves might very well be intelligible but if there isn't anything resembling human cognition perceiving it I can just as well call it unintelligible.
You say it yourself, you need a capacity to understand for things to become intelligible, it's my opinion we need something resembling human cognition to do so and I feel 'that' is something very physical.
Apokrisis posits an apeiron, which is inherently unintelligible, as the beginning from which substantial existence emerges. The apeiron is an infinite potential, a vast vagueness. Vague is described as a situation where the law of non-contradiction does not apply. So it is implied that this apeiron is something which is impossible for a brain, or any form of intellect to understand, because it defies the basic principles of logic which are used in understanding. Therefore it is inherently unintelligible, impossible to understand, whether or not a brain is attempting to understand it. That is the principle which I object to.
Quoting Gooseone
I don't see how you can make that statement. "Intelligible", and "unintelligible", refer to whether or not a thing may be understood by an intellect. Suppose there are four chairs at a table. This situation is intelligible (possible to be understood) whether or not there is a human being there, actually perceiving it. Do you recognize the difference between being actually understood, and having the possibility of being understood? You seem to think that if something is not actually understood, then you are justified in calling it unintelligible. But the "ible" suffix implies having the possibility of being understood, so just because something is not actually understood, this does not justify calling it unintelligible, it is simply unknown.
Quoting Gooseone
I agree, that if there was no capacity to understand, no mind anywhere in the universe, we couldn't call anything "intelligible". But to call something "intelligible" requires a mind itself, and it is clearly not the case that there is no mind anywhere in the universe. So that primary prerequisite. that there be a mind for something to intelligible, is already fulfilled, necessarily, by the present conditions of existing minds. Now, what is at issue is what type of things do we label as intelligible or unintelligible. The fact that I can't understand something, or even that no living human being can understand this thing, doesn't warrant it being entitled unintelligible. In the future, someone might figure it out.
Suppose something is described in contradictory terms. Do you agree that this description is unintelligible, because it is contradictory? But just because the description of the thing is unintelligible, this does not necessitate the conclusion that the thing itself, which is described, is unintelligible. The person making the description may be mistaken. My argument is that it is unphilosophical, and wrong, to assume that anything itself is actually unintelligible. When something appears to be unintelligible (requiring a contradictory description or something like that), this is really due to a deficiency of the intellect which is trying to understand it.
No, as I explained already, knowing something to be unintelligible is contradictory. If you know the thing, clearly it's not unintelligible. You can partially know a thing, and think that it's unintelligible, but this just means that you must make a better effort to understand it. It does not mean that you know it to be unintelligible.
Again, though I am not of the opinion that "reality" depends on a human observer to exist, for all practical purposes, if something cannot be known it is not dissimilar to it not existing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For the child in grade school algebra would indeed be unintelligible, this points to the narrow framework we have to make sense of things. It's evident in a human life (you don't remember how you understood things when you were very young, you only know you were asleep when you wake up or when you remember a dream and you don't know what it's like to be dead). As a society we have become able to vastly improve our understanding of a lot of things but I feel it's still a narrow framework, maybe you could think of ancient cultures using myths to explain things which we can now understand as natural principles. The changing of the seasons might be such an example and things like gravity might have been an unknown unknown for a large part of human history because nobody was able to even conceptualize it could be other then self evident we tend to stick to the ground.
This narrow framework we are operating in in this thread seems to be the one of the known unknowns where Apo points to the lower end where we can fathom things becoming unintelligible (we do not assign agency to ants yet when we look at the behaviour of an ant colony it can appear to behave intelligently, still we don't assume ants are intelligent) and others point to the higher end where we can fathom more things becoming intelligible (assigning anthropomorphic qualities to the universe, believing in god, having faith in human progress, etc).
When we're talking about, say, physics, we(!) are able to determine various causes for what we see and I do not find it inappropriate to state that some things "just happen" (with the caveat that you're looking at something in a specific framework, still, no need to explain the universe to bake an apply pie). The limit to our knowledge when it concerns the mechanistic / deterministic framework of viewing universe lies in the resolution with which we're able / unable to view things (both in size, time and even place it seems). When we're looking at life, causes become hidden from plain sight in a novel way, though I am able to fathom we might become able to look (back?) at our current situation and describe it in a physical / mechanistic / deterministic framework, it's just as much off the mark to claim we are sure of that at this point as it is to claim we need an equivalent to an elan vital or god to ever make sense of things.
Being able to fathom everything being intelligible to an intellect does not mean it will be so per se. As Apo mentions, you seem to exclude the possibility for unknown unknowns which are, at this moment, unintelligible. And, if you are excluding the possibility for unintelligibility and claim that everything can, in principle, be intelligible, do you then also believe we have the potential to become god-like?
Also there is, for example, Rich, who seems to take issue with Apo trying to lay out a framework of understanding our current situation because it's not to be interpreted fully mechanistically / deterministically and does not provide a succinct final cause nor disproves the existence of a higher power. I guess you could accuse Apo of being a fundamental / reductionistic "emergentist" yet I don't see an issue with taking some consistent constraints (causes?) and using them to see what we can make sense of.
When the PNC does not apply, it is and it is not. This means contradiction is united within the same object. To say "not being actually divided by a contradiction" is slight of hand, because what is really said is that contradiction is allowed to be united in the same object. So the object may be described in contradictory terms.
Quoting Gooseone
All you are saying here, is that in relation to the child's intellect, algebra is unintelligible. So you are judging the object, algebra, by relating it to a child's intellect, and coming to the conclusion that the object is unintelligible. You have proposed a system of relativity, and have chosen the child's intellect, as an arbitrary frame of reference, and concluded that within this frame of reference the object is unintelligible. Therefore your use of "unintelligible" is completely subjective, arbitrary. and totally meaningless without a qualifier which designates relative to what.
Quoting Gooseone
It's one thing to say that from within my framework of understanding, it appears like the universe emerged from an unintelligible apeiron. But it is a completely different thing to state this, as apokrisis does, in a way which implies that it is a scientifically proven fact. The latter shows absolutely no respect for the fact that this is only how the object appears from one particular framework, and other frameworks will perceive the object in a completely different way. To base your application of the word "unintelligible" on a framework of relativity, which reduces intelligibility to something completely arbitrary and subjective, and then turn around and insist my framework is the correct one, is completely hypocritical if not actually contradictory.
Quoting Gooseone
I can't say that I have ever heard a physicist talk in this way, to say things "just happen". A physicist will claim to know why it happens this way, or to not know why it happens this way. When they say that they do not know why it happens this way, what is emphasized is that they do not know. They do not imply that they know that it just happens. Much of high energy physics today is concerned with statistical probabilities. The physicists acknowledge that they do not know why things must be understood in terms of probabilities, but the fact that statistical analysis is applicable, and is being applied, indicates that they do not believe that things just happen.
Quoting Gooseone
To speak of unknowns, is completely different than speaking of things unintelligible. "Known" and "unknown" refer to an actual condition in relation to intellect. "Intelligible" and "unintelligible" imply potentiality in relation to intellect. For the reasons I described, it is irrational to assume that something is unintelligible. You have made it rational in a qualified sense with your system of relativity, described above. Things may be deemed as "unintelligible" in relation to particular intellectual frameworks. My argument is that these intellectual frameworks, are therefore deficient. My system allows that if there is something "god-like", then for that god-like being, all is intelligible. Why would you think that it allows that human beings could become god-like?
Or rather, metaphysically as a state, it is neither one thing nor the other.
Where you just went wrong is to talk about vagueness or Apeiron as an object. An object of course is defined as an already crisply entified thing, although it may have vague properties.
I wondered if the potentiality for humans to become god-like was something which would follow from your philosophy, it was an actual question, not an assumption ;).
For the rest, I don't see much difference between knowing / the unknown and intelligible vs unintelligible, to me they both fundamentally require a perceiving entity (which I can not absolutely rule out). I could try and differentiate between them by saying something about what might constitute an adaptive response (talking biology here) and how intelligibility might depend on communicating with other minds but I find the differences between the terms quite transient.
Also I have not read this thread as thoroughly as might have been proper so I have not seen Apo claim an Apeiron as a fundamental and absolute scientific truth. Again to me it appeared as if some of his observations were declared null and void / strawmanned because he did not provide a succinct final cause ...or something like that.
Yep. The argument is one of metaphysical logic. And then I also show how science supports it.
But note also that "intelligible" has a technical meaning in this discussion. It is about metaphysics. And it means the Cosmos is rationally structured, therefore capable of being understood in those terms.
The unintelligible then means a "state" where that structure is lacking.
Actually, this is a situation where the principle of excluded middle does not apply. You should learn to differentiate between these two. PNC states that contradiction is not allowed, PEM states that "neither one nor the other" is not allowed. With respect to ontological principles, there is a substantial difference between these two.
Quoting Gooseone
I would say, that this is not possible, because God is understood as being immaterial and human beings necessarily have a material body. If you read some Christian theological principles, like those explained by Aquinas, you'll see that it is claimed that the major constraints on the human intellect are due to the fact that the human intellect is united with, and dependent on, the material body. God, being a separate Form, meaning a form which is independent from material existence, is intelligible to the highest degree because intellection is an abstraction, or separation of the form from the material object. But to the human intellect God may appear to be unintelligible, due to this deficiency of the human intellect.
Quoting Gooseone
Do you not recognize the difference between actual and potential here? Known and unknown refer to what is actually apprehended by an intellect. Intelligible and unintelligible refer to what is potentially apprehended by an intellect.
No. It is generality to which the LEM fails to apply. The PNC fails to apply to vagueness.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You need to brush up on your definitions of generality and vagueness by the looks of it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is about ontology, not epistemology. The claim is about reality itself having rational structure. Though that in turn would be why we can understand reality in rational terms.
I'm not talking about generality or vagueness, I'm talking about the LEM and the PNC. If the LEM fails to apply then this is a situation where contradictory terms can be used in description. If vagueness is when the LEM fails to apply, then vagueness is when contradictory terms can be used in description.
If there is a situation where neither one nor the other, of contradictory terms may be used, then this is a situation where LEM fails to apply. If generality is where LEM fails to apply, then generality is where neither one nor the other of contradictory terms apply.
Quoting apokrisis
If there is an aspect of reality to which the PNC does not apply, what you call vagueness, then this aspect of reality would be unintelligible because it allows for contradiction. My argument is that to posit the reality of this vagueness, as an ontological principle, is an irrational act, because it is impossible to determine whether the appearance of vagueness is due to reality not having a rational structure, or to a deficient epistemology. However, if assuming the reality of vagueness requires that we forfeit the PNC to allow for this assumption, then clearly this is a deficient epistemology, because the PNC is fundamental to any epistemology. Therefore we ought to conclude that the appearance of vagueness is necessarily due to a deficient epistemology. To say that vagueness is real is to say that the PNC does not apply, and to say that the PNC does not apply is to have deficient epistemology. So to posit vagueness as an ontological principle (assume the real existence of that which the LEM fails to apply) is irrational.
I can see why you only want to talk about the particular and not the vague or the general. I'll just remind you that I am talking about a triadic holistic metaphysics - such as Aristotelean hylomorphism - and opposing that to your reductionist metaphysics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It doesn't allow for it. It swallows it up. It absorbs it. It removes the very fact of there being a difference that makes a difference - a fact of the matter, an individuation of either kind.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It makes the PNC an emergent feature of reality. It explains the PNC itself.
Sorry, but you're wrong here on two counts. First, Aristotle's metaphysics is nowhere near like yours. He denied the reality of the apeiron, and as I explained to you already, provided decisive refutation of this principle. It's in his Metaphysics Bk. 9. Also, as an epistemological principle he insisted that the LNC not be violated.
Second, I do not have a reductionist metaphysics, I have a dualism. I will discuss both the particular and the general, as distinct ontological categories. What you call vagueness appears to be a mixing up of these two categories, category mistake. Since it is a human an error, it is epistemic in nature. You take something which is of the category of the general, potential, and assign to it particular existence, the apeiron. This category mistake, the failure to properly distinguish between the general and the particular initializes your assumption that vagueness is a real ontological category. If you correctly apprehended the nature of potential, as general, you would not be able to assign to it particular existence, as an individual thing, the apeiron, and there would be no basis for your claim of ontic vagueness.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly, you lose that difference to category error, and the result is your assumption that vagueness is ontologically real. Therefore the difference actually does make a difference, because denying that it makes a difference allows vagueness as an ontological principle, to emerge.
Quoting apokrisis
Tell me how the claim that there is situations in which the PNC does not apply, "explains" the PNC. It looks to me more like this renders the PNC as a useless, meaningless statement. Or is that what you mean by "explains the PNC", that the PNC is a useless statement?
Dualism is reductionism. Just doubled down. Instead of one variety of brute fact - material substance - you offer two. There is a spirit stuff or res cogitans as well.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It is well recognised that Aristotle was ambiguous and inconsistent about what prime matter might be in his scheme. There isn't a single interpretation. And that likely reflects the fact Aristotle hadn't got the last bit of the puzzle sorted out. He had thoughts but not a decisive answer to offer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You keep presenting my arguments back to front. Vagueness - in being limitation on being - would be ontically unreal. It marks where actuality begins. So itself, is the unactualised or the purely potential.
Are you serious? Obviously you haven't read A's Metaphysics, or his Physics. To say that he was ambiguous and inconsistent with respect to the concept of matter is nonsense.
.
To say that there is nothing equivocal in Aristotle's handling of the question is just silly.
In his Physics, matter is described as the underlying thing which persists, remains the same throughout a change. Form is active and changing. In his Metaphysics he questions the possibility of a prime matter, a matter without form, the underlying thing common to all physical existence, the basis for being. Aristotle's cosmological argument, which demonstrates that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality, shows how it is impossible for prime matter to have real existence. Anyone familiar with that argument will recognize this.
Nothing in your quoted passage demonstrates that there is any inconsistency or ambiguity in A's concept of matter. In Physics, matter is assumed, as the basis for the continuity of existence. In Metaphysics the real existence of prime matter, matter without form, is denied. The concept of matter, and its relationship to potentiality is developed throughout his work, principally Physics, De Anima, and Metaphysics. They are large, complex, and difficult texts. Equivocal interpretations are the result of misunderstanding.
So prime matter is denied? Or defined by some other modality other than "real existence"? And was the assertion ever just that it is matter without form rather than being beyond either (actual matter always being actually formed).
It is hard to discuss the lack of ambiguity in a text when you make such ambiguous pronouncements.
Prime matter is denied, as illogical. Read up on Aristotle's cosmological argument. It is logically impossible that there ever was matter without form. The proposed situation, infinite potential, prime matter, or matter without form, excludes the existence of form, because any form would mean that the potential is non-infinite, and therefore not fulfilling the definition of prime matter. If prime matter had form this would be contradiction. But potential requires an actuality to actualize it, it cannot actualize itself. Therefore if there ever was infinite potential, prime matter, or matter without form, there would always be infinite potential, prime matter, or matter without form. But this is not what we observe, we observe that matter has form. Therefore the empirical evidence along with the preceding logical argument denies the possibility of prime matter.
Quoting apokrisis
It is not an assertion, it is a complex, well constructed logical argument which is drawn out through the explanation of the relevant terms, over many books in his Metaphysics. It is actually the substance of his metaphysics. After concluding that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality, he proceeds to posit eternal circular motion to account for this actuality, the form, which is prior to matter. But this is where he went wrong. The Neo-Platonists went on to posit independent Forms, forms which have existence separate from matter, and prior to matter. Both of these proposals are brought about because of the logical force of the cosmological argument, which, with no uncertainty, or ambiguity, demonstrates that prime matter is logically impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't see where you draw the charge of "ambiguity" from. I've been repeating over and over again, to you, in this thread, and others, that Aristotle demonstrates prime matter as logically impossible. And I do not believe that there is any ambiguity on this subject in the interpretation of Aristotle's Metaphysics. I took a course on Aristotle's Metaphysics in university and one of the first things told to us in the introductory classes, was that in this text, prime matter is proven to be impossible. Aristotle is well known as the originator of the cosmological argument, which is commonly adapted by theologians to demonstrate the need to assume God, as the actuality, which creates matter, as the potential for material existence.
So there is no ambiguity on this subject. You are simply in denial, acting irrationally, refusing to face the reality of the situation. Instead of approaching this logical argument, which demonstrates your faithful first principle of "matter" as false, you make the unwarranted claim that the pronouncements are ambiguous. But what you ought to do is obtain a firm understanding of this argument, and from there you can either offer a coherent refutation of it, or do as I did, and release your preferred principle of prime matter in favour of a more intelligible first principle. When I first studied the refutation of prime matter, in that university course, I did not accept the arguments. This was because I did not understand the complexity of the concepts involved, so that I did not adequately understand the argument. It took me many years of studying later Aristotelians, and reflecting back, as well as consulting Aristotle's many texts, before the whole structure of that argument became coherent for me.
Yet....
I agree that a dualistic reading of prime matter doesn't work. It makes a mystery of both the forms and the material principle.
But that is why I support a triadic vagueness-based metaphysics - Peirce's answer. I argue the interactive story where the naked potential contains within itself this very dichotomy of form and matter within it. And the two co-arise as each other's limitation.
So from the first moment of actuality, there is the substantial being of in-formed materiality. The game has already got going as constraints are shaping material degrees of freedom. Of course also in this first moment, the state of this first substance is as vague as can possibly be imagined - a mere fluctuation that looks as much an accident as a organised tendency. With as yet no history or context to stabilise it, the first formed material fluctuation counts as merely a suggestion. A spontaneity that has yet to show it will lead anywhere.
So vagueness "contains" the potential for en-mattered form itself. What ever comes out of vagueness - gets crisply actualised - is logically what that vagueness contained as a potential. And the most metaphysically basic thing to come out of that vagueness was the mutual deal of formal cause and material cause - the possibility of the constraints that could form the material actions which, in turn, could construct the definite history, the physical context, which could go on to become the increasingly fixed habits, the fully realised global forms, which then constituted the Cosmos.
You are going on about this being contradictory - that both matter and form would "co-exist" in the bare potential that is the Apeiron. But in this triadic metaphysics, form and matter, constraints and degrees of freedom, are understood as being causally joined at the hip. Each is the other face of its "other". It is the dichotomy itself which exists in potential fashion and then realises itself via the spontaneity of a symmetry-breaking fluctuation, or "first accident".
I don't pretend this ontological formula solves all problems. The claim is only that this is the simplest story we can imagine, taking what we know of existence and rolling it back logically to an origin point. It is the ontology that minimises the mystery by starting existence with a lucky accident ... that was also historically inevitable.
That is where the symmetry maths argument comes in. As soon as there is any random action of the slightest kind, already that brings with it the hard possibility of the limitations of mathematical principle. If there is a group of transformations, then there is also a definite fixed invariance already waiting to greet them and bind them in their collective future. A purpose - a tendency towards this mathematically-described equilibrium - is exerting its finality over events already.
It doesn't really matter what Aristotle thinks because it is a Peircean triadic metaphysics which I am defending. But of course Aristotle is also important in traversing the same ground and highlighting the important elements in such an argument.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is only a problem if the potential is imagined as being passively material. That is why I talk instead of a sea of chaotic fluctuation.
What comes out of the Apeiron is definitely determinate in being either more passive or more active. Actuality is divided between these opposed limits on being. So it is quite logical that the Apeiron must contain both these contrasting limits within it ... as its potential. It is the dichotomy itself that the Apeiron contains in seed form. Thus it is not a contradiction to claim the Apeiron contains two opposed tendencies. It is this very contrariety which it must contain ... as a potential division of nature.
And so we are saying the Apeiron contains within the very means of self-actualising.
The trick is seeing how form and matter really are just two ways of looking at the one thing. A fluctuation is an action with a direction. As an actual Cosmos develops, these two counterparts take on a hierarchically developed identity.
They start off as indistinguishable - action and direction have no real size or result as yet. With no history, the action has nothing to change, the direction as yet offers no context to be the limit of such a change.
But over time, there is a regularisation as a context of such events build up. Local action takes on a fixed and repetitive nature as the global context comes to provide definite directionality. You arrive at mechanical picture of nature as atoms in a void - an ontology of concrete objects acting with the regularity of eternal law.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That's as maybe. Can you provide a cite to back this interpretation up?
I agree that Aristotle's story had holes. But it sounds here like you are speaking for a Christian apologetics interpretation of his writings. And the cosmological argument for a Christian god has huge, vast, gaping holes.
I find that in general, your quoted website is very inaccurate, and often misleading. The fact is, that Aristotle went on, in BK 10-12 of his Metaphysics, after discrediting the idea of prime matter, to describe eternal circular motions. The concept of eternal forms (circular motions) is clearly inconsistent with the concept of prime matter. If there is eternal forms then it is impossible that there was ever pure matter. It is very clear that Aristotle promoted the idea of eternal circular motion, so to claim that he also promoted the idea of prime matter is to produce an inconsistent interpretation. One might refer to such a poor interpretation to claim that Aristotle is inconsistent, but that's really the mistake of the interpreter. However, all one needs to do is to pay attention to what is written in Bks. 6-9, to see that the concept of prime matter is refuted, regardless of what your website says.
Quoting apokrisis
Now you are giving different definitions to these terms, "potential" "matter", and "form". So I cannot refer to the Aristotelian definitions, I can only refer to yours. Under the Aristotelian structure, matter and form are defined by potential and actual, respectively. Here, you are saying that potential contains within it, both matter and form, so it is impossible that form is defined by actual, unless actual is some type of potential. In any case, you now need to provide new definitions of matter and form, as well as actual, because the Aristotelian definitions are not applicable. In other words, your use of "potential", is meaningless unless you provide a new conceptual structure to house it.
Quoting apokrisis
So I must ask you, what do you mean by "actuality" here? If potential already consists of matter and form, and form implies actuality (as it does in A's structure), then there is already actuality prior to substantial being. If you are proposing some other form of actuality, which is not formal actuality, then what are you talking about? Or, in saying that potential consists of matter and form, is it the case that potential is substantial being, and there is no such thing as the potential for substantial being prior to substantial being?
Quoting apokrisis
If it is necessary that form and matter "co-exist", then they are inseparable, and one cannot be prior to the other. I see this proposition as a big problem, because this would negate the essence of the dichotomy between actual and potential, which Aristotle worked so hard to describe.
The potential for an object is necessarily prior in time to the actual existence of that object. We understand the potential for the object as the matter, which is now in another form, which will be re-formed to become the object. Since one is temporally prior to the other, then when you say that they are "causally joined at the hip", what you mean by this is that one is necessarily prior in time to the other. To say that they "co-exist" is a mistake then, because as soon as the potential for something is actualized, that particular potential no longer exists, as it is replaced by the actual thing.
To give co-existence to matter and form, would have to be to disassociate matter and form from potential and actual. But this does not dismiss the reality that the potential for something is necessarily prior to that thing, it just forces us to discuss this under terms other than matter and form. Here is the difficulty which Aristotle addressed with the cosmological argument. The potential for something is necessarily prior in time to the actual thing. But in order for that potential to become the actual thing, the potential must be actualized, and this itself requires something actual. We could say that there has always been the potential for something, and that there has always been something actual, co-existence of potential and actual, but we would not get beyond an infinite regress. Thus to give co-existence to potential and actual implies infinite regress.
So co-existence is rejected because of infinite regress. Now when we look at the relationship between potential and actual naively, we say that potential must be prior to actual, because the potential for something is always prior to the actual existence of the thing. But then we must account for the fact that the potential must be actualized in order that there is something actual. To avoid the infinite regress of co-existence, we must designate either potential or actual, one as prior to the other. If potential were prior to actual, then there would forever be just potential, because there would be nothing to actualize that potential. Therefore we assume actual as prior to potential.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the category mistake, which I referred to a few posts back. When you describe "potential" as "chaotic fluctuation", you are describing something active. So you have conflated the two categories, potential and actual, to say that something actual, chaotic fluctuation, is potential. Now you no longer have the categorical separation between potential and actual, and you might insist that they co-exist, but this is inconsistent with observed reality which sees the potential for something as prior in time to the actual thing. Therefore your "chaotic fluctuation", and what you call "vagueness", is nothing more than a failure to represent, and maintain a proper temporal order with the categories of actual and potential, in your ontological principles. Instead of maintaining a crisp separation between potential and actual, with a determinate temporal order, you combine these in a chaotic vagueness. The so-called chaotic fluctuation of vagueness, apeiron, is not a real feature of the universe, it is a manifestation of the failure to provide a crisp categorical separation between potential and actual.
Quoting apokrisis
See here, you unite the passive and the active, which all classical metaphysics separates into distinct categories, in order to produce your conception of apeiron. So your conception of apeiron, and vagueness is nothing but a denial of classical categories. The denial of classical categories would be an acceptable procedure if it was warranted. But as I've already pointed out, the separation between potential and actual is well supported by observation, empirical evidence, which demonstrates that prior to the actual existence of anything, it is necessary that there is the potential for it.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes of course, that is what you are saying, that the aperion, as infinite potential, has the power of actualizing itself. That is what I insist is a case of being irrational. You only produce this power of self-actualizing by breaking down the divide between potential and actual, allowing that potential has activity already within. But such a potential is nowhere near like the proposed prime matter, or unlimited potential, it is already limited to the activity (fluctuations) within. And each flustuation has a fluctuation prior to it, such that we are still in the position of infinite regress which results from the postulate of co-existence.
Quoting apokrisis
Read the text. It's quite clearly argued that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality. And that is why he goes on to assume eternal circular motions. Also, if actuality is prior to potentiality, then pure potential is impossible. Here, check the first line of BK.9, ch8 (1049b):
"From our discussion of the various senses of 'prior', it is clear that actuality is prior to potency."
Further, 1051a:
It is obvious, then, actuality is prior both to potency and to every principle of change."
Quoting apokrisis
Aristotle doesn't argue for a Christian God, he argues that "prime matter" is impossible because actuality is necessarily prior to potential. I don't think that's a matter of interpretation. If you find it stated on the internet, that he promotes and believes in the idea of prime matter, just like you'll find it stated on the internet that the world is flat, then the people making these statements on the internet simply left out the core of his Metaphysics. Perhaps it was too difficult for them to understand, or it wasn't consistent with their materialist prejudice. Christian theologians such as Aquinas have adapted the argument for their own purpose because the idea of God the creator, is consistent with the argument..
Naturally. I look forward to your citation to support your own stance.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Alternatively, for me, it is only natural that matter and form should express such a dichotomous pairing of limits.
Aristotle was wrong about the fact of the matter - that the prime mover was "circular motion". But a prime mover to match the ur-matter is metaphysically logical. For there to be action, there has to be a direction. The laws of thermodynamics show how the Cosmos is indeed pointed in a universal entropic direction - moved according to that.
So again, the triadic view is that both "prime matter" and the "prime mover" would be the two aspects of the one basic relation that was present as a potential in an ontically vague beginning. You wouldn't talk about the Apeiron as "pure matter" as it was neither, as yet, in-formed matter, nor en-mattered form. It was only the potential for this metaphysical division which then yields a world of actual substances.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Or maybe you should drop archaic definitions of the potential and actual.
A potential is the power to cause motions, set in train events. So it is efficient cause for a reductionist. For me, it is more complex as a holist. I would say a vagueness is a state of potential in containing the seeds of self-organised action. It is first a chaos of impulses - undirected action. But then, as I say, just as much the potential for the emergent organisation that gives generic direction to all action.
So yes, if I have to use the word "potential", it does gain a specific twist in a Peircean holistic context. And I have presented that "new conceptual structure" often enough.
Then actuality - in the Aristotelean sense - speaks to finality. It is the goal which defines the ideal form towards which some material development is tending. It is the global constraint, in my parlance.
But the actual, in ordinary language, means the reality of here and now. The physically realised. And a weakness in Aristotle/Plato is that the actual form of things is as much a matter of contingency as necessity in the real world. An acorn might want to grow into a tree (thanks to its genetically encoded constraints), but the tree could be proud and tall, or wizened and wind-blasted, depending on the vagaries of the landscape where the acorn took root.
So I would go with the ordinary language use of "actuality" as that simply means the physically realised form of something - a particular instance - without making a distinction between the parts of that material form which are accidental vs the parts that are intended due to some finality.
Then if I wanted to highlight finality - as the shaping global goal or constraint - then I would use those teleological terms explicitly.
Another confusion - which keeps cropping up with you - is that you then want to insist that finality precedes potentiality.
In my view, finality calls forth its material being from the future. Or at least, it may be there right at the beginning, but only as a pretty invisible tendency. A habit has to grow and harden via repetition. It is only in retrospect that it was clear the final outcome was "well anticipated".
I can also see what you or Aristotle might mean by saying that the potential arises out of a form being materially realised. A horse can gallop, a kangaroo can hop, by virtue of their bodily design. But I would more correctly call these their possibilities or degrees of freedom.
A die has six numbered sides. So out of that form comes the completely crisp and definite possibility it will land on a number between one and six. But when I talk about potential, I mean a vaguer state of unformed possibility. It is possibility without yet a concrete form.
So this weakens emphasis on the potential as a directed source of action. It is just action in some direction. That is why we talk about electrical potential, or potential energy in general. In physics, the word is normally used to talk about a vaguer form of material cause - one that is generic.
Note that actuality was called energeia by Aristotle in places. And now energy is how physics instead talks about generic potential. Energy is in fact matter now. The passive principle you defend has become the active part of the equation.
There are good reasons for the slippage in the Aristotlean conceptual framework. Important aspects of the ontology did end up facing the wrong way round.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
For them to be separated, they must have once not been separate. Seems logical to me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Consider it done.
Or rather, the new dichotomy is the developmental axis of the vague~crisp. Matter and form become separated with ever greater definiteness as existence evolves from tentative beginnings to solidified habit. And to become separated, that process must have begun by them being together - in indistinguishable fashion.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The naive reading still seems better.
But in my view, the potential is simply an undifferentiated vagueness. A state without either definite material action, nor formal direction. So it is easy to accept these twin faces of reality becoming the separation that needs to develop.
If actuality comes first in time, then how on earth does that conjure up the necessary materiality to physically realise its desires?
Of course I agree that a matter-first ontology is almost as bad. So that is why my ontology is based on the notion of both matter and form co-arising, each emerging via the other.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You're being a bit rough on an Oxford lecturer whose specialism this is. Ainsworth ain't some random internet dude.
The problem though, is that "limits" are by definition constraints, and therefore formal. You can talk about limits and lack of limits, and you are talking about form. Matter doesn't enter this discussion, that's why matter and form are not dichotomous pairings, they are separate categories.
Quoting apokrisis
But matter exists as potential. So you are simply mixing up the terms, breaking down the categories. You are saying that the apeiron isn't pure matter, but it is potential. Aristotle's cosmological argument though, addresses the issue of potential, that's how it is directed at both materialists and Pythagorean Idealists. The same argument refutes both positions. What is proved is that it is impossible for potential to be prior to actuality in any absolute sense. We can take "matter" right out of the picture if you want, and it is still illogical to say that the potential is prior to actual existence, because potential only exists as a property of something actual.
Quoting apokrisis
This is the idea which appears unintelligible, and irrational to me. You talk about a die having crisp, and definite possibilities. And, we could talk about definite possibilities in relation to many other different things. But then you refer to a "vaguer state of unformed possibility". So you have jumped to a different category, and want to call it by the same name, "possibility". I can see that if a person didn't know the form of a die, the possibilities would be vague, but this is an epistemic vagueness, the possibilities are still definite, only the person doesn't know them, so to that person the possibility appears as vague and unformed.
Let's take for example, a tree. The wood of that tree is the matter, and when we see the tree as wood, there are numerous possibilities, firewood, lumber, sawdust, etc.. As much as it may appear like the possibilities are endless, they are not, the tree is of a particular size, the wood a particular type, etc.. Each possibility is a definite thing which can be done with the tree, and there is no such thing as a vague or unformed possibility with respect to the tree. What would that even mean, that there are unformed possibilities within the tree? Sure there are many possibilities which a human being hasn't apprehended, but how does that make them unformed possibilities unless we're talking about epistemic possibilities?. We can only call them vague or unformed because the human mind hasn't determined them. But when the human mind determines a possibility, this doesn't change the nature of the possibility itself, so we cannot say that the possibility changes from being vague and unformed, to being definite, simply by being determined by a human mind. The possibility exists as a definite thing whether or not it is determined by a mind. Where does the notion of vague unformed possibility come from?
Suppose we go deeper into the composition of the tree, and instead of assuming wood as the matter, we assume the molecules, or even the atoms, as the matter. Now the tree presents us with an even bigger array of possibilities. But again, each of the possibilities is a definite possibility, and the possibilities are restricted by the actual atoms of the tree. No human being could possibly know all the possibilities, but this doesn't make the potential of the tree vague or unformed, the potential is well formed by the chemical constitution of the tree. And if we go deeper, to quantum fields with fundamental particles, the possibilities are still definite, limited by the form of the tree. The possibilities only exist as property of the tree. No amount of reduction can render the definite possibilities, which are determined by the form of the tree, into vague unformed potential. The concept of "vague unformed potential" is completely out of place here, because you want to jump from possibilities which are the property of a definite form, to the claim that there are possibilities (vague and unformed) which are independent from any definite form, simply existing as vague unformed potential. But the idea that potential can exist in a vague, unformed way, having no form whatsoever, is nonsensical.
Quoting apokrisis
Here you seem to be making the same sort of jump from one category to another. We can talk about motion, or action in a general way, describing what it is, etc., just like we can talk about potential in a general way. But any existing action is a particular action. It doesn't make any sense to talk about an action which is not an action with a direction. This is like saying that something could be moving, but not moving in any direction. Sure, we could talk about motion, and say that it is not necessary for any motion to be in any particular direction, in order to be a motion, but to single out a particular motion and say that this motion is not in any direction, is nonsense. It might be the case that the human being knows there is activity there, but cannot determine what the direction of the activity is, but this doesn't mean that the activity has no direction, that's nonsense, and an irrational conclusion
Quoting apokrisis
His published work is on the internet, seems like a random internet dude to me. If you really think that Dr. Ainsworth thinks Aristotle believed that prime matter has, or had real existence, then maybe you should invite him here to defend that position. I've already given you the unambiguous quotes where Aristotle himself denies this, and explained how prime matter is contrary to eternal circular motion, which he went on to propose as an alternative, after refuting the idea of prime matter. Perhaps Dr. Ainsworth just said that because it was what the publishers wanted. Maybe there's a materialist bias there.
That's not an issue in my triadic/hierarchical approach. A hierarchical relation has both an upper and a lower bound. Constraints come in two kinds - one that you might call material, the other formal.
We see this coming through in fundamental physics. The world is formed by two kinds of constraints - the formal laws and the physical constants.
So limits aren't by definition "formal". A triadic approach sees substantial reality emerging from material and formal cause. And both of these can then be "formally defined" in terms of a constraining limit.
Your complaint here is really just word play.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Note again how you are relying on terminological slippage.
I agree that definite properties require actual substances. They are the possibilities that "subsequently" arise due to some state of formal limitation of material potential.
But then there is this other thing, this third thing, of a foundational Apeiron or Vagueness. That is the more standard understanding of "potential" - a materiality that is vague in lacking yet a positive direction. Now form follows in creating that definite direction.
And as I then add, the idea of the Apeiron or Vagueness as a "pure potential" goes beyond even that as the argument is it contains the very dichotomy of matter~form as a seed action.
So there are a variety of meanings of "potential" in play. You may keep asserting that Aristotle offered the only "right one". But even there you interpretation seems back to front - or overly theistic - in wanting to credit creation on a prime mover rather than on prime matter (or better yet, the interaction between the two). You simply try to define prime matter out of existence, leaving only a prime mover, despite what mainstream interpretations are cited as believing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Obviously I was contrasting unformed possibilities with definite possibilities. So I am happy to call vagueness by its name. But also, somehow, it have to offer an intelligible contrast to explain what it could mean. A die is engineered so that it has counterfactual definiteness. Understanding what a die has then got - 6 exactly equal sides - allows you to understand what a die has got to lose ... what it would mean to be vaguer.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, to the degree something is actualised and particularised, then it has lost any vagueness or generality. That is exactly the way it goes.
But before the tree grew, there was much about its future that was indeterminate. If you want to be epistemic, who knew the tree was going to be chewed up by borer or smashed by last Saturday's lightning bolt?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are being optimistic now. If we go truly "deeper" into the tale of cosmic development, the Universe is blazing bath of radiation and nothing else. All action is lightspeed. The average temperature is billions of degrees above what matter can stand.
So yes, look around right now when the Universe is less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, and matter looks like fixed stuff with fixed properties. But that is not the "deep" view.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
And yet physics shows these two aspects of reality become indistinguishable or symmetric at the Planck scale. There is a fundamental convergence where indeterminacy then definitely takes over. Hence the uncertainty relation between location and momentum in quantum mechanics.
Or I could just as much point out the relativity of notion of motion. A context is needed to decide which one of us is doing the moving. Or even - in some absolute sense - not moving at all.
You are just applying a naive physical point of view to metaphysics here.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure. Oxford always be handing out PhDs to random internet dudes. I'm sure yours is in the post too. :-}
This doesn't make sense to me. Formal laws are the laws which scientists make, they are descriptions of the physical reality. These are not constraints because they are descriptions which human beings make, so they cannot act in the world to constrain anything. If you are saying that these laws refer to something law-like in the physical reality, then these are physical constraints. Now we don't have two types of constraints, only physical constraints. If you drop an object, and say that it will be constrained to fall, this is a physical constraint. If a material object interferes, and breaks the fall, again, this is described by laws of interaction, and is again a formal constraint. Where are the two distinct types of constraints here.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh really? I beg to differ. You accuse me of adhering to classical definitions, saying that you want to introduce new definitions. And you say I am relying on "terminological slippage". You continue to present things backwardly.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think that's the standard understanding of "potential" at all. Potential means capable of, or the capacity for, it has nothing to do with vagueness. If you are proposing a relationship between potential and vagueness, this must be justified, or at least explained.
In the Aristotelian structure, the concept of "potential" is required to account for the nature of time. The truth about things which may or may not happen at a future time (like the sea battle tomorrow), is stated with reference to potential. So it is neither true, nor not true, that the sea battle will occur, it is possible. Aristotle allows for exception to the law of excluded middle in reference to future events, and this opens the door to vagueness in "potential".
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, there are a variety of meanings of "potential", or "possible", and the goal is to avoid ambiguity and especially equivocation. Do you agree, that when we look to past events, there is a truth concerning what actually occurred, yet if we do not know what actually occurred, we might entertain possibilities? This is a type of epistemic vagueness, a not knowing about something which there is an actual truth about. But "potential", in reference to future events which may or may not occur, is an ontological category. There is no actual truth as to whether or not there will be a sea battle tomorrow, because whether or not there will be a sea battle has not yet been decided. So the vagueness here is not a simple matter of not knowing what is actually the case, it is a matter of it being impossible to know what is the case, because it has not yet been decided. The reality is, that what will occur tomorrow will not be decided until tomorrow, so there is no truth nor falsity with respect to this. The LEM is violated, and there is vagueness. Do you agree with this ontological assessment of the future, and that this is what "potential" refers to, the future, and why it is designated as vague? That one chooses to violate the PNC rather than the LEM when dealing with the future (potential) is a matter of metaphysical preference.
Now consider your proposed foundational vagueness, apeiron. We need to determine whether this is a case of vagueness which is derived from not knowing, epistemic possibility, or is it the ontological vagueness which is given to us by the nature of the future, potential. Suppose, in a thought experiment, we project ourselves back to this proposed time, at the beginning of the universe when the apeiron is assumed to exist. In this projection, the present is then, such that all time is in front of us. I assume you would say, that according to the nature of the apeiron, the potential for the future is infinite. This potential is pure, so that means that there is no actuality in the past, nothing which has already occurred, to constrain what may happen in the future, so that anything is possible. Would you agree that this means that at this time, there is no past, there is only future?
So here's the problem. There is no actuality of the past, only pure potential, infinite possibility for the future. But if there is no past, that means that time is not passing, there is no time. From this position of pure future, with no past, how do you propose that we get time started? What creates a past, such that there is something actual? What Aristotle argues, is that from this proposed position of pure potential, all future and no past, it is impossible that there ever will be a past, because time is not passing, and no reason why time would start passing. So we need to introduce something which accounts for time passing and this is why he suggested eternal circular motions. But this is to deny the pure potential of the aperion, which is all future and no past, by introducing eternal time.
This is what you need to clear up for me then. You have proposed a situation where no time is passing, because there is only future, and no past. Necessarily, time is not passing. What makes time start to pass?
Quoting apokrisis
This is exactly my point, physics does not show this. What the modern principles of physics show, in this regard, is that physicists have not the capacity to distinguish these two aspects of reality, at the Planck scale. This is evident from the principles of the Fourier transform, the shorter the period of time the more difficult it is to determine the frequency, until in a very short period, it becomes impossible. It is not the case that the two aspects of reality, actual and potential (past and future) are really indistinguishable, it is just the case that physicists have not developed the appropriate means for distinguishing them and so they get lost in the vagueness of symmetry math. In reality, there is a very real difference between past and future, actual and potential, because time is asymmetrical. To say that this difference is actually indistinguishable (rather than indistinguishable due to the deficiencies of human applications), such that it is lost in symmetry, is a mistake.
Quoting apokrisis
The problem here, is that the notion of motion already presupposes the passage of time. You have proposed a point, pure potential, at which point there is no passage of time, or else there would be an actual past, and not pure potential. So you cannot turn to motion, or any physical activity, to conjure up the start of time, because all of these imply that time is already passing.
Potential is defined dichotomously by Aristotle. It is about the production of "what is" in contradiction to "what is not". White is a definitely possible quality because blackness is the "other" that underwrites that. The less black something is, the more white it is. The PNC can thus apply to the actual outcome. If the change - the suppression of blackness, the production of whiteness - is complete, then we have the counterfactual definiteness of the PNC where some thing is either white or black.
But clearly the differentiation of black from white is a developmental process that passes through many shades of grey. And some shade of grey will seem exactly poised between blackness and whiteness. It will be as much black as it is white. So really it is just vague as which it truly is. It is simply now the potential to develop towards either end of the spectrum. The PNC fails to apply at this point even weakly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, future conditionals are an example of vagueness. The reason then for talking about the PNC not applying is that Peirce made the argument that it is with generality, or universality, that the LEM does not apply. (And note also, rather than speaking of "violations" - as if a law is broken - the claim is that the law simply does not apply, there being "no fact of the matter".)
So a general is a form or substance that has crisp or definite actuality. It is a concrete possibility which is "all middle". The general is understood by what it manages to definitely include ... and so what it fails to exclude. The PNC is then about the vague as it neither definitely includes nor definitely excludes. Vagueness swallows up all distinction at a more primal level.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. Both time and space, and energy as well, would all have to "get started". In a metaphysics based on Apeiron, a pure potential, all the basic substantial furniture of existence would have to self-organise into definite, actualised, being.
This is then made intelligible by energy (or action) and spacetime (or direction) being themselves recognised as a dichotomy, a symmetry breaking, harboured in that pure potential. A state of everythingness can't prevent itself from becoming divided against itself in formal fashion.
Being grey can't prevent the division that would be the separation that is moving towards black and white. If a greyness fluctuates even a little bit at some point, it is moving towards the one and moving away from the other in the same act. All it takes is for this kind of simultaneous departure to be a more intelligible state for it to develop then into a definite universal habit. Greyness disappears as the broken symmetry of white vs black takes over and makes for a world of definite being.
So all physics has to show is (1) that a fundamental dichotomy - like action vs direction - has that basic complementarity. It must produce a fluctuation of that form even in a "pure state of initial symmetry". And then (2), that that fluctuation would be self-sustaining and have reason to grow. And here, the argument is that the fluctuation will prove to be dissipative. There is some discovered advantage that drives a phase transition or fundamental change of state.
So yes. It is a big ask of physics to cash out this metaphysics. But even time is being looked at in this fashion now in fundamental physics - as thermally emergent rather than ontically basic.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But Aristotle instead argues that there is no beginning. It is because he can't imagine a "beginning" which is a vagueness - a "state" where there isn't even a fact of the matter in regard to "time" - that he feels forced to conclude existence is eternal ... timeless in the opposite sense. And it is to make sense of that which leads him to an argument for an unmoved mover.
A vagueness-based ontology also has its unmoved mover as I say. The maths of symmetry, or invariance under transformation. There is a principle that "eternally" wants expressing. And it "exists" outside of time if you like. The Apeiron seems - retrospectively - a principally material state, as it is easiest to describe it in terms of the "chaos of unbounded action or fluctuation that got things going". Then the definite symmetries that were "always going to organise it" can be understood as "eternal mathematical truths" in being the regularities that were always going to manifest by necessity.
In that view, it is no surprise that Aristotle was already thinking in terms of the most symmetric form known - a circle. Or rotational invariance. That bit of reasoning is correct and shared. Particle physics has arrived at the same conclusion. All particles (or quantum excitations) have their definite form because there are only those invariant states of rotation or spin available to them.
The big difference of course is that particle physics invokes spin symmetries at the smallest scales of being. The Cosmos itself, by contrast, lacks rotation. Or at least, rotation of the Cosmos makes "no sense" as there is nothing to measure that in a relative fashion.
But also, modern physics recognises a dichotomy of "unmoved movers" in that the Cosmos is based on a pair of inertial symmetries, or free motions - rotational symmetry and translation symmetry.
So my point is that the idea of an "unmoved mover" is a general feature of metaphysics. In discovering the Cosmos to be rational and mathematical, this of course gets us thinking in terms of timeless or eternal principles that must become manifest in any material destiny. Even if matter tries to be maximally chaotic, that very attempt will reveal the limits to chaos. A "deeper" order will show through as the attractor - the final cause, or the actuality towards which the potential must "aspire".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it could always be the case that more might be discovered and there is something definite "beyond the Planck scale". One can never prove a theory, only show it has not yet been clearly falsified.
However a vast weight of evidence and theory has been accumulated which points to the Planck scale as a true boundary to distinguishability - to counterfactuality and separability.
So the astounding progress of the last century of physics stands against your nay-saying here. If you want to argue the physicists are all missing something, you would have to provide a better motivation for your position on that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are missing the power of dichotomous reasoning. It is always simply the case that for one thing to be, so must its "other". You can't have figure without ground, event without context. So what you point out as a bug is instead the metaphysical feature.
As I said, you can't have action without direction, and vice versa. If this is the most foundational dichotomy or symmetry breaking (and in physics, it is) then you always will get these two for the price of one. For anything to happen, both these complementary things are what must happen together.
So time is change, and change is time. That is, the possibility of a particular action also calls forth the possibility of generic action. "Time" gets started when a distinction of this kind can itself begin to get made.
Note also that we can read off the passage of time either by seeing a local change as happening against a static global backdrop (a fixed cosmic temporal dimension), or instead as a local lack of change against a dynamic global backdrop (as is more the modern physical picture given that the universe started as a spreading bath of radiation, nothing happening "slower" than lightspeed).
So there is indeed both a dichotomy at the heart of things (change vs stasis) and thus a situation that can be read in either direction.
It is no surprise that Aristotle - admirable thinker though he was in every way - took an obviously human-centric view of his metaphysical story. Matter fell because the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Mind was fundamental to the Cosmos because it was fundamental to thinkers like himself. Motion needed explaining while stasis did not. And so forth.
The dichotomous or dialectical reasoning employed by the Ancient Greeks was very powerful and correct. But also, the tendency was to read the dichotomies the wrong way round. The human-centric qualities of nature - those most readily perceptible - were taken as the fundamental rather than as the emergent. Now that - through science - we can see reality in a more holistic and cosmic fashion, the same dichotomies can be used to make better sense of what the big picture really is.
Potential is difficult to understand, because it is not any definite thing. It is defined by Aristotle by referring to the dichotomy of what is and is not, but it is not defined dichotomously. It is not about the production of what is in contradiction to what is not, it is that which neither is nor is not. Dichotomy is formal, through and through. Matter has perfections and imperfections, completeness and incompleteness, but all these dichotomies are with respect to the form, not the matter.
Quoting apokrisis
Look, matter itself is neither white nor black, but may be either one. White or black is the form which the matter has.
Quoting apokrisis
So this is where continuity is the issue. Aristotle proposed, in his Physics, that matter provides a continuity of existence. In this way, when a thing's form changes from being black, to being white, we can assume that it is still the same thing, just having a different form, by assuming that it is still the same matter'
There was a logical problem which arose from the nature of becoming, which sophists exploited. If a thing changes, from black to white for example, it has a different form, so logically it is not the same thing, it has a different description. Aristotle pointed out, that if we assume an intermediate form, grey, then we have to account for the change from black to grey. So we would have to assume another intermediate form, between black and grey, a different shade of grey, and so on, such that there is an infinite number of intermediate forms necessary to account for any change from one form to another. His conclusion was that becoming is inherently incompatible with the logical forms of being and not being.
So matter, with the essential nature of potential, was proposed to account for becoming. Becoming, for Aristotle is where the laws of logic break down. Notice though, that it is a very particular law of identity which suffers from this problem. It is only when we assume continuity, that a thing continues to be the same thing, despite changing through time, that we have "becoming", a thing which is changing, and this produces a problem with the laws of logic. This is A's formulation of the law of identity, that a thing is the same as itself. It doesn't matter if the thing is changing, so long as it is itself, it is the same thing. If we stick to logical identity though, then every moment that a thing changes, it is a new thing. There is no continuity of existence of an object from one moment to the next. Each moment gives us a different form, a different description, therefore a different thing, and the logic of being and not being dictates that there is no continuity. However, we observe a continuity of existence, things continue to be the things that they were. So A assumes matter, and potential, to account for the observed continuity. Vagueness lies here within this continuity, where the laws of logic, if applied, would result in infinite regress.
Quoting apokrisis
But this is what doesn't make sense. You are proposing that something, pure potential exists prior to time getting started. But this apeiron doesn't have the capacity to start time, so we'd just have to assume something else as that which starts time. Then why propose apeiron as the first thing? Potential is used to describe the temporal continuity between two existing states in a changing world, the situation which is neither this state nor that state, but in between. The situation prior to all physical states is a completely different situation, then is a change between two states.
Quoting apokrisis
Here, you use "grey" as analogous to the pure potential apeiron. But the point of Aristotle's demonstration with becoming, is that it is incorrect to refer to the becoming, which accounts for the in between of black and white as "grey". To call it grey is to name another state, and you imply the infinite regress. So the matter, or potential, which accounts for becoming, is something completely other from black and white, it is completely incompatible. So we cannot say that the potential (grey) gives way to black and white, it is something completely different, which is always there regardless of whether it is black or white. The potential (matter), may at one time give way to black, or at another time give way to white, but it is always there, all the time, as the same. You cannot represent it as "grey", which is just a degree of difference between black and white, because this gives rise to infinite regress.
So now we have the apeiron of potential, which is completely other from the dichotomous black and white, but it continues to exist, along with the black and white. It cannot give way, and become the dichotomous black and white, it just exists with them as the continuity within change. If we say that the apeiron of potential is prior to the dichotomous black and white, this doesn't get us anywhere, because it cannot ever give way to the dichotomous black and white, so this tells us nothing about the forms which exist. We still need to seek the cause of why there is what there is. Assuming apeiron does nothing but confuse the issue by taking the principle which is responsible for explaining the change between two states, and trying to apply it where it is not suited, to the beginning.
Quoting apokrisis
But action vs direction is not a proper dichotomy. One is the property of the other. Action has direction. And this is the same as matter has form. But these are not what I would call dichotomies, they are categorical differences. One direction may be opposed to another, like black is opposed to white, but action is in a completely different category, like potential is, and action cannot become direction. That doesn't make sense.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I keep telling you over and over, it is not that Aristotle can't imagine a beginning in the vagueness of potential, he demonstrated that this is logically impossible. He clearly imagined it, and he discussed it. That's why your quoted scholar said that he believed in it. But he clearly did not believe in it. This is why he presented the cosmological argument which he is well known for, to refute it. After he accepted this impossibility, the impossibility of a beginning in vagueness, then he proposed the eternal circular motions.
Quoting apokrisis
Because the Planck limit is completely dependent upon the theories employed to explain the features of the universe, it is just a manifestation of those theories. That these theories produce a boundary to distinguishability reveals the inadequacies of the theories, not true boundaries to distinguishability.
Quoting apokrisis
This is your category mistake creeping in again. It is only in conception that there is necessarily an other. Hot is defined by cold, negative defines positive, etc.. But in the actual world of individual material things, there is no such thing as a thing's other each thing is unique in its own ways. This is why matter, with potential, has it's own separate category. The matter has the potential to have the form of white or black, one or the other, but this is formal, and there is no other to the matter (potential) itself.
Quoting apokrisis
You seem to be using "dichotomy" in two distinct ways here. In the first case you present what I call a categorical difference, a thing and its property, action, direction. In the second case you have opposition, change and stasis.
Yep. So it is vague ... in relation to the definite actuality that it then gives rise to.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. It is defined dichotomously - A and not-A. Or rather it is the prior state when there is neither A nor not-A present. That is, the PNC as yet fails to apply. So it is defined as that which must be capable of yielding the dichotomy and an actuality that is ruled by the PNC.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again yep. Formal cause - a calculus of distinctions - is what produces an intelligible actual world out of "bare material cause". There is nothing substantial except that it has been formed by informational constraints. And the dichotomy is just speaking to the "how" of the distinction-making.
Aristotle saw that reality is a hierarchy of increasingly specified distinctions, or dichotomies/symmetry breakings. Genus begets species by critical divisions. Man is generically animal (and thus not mineral), but also more specifically rational (and thus not irrational or lacking in reason).
So actuality is the product of a hierarchy of constraints that impinge on localised matter, giving it concrete shape. And that seems to be the case "all the way down". Even the simplest forms of materiality - like fundamental particles - already have formal shape due to mathematical-strength symmetry-breakings.
Quarks are stuck at an SU(3) level of symmetry-breaking - locked into a state due to the cooling universe and their stable confinement by their own strong force. Leptons are then particles that managed to decay all the way down to bottom-most U(1) symmetry. So fundamental physics agrees it is formal cause - a hierarchy of dichotomies or symmetry-breakings - that turned the vague potential of the hot Big Bang into a cascade of actualised particles. Cold shards of pure structure.
And that means that we both know - from reason - that there must be some "stuff", some "material", that gets formed in this way, and yet this material cause becomes the ultimately elusive part of reality. We can't pin it down - see it in its raw formlessness - as it only becomes something definite and "pinnable" if it has a form.
Aristotle was dealing with exactly this issue in discussing the prime matter that must underlie four elements.
Now the four elements themselves - fire, air, water, earth - we can today recognise as the four phases of matter. Plasma, gas, liquid, solid. Those four distinctions have become purely formal ones - the different states of atomic interaction due to changing temperature.
But nevertheless, the same reasoning applies. Some material principle - some principle of energy/matter conservation - must provide the continuity, the imperishability, that allows the observed phase transitions, or perishings and generations, that are clearly part of the actual world.
So note the very reasonable assumption here - which is in fact a pretty impressive leap of the human imagination. From observation of the world, it was assumed that matter is ultimately conserved in quantity. Or rather, the quantity of potential action was fixed. Action or dynamism could be converted from one form to another, but the actual total quantity of action is conserved.
So Anaximander's Apeiron was an open system view. The Apeiron was like an inexhaustible supply of action. (Although a conservation principle was embedded in the idea that everything produced by dichotomous formation - fire, air, water, earth - would then return to Apeiron as that form eventually degenerated.)
Aristotle pushed for a sharper distinction. The Comos became a closed material system. There must be an underlying "prime matter" that is eternal and imperishable, endlessly taking new shape without in fact being used up, or being generated anew. And it was from that assumption that the idea of a creation event - a birth of all this imperishable matter - became a great metaphysical difficulty.
So Aristotle was taking the metaphysical argument the next step. He was making it clear that the choice was between a Cosmos open for causality (freely fed by an Apeiron) versus a Cosmos closed for causality (getting by on an eternally fixed quantity of prime matter). That then led to the apparently necessary conclusion that the material principle was the passive and imperceptible part of the equation.
Well seeing the Cosmos as a closed system, a conserved quantity of matter, doesn't ultimately work. But it does then allow the even more sophisticated metaphysical point of view. We can ask how closure itself could arise. We can seek an immanent model of self-organisation where a classical, materially-closed Universe, is the rational outcome.
This is where we get to modern dissipative structure thinking. This is where a logic of vagueness, a logic of hierarchical emergence, comes into its own.
So Anaximander understood reality in terms of an open flow action that self-organises to have emergent structure. Aristotle then showed what this reality looked like by going over to the other extreme - how we would imagine it as a system, still with hierarchical structure, but now closed and eternal.
Then following that sharpening of our thinking, we can understand reality in terms of self-organising material closure. We no longer rely on Anaximander's admittedly very material conception of the Apeiron, nor Aristotle's maddenly elusive notion of prime matter, but understand that there is a vagueness beyond both material and formal cause. We can't grant primacy or priority to either material cause or formal cause because they themselves are the dichotomy that emerges from a "pure potential" that is both neither of these things, yet necessarily must be able to break to yield these complementary things.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. The formulation of a conservation principle - the law of identity - is the basic step to get formal logical argument going. It is how you ground a pure calculus of distinctions. It literally is the making of pure form by abstracting away the real world materiality - getting rid of the inherent vagueness of the actual world. Or rather, ignoring the vagueness, the ontic indeterminacy, that still inheres on close examination.
So identity - a conservation of "fundamental stuff" - is an epistemic presumption. It axiomatically grounds the ontic modelling. And from that assumed basis, we can compute arguments using the "pure forms" of the laws of thought.
But then to argue backwards from that set of assumptions to say that is how reality actually is, well that is the obvious mistake. Just because logic "really works" doesn't mean we should believe it is "the thing in itself".
That is why a systems approach to metaphysics would embrace Peirce's approach the laws of thought. He saw that they describe the regularity of a world which has developed rational habits. So yes, the laws of thought do describe the final outcome with great accuracy.
But when the question turns to how could such a world develop, we have to bring in vagueness - firstness, tychism, spontaneity, fluctuation - as the logical corollary. The starting condition of the crisply organised, the definitely closed, the conserved and (future) eternal, has to be its own formal "other". Creation has to be explained in terms of its own reciprocal being - the inverse of what it becomes.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
The infinite regress of causality is asymptotic at worst. So it converges on a point. And that point both defines the limit and stands "outside" it. So this is exactly how I have argued for vagueness - as a limit which itself is formally "not real".
If you are going to make the accusation of infinite regress, you have to also acknowledge that this is a special kind of regress - one that converges on an "actual" point. It is like pi. We can never arrive at the actual final decimal expansion of pi. Yet the very fact that we can get arbitrarily close shows that pi "definitely exists" .... as a formal limit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. Once you argue for a generalised conservation principle, then you have a real problem with understanding reality as any kind of creation event. And yet modern science shows the Universe did emerge from a "Big Bang". So we can't simply pretend that our existence doesn't have some kind of creation moment.
The metaphysical question then becomes how can we best explain the situation as we now know it to be? Is there a logic of self-organised development that can get us a step closer to "the truth"?
So sure Aristotle made some arguments. Those have been tested against reality. They clearly don't hold. We can thank him for so clearly presenting the contrasting alternatives that made them actually thus testable, and move on.
Aristotle's mistakes were valuable ones. Imagining matter as the passive principle is an example of getting it exactly back to front in a way that allows us to then flip to the other better perspective eventually.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Now you are simply misunderstanding the pragmatic foundations of belief. It is the whole point of theories to deliver confirmation in terms of measurables. But the theory doesn't manifest the observables. They are what we actually measure when we apply the theory in modelling our reality.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is only true to the extent that materiality has become locally complex and historically specified. I can tell one oak leaf from another due to all kinds of microscopic accidents - blemishes - which have become incorporated into its material structure.
But down at the fundamental level of quantum particles, individuation disappears. That is why quantum matter becomes "entangled". Two particles, supposedly separate in regards to their location and momentum, are in fact acting as if it is impossible to tell them apart.
So you are building your classical notion of individuated substance on incorrect foundations. We now know from observation that your foundational notions about the "actual world" are simply wrong.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A "metaphysical strength" dichotomy is how categories are themselves generated. If there is quantity, then its formal other is quality. For form, there is matter. For one, there is many. For discrete, there is continuous. Etc, etc.
The job of metaphysics is then to try to describe reality using the least number of such dichotomies. Or arriving at the most basic ones.
For me, that leaves you with two foundational dichotomies. One encompasses "what is" - the hierarchical or structural notion of the local~global. And then the other speaks to how what is can develop into its definite state of structured being. That dichotomy is the vague~crisp.
So a generic dichotomy for measuring reality in terms of its synchonic structure, and another one for doing that in terms of its diachronic development.
Which is the source of the so-called 'observer problem', is it not?
It would be why I like quantum interpretations that now take the information theoretic approach and explain quantum uncertainty in terms of the fundamental impossibility of asking "two opposite questions of reality at the same place and time".
Instead of there being an observer problem, reality is now viewed as "observer created". It comes down to being able to ask a meaningful question.
But the flip side of that - which you won't like - is that any notion of a mind or conscious observer gets reduced to a thermal decohering environment. At the fundamental level there is "nothing else going on".
Isn't that simply another way of trying to dodge the apparent 'primacy of consciousness'?
I read this almost interminable discussion and I side with MU. Apo has just made an entire jumble of categories and treats them as if they were convertible from one to the other. Also he often talks past what is said to him and just repeats his story with new words. A story which makes sense only if you grant him an irrational point of departure and an irrational point of finality. With those two small sleights of hand, everything else can be accounted for.
It's not about God, your metaphysics just doesn't make sense though. The argument has already been made, you're just avoiding it.
The purpose of thermodynamics is artificial or emergent. It's like having a 12-sided dice with 11 faces having a value of 1 and only one side having a different value. According to thermodynamics, it is only this asymmetry in the structure of reality that creates the entropic imperative in the long run - meaning the entropic imperative is only statistical and results from there being a lot more entropifying possibilities (a lot more possibilities to score '1' given a throw in the dice analogy) in the pool of possible choices than the opposite. So if anything this "purpose" is enforced by the a priori structure of reality.
I really don't need you pseudo-scientific gibberish. The heart of your ideology is pure Daoism. Deal with it.
You're not speaking with Apo lol...
LOL. Rich did hit the bullseye there.
I'm saving your choiced ideology for a summary so everyone can enjoy your poetic verbiage.
That's a spectacularly bad description as it mushes all the different aspects of a dissipative structure ontology together.
But anyway, it should be remembered that teleology at the base cosmic level only needs to be considered a globalised tendency. At the biological level, we could talk about it being a function. Then at a psychological level, we could talk about it as a purpose.
So a continuity is claimed. It is finality all the way down. But constraint at the cosmic level lacks choice. It is what it is. Then when the flow of entropification gets blocked, that is when more local choices start to need to get made. More complex structure must arise to restore the generalised tendency. And this complex structure is free to find any method that works to do the job. That explains the development of intelligence and anticipatory planning. You start to get evolved functionality and even conscious choosing.
Typical western new age cultural appropriation.
Rather than peddling esoteric spirituality, focus on how Taoism is about the naturalness of constraints and the organic emergence they foster. The world has a way.
Oh you whacky westerners! Align your chakras and boogie on down to your dharma. Everyone in the house go "om". :D
Wow it does exactly what your whole philosophy does :D
Quoting apokrisis
Yep, and like so globalised tendency, function and purpose are all mushed together into a cute word salad that is taken to be philosophy and deep understanding :B
(Oh and I forgot, finality is added in there too... do you liked mashed potatoes?)
You still didn't tell me if you like mashed potatoes... ;)
But remember, I use "vague" and "potential" in a different way from you. For me, vagueness, is necessarily conditional, as is potential. It is conditional on the nature of time, Time is passing, and because time is passing, there is a future. Potential, along with its associated vagueness is descriptive of the future. You propose an unconditional vagueness. You disassociate vagueness from the passing of time, so that vagueness is no longer dependent on the passing of time, in order to propose an unconditional vagueness. This allows you to posit a "beginning" point where there is no past, only future, such that the potential of the future is unconstrained by any past. But this proposition is unjustified and incoherent, because unless time is passing, the claim of a future or a past is unsupported, not grounded at all. So your proposal of a point of infinite vagueness, pure potential, as a beginning, before time starts passing, is completely incoherent.
Quoting apokrisis
Why do you have such difficulty recognizing the difference between the principle of con-contradiction and the principle of excluded middle. What you have described above, "there is neither A nor not-A present" is a state where PEN does not apply. Yet you say that the PNC "as yet fails to apply". The PNC does apply. When the state has neither A nor not-A present, we can clearly make the valid claim that there is not both A and not-A present, so there is no need for the claim that the PNC does not apply.
Therefore, the so-called dichotomy of A and not-A exists, is present, but it is not attributable to this particular point. We have identified a particular point where neither A nor not-A is present, but this is applicable only to that particular point, as A and not-A are not denied in an absolute sense. So we still have the defining feature of A and not-A available to us, yet this particular point cannot be defined by these. The PEN does not apply, and this point being referred to, potential, or vagueness, must be described according to other principles.
So vagueness, or potential, as I understand it, is not described dichotomously, it must be described by referring to other principles. You want to describe it dichotomously, and say that there is no dichotomy right here at this point, but it "must be capable of yielding the dichotomy". This claim is totally unjustified, produced only by your desire to assign "firstness", or "beginning" to this vagueness. That desire forces you to utilize this particular point where PEN fails to apply, to exclude the dichotomy of PNC, in an absolute way. When PNC has been excluded absolutely you insist that vagueness is prior to it, and you are left with this incoherent claim, that the dichotomy of PNC emerges from the vagueness. This replaces the more intelligible claim that the vagueness of potential is not the beginning, or first at all, it is not prior to the dichotomous A and not-A, it is simply something other than this.
Quoting apokrisis
As usual, you have things backward again. The terms "genus" and "species" refer to the degrees of human understanding, they refer to concepts. Within the conceptual realm, the more specific "begets" the more general, as Aristotle explained, we move from the more well known, the particular, toward the lesser known, the more general. So "man" is defined as being "animal", such that "animal" is within "man", and what an animal is less well known than what a man is. And what alive is, is less well known than what animal is. The concept of animal (the more general) comes from the understanding of the particular (man). These are not "critical divisions", as they are not divisions at all, but principles of unity. "Animal" is within "man".
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly, and as I have been telling you over and over again, Aristotle came to a very decisive conclusion on this issue. There is no such thing as prime matter. It may be useful for physicists to imagine this "raw formlessness", but in reality it is completely impossible, irrational to think that such a thing ever existed, because it is unintelligible. So, when you say it "becomes the ultimately elusive part of reality", this is very true, because it's not real, it's just a dream. Those who are seeking it are running off in the wrong direction, tilting at windmills. "The Impossible Dream".
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, Aristotle showed how Anaximander's understanding looked, it looked impossible. And so it was laid to rest, dismissed for thousands of years until hard core materialists, dialectical materialists, resurrected that impossible dream in the nineteenth century.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, how many times must I tell you? This is unconditionally false. Aristotle proved that the idea that "there must be an underlying 'prime matter' that is eternal and imperishable" is absolutely false. He demonstrates that anything eternal must be actual, that's why he posits eternal circular motions.
Quoting apokrisis
All you are saying, is that if prime matter has been shown to be the impossible dream, let's posit something else, "pure potential", in its place. But "pure potential" is just another way of saying "prime matter", and Aristotle's argument is directed specifically at the notion of "pure potential'. That is why Aristotle's argument is so effective. As I said it is a double edged sword which defeats both materialism and idealism. He demonstrates how ideas have no actual existence prior to being "discovered" by human minds. The act of discovery is an actualization. So anyone who claims that ideas exist prior to being discovered by the mind must consent to the fact that such existence is purely potential. Then he demonstrates that anything eternal must be actual.
The idealist notion of "pure potential" is just the flip side of the materialist notion of "prime matter". Both are effectively refuted by the cosmological argument. So it is pointless, senseless, and meaningless to dismiss the materialist "prime matter", for the idealist "information", or "pure potential", because these are just the two sides of the same approach, the approach which was refuted by Aristotle.
Quoting apokrisis
I think you are misunderstanding the relationship between the conservation principle, the law of identity, and formal logic. There are two distinct forms of the law of identity. The one employed by formal logic, says that the object referred to cannot be other than what is expressed by the defining statements. Aristotle saw that this principle was abused by sophists, and stated a new form of the law of identity, which says that the object cannot be other than itself.
The first form of the law of identity is what is required to get formal deductive logic going. The conservation principle emerges from the second form, Aristotle's form of the law of identity. This form allows that "sameness" refers to the temporal continuity of the object as "itself". And conservation principles are derived from that assumed temporal continuity. The two forms of the law of identity are not inherently compatible. They must be made to be compatible, by adjusting them. You might assume the descriptive form of identity used for deductive logical, is the one which must be adjusted, because the temporal continuity of the object is the way that nature is. But this is just an assumption, and there is nothing to show that the assumed temporal continuity, and conservation principles, should not themselves be adjusted. Therefore conservation principles, as a starting point for ontology cannot be taken for granted.
Quoting apokrisis
The way to avoid infinite regress is not to set an arbitrary limit, it is to find a new approach, one which avoids the infinite regress. So it is clearly a mistake, to take an approach which has infinite regress firmly rooted in that approach, and say that when infinity is approached, this is the limit. That is an irrational, unintelligible approach. It is inherently, self-contradictory because you are claiming infinity as a limit. When something converges on a point, yet never actually reaches that point, to say that this is a limit, is contradictory.
To say that .99999 repeating is actually 1 is contradictory. And to avoid this contradiction is not to insist that the contradiction is actually true, and what is the case. It is to find a new approach which avoids the infinite regress conclusion of .99999 repeating, and the urge to insist that this is actually 1.
This is exactly the problem with your proposed vagueness as a beginning in pure potential. Your approach. using conservation principles, leads necessarily to an infinite past in time. But instead of accepting that this is what your approach leads to, and looking for a new, better approach, to avoid this problem, you designate a random, arbitrary, beginning point, as vague potential. Your justification for this beginning point is nothing more than the contradiction, that .99999 repeating is the same as 1. And if it is pointed out to you, that this is contradictory, you would say sure, because vague potential is where the PNC does not apply.
Quoting apokrisis
Here is that contradiction.
And here is a contradiction of another sort:
Quoting apokrisis
When I suggested that the Planck scale limitations are created by the theories which are applied, you said no, the theory doesn't manifest the observables. Then you went right on to the claim that reality is observer created. When it supports your argument one rule applies, but when it supports mine, the opposite of that rule applies.
Thanks for the encouragement. It's a bit difficult to maintain a continued and extensive dialogue with apokrisis for the reasons you mentioned, so I appreciate the encouragement. I assume that on apo's side, it is difficult to maintain a dialogue with me, probably for other reasons.
I’m not sure how to here best interpret the term “ideas”—and I have not read Aristotle’s arguments first hand. I so far find it reasonable that at least some platonic ideas (ideals / forms) can be safely presumed to exist prior to any person’s awareness of them. Though not my main interests, basic geometric forms might serve as an easy example—a triangle, for instance. More importantly to me, though, are forms such as that of the Good—which I maintain necessarily exist as actuality even were no human to be consciously aware of this platonic “idea”.
Better expressed: My own present contention is that the Good as form, for example, is both actual and, in an equivocal sense, simultaneously potential. The Good thereby, imo, exists in and of itself as metaphysical actuality while, from the vantage of all actual people, existing only as a potential state of affairs yet to be obtained by any of us. Furthermore, it would hold this status even if no sentience were to be consciously aware of it so being.
For me, this is in no way intended as a defense of idealism. I’m however interested in better understanding the logics of actuality and potentiality from the vantage of a hypothetical global telos.
I think that the point here is that things like "the triangle", and "the good", are human words. Now, there is supposed to be an objective, independently existing idea which corresponds to these words. But what actually exists, in relation to this assumed correspondence, cannot be anything beyond the correspondence established by a human mind, between the word and the human idea. The human mind cannot establish a relationship between the word and the assumed independently existing idea, it only has the ideas in its own mind. Therefore, that the independently existing ideas exist, cannot be known in any sense beyond an ungrounded assumption, and we must maintain this in our representation of reality, that independently existing ideas is a possibility. The next step of the problem is that an eternally existing possibility is not a real possibility due to the principle of plenitude. So eternal, immutable, independent "Ideas" is refuted in this way.
Quoting javra
I believe that this is the way that Idealism in the form of Neo-Platonism and Christian theology gets beyond the cosmological argument of Aristotle. The Neo-Platonists designate independent Forms as having actual existence. This assumption is proven necessary by our experience with the material world. But this produces a categorical separation between human ideas, which according to Aristotle's argument are of the nature of potential, and the independent Forms which are of the nature of actual. In theology the independent (actual) Forms are the divine Ideas, property of God. There is a necessary separation between these Forms, which are independent from, and prior to material existence, and human ideas, which are dependent on the human soul's union with the body.
Quoting javra
With respect to telos, telos is what validates the claim of independent Forms. In the case of human intention, it is seen that the form of the thing is prior in time to the physical existence of the thing, the form is the blueprint which is followed in the creation of the thing. Plato demonstrated, that in nature, the form of all material things precedes the material existence of the thing, and Aristotle followed this principle with a claim of "that the thing will be" only follows from "what the thing will be". In other words, it is essential that "what the thing will be" is determined prior to the determination "that the thing will be". To say that it is determined "that the thing will be", when there is no specific "what the thing will be", already determined, is nonsense. The clear examples which we have, where we can analyze how "what the thing will be" is prior to "that the thing will be", are instances of human intention, telos. So we conclude that in nature there must be a similar telos at work.
I’m in a bit of a hurry right now. So a quick reply to a quick reading of your post (may reply in greater detail later on after a rereading):
I agree with the position that actuality can logically only be a priori to potentiality. So, from my point of view regarding a global telos, the telos must be a priori to all potentiality as an existent actuality—this even though its obtainment by aware agencies (these also being present actualities) can only be appraised in terms of potentiality. I’m hoping that this at least makes some sense—and it is this overlap of actuality and potentially that currently has me further contemplating the matter. Still—though I can’t yet make out if it’s due to the same reasons or not—I’m in full agreement that actuality cannot be birthed of pure potentiality, and that the latter notion is nonsensical.
If I understand you, you are saying that the actuality which is known to us as a global telos, is understood by us in terms of potentiality.
Quoting javra
So I believe that this is the difficulty, the gap between what appears to us as potentiality, and the real actuality which lies behind this appearance of potentiality. There is a substantial difference between these two, due to the categorical difference. But when we apprehend the potential as real, like apokrisis does, then it is necessary to recognize the actuality which provides for the existence of this potentiality, which apokrisis does not. When the actuality is not apprehended then one will proceed to make unsubstantiated claims concerning the existence of this potentiality, it's "firstness" etc...
A good place to develop a firm understanding of the relationship between potency and act, is by reading Aristotle's On the Soul. All the powers of living creatures are described as potencies. But these potencies must be attributed to something actual in order to substantiate their existence. The potencies, or powers, exist as the body of the living being, the various different bodies of various living beings, are the various potencies of living beings. So the body as a collection of potencies, must be attributed to something actual, and this is the soul itself. Aristotle provides, as the primary definition of soul, the first actuality of a body having life potentially in it. This necessitates that the body has no actuality prior to having life, there is no actual body, only the potential for such. And the soul brings, or gives, actual existence to the body.
This is contrary to the principles of emergence which hold that the soul, or life, emerges from the existence of the body, as if it is a potency of the body. But when this premise is taken, then we must look to a prior material existence to substantiate the actual existence of the living body. Since this prior material existence is not living, it can only substantiate the potential for life, not the actual existence of life. So the infinite regress of potential without anything to substantiate the actual, gives way to the infinite vagueness of pure potential, or apeiron.
Remember that Peirce in fact defined vagueness as that to which the PNC fails to apply. So that is the definition in contention, not something else you might make up for yourself.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
That then gets into the metaphysical issue of how existence - the essential elements of time, space and energy - could be created.
Now of course you can argue for the alternative - that existence is simply uncreated and eternal as some sort of always definite brute fact. It doesn't satisfy logically. But that is the other point of view.
However Peirce is very clearly asking the question of how existence could develop. And a logic of vagueness is his answer. And he says without equivocation that Firstness - being vague undifferentiated potential, pure quality without yet quantification - is generative of time and thus essentially timeless. So time (and space, and energy) only properly exist as Secondness.
If you want to talk about time in Firstness, it is by definition vague temporality, the potential for an unfolding temporal progression.
And then modern Big Bang cosmology and tentative quantum gravity modelling takes the same view of time. Time as something historically definite to order events is going to have to be emergent. The Universe did not arise in time. It was the birth of time - as we conventionally or classically understand it.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Sure, I see that you will forever deny the logic of Peirce's position, or that modern physics might say the same thing.
But it is a coherent argument. Or at least it IS an argument ... unlike the brute fact approach taken be eternalism and "uncaused existence".
In fact the brute fact approach is worse than just lacking in a rational basis for its belief. It flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang now, and the matching understanding in physics that time has to become an emergent feature of a successfully unified theory of quantum mechanics and general relativity.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again, just deal with the argument that Peirce actually makes. Vagueness is defined by the failure of the PNC. Generality is defined by the failure of the LEM.
So the vague is where it simply isn't clear what is the case. You can't what is going on and so there is no way to tell if it is contradictory or not. And generality is then where you can crisply tell what is going on, but being completely general, it is not doing any excluding. Everything within its purview is included.
Then the next bit of the argument here is the dichotomy - the developmental story of how the divisions of nature arise in a way that understands them also as a unity of opposites.
So you have a starting and stopping point - vagueness and generality, or Firstness and Thirdness - and then you need the third thing of the interaction that produce the developmental outcome
Logically then - to the degree one believes the dialectic, or dichotomy, or apokrisis, or symmetry breaking is how development happens - this is the reason why the vague has to "contain within it" the possibility of whatever metaphysical-strength dichotomy is then observed to emerge. And equally, generality has to be able to absorb this dichotomy as its unity of opposite.
Because you are so busy trying to force a scholastic reading of Aristotle on this Peircean developmental ontology, you keep missing the target. And even missing the degree to which Aristotle was arguing the same story in many places.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
A hierarchical relation is transitive. It works both ways. That is basic to a systems view - the belief in the reality of both top-down formal/final causality and bottom-up material/efficient causality.
So constraints and degrees of freedom. The whole shapes the parts. The parts compose the whole. You have a developmental ontology ... because this is the basic dichotomy that brings anything, including most especially the Cosmos, into crisp and hierarchically-organised being.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are just imposing your scholastic version on things as usual. Aristotle - or the way his writings were collated several centuries later - may have seemed to contradict himself at points. But it seems clear enough to me that he was forced towards a hylomorphic duality of prime matter and prime mover as that just is the right developmental/systems logic.
Sure, you need the "eternal mathematic forms" as the ultimate constraints on material action. They somehow do stand outside time - as future finality. But rather than being active drivers of that action (in the way genes organise a body, or intentions organise our behaviour), they are simply passively emergent regulatory principles when we are talking about physics, or the generic Cosmos.
There is a lack of choice - in contrast to the production of choices that define life and mind. So the maths that forms our Universe has the quality of necessity. They certainly fix the inevitable outcomes even before anything has started to happen. But they are not active in the actualisation of those outcomes. They are simply the necessary outcomes that even the most chaotic, free and "choice-endowed" play of material action must in the long run discover.
Then we can understand prime matter as dichotomous to that. It becomes the chaotic starting point - a state that is undifferentiated in being also utterly differentiated. Pure contingency lacking in any habits. A continuity of spontaneity - action that lacks any form.
Or better yet, we can understand it as a vagueness. That removes any lingering notion of "matter" -
substantiality - from the discussion. We can now see that Firstness is just the potential for matter and form. All the apparent contradictions are absorbed by making substantial being fully emergent via the logical machinery of dichotomisation.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Great. Perhaps you can provide a citation on this point ... if you are suggesting it is based on established authority and not something you've dreamt up on the spot.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Funny. That's how maths approaches irrational numbers. It is how they know they are real.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are mixing epistemology and ontology. Epistemically, we humans - as observers - produce both the theories and the acts of measurement. Ontically, in an "observer-created existence", the theory wouldn't be a free choice but simply the way the reality actually is structured as a state of constraint. The observations would be then "acts of measurement" - as in actual wave function collapse.
That would seem to fit with my position then. Form stands "at the end of development" as ""emergent necessity". In the end, it restricts free choice as there is only one "right" choice.
It is actual when it is finally realised. And already also definite in potential. The potential seems a state of pure contingency. Yet even before it knows it is constrained, that constraint exists as its definite future. Every free action already faces the inevitably of its eventual consequences.
Yes, this is the definition which needs to be defended. You can define any term any way you like, but if it is nonsense, or contradictory, then it's a rather meaningless definition. As Aristotle demonstrated, due to the nature of time, we can determine certain situations where the PEM does not apply, and this is where the term "potential" is applicable. Does Peirce provide any such demonstration as to the type of situation where the LNC does not apply, to support his definition of vagueness?
Quoting apokrisis
What exactly is "a logic of vagueness"? If vagueness is where the LNC does not apply, then I assume you are referring to a logic of contradiction. But this is irrational nonsense. It is not logic at all. If we start with a contradictory premise, we won't get far with the logic.
Quoting apokrisis
Wait, you just said that vagueness is where the PNC does not apply. Now you are saying that it is "potential". But "potential" is already defined by Aristotle as where the PEM does not apply, because of the nature of time. Can you explain why Peirce wants to change Aristotle's definition of potential? Does Peirce have a different understanding of time? Why would Peirce insist that time is generated from potential, or vagueness, when Aristotle clearly demonstrates that the existence of potential is a result of the nature of time. This is demonstrated by the fact that when time is passing there is a future, and future things are indefinite due to potential. Without any time there is no future, and no potential, therefore it is impossible that potential is prior to time. I suggest that you consider the possibility that Peirce is mistaken about this.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, you should recognize that it is nonsense to speak about the potential for anything if time is not passing. So clearly time is prior to potential. It is a mistake to posit potential as firstness, and time as secondness, because potential is unintelligible without time. Or is that Peirce's intent, to render potential as unintelligible? But what kind of irrational move is this, after Aristotle worked so hard to make potential intelligible?
Quoting apokrisis
But what you describe here is an epistemic vagueness. it isn't clear what is the case, you can't tell what's going on. What you are referring to is a deficiency in the human capacity to understand. But just because the human being cannot determine what's going on doesn't mean that there isn't a definite "what's going on". This is the point I've been trying to make to you, Peirce sees the human inability to determine what's going on as proof of real ontic vagueness, where the LNC does not apply.
This is the irrational principle which got us involved in this discussion in the first place. If it appears to the human being that the PNC does not apply, then we ought to conclude that the human being has produced a faulty description of the situation. We need to revisit the situation and determine where the faults in the description are. We can never prove, and therefore know that the situation is such that the PNC does not apply because it is always possible that we have faulty descriptions. The human being may simply be lacking the capacity to properly describe the situation.
Since the claim that the PNC does not apply is the claim that the situation is unintelligible, then we should always assume that if it appears like the PNC does not apply, this is due to faulty human descriptions. Then we will seek to understand the situation in an intelligible way. To adopt as an ontological principle that there is a situation in which the PNC does not apply is to say "I can't understand this situation, so I am going to designate it as unintelligible, and quit trying". This is irrational. And so Peirce's definition of vagueness is irrational.
Quoting apokrisis
As I've been demonstrating from the beginning, the Peircean ontology of vagueness, as presented by you, is irrational. To claim as an ontological principle, that an aspect of the universe is contradictory, is irrational unless you can explain how this contradictory aspect is somehow intelligible. I refer to Aristotle's understanding of "potential", as a demonstration of how potential violates the LEM, but it is still described by A as intelligible in relation to a proper understanding of time.
You haven't shown any such thing. You, or Peirce, simply have an irrational desire to assign vagueness the status of firstness. It is irrational because you are simply saying this:
"I can't understand firstness, because it is where it appears as if the PNC does not apply, therefore I'll designate it as the unintelligible "vagueness", and I won't have to worry about trying to understand it because I've designated it as impossible to understand."
Instead of persisting, and trying to develop the means to understand firstness in descriptions which are not contradictory, you simply quit, saying it is impossible. That's what designating firstness as vagueness does. It says that it is impossible to understand firstness. If a person accepts this principle, then that person will never attempt to understand firstness, it has already been designated, without justification, as impossible to understand.
Quoting apokrisis
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. You say that there are eternal forms, which stand outside of time, then you say that they are "emergent". It is impossible that anything emergent is outside of time and eternal. Clearly, if you are following this ontology of vagueness as firstness, it is impossible that there are forms outside of time, and what you are really trying to say is that there is no such thing as eternal forms, and that you really believe they are emergent.
Quoting apokrisis
What do you mean by "all the apparent contradictions are absorbed"? You have already defined vagueness as where the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. So we can only conclude that contradiction is abundant in this vagueness or firstness. How can any principle of firstness which allows for the abundance of contradiction within firstness, be in any way a rational ontological principle?
Quoting apokrisis
Check your favourite, SEP, you'll see that they distinguish numerical, and qualitative identity. I do not agree with some of their descriptive principles, but at least they distinguish the two distinct forms of identity.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, that's very "funny", isn't it. When something appears to be irrational in mathematics, instead of attempting to understand the reason for this, and addressing the nature of this problem, they simply assume a contradiction, and on the basis of this contradiction they claim that the irrationality is something real. That's exactly what Peirce does with vagueness. Vagueness is the appearance of irrationality. But if he simply assumes contradiction, then the vagueness becomes real and the problem appears to dissolve. At what cost do we assume that the irrational is real, to dissolve the problem? I'll tell you. We do this at the cost of accepting contradiction. Accepting contradiction dissolves the problem. But this is the act of allowing into our reality, the impossible. This is a mistake, to allow that the impossible is real. The problem isn't dissolved, it is hidden underneath an even bigger problem. Perhaps if the bigger problem, accepting contradiction, is so big, we won't even notice that it's a problem.
Lots of material here. Not sure if all my replies will be worth debating if there are disagreements, and I’m confident enough that there will be. Most is an exchange of perspective. I'm mainly interested in the notions of actuality and potentiality as applies to a global telos.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
If ideas are taken to necessarily be human representations of their referents, then I would understand this position of “[human] representations of reality”. However, this to me seems at odds with at least some Platonic Forms. To me, representations are phenomenal in constituency (either perceivable via the physiological senses or perceivable via imagination in like manners: sights, sounds, smells, proprioceptions, etc.). This while some Platonic Forms, such as that of the aesthetic, for example, are of themselves articles of awareness only in so far as being purely sense-ual and, hence, noumenal: thereby more aligned to faculties such as those of understanding (of sense/meaning)—albeit, this despite the aesthetic as Form being most often apprehended through concordant awareness of the phenomenal. Here, my position is that our awareness of at least some Forms—though they may find representation via words or other symbols—cannot constitute representations of what actually is. For example, an awareness of the aesthetic is itself non-representational … and any representation of what is experienced (though it may help to convey the essence of meaning from one person to another) will in no way of itself embody the given experience (if one for whatever reason cannot experience what another experiences as aesthetic, no amount of phenomenal representation will convey the noumenal reality that is experienced by the other).
All the same, can you further explain the argument from the principle of plentitude: why it precludes any eternally existent possibility from being a real possibility? This to me is tied into what I express toward the end of this post regarding a global telos.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
While I can feel at home in certain discussions of theology, these independent Forms to me will hold even when addressed atheistically (i.e. when contemplated in the absence of Deity or deities, angels , and the like). The independent Forms in my view are occurring limitations which bind that which can be. To again use the aesthetic as example, this particular independent Form (here presuming it to so be) will limit, constrain, and form that which in essence is sense-ual attraction and aversion—this from the most base variants of this Form which can be found in the lower lifeforms to more refined and elevated variants of this same Form which can be found among mankind. As Form, the aesthetic emanates through the phenomenal in relation to observers and, in its most refined state, is purely noumenal: the former phenomenal variants being the allegorical shadows on the wall in Plato’s cave; the latter noumenal variants being the Form’s non-representational pure nature—which is sometimes accessible to humans. Given that all beings hold attractions and aversions, all beings are then limited, constrained, and formed by an intrinsic sense of the aesthetic; because no sensation-based attraction or repulsion could manifest devoid of this limitation on what can be, the limitation of the aesthetic is a priori to any potential attraction or aversion of individual beings. (This is quite the mouthful and not at all well substantiated, I’m well aware.)
I bring this perspective up, however, both to offer the possibility that independent Forms need not be theistic in their nature and, for me more importantly, to say that (at least some) independent Forms, as universals, are that which actively in-forms all beings’ identity—thereby making the actuality of the Forms minimally concurrent with the actuality of the beings whose identity is thus brought about via these universal Forms. Else argued, to me, the independent Forms are never fully severed from the beings thus formed—even if these beings hold no conscious awareness of these Forms; e.g. a cat may hypothetically sense sense-ual attraction toward some stimuli (say, some patch of colors) and aversions to others—this being the cat’s aesthetics—even though the cat has no comprehension of what aesthetics are. Yet, the greater the awareness of the beings in-formed by aesthetics, the more the beings can approach sense-ual understanding / awareness of this Forms’ noumenal, true (or pure) non-representational nature. E.g., all life will hold affinities and aversions to phenomenal stimuli but only humans can hold awareness of non-carnal beauty (here taking beauty to be a more refined aesthetic) … and, at times, even reapply this sense of beauty back to carnal bodies: e.g. a straight guy’s appreciation of the beauty to a male nude figure, like Michelangelo’s David, without any sense of sexual desire or any aversion due to this same issue of sexuality (top scores if a straight guy can at times likewise hold appreciation of non-carnal aesthetics when considering the female nude, I’d think).
In overview, imo universal Forms cannot be severed from anything which they any way in-form … this even when that which is thereby in-formed holds no conscious awareness of the universal Forms’ most likely noumenal nature.
Needless to add, these are perspectives on this issue.
The important part regarding the global telos as both actuality and potentiality:
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I'm so far in full agreement with this.
To me the global telos is also something which can eventually become fully actualized on a global scale by all sentience. In this way, the factual global telos also serves as a global end-state of being. I know this perspective can easily be ridiculed as unusual. Still, when comparing this outlook with theistic worldviews, it can readily approximate notions such as “closer proximity to God / G-d”, “to Brahman”, “to Nirvana”, “to Moksha”, and so on. Even when one addresses this global telos in a purely atheistic manner, it is for me the universal noumenal Form (as both global telos and global end-state of being) on which all other universal Forms are contingent—via which, again, all presently actual individual beings become bound, or limited, and, thereby, given their present actual form.
Then, as to the relation of actual and potential: This global telos is both actual as real telos and as an eventual, predetermined, global end-state of being (apo’s Heat Death; my hypothesis of an “unbounded awareness”)—as well as not yet manifest as an actualized, global end-state of being. So while it is thus actual as global telos (and as a metaphysically determinate end-state of being), because it is not yet manifest, it is also only a potential future manifestation whose realization is contingent upon numerous givens—including (in at least the metaphysics I uphold) the free-willed intent of all conscious agents so desiring it to become manifest. (Hence, it’s a given to me that we’re in no danger of it becoming manifest anytime soon, nor in any number of millennia from now.)
In this manner it is both an actuality that is a priori (akin to the Kantian sense; not necessarily in a temporal sense) to all other forms … while also being as end-state a potentiality forever awaiting to be realized.
Though the metaphysics are notably different, I see this relation between actuality and potentiality as holding fast both for a physicalist notion of the Heat Death as global end-state of being as well as for the non-physicalist metaphysics I’ve just touched upon … wherein the end-state is that of what for brevity I’ve so far termed “unbounded awareness” within this thread (including in the OP).
TMK, the conclusion that a global telos is both an a priori actuality and a temporal potentiality remains wherever a global telos is postulated. It is this stated conclusion that gets me interested in the logics of actuality and potentiality.
Then, as a generalized metaphysical hypothetical: Why can it not be logically viable that an eternally present, a priori actuality is coexistent with the temporal potentiality which it as a priori actuality brings forth? Otherwise expressed, given that the global manifestation of the end-state (as global telos) is itself contingent upon multiple unpredictable factors (such as the freewill of all coexisting agents), then this temporal potentiality of a manifested end-state will itself be contingently eternal: the moment in which the globally manifested end-state occurs forever remains indeterminate until all the proper events occur which will result in the end-state’s manifestation.
I maintain this possibility. In which case, one simultaneously has an eternal a priori actuality and a contingently eternal temporal potentiality as a consequence of a global telos. (But this seems to contradict what you say Aristotle argued to be.)
Though I’ll skip the details, I can very much relate to this understanding.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, agreed. It’s what I was looking for with the OP: some process that, while not life / anima, is yet not altogether nonlife / devoid-of-anima. I acknowledge, maybe a bit too Quixotic even for my eccentric tastes. Hind sight is always 20/20, or so they say.
I’m in no way surprised by this. For my part, the main disagreements between us so far concern there being vagueness (potential) devoid of a ready existing a prior global telos. Without the ready existing telos, the apeiron could only remain apeiron, as MU has so far argued.
If the apeiron were not perfect potential but, as you sometimes state, “fluctuations of potentiality” (which to me indicates some notion of time and of separateness, however chaotic) and there would already be a ready existent, a priori, global telos, then I could understand how the metaphysics you endorse could logically get off the ground.
All other disagreements as regards the metaphysical seem to me secondary to this one.
I'm instead making the opposite presumption. Fluctuations are the result of a lack of constraint. The problem that existence has is in developing regulating habits.
The initial conditions are an everythingness of spontaneity that is utterly unruly. There is nothing standing in the way of motion, change and action. Then out of that constraints develop. Chaos is transformed into definite actions having definite directions.
So one view sees stasis, a lack of action, as the obvious de facto state. Nothingness seems quite natural. Any first action must have a cause - the atomist's "first swerve".
The other instead sees flux as the basic unavoidable condition. If constraints are lacking, then of course there is nothing to prevent a chaos of fluctuation. What is stopping spontaneity? Constraints need to develop to produce an orderly state where cause and effect now operates and time flows smoothly towards its completely constrained and tamed Heat Death future.
Hi, apo. I generally like your thermodynamic theory to the degree that I understand it. It's fresh. It has a dark beauty.
Now to my question. Why this association of brute facticity and uncreated and eternal? As I understand the argument for brute fact, it's really about human reasoning. It doesn't matter if existence was always here or whether it sprang from nothing. Both could be understood as brute facts, depending on the theory which included them.
You write a vagueness as origin. Would this not be a brute fact? It's really just the old question of infinite regress. Either the chain of whys stretches forever of this chain terminates in a "just because" or "I don't know." Since I think brute fact is logically necessary, I don't think it's a flaw in a metaphysical vision to acknowledge an "irrational" origin.
Do you reject the idea that there is brute fact at the origin of your own vision? If so, how and why?
Here are some other versions of the same general idea:
[quote=SEP]
When the existence of each member of a collection is explained by reference to some other member of that very same collection, then it does not follow that the collection itself has an explanation. For it is one thing for there to be an explanation of the existence of each dependent being and quite another thing for there to be an explanation of why there are dependent beings at all. (Rowe 1975: 264)
...
Peter van Inwagen (1983: 202–04) argues that the PSR must be rejected. If the PSR is true, every contingent proposition has an explanation. Suppose P is the conjunction of all contingent true propositions. Suppose also that there is a state of affairs S that provides a sufficient reason for P. S cannot itself be contingent, for then it would be a conjunct of P and entailed by P, and as both entailing and entailed by P would be P, so that it would be its own sufficient reason. But no contingent proposition can explain itself. Neither can S be necessary, for from necessary propositions only necessary propositions follow. Necessary propositions cannot explain contingent propositions, for if x sufficiently explains y, then x entails y, and if x is necessary so is y. So S cannot be either contingent or necessary, and hence the PSR is false. Thus, if the cosmological argument appeals to the PSR to establish the existence of a necessary being whose existence is expressed by a necessary proposition as an explanation for contingent beings, it fails in that it cannot account for the contingent beings it purportedly explains.
[/quote]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/#Obje1UnivJust
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
This is the case once time has got going and a concrete history has developed.
So it is not wrong. But it is a different sense of "potential" - one that is now about crisp possibilities or definite degrees of freedom.
History builds up a context or pattern of constraints. This then concretely shapes the possibilities that remain. I toss a coin and the outcome is uncertain. But it is also already definitely going to be heads or tails.
So the LEM certainly applies once history has got going and built up a past to constrain the present. And then the LEM doesn't apply to future conditionals as ... they are still off in the future ... but as definite unknowns, not vague ones.
Then you have the more radical sense of potentiality that is vagueness or firstness. This is where the PNC fails (as yet) to apply.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Their actualisation would be emergent. And spacetime~action, as the most fundamental form of symmetry breaking or dichotomisation, would be itself emergent. Time - conceived of as the necessary medium to effect change - itself emerges to achieve the said change.
Or better yet, just learn to stop thinking of time as a medium - substance - and learn to conceive of it as a process. Time is the general process of a congealing cosmic memory, a steady development of ever greater constraint on action. Eventually the Cosmos coasts to a Heat Death standstill at "the end of time".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
It's always suspicious how you can provide actual references.
You are right. Neither are acceptable (to me) as they rely on brute fact claims.
Why should something come from nothing? Well it just did.
Why should existence just exist? Well it just does.
Quoting t0m
Yes, in the end all metaphysics must arrive at a brute fact. So my claim is that my approach demands the least possible in these terms. There will still remain the question of "why anything?", but instead of the question being "why something rather than nothing?", it becomes "why something rather than everything?".
Vagueness says we know there is in fact something (we exist after all) and really anything and everything also seems possible as its prior (as what would there have been to prevent that being the case?).
So from that, we can reason that our somethingness has to result from the emergence of those initially absent constraints. So rolling back time to define those necessary initial conditions, we arrive at the notion of this raw and unformed state of potential - whatever it is that is the opposite or inverse of a constrained state of actual somethingness.
Also note the argument about irrational numbers and convergence on a limit. If you have two things in play - the thesis and antithesis that make up the two poles of a dichotomy - then infinite regress does get terminated by a limit. We can roll back our state of somethingness - which is some yin and yang of crisply developed opposites - back towards the shared limit within which they converge. Vagueness can absorb the contradictory (or contrarieties, to be more Aristotelian) as each is folding back into its other.
It is just inverse dialectical reasoning. If two things come out of the one prior, then we can run that story backwards to recover its limit. And that limit is how we would define vagueness.
So my approach has a lot of new tools that can be used to minimise the brute factness of metaphysics. I don't need to get carried away and claim it eliminates brute fact. :)
The "why something rather than everything" is a nice twist. I'm glad that you agree, though, that "all metaphysics must arrive at brute fact." It's not easy to squeeze that out of philosophers.
Quoting apokrisis
Interesting. It reminds me of (without necessarily be the same as) differance.
[quote=Derrida]
[The philosophical term différance refers to conceptual differentiation and deferral of meaning in processes of signification. Wiki]
It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is not present, nor above all present to itself before différance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral; and it confirms that, as Saussure said, "language [which consists only of differences] is not a function of the speaking subject.
...
Différance is not only irreducible to any ontological or theological—ontotheological—reappropriation, but as the very opening of the space in which ontotheology—philosophy—produces its system and its history, it includes ontotheology, inscribing it and exceeding it without return.
[/quote]
Hah. Don't get me going on PoMo approaches. They are generally hostile to hierarchical or structuralist thinking. They thus prefer the play of paradox to the resolution provided by dichotomies. They apply Saussurean dyadic semiotics rather than Peircean triadic semiotics.
So yes, often PoMo is feeling up the legs of the same elephant. But the instinct is to draw a different kind of conclusion. Hierarchies and constraints and stuff like that are deemed "politically incorrect". So the metaphysics has the goal of supporting that (Romantic) world view.
I wonder if you can speak to the idea that I had that emergence only works from physical to physical events. I see emergence as incoherent from physical to mental events. Do you have anything to say to that?
I think that the route toward understanding this issue is Plato's concept of participation. This is critical to Plato's refutation of Pythagorean Idealism. But when it is not understood, that refutation is not apprehended, and Plato is presented as a Pythagorean Idealist. If you are familiar with The Symposium, which is an early work by Plato, you know that the Idea of Beauty is discussed. It is explained that beautiful things obtain their beauty through partaking in the Idea of Beauty. So when we come to see things as having beauty within them, what is claimed is that what is really the case is that the thing participates in the Idea of Beauty. So it is proposed according to the principles of Pythagorean Idealism, that there is an independently existing Idea of Beauty which the things are participating in. This is a universal Idea, and the particulars participate in the universal. So in this model, the universal is passive (participated in), while the individuals, or particulars, actively participate.
Throughout his early dialogues, this model is presented, and continually attacked from all perspectives, revealing its weaknesses. The existence of the independent universal Idea is very difficult to uphold because it cannot be positioned within the human mind, nor the separate world. To give it objectivity, to make it more than just opinion, requires a separation from any human mind. Furthermore, the passivity of the universal Idea starts to become a real problem. If the objects actively participate in the universal Idea, then there ought to be evidence of this activity. And what is really needed to support the position is an active Idea, which causes the objects to "be", or exist, according to the Idea. So the Pythagorean Idealism begins to look deeply flawed in this respect.
In The Republic, a work from his middle stage, Plato proposes "the good". The good appears to be meant as a principle of actualization, it's what gives Ideas actual existence. Notice that the good illuminates intelligible objects, like the sun illuminates visible objects. As much as some Platonic scholars will represent the good as "the Idea of Good", this is a misrepresentation, because it puts the good back into the classification of a passive, Pythagorean independent Idea, when the whole point is that the good is meant as a principle of actuality which allows us to go beyond the constraints which are imposed by the deficiencies of Pythagorean Idealism. But the existence of the good itself needs to be supported, so Plato must turn to divine Ideas in a divine mind to support this. (The divine mind must be singular mind, to maintain consistency in the divine Ideas, contrary to a plurality of gods). So by the end of The Republic there is a hierarchy of existence described. The craftsperson produces a physical object, a bed. The physical bed is a representation of the craftsperson's idea of bed. From "the good", the craftsperson believes that there is a proper (objective) Idea, of how a bed ought to be. So the craftsperson wants the bed to participate in the Idea of Bed, in the way of Pythagorean Idealism. But this Pythagorean Idea of Bed is only supported by 'the good". The craftsperson must believe that there is a proper, or good, Idea of Bed, and attempt to conform to this. Now the good Idea of Bed must be supported by a divine Idea of Bed, such that the craftsperson person attempts to represent the divine Idea of Bed with the chosen idea of a bed which is supposed to be the good idea of a bed.
Quoting javra
I believe that Plato tries to stay away from the necessity of a divine mind to support the independent Ideas. His best defence of Pythagorean Idealism is probably in The Parmenides, but this is where many say that he effectively refutes it. Here he brings in the nature of time, and if you continue with this inquiry you'll find that time is of the utmost importance, due to the passive/active classifications. Socrates compares the existence of the Idea with the existence of the day. We can replace "the day" with "the present", or "the now". No matter how many different places participate, or partake, in "the day", this participation removes nothing from the day. The day, or the present, is actively participated in by all different things, while it maintains its status as passive and unaltered. But in a way completely different from the things which actively participate in it, the day, or the present, is itself active.
I believe that the key to understanding Platonic Idealism, in the sense of the Idealism which was developed by the Neo-Platonists, is to understand the role of time. Plato's Timaeus was pivotal, and it represents a transformation from the universal Ideas of Pythagoreanism, to the particular Forms of Neo-Platonism. What Aristotle describes, is that the important metaphysical question is not why there is something rather than nothing, but why is there what there is rather than something else. Now in the Timaeus Plato posits an independent, and active Form for each individual, particular thing, which determines what that thing will be when it comes into existence. The independent Forms of Neo-Platonism are the forms of particular things.
Here it is important to develop a peculiar notion of time. We look to the past as comprised of that which has actual existence, and we look to the future as comprised of that which has potential existence. So there is a coming into being of actual existence which occurs at the present. This means that all physical existence must come into being at every moment of the present. The Forms determine exactly how every individual physical thing will come into being at every moment, but the Forms are changing, and may be altered by human will. The Forms are on the future side of the present so they cannot be detected by human senses, but they are actual in the sense of being active in determining how the physical world will appear at each moment in this world of change. There is some speculation as to how the Forms interact with each other, and the Neo-Platonist posited an order, a type of procession, which dictates how things appear to us at the present.
Quoting javra
Let's assume for the sake of argument, that this "a priori actuality" which is "eternally present", is the present itself. At the present, there is an activity which I can describe as the future becoming the past. So, we know that there is future time, and past time, and a difference between the two, such that tomorrow becomes yesterday, when Oct. 9 comes to pass, and October 9 is substantially different when it is in the past from when it is in the future. The past is always coming into existence, and this activity is occurring at the present. This, what you call "a priori actuality", the activity which is occurring at the present, is what validates what you call "temporal potentiality". There is no temporal potentiality without this activity occurring, which is the passing of time. We can say, as you suggest, that these are coexistent, they are two sides of the same coin. There is the activity of time passing, and this appears to us as the potentiality of the future.
However, we cannot neglect the fact that this activity of time passing also appears to us as the actuality of the past. So we have the activity of time passing, and this is the other side of the coin, or co-existent with, temporal actuality and temporal potentiality, as a dichotomy. Now, when we look at this side of the coin, the side described as the dichotomy between actuality and potentiality, we see that as time passes, particular actualities are actualized, from a vast realm of numerous potentialities. There is a lacking of necessity with respect to potential, expressed by "possibility", such that there must be a cause of the actualization of the particular possibilities which are actualized. So we have to posit a different type of actuality, one which determines which potentialities will be actualized at each moment as time passes. This actuality must be in some sense prior to the actuality which is time passing, in order to have any power over time passing (on its other side, potentialities being actualized). So this is the actuality which is somehow outside of time, as prior to time passing, and cannot be said to be co-existent with it.
Quoting javra
The principle of plenitude says that if given an infinite amount of time, any possibility will be actualized (a monkey at the typewriter will type Shakespeare for example). Therefore a possibility cannot be eternally existent because that possibility would be actualized, and therefore cease being a possibility, it would be an actuality.
Current logicians will use forms of modal logic to break the categorical division between possible and actual. In this case what is actual is just one of the many possibilities. Some will proceed to argue against the above stated conclusion, to claim that when a possibility is actualized, it still remains in the category of being a possibility. But as you can see, this is to conflate, and create equivocation, between epistemic possibility and ontological possibility.
To be accurate, in the first quoted sentences “a cause” should be changed to “causation”—thereby including various types as well as allowing for a plurality of instantiations. And then, yes, this is one of my premises.
BTW, doesn't "spontaneous" translate into something like an uncaused event? You could also uphold ex nihilo events but these would need to reify the nothingness into an uncaused given, or so I'll argue. Nevertheless, these are yet notions of causality--for they address causal mechanisms (of origination).
As it happens, I also very much uphold the notion that “[random] fluctuations are the result of a lack of constraints”. Yet this chaos (these random fluctuations) to me is always relative and can never be absolute (absolute chaos to me is logically contradictory); this, then, likewise specifies that the lack of constraints upon the given chaotic system is itself always relative, and can never be an absolute lack of constraint.
As to the issue of causation-devoid motion, change, or action: how would one go about justifying this position? As a reminder, we both agree upon there being multiple, existent forms of causation, and not merely the efficient variety.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I’m very much in tune with this. As previously noted, I would append to it the additional factor of this same “actuality which is somehow outside of time” being itself a metaphysical end-state of being. All the same, the relation between actuality and potentiality you’ve described in relation to the present works well with me.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I should have known. Cheers for the explanations.
I see a faulty premise here. The faulty premise is in "what is the colour of the dividing line". There is no such dividing line in the original description. There is a green surface, and a white surface side by side. Then the need for a "line" is assumed, but this assumption is unwarranted, there is no need to posit a line here. So the violation of the principle of non-contradiction is derived from this unwarranted assumption, that there is a line between the green and the white.
As I explained, the Aristotelian description is much more logical. Instead of a dividing line, we assume a transition of :"becoming". In the "becoming", the LEM does not apply, because the surface is neither white nor green. This renders the transition area intelligible through such concepts as potential, and matter. In this way, "possibilities" is understood through the concept of "potential", which is understood through the concept of "becoming" which is understood through the concepts of matter, change, and time.
If we claim that there is a dividing line, as per the quoted passage, instead of a transition of becoming, then the existence of this line is unintelligible due to the fact that the non-existent line is described as both green and not green. It is unintelligible because the line is not really there, what is there is a transition between green and white. When it is assumed that there is a line there, then the line must be given attributes, so it is said to be both green and not green.
The faulty representation is due to the positing of something, a line, which is not really there. So the premise, that there is a dividing line there, is a faulty premise, and this premise creates the illusion of Peircean vagueness. That vagueness is created by the false premise of a line. When we remove the line, then there is nothing there except a "becoming". And "becoming" is of a completely different category from being and not-being, so the question of whether the becoming is green or not green is simply not an applicable question. And we are in no way inclined to say that it is both green and not green, which is the Peircean way, which renders the transition unintelligible.
Quoting apokrisis
No, it is actually wrong. It is wrong because it is a sense of "potential" which is created by that false premise. That false premise is what renders "potential" as something unintelligible. If we remove that false premise, then we are left with the Aristotelian concept of "potential", which makes "potential" something intelligible under the principles described above.
Quoting apokrisis
But how can you refer to "fluctuations" which are prior to change? Change is emergent, but fluctuations are prior to symmetry breaking. Fluctuations are, by definition, changes.
Quoting apokrisis
You mean you have suspicions that I might actually be right, because I can actually provide valid, coherent references to back up my claims? You firmly believe that I must be way off base, because my position is so foreign to you. Then I provide actual references to back up my claims, and suddenly you become suspicious. Suspicious that I might actually be right, while you and Peirce are actually wrong about this ontological matter?
But then what meaning does constraint have except that it is relative to a possible action? So how is the actual possibility of that action not prior to the existence of the constraint?
Unless there is something trying to happen, then it makes no sense to speak of that which is preventing it happen.
So the argument you want to employ is the one that is also going to count against you.
I'd agree that the idea of an uncaused fluctuation is unsatisfactory - a brute micro-fact!
So what comes next to dissolve that? We may still have a problem, but at least we have drilled down further to have an actually deeper level structural issue in our sights.
Getting technical, a fluctuation would seem to have to be understood as both an act of differentiation and an act of integration at the same time. Two ends of the same stick in some subtle way.
So yes, you can still make the usual "no cause/no effect" protest. You can point out my talk of fluctuations looks like talk of brute micro-facts. But my argument also hinges on mutuality or dependent co-arising. The two faces of reality will each be seen to be the cause of its other. And that in turn means that follow their present separation back to their root common origin and a convergence to a limit will result.
There will be some scale where the separate things of action and direction (energy and spacetime) become equivalent and indistinguishable. A blur. A vagueness.
Now you have the constituents of reality explained - if each face of reality is the cause of its other. And you have a common limit defined by the logic of convergence. Cosmic development, when inverted, sees everything causal contract and blur, then vanish at some limit.
Yeah, that works. :-}
So does the edge of one surface touch the edge of the other at every point? Or are you imagining a faint gap in-between? If touching, then what makes that not continuous. If a gap, let's talk about the colour in-between.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So we now have the third thing of a transition area. And the LEM does not apply as clearly this third thing is a crisply existent generality of it own. So far, pretty Peircean.
But this new transition area that replaces the line now has two boundaries - the one on the green surface area side, and another on the white surface area side. So what colour are they? Or are they further transition areas (and so on, ad infinitum)?
Aren't you really now hoping that the whole boundary question disappears into an amophous blur? The question becomes vague. It becomes impossible to say it is one thing or the other, and so therefore possible to say either could be claimed equally well without fear of contradiction?
Think again about how the laws of thought go, starting from the principle of identity. If the individuated particular is by definition the particular, then it is not not itself, and thus not its "other". The PNC and PEM follow from an axiom that assumes individuation exists.
But that leaves individuation itself unsecured. So when it comes to talk about boundaries or dividing lines, we can't afford to simply attempt to bury the problem out of sight for the moment with talk about further things such as transition zones.
Note that Peirce does follow Aristotle closely on treating the infinite as potentiality. So the number line is considered to have the continuity of a limit. We did discuss this about a year back with a guy who was a decent Peircean scholar. There is also this paper - https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/viewFile/13389/9925 - which relates this back to Peirce and Aristotle's shared conception of time. It might be worth you reading to see the basic degree of overlap.
But then I depart from Peirce at this point in adding in the strong notion of the dichotomy, or symmetry breaking. I employ the convergence to a limit argument to show that the continuity of a limit is a virtual object.
This isn't anti-Peirce, as in his voluminous writings, he touches on the same thing. But it is something I am foregrounding as the critical element. Just as I foreground the hierarchical structure which is also more implicit than explicit in Peircean semiotics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hah. No. That was just my iPad autocorrecting can't to can.
I'm just complaining how you wave your airy hand at SEP and say look there when I ask for a specific reference. You have always avoided quoting actual sources when citing from authority. So of course I think the reason is that the sources aren't going to be much support to your rather personal interpretations.
The possibility of action is the possibility of causal agency. In a culture heavily habituated to notions of causal determinism this is often overlooked, or else looked upon as illusions we live by. This especially holds where we know the physical to be inanimate (devoid of causal agency) and then further uphold the ontology of physicalism (everything is physical and, so, inanimate).
The possibility of causal agency, in turn, cannot be devoid of ready existent teloi which bind, limit, and thus constrain that toward which possible actions can move. So no possibility of action can exist prior to the actuality of teloi which constrain what the causal action moves toward.
The action will always be concurrent with the actuality of teloi, but the teloi will be a priori to the possibility of action.
With the proviso of actions out of learned habit.
Trying to keep things as simple as possible. With habit, it can well be argued that former consciously willed actions between teloi have become repeated so often that they become automated relative to conscious awareness. Actions from learned habit can then be argued to still be constrained by the a priori existence of teloi. Same stimulus, same choice of which way to go between alternatives, only that now it’s become a learned instinct. Or so I’d maintain.
Agreed. They are learned and are in memory and will repeat unless overruled.
Your description is a precise description that can be directly observed by any individual who wishes to spend the time observing it. It is life as we experience it.
Clearly it's not Peircean, because Peirce proposed a line between the green and white, which is both green and white, violating PNC, while I propose a transition which is neither green nor white. violating LEM. Do you not see the difference? Furthermore, the violation of the LEM, is specific to that particular object, it is not a generality. It is common to particular objects in general, due to the nature of matter, but it is not a property of a generality, it is the property of physical things.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, you are just repeating Peirce's mistake, replacing "line" with "boundary". There is no line here, nor is there a boundary. Why do you feel the need to assume a boundary? There is nothing about the description which implies that there is a boundary here. It is the assumption of a boundary which is the false premise, the mistake which is leading you awry. The fact of the matter is that physical objects overlap each other, the gravity of the sun and moon are here on earth, the air around me enters the pores into my body. There is no boundary between one object and another. The assumption of a boundary is a false representation which is causing you problems, as it did for Peirce.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually, the boundary question does disappear, when you realize that there really is no boundary there. You are assuming a boundary for no reason, so this is a false assumption. Then this imaginary, and non-existent boundary is assigned the property of where the PNC does not apply. But it's all imaginary, not real at all. There is no boundary.
Quoting apokrisis
Did you read what I said about the law of identity? The Aristotelian formulation of the law of identity is that a thing is identified as itself, the thing is the same as itself. This implies that identity is completely arbitrary. What the thing is, is what the thing is. It need not have any specific form. There is no necessary formula which the thing has to follow, in order that it is itself, it simply is itself, no matter what it is. So individuation is completely arbitrary, there is no rule which says that individuation must follow this or that procedure. And in order that individuation is completely arbitrary, we must dismiss this idea that there are boundaries, because this would mean that individuation must follow these boundaries.
Boundaries are created, artificially, by the human mind, when "what the thing is" is described. This gives us the other formulation of the law of identity, the one employed in formal logic. Here, the thing is identified by "what the thing is", the description. And in order for the logic to work, the thing cannot be other than what the description says. So boundaries are part of the description, they are not part of the thing itself.
Quoting apokrisis
See, the "limit" is something produced by the human mind. It is conceptual only, and doesn't represent anything real within the physical world. Limits are completely immaterial, and that's why any proposed limit will never actually match what exists in the physical world, because there aren't any limits there. They are made up by the mind, and applied by the mind, in an effort to understand the physical world through containment. But this containment, these constraints which we impose, do not actually constrain the material world. However, it must be constrained in some way. We observe that the physical world is constrained, so we must look for something, other than boundaries, or limits (which are human constructs), which is doing the constraining.
I gave you the reference, it's right there under "identity". What do you want me to do, read it for you? Furthermore, the other time you asked for reference, I gave you direct quotes from Aristotle. So your claim that I haven't been able to produce references is very bogus. Just because the reference doesn't say what you think it should say doesn't mean that I didn't provide the reference. Now go read SEP under "identity", and tell me that it doesn't explicitly say that that there are two distinct forms of identity.
"Edge"? Who said anything about an edge? How does this urge to add something to the description, which isn't there, possess you?
I've been telling you this from the very beginning, your position is completely irrational. On your part, reason hasn't yet come on the scene, you just regurgitate nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
I also did not follow this example. If a part of a surface is painted green, then there is no "dividing line" as such - the division does not constitute in a substantive, in a noun, in an object. The division is therefore not a line.
The division constitutes in a transition from a white line, to a green line and vice-versa. It is a becoming. This is an interruption in the continuity of whiteness (or greenness). In order to perceive the boundary (which again is not a thing, but a process, a transition) one must perceive both the white surface and the green surface juxtaposed. Indeed, it is this perception of a rupture in the continuity that constitutes the perception of the boundary - it is this very act of seeing both as juxtaposed. This rupture in the continuity is not a thing once again, so don't reify it. It's the very process of seeing the one, and then the other.
The edge of the green surface is green, and the edge of the white surface is white. The two edges are touching - it is not spatial separation in-between that makes them discontinuous, but rather the change in color.
So does the PNC apply to this "transition"? Can we say whether it is white or green? Do we feel moved to claim it has to be one or other because it can't be both? Or do we want to say the question of which colour it is seems vague?
Yes.
Quoting apokrisis
Does this have anything to do with the previous question? I certainly hope it doesn't.
Quoting apokrisis
No, the question of what colour it is isn't vague, it's incoherent, a pseudo-question. A transition is not in the same category of things as a line or an object. A transition is a process of passing from one thing to another - in this case from a green line to white line (in vision). As such, a process does not have the property of colour the way things (such as the lines) have the property of colour. The transition has no color. There's absolutely nothing vague here.
Your question is much like asking me "can we say running [a process] is white or green? Or do we want to say that the question of which colour it is seems vague?" - The apparent vagueness you detect there is the result of the category error that the question presupposes.
In fact, your whole philosophy is a bunch of category errors stuck one upon each other, precisely because you want to reach the point where mind and matter, time and space, etc. collapse into a unity and become indistinguishable. That means that you are not willing to recognise the categorical difference in kind between these phenomena. Your philosophy implies that envy can be white because there is some limit after which the two become indistinguishable in the supreme vagueness of the apeiron :s
Say what you will, but logically this is the status of your thought. It is built on a foundational incoherence which is bound to propagate throughout - and that is the category error. You refuse to admit that some things are categorically different than others, meaning that they are different in kind, not in degree.
1/9 = 0.1111111111 repeating, agreed?
So if I multiply both sides by 9, I get 9/9 = 0.99999999 correct? So how are the two not equal? I think the idea behind this is rather that decimal notation cannot capture the value of a number to the same precision as fractions can.
If you want to say they are not equal, then what number is there between them? Two numbers that are not equal are after-all separated by another number. The problem of mathematics is that continuity cannot really be broken into discreteness without creating such paradoxes.
I don't understand why the long paragraphs. It's quite simple:
1) First there is the Vagueness (the Dao)
2) Then the Dao/Consciousness (Thermodynamics Imperative) begins to differentiate into a multitude.
It is straight out if the Dao De Jing or Whitehead's God. At least Whitehead was intellectually honest about it while Peirce neatly hides it away as The Vagueness. It is the Dao. There is always a sleight of hand in materialistic descriptions of Genesis.
Is it appealing because the word Thermodynamics is bring used? Well it isn't. The phrase Thermodynamic Imperative is being used to replace God.
The alternative to what you call 'long paragraphs' is dogmatic assertion. I prefer to make a case for my ideas. Whatever Hegel's failings, he was write about the content or the development of the thesis being the thing itself. Philosophy isn't math. In math, the theorem can be used without its proof. In philosophy the "theorem" (thesis) is more or less devoid of content when unaccompanied by its development. Slapping different names on the "absolute" without developing one's vision of it is a rhetorical affair. Feelings dominate in this slapping-names-on. There's nothing wrong with feelings, but for me philosophy is largely the "labor of the concept." Hence their actual development in "long paragraphs" like this one.
So you yourself speak of the origin as vagueness and then mention the thermodynamic imperative as the force behind differentiation? And your primary objection to apo's/Peirce's description of this is the choice of "The Vagueness" instead of "God" for this origin? To me this is just an emotional investment in mere choice of names. Who cares if it's Firstness or God? Such names only have conceptual content in the theory as a whole.
Answer if you dare what God means to you. Do you take the bible as the word of God? Or is your God a "philosopher's" God? Are you a Taoist? A Christian? Do you believe in sin and personal immortality? I'm not saying you are wrong or right to believe in this or that direction. I'm trying to root out your emotional investment in the word "God." Does materialism offend you as a metaphysician? Or does it threaten your belief in the afterlife (if you have one)?
Finally, sure, the thermodynamic imperative is a theology of some kind. I don't think apo would deny that. But for those no longer pious this isn't much of a confession.
Some have an emotional investment in the word "God" and others have an emotional investment in the word "No God".
You are just playing with words. The talk here is of the boundary that marks the position where the transition happens. It's a well traversed debate in the philosophy of maths.
Quoting Agustino
Sure, the Apeiron would absorb all differences of any category. But the categories that matter at a metaphysical level are all the product of dialectical reasoning. They are dichotomies.
So there is no dialectical connection between white and envy. One might talk about black and white and the spectrum of gray inbetween. One might talk about envy and whatever its polar opposite seems to be, plus the transition then connecting them which is defined in terms of these limits. But that kind of category forming relation is not being claimed of randomly chosen particulars like white and envy. They are not opposites and so neither in any useful sense the same.
Quoting Agustino
I'll just say I thought you were smarter than this. Looks like you can't in fact rise above glibness. At least MU is passionate about ideas. You don't sound like you believe your own argument for a minute.
A Vagueness Imperative, is not making a case. It is a manufactured phrase designed to replace the word God so as not to upset the sensibilities of "scientific materialists." Pure obfuscation embedded in long paragraphs in the hope that the sleight of hand is not noticed. In short (I do prefer getting to the point), nonsensical babble masquerading as intellectualism.
Quoting t0m
I have no idea what God means.
However, I do know my Mind and that is the creative force that is shaping and evolving as the universe.
There is no boundary as a thing. You've done nothing to show that there is such a boundary.
Quoting apokrisis
Oh, so how are these different dichotomies related one to another? And why is it that this vagueness apparently contains unrelated dichotomies inside of it?
Quoting apokrisis
:-} Next time try a different strategy.
That's why the PNC fails to apply.
No, that doesn't mean PNC fails to apply. It only means that the boundary cannot have the property of color because it is not a thing, and therefore such a property cannot apply to it. But the PNC still applies - the boundary is a boundary and not - not a boundary.
Hmm. See what happens when you think you can get away with glib sophistry in place of serious thought. It might pay you to read up on the philosophy of boundaries before you make too much more of a fool of yourself.
Where did I say that?
I think you're tilting at windmills. Your "getting to the point" is just a repetition of dogma, a mantra. You love Bergson. Cool. I like Bergson, too. If that's the last word for you and everything else is a conspiracy to cover up his final revelation of the Truth, then I'm OK with that. Proceed. Believe. Preach on.
You really are making a muck of this.
No. I denied that there is any in-between. A transition is a process - your eye goes from green line to white line. It's not a thing. There is NOTHING between the white line and the green line. What have I been telling you for the whole time? Are you so heavy headed that you cannot read a simple sentence?
You are thinking mathematically, but I'm telling you how things are in reality. Mathematics is just an approximation, that's why you can infinitely divide in mathematics, but obviously can't do that in reality.
Of course you did. You said there was a boundary in-between. You also denied this. The boundary had its own location. But then it also doesn't. It all seems to make some weird kind of sense as an example of the PNC failing to apply.
Quoting Agustino
You mean there is A nothing in-between the white line and the green line. Otherwise how are you claiming them to be actually separated if there is no thing to separate them? And if you take that position, you have created some third thing that has some bare property of location, and can somehow effect the change which is a transition, and yet says "nothing" when it comes to the important question of where does one hue leave off, the other one begin.
Quoting Agustino
Ah. I see. The problem is now that the maths is "approximate". And when the reason for that is pointed out - the logical vagueness where the PNC fails - you missed the point. You come blundering in with the usual half-baked response of the naive realist, muttering about how you can tell me all about the world as it actually is without all the philosophical bullshit.
Great work!
The difference is that Bergson was direct. He didn't need to invent stuff out of thin air.
A philosophy that depends upon Vagueness as its center is actually more than that, it is deliberately obtuse and full of nothing. Worthless in all respects.
So in answer to the OP, we have pages upon pages of not only Vague but impenetrable Nonsense. For Materialists this is not only sufficient, it is all that is available. "It just happens", over and over and over again. Thank you for the well constructed (concocted) argument.
You cannot actually reach a conclusion when you multiply a repeating decimal. You have to round it off in order to perform the procedure. So when you say that .11111 repeating, times 9, equals .99999 repeating, you are just assuming this because you cannot actually complete the task. Demonstrate for yourself, by dividing 9 into .99999 repeating. You'll keep placing another 1 until you decide that you'll keep on doing this forever, so you designate it as repeating. But this decision is based on some inductive principle, rather than a mathematical principle.
But I agree with what you say about fractions. Some ratios, like pi, cannot be properly expressed in numerical notation. So these ratios are designated as irrational, and this is in way contradictory, an irrational ratio. We could look into the nature of these irrational ratios, to speculate why they exist, which I have done before. It appears like when we move from one spatial dimension to two spatial dimensions, there is an inherent incommensurability between the two systems of coordinates. So for instance, a circle's diameter is one dimension, and the circumference is two dimensions, and there is a incommensurability between them. Likewise, two perpendicular sides of a square represent equal distances from a point, in two different dimensions. But the hypotenuse which relates these two equal distances is incommensurable, just like the circumference of a circle which represents equal distance from a point in two dimensions.
There are other interesting features of fractions, such as those found in wave representations like in music. I think that the study of ratios ought to be a science in itself.
Quoting Agustino
So I don't think it's a question of if .99999 repeating is not equal to 1, then there must be a number in between them. It is that .99999 repeating is not really a number, because numbers are definite, conclusive, as you say, discrete, like 1 is. But .99999 repeating is inconclusive, indefinite, expressing an unending continuity, So it's not a number. It signifies something which cannot be expressed as a number. This is similar to the categorical separation you explain to apokrisis above. We use "equal" within the category of mathematics, but .99999 repeating is outside of this category so "equal" cannot be applied. Once we round off the repeating decimal, it is expressed in the form of a number, but it's true nature has been compromised in order to do this.
Quoting Rich
Hmm. The master truly challenges us with his koans.
I agree. Some atheists might deny that preference or irrationality is involved in their position, but not all of them do. (I would be called an atheist by most theists). "Pure reason" can function as one more idol. That's why I mentioned that collision of rhetoric or sophistry in the Kojeve thread. Just about everyone thinks that they are rational. It's the other guy who's all turned around. Why won't he listen to [s]me[/s] reason?
For me what we have here generally is obviously the clash of personalities in terms of creative seduction (sometimes intimidation). We trade stories. "Here's [s]my vision of my world[/s] the absolute truth about our world. Here's who [s]I think [/s]you should be. Here's who [s]I think[/s] I am. Here's who [s]I think[/s] you are. " I'm not complaining or accusing. Just describing what I see. Your results may vary.
No, I never said there was anything in-between. There is no in-between. There is no empty space between the white line and the green line, the two are touching.
Furthermore you keep changing between transition, boundary, etc. and the discourse is becoming confusing. They are not the same. The boundary of the green surface is a green line. The boundary of the white surface is a white line. The two boundaries are touching. The transition is seen simply by the eye jumping from one line to the other.
Quoting apokrisis
The PNC does not fail to apply. You have not shown this at all. All that you have demonstrated is that you have a wrong conception of the problem. You conceive of a real problem as a mathematical problem, but the two aren't the same.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I mean there is nothing between them, exactly as it sounds. There is no line between them.
Quoting apokrisis
No, that is exactly the problem. That you confuse the math with reality - the map with the territory - and then go backwards from the infinite divisibility of mathematical space and postulate a necessary vagueness in real space. The vagueness only exists in the map, not in the territory. You have been fooled by the map and are unable to see its limitations.
I can see that you might be struggling to follow the logic of Peirce's example if you are unfamiliar with the philosophy of maths. This is a good clear primer on the continuum issue - why Peirce was following Aristotle in treating the numberline and dimensionality generally as the potentially infinite, not actually infinite - http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Zalamea-Peirces-Continuum.pdf
But another example of the vagueness/PNC~generality/LEM dichotomy which is basic to his logic is the triangle. A triangle is a general concept that forms a continuum limit - a global constraint - that then can't be exhausted by its particular instances. An infinite variety of particular triangles can be embraced by the general notion of a triangle.
So the LEM does not apply to this generality as a triangle can, in genus~species fashion, be equilateral, isosceles, or scalene. Of course the triangle must be a three-sided polygon, but that is talking of a still higher level generality of which it now partakes as a definite particular.
Peirce's point was that a general represents one notion of the indeterminate. As a description of a global constraint, the LEM fails to apply to it because contrary possibilities are not being excluded. Family resemblances are allowed within it.
Then vagueness is defined dichotomously to the general. Where generality allows you to say any particular triangle can be either scalene or isosceles, vagueness speaks to the indefinite case where there is as yet no triangle specified and so there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is scalene or isosceles. It is not a contradiction to say the potential triangle is both.
So the general is the global continuity that absorbs some category of all difference or particularity. The vague is the local generativity or spontaneity that produces all manner of difference or particularity.
You've leapt into a conversation without understanding its metaphysical intent, trying to turn it into a "commonsense" view of deep matters - commonsense representing the reductionist view of reality where crisp particulars are simply taken for granted, and so all causality is just a matter of composition or construction.
Peirce, like Aristotle, was fundamentally challenging that with a holistic or systems view of causality. So the laws of thought - in talking about the logic of definite particulars - are taken as being emergent. They have to develop their counterfactual definiteness within the two bounding and complementary limits of the vague and the general, or metaphysical Firstness and Thirdness.
Well if you want your vagueness to apply only to mathematics and epistemology that is fine, but I thought we were talking about ontology. I've already told you that in mathematics space is infinitely divisible, hence where the paradoxes arise from. You were asked in the conversation with MU to provide an example of vagueness which showed that vagueness was ontological, not epistemological. In other words, that it belonged to the terrain, not to the map that we have.
I'm an engineer (by degree anyway), and so it's been very well-ingrained into my blood to be sceptical of mathematics and mathematical models and to be aware that they are very limited in describing reality. You seem - coming from a background of theoretical physics/science - not to have this awareness of the limitations of mathematical modelling. In engineering you are trained to think about the result you obtain through maths, and if it doesn't make sense, you are to reject it - that should be the impulse. You should definitely not accept an absurdity just because it emerges from the calculations. And by no means should you ontologise mathematics. Engineering is very concrete in that sense - it always goes back to reality, and discards mathematical models when they're no longer useful. Physics seems - in its version as theoretical physics - to, unfortunately, have the opposite tendency.
For example, some of the equations we use in hydraulics break in certain conditions. That means that they give results which involve infinity. We know that in reality there is no infinity, what happens is that a chaotic pattern of flow emerges that can no longer be handled by the equations. So, in that case, we don't ontologise the mathematical results and claim that there is some vagueness or anything of that sort. Our mathematical models simply cannot predict accurately beyond that point. But that's a fault with the models not with reality.
It seems that you have ontologised mathematical models of the Universe and have developed your entire philosophy out of that. The problem is of course that you've just confused the map with the territory.
I'll look at the resource you provided, it will be interesting, but mathematics is not reality or ontology. You are either looking to discuss a mathematical paradox, or you are looking for the underlying reality involving real - not mathematical - space.
It is about logic - reasoning itself. So it is mathematical in that maths is our most rigorous language of reasoning. It is epistemology as the right way to reason is mission critical. And then it is ontology, because equipped with the right reasoning, the right logical framework, we can hope to make the best sense of what reality actually is.
Quoting Agustino
This understanding of what is required just confirms you are a naive realist. Peirce established the proper pragmatic basis for a logico-scientific understanding of reality.
Rather than just a map and a territory, there are the three things of a modelling relation. The "map", or mediating level of sign, is a living and adaptive "umwelt".
So the map isn't the territory of course. But more than that, it doesn't aim to re-present the world. It aims to ignore that world as much as possible. So the map comes to be a map of our own interpretive interests as much as a map of the external reality. It is a picture of ourselves as much as it is a picture of the thing in itself.
The famous example is the London Underground map. It is a picture of our interest in getting from A to B in terms of changing trains. It does this by ignoring the actual geography of the world as much as it can.
So the Peircean argument is internalist. All we can know of the world is the beliefs that we are prepared to hold about it, the beliefs we are prepared to act by.
This doesn't deny the thing in itself. But it should also alert us to the fact we don't really care about the world in some disembodied fashion. The maps we make are as much a self-portrait - indeed, the very act of creating that "interpretive self" - as they are a re-presentation of the world as it might be said to be in terms of its own set of interests.
The map faces both ways. It mediates rather than represents. So our realism is psychologically indirect. And that is a feature not a bug as otherwise "we" - as a packaged set of interpretive habits - could not even "exist" unless we could find ourselves in the very maps we create. Our maps make our purposes concrete in a way we can then actually talk about ourselves as a further ontological fact of existence.
Quoting Agustino
Nice try at boxing me in. But that pragmatic intersection between theory and practice is exactly what I have a good meta-theoretic understanding of.
Mathematics, logic, and reasoning are not the same thing. Mathematics is a set of tools, based on logic and intuition that allows us to create, in some limited circumstances and for special purposes, models of the world. Logic is a different branch of study than mathematics.
Reasoning itself is much larger than logic and mathematics and includes elements of noetic intuition (as per Aristotle and Plato).
Quoting apokrisis
No, mathematics is just a tool of reasoning. It's not the only tool in our toolbox, and probably not even the most important one. What Spinoza called intuition, what Plato called noesis, what Einstein referred to as imagination - that is more important than mathematics, since it is what sees into the very first principles themselves.
Quoting apokrisis
No it isn't ontology, that's a non-sequitur. At most, it would provide you with tools that would enable you to do ontology. However, "right reasoning" is much more than the correct logical framework.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I wasn't aware that Peirce is a god who cannot be challenged. Please. Put up some argument, don't tell me the historical antecedents of your view.
Quoting apokrisis
Exactly. That's why you cannot use the map to do ontology. You must go back to the things themselves.
Quoting apokrisis
Wait, how do you jump from the nature of maps and models, to how we can know about the world? Do you mean that we can only know about the world through models? And if so, what justifies that?
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, but as you can see this cuts your own branch. If this is the case, then you cannot be doing ontology with your philosophy. You can at most be creating narratives that are useful for particular purposes, such as advancing scientific discoveries, while, as per your own statements, leaving you blind to others, which don't interest you. In this case ontology, theology, etc.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, you understand it at a meta-THEORETIC level ;)
Oh? So my remarks regarding your philosophy's incapacity to reach the level of ontology isn't something you disagree with? Fine. I never knew you had such small ambitions ;)
Well you would have to make that argument then. So far you have only told me about your own map of the territory. And that turned out to have separated togethernesses.
Well, I will make an argument once you explain to me how you go from the vagueness in the map to vagueness in the territory. I'm looking to see how you derive your ontological vagueness at this point. We've arrived at there being some vagueness in the map. How do we go from this epistemological vagueness to the ontological one? This may be a more productive route given the way none of the other routes have worked with you so far.
As for the argument you want - I've already made the argument you're looking for, namely that vagueness in the territory is contradictory and impossible. That is because any sort of potentiality always presupposes an actuality which is prior to it. You've gone over this with MU in this thread, and with me in another older thread a few weeks ago. There cannot be any primordial chaos, infinite potential, vagueness and the like - some minimal degree of order and act are always required.
Now, what problems do you have with that argument (and with how it was expressed starting with Aristotle)? By means of what would an infinite potential, in the absence of act, actualise itself? In concrete terms, why would there be any sort of fluctuation in the first place if there is a necessarily inert vagueness in the first place? If there is a fluctuation it seems to me like there is some act already. A fluctuation isn't a potency. And please don't answer me with "Why wouldn't there be a fluctuation, what's there to stop it?" -_- . Because if you answer that way, I will ask why a fluctuation and not something else, what's there to stop it?
The usual way. Measurement.
For instance, engineers are always telling me that my definite models of reality turn out not to fit the world in vague ways. Quantum wavefunctions still need to be collapsed. Chaos turns out to forget its initial conditions. The way the maps keep failing look to be trying to tell me something deep about the essential spontaneity of the territory.
Aha! Exactly. Now we're getting onto something. So the phenomenon is very similar to this.
When we're attempting to apply our models to reality at the smallest scales possible (and wherever behaviour is non-linear and chaotic) we notice that we're unable to predict what will happen, even though the phenomena - according to our laws - are entirely determinate.
So our models do not fit the world, in all sorts of "spontaneous" and unpredictable, vague ways. So from this fact, to your conclusion, there are still some steps required. Namely, you have to show us how we go from this fact of being unable to model certain aspects of reality concretely, to there being a vagueness in reality. Clearly there is a vagueness in the models - they provide vague answers, which differ spontaneously and in unpredictable, vague ways from reality.
But just like in the case of the coastline paradox, you cannot extend the mathematical conception of space - where space, for example, is infinitely divisible, and hence it becomes impossible to determine the length of some fractals whose limit diverges to infinity when you attempt to calculate it using the mathematical methods we have at our disposal today - you cannot extend this mathematical conception to real space. That's an unwarranted assumption, and it would be wise to suspect the mathematical model to be responsible for the vagueness and not reality. Reality is not vague, but it's not vague in a way that we cannot know.
So in a similar manner and by analogy, you wouldn't suspect reality to be responsible for the vagueness that is noticed by the lack of correspondence between your expectations - as given by the model - and the reality.
You mean like a fluctuation?
Quoting Agustino
And a direction too. The degree of order is also minimal, remember.
Quoting Agustino
Why would inertness be necessary? The very fact something exists shows that by necessity it couldn't be.
Of course vagueness doesn't even exist according to your own map of reality. You rely on God to kick things off. Or divine circular motion to swirl things about. Or something equally bizarre.
Surely it could be a fluctuation I do not care what it is for the purposes of this discussion, but it must be something actual, not an infinite potential, vagueness and the like.
Quoting apokrisis
Because you want it to be an infinite potential, a vagueness where no act is present. If that's the case, then it is necessarily inert since it cannot actualise itself. Its chaos - as it were - prevents it from creating anything spontaneously, even a fluctuation. That's how chaotic it is.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, and this was Aristotle's argument to show the primacy of act over potency in his metaphysics.
Quoting apokrisis
You can rely on the fluctuation, but you cannot rely on the infinite vagueness to account for the fluctuation. If you want, the fluctuation can be a brute fact in yours - that's not a problem within the constraints of this discussion. But you cannot rely on the infinite vagueness. So scratch that out. That's the mythological element. The beginning point is a fluctuation for you, as for science actually. Science cannot get beyond that assuming that there is even a beyond.
Sure. You get infinite outcomes if your model offers no lower bound cut-off to limit material contributions. So your example illustrates my points quite nicely. Our measurements coarse grain over fractal reality. We are happy to approximate in this fashion. And then even reality itself coarse grains. The possibility of contributions must be definitely truncated at some scale - like the Planck scale - to avoid an ultraviolet catastrophe. Vagueness is required at the base of things to prevent the disaster of infinite actualisation.
Also how much do you understand fractals? Note how they arise from a seed dichotomy, a symmetry breaking or primal fluctuation. That is what the recursive equation with its log/log growth structure represents.
As the first fluctuation, it would have as yet no context. History follows the act.
So as I said before, the fluctuation is the birth of both material action and formal direction. But it takes longer for direction to seem firmly established as that requires a history of repetition.
It seems the mistake you keep making is to forget I am arguing for the actualisation of a dichotomy - the birth of matter and form in a first substantial event. You just keep talking about the material half of the equation.
Think about the implications of that for a theory of cosmic origination. It argues that a world that can arise from a symmetry breaking - a going in both its dichotomous directions freely - does in fact have its own natural asymptotic cut off point. The Planck scale Big Bang is not a problem but a prediction. Run a constantly diverging process back in time to recover its initial conditions and you must see it converging at a point at the beginning of time.
This has in fact been argued as a theorem in relation to Linde's fractal spawning multiverse hypothesis. So if inflation happens to be true and our universe is only one of a potential infinity, the maths still says the history of the multiverse must converge at some point at the beginning of time. It is a truly general metaphysical result.
Another way to illustrate this is how we derive the constant of growth itself - e. Run growth backwards and it must converge on some unit 1 process that started doing the growing. Thus what begins things has no actual size. It is always just 1 - the bare potential of whatever fluctuation got things started. So a definite growth constant emerges without needing any starting point more definite than a fleeting one-ness.
So from a variety of mathematical arguments we find that any tale of infinitely diverging processes tells us conversely also the tale of a convergence to some necessary cut-off limit. Run history backwards and we must arrive at a common point.
Okay, no disagreement there.
Quoting apokrisis
It's difficult to make sense of what you're trying to say here because you're using words differently from Aristotle it seems to me. Matter is inert, it is form which is act, and actualises. So form is imposed on the inert matter (which is potential), and this form would be the fluctuation. But note that form must be independent to and prior to matter.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, so then the mathematical concept of space as infinitely divisible isn't how real space actually is. It's important to see this.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, so reality eliminates all those infinities that are inherent in our mathematical models. Our initial predictions that blackbodies would emit infinite amounts of UV were based on the mistake in our mathematical model of assuming an infinite continuity going all the way down, while the truth is that things are cut off at one point, they become discrete.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't follow this.
Quoting apokrisis
Well that's a metaphorical way to put it regarding the "primal fluctuation". They do arise from a symmetry breaking, or rather that the process of constructing a fractal involves a symmetry breaking. Regarding the recursive eq, are you talking about fractal dimensionality? As in log(number copies)/log(scale factor)?
OK, so the concept of a triangle is "a plane figure with three sides and angles". Let me see if I can figure out how the LEM does not apply here. You say that any particular triangle, must be one of a number of different types of triangles. Where does the LEM not apply? It doesn't make sense to say that the concept of triangle in general must be a particular type of triangle, just like it doesn't make sense to say that the concept of animal, in general must be a particular type of animal. So it's just a case of categorical separation. It doesn't make sense to attribute a species to the genus, that's a category error, not a failure of the LEM. If we insist that the concept of colour must be either red or not red, and find that this is impossible, it is not that the LEM does not apply, it is a simple category mistake.
Quoting apokrisis
This I can't make any sense of. We have the concept of triangle. Your claim seems to be that if there is no particular triangle, then this particular triangle the potential triangle, may be both scalene and isosceles. I'm sorry to have to disappoint you, but yes, this is contradictory. Don't you see that you are saying that there is no particular triangle, then you say that this particular triangle, the potential triangle, which has already been denied, is both. Don't you see that to affirm something and deny it, both, is contradiction? To say that there is the potential for a triangle which is either isosceles or scalene, is not the same thing as saying that there is a potential triangle which is both. The latter affirms that there is a particular triangle, the potential triangle, which is both isosceles and scalene. And that's contradictory nonsense.
Well yes. I must have spent quite a few pages in this thread making it plain that my claim is that prime matter would be an active and not inert principle. Then the prime mover would not be an active principle in the normal sense of effective cause, just "active" in the sense of an emergent limiting constraint on free material action.
There are quite a few difference I would have with a scholastic understanding of Aristotelean metaphysics. That was rather the point.
Quoting Agustino
Now you are repeating what I have disputed. And I have provided the rationale for my position. So instead of just citing scholastic aristoteleanism to me, as if that could make a difference, just move on and consider my actual arguments.
Quoting Agustino
It is also important to see that Peirce's mathematical conceptions are based on the duality of generality and vagueness. So you can both have a general continuum limit and also find that it has potential infinity in terms of its divisibility. In fact, you've got to have both.
And funnily enough, real space is like that. Just look at how we have to have the duality of general relativity and quantum mechanics to account for it fully. One describes the global continuity of the constraints, the other, the local infinite potential, the inherent uncertainty that just keeps giving.
Quoting Agustino
It amusing that you talk about this as some mathematical mistake.
You are trying to paint yourself as the commonsense engineer that is never going to be fooled by these crazy theoretical types with their dreadful unrealistic mathematical models. And yet an engineer has a metaphysics. He believes in a world of clockwork Newtonian forces. That is the right maths. And on the whole it works because the universe - at the scale at which the engineer operates - is pretty much just "classical". There is no ontic vagueness to speak of.
Of course, the beam will buckle unpredictably. An engineer has to know the practical limits of his classically-inspired mathematical tools. The engineer will say in theory, every micro-cause contributing to the failure of the beam could be modelled by sufficiently complex "non-linear" equations. The issue of coarse graining - the fact that eventually the engineer will insert himself into the modelling as the observer to decide when to just average over the events in each region of space - is brushed off as a necessary heuristic and not an epistemic embarrassment.
Even proof that the model can't be computed in polynomial time won't dent the confidence of "a real engineer". Good enough is close enough. Which is why real world engineering projects fail so regularly.
So forget your engineer's classically-inspired commonsense understanding of maths here. Peirce was after something much deeper, much more metaphysically sophisticated.
Quoting Agustino
Yes.
Of course the LEM applies to any particular triangle. It doesn't apply to the notion of the general triangle.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Exactly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. The LEM fails to apply. It doesn't even make sense to think it could. It is definitional of generality that it doesn't.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Before a particular triangle has been drawn, it may be scalene or isosceles. That is the potential. And so while still just a potential, it is not contradictory to say this potential triangle is as much one as the other. That is, what it actually will be is right at this moment vague - as defined by the PNC not being applicable and any proposition that pretends otherwise being a logical failure.
The laws of logic are rules of predication, how we attribute predicates to a subject. If your subject is the general notion of a triangle, the rules apply. The subject is identified as the triangle, by the law of identity, and the other two rules of predication apply.
Quoting apokrisis
It is only when you define "generality" in the odd way which you do, as a potential particular, that the laws of logic might fail to apply. But this definition is a category mistake because there is a well respected categorical separation between the general and the particular, and you seem to define the general as a type of particular.
You justify this denial of the categorical separation by claiming that the distinction between general and particular is relative only. The triangle is general in relation to isosceles but particular in relation to geometrical figure. But all you have here is relations of generalities. You have not identified a particular. The PNC and LEM rely on the law of identity, the identification of a subject. Until you ,move to identify a particular, it is a foregone conclusion that the laws of logic do not apply.
So you can talk about your generalities all you want, and how the laws of logic are inapplicable to your talk about generalities, but this is just an epistemic failure on your part. It is a failure to identify a particular in order to move forward using the laws of logic. These claims you make about generalities have no ontological bearing, because there is no evidence that such unidentifiable generalities exist anywhere but in the indecisive human mind. And when you move to identify "generality" as a particular thing with ontological status, like apeiron, vagueness, or pure potential, we can apply the principles of logic, despite the fact that you do not want us to, and will not listen to our conclusions.
Quoting apokrisis
Don't you see this as nonsense? There is no triangle. It hasn't been drawn, it isn't even conceived of in the mind of a person who might draw it. Yet you say that it may be scalene or isosceles. That's nonsense, there is nothing there. If you instruct a person to draw a triangle, we might say that the person has these options, but that is not to say that there is a potential triangle which is both scalene and isosceles.
Quoting apokrisis
That's nothing but irrational nonsense. You have identified the potential for a triangle, a person might draw a triangle. From here, you want to identify the triangle which might be drawn, and say that since it's not drawn yet, it's both isosceles and scalene. But that's nonsense, because the person might draw a square or a circle, or nothing at all.
The triangle is identified as potential, and this means that its existence is contingent. If its existence is contingent, then it may or may not be. If there is reason to believe that the existence of the triangle will be necessitated (the person was instructed to draw a triangle), we can consider the possibilities. It may be isosceles, it may be scalene, etc.. But to say that there is an identified triangle, the "potential triangle", and it "is as much one as the other", is pure nonsense, because what is actually the case is that the probability for one triangle is equal to the probability for the other triangle.
Therefore there is not an identified "potential triangle" which consists of all the contrary possibilities. There is the possibility for many different triangles, contrary triangles. Each potential triangle has features which are consistent with the laws of logic. So we can adequately describe the situation without the irrational nonsense which insists that the laws of logic do not apply. The situation of "potential triangle" is treated as the possibility for many different triangles, as well as other things, each consistent with the laws of logic. It is not treated as one triangle which has features which are inconsistent with the laws of logic. The latter is irrational nonsense, and there is no need for the claim that laws of logic do not apply.
You are avoiding the point. Peirce is dealing with how the laws could even develop. You are talking about the laws as they would apply when the world has crisply developed, when everything is mostly a collection of objects, a settled state of affairs, a set of atomistic facts.
So sure, generals can have universality predicated of them. They can be said to cover all instances of some class. They can themselves be regarded as particular subjects. That is what make sense once a world has developed and generals come to be crisply fixed within the context of some evolved state of affairs.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Correct. Except now I'm talking about how crisp particularity itself could develop. It is hylomorphic substantial being. And it develops out of what it is not - vagueness and generality. Peirce's version of prime matter and prime mover.
So the laws of thought don't apply until they start to do. That is what a developmental ontology is claiming. Peirce described the Cosmos as the universal growth of reasonableness. The lawfulness the laws encode are the product of evolution and self organisation.
There is no point you just telling me you don't see the laws as a product of development. I already know that you just presume their natural existence. You have never inquired how the laws might come to be as the result of a larger ur-logical process.
So why not set aside your predudices and actually consider an alternative metaphysics for once? Make a proper effort to understand Peirce rather than simply assert that existence exists and that's the end of it.
The laws of logic were produced, and developed by human beings. They are human statements of how to proceed in logical process. Surely they have only existed in an evolved state of affairs. The claim that there was a time when the universe didn't consist of a collection of objects would need to be justified. The logical principles, and evidence which would be used to justify this claim would provide information as to whether this universe without particulars would consist of anything like what we call generalities. As discussed, the logical principles demonstrate that this is an irrational claim. If you have evidence, you should describe it, rather than repeating over and over again assertions about symmetry-breakings.
Quoting apokrisis
The laws of logic are only applied by human beings, who started to apply them a few thousand years ago, along with the development of language. If some human beings believe that there was a time when the universe existed, but its existence cannot be understood by the laws of logic, then the principles for this claim need to be demonstrated, because it appears to be an irrational claim when examined in relation to accepted ontological principles.
Quoting apokrisis
I see the laws of logic for what they are, principles set down by human beings for the purpose of carrying out logical proceedings. There is no question of whether they are naturally occurring, that would be a very odd thought, because they are clearly artificial.
As for making an effort to properly understand Peirce, you've referred me to some of his papers in the past, and I've determined some mistakes, one of which we are going over in this thread. So you should actually set aside some of your Peircean bias, to consider these problems in a reasonable way.
Sure we framed them to explain the world as we have found it. The deeper question is why the existence of that intelligible world? If the laws were merely social constructs, they would hardly hold a foundational place in our methods of reasoning.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Fer fuck's sakes. If existence isn't eternal, it must have developed or been created. Being created doesn't work as that leads to infinite regress in terms of claims about first causes. So development is the metaphysical option worth exploring - rather than being pig-headed about, as is your wont.
And then cosmology gives good support to that metaphysical reasoning. Look back to the Big Bang and you don't see much evidence for the existence of a collection of objects.
Yes, that is indeed an interesting implication of any growth process that depends on symmetry breakings - it must ultimately reduce itself to a beginning point.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't follow how "what begins" has no actual size. Fractals always have some size. Even the simplest ones like Koch curve start from some definite size of a simple line segment. But see the absence of a definitive perimeter, combined with things like having no tangents at any points, make such fractals strange mathematical objects, which may approximate some real objects, but not in this lack of definitiveness.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay. But I don't see anything in your position that could elude what Aristotle has determined. You have redefined the terms, but this redefinition does not save you from the requirement that there is a prior act to all potency (using these terms to mean what Aristotle meant by them). As I said, it makes sense when you say that everything reduces to a primal fluctuation. I can understand that. But I cannot understand the movement from primal fluctuation to ontic vagueness - that sounds contradictory to me.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, much of actual math is done this way. The difficulties of infinite divisibility and the like are avoided through limit calculus in practice while doing math. This is fine so long as you are aware that you're just doing math. Limit calculus enables you to perform through an infinity of operations and arrive at a definite answer - in some cases, those which are convergent. Not all are though, and the cases where there exist problems in physics - such as the Big Bang singularity, are precisely those cases where limits are divergent. Again, such issues illustrate discrepancies between mathematical models and reality.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, we're not sure, we have to wait for quantum gravity to be more fully developed to see what's what. If there is a quantum theory of gravity, then GR will be reduced to it, as would be natural, in my opinion. It's absurd to have a macro theory that cannot be shown to emerge from the micro level.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I'm not sure that he believes in the "clockwork Newtonian universe". Depends on what you are engineering. Standard structures will be engineered according to the Newtonian clockwork view of the universe, because it's a close enough approximation - especially when you put factors of safety on top of it.
But there are many non-standard structures - suspension bridges, skyscrapers in earthquake-prone regions, shell structures and the like which are definitely not engineered according to clockwork Newtonian views. These structures are very difficult to analyse and they can be very sensitive to imperfections. They display dynamic, non-linear behaviour under loads, which is more difficult to analyse because positive feedback loops between an acting load and the response of the structure can be generated, which can lead to collapse - Tacoma Narrows, things like Fokker monoplanes, and the like.
These structures are generally analysed by computers under different scenarios, with different possible failure mechanisms taken into consideration. Evolutionary algorithms may also be used to determine the right values for certain parameters. Determining the failure mechanisms that should be tested is largely about intuition though ;) .
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, the phenomenon of buckling is more complicated than our lower bound calculations suggest. Non-linear effects do start to play a role, and there are other mechanisms too - in reinforced concrete beams for example, a phenomenon known as arching can develop making the behaviour of the beam plastic and permitting it to withstand more load than predicted.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually, real world engineering projects most often are overdeisgned. We just hear about the failures more often than not, but the many successes are forgotten. When you use lower bound approaches combined with factors of safety of 1.5 for structures, and up to 3-4 sometimes for foundations, you are bound to overdesign to a certain extent. Basically whatever answer you calculate you will multiply by the factor of safety to really make sure it's safe - and you are pretty much forced to do so by legislation in many countries, just because failure can lead to death. So better safe than sorry - better to be humble and expect that you don't know than to have false pretences to knowledge.
Real world structures which do collapse or fail likely do so because they involve an upper bound method of calculation, and the lowest failure mechanism wasn't thought about or taken into account. For example, the World Trade Centers were actually designed to withstand a plane impact. But the actual failure mechanism was never taken into account. They didn't think that if the plane strikes at the right height of the building, the fire can progressively cause steel floors to collapse, and once one floor collapses, the effective height of the steel columns doubles, which means that buckling load becomes 1/4 of what it used to be before (not even taking into account the effect of temperature rise on the columns). So if even more floors collapse, then the demolition-looking collapse of the world trade centre is inevitable as the main columns buckle, and the top part of the building comes crashing down on the bottom part. Even with factors of safety, this mechanism would lead to collapse. So nobody thought about it. And the structure failed.
There's a lot we still have to learn. Whenever we do a controlled demolishing of a bridge, we often load it to see at what load it actually fails compared to what we predict. They often fail at higher loads - there's a lot left to understand about structures.
Sure. To model, we need to start at some initial scale. My point was that log e, or Euler's number, shows how we can just start with "unit 1" as the place to start things.
It may seem like you always have to start your simulation with some definite value. But actually the maths itself abstracts away this apparent particularity by saying whatever value you start at, that is 1. The analysis is dimensionless rather than dimensioned. Even if we have to "stick in a number" to feed the recursive equation.
Quoting Agustino
Nope. This is the big misunderstanding.
Sure, irregularity being constrained is what produces the now definite possibilities or degrees of freedom. Once a history has got going, vague "anythingness" is no longer possible. Anything that happens is by definition limited and so is characterised by a counterfactually. Spontaneity or change is always now in some general direction.
So there is potential in the sense of material powers or material properties - the things that shaped matter is liable to do (defined counterfactually in terms of what it likewise not going to be doing).
But Aristotle tried to make sense of the bare potential of prime matter. As we know, that didn't work out so well.
Peirce fixes that by a logic of vagueness. Now both formal and material cause are what arise in mutual fashion from bare potential. They are its potencies. Before the birth of concrete possibility - the kind of historically in-formed potential that you have in mind - there was the pure potential which was a pre-dichotomised vagueness.
Prime mover and prime matter are together what would be latent in prime potential. Hence this being a triadic and developmental metaphysics - what Aristotle was shooting for but didn't properly bring off.
Quoting Agustino
You keep coming back to a need to believe in a concrete beginning. It is the presumption that you have not yet questioned in the way Peirce says you need to question.
Until you can escape that, you are doomed to repeat the same conclusions. But its your life. As you say, engineering might be good enough for you. Metaphysics and the current frontiers of scientific theory may just not seem very important.
Quoting Agustino
But you still do believe there is a concrete bottom level to these non-linear situations right? It's still absurd to suggest the emergent macro theory doesn't rest on a bed of definite micro level particulars?
I mean, drill down, and eventually you will find that you are no longer just coarse-graining the model. You are describing the actual grain on which everything rests?
People say that the storm in Brazil was caused by the flap of a butterfly wing in Maryland. And you accept it was that flap. The disturbance couldn't have been anything smaller, like the way the butterfly stroked its antenna or faintly shifted a leg?
I mean deterministic chaos theory doesn't have to rely on anything like the shadowing lemma to underpin its justification of coarse graining "all the way down"?
In other words, the maths of non-linearity works, to the degree it works, by coping with the reality that there is no actual concrete micro-level on which to rest. And that argues against the picture of physical reality you are trying to uphold.
The beam buckles because of a "fluctuation". Another way of saying "for no discernible reason at all". Anything and everything could have been what tipped the balance. So the PNC fails to apply and we should just accept that your micro-level just describes the vagueness of unformed action.
Quoting Agustino
I wonder why. (Well, I've already said why - creating a "safe" distance from fundamental uncertainty by employing informal or heuristic coarse-graining.)
Quoting Agustino
Thanks for the examples, but I know more than a little bit about engineering principles. And you are only confirming my arguments about the reality that engineers must coarse-grain over the best way they can.
Okay, but I fail to see how this changes anything :s - I mean sure, you can use whatever number system you want, so effectively you always start with "unit 1" if that's what you want. But how does this change the fact that there is a definitive size to this beginning, regardless of the number/measuring system you choose to use, and hence what you use as the standard for 1 unit?
Quoting apokrisis
Why should I think that this vague "anythingness" was ever possible?
Quoting apokrisis
Why do you say it didn't work out? Aristotle showed that prime matter is impossible to exist in-itself. But prime matter does exist in the sense of the underlying potentiality for anything already actual to be other than it is - in other words, the radical potentiality for a chair to change into an elephant, as an example.
Quoting apokrisis
So is "bare potential" actual?
Quoting apokrisis
:s - if Prime Mover is the potentiality of something else, then it is not Prime Mover anymore. Prime Mover would be whatever lies behind and is pure act.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, because other beginnings are logically contradictory and impossible, just like square circles are impossible.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I do believe there is a non-contradictory underlying reality.
Quoting apokrisis
No, absolutely not. The phenomenon of buckling in these non-linear ways is most commonly seen in shell structures. What happens is that there are imperfections in the structure (not perfectly round, etc.). And these tiny imperfections reduce the failure load significantly. They can be ignored for most structures, but things like shell structures are imperfection sensitive. So there is an actual cause for why they buckle - just that we cannot pin-point it. It's epistemologically, but not ontologically vague. This is exactly how we were taught this in University, and how it makes sense. If a professor said that the structure is ontologically vague, and that's why there is no discernible reason for buckling, we wouldn't have understood much of anything, because it doesn't make much sense :s - it's illogical. How can you have an illogical metaphysics?
Oh and by the way, the above is all tested. We can engineer structures to have imperfections at certain locations, and then test them - and guess what, we see that they fail where the imperfections are. So clearly it's nothing to do with some vagueness, fluctuations and the like...
Quoting apokrisis
Right, or rather creating a safe distance from the area that we cannot know very well, since our models and theories do not permit us to. That's also a possibility, one that seems to be more logically coherent.
So you don't understand dimensionless quantities. Cool. https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_quantity
Quoting Agustino
Whoosh. Ideas just go over your head.
Imperfections are just another name for material accidents or uncontrolled fluctuations. The argument is about why the modellling of reality might be coarse graining all the way down. The reason is that imperfection or fluctuation can only be constrained, not eliminated. Hence this being the ontological conclusion that follows from epistemic observation.
Our models that presume a world that is concrete at base don't work. In real life, we have to have safety margins. Even then, fluctuations of any scale are possible in true non-linear systems with powerlaw statistics. So we can draw our ontological conclusions from a real world failure.
Quoting Agustino
Now you are really just making shit up.
No, I do understand dimensionless quantities quite well, thank you. What I don't understand is your silly metaphorical fancy of treating a dimensionless quantity as a "1 unit", which is then somehow also a "bare potential" :s .
Quoting apokrisis
Material accidents are not "uncontrolled fluctuations" :s
Quoting apokrisis
That would be a methodological limitation of our manufacturing techniques, it would definitely not be an ontological limitation of reality itself...
Quoting apokrisis
Right, so you are willing to accept ontological contradictions. Why aren't you going to accept square circles then, and other contradictions? Maybe at the level of those fluctuations squares and circles aren't all that different anymore - there's some vague square circles :s
Quoting apokrisis
:-} The point there was simply that any object has to potential to become another - the elephant is made of atoms, as is the chair, now supposing there are sufficient atoms in one as in the other, all it would take would be a rearrangement of them - in other words, a new form. That's what Aristotle meant by prime matter - but prime matter only applies to already actual objects - it doesn't exist in-itself, abstracted away from such objects.
Clearly you just don't.
You are convincing me it is essentially pointless discussing this with you as you are either just being pig-headed or you lack the necessary understanding of how maths works.
Quoting Agustino
Just stop a minute and notice how you mostly wind up making simple negative assertions in the fashion of an obstinate child. No it ain't, no it ain't. Then throw in an emoticon as if your personal feelings are what concludes any argument.
I find replying to you quite a chore. You try to close down discussions while pretending to be continuing them with lengthy responses. It is like hoping for a tennis match with someone who just wants to spend forever knocking up.
Quoting Agustino
So you claim in unsupported fashion, ignoring the supported argument I just made in the other direction.
Quoting Agustino
And your problem is?
Vagueness is as much circular as it is square. The PNC does not apply. Just like it says on the box.
Quoting Agustino
Ah right. Atoms. :s
Oh look, I just disproved your argument with an emoticon.
Get back to me when you have figured out that atoms are a coarse grain notion according to modern physics.
Correct, we find the existence of an intelligible world, and the laws of logic are developed to help us understand that world. We have no reason to believe that the world ever was anything other than intelligible, because experience demonstrates to us that it is intelligible..
Quoting apokrisis
The laws are expressed in words, therefore they are human constructs. I don't see how they could be anything other than that. They are foundational in the sense that they are created to support conceptual structures, just like the foundations of buildings are created to support structures. I don't see what you are trying to claim. The laws of logic might in some way represent some real, independent aspects of the universe, or be a reflection of the reality of the universe, but these laws are still artificial, human constructs which reflect whatever that reality is.
That the laws of logic work, is evidence that there is such a reality. But to proceed from this, to the assumption that there was a time when there was not such a reality, is what I see as irrational. The passing of time itself is an intelligible order, so to claim that there was a time when there was no intelligible order, is irrational.
Quoting apokrisis
You have reduced the existence of the universe to three options, eternal, created, or developed. I'm sure an imaginative mind could come up with more options, but I'll look at these three.
The infinite regress you refer to is only the result of assuming efficient cause, and this infinite regress is no different from "eternal". The first cause of intention of a creator, which is commonly referred to as "final cause", does not produce an infinite regress. It is introduced as an alternative to infinite regress. The act of the free will is carried out for a purpose, and that purpose is the final reason, there is no infinite regress, so long as you respect the finality of purpose. So your claim that creation leads to infinite regress is false.
The "development" of a universe with intelligible order, emerging from no order, does not make any sense without invoking a developer. So this option leads to the need to assume a creator as well. Your mistake is that you attempt to remove the developer from the development, so you end up with irrational nonsense.
Quoting apokrisis
The Big Bang theory only demonstrates that current, conventional theories in physics are unable to understand the existence of the universe prior to a certain time. The Big Bang theory is just the manifestation of inadequate physical theories. It says very little about the actual universe accept that the universe is something which our theories are incapable of understanding. To attribute the "vagueness" which results from the inadequacies of one's theories, to the thing which the theories are being applied to, in an attempt to understand, is a category mistake.
Quoting apokrisis
Yeah, I find that contradictory, and contradictions are by definition impossible. If you will allow contradictions in your system of thought, there's no way to make heads from tails anymore - that's completely irrational.
That's the conclusion I came to a few days back. Apokrisis is very convinced that the position expressed is the correct one. So no matter how many times the illogical, irrationalities of that position are pointed out, apokrisis just continues to assert, this is the way things are because I adhere to Peirce's principles. There is a complete disrespect for all the problems which are pointed out. It is an act of self-imposed ignorance.
I'm waiting for you to get the ball over the net. I see a lot of swishing and grunting but not much result.
To remind you of the essence of where the argument had got to, your own point about engineering is that it can't trust perfect world maths. Even statistical methods are risky as they still coarse grain over the metaphysical reality.
A linear model of average behaviour is going to be fundamentally inaccurate if the average behaviour is in fact non-linear or powerlaw. At least a Gaussian distribution does have a mean. A powerlaw (or fractal) distribution has exceptions over all scales.
This gets quite critical where engineering has to engage with real-life dissipative systems like plate tectonics. Earthquake building codes and land-use planning really have to do some smart thinking about the true nature of natural hazard risks.
So how engineering papers over the cracks in mathematical modelling is important here. That is a heuristic tale in itself. Eventually even statistical methods become so coarse grained they no longer offer a concrete mean. The central limit theorem no longer applies.
But I was focused on the foundations of the modelling - the starting presumption that there is some definite micro-level of causality. My argument is that it is coarse graining all the way down. What we find as an epistemic necessity is also an ontic necessity.
Now you can argue that the mathematical presumption of micro-level counterfactual definiteness - atomism - is in fact the correct ontology here. Great. But it is mysterious how you don't pick up the contradiction between you saying that the presumptions of maths can't be trusted epistemically, and yet those very same presumptions must be ontologically true.
Your position metaphysically couldn't be more arse about face - the technical description of naive realism.
So really, until you understand just how deeply confused you are about your own argument, it is hard to have much of a discussion.
We don't have to agree. And where would be the fun if we did?
I know, that's just the way it is.
Creation by a creator is efficient cause masquerading as something else. It doesn't offer a causal explanation because if creations demand a creator, who creates the creator? The infinite regress is just elevated to a divine plane of being.
And it doesn't even explain how the wishes of a supernatural being can get expressed as material events. Sure, somehow there must be a "miraculous" connection if the story is going to work. But there just isn't that explanation of how it does work.
So anthropomorphic creators fail both to explain their own existence and how they achieve anything material.
Yes, I know that this then gives rise to thickets of theological boilerplate to cover over the essential lack of any explanation. But I'm saying let's cut the bullshit.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
So causal stories of development and evolution are irrational. Claims of brute existence are rational. Gotcha.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You mean constraints? Those things which could emerge due to development?
Why revert to talking in terms of efficient cause - the developer - when the missing bit of the puzzle is the source of the finality? You already agreed that efficient causes only result in infinite regress.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You mean where physics has got to is knowing that a Newtonian notion of time has to be inadequate. That is the new big project. Learning to understand time as a thermal process.
The search for a final theory of quantum gravity is the search for how time and space could emerge as constraints to regulate quantum fluctuations and produce a Universe that is asymptotically classical.
So exactly what I've been arguing. And what Peirce foresaw in his metaphysics.
When our smartest modern metaphysician and the full weight of our highly successful physics community agree on something in terms of ontology, that seems a good reason to take it seriously, don't you think?
(I realise you will reply, nope its irrational, while Augustino eggs you on from the sidelines with some frantic emoticon eye-rolling.)
Have you never heard of the concept of free will? This is a cause which is not an efficient cause.
Quoting apokrisis
You can call free will miraculous if you want, I prefer to call it final cause.
Quoting apokrisis
Where do you find this "smartest modern metaphysician"? If you mean Peirce, I can only take that as a joke.
I have explored that cultural fiction in great detail.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
No. I call it a cultural fiction.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You have to pretend to be laughing. Otherwise you might have to reconsider your views.
See how freewill works? It is mostly the power to say no even when by rights you should be saying yes. It is the way people justify their irrationality.
When you call free will a cultural fiction, I know you have very little metaphysical education. And that explains why you would say that Peirce is the smartest modern metaphysician, you really don't know what metaphysics is.
Quoting apokrisis
There must be a reason for the existence of irrationality. If the concept of free will explains why there is such irrationality, then that's good evidence that free will is more than just a fiction.
Quoting StreetlightX
Note - This response is to a couple of threads that ended months ago. I just wanted to follow up.
I finally finished "Life's Ratchet." It changed the way I think about living and non-living matter. You know - everything. It makes the transition from non-living to living seem, if not inevitable, at least unsurprising. This has only happened to me once or twice in my life - I learn something I had never conceived of before and immediately think "Of course that's how it works. It couldn't work any other way."
Ideas that were new to me:
Great book. Thanks for the reference.