Becoming and Relation: Difficult Thoughts
Becoming is a particularly hard thought to think. So hard, in fact, that at almost every point is it subordinated instead to 'Being'. This is particularly the case when becoming is thought of as simply another word for 'change'. But to think becoming as change is to more or less forget the specificity of becoming altogether. Why? Because to assert the primacy of becoming is precisely to assert what we might call becoming without terms. That is, it's not that one 'thing' becomes another 'thing'. Thinking of Becoming in this way just reverts back to thinking in terms of Being (becoming here is subordinate to 'things', which are primary). If becoming has any cogency at all, it must not be thought of as occurring between two terms, but as a concept self-sufficient unto itself.
Consider Deleuze: "[in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself."
To properly understand this, one needs to turn to the question of relation, which is inseparable from the question of becoming. This is because relations, like becoming, always stand outside the identity of any one thing. For example, while the predicate 'blue' might belong to the subject 'sky', the relation "taller than" does not necessarily 'belong' to the subject Peter. Peter might be taller than Paul, but shorter than Mary. In this case, "taller than" does not properly 'belong' to the concept of Peter (there is nothing 'intrinsically' "taller than" about Peter). The relation stands outside of it's terms.
Relations then, belong not to being, but to becoming. Here is the philosopher Daniel Smith, writing on the topic: "If properties belong to something solid, relations are far more fragile, and are inseparable from a perpetual becoming... If relations are external to their terms and do not depend on them, if relation is the domain of becoming (if every relation envelops or implies change), then one might say that, at the limit, or at a deeper level, there are not even terms, but only packets of variable relations. What we call a term in itself is only a packet of relations." (Daniel Smith, The New).
One way to understand the scope of these claims is to recognize in them some of the central principles of empiricism. Whereas rationalism staked it's claim in grasping the world from the point of view of a concept which could be analytically decomposed into exhaustive predicates (e.g. the concept triangle, with it's three sides and interior angles adding up to 180 degrees, etc), empiricism begins not from concepts, but from a kind of exploration of the world that begins instead in relations. Insofar as relations escape the 'solidity' of the concept (of the 'thing'), it's to relations which empiricism looks to kick-start it's philosophical program.
Whether or not one agrees with the perspective above, I think it's important to at least recognize the strangeness and the specificity of the notion of becoming. To respect, as it were, the singularity of becoming to at least give it a fair hearing, whatever one may make of the idea.
Consider Deleuze: "[in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself."
To properly understand this, one needs to turn to the question of relation, which is inseparable from the question of becoming. This is because relations, like becoming, always stand outside the identity of any one thing. For example, while the predicate 'blue' might belong to the subject 'sky', the relation "taller than" does not necessarily 'belong' to the subject Peter. Peter might be taller than Paul, but shorter than Mary. In this case, "taller than" does not properly 'belong' to the concept of Peter (there is nothing 'intrinsically' "taller than" about Peter). The relation stands outside of it's terms.
Relations then, belong not to being, but to becoming. Here is the philosopher Daniel Smith, writing on the topic: "If properties belong to something solid, relations are far more fragile, and are inseparable from a perpetual becoming... If relations are external to their terms and do not depend on them, if relation is the domain of becoming (if every relation envelops or implies change), then one might say that, at the limit, or at a deeper level, there are not even terms, but only packets of variable relations. What we call a term in itself is only a packet of relations." (Daniel Smith, The New).
One way to understand the scope of these claims is to recognize in them some of the central principles of empiricism. Whereas rationalism staked it's claim in grasping the world from the point of view of a concept which could be analytically decomposed into exhaustive predicates (e.g. the concept triangle, with it's three sides and interior angles adding up to 180 degrees, etc), empiricism begins not from concepts, but from a kind of exploration of the world that begins instead in relations. Insofar as relations escape the 'solidity' of the concept (of the 'thing'), it's to relations which empiricism looks to kick-start it's philosophical program.
Whether or not one agrees with the perspective above, I think it's important to at least recognize the strangeness and the specificity of the notion of becoming. To respect, as it were, the singularity of becoming to at least give it a fair hearing, whatever one may make of the idea.
Comments (209)
But what justifies that when any one term can only have cogent definiteness or counterfactuality in terms of its "other"? You have to be able to say with certainty what your term is not otherwise your term is merely vague in not admitting to the principle of non-contradiction.
Self sufficient terms are a dangerous pipe dream. Metaphysics is done with dichotomies for good reason.
Quoting StreetlightX
And so this is particularly wrong headed.
Becoming can best be defined in terms of symmetry breaking - pure dichotomisation. So what gets lef behind is the initial absolute lack of distinction - the symmetry of a pure and unbroken potential.
And what becoming arrives at is the equilibrium limit. The division that is the symmetry broken as much as it can possibly be. You have two complementary aspects of reality standing in orthogonal or asymmetric relation - as "far apart" as they can logically be. Like chance and necessity, matter and form, flux and stasis, discrete and continuous, etc, etc.
Quoting StreetlightX
Predicate logic is for reasoning about individuated particulars. Metaphysical generality needs dialectical logic. So while relations might seem extrinsic extras floating above individuated particulars, if you are really talking about becoming in a metaphysically general sense, relations instead have to intrinsic. It is the action and reaction involved in symmetry breaking which organises what eventually emerges as the being.
So taller than is a relation that makes sense only in the context of its antithesis, shorter than. Peter has no "height" to speak of unless there is already - intrinsically - a reasoned point of comparison.
Quoting StreetlightX
Frankly you lost me with that leap. I see no connection with what came before.
Probably the mistake is trying to drive a definite wedge between rationalism and empiricism when clearly they are locked into a mutually definitional relation as theory and measurement, or generalised symmetry and particular symmetry breaking.
A Platonically idea triangle is defined by it maximal possible symmetry. Every real material triangle can thus be measured by its approach towards this ideal limit. The ideal defines also the complementary thing of some particular lack of symmetry.
So again, yeah nah, nothing is adding up. Becoming is of vital Metaphysical import. But symmetry breaking and a logic of vagueness is still the way to go.
But this is just a warmed-over Kantianism that gets everything back to front. As if the world cares about the definteness of terms. Nah mate, its you who's wearing your knickers on your head. The whole edifice - generality, symmetry-breaking, vagueness, dichotomies and dialectics - are so many backward projections that compensate for an inability to think the singular.
And yet the whole wonderful edifice of science arose based on metaphysical dialectics. Curious.
So what branch of metaphysics successfully deals in the singular? Your OP was founded on dichotomies - being~becoming, relations~relata, rational~empirical, probably a few more. So in what sense is any philosophy ever not framing itself dichotomistically? Even singular is opposed to multiplicity so as to make sense. 8-)
A new syntactical medium - one with fewer constraints/more dimensionality - opens up also more expressive possibilities.
Hence McLuhan makes my usual point that dichotomistic relations are mutual. For singular or reductionist thinkers, that might be surprising. The relation might be thought to be strictly one way (from the message wanting to be expressed, to the constraint thus exerted to form the suitable medium).
That was a little too easy. Give us another.
How are we to understand his thesis precisely. Is the contrast with antithesis our best avenue?
It isn't though. Maybe one day it'll hit you that your pre-fab Apospeak isn't applicable here. Maybe one day you'll even respond to the singularity of the discussion, but it's no surprise that one committed to modelling reality after the image of thought is incapable of novelty in thought. Deleuze understood the dangers and inadequacies of exactly your approach better than anyone, and it's unfortunate that his warnings are less heeded than they should be:
"Of what use is a dialectic that believes itself to be reunited with the real when it compensates for the inadequacy of a concept that is too broad or too general by invoking the opposite concept, which is no less broad and general? The concrete will never be attained by combining the inadequacy of one concept with the inadequacy of its opposite. The singular will never be attained by correcting a generality with another generality.... the dialectic [is] a false movement, that is, a movement of the abstract concept, which goes from one opposite to the other only by means of imprecision."
How better to capture the poverty of your entire thought process? And as for the conjunction of 'singular and reductionist thinkers...' - well, that's just embarrassing.
Love that phrase! I'll be stealing it as a substitute for 'the truth is a pathless land.'
One drops one's immutable and entirely correct vision into the thread, and it doesn't even fall apart, but sinks without trace, because it cannot respond or relate. Oh, the horror; if this is a new and singular discussion, I will have to think again!
On my view being and becoming are the same thing. Being is becoming. Becoming is being. So it's not that one is primary, it's that they're the same thing. The mistake is to assume that there are static things. Static things are simply an abstraction we perform.
Because of this, relations aren't "separate from their terms." Their "terms" are always becoming in the first place.
Also, properties (which aren't something that things (or "terms") have, but which is what they are/what they are like) are always relative and relational.
Also, I don't buy the idea of anything "properly belonging" or not to any concept. There are no real essences, no real essential versus accidental properties. There are simply individual (person) necessary and sufficient criteria for calling some x an F. (Keeping in mind of course that any x is dynamic--it's becoming).
This is the foundation of relativity theory, which itself is fundamental to modern physics. Motion is not the property of an object, it is the relation between objects. In physics, this get's extended into the concept of energy, so that energy, strictly speaking, cannot be claimed to be the property of any particular object.
Quoting StreetlightX
To assert the primacy of becoming may be a useful thought experiment to help one separate the concepts which are based in becoming, from the concepts based in being, but ultimately, to maintain and assert this, in an absolute sense, I believe, is to render the world unintelligible. Simply stated, this is because we must establish the existence of things first, before we can establish a relationship between things. So an understanding of things (being) is necessarily prior to an understanding of relations between things (becoming). To propose primacy of the relation, as a premise, is to propose an illogical, or self-contradicting premise, which if excepted will render the world as unintelligible.
As evidence, you will see this in the unintelligibility of apokrisis' metaphysics, with symmetry-breaking claimed as fundamental, but no approach to the symmetry itself, which logically must be prior to symmetry-breaking. All philosophies which claim the primacy of becoming (process philosophy) face this problem. The process ontologist must either accept that the universe is fundamentally unintelligible, or do as Whitehead does, and insert unintelligible aspects (e.g. prehension, concrescence) into the universe, in order to bring the universe into intelligibility. To propose that the universe is fundamentally unintelligible, I would argue, is expressly unphilosophical. So this "primacy of becoming" may be a useful exercise, to aid in understanding what is really the case, but I believe it is a dead end philosophy because it is unacceptable as an ontology.
How does Deleuze deal with this problem?
Relations aren't the same thing as becoming. Imagine that there are two static things, A and B, situated in space. From reference point r, A is to the left of B. That's a relation, but it's not becoming.
Yeah, I'd agree with that.
I don't think the idea of having one "thing" be primary makes much sense anyway. I don't get the desire for that.
If you're worried about historical "coming into existence" positing something as primary doesn't solve anything. You still have the problem of that thing coming into existence or you need to posit it as always existing.
Do you think sense datum can be classified as becomings, in the genesis (the genealogical relationship between causes and effects)of a perception, the process whereby something non-conceptual and unintelligible becomes conceptual, intelligible. How the substantial becomes intelligible.
Correct, but you are one step along, in the long process of understanding. Learning is an extremely long process. Finding out that I came from my parents is just one step in determining where I came from. But it wouldn't make sense to say that, because I still must learn where my parents came from, there is no point in learning that I came from my parents.
There's no reason to believe that you are though. Again there's no reason to believe that one thing is primary over another. Believing that one thing is primary doesn't at all solve the problem that you either have an infinite regress historically or that something "came from nothing," so that doesn't work as an argumentative justification for positing something as primary.
You don't see a reason to believe that your parents are prior (primary) to yourself?
If for anything, something preceded something else, then for everything, something must have preceded something else.
Is that true?
Haha--ignore the question and pretend that I agreed with you. Nice tactic.
Not necessarily prior, since identity is a relation. There is also the Christian concept of God as Trinity, such that Being and relations are both necessary and eternal. In any case, my view (contra @apokrisis) is that Peirce's final cosmology requires the reality of God as Ens necessarium.
According to Aristotle's principle of identity, identity is not a relation. A thing is itself. That is its identity, its very self.
If anything you'd think you'd want to look at a zero-place predicate like 'rain' as a model, but even here, I 'm not sure what this accomplishes.
I'm not sure what example you're talking about, but remember that on my view, becoming isn't primary. Becoming isn't different than being. They're the same thing.
This just again confirms Deleuze to be a donkey. There couldn't be a more precise movement than a reciprocal or inverse relation.
Again, if you could present a valid example of a singular conception - one that somehow exists alone without being reciprocal to a context - then you might have something to get started with here. But you don't.
In arguing that absolute distinctionless potentiality is "left behind" musn't there be a time when there was no distinction? (bc otherwise what would 'left behind' mean?) But wouldn't that be then its own self-sufficient other-lacking term? So wouldn't it be more correct to say that pure poeteniality can only be a term 'after' the symmetry is broken (or that there is no pure symmetry that was broken, only one that has always already been broken?)
It seems, by your own lights, like you're stuck with two options - either we can speak cogently of something self-sufficient, even if, in speaking of it, we have to oppose it to something else. Or there is ever only the dichotomous, and its quite right to say there's no origin, only an in-between.
You are quite right. Except of course time then becomes another distinction. As does the notion of space that is invoked in talking of something being left behind. So the argument is a little more complex.
In my lingo, this absolute becoming is the perfect symmetry of the Apeiron or vagueness. I prefer vagueness as a term because it is self evidently opposed to the crispness of being. Although if you know your Greek, then - a peras - being without limit naturally points to its other of coming to be limited.
So yes, the Apeiron would have to "exist" in a way that is the least like any form of existence to stand as the metaphysical other of existence. And the only way we could know of it is by retroduction - looking at its broken parts and seeing there must have been the perfect whole.
If we take our existence to be completely and fully realised - at its limit in being real, as we do without even really thinking about it - then Apeiron, vagueness, potential, becoming, or whatever we want to call it, is the exact opposite. Whatever we take hard, cold, crisp, determinate Being to be, then already in that lies our best possible understanding of what could be the other of Becoming.
So it just is always the case that our Metaphysical strength conceptions seem strong because they are not self-defining, but defined in terms of everything they are not. Dichotomies form categories that are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive. So they are the only completely rigorous way to form conceptions themselves.
The difficult thought - the one that eludes pretty much everyone - is that the dichotomous relation is not in fact oppositional but reciprocal. If expressed mathematically, x become its other of y by y being 1/x.
Normally of course, the relation is understood in terms of subtractions - A vs not-A. One turns into its other via negation. And this can be constructed by taking away every essential property in a way that might satisfy the atomistic logic of a reductionist.
But I am taking the holist view where existence is the product of constraints on freedoms. And so a different maths expresses that.
For example, the opposite of infinity is the infinitesimal - that is to say, the infinitesimal equals 1/infinity. And vice versa of course.
And critically, each then becomes the others limit. So neither the infinite nor the infinitesimal actually exists. Instead we have made it clear we are talking about the complementary boundaries of existence (or in this case, counting all the way up vs counting all the way down).
So apply this to the dichotomy of being and becoming. Each is now the others limit. And each achieves its own status as a limit by being as far away from its other as it can get. But by the same token, neither can ever break the bond that (semiotically, meaningfullly) connects them. In yin yang fashion, each must retain an irreducible element of the other within itself to have that essential property of being always measurably other to its "other".
What that in turn means is that even Being - that which we take to be fully and unambiguously actual - is itself (by logic) always still to some inifinitesimal degree in the act of becoming.
And hey, what does quantum theory now tell us? This is exactly the world we observe. Zoom in on crisp classicality and it turns out to have in the limit vagueness or indeterminism. Science has cashed out metaphysics yet again. Peirce in particular was right about tychism in relation to synechism, to use his jargon.
So when it comes to talking definitionally about a state of pure potential, we are having to define it terms of what it is not, while also, we have to remember that - like being - it must still be infinitesimally a bit like its other. The unbroken symmetry must already be broken ... to the least possible degree.
So dichotomy thinking - done correctly as a reciprocal forming of limits and not the usual dialectical opposition of absolute "things", concrete abstracta - says neither being nor becoming are ever truly disjunct states. They are only maximally separated in terms of being as minimally like each other as possible.
Think again about the reciprocal argument. Note the 1 that gets employed. We are saying in effect, whatever is the thing we have in mind, let's start by calling it a singular one, a pure standalone whole.
Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.
So that is the way that in Metaphysical conception, one deals with singularity. It is an abduction awaiting its proper deductive framing.
Thus Becoming is 1/Being. It is whatever it is that would be the least possible when it comes to the complementary "thing" of being. Beyond that, talk about becoming becomes meaningless because it has snapped the connecting thread and left us talking merely about a singular and contextless one again. Which is - technically speaking - unintelligible.
I should add that the whole story is triadic. So you have to add in the hierarchy that stabilises the dichotomy which is breaking the vagueness.
The simplest symmetry breaking results in easy reversibility. It has no stability because - just as you can erase a turn to the left by now swivelling right - if there is passing time, the next fluctuation is just as likely to cancel the last one out.
And that is the whole reason for the need of the further thing of pansemiosis or the habits of constraint that hierarchical development allows.
For symmetry to stay broken, you need it to be self sustaining. Like Apeiron presumed as a property it had, any breaking must continue due to its own contextual feedback. The breaking has to become "inexhaustible".
Again this is a mathematical subtlety that goes over heads. But who studies the actual maths of hierarchies?
Alright, I believe I understand your broad portrait -
but then I don't understand what you're objecting to here: [quote=Deleuze][in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself.[/quote]
The origin and the destination, in your account, both stretch asymptotically away, so are we not ever in-between? What's wrong with the quote?
You lose me here though. A singularity is the limit for that which would limit it? Would you be willing to illustrate this by means of an example?
(also: If it's meaningless to provide a term unless you also provide that which reciprocally limits it, wouldn't reciprocity itself have to be reciprocally limited by non-reciprocity? But, if everything in your system deals in reciprocally limiting dichotomies, where is there room for non-reciprocity? )
Or at least that's the long-held consensus of everyone in the Deleuze Studies department ;)
Just kidding, sort of, I really do like Deleuze, but do you know what I mean?
I don't follow. The only place we are is inbetween. My position is internalist.
And also - a further aspect of symmetry breaking - there is indeed a global directionality for becoming. That is what the vague~crisp distinction describes. Vagueness is the point of departure, crispness (the crispness of dichotomistic separation and hierarchically formed habit - are the terminus. At the end of time is when individuation has most fully happened.
Quoting csalisbury
Once again, the singular here is the bare abductive guess. So I am agreeing - as is explicit in Peirce's epistemology - that Metaphysical conception would have to begin with some dimly grasped "something". We can call that - vaguely - some inkling of "whatever the hell it is". The principle of non contradiction does not yet apply because so far we might have a name for this guess - let's call it concept X - but we don't really understand it in any properly intelligible or counterfactual sense.
So the next step is to sharpen our definition so as to make it pragmatically measurable. And we can do that by seeking to define it in terms of its own inverse.
We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.
So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.
If this combinations of intuitions works out, we will find that the formula works. They will form the complementary limits on possibility. And we will wind up inside those limits in a way we can now directly measure.
This is how all the complementary Metaphysical pairs work. Chance is the lack of determination, and vice versa. And soon through all the other standard dichotomies that work (even if PoMo has got into the habit of thinking them dazzling paradoxes).
Quoting csalisbury
But triadicism or hierarchy theory is an internalist approach. It puts us inside a pair of complementary limits. So those limits can be pushed away "infinitely" - or more accurately, asymptotically - but there is by definition any possibility of stepping outside the world they make.
So the term - if it describes a limit - describes itself fully in saying that it has within it the least of the other. And the other term for the other limit does the same thing. So the reciprocality is mutual or reciprocal in itself. Non reciprocality is then the third thing of vagueness - vagueness being reciprocal with crispness in being the undifferentiated vs the fully dichotomised.
I think the primacy of relation is exactly what becoming gets at. Awareness pre-dates sorting into strict discursive catergoies. One senses so much before using the catergoies and classifications used around them. I think we notice a lot before we "establish existence."
The act of establishnent is sort of a second order act. We do it force or create the world in a particular direction. Awareness pre-dates this action. People realise something before the start directing themsleves to change the world.
Rather being unintelligible, the world before (or without) the act of establishnent is perfectly intelligible. People genuinely realise something without setting a stuffy and exact discourse. Becoming doesn't need the loss of intelligibly, but rather that comprehension goes beyond merely setting out defintions of forms. Intelligibly has more depth than many philosophers give it credit for.
Ok, the directionality bit is certainly different than Deleuze (tho I suppose there's a case to be made for focusing on local zig-zagging at the expense of global crisping, b/c in the long run we're all heat dead. On that note - & I'll admit thermodynamics isn't my wheelhouse -but how is the steady march of entropy an increase in crispness? My gut reaction has me seeing crispness as requiring a figure/ground thing, where something stands over and against some background. B/c my gut can't imagine something crisp that isn't foregrounded against something less crisp. Doesn't the possibility of that fade as the world grows cold and dispersed?)
It's still a strange thing, tho, if neither extreme (pure vagueness/pure crispness) can be fully realized, than we're always stretched out between two infinities (infinitely free, infinitely constrained), always have been, always will be.
My stumbling block right now is that I'm not sure what sort of analysis this is. Is it phenomenological and/or anthropological (i.e. is this how we observe ourselves or others coming to grips with a strange new 'something'?) Is it a methodological prescription? Is a description of an already practically exercised methodology?
It just doesn't look anything like any process I know. When we come up against a new something, we usually try to see what it can do, how it reacts, how it's similar to other things we already know etc. When do we ever try to determine the thing most antithetical to it? Or is it just that you think we can, in principle, define it by reference to that antithesis? Like what's the pure antithesis of my mother/Beethoven's 5th/this bottle in my room/'Swann's Way'/ ? I still don't really know what you mean. I understand the 1/x thing for big ol headliners like Being/Becoming Determinism/Chance etc. but I'd really need some concrete analysis of some singular thing to understand how it works at the level of singularity.
But isn't this just stipulating non-reciprocality (non-dialecticity?) as a fixed absolute in order to hold stable an equally absolute system of reciprocal/dialectal dichotomizing? "Everything has to be defined reciprocally EXCEPT reciprocity which exists in a non-reciprocal asymmetric relationship with non-reciprocity." Can't we use this same template and generate any number of metaphysical systems, depending on our tastes? Essentially what you've done is exempted your own model from the metaphysics of everything else, by carving a special metaphysical niche for it.
The baseline condition of the Universe is that it was born as a spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So at the heat and smallness of scale near the big bang, by quantum uncertainty, everything is maximally indeterminate. And then roll forward to the heat death, everything is instead so cold and large that it is as classically definite at it can get.
Thus crispness is defined in the sense that the dimensionality of the Universe - its degrees of freedom - are as generally limited at they can get. And this is due to the duality of expansion and cooling. The dichotomy consists of the reciprocal actions of heading towards asymptotic spatial flatness and asymptotic thermal coldness (each being the means by which the other can happen).
Of course the actual universe is a cascade of other symmetry breakings. So it gets complex. At the electroweak symmetry breaking scale, massive particles condense out of the generalised entropic flow. They make the whole universe suddenly somewhat colder than it should be "ahead of time". And those massive particles then have to give back that negentropy at a new rate - one which more complex structure still, like stars and bacteria, can in turn pay for their existence by accelerating the return of the stolen negentropy.
So the early smooth flow breaks up into a hierarchical mess of complexity - but all still entrained to the same final purpose.
It is all essentially or logically exactly the same thing - dissipative structure - but existing parasitically on multiple scales of being (due to there being these further symmetries able to be broken as things cool/expand enough for them to also be revealed).
Deleuze was of course supposedly influenced by Prigogine's ground breaking work on this kind of far from equilbrium dynamics. But I only see a garbled version in any of his writing so far. Not that I've felt the need to dig that deep myself given the science of dissipative structure, and also basic physics, have moved on so much in the past 30 years.
Quoting csalisbury
In what way are we actually ":stretched out" if we are always falling in the one direction (or more accurately, accelerating the world in that direction so as to pay for the right to exist ourselves as passing negentropic organisation)?
And also, remember the subtle difference between how we can think about these things and the thing in itself.
In the end - in Kantian fashion - we can only "know" the world we model. So the dichotomy - with its story of both things having an irreducible degree of its "other" in it - is only our best metaphysical conception. It is the theory we can produce following a dialectical logic. But no theoretical map is ever going to just be the territory it navigates.
Although, again, the evidence is certainly supporting the theory. The "surprise" of quantum physics is the kind of radical confirmation that says classical mechanics - the "physics of predicate logic" - just doesn't predict the world we've actually found. Quantum physics is incomplete, but already it bears out a metaphysics based on vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.
Quoting csalisbury
And yet - from my natural science background - it looks exactly like every process I know.
Quoting csalisbury
Here you are talking of complex negentropic objects and not the metaphysical generality of existence itself.
All particular things are full of accidents - differences that don't make a difference to nature in general. just possibly a difference to some also rather particular observer.
Look. My favourite cup is cracked. The second law doesn't give a stuff (it's entropy in progress my son). And yet for me it feels the end of the world.
So thesis and antithesis don't operate down at the level of the particular or accidental. They speak to what is generally necessary - the only kind of conflicts or symmetry breakings which don't simply cancel themselves away and so can survive to be "things" that exert constraints.
Quoting csalisbury
OK. But it is confusing to now talk to individuation (or particularisation, or contingent being) as "singularity" when singularity was instead some kind of claim about monism over dualism or triadicism (who knows what SX really thought he meant). And I've just defined my acceptable understanding of singularity as the bare abductive "well what ever the hell it is" which of course is the spur needed to get any metaphysics started. And that sense of singularity then explains the third thing of the 1 that has to be introduced to talk about dichotomistics X and Y - becoming the vague possibility that gets divided by the familiar maths of reciprocal or inverse relations.
So if we are talking about individuation, it is absolutely key that not everything in existence is determined. The point about constraints is they encode finality or purposes and so they only limit chance to the degree there is a reason to care. That then leaves abundant scope for accident to play its part in actuality.
Of course we care that the world's highest mountain happens to be in Nepal. But does plate tectonics - as a vicar of the second law - give a fuck? It is a complete accident that that is the particular case. On the other hand, it is completely necessary that hills and valleys form in a way that conforms with fractal statistics. Growth and erosion are the reciprocal actions that must be balanced.
Quoting csalisbury
But vagueness doesn't need to lack reciprocality. It just has to say there is no order or organisation to it. Any beginnings are just as fast ended as vagueness is a state of perfect symmetry, and thus a perfect condition of constant self erasure.
Again, this just describes the quantum physics of the vacuum. It is exactly how nature is. The vacuum, due to uncertainty, could spit out any kind of possible particle at all. Yet by the same token, there is the same likelihood it will spit out its exact anti-particle - and the two virtual particles will annihilate immediately to leave the vacuum looking still a blank, non-fluctuation, symmetry.
So vagueness can have every possible reciprocal action going on, but none of them have any bite.
Of course, it is also the case that this symmetry breaks - lucky for us. And we thus have to identify - via symmetry maths - how this could be the case.
A big clue for example is that the Universe has just three dimensions. And theorems from network theory tell us that every more complex network can be reduced (constrained) to interactions of three edges. But you can't have a network of lower dimensionality than that.
So it is easy to see that once a self-simplification gets going (of the dichotomous kind, which for networks is the crisp thing of "connections and nodes"), then it will go to its limit. And the limit may have irreducible structure. Hence something is left existing despite all attempts to self-erase. Not everything actually can cancel. (And if you want to be technical about it, now we are talking about the mathematical definition of a singularity!)
So yes, my approach as I've outlined it is metaphysically bootstrapping. And that's its feature, not a bug.
You are basically saying that my metaphysical model doesn't accord with your belief about the thing in itself - the thing in itself not being allowed to bootstrap ... because that then is in conflict with your own metaphysical logic.
But you can see how that is not an acceptable complaint. The "thing in itself" is that for both of us. So all we can do is propose our various models and see which turns out to work best as the map that allows us to navigate reality.
I mean I have no trouble using good old fashioned predicate logic. Classical physics works for everyday engineering. Reductionism makes normal life very simple. So in its domain - roundabout the human scale of physical existence - it works fine, nothing better.
But it should be no surprise that if we are dealing with the extreme scales of existence - the vanishingly small and the incredibly complex - then actually we need a metaphysical logic that deals directly with the very issue of scale extremes. Hence hierarchy theory ... which in turn needs dichotomies that produce separations ... which in turn need vagueness as the foundation on which the rest can get started.
Calling it 1 is again just to say that there is something, abductively, which is just whatever the hell it is. By then going through the further steps to discover the reciprocal relation that can work to clarify what we might have actually been talking about, the 1 is transformed into the scale factor that then specifies the measurement basis.
Does it help to give the equation in more complete form?
1/infinitesimal = infinity/1.
You see that the 1 in fact appears on both sides. But on one side it scales the parts and the other it scales the whole.
Yeah but who cares unless you're invested in that little cottage industry to begin with? Honestly, it's these self-referential loops that get us stuck in these situations in the first place. Really, if your thinking isn't being forced by the exigency of the situation, if it's not imposing itself upon you in order to reorient your sedimented categories of thought, then what's the point? I mean honestly, Apo literally does not think as far as I'm concerned. He's like one of those conversation-bots you used to come across a few years ago that kind of just spat out pre-fab lines depending on the keywords it came across. I mean he is literally incapable of understanding what it means for something to be singular and not - because this is the only word his fifteen word vocabulary allows him - particular.
[quote=Apo]This just again confirms Deleuze to be a donkey. There couldn't be a more precise movement than a reciprocal or inverse relation.[/quote]
Yes, precise because analytically so, and thus completely incapable of engaging at a singular level, and thus philosophically impotent. And who says donkey, lol.
And who says singularity is something that 'exists alone without being reciprocal to a context'? Again, It's cute how you like to jam things into the three of four categories of thought you are capable of, but it makes for very boring conversation.
This is exactly the problem which StreetlightX is trying to bring to your attention. You have transformed "becoming" into a form of "being", and in doing such you leave real "becoming" aside, claiming it's unintelligible so there is no point in guiding the mind toward that direction.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
The point though, is that if "becoming" is to be conceived of as primary, it is necessary to lose this idea of becoming as relation. It is logically impossible that relations are primary. I think this is probably what Deleuze is getting at when he says that we must get rid of the idea of becoming as proceeding from here to there, because this necessitates a start which is prior to becoming. As The Great Whatever says "...relations still have relata..", so if becoming is necessarily relation, then the primacy of becoming is an impossibility.
Quoting The Great Whatever
Notice, the op, how StreetlightX says relations "belong" to becoming, "if relation is the domain of becoming", relation "implies" becoming. This, I believe, is what Deleuze is trying to lead us away from, the idea that a "becoming" is necessarily a relation, toward the idea that a relation is necessarily a becoming. What we need to do is to see relations as examples of becoming, but make becoming the broader term, such that all relations are necessarily becomings (necessitated by the nature of time), but not all becomings are necessarily relations. This allows that there is (logically) a first becoming, with nothing prior to it. Then we are left to look at the nature of the relation without the relata. What type of thing, exactly is a relation, and how could it exist prior to the things being related, such that the relation only gains real physical existence when there are things which are being related?
Just curious - is there a reason why you prefer "crispness" as the term for the opposite of "vagueness," rather than something like "determinacy" or "definiteness"? Is it just to emphasize that you are talking about a continuum, a matter of degree, rather than an absolute dichotomy?
And I think it does admit to degrees of development more easily. But also it just has a pleasing ordinary language match to vagueness.
So we could talk about definiteness and indefiniteness, or determinacy and indeterminacy. But those are explicitly just negative formations - the thing and it's lack.
A dichotomy - as a reciprocal deal - is instead a symmetry breaking so complete that you appear to have two different fully realised things in opposition, So it feels more appropriate to give each its own full name, like vagueness and crispness.
That more than just the continuum issue would be why the pairing sounds right to my ear. So like discrete and continuous, or one and many, it is about making a clear statement that both limits are real and different enough to have their own distinct character. The continuous is not merely the in-discrete. It is the positively completely continuous (as a maximal exclusion of the discrete).
And this coming from you who can never deal with the notion of vagueness, or emergent temporality, or finality that is not prior to what it calls to, or prime matter that is not already substantial.
It is you that can't shake the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not I.
This doesn't make any sense to me, but OK. I'll let SX speak for himself on the matter.
It only demonstrates that unlike you, I am capable of adopting a different perspective. But also unlike you, I will not even consider a logically impossible perspective. You claim the primacy of a relativity induced vagueness, denying the logical priority of the relata. But a relation can only follow from the existence of the relata, so relativity cannot bring us to the primal condition. Therefore you proceed from a logically impossible position, and your emergent temporality is purely fiction.
That was just my way of phrasing it, and that was probably not good. But the point is, that if we make "becoming" the broader category than "relation", which is what is necessary to understand becoming in the way that SX describes Deleuze, then we need some other way to understand "becoming". If relations are all the examples of becoming which we have, yet we want to understand becoming outside of relations, what can we turn to?
Your logic is evidently too narrow.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
"____ is red" is a monadic relation; its reality does not require an existing subject to fill the blank. "____ is larger than ____" is a dyadic relation; its reality does not require two existing subjects to fill the blanks. "____ gives ____ to ____" is a triadic relation; its reality does not require three existing subjects to fill the blanks. And so on.
Another way to think about it is that nothing exists without being in relations. In fact, existence is reaction, the state of being in dyadic relations with other things.
You have a "____" there. Are you saying that the "____" is nothing, in an absolute sense? I don't think it is. Clearly it signifies something, just like if you had a word there. The only difference is that the ___ provides a higher degree of vagueness than the word.
It is due to the nature of time, that relations are always becomings. Relations are changing in time, that is fundamental to relativity theory. A static, and therefore eternal relation, would belong to the category of being. But such a relation would be outside of time, so we can dismiss that relation as unreal.
Aha. So time has an outside! (Or spacetime has an outside! - if you are indeed talking relativistically.) It is itself a definite thing and so is embeded in .... something else.
What are you calling that something in which time (or properly, spacetime) resides (presumably as a more local constraint on its more general degrees of freedom)?
It is not anything in particular; i.e., it need not be something that actually exists. The relation is real apart from any individual relata.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Hmm, maybe you are finally starting to catch on. The relations as I formulated them are general, rather than singular.
I'm even more confused now. I can understand your thinking that I'd shifted the goalposts, if, earlier, we had both been speaking of singularity qua monism (rather than the singularity of any particular thing.)
But then what was this:
Weren't you talking, literally, about any thing at all? And wouldn't that include complex negentropic objects? & The problem with my discussion of singular objects is it that's not general enough [for what]? And the method-of-generating-complete-definitions of any thing at all we may have in mind - that doesn't work with complex negentropic objects?
Again, I get what the whole 1/x thing for Being/Becoming etc, but I still haven't the foggiest how it's being applied to singular things (which is especially troubling if, as you say, this is precisely how all natural scientists progress. I'd still love if you could sketch a quick example of how this plays out. Since, as you say, this kind of thing is ubiquitous, wouldn't it be easy to do this?)
(I'll respond to the second half of your post in another post)
In the context of the OP, clearly I thought not. I was talking about metaphysical generality - which could of course start abductively from anywhere. So if we are talking of that particular rock over there, or this particular cat at my feet, then while they may stand at the long and complex end of a trail of constraint or symmetry breaking, they are clearly not simple dichotomies.
The "other" of that rock or this cat is not going to be some metaphysical strength generality - given the rock and the cat are not themselves metaphysically general. That would be illogical. :)
Even Platonic ideals suffer from not properly getting that individuation is a hierearchically organised business of increasing degrees of constraint. So there is no ideal cat or boulder up there in Platonia. But geology does conform to fractal erosive principles. Cats are the individuated product of a genetic and developmental history.
I already stressed that when talking about individuation, the key dichotomy is this one of the division between constraints and degrees of freedom - or necessity vs accident.
My cat is my cat according to the necessity of some history that makes it impossible for it to be considered anything else (like - for real - that I got the right black cat back from the pet shelter when Ollie went missing for several months as a roving juvenile). But then there is much that I would consider accidental to Ollie being Ollie. Like that he might have lost or gained weight, broken a leg, got covered in muck, is mostly a completly different set of atoms every few months due to molecular turnover, or sadly, he's been dead a few months now. Even the immaterial Ollie remains resolutely real - at least for me.
So the particular - your word for the singular - is the intersection of two forms of information (as made clear in the semiotic version of thermodynamics that would be, for instance, Pattee's epistemic cut or Salthe's infodynamics). There is the formal information and the material information. That is, the information which describes the constraints that produce some particular x, y or z, and the information that describes the accidents that compose particular x, y or z - the little differences that don't make an essential difference, like Ollie losing a leg, changing all his atoms, or becoming part cat/part tumour.
Well the last did matter for Ollie's existence. The information that held him together was eventually over-run by accidental growth rather than self-sustaining growth. But you get what I mean. All particular are dichotomistic in being some mix of the necessary and the accidental - and there has to be "enough" of the one to balance out the other. That is the nature of a self-organising state of equilibrium.
No, that's why I said that we can dismiss this idea as unreal. I said, such a relation would be outside of time, therefore we can dismiss it as unreal. We have not established any premise whereby we can assume the existence of anything outside of time. Doing such, with the premises and conclusions that we have, is completely unjustified and unwarranted, it's nothing more than an excursion into fantasy.
Didn't you just accuse me of an unwillingness to question these kinds of kneejerk givens of metaphysics? How can we speak of time with any counterfactual definiteness or particularity if we can offer no story on how it stands "other" to some suitable context?
Becoming seems more like that which changes, lives or is present, than a movement from here to there.
Indeed, becoming is sort absent in reflective discourse; it only picks out two states which have no more change to undergo. If we point out X had changed to Y, we aren't referring to something which becomes, but two moments captured in suspension. The X we talk about goes nowhere else. The same is true of the Y.
Becoming is necessarily a relation because it involves a distinction. To become means something is in realationship to other things-- a boundary of object, change and presence-- even when it's not made explicit or sorted into specific catergory. The moment anything is, becoming is so. It's not a thing of existence, but an expression given by anything that exists.
Ok, but even if you were speaking about metaphysical generality, I still don't understand what you're doing here:
Is the singular x everything - the totality, the cosmos, what is, the world etc. - or some particular thing? If it's everything, then what is this y which is a second singular which is the pure antithesis of everything taken as a whole?
That doesn't make any more sense to me than the pure antithesis of Ollie.
You can say whatever you like, "square circle", or whatever, but unless you can support what you say, it's meaningless. So you can mention "notions of relations that exist outside such constraints" all you want, but until you give an example, or describe what you are talking about, you may as well be talking about square circles.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know why you're obsessed with describing everything by referring to its "other". That's not how we describe things, we describe things by saying what the thing is. So we can say what time is, by describing a relation between past and future, and there is no need to say how it stands "other" to something else.
But the op asks us to consider the primacy of becoming. This means that we must reject this idea that "becoming is necessarily a relation", because "becoming" expressed in this way logically excludes the primacy of becoming. So "becoming" as "necessarily a relation" is not the same "becoming" which is referred to by the op.
You are asking me to make sense of the use of terms in an OP that made no particular sense to me. But being charitable, I am trying to make the best sense of SX's foggy mention of "the singularity of becoming" - and presumably, the singularities of metaphysical terminology generally.
If you understand SX as saying something different, please explain what he apparently can't. All he will tell us is that the singularity of becoming is a "strange and specific notion". But unless he can say strange and specific in relation to what, I can find no proper meaning in what he says - just like everyone else who has responded so far.
So in my version of this tale, I never use the term. But I point out how I do have it covered in the "1" that the maths of reciprocals employs as its "anything goes" hinge idea. And I said explicitly that in metaphysical reasoning, it stands as a first abductive guess at "what goes". (If you don't know what abduction means in a Peircean context, you can look it up.)
So in speaking vaguely and abductively about "whatever the hell it is - that we will just call the singular one which is now the target of our inquiry", that is merely to say that I at least feel I have latched on to some kind of difference that makes a difference. I dimly sense something that could be right - as a foundational "direction" or dimension of nature. And having found one way to go, antithetically, I can immediately start thinking deductively of its "other" - what it would be to go in the reverse (or rather, dichotomously, inverse) direction.
So intuitively - like a newborn babe even - one can discover that there is the "thing" that is to turn right. And then that is exactly now matched by its opposite - going left again. Dyadically (Peircean secondness), for every action there is a reaction.
And look, I can go up and down and back and forth. Amazing. Reality seems crisply divided so that it always has three orthogonal spatial dimensions no matter where I go, wherever I stand.
But oh? Why only these three directions. Why not four, five or an infinity? There is now a new problem of living in a reality that is bounded by three dimensionality. And yet higher dimensionality seems mathematically unconstrained. What new dichotomy could account for that?
So "singularity" - as I am attempting to deal with it in the logic of dichotomies - is the process of uncovering the constraints that could (retroductively) account for the particular state of the world. It is leaping into the future based on an inkling of a dialectial structure which can account for "what is" (the first thing to smack me in the face as a "brute fact of existence") in terms of "what is not" (the context of everything else that has in turn been constrained, suppressed, restrained, or in other ways bypassed by historical development).
I can only go left, because going right has been negated in the completest sense possible. (Going right has just been made 1/going left - the thing I can be most sure I'm not doing right now.)
But as you say, singularity is a thoroughly bad term because it is ill-defined in the OP. Everyone is already confusing it with the particular. And so you in turn - being diverted down that wrong path by a misreading of SX - must interpret me as talking only about the maximally general.
To be accurate, I am describing how the machinery of the dichotomy is the way to make it clear what we might in fact being talking about - or whatever the hell it was SX might have vaguely understood himself to be saying.
If there was any meat in the OP, dichotomisation is the only sure way to extract it. The singular must be defined in terms of its "other". And the reciprocal relation is the way to force the issue. If there is anything meaningful to say, it will be obvious once the singular has been placed in some definite relation with its proper "other".
So did time exist before there was space or matter? Explain that in a way that seems meaningful.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How does the future relate to the past if neither - right now - exists? Are they relating "outside" (spatial/material) existence in relating "within" time?
I'm guessing that capitalisation makes some really big difference that is over my head. You are going all Platonic in response to my un-capitalised pragmatism?
You do understand that a process metaphysics is happy with the modesty of self-organising emergence. It doesn't believe in transcendent being?
On the contary, the OP is arguing becoming is necessarily a relation. The point is how we think about relation is frequently flawed. Rather than a secondary feature, formed out specific judgement, relations are actually primary. For anything, from the moment it is, it is of becoming and in relation. Becoming is necessary a relation and also primary.
Indeed. It is the necessary relation of becoming (crisply) unrelated and so no longer "singular" (or vague).
Only once possibility is divided into some "this" and "that" can those opposed categories of nature start to mix in more interesting fashion.
So in vagueness, all possibility is of the undifferentiated type. It is all "related" by being "all indistinguishably the same".
And then follow the differentiation and integration (the dichotomy and the hierarchy, the symmetry breaking and its going to mixed equilbrium balance) which is the coming into definite being. Now you indeed have the whole show of actual relations between actual relata.
This is a valid move I think, but I also think that it comes with a trade off, which is precisely to give up thinking about relations. That is, it's possible to translate: "Peter is taller than Paul" to: "Peter being taller than Paul is a property of the dyad
But the whole point is to think relation outside or beyond the subject-predicate model such that - to use the Deleuzian phrasing - 'relations are external to their terms'. I think that terms can always 'co-opt' relations in precisely the way you've proposed, but in order to secure the autonomy of relation, one ought to resist that kind of move. Of course at this point I'm not trying to adjudicate between the 'two paths', as it were, but just exploring where this particular one might take me.
Sorry it's taken a while to reply, yours was a great reply which I had to think about a bit and I've been a tad busy recently.
General enough to fit into the artificial coordinates of his 'system' of course. The whole thing is a kind of watered-down Hegelianism: if the singularities don't fit the system, simply throw away the singularities. There is simply no 'place' in Apo's 'system' to accommodate the singular: it - and consequently he - cannot think in terms of the specificties of a given, concrete situation because the whole thing is designed to 'level' singularities and subject them to a (general) order of equivalence in order to render them into particulars. That's why you never actually learn anything from Apo's posts except how the system itself works - it's a self-referential mess that basically ends up talking about itself more than the phenomena it supposedly accounts for. Hence also their mind-numbing monotony.
It's what Deleuze speaks of in the opening pages of D&R, where he specifically points out how such conceptions render themselves blind to both the singular and the universal:
"There is no reason to question the application of mathematics to physics: physics is already mathematical, since the closed environments or chosen factors also constitute systems of geometrical co-ordinates. In these conditions, phenomena necessarily appear as equal to a certain quantitative relation between the chosen factors. Experimentation is thus a matter of substituting one order of generality for another: an order of equality for an order of resemblance. Resemblances are unpacked in order to discover an equality which allows the identification of a phenomenon under the particular conditions of the experiment. Repetition appears here only in the passage from one order of generality to another, emerging with the help of - or on the occasion of - this passage.
... However, If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular... It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general ... In its essence, repetition refers to a singular power which differs in kind from generality, even when, in order to appear, it takes advantage of the artificial passage from one order of generality to another."
Peter being taller than Paul isn't, I would say, a property of the dyad
What does it mean for a relation to be external to its terms, in a way a property isn't? If I think of a property as a set of individuals, those individuals of which the property is true, and think of a relation as a set of ordered pairs of individuals, then it seems they depend in the same way upon the relevant individuals, it's just that one involves one individual, while the other involves two.
Yep. So precisely as I say. Intelligibility is claimed on the basis of establishing a dichotomy.
Quoting StreetlightX
I forgot though that Pomo likes to a lot of denouncing as well as paradoxing and its other messed up shit.
Quoting StreetlightX
Oh there's the paradoxing. So predictable.
No I don't think that's the case. Look closely at how the relation between becoming and relation is described in the op. Relations are said to "belong" to becoming. It also puts relation in "the domain of becoming". And says that relation "implies" becoming. This means that relations are becomings, but there is nothing to indicate that becomings are necessarily relations.
So I think this is the way that we are supposed to be looking at "becoming" here, such that it is the broader category than "relation", therefore a becoming is not necessarily a relation. This is the only logical way that we can give primacy to "becoming", because relation is necessarily a relation between things. So if becoming is necessarily relation, then we would give primacy to the things being related.
Interestingly, this was almost exactly Plato's solution: to posit the (supersensible) Idea of the Small and the Idea of the Large which things could 'participate' in - as in, to say Peter is taller than Paul is to say Peter participates in the Idea of the Large in relation to Paul and that Paul participates in Idea of the Small in relation to Peter: but of course this just kicks the problem down a level because this 'taking part' or 'participating in' is itself a relation - and it's no good to account for a relation in terms of a relation.
This is why I think relations are troublesome: either one erases their specificity by treating them as a property, or one ends up recoursing to some Platonic notion of Participation which just makes the whole thing mysterious to begin with. The upshot of treating relations as external to their terms, on the other hand, is to grant relations a kind of autonomy with respect to their terms, or rather, it reverses the relation: rather than the relation being defined by it's terms, terms themselves become defined by their relations. This is the link between relations and becoming: if understood on this model, a change in a relation would imply a change in the relata (rather than the other way around): "If relations are external to their terms, and do not depend on them, then the relations cannot change without one (or both) of the terms changing. A resembles B, Peter resembles Paul: [if] this relation is external to its terms, it is contained neither in the concept of Peter nor in the concept of Paul. If A ceases to resemble B, the relation has changed, but this means that the concept of A (or B) has changed as well. If properties belong to something solid, relations are far more fragile, and are inseparable from a perpetual becoming" (Dan Smith, The New).
One way to cash this out a little more solidly is - as Deleuze does - is to turn to the differential (dy/dx) in differential calculus as a model for a "pure relation" without terms that is at the same time generative of the curve or solution-series which it is the (supposed) 'derivative of'. I won't go too far into this as it's perhaps a bit more math-y than is necessary for a general discussion, but if you have access to Academia.edu, check out Aden Evens's paper on this: https://www.academia.edu/1084825/Math_Anxiety; long and short of it is that one can look to calculus as model for what it would mean to have a relation without relata, and which also plays the function of generating relata (quick quote for preview's sake: "the differential relation, dy/dx precedes the “primitive” function whose slope it is said to represent. In calculus class we are presented with a function and told to differentiate it, to take the derivative or produce the differential relation. In Deleuze’s rereading of the calculus, the primitive function does not precede the differential relation, but is only the ultimate result or byproduct of the progressive determination of that relation.The differential is a problem, and its solution leads to the primitive function".)
This is what relativity theory does, and how physicists come up with "energy". Motion is an expression of relations, and energy is an expression of the motion. Objects are defined by their energy, which is really an expression of their relations. Since the "energy" is seen as the important aspect, we can focus directly on that, and actually lose track of the relata themselves. But I don't think that the suggested logical process in this passage is sufficient to get to the "primacy of becoming". The problem is that this "thing" which is created, the relation itself, or in the case of physics, the energy which is an expression of the relations, is itself artificial. It is a concept derived from relations and therefore there is an inherent reliance on the existence of the relata for the validity of the concept "relation".
To build a concept of "relation" and then remove the relata is inadequate if the desire is to produce a concept of "becoming" which is not dependent on the existence of relata. That is because the concept of "relation" is produced from observation and documentation of the existence of the relata. The concept "relation" is produced with this purpose in mind, it is meant to represent this. It is grounded in this, and it is valid only on this grounding. If we desire to pull out the relata, and have the "relation" stand alone, we no longer have any grounding of the concept.
This is the problem with apokrisis' "symmetry-breaking". This position is an attempt to bring the relation "symmetry-breaking" into a stand alone position, prior to the existence of the relata. But the basic concepts employed here, energy, and relativity, were not meant to be used in such a stand alone position. So when the relata are removed, the concept must be grounded in something else. Now we have the necessity of "symmetry" which is logically prior to symmetry breaking. But this symmetry can be nothing other than an eternal object, like what is found in Parmenidean Being, or Pythagorean idealism. Now the whole exercise, which was to establish the primacy of becoming has failed.
What is evident is that our understanding of "becoming" here, has not even approached the level professed by Aristotle through his cosmological argument. I think that focusing on "relation" is the wrong approach, because "relation" is inherently grounded in the existence of the relata. We have no way to get from the concept "relation" to the other side, which is the non-existence of the relata, and this is what is necessary in order to understand the "primacy of becoming". We must focus on the nature of "becoming" itself, free it from the concept "relation".
Notice that in the case of "becoming", Aristotle gave exception to the law of excluded middle. We can take this to indicate that the two opposing terms which are essential to the concept "relation", become irrelevant in "becoming". We must completely free ourselves from the confines of such terms. That demonstrates how different "becoming" actually is from "relation". It is the "becoming" which may or may not create the terms, rather than the terms which define the "relation". I think we must be prepared to completely dismiss all terms of logic and mathematics, to understand the "primacy of becoming". That is why this route is prone to drawing one into mysticism. We might look into it, but maintain your footing because you wouldn't want to slip right in. Or would you?
Quoting StreetlightX
This is possible, but I'm not sure what it buys you. For example, one can 'Montague-lift' an individual, to turn it into what's called a 'generalized quantifier -' that is, the set of properties true of that individual (which includes its relations to other things - these being properties once you saturate the first term). In fact, the originator of the device, Richard Montague, proposed that the meaning of say a proper name is not the individual which it denotes, but rather the set of properties that individual bears.
You could also create a logic in which properties are primary and individuals are secondary, reversing the role of function and object we've had since Frege. But I think ultimately this is a terminological quibble and it's unclear to me how it genuinely rephrases the problem. The point is that properties and individuals interact in a certain functional way: whether one takes individuals or properties/relations as fundamental probably won't change that.
Quoting StreetlightX
I still don't understand the special status granted to relations here. Again, a property is a relation, just with an arity of 1 rather than 2, and everything said about it here could be said of properties as well.
But there is a distinction to be had between simply a reaction between two objects and the relation between an object and its world.
So a property is some propensity or habit of an object. And the relation is one of generality. There is something general about the world (a symmetry) that makes it possible for the property to exist as something the object "has" (as a broken symmetry, or particularity).
Let's say Bill is an obtuse sort of fellow. If that is a property, then it characterises Bill's general reaction to the world. It is a habit or regularity. And one defined by the world being - in some generally matching sense - not obtuse.
In Bill's world, it is at least expected that the majority have the property of being completely with it. A general state of symmetry is defined (in terms of the majority being in a similar state). And Bill can then "have" the property of obtuseness as a breaking of this symmetry that persists in every situation he seems involved in.
But if we just see Bill interacting with Fred, then it might seem that Bill is being frustratingly uncomprehending for some reason. However, is Bill really in possession of the property if we only see the one instance? It could be Fred who is simply a bad explainer. Any relation taken as a one off could be read in either direction. The relation is not yet one in which either Bill or Fred can be said to be owners of the relevant properties - either a general tendency to obtuseness or inarticulacy.
So (just as Peirce argued), a property or propensity has an arity of 3. A property doesn't exist except as a persistent habit, and so as a fact of a hierarchically organised triadic relation. A property is a relation between the particular and the general, which develops after a history of relating between the particular and the particular (the dyadic relation of Secondness). And then it all begins back in Firstness or Vagueness where there is only the monism of some brute quality - the possibility that on first appearance seems a bare particular, not yet in reaction with anything, let alone stablised to have a regular identity due to some generalised world history.
So yes. Frege certainly argued the reductionist version of logic - the one that constructs more complex relations by addition. But Peirce nailed the holist story where persistent particularity is instead the product of contextual constraints.
I agree, to some extent, with apokrisis here, we cannot say that a property is a relation, because the relation is actually something else. We can say as apo does, that the property is related to the object in some way, such as habituation, or we can say that the property is related to the subject by predication, depending on how you categorize "property". In either case, the property is not the relation itself, the relation is some form of activity.
But what I actually say is the predicate relation - as the "thing" that exists between "two other things" - is, as holism recognises, a relation between particulars and generals. Or particular things and general things - if one must continue to use a metaphysics that relies on entification.
So this is perilously close to transcendent Platonism in granting existence to abstracta, ideas, universals, etc. But only if one insists on reading my words (or holism generally) from an object-based, non-process, point of view. From the process point of view, there are no crisply singular entities. Everything reduces to vagueness. It takes triadic symmetry breaking - the kind of symmetry breaking that is itself asymmetric, divided by its particulars and generals - to produce persistent regularity, or the usual classical realm of (apparently existent) objects with (apparently inherent) properties.
The point of much of this is to see how one would approach concepts from the point of view of genesis: that is, if we don't take for granted the individuality of any-one-thing and instead try and approach from the point of view of things-coming-into-being. From such a perceptive, basically the entire edifice of formal logic is more or less inadequate to the task, precisely because it can only 'think' in terms of a subject-predicate coupling, and consequently, in terms of the already-individuated. The very form of thought that it engages in is compromised. As such, it's not enough to 'swap' the priority from individual to property, which simply keeps the form in place while reversing out the contents, as it were. Every time a relation is treated as a property, one gives up on thinking relation.
From the point of view of genesis and individuation, to say something like: "The point is that properties and individuals interact in a certain functional way...", is basically anathema. There's no point in beginning with your set of properties, and your set of individuals, and then combining and breaking them apart, lego-like. Doing this takes for granted individuation, and no amount of combinatoric cleverness will ever attain the point of view of genesis.
Also, if you believe Plato, anyway, the becoming-privileging view, where relations precede individuals, is far more ancient than the substance view. It probably has mythological precursors as well. I'd be inclined to think about it in terms of suffering, but that's just me.
What a surprise. It makes the very case you so strenuously want to deny!
It points out that dy/dx is a reciprocal relation. It is entire to itself because it is a dichotomy. The x axis and y axis are orthogonal - mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive as dimensionality. Change is then mapped to points by allowing for a hierarchically organised cascade of constraints - the derivatives that internalise actual change by measuring it against the imagined tangent.
So the first derivative is just linear y/x. The velocity change in both axes is symmetric and so we start with each velocity a perfect image, the simplest possible reflection, of each other. We have a general symmetry waiting to be broken in some particular way. We await ... the swerve.
Now we see the line created by a moving point is curving or accelerating. And we need some means to measure this new kind of change. It looks like y is growing faster than x, or vice versa. The symmetry is being broken in one of its reciprocally defined directions.
So a new "lack of change" has to be imagined locally to give a secondary symmetry which the curvature breaks. Hence the tangent. The tangent is a line which is flat to the change. You can see the symmetry it re-imposes on the scene because the tangent has equal angles either side of where it brushes the curve. It is the new flatness from which there can be a definite degree of change.
And so it goes on. You can keep repeating the trick for ever higher derivatives. The differential is always tracking the same notion - the dichotomy of a change as revealed against a flatness. If you can hold one end of existence absolutely still, you can measure exactly how much the other end is definitely changing within a reciprocally exact reference frame.
Even more importantly, these rates of change can be said to be coupled, which is just to say that rates of change very in relation to each other. The higher the birth rate, the higher the change in resource consumption, for example. What we're dealing with here, in other words, is relations between relations; moreover, it's these relations which define the very 'objects' of which they are said to be relations 'of'. In embryogenesis for example, it's the differing rates of change between cell birth and death, along with the synthesis and degradation of so called 'adhesion molecules' (which bring cells together), that define what kind of cell (brain cell, skin cell, etc) will be formed. These coupled relations - which are productive and not merely derivative of their relata - have the 'form' of the relation prescribed in the differential calculus: dy/dx (the ratio between the change in one series and the change in another).
Note that one can of course, artificially reverse this whole enterprise so that rates of change are mere 'properties' of self-identical substances. But everything that is in any way important is thereby missed: the entire process of individuation whereby a thing 'takes on' an identity is missed. Any attempt to treat these relations as properties - which is entirely possible - simply misses the becoming of the entity or process at hand. Recall too that in the OP, I marked a distinction between becoming and change. In a process such as embryogenesis, becoming is taking place 'all the time': change, however, only occurs when coupled rates of change cross certain thresholds, when enough cells accumulate in a certain point at a certain speed in order to trigger certain reactions which in turn engender cell mutation, etc. Predicate logic basically operates entirely at the level of 'change': it literally cannot see, by design, the intensive becomings which operate at the level of relations.
I should also note that none of this is particularly 'out of the box': the sciences have been operating in this domain for decades, and continental philosophy has never taken predicate logic seriously. I would suggest instead that the whole institution of formal logic has on the contrary 'boxed itself in', playing formal-logical games without actually attending to the world about it.
Deleuze warns exactly against this conflation - of which you engage in every time - of what he calls the virtual with the actual, wherein the terms of the reciprocal relation are taken to be themselves terms rather than relations. On such a compromised view, "difference can no longer be anything but the negative determined by the concept: either the limitation imposed by possibles upon each other in order to be realised, or the opposition of the possible to the reality of the real.... It is contradictory to speak of 'potential' ... and to define differenciation by the simple limitation of a global power, as though this potential were indistinguishable from a logical possibility."
Terms are a term you introduced. You might be thinking epistemically of concept formation or "names for things". I am thinking of an actual ontic process - symmetry breaking.
It is boggling that you can't see they are the same thing using slightly different jargon.
So you added this further idiocy. Explicit in my description of limits is that they don't "actually exist". Limits are what actuality can approach - with asymptotic closeness. But by the same token, actuality can never arrive at the limit. The limit is where existence ceases to be an intelligible possiblity.
Thus a limit is virtual - in having this kind of negative reality. The reality of a general constraint on actualisation or individuation.
But I guess you are just desperate to misrepresent my position. It can't be that your comprehension skills are that weak.
This is the deep, and most fundamental problem of acceleration. If we assume that an object is at rest, and it is, due to some force, induced to move, then there is a moment in time when it moves from zero velocity to some determinable velocity. That initial movement cannot be expressed as a "rate of change", because it is fundamentally, therefore conceptually, different from a rate of change.
Of course physicists have no heed for this issue because relativity theory disallows the possibility of rest, so ultimately there is no such thing as a zero velocity, rest is relative. Then the change from rest to acceleration is just an expression which doesn't represent anything real. Consequently, acceleration is understood as a change in direction, so we have curves, and the ever present pi, in relativity formulations of acceleration.
This must be why they say ignorance is bliss. It saves you from this kind of embarrassment. As usual, the terms in play aren't so easily coopted into your pre-fab categories: the virtual - which refers here to the register of coupled rates of change - is precisely opposed to the possible, and in fact is more or less defined directly in distinction to it: “The only danger in all this is that the virtual could be confused with the possible. The possible is opposed to the real; the process undergone by the possible is therefore a 'realisation'. By contrast, the virtual is not opposed to the real; it possesses a full reality by itself…. Any hesitation between the virtual and the possible, the order of the Idea and the order of the concept, is disastrous, since it abolishes the reality of the virtual.” Your conception of limits - as having ‘negative reality’ that constrains a general ‘vagueness’ could not be better described as exactly what Deleuze considers to be the entirely wrong approach to things.
Elsewhere again: "The notion of 'generality' here suffers the disadvantage of suggesting a confusion between the virtual, in so far as it is actualised by a process of creation, and the possible, in so far as it is realised by limitation.” And I’ve already quoted it, but since you seem to have a selective reading problem, here it is again: on your view, "difference can no longer be anything but the negative determined by the concept: either the limitation imposed by possibles upon each other in order to be realised, or the opposition of the possible to the reality of the real.... It is contradictory to speak of 'potential' ... and to define differenciation by the simple limitation of a global power, as though this potential were indistinguishable from a logical possibility.”
So no, the only idiocy here is yours, thanks to your ever-reliable inability to think beyond the six or seven words you have at your disposal to talk about anything whatsoever. Thanks too for affirming beyond doubt that you take the entirely wrong view of how to understand the problem of relationally here. As for the Evens paper, the irony of complaining that I have a comprehension problem is kinda hilarious considering that the whole paper is geared towards treating the differential not as a question of limits, but as a question of generative production that is everywhere opposed to understanding the differential in terms of limits. But please, don’t let that stop you from trying to continually jam your misshapen pegs in to spaces where they don’t fit.
As for me occasionally adopting the parlance of Bateson and the cyberneticists - yeah, I do actually recognize the usefulness and importance of such concepts, when taken in certain contexts. However I'm not so fool as to pretend that they constitute anything close to a reasonable metaphysics, and I'll be the first to tell you that they are only useful within a very limited and circumscribed domain of application. And besides, if we're simply 'talking about the same thing with different jargon', then one wonders about the pathetic arrogance of your introduction to thread by declaring that the OP is 'a dangerous pipe dream' which is 'particularly wrong headed'. Perhaps the vacillation is function of your literal inability to understand most anything of what's going on here coupled with the need to preach your gospel despite it's utter intellectual poverty.
And speaking of preaching - dude, if it were up to me I wouldn't engage with you ever, except you can't help but spew your babble in every thread I post in. Trust me, I have never once initiated a conversation with you except when you barge in telling me how I got it all wrong from the perspective of your ready-made monotone pseudo-system. The only one who incessantly rocks up time and time again to spread the gospel of symmetry-breaking and general-particular bullshit here is you. So if you feel hard done by feel free to fuck off any time - you won't exactly be missed.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think the general continental illiteracy with modern technical advances in logic is unfortunate. Even if there are metaphysical qualms, it's a useful skill to have, and has lots of applications in computer science and linguistics and so on.
The issue is that much like the quantum formalism, there are differing interpretations of the differential, and the general attitude in math is mostly 'shut up and calculate'. While Newton and Leibniz - who 'discovered calculus' - appealed to infinitesimals to explain the efficacy of the calculus, modern interpretations like the epsilon-delta method get rid of any such notion and appeal to the idea of limits instead. Basically the e-d method gets rid of any reference to geometry. There is also non-standard analysis, which formalizes the notion of the infinitesimal, but there's lots of people who're are pretty sus about it.
Deleuze sits somewhere in the middle here. He refuses the turn to either infinitesimals and limits to explain the differential, and instead argues that the differential must differ in kind from the numbers that make up the primitive curve; negatively, the differential is not another number. Positively and specifically, the differential must be productive and generative of the primitive curve, and indeed, of number more generally. So while infinitesimals posit the existence of 'really little numbers', and limits do away with any reference to such numbers, Deleuze - whose reading is indebted to Jean-Baptise Bordas-Demoulin and Hoene-Wro?ski - instead reads the differential as determining the behaviour of the curve around a singularity. Singularities are points at which the curve changes it's overall behaviour: generally a change in the value of the slope of the curve (from positive to negative, or from either one to zero and back again, for example)
What's important about this is that the differential no longer simply corresponds in a one-to-one manner with a value on the primitive curve. Rather, what's important is that the differential determines the overall character or quality of the curve. Here's Evens: "This is the sense in which the differential is a universal: the differential packs into each point the nature of the entire function, for the differential relation generates not the value of the function, but its behavior, its character, what the function is doing at each point. It’s not that the differential relation represents the slope of the function at each point; it’s that by representing the slope of the function at each point, the differential relation presents or characterizes the whole function in each of its points... The differential relation captures... how many times [the primitive function] changes direction, how many bumps it has and how regularly they occur, how often it becomes infinite, and how often it crosses the x-axis." (my emphasis).
The point - after this long digression - is this: the differential - interpreted thusly - is not a matter of binding variables. On this reading, it is explicitly the opposite of that. Evens again: "In other words, the differential relation is not a formula that relates x to y over some range of values for x, though this is how we are taught to interpret it: in school, the differential relation, or derivative, is just another formula, another function akin to the primitive function. Rather, the differential relation relates x to y not in breadth, over a range of values, but in depth; it operates in each point on the function, condensing the quality, the character of the entire function into every point... In fact, if you know the values of all the derivatives of a function at a given point, you can construct a polynomial, another function, that is equivalent to the primitive function near that point."
This universality of the differential - the fact that it determines behaviour over singular points rather than explicit values in a one-to-one manner - is why Deleuze will explicitly set this understanding against any which would take the differential to be a matter of a general formula generating particular values: "The relation dy/dx is not like a fraction which is established between particular [values], but neither is it a general relation between variable algebraic magnitudes or quantities. Each term exists absolutely only in its relation to the other: it is no longer necessary, or even possible, to indicate an independent variable. ... The zeros involved in dx and dy express the annihilation ... of the general as well as the particular, in favour of the universal..." Anyway, I hope this hasn't gotten too technical, and I'm kind of writing on the edges of my math knowledge as well, but I hope it constitutes something of an answer to your concern here.
For example, f(x) = 3x + 1 and f(x) = 3x + 2 are different functions, but their derivative is the same: f(x) = 3. You cannot go 'backwards' from 3 to either of these lines, not even around a single point (they're parallel and share no points in common). The lines can be specified without reference to the differential, as I just did.
Also, the claim that the differential is not a number is confusing: if by 'differential' you mean the result of performing the differential operation on some function, then of course it's not a number, it's another function. The result of differentiating is of the same sort as the thing differentiated, it's just of a lower power.
If by differential you mean the infinitesimal, I don't know what people think about it generally, but certainly you don't need to treat it as a number. You seem to be saying you don't want to treat it as an ideal limit, either, but then, I'm not sure what you're proposing instead.
1) 12x^2 + 6x + 2
2) 24x + 6
3) 24
At each derivative, you lose a piece of information, and clearly there is no way to construct the original function from just 24, or from any intermediate step. For '24' erases the y-intercept of the linear function that comes before it, but this intercept is crucial for determining the character of the original function: that's how you get to the 3x^2. So from each derivative you can reconstruct part of the previous function, and less and less of it at each successive stage. You won't be able to tell how fast something is moving from '24,' nor where it should be located at each moment in time.
The original function, however, can be stated independently of the derivatives.
As for the derivative, you have to remember that we're speaking about dy/dx under the double condition that dy/dx = 0/0, AND dx > 0. That's what at stake here, not just the derivative of any particular function.
Without knowing the original function? In Taylor series the first element f(a) is the most important one in reconstructing the function - has the biggest effect, and then successive terms have lesser effects, the farther down you go with the derivatives. And anyway, Taylor series are useful to approximate and work with functions which have an infinite number of derivatives. Like e[sup]x[/sup] for example. Or sin(x) or such functions. Definitely not polynomials.
So TGW is right that you can't reconstruct unless you have the original function. The procedure of integrating gives you a range of possible functions and doesn't "zoom-in" to the correct one, you need to know additional information to get that.
I've been dealing with this same problem for a client of mine actually in that some operations cannot be re-constructed backwards. Like my client uses rounding in the calculations of net salaries for his employees. He wants my database to back-calculate for a net salary given by him to give the gross salary, before taxes.
So say I have something like: Gross Salary - Round(Gross Salary*Tax1) - Round(Gross Salary*Tax2) etc. = Net Salary
If I give a Net Salary, I cannot back-calculate a Gross-Salary without error because I cannot take the rounding into account. When you round a value you round an entire set of possible values to a single value. 3.35 and 2.95 all round to 3 for example. It's the same with integration or taking derivatives. Thus it is impossible to get back to the original value that you rounded. There is no "unround" process.
Edit: no, I get it. You would need to know one point of the line plus its slope for the series to get off the ground, and this uniquely determines a line. But then in this case it's trivial, since knowing this is tantamount to knowing the original function.
I think, for the series, you must know the value of the function at some point, not the function itself. But then you have to know the derivative values at that point, and so on down the line.
Yes that would obviously be sufficient if you're only integrating once.
Yes, but you'd have to know one value from each derivative. Say I start with f(x) = 3 and the function I'm looking for is 3 integrations up. First integration I need one point on the line 3x+C1, which will enable me to find C1. Second integration I need one point on the curve 3/2 x^2 + C1*x + C2. And so on. Or if not I need as many number of points as the number of integrations I perform to get to the mother function that I'm looking to find.
Quoting The Great Whatever
To understand Taylor just follow the formula. Take an easy second degree order equation:
f(x) = 2x^2+3x+2
f'(x) = 4x+3
f''(x) = 4
f'''...'(x)=0
Say you don't know anything about what the function is. All you know is that f(0) = 2, f'(0) = 3, f''(0) = 4, and f'''(0) and further equal 0. You could also know f at any other point - say you knew f(2), f'(2), etc.
Now, taylor says that the function can be approximated at a certain point by f(a) + f'(a)/1! * (x-a) + f''(a)/2! * (x-a)^2 + f'''(a)/3! * (x-a)^3 + .... and so on where a is any number in the domain of the function
For simplicity pick a = 0;
f(0) + f'(0) * x + f''(0)/2 * x^2 = 2 + 3*x + 4/2*x^2
Is this the original function? Yes. So using the Taylor series, if you have one piece of information at each level you can reconstruct an estimate of the function. For polynomials, because derivatives all become 0 after a certain point, Taylor gives an exact answer. But for a function like sin(x) it doesn't because the derivatives go to infinity.
What do you mean? Are you asking what the use of Taylor series is? Or?
Yep. So as I said. A limit is defined "directly in distinction" - dichotomously - with the immanently realisable or actually possible. Becoming ends in being. Or rather, more subtly, being is our conception of an absolute state, a limit, that can be approached arbitrarily closely without ever being perfectly grasped. That is why it might be called virtual in some metaphysical jargons.
Quoting StreetlightX
Well maybe Deleuze does say it is exactly wrong. But in my view it seems Deleuze who muddles things up now.
As far as I can tell - it is hard to make sense of what doesn't actually make sense - Deleuze wants to reduce existence to differencing or individuation. Which is fine. That is a constraints kind of thinking.
But then he doesn't get the need to remain dichotomous. The systems view is that a world forms by a reciprocal action of differentiation and integration. What is separated must also mix. Divisions must be globally coherent to persist in a general long-run fashion.
So at the top, constraints define sameness rather than (directly) difference. They encode an idea or purpose (ie: traditional formal/final cause) that thus - negatively - encodes also a matching idea of indifference. Constraints are semiotic relations which "know" what differences make a difference ... and so also define and ignore all the differences that don't make a difference.
They are a sieve that acts on reality. A sieve that separates the causes of actuality into the necessary and the accidental. So if "anything is possible" in an initial state of vagueness or symmetry, constraints emerge to organise this brute potential into a space of the lawfully possible. And laws have the character I just described. They define the regularity that is a necessity - the generality that is the form a local symmetry breaking must take. And then they leave to informal measurement the other part of existence which has been now rendered the contingent or accidental - the degrees of freedom which are the values we measure as some physical state of affairs and plug into our symmetry breaking equations.
So this is what seems missing if one seeks simply to invert the traditional formula where identity is defined in terms of "being similar (to an ideal)", to one of identity being "difference all the way down".
Both ways of looking at it leave out the actual reciprocal relation involved by trying to describe reality in monistic terms - as bounded by one kind of action, either cohering or differencing.
My way of looking at it - or the systems way, ably represented by Peirce and modern hierarchy theorists - instead explains how constraint carries within itself a limit on caring, in being actually (or virtually really) caring. In being a definite limitation on possibility - and yet vague potential being still unlimitedly fecund - constraint only exerts its influence so far on existence. There is point at which constraint doesn't care because it can't care. Its purpose has been met and the rest becomes just a sea of differencing that doesn't make a difference.
Quoting StreetlightX
But that is just your misunderstanding of calculus as others note.
This "differential" is indeed a mathematical singularity - that is a violence against nature. A singularity of that kind is "a bad thing" in that it becomes a Pandora's box of (vague) possibility. Physics knows it has a problem when it arrives at a singularity.
So what is really going on here is that the dynamics of geometry are encountering this useful fiction of the zero dimensional point - the point that does not exist. It is a limit on existence in being the ultimate possible constraint on dimensionality, and so - as I say - the very thing that cannot itself be real except negatively as pure idea. (We can certainly talk about zero dimensional points.)
So what you call the differential - the seed relation - is simply the unlimited possibilities of a zero dimensional fiction. A point could be tracing out any kind of trajectory. So it embodies infinite freedoms - once we imagine its zero dimensionality now inhabiting some actually dimensional space.
This mathematical device alllows us to start to cloak the point in derivatives of motion. Even though the point has no extent, we can place it within a hierarchy of motions. We can "add back" the constraints we have just abstracted away. We can grant the point a first degree of freedom - a velocity or constant motion. Then a second degree of freedom - an acceleration. A third degree - a jerk. A fourth degree - a snap.
So the "differential", as you call it, is just the ability to strip down dynamical geometry of "everything" that is an actual state of change to a bare potential - strip away all possible constraints to produce the radically vague, infinite possibility of a zero dimensional point - in a way that allows us to build reality back up in terms of localised degrees of freedom.
So reality, as we know, tends to energy degeneracy. Constraints over time remove meaningful degrees of freedom. The calculus then is a way for humans to imagine reality as a negentropic inverse of that. We can pretend reality is constructed bottom up by gluing together degrees of freedom. So - by adding energy - we can set balls rolling inertially, accelerate them with a constant force, accelerate that acceleration with a steadily increasing force, and so on.
But the mechanical nature of that way of creating real states of affairs is the reason why you wouldn't want to start taking it as the metaphysically basic picture of reality. So that is where you conception of the singular differential seems wildly astray. You are falling straight into the usual trap of understanding the point as a definite thing and not actually a singularity - a radical vagueness that can take on any crisp identity (or set of bounding constraints) because it has none itself.
Quoting StreetlightX
You have a hard life ahead if you can't tell the difference between a challenge to your arguments and an attack on your person. I've really tried to help you out in the past because I could see you were following a similar trajectory to me, so I thought it useful to point out folk like Peirce, Rosen, Salthe and Pattee who I found to be at the end of the trail (in my opinion of course).
Instead you seem to be so wedded to PoMo and its own realist counter-reactions that any mention that others have got there long ago sends you into a fit of anger.
But, ah well. At least its entertaining. ;)
This "need" you refer to must be justified, or else it's not a need at all, just an assertion. Any such dichotomy is artificial, created conceptually, for a purpose. So your "need" only exists in relation to a particular end (necessary for the sake of...). You may claim that there can be no knowledge or understanding without dichotomy, and this may be justifiable, but it does not produce the conclusion that there can be no existence without dichotomy. And once you allow for the possibility of non-dichotomous existence it gives you a completely different perspective on the relationship between existing and knowing.
But dichotomies are justified logically. They are crisply defined as an operator or symmetry-breaking relation in being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
So yes, one still needs to argue the case that something about the real world can indeed be best explained using this standard dialectic template. I have no problem with that.
But the validity at the level of logic is another matter.
As usual, the worst case scenario is that it might be an arbitrary scheme to impose on nature in being axiomatic. Maybe because there is such a vast gulf between phenomenon and noumenon, even our best tools may still be inadequate for approaching the thing in itself. And yet, if it works, it works.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
You are not listening because I frequently say that there is nothing wrong with reductionism, mechanicalism, atomism, predicate/modal logic, and other such tools of thought, from a pragmatic point of view. Where human purpose is limited to the "close at hand" - our own classical scale of existence - then this kind of general framework is indeed the most materially efficient way of thinking about nature. It shortcuts things by cutting out the very question of formal and final cause that a holistic view of nature is concerned with.
So sure, reductionism works to build laptops and cities. But by definition, it is not holism.
And my argument is that the two are in fact related by the reciprocity of a dichotomous relation. If we understand reductionism vs holism properly, each is "true" as the inverse of the other.
So one does not have to reject the other. Instead each represents a different natural limit on our modelling of nature. We have the choice of thinking either in terms of the particular or the general. And both are right - so long as we respect their appropriate scales of description.
I'm the only one around here who doesn't in fact get stuck in some monistic rut of thought. I can switch between reductionism and holism with ease as I have two complementary logics with which to do the work.
The problem of course is that the whole of human education is organised around a reductionist mentality because that is what is materially efficient. Virtually no one can get a interdisciplinary training in holism. You have to be at least post-grad to find your way into some obscure university institute that might pursue that explicitly.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well if you can explain what kind of crisp existence is not the result of a symmetry breaking dichotomy, go for it.
I've already asked SX to name a single generality that does not come trailing the "other" that is its context. He failed to come up with any term that could possibly stand alone.
Maybe you can do better?
If being is thought in its ontological (temporal) sense, then it simply is becoming. In the temporal sense, being that does not become, does not process or change, is simply unthinkable.
It is when being is considered logically, when the question "What is it that becomes or changes' is asked; that the question of formal (atemporal or absolute) identity is raised; and it is precisely here that there seems to be a dichotomy between being and becoming.
Being is the eternal perspective and becoming is the temporal perspective. They do not contradict one another because they are incommensurable perspectives proper to different contexts. It is when we try to think the two together, try to think of something becoming something else and yet remaining itself that we are faced with paradox. This paradox is a chimera that arises due to a failure to understand the limited contextualities of the ideas of change and identity, of similarity and difference.
So, I agree with you that becoming is a concept "self-sufficient unto itself", but only if the question of identity is kept out of consideration. But, as such it is an eminently vacuous, and even incoherent concept, however self-sufficient it might be. Of course the same might be said about identity (being) considered without becoming. So, I think we must be content to shuttle back and forth from one to the other, and turn a blind eye to the merely apparent aporias, aporias that only arise when we try to unify two wholly incompatible concepts. Why must we demand that all our concepts be compatible? Is good compatible with evil, for example?
This is just circular reasoning. What I'm asking is to ground the dichotomy in ontology, rather than to base your ontology in dichotomy, simply because dichotomy is logical. Why would you think that existence has to adhere to logic? And if not, then why assume dichotomy as a fundamental ontological principle?
Quoting apokrisis
Whether or not it "works", is relative. Walking "works" for getting us places, the horse "works" for getting us places, so does the boat, the train, the car, and the plane. Some of these work better than others, but the others still work. Depending on where you want to go, some of these will not work to get you there at all, though they'll still work to get you places.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't understand how you can claim a dichotomous holism. That appears to be self-contradictory.
Quoting apokrisis
And I don't understand what you mean by "crisp existence". The way that you use "crisp" leads me to believe that crispiness is artificial, produced by the mind which dichotomizes. What leads you to believe that existence itself is crisp?
What could that possibly mean? If you start from monistic assumptions then you will never accept a dichotomy as being ontologically robust.
As I tried to show above the dichotomy proceeds from our reasoning, which I think is fairly obvious. One side of it comes from logical reasoning and the other from ontological reasoning. These two incommensurable kinds of reasoning cannot be grounded in ontology simply because one of them is firmly grounded in logic.
If you think that a modelling relation is circular - and that active cybernetic relation is a problem - then fine. I'm not explaining it yet again.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Great. Relativity is all there is in the final analysis.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. True that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again something I've explained to you ad nauseam. Things are crisp when they are sharp, definite, fixed, energy degenerate, etc. All the different ways of saying fully and unambigously individuated. (Which as I also keep saying, is a state that nature can only approach with arbitrary closeness, never in fact completely achieve - as bloody quantum theory makes bloody convincingly clear by now.) 8-)
Personally I am much more on the idealist side than that. We can't ground belief in ontology at all. We can only truly know our own "ontic commitments".
I mean at least we know what our own (rationally expressed) ideas are, right? But beyond that, we have to leave it to the world to suggest we might be getting it wrong somehow.
Yes, I think that's true. Ontology is only ever us doing ontology, right? We can't get beyond our own doings to the Real itself, as it is in itself absolutely independent of our doings.
My point, though, was that being (identity) since it is grounded in the human eternalistic doing called 'logic' cannot be grounded in the human temporalistic doing called 'ontology', because in the latter there is no being that is not becoming, when we examine and think about 'what is'.
I'm not exactly sure but this certainly sounds the same as what I'm saying. :)
You may focus more on Geist or spirit - which I say is treating mindfulness as a substance rather than a process. I take the Peircean route that mind is the process of semiotic reasoning - it is an enactive relation with the world based on sign.
But in some sense, "eternal" reasoning or intelligibility is what results in the "doing" that is a materially actual world.
However when it comes to being and becoming, I take a (no surprise) tradic approach in which becoming seems to take two forms - vague potential and crisp degrees of freedom. And most talk about becoming - ever since Aristotle - has focused firmly on the modal and atomistic later, the definite possibilities that are the result of having become largely well-organised.
So vagueness is what begets being and becoming dichotomistically. That is a deep state of unformed and unlimited possibility that is pretty impossible to imagine (it seems).
But the world as we find it is grown up and set in its ways. It has a history that tightly constrains its raw possibilities. True vagueness has largely been dissipated.
Yet in becoming constrained to become Being, that also makes definite some remaining set of generic properties or freedoms that material objects can possess. So now from definite Being arises the kind of equally substantial becoming which is what Aristotle was talking about. It is actually possible that a horse is white because we are in a world where there are these definite states of being that can be thus combined with (relative) freedom.
So dichotomies simply serve to dispel vagueness. They get the party started by separating existence in complementary fashion. Then as crisp states of being, the separated can now be mixed and combined in free fashion. That sets up the secondary play of Becoming which is the evolution of complex Being.
And complex Being is an ascent that is unbounded. We can imagine minds even more powerful and marvellous than a mere humans. We can imagine subjectivities unlimitedly more ... intense.
Or is that too a bounded fact? Are their material constraints on such complex being? (Answer: yes. Too much computation concentrated in the one place is going to melt with its own heat, or exhaust all resources, or - failing that - eventually find its ontic limit in gravity. It will curl up and become a Black Hole when its massiveness can no longer be sustained.)
I think this is kind of true if you think Hegel, but I think of spirit more as a process of expressing freedom than as any kind of substance. The world is the process of restrictng freedom; and there is an interplay between the freedom and its restriction, that I'm guessing you would think in terms of possibility and constraint. I think the notion of substance, like identity, has provenance only in the realm of pure logic. Process is much more in accordance with the world we experience
A challenge? Please, don't flatter yourself. Your modus operendi consists of waltzing into a thread, declaring a position wrong from the point of view of your already-established orientation, then proceeding to pontificate on how that orientation works itself out. After which you conclude, thanks to this circluar hop on the spot, that the original position is wrong. You wouldn't know how to effectively engage with another position on it's own terms if your life depended on it. So no, your don't offer challenges, you self-aggrandize by using other people's posts as platforms to preach your system-mormonism from.
Conversely I have to spend most of my time explaining how your two-bit categories of thought are generally entirely inadequate to the discussion at hand, and then have to deal with you mounting rearguard actions to fit things into your misshapen boxes. The blunt hammer of your 'systemetizing' treats everything it encounters as a nail, and you lack the very ability to imagine that not everything amenable to it's bluntness. This is nicely dramatized in your request for a 'generality that does not come trailing the other for context': as I've told you time and time again, this isn't what it's meant by a singular, but because you literally lack the capacity to think outside of your pre-fab categories, you take your own failure of imagination for a failing on my part.
So it's cute that you think you're trying to help me, but until you develop some sense of just how inadequate your categories of thought are, I'm afraid that all you're doing is consistently charging me with not living up to an extraneous position, which, as far as I'm concerned, gets everything entirely bottom-up to begin with. Your 'help' is of the same kind offered by Mormons at the door - mostly irrelevant and preaching for the sake of conversion.
Of course I would employ the same analytic tools on every question. It is what everyone does - they just call it being logical. I simply make the added distinction between the kind of logic that is good for thinking in terms of atomistic particulars and the kind of holistic or dialectical logic that is traditional at a metaphysical level of thought.
For some reason you take it terribly personally. And that will limit you professionally.
You've forgotten one important step. Prior to reasoning, whether it be "logical reasoning" or "ontological reasoning" (whatever difference there's supposed to be here), we need to identify and describe the identified thing. The description of a thing is not derived from logical reasoning, logical reasoning follows the description as an attempt to understand the described thing.
It seems that we have a name for the thing, "becoming", but without a description of the thing referred to by the name, that name could signify anything. And if we proceed with reasoning alone, when we just have a name, then "becoming" could refer to anything which is logically possible. So unless we have a description of what it is which is referred to by "becoming", then all your forms of reasoning and your various dichotomies are completely meaningless in this inquiry.
I think the thread has progressed to the point where we can recognize that "relation" is not an acceptable descriptive term for "becoming". There was some talk of "functions", but a function is a particular type of relation, so this appears like a step in the wrong direction. Until we can get some acceptable terms, there is no call for any sort of logical reasoning.
'Becoming' or 'flux' are words used to denote what is as it presents itself to us. What is presents itself as a vast field of more or less changing similarities and differences. Some things remain so similar through time that the differences may be indistinguishable to us; they are for us so much the same across time that they are logical identities. But we believe that they are not ontological identities, at least insofar as their physicality is concerned, because we know that they must be changing, however subtly, as time passes. So becoming is not a determinably identifiable 'thing', but a general attribute of phenomenal reality.
So I didn't say that the idea of becoming derives from logic. It is the idea of identity which is derived form logic, it is a formulation of the idea of similarities that are perceived to be so lacking in difference to the naked eye, so to speak, that some things at least may count as being the same across time.
I'm guessing you mean monism in some sense. And in the OP's case, the suggested monism is that of relations being all you need to account for becoming. You don't need "terms" (relata?). Dan Smith says terms are just "packets of variable relations" - whatever that might mean.
Anyway, I suggested how the Peircean would view this (surely one is alllowed to try to make sense of a strange and disjointed OP by seeing how it is similar or different to an established and respected metaphysics?).
So yep, triadic semiosis is a monism in the sense it is an irreducible whole. And even better, it is a developmental ontology - based on a becoming which is radical by most lights. And better yet, it is "pure relations". It doesn't begin with the usual existence of things like material substances or even necessary ideas. These regularities themselves must arise, or become, from the pure possibility of vagueness.
So Peircean metaphysics seems to fit the bill you describe. It is different just in being a highly structured or systematised view of becoming/relating. And so, as said, it achieves monistic holism only via an irreducibly complex sign relation.
But for some reason, rather that responding to my argument, you just immediately launched into a personal attack.
Perhaps now you will reconsider and actually explain what the difference might be if it exists. What am I not understanding about your notion of singularity?
Is it more that some thought that such a singularity would have to be ultimately simple and structureless? Yet then I would have to wonder about how a relation could be structureless. What could that even mean?
Even Smith seems to think terms or relata cash out as packets of variable relations. So in some way, they certainly can't be simples, let alone the same simple as the "singular" relation of which they appear to compose a part.
So your OP does spark a set of questions as it seems on the face of it to be patently self-contradicting. It would be nice if you could focus on legitimate questions and not go into further tirades of abuse.
So Smith is absolutely relying on dichotomies to define terms epistemically and also making the ontic connection to physical symmetry breaking with its critical point behaviour.
This makes your replies still more inexplicable.
If something presents itself to us, as to "remain so similar through time that the differences may be indistinguishable to us", yet we "know" that it must be changing, then how is it that we know this, other than by the means of logic?
Quoting John
You haven't described how you can derive a concept of becoming without the means of logic. You say "'Becoming' or 'flux' are words used to denote what is as it presents itself to us." But I see static things present to me, far more than I see activity present to me. And if things which present themselves to me are not the same now as they were before, I conclude that there has been change, and therefore becoming. How is this not a use of logic? What presents itself to me is many different static things which are not necessarily changing, but could change, and do change. I also observe some activity, such as a fire, and I conclude that this is something which is in the process of changing. These changes are so rapid that I cannot identify the static things.
The question for you, is why do you use your logic to conclude that all the static things I observe are really in a process of becoming, instead of concluding that all the processes of becoming are a change between static things. If you are going to use logic to make the claim to "know" that what appears as "beings" are really "becomings", what are your premises to support this? How are you describing "becoming" such that it is not just a relation between static things?
Quoting John
This is not true. Logic proceeds from identity, so identity is necessarily prior to logic. It is quite clear that we must have a good grasp of identity before we can proceed with any logic, as logic operates on identified things, so the very opposite of what you say is the truth, logic is derived from identity.
That is why we must accurately identify "becoming" prior to applying any logic. The conclusions of the logic will represent the identity given, in the relation of premise/conclusion. The accuracy of the conclusion will reflect the accuracy off the identity. If we cannot identify "becoming" as something other than a relation between definable states, then all of our conclusions will be representations of this.
Okay, I wanna backtrack here a little because a) we've both misread the passage on generation, because of my out-of-context quote, and b) I wanna deal more precisely with the Deleuzian treatment of the differential, which I wasn't clear enough about. First, the passage on the creation of the polynomial refers not to (re)creating the entire function, but the function around the point in question: "You are given one point on a function and a sequence of numbers representing the values of the derivatives of the function at that point, and from these numbers, you can reconstruct an approximation of the whole function not just at that one point, but also in an area around that point." So the reconstruction referred to is pretty local rather than global, but the thrust and stake of the passage is that this locality is nonetheless not correlative to a single, particular point: the successive derivatives express the overall behaviour of points around any one particular point.*
We can bring out the importance of this seemingly trivial point however if we turn again to Deleuze's reading of the calculus. I said originally that "the differential must differ in kind from the numbers that make up the primitive curve" - this was ambiguous and you were right to call me out on this. It's indeed far more precise to say that the derivative of f(x) yields another function f'(x): what I wanted to convey is that on Deleuze's reading, the difference between these two functions is not simply quantitative but rather qualitative. What does this mean? Negatively, that the differential cannot be a magnitude or a quantity: at the point at which dy/dx = 0/0, the value of the derivative is itself neither zero nor an infinitesimal. As Sean Bowden puts it, "dx represents only the cancellation of quantity in general"; instead, Deleuze's argument is that while it cannot be determined in the form of quantity, it can (only) instead be determined in "qualitative form".
And what does it mean that the differential can be determined only in qualitative form? Simply that, as we've said, the derivative is never simply a value that correlates to a single, particular point on a primitive function, but instead defines the qualitative character of the function around a particular point. In Simon Duffy's words, "the differential relation characterises or qualifies not only the distinctive points which it determines, but also the nature of the regular points in the immediate neighbourhood of these points" (Duffy, "The Mathematics of Deleuze's Differential Logic and Metaphysics"). This is the import of the Aden quote above. Now, the point of this giant mathematical detour is that insofar as the differential is understood as this element of pure quality ('the cancellation of quantity in general'), it serves as the model for Deleuze's notion of pure relationality. Again in Bowden's words: "even though dx is totally undetermined with respect to x, as is dy to y [[dy/dx can only be determined in relation to each other, without each each value is nothing], since the relation subsists, they are in principle determinable with respect to each other" (my emphasis).
Why is this reciprocal determinability of the differential important to Deleuze? For two reasons: first, not only does it provide a model for pure relationality, but second and even more importantly, this model itself has a distinctive trait that allows Deleuze to set himself against a position that his entire oeuvre pitches itself against: the idea that what exists prior to individuation is an indeterminate generality which is then progressively differentiated though limitation or negation (which itself calls for a correlative abandonment of any hylomorphic model of individuation). In other words, Apo's entire metaphysical picture. What's at stake here? It's this: while Deleuze agrees that one must begin any approach to individuation from the perspective of the undifferentiated (at the point at which there are not yet 'crisply defined individuals', to use Apo's parlance), it is nonetheless a complete mistake to think that this undifferentiated realm is indeterminate. On the contrary, he will argue that this pre-individual, undifferentiated sphere of being is entirely determined - and determined precisely in the qualitative form as outlined above: this is it's 'distinctive trait' that I mentioned.
To bring it all together then, the determination of the pre-individual realm means that it is characterized buy the distribution of singular and ordinary points. And what does this mean? Again, back to the differential: if we accept that the differential characterizes the qualitative behaviour of a primitive function, then one can argue for the 'existence' of two kinds of behaviours: singular and ordinary. Points with 'singular behaviours' are, as we've said before, things like inflexion points and stationary points (where the value of a gradient changes or equals to zero or infinity); points with 'ordinary behaviours' are those that remain relatively continuous to their neighbouring points. So with the calculus as his model, Deleuze will refer individuation to the manner in which singular and ordinary points are distributed among a series, and from which, taken together, a primitive function can be generated. Hence Deleuze's affirmation that "the reality of the virtual [the pre-individual] consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them […] Far from being undetermined, the virtual is completely determined.”*
--
It's ultimately over the question of the determination of the pre-individual that the debate between me and Apo turns. Apo is unable to recognize - perhaps because he's never encountered it before - the idea of a determinate but undifferentiated realm of the pre-individual. The terminological disputes over the general and the particular, the singular and the universal, and pretty much the rest of it, all turn upon this difference. The idea that the pre-individual is a vague generality is the 'null hypothesis' which Deleuzian metaphysics tests itself against, even as it responds to a similar motivation - which accounts for the closeness and the distance between our respective position. Anyway, sorry for the long reply, but I'm working on two fronts at once - if you haven't noticed already not all of this post is for you TGW - so I don't have to post multiple times.
*See also Gil Morejon's paper, "Differentiation and Distinction: On the Problem of Individuation from Scotus to Deleuze" (on academia.edu), which helped me clarify alot of these issues to myself (sneak peak: "What we will suggest is that the positive notion of common nature or virtuality, as something both completely determined and undifferentiated, far exceeds in its explanatory capacities a negative notion of possibility as purely indifferent... This is an important insight because it forces a re-evaluation of the idea of possibility, which was classically understood as the negation of actuality. Hegel’s famous critique, that Schelling’s philosophy of Indifferenz amounted to ‘the night where all cows are black’, exposes the paucity of such a conception, through which we ultimately are left incapable of accounting for the reality of actual individuals or distinguishing between empirical instances"
(^ i.e. accounting for the singular - this explains why so many of Apo's posts end up being a simplistic 'taxonomy' of being: things and processes only have 'value' in his system to the degree that they correspond to one or another of his pre-established categories - in themselves, they are meaningless, devoid of significance. I wasn't just being snide when I said earlier that the whole edifice is self-referential - it really is).
I haven't said that, I have said that 'what is' presents itself as a vast field which displays a whole range of rates of change in its different parts. The world as a whole is never the same from one moment to the next, and we observe this constantly. It is scientific investigation, not logic, that has revealed that everything physical is constantly changing.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I haven't denied that identity is the basis of logic. We arrive at the notion of identity by thinking about the logic of our ways of communicating about our experience. Certainly the idea of identity was implicit in human discourse long before it was identified as an explicit concept. But its realization as an explicit concept came about via logical thought, by seeing how, for example identity is implicit in the the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Excluded Middle.
So, the idea of being is the idea of identity, and the idea of becoming is the idea of change. To state it again, my contention is that identity is not observed. Change is observed, difference and similarity are observed, And thinking about difference and similarity leads to the formal idea of sameness. Sameness or identity is never actually instantiated in the temporal world of constant physical change, only difference and similarity are. So being is a more purely logical idea than becoming. We actually witness becoming, we do not witness being.
It means that the derived function is less constrained in adding a further dimension. And yes, it would be fair to dichotomise that in terms of quality~quantity. The quality is the "twist away" that this extra dimension of change represents. And that is quantified by some value which is a measurement of the degree of "twist".
Quoting StreetlightX
But 0/0 is the limit. So the point never exists - except as an idea, a goal, a virtual object (in the way that singularities, event horizons, virtual particles, renormalised fields, etc, are all virtual objects in physics).
So all we can do is imagine the point as the virtual locus - a bare property-less location - to which we can then start artificially gluing dimensionality (the general or global quality that is constraint!) back on to.
0/0 of course refers to a 2D realm - the complementary extrema of the x and y axis. In a 3D realm, we would have to specify "the point" as 0/0/0. So yes, the idea of a point already - dichotomistically - invokes its own local neighbourhood. In a flat Euclidean space or Newtonian inertial frame, the lack of curvature indeed means the idea of the point in fact defines the global space out to infinity. And advantage of simplicity or linearity.
So 0/0 deals fully with one quality - location - if we are safe to presume that the point lives in a flat plane as its quantities (zero x change, zero y change) implies. And then that point can start being granted further qualities - like the energy of a velocity. It can be seen to be speaking about, in fact, a trajectory or line.
So 0/0 specifies a point that can stand for a line - if you add a velocity term. 0/0 certainly does not contain that "difference" itself in speaking only for some definite lack of change (qua a flat plane). All it does - for the sake of easy reductionist representation - is erase the world (the plane with its lines and locations) of all possible change so that change can now be added in, degree by definite degree, by hand.
Quoting StreetlightX
But plainly the located 0/0 point has the quality of being located on an x/y plane. So change as an actual quality has been cancelled - it now measures zero in both directions on the change scale. But in reciprocal fashion, the quality of locatedness is at its maximum. It measures infinity (or reciprocally, any deviation from absolute and ideal locatedness is infinitesimal - too small to make a difference).
So this mathematical detour exposes some really sloppy thinking.
Quoting StreetlightX
Again this is bogus as x/y specifies a relation - the quantifiable quality of being a fixed location on a plane. The generality is that the plane has infinite locations as an attribute. And that global attribute can be picked out as a point with arbitrary precision. The transcendent modelling machinery of x/y - the idea imposed on the plane in a sign relation - can be used to quantify the quality being claimed.
So even at the zeroeth derivative, there is a complementary dyad of quality and quantity - general concept and particular fact. The x/y definition of a quality waits to be cashed out as (3,7), or some other pair of actual co-ordinate values.
Then first, second, and further derivatives are the tacking on of further qualities, further degrees of freedom. And it takes tangents - new global co-ordinate frames - to give these further qualities (the many varieties of possible change) some definitely measurable character.
One point turns out to participate of a hierarchy of worlds of measurement, each with its own general quality of change (when measured against the point as a reciprocal absolute lack of change). We can tell they are qualities because we give them substantial sounding names (or terms) like "velocity", "acceleration", "jerk", "snap"....
What we can measure is always then "a thing". ;)
Quoting StreetlightX
It's great that Deleuze may offer a different view. That's why I am interested. But in the past, I've found it to be half-baked. And so far you have done a great job confirming that view.
But as to my own position - the Peircean one - you misrepresent it. Indeterminism is explicitly distinguished from generality. Again to remind you, one does not participate in the principle of non-contradiction, the other does not participate in the law of the excluded middle. So the distinction is clear just in terms of the way they "other" the standard laws of thought.
So the indeterminate is the vague and undivided. The general is instead the crisply dichotomised, the crisply symmetry-broken. So generalities are the emergent habits - the triadic relation that is what it is to be the actuality, the substantial, hylomorphically formed by there being complementary bounds to that existence (as in globally structuring constraints vs local material degrees of freedom).
I agree this is a sophisticated and subtle metaphysics. It tends to go over heads. But you need to understand it right if you don't want to look such an idiot when going off on your epic whinges against me.
Quoting StreetlightX
But there is a deep and obvious metaphysical argument against any such scheme that wants to found itself on stasis rather than flux. The primary fact of nature is that it has this direction - this irreducible broken symmetry - that we call time.
So space and matter are locally symmetric qualities. You can erase a spatial change by going back and forth, or erase a material change by introducing any particle to its anti-partner other. But time stands apart in being a globally broken symmetry. It has only the one direction - entropically downhill forever.
So that makes change a fact that exists "before" stasis. Metaphysics has to be done in terms of process or development.
That can be cashed out itself in terms of differentiation. But we would have to be talking globally general differention - as in the Big Bang story of a cooling/expanding. Deleuze is making the classical error of taking the humanly local scale of being - the Universe as it is for us right at this small moment in its history - as the metaphysically typical scale of description.
So right now, we humans clearly live in a world that is a big, dark, cold space, and yet also filled with this mess of concrete objects (like stars, planets, mountains, bacteria, iPhones).
The proper long run view of the Universe is that it is simply a cooling and spreading featureless bath of radiation to close approximation. At no point in its history does the small scum of "complex material objects" amount to anything significant or fundamental. We can literally quantify that level of insignificance. If all the objects in the visible universe were vaporised to radiation immediately rather than waiting for another 100 billion years, it would add only a percent or two to the sum total of its radiative being.
Anyway, we can see why Deleuze may again return metaphysics to a focus on "differentiation" in terms of highly negentropic local structure. It is of course what we humans must care about most for pragmatic reasons.
But in terms of metaphysics, its just dumb to take the negentropic exception as foundational. We already know from cosmology that entropy rules - it provides the arrow of time that is the primary fact of nature.
Quoting StreetlightX
It's more the case it is so transparently confused that I give the benefit of the doubt that it could be truly meant.
Quoting StreetlightX
I'm sure he noticed that you only kept mentioning me. LOL.
Quoting StreetlightX
So you were being snide as well. Cool.
But the charge of being self-referential is hardly going to bother me when a bootstrapping self-organising
relation is what I seek from a sophisticated metaphysics.
The existence of the difference, or relation, which cannot be expressed quantitatively can be demonstrated by the difference between spatial dimensions. The relation between spatial dimensions is incommensurable. The relation between the circle (2d) and the diameter (1d), is pi, which is an irrational ratio. If one takes two equal length line segments at a right angle to each other (representing two distinct dimensions), the diagonal (which crosses both dimensions), is again irrational.
Consider the difference between a straight line and a curved line. We could assume points on those lines to mark off segments. No matter how small the segment of line is that one marks off with the points, the segment of curved line will always be fundamentally different from the segment of straight line, and the relation between them is incommensurable. I believe there are two approaches to this problem. First, we could consider giving dimensionality to the point. Then a point on the curved line would be fundamentally different from a point on a straight line. But this would make "points" complicated, requiring different types of points for different applications, a 1d point, a 2d point, etc.. Furthermore, the non-dimensional point has been proven to be very useful, so there is very good reason to consider that it has some basis in reality. The second possibility then, is to maintain the non-dimensional point but to allow that the space between the points on the curved line is fundamentally different from the space between the points on the straight line. This requires that we reify space itself. We must allow that the space between points is something real, if we desire to maintain the use of non-dimensional points, and also allow for the reality of the non-quantifiable relation between different spatial dimensions. Space exists and it has real qualities which we do not know how to measure. We measure objects, but since objects are merely the way that space is represented to us, the unintelligible aspects of space render absolute accuracy impossible.
Now we approach the basis of the non-quantifiable relation. This is the relation between space (being now described as something real), and the non-dimensional point. In order to understand this relation we must give the non-dimensional point a position with respect to space. Without a position, it cannot be related to space. I believe its position is in time. The non-dimensional point is a point in time. Now we must reverse the relationship between space and time, which makes time the 4th dimension, such that time can have its proper relation to space, as the 0th dimension.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is very good, because if we consider the point in time, as the non-dimensional point, we can start to see the vague relationship between points in time, and the surrounding space. Recognize that we have reified space, such that it is something "real", in the sense that physical objects are real, but what we are actually looking for now is the real reality, the reality which is the "becoming" that lies beneath the object which has been identified as space, and is associated with the 0th dimension, time. Since the incommensurability has been identified as existing within the dimensions of space, the vagaries which exist around the non-dimensional points are proper to that object, space itself. So we must go deeper, into the non-dimensional points to find real quantity, or quantifiability.
Quoting StreetlightX
With respect to this then, my position is that the whole appearance of indeterminateness is due to the somewhat unintelligible nature of space. Because space has unintelligible aspects, we can conclude that space does not necessarily behave in the way that it should. The "way that it should", is the way that is determined by this underlying reality, the sphere which Deleuze is saying is completely determined. This is the realm of what Bohm calls "hidden variables". In his "Wholeness and The Implicate Order", he posits an underlying realm of activity, becoming, of which we see only a reflection of, in the spatial existence of objects, just like Plato's cave people only see a reflection of reality.
Yes - it's a limit precisely from the perspective of the already-individuated, which in this case would be the primitive function. But the whole point is to reverse the order of priority in order to think the construction of the primitive out of the virtual, which, although not actual, is in every regard real: "The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual [it is] real without being actual, ideal without being abstract [...] The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which correspond to them". Indeed the reason you can only think in terms of mutually-constraining limits is precisely because you are unable to countenance exactly this reality of the virtual.
Which is just another way of saying that you are unable to properly consider the process of individuation because you can only ever look at it from the perspective of the already-individuated. And from that POV, all you will ever see is limits and a process of othering. As Deleuze puts it, "Negation is difference, but difference seen from its underside, seen from below. Seen the right way up, from top to bottom, difference is affirmation." In other words, if we reverse the picture and look upon individuation from the perspective of individuation, what you see instead are differential relations - coupled rates of change - and distributions of singularities which define thresholds of mutation.
One can think of an economic system this way: flows of labour and capital, rates of birth and death, employment and wage (all of which reciprocally determine each other as coupled rates of change), together with thresholds of mutation (environmental carrying capacity, minimum survival income, etc): these are the parameters out of which 'economic individuals' are crystallized from - companies, trade agreements, tax rates, etc. The 'virtuals' here are not 'possibilities' which are then culled by a process of mutual limitation to give rise to actualities: the virtualities are fully real and they engender creativity at the level of the actual. Given these rates of change, given these singularities which define thresholds of tolerance, in what way should 'economic individuals' go about achieving whatever it is they do - in what manner do they become the individuals that they are ?
They is why Evens - inspired entirely by Deleuze from whom these terms are borrowed - speaks of individuation as a matter of 'problem solving'. Not 'symmetry-breaking' but problem-solving is the model for the process of individuation: the differential qua genetic element of quality defines an open-ended problem (like the coupled rates of change in an economy) that can be 'solved' in multiple ways (two different companies might attempt to 'solve' an inequality of supply and demand in two different ways, even though the 'problem' itself is entirely determined); a distribution of singularities can give rise to varied curves, so long as the points of that curve behave in roughly the right ways around those singularities themselves.
Evens: "The function thus takes shape gradually, progressively, as the singular points shift and glide relative to each other, tense and relax to alter their configuration. A problem forms like a soap bubble stretched across the wire outline of an abstract geometric figure. How to connect the vertices most efficiently, how to find the correct degree of curvature, how to distribute density so as to bend without breaking? And when a weakness is stretched beyond its breaking point, the bubble snaps into a new shape, determining new criteria, new boundary conditions, posing and solving a new problem in a flash, so that one would never suspect the whole network of differential calculations that take place in this instant. Problems determine themselves incrementally and always in relation..."
Individuation as symmetry-breaking in comparison is an incredibly basic and rather naive approach to the whole issue. Indeed, the entire model is a back-formation, a retroactive posit that takes the actual and, through a fantasy or a daydream that operates by means of an hallucinatory extrapolation, imagines that there must be some vague, indeterminate potentiality out of which individual, 'crisp' things are coalesced. But just as the 'limits' which apparently drive this process are fictional, so too is the entire edifice a just-so story that weaves itself in order to justify itself. As a good King Lear might have said to you: only fantasy comes of fantasy - speak again. This is why what you bring to the table is not philosophy but taxonomy: you have a sterile descriptive framework under which various entities and processes can be slotted into as so many indifferent elements, but which itself does nothing to account for their ontogenesis except by means of an ineffectual handwave. The Apeiron, like the Anaximandian myth that spawned it, is exactly that: a fable told in the place of any concretely engaged analysis.
I want to return to this point (pardon the pun) because I like it so much. If we assume a particular point (a non-dimensional point of location), then there is a surrounding area, "the neighbourhood", which may have a number of positions in the neighbourhood related to this point by the same function. These points are exactly the same, functionally. In a simple spatial relation we could say that these functionally identical points make a sphere around that original point. The points equidistant from the original point.
Now from this point of view, of functionality, each of these related points has the exact same relation to the original point. They are the very same point, functionally, but my description has described them as a number of different points in a neighbourhood. So we need a principle whereby we can individuate the parts of the neighbourhood, as different from each other. They must be different because they are being described as different, and we can visualize the points on the surface of a sphere as different from each other. We need to introduce dimensions. Dimensions will provide the basis for this difference. To do this, we must return to the original point, and give that original point context, a position. We cannot appeal to the functional points for context because this would constitute circular reasoning, and there is nothing to distinguish one from the other, so such a determination would be completely arbitrary. So the context, and therefore dimensionality, must be derived from the underlying flux which relates one non-dimensional point to another, and this presents a problem due to the nature of "flux". Bohm's proposal is a local clock, an inner time for each neighbourhood. The clock takes the place of the non-dimensional point of location. But since he hasn't assumed a non-dimensional point, just a neighbourhood with a clock, he gets an infinite regress of a clock within a clock within a clock. If we assume a non-dimensional point, then dimensionality can only be determined from within that point.
LOL This seems to be gibberish and reminds me of Nietzsche: "They muddy the water to make it seem deep".
Neural functioning: "We can see the embodied and embedded nervous system as a preindividual virtual field: (1) a set of differential elements (reciprocally determined functions —in other words, neural function is networked: there is no such thing as the function of “a” neuron; some argue the same for higher-level cognitive processes, i.e., that they emerge from global brain activity and hence cannot be understood in isolation) (2) with differential relations (linked rates of change of firing patterns) (3) marked by singularities (critical points determining turning points between firing patterns). The dynamics of the system as it unrolls in time are intensive processes or impersonal individuations, as attractor layouts coalesce and disappear as singular thresholds are passed (Varela 1995)"
A football game: "Let's take the Idea of football games. ... What are the [virtuals] that conditioned the genesis of American football? Well, it would be a multiplicity of differential elements, differential relations, and singularities. The differential elements would be the players, the field, and the ball. They are differential elements because they are defined only in relation to each other. A prolate spherical of pigskin leather is only a football in relation to the players, who are only players when the entertain a certain relation to each other and to the ball, and of course, to the field, which in turn. The differential relations are what the players are able to do with the ball and with each other. They are differential in that they are relations of change in the elements: how they are able to move, to advance and retreat. And these relations are strewn with singularities, or sensitive points: when the ball moves between players across a certain threshold of the field, a touchdown or field goal is scored."
Ecology: "An example here would be a Deleuzian understanding of niche construction: the activities of organisms change the selection pressures for future generations. The ecological web of relations that we describe as “selection pressures” is not ghostly, it is perfectly real, but for Deleuze, it does not have the same ontological status as a single individuated act (e.g., a predator devouring a prey animal). Rather, the web is virtual, that is, composed of the relations of dynamically interactive processes. The virtual field is not composed of the processes themselves but by the differential elements, relations, and singularities of the processes. These elements, relations, and singularities are progressively determined by intensive individuation processes so that at critical points in the relation of predator and prey activity — at a singular point in the linkage of the rates of change of those processes — we can find the triggering of an event such as a population explosion or, in the opposite direction, an extinction."
I believe that the "virtual" must be actual as well as real. But it cannot be actual in the common sense of physical bodies in motion. The need for two distinct types of "actual", provides the approach to a reconciliation with dualism. Within the virtual exists what you call "the differential elements and relations". But the virtual is what I call the non-dimensional point, which must itself be like a self, with a right and left, up and down, etc., in order to provide for the possibility of dimensionality. The principles which will differentiate the parts of the neighbourhood must inhere within the non-dimensional point. So the principles for dimensionality inhere within the non-dimensional.
Now we must remain true to our premise, the primacy of becoming. This will necessitate that the virtual itself is a world of flux, the relations etc., the principles within the non-dimensional, are active, and changing. It is argued by Lee Smolin in "Time Reborn", that we must allow for the laws of nature themselves, to actively change in time. So, if within the realm of the virtual, there is activity, we must reverse our established relation between space and time (time being presently represented as following from the activities of physical bodies), to allow for becoming within the virtual. This is "the reversal" which gives reason to express time as the 0th dimension, instead of the 4th, allowing for the reality of this activity of the virtual.
One of the paradoxes of singularity - and what accounts for it's fragility as a category - is that precisely because it's bears in itself the index of it's own recognition, it can only be recognized as a singularity only retroactively, by means of a repetition. Zizek - whose reference here is Hegel rather than Deleuze - gives the example of both Julius Caesar and Margaret Thatcher, the novelty of whom had to each be affirmed by a repetition: that of Augustus in Caesar's case - who assumed the title of the first 'caesar' - and that of Tony Blair in Thatcher's case, who was said to have institutionalized Thatcherism as a philosophy of government. In both cases it's only in the light of the 'repetition' that the novelty of the 'original' can be recognized. Without Augustus one could not speak of Caesarism, without Blair one could not speak of Thatcherism.
Again the reason for this is that the singular brings with it it's own index of generalization, the novelty of which is ungraspable without a repetition which brings it to light: "the murder of Caesar - the historical individual - ended up resulting in the establishment of Caesarism; Caesar-the-person is repeated as Caesar-the-title. The crucial point here is the changed symbolic status of [the new]: when it erupts for the first time it is experienced as a contingent trauma, as an intrusion of a certain nonsymbolized Real; only through repetition is this event recognized in its symbolic novelty" (Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology). Deleuze himself, for exactly these reasons, will link singularity indissolubly with the concept of repetition: "To repeat is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent... If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general... In its essence, repetition refers to a singular power which differs in kind from generality." (Difference and Repetition)
I mention this because it's easy to see, because of this, how singularity can be so easily mistaken or miscrecognized for particularity. Because repetition retroactively constitutes the singular status of the novel event, it becomes easy to treat both things as particulars, and from there, extract - by means of an imaginary extrapolation - an order of generality to which both might be said to belong. But it's clear that any operation of this kind is simply a kind of epistemological back-formation, an attempt to expel any consideration of novelty by 'levelling' the field of events in order to embed them into an artificial coordinates through which they can be compared, and subsequently particularized. This is why Deleuze warns that "generality, as generality of the particular, thus stands opposed to repetition as universality of the singular."
I can understand and agree with the sentiment that my opinion, per se, doesn't and shouldn't matter to you. On the other hand my opinion is hardly "random". I have invested a fair deal of time into reading and trying to understand the import of the kinds of philosophers you seem to mostly concern yourself with. And I have come to the conclusion that much of their work is of little real philosophical consequence.
If philosophy becomes a specialized activity that is only accessible to those who are prepared to devote their lives to studying a narrow, arcane section, then it becomes of no more import to the common person than bird-watching, butterfly collecting or nuclear physics. At least nuclear physics has practical applications. Philosophy should be primarily concerned with how to live, in my opinion. And since life is short and reading and understanding everything is not possible, then I think a broad, inclusive overview of the whole drift of philosophical, aesthetic and religious ideas is the best foundation for a good philosophical life. Academic specialization is the disease of philosophy, as I see it, it is not the cure.
I try to see the import for life of what you wrote and quoted, and I just can't see anything much but cryptic gobbledygook. If you want to spend your life with that it is fine, though; there may be great art in it for you, but I was just expressing my opinion of it, much like someone might say that they see nothing in the music, poetry or paintings you admire. There is no accounting for taste, after all!
:)
Don't we need to determine what it means "to live", before we can approach the question of how to live?
No. I think that would be backwards. We always already find ourselves living, so we know what it is to live. The important question is what it is to live well.
The opposite to what you say is actually the case. We find ourselves doing things, and then we seek to understand exactly what it is that we are doing. Only when we come to this understanding can we determine a better way of doing it.
So, we are not necessarily living then?
And while I can understand your desire to reject the criticism, the sentiment has little import from within the tradition, where you're least positioned to examine its validity.
Of course, we shouldn't expect specialized disciplines always to be accessible to everyone at all times. It's just a matter of how inward-looking you want your inquiry to be. I think there is a broad tension in your posts, SX, in that you object to people who deny the relevance of your highly specific tradition-internal approaches to problems to general concerns, but at the same time base a lot of your philosophical identity on a snobbery towards anyone not versed in that specific tradition. There is a lot of venom toward people who come at things from a different tradition (e.g. apokrisis) on grounds that they can't think broadly enough, but you evince that same unwillingness or inability.
And this results in your doing the same thing you despise. For example, I think your comment dismissing formal logic was embarrassing and parochial. Maybe you don't want to hear that, but that's how I read it, and I think you should study formal logic before dismissing it out of hand.
Know I'm replying late, but:
I'm not saying that though. I feel like the thing-in-itself would have to bootstrap at some level. What I'm saying is that you keep measuring the ideas of others against your system, because they doen't satisfy criteria central to your system, but your system itself rests on a brute absolute, exempted from its own criteria. So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong. It's like you've taken a whole bunch of great insights and turned them into one big parlor trick (or, super-secure self-sealing knowledge edifice, if one wants to get psychoanalytic, which I usually do.)
(I'll add that that doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong. It just means the criticisms you've been levying against street/deleuze don't boil down to anything but: I have a different view.)
Yes, I do understand that. What I'm saying is that what makes Ollie Ollie is not that the Necessary and the Accidental have produced this very being. Caps bc they're principles (or aren't they?). If everything's the necessary and the accidental, then to say ollie, this cat (hey this cat) is the intersection of the two, is to say nothing, at all, about ollie. You could be talking about a star or a cell or a neutron. That's self-evident. Isn't it?
I think actually that this is fair, with the caveat that I will always try, as far as space and time allow for, to explain what I mean when I invoke the authors and traditions I do, and explain the relevance of much of what I call in. If my posts tend to be sprawling and long, it's because I'm trying quite hard to make admittedly tough ideas digestible. On the other hand I do expect an equal hearing - even if to register incomprehension - and I will tend to treat bad reading with the scorn or indifference it deserves. Long story short, I'll tend - I hope - to meet like with like.
As for formal logic, I do regret not being more acquainted with it, if only because one ought to know one's enemy to all the better to engage it. But I really do think the subject-predicate form is inseparable from a kind of Aristotelian substance-accident metaphysics that it's almost incomprehensible to me that anyone takes it seriously other than as a kind of engineering tool. And what little I have read of the metaphysics that takes logic as it's base - Ted Sider, David Lewis - has always made me balk, if only because of what seems like it's breathtaking naivety in taking that form itself for granted. I've a strong interest in the paraconsistent guys and gals, but even then I think they're exploring the limits of the field "for" that field. But if you're not invested in it then...
So yeah, I find it hard to motivate myself to engage with this stuff, which just seems so - backward. Especially when the sciences seem to be a vastly richer resource for philosophical thinking (and there seems to be an almost inverse relationship between how well one is versed in formal logic and scientific ideas among many of those who use logic as the touchstone for their metaphysics - a relationship I'm guilty of playing into as well, on the other side).
How can you know it's your enemy if you don't know it?
I'm not really a fan of Sider or Lewis as metaphysicians myself, but Lewis' contributions to logic with his logic of counterfactuals, counterpart theory, centered worlds, etc. are not only brilliant technical innovations, but provide tools for formalizing tricky concepts in fresh ways. It may be that I'm biased toward formalism because linguistics needs formalism to survive, far more than philosophy, but to dismiss the really interesting things these guys have done with their logics on grounds of some vaguely felt dissatisfaction with what you think (without really knowing) represents a fundamental metaphysical misconception is naive.
I mean, whether you like it or not, counterfactuals, for example, have a certain logic to them, in the way they license inferences, and in struggling with that Lewis is doing something concrete with interesting formal consequences that, for all their protests, continental philosophers are not doing. This is not to say he's the continental's superior, but just that it needs admission that your 'foe' has resources you don't, and to admit that in many ways he is more sophisticated than you. The reverse might also be true, but then I think the incumbency runs both ways.
I also think drawing indiscriminately from scientific sources has a danger of tourism to it, but maybe that's a separate issue.
I am not demanding that anyone study any tradition in particular, and it's impossible to give equal time to them all. What I am demanding is that these traditions not be insulted in ignorance, and that given that one is interested in a certain narrow scope of philosophy, that others not be insulted for exercising the same prerogative and not reading Deleuze.
I didn't say that. I said that we can claim to be living without knowing what "living" means. How does the assertion "I am living" produce the necessary conclusion "I know what it means to be living"? It is easy to put a name to an activity. It's not so easy to understand the activity. Naming an activity does not indicate that you understand it. So by what means will you describe how to best carry out the named activity, if you've only named it without understanding it?
As for Deleuze, as I said, I don't expect that people 'know their Deleuze' to engage with me, but if - like Apo - you're going to grab a quote (one employed in the OP because I thought it had pedagogical value) and say 'this is all wrong because it doesn't agree with my pre-fabricated POV', then you can expect some push-back on a technical level. Especially when it gets the technicals totally, absolutely wrong.
Oh so you are arguing that the bad guys are the Laplace guys and the good guys are people like Leibniz and Spinoza (to take a completely different 'singularity' insofar as metaphysical thought is situated). By the way, how would we talk about a singularity in language? Because it seems like language is very particular by nature.
[quote=SX]I think we must be prepared to completely dismiss all terms of logic and mathematics[/quote]
[quote=SX]the entire edifice of formal logic is more or less inadequate to the task[/quote]
(And how 'dramatic' is this language!) These are things, I claim, that you don't know and can't pronounce on. And then the larger point was about the hermeticism and dismissal you are criticizing others of, and my attempt to show you that this was common in your own posts.
I guess?
Quoting discoii
I'm not sure what you mean by the question.
Yeah, my bad, I misread.
Quoting StreetlightX
Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image. The issues in the OP don't really matter to me, I just thought the debate about the debating style was interesting.
I don't think that's fair. My main complaint is that he's erasing the specificity of my position by translating it into terms - his terms - that aren't adequate to it, and then critiquing that improper reconstruction of it; and further, that he's so caught up in those terms, that he can see neither that nor why it's inadequate. If I'm doing the same to him, then I'd welcome some correction.
Well, proper names kinda just are ways of referring to singular entities. So I think there are resources in language to deal with this.
I think you've stop trying.
Talk of similarity and difference could be extended to the level of the genus "Cosmos". But here we are talking just of the already highly constrained genus of "Feline".
It can thus be taken for granted that "my dead cat Ollie" is not a gas cloud undergoing explosive fusion, or something you would need a microscope or particle accelerator to interrogate.
Biggest laugh of the day. But whatever keeps your spirits up sunshine. :)
We know we are living, otherwise we would not be able to say we are living, right? And it would make no sense to speak about living well, if we didn't know we are living. So what kind of additional thing do you think we would need to know about what it means to live, in order to enquire into what it means to live well? Can you give some examples of the kind of thing you have in mind?
Perhaps I'm not a Deleuzean specialist, but I can recognize a potential contradiction when I see it.
Quoting StreetlightX
This appears contradictory, because as I understand "real", to be real is to be actual. Of course we can redefine 'real" so that it is not necessary to be actual in order to be real. But what's the point? We are talking about "becoming" here, which is clearly an activity. If we describe "becomings" as relations, and now we introduce a real relation which is not actual, this new relation is not a "becoming". So we admit that "becoming" is not the broader term than "relation", relations which are not becomings may be prior to relations which are becomings, and we have defeated the primacy of becoming.
Deleuze has produced the very same deficiency (from a different angle) which Apokrisis insists on. Apokrisis claims that time is emergent. But emerging is an activity which necessarily requires time. So we are faced with the contradictory position, that emerging is occurring when there is no time for its emergence. In other words, we have becoming, an activity, which is without time. That is because time has become a spatial dimension in apo's relativistic principles. Apo wants time to emerge from space-time.
This is the problem with Pythagorean Idealism which was exposed by Plato. Spatial relations are understood by geometrical constructions, which are understood by mathematical relations. Spatial relations are conceived of as changing in time, mathematical relations are not allowed (conceptually) to change in time. This supports the unchanging, "eternal" Ideas of idealism. The flaw in this position, as demonstrated by Plato, is within the very nature of ideas. If Ideas are eternal, they are inherently passive, as that which is partaken of. If they are not eternal, then they are actively developed by human minds, and are instances of becoming. This constitutes the prelude to Aristotle's cosmological argument, where he argues that anything eternal must be actual, effectively denying the possibility of eternal ideas. We should consider the cosmological argument, in its original form, as the argument which gives primacy to becoming, by giving primacy to actuality. Becoming, as an activity (therefore actual) may now be conceived of as prior to all mathematical relations which are conceived of as passive and unchanging.
The human approach to ontological reality has been to analyze spatial relations, deriving mathematical and geometrical relations. Then the human beings attempted to establish compatibility between these relations and time, mathematical relations forming an eternal backdrop, to represent an absolutely consistent "time", upon which geometrical changes are mapped. Because the mathematical relations are those which render the changes in spatial relations intelligible, the human being has given priority to the mathematical relations, rather than the 'time", which the mathematical order represents. But this is to neglect the true back drop which is the temporal order of becoming. Now human beings should see themselves as faced with the task of associating mathematical relations directly to time, with respect for the most simple property of becoming, "order", to determine how spatial relations emerge from the backdrop of temporal order.
No, we can say whatever we like, without actually knowing what we are saying. And if we can convince others to accept what we are saying, then what has been said is justified. But the fact that what has been said has been justified does not mean that what has been said is known.
Quoting John
You can make an example out of any activity. Suppose you want to describe what it means to behave well, don't you need to define what it means to behave first? How about eating? Suppose you want to say what it means to eat well, don't you need to make some specification as to what "eating" is first?
Or instead, emergence IS time, time being what we call a sequence of change or development.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Well I would want a model of thermal or thick time that is consistent with the theory of relativity. And spacetime really is a thing in physics, despite your horror of all metaphysics that is post Newtonian.
But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. The abstraction is not the same as the thing it is abstracted from. A metre is not the same as a thing which is a metre long. If our only means for measuring change and development is change and development itself, then we are trapped within the vagueness of self-reference.
Quoting apokrisis
If you could show me a way past the contradictions I've indicated, then perhaps I wouldn't be so adamant that the description of the relationship between space and time produced by special relativity is fundamentally flawed. But it isn't the fact that this relationship is fundamentally flawed, which is horrifying, as it is a very useful relation in many applications. It is the fact that the vast masses of humanity accept this relation as ontologically sound, without referencing ontologically sound principles, which horrifies me.
So for Peirce, actuality is a process, an eternal coming-to-be. It can be talked about as being monistically "one relation". And it also "starts" with a monism in the grounding notion of Firstness, or Vagueness. But through a principle of incompossibilty - not everything that might want to be, can be, because it clashes and contradicts in a way that suppresses its actualisation - it describes how regulation or constraint emerges to organise a world bound by habits.
So similarity or generality emerges to organise difference itself. Vagueness is not nothingness, but chaotic everythingness - unbounded fluctuation without structure. In Deleuzean fashion (it seems), vagueness is multiplicity - but more than multiplicity as it includes even the actions that coming-to-be must suppress (through incompossibility).
Vagueness is thus an ultimate kind of difference - the difference of an infinity of disconnected impulses that sum to nothing.
And then from that chaos you have developing the regularity of actuality. The raw energy falls into dissipative patterns as the wildness of possibility falls away and the sum over possibility - the least action path - emerges. Difference changes character so that now it is regulated and well behaved - repetitive in the way that properties and attributes are the developed habits of concrete beings. Development ends up producing a classical world of atomistic material objects at play within a blank void - the spacetime backdrop that is all those other now well-suppressed fluctuations or opportunities for action.
So that is the triad. Vagueness is every possible difference (and thus a state of utter indifference and lack of constraint). But as soon as differences start to react against each other (the Secondness that follows Firstness), you get a collective or emergent effect. Some differences cancel each other away, other differences reinforce each other by feedback. (This is all standard non-linear physics or chaos theory.) And so in short time you have the beginnings of self-organising global regularity or generality.
As with the water draining out of your bath, a vortex begins as a slight suggestion of a symmetry breaking. In the beginning, the twist could be to the left of the right. Both are going to be happening - it doesn't make any difference which way the symmetry breaks. But the breaking of the symmetry - spin left or spin right - then makes a big actual difference. It quickly locks itself in, completely suppressing its "other" as an accidental fact of history.
In Peircean terms, the world (or the draining bathwater) is now ruled by the Thirdness of persistent habit. But Thirdness itself is a monism in that it incorporates Secondness and Firstness. We are talking about the wholeness of a relation. So just because there is one symmetry breaking that gets things started doesn't mean that the new state (this singularity, as SX terms it after the notion of a phase transition) can't break again.
Vague potential will still remain within the system. Reaction could set in. A higher level of organisation could break out that regularises this grounding action, gives it shape, turns it into a repetitively generated action that constructs a more complex state of habit or law.
Biophysics shows how life and mind arise as that kind of further semiosis. The "vortexes" of chemico-physical gradients can be harnessed and turned into the complex hierarchies that are bodies with cells and organs.
Anyway, it is foolish to talk of doing away with similarity to found metaphysics on "pure difference". Instead we must recover difference from difference by way of similarity. Vague difference (that is of course not even a difference, being a differencing lacking any relations) must be turned into crisp difference by a general relation (a habit of constraint, a principle of least action) that sorts difference into its various forms of dichotomous actuality. So for instance, we can speak with definiteness of differences that are purposeful versus those that are accidental.
So Deleuze gets some things right. If we are going to make something fundamental, it has got to be process, change or development. Plato needs to be inverted to make sense.
But then just to invert is only half the story. It is the invertibility of all things that is the foundational relation. So really, Being is still founded on stasis. It is just that it is equally founded in flux. While your metaphysics has to explicitly include an axis of development (as in the vague~crisp), it also has to have within itself a matching axis of "equilibrium balance" (as in the stable local~global, or part~whole, hierarchical structure that Thirdness describes).
So Deleuze makes the mistake of simply "othering" to arrive at a reductionist monism. And the error can be seen in that he ends up - like Plato - lacking the resources to account for how differencing actually happens. Plato could only say rather weakly that matter ends up "participating" in the ideal forms to achieve an imperfect repetition of similarity. Deleuze - as channeled by SX - is burbling something about virtuality as the (Platonic sounding) multiplicity which generates difference as its eternally different actuality.
The Peircean view places differencing - or dichotomisation, or the secondness of reaction - in the middle of a hierarchical sandwich. It is the individuated or particularised actuality that arises from vagueness - possibility in its rawest sense - in interaction with generality or habit, the emergent order which provides the other "eternal" thing of a system of constraints or "transcendent" necessitation.
Well we can count the changes, can't we? Or is "sequence" a notion alien to you?
And the reason we can count changes is because they are locked into as history. When changes stops (when it is equilibrated and looks to change no more) then we can count the change as "being over" and "part of history, not part of the future".
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Merde! The French bureau of standards have a problem with that strip of metal they've got locked up in temperature controlled vault then.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Yep. MU right. Humanity wrong. Sounds legit.
But you don't seem to get that spacetime relativity is God's way of preventing everything happening all at once. It creates the separation between events that is ontically essential for there to be anything interesting in the form of a "world". If forces acted instantaneously and without dilution across any span of time and distance, where would we all be, hey?
So if you want to talk about sound principles, begin with the fact that physical action needs to have an interesting structure. Things must divide and connect, differentiate and integrate. There must be separation, but only relatively speaking.
Right, I agree and I would not say it is of little consequence per se, I just can't, for the life of me. see its broader philosophical significance. I allow that it may be I cannot see the latter due to my lack of familiarity with the arcane subject matter, but I think it is more likely the problem with such material is that it cannot be expressed in sufficiently simple terms such that it can be understood by the intelligent lay person.
Understanding in this context always seems to be reliant on complex, hard to penetrate webs of academic reference, and I am not willing to spend the time to acquire the requisite familiarity, because I fear the intellectual effort would not be sufficiently repaid. Having said this SX probably just wishes to engage those who are familiar enough with the material to understand his points, so I can see where my opinion would be quite irrelevant to him. I probably should not have weighed in on it in the first place.
Apparently unlike you MU, I already know what living and eating are, I do them every day. I also have ideas about what it means to eat and live well, but I admit it is an ongoing, open-ended enquiry. I think I am well on the way, but I also think that if I had begun with your assumptions then I could never have set foot on the road.
You haven't presented the examples I asked for, either.
When we count a repetitive change, to provide us with a notion on passed time, there is an assumption that each repetition takes the same amount of time.
Quoting apokrisis
To represent the cause of separation as "spacetime" is what I affirm is a mistake. This doesn't properly distinguish the role of time from the role of space. In other words we neglect the principles which differentiate (temporal) "order" from (spatial) "relation". Order already assumes separation, and relation already assumes order. So separation must be first, then (temporal) order, then (spatial) relation. Notice that the primary separation is therefore not a spatial separation.
And (tricky ain't it?) this compossible variety is itself dualised into the purposeful and the accidental. There are the acts that are desired by telos - even if it is the dilutest possible form of constraint in the being the second law's desire to entropify. And then there is - by mutual definition - all the other compossibilities that are beneath the notice of any such active law or constraint. I can buy a blue car or a red car. It makes no real difference to anything really.
Anyway, can we make any sense of the Deleuzean project to reduce existence to bare difference? Clearly - as a self-proclaimed inversion of Plato - it as least foregrounds the "other" to constraining sameness. And so it is going to sound Peircean in at least also taking difference or development as fundamental.
SX is hopeless at explaining the actual machinery that might link virtual differencing (this frozen sounding multiplicity) to actual "almost repeating" difference. It is dangerous for him to even to attempt an explanation of course as the whole metaphysic project will immediately unravel. He will start to have to talk about the dichotomous othering that is used to achieve a reductionist monism. And once you start talking openly about dichotomies, well that leads to the inevitable triadicity of a hierarchically organised relation. Holism has arrived and your dreams of monistic finality have just gone up in smoke.
So how do others handle this. I'll look at Todd May's "Gilles Deleuze, Difference, and Science" - www3.nd.edu/~hps/May=Deleuze.doc
We start - as is PoMo convention - with wisdom as paradox. We know we are really being deep when our very words contradict themselves.
Then fair enough, the issue is to get away from tales of transcendent perfect order to talk about the "imperfect" immanent order that can arise via self-differentiation (and self-integration of course). For Deleuze, this is achieved in Spinozian univocity (noting Peirce was also a big fan of Duns Scotus for the same reason).
Now note two bum notes in this reading of univocity. Already we are lapsing back into substance talk - the ontology of form materially actualised. And we are setting up an illegitimate grounds for rejecting the eternal "other".
Dichotomies are being read as always having to generate a good guy and a bad guy as thesis and antithesis. But it is a bad dichotomy that does that rather than producing two generalities that are of equal (because necessarily complementary) status. Instead of focusing on what makes a good dichotomy (as I do), this is clearing the ground to reject dichotomies in toto.
Then the sensible question...
Yes indeedy. Where is the mechanism that connects? (In Peirceanism, it is semiosis.)
And here the beginnings of a bad answer.
So now we are talking from the point of view of actuality - already formed materiality, or substance.
Yes, it does make sense in the usual Aristotelean fashion in that substance is actuality with attributes and properties. A dog has the characteristics of its species. It has that family resemblance than means it is quite liable to chew your shoes, piss on your fencepost, slobber on your carpet.
But this is metaphyics and the question is how does substantial being itself become? How does it develop as informed or constrained materiality? And therefore, how do we account for the sameness that is form, the difference which is material haecceity?
Peirceanism explains them by putting them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Materiality is brute firstness or potential. Form is the regularity imposed by the seiving necessity of compossibility. Each is placed at sufficient distance from the other for them to have a formally inverse or reciprocal relation. (Remember, form = 1/material, and material = 1/form.)
Anyway, this indicates why SX wants to treat the virtual as itself a species of substance. Which is also then why he cannot in fact explain anything in terms of some actual developmental relation. Difference becomes just a property of a higher level notion of substantial being. Repetition is as repetition does.
Luckily May is alert to these issue. An urgent paradox arises....
The day is saved by capitalisation - or dichotomisation that conceals its "othering" by using the same term, just discretely denoting generality by using a big B (while continuing blithely to undermine generality's ontic connection to formal cause by treating Being as already formed Univocal Substance!).
Then follows a Bergsonian analysis of time vs space which we can skip as I sort of agree. Let's get on to where there is some attempt to account for an interaction between virtuality of differencing and actual substantial differences. ;)
OK. So does this work, anyone?
The virtual contains the structure that produces difference. Then material difference is what gets actualised.
So far, so Platonic.
But then the virtual is a substance. It "actualises itself". So not only is the virtual the general form or the general structure of difference-generation, it seems to possess its own material means too.
Where I would have a more traditional conception of the virtual as a principle of formal necessity - expressing the telos of the least action principle in interaction with the material restriction that is the complementary principle of generalised compossibility - Deleuze wants simply a tale of a "ground difference" that substantially exists as a generating mechanism (a hopper complete with the materiality to fulfil its desires) and only needs to be turned on so that it starts spitting out actual instances bearing a family resemblance to the originating seed (or - snort - rhizome).
So we see why SX strains so hard to find a generating seed difference in calculus. Materiality is the obvious issue for this Deleuzean scheme (as it is for all metaphysical schemes I agree - even Peirceanism). If you duck into maths - the science of patterns, the conjuring with pure immaterial forms - then you can simply sideline the very issue that your metaphysics must address. You can appear to be speaking about substantial actuality when really - in shifting into the register of the model - you most definitely ain't.
(How does Peirceanism answer the foundational question of materiality or primal action - the question of "why anything?". Well as I say, it doesn't in the final analysis. But it does make it explicit that it is a different kind of question and does not try to subsume in into a substance ontology like SX/Deleuze. Instead, it set it out apophatically - it approaches it via a model of vagueness or firstness.)
OK, so having emphasised some differences, let's look for some reconciliations....
Again, this is utterly wrong ( :) ) from a fully holistic point of view - the synchronic view of a development of regularity out of vagueness. But it is - in Aristotelean hylomorphic fashion - quite reasonable once understood diachronically as a slice across temporal development (so as a slice not across a moment in time, as such, but across the transition from vague to crisp "coming into being").
Once substantial being arises, it can of course host further development in the usual hierarchically complex fashion. Physics - in closing off one set of possibilities or differences, as it does with describing some universal telos like entropification - then itself creates the further possibility of its own counter-action. In the case of life and mind - or even just dissipative structure in general - that reaction is of course negentropy as a counter-telos.
But anyway, this hierarchical logic holds as a generality. It is precisely the system's take of constraints and the further freedoms they can't help but create. In - via compossibility - imposing a limit on free variety, that produces the now far more definitely defined freedoms which can start to do their next level of interacting and habit formation.
So yes. Examine reality at any particular level (look at it either side of some "singularity" or symmetry breaking critical point) and you will find that substantial being is "intrinsically" dual. An object is both a species of a genus (it has attributes due to a context), and it itself possesses further properties or freedoms of actions (as that is why we would indeed distinguish it as a concrete object - it has been transformed into the context for new happenings, or novelties.)
But what do you do when faced with the need to make substantial Being univocally fundamental still....
...you quietly change the spelling of the word just a little bit to hide how big an explanatory gap you want your fanboys to vault.
A proper dichotomy is one that openly proclaims the absoluteness of its reciprocal transformations.
If you invert the continuous, you bloodly well get the discrete. You don't just get the discontinuous, let alone the continious, or some other rat-swallowing circumlocution. You get an upfront assertion of a proper categorical difference.
Oh hold up! Not triadicism to the rescue?
Does this sound like 1) vague difference - the raw possibility, 2) reactive difference - actual particulars now having actual reactions, and 3) habitual difference - the stably broken asymmetry of a hierarchically developed organisation between globalised or general differencing vs localised or particular differences to you?
Well yes indeedy. Got there backwards, but that is now where this line of thought has arrived.
I think we can leave it there for the moment. SX - being the tough samurai kid he is - is probably doing the honorable thing of self-evisceration right about now.
Yes. And....? (I mean if that's how we design a clock, then what else do we expect?)
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But I said that the requirement for separation is the cause of spacetime.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
We've been through this a thousand times. Separation does come first. Time and space (or change vs stasis) is then what separation looks like.
You are just doing the very thing you complain of in reducing your notion of "separation" to "not being spatial separation". Your attempted apophatic definition of temporal separation in terms of not being "a spatial separation" ends up resting on a spatialised notion of separation as its primary distinction.
That is why I prefer to make vagueness primary. In immanent fashion, it avoids that error of metaphysical reasoning.
I missed this. You're wrong because the Peircean system is a hypothesis set up counterfactually. If it fails to accord with nature, then nature will make that plain.
So for instance a prediction of Peircean metaphysics is that the universe and its laws evolve. Peirce actually suggested experiments to measure the curvature of space as Euclidean flatness shouldn't be taken Platonically for granted. And his whole philosophy - based on a metaphysics of propensities - foreshadowed the current quantum probabilistic conception of nature.
So sure, the metaphysical model has pleasing completeness in comparison to other schemes. It is much more mathematically definite in what it claims. And by the same token, that makes it empirically testable. It could be wrong - where the majority of metaphysics ought to be dismissed as the "not even wrong".
As I said, the fact that you do something doesn't produce the logical conclusion that you know what you're doing. The cold temperature makes the water freeze. It really does this. But that doesn't mean that the cold knows what it is doing, So I think that you and I are on distinctly different roads. And, please look back, because I've already given you the examples you've asked for.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, if we assume that there is consistency in the amount of time that it takes for the repetition to occur, then the "amount of time" is something other than the repetition itself. Therefore time is something other than the repeated change, it is derived from it.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually you very distinctly said that spacetime is God's way of causing the separation.
Quoting apokrisis
How would you conclude this? If the temporal separation is only determinable by us through the means of a spatial separation, how does this produce the logical conclusion that a temporal separation is necessarily a spatial separation?
Quoting apokrisis
Isn't this exactly what you do, "duck" into the symmetries necessitated by the general theory of relativity?
Quoting apokrisis
I've said this numerous times already in this thread, what is required here is a description, not a dichotomy. We can only proceed to the dichotomy after we derive the description, because we first need to make a designation of what it is , before we can determine what it is not. Any random designation of "it is not this.." could be wrong if we have not first made a designation of what it is. So the description "what it is" is prior to any dichotomy. Therefore if you are looking for any sort of "absoluteness" it will be found in the description rather than in the dichotomy, which is a function of the description.
Maybe I've misunderstood you, but I had the sense your model includes not just the world, but thought itself. Indeed, the two are inextricably bound together. The only we can think or make reasonable statements is is because thinking and reason are very precisely constrained, by the same whirling hierachical recriprocally-constrained processes and principles that govern everything.
So the very process of registering something as falsifying would operates according to those rules. But to integrate the falsification, to see that the model is wrong, would be to try to think outside of the very constraints necessary to thinking/reasoning, in other words it would be to not think at all. It would be as senseless as trying to think becoming without thinking being.
Do you see what I mean?
It explains things like the very fact that our models of the world are not driven by the kind of philosophical completeness that you hold up as the only criteria. Modelling is Pragmatic.
And so right there again is the counterfactuality. You may not have framed your opinions in that fashion, but I have.
It could be the case that brains evolved to faithfully re-present the noumenal. So phenomenology becomes some sort of knowledge failure.
Or it could be the case that phenomenonolgy - the world reduced to bare signs - is precisely the way that minds ought to work. That is, semiotically.
Given two sharply contrasting paradigms, my approach can positively compare itself to others - even the shrill hermeticism of the circle SX is won't to form wiith himself. :)
Amazing, clocks and rulers measure space and time and yet only take up some interval of space or time. One would almost think that signs of things were not the things themselves. What inspired insight.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
I was very distinctly being facetious. Its an old joke in physics.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Who said it was a spatial separation. Isn't it an energetic one? Doesnt quantum physics take time and energy as the two complementary operators of an uncertainty relation for that reason? Doesn't time stop for a body travelling at light speed while its energy density goes reciprocally to infinity?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
But as I say, I don't pretend that this explains the material side of the deal, only the ontic structure of reality. Of course suitably advanced physics might even explain matter by maths. But everyone who does even string theory knows the matter fields still have to be inserted into the compactified dimensions by hand. They don't fall out of the maths as yet.
.Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Again this is just you not getting the logic of a dichotomy - what if means to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.
True, you can do something and be totally unconscious of doing it, as the cold temperature presumably is when it freezes water. But I am conscious of living at least some of the time, therefore at those times I know I am living. Undoubtedly we are on very different roads, mine is a road I know I have set foot on, yours apparently is not a road you do not know you have set foot on.
Also I don't believe you have given me the examples I asked for. Perhaps you didn't know what it means to give examples, perhaps you need to know what it means before you can do it, and certainly before you can do it well. If you really have given the examples, though, please cut and paste them for me to peruse.
I believe that's an improper representation. Clocks and rulers do not measure space and time, human beings measure space and time using clocks and rulers as tools. The abstracted ideas "space" and "time", exist within the human minds. This is what you continually neglect, and overlook in your semiotic descriptions, the necessity for a human mind. So until you can demonstrate how these acts of measuring can occur without a living creature which is actively measuring, your semiotic explanations are unintelligible and most probably simple fictions, produced in an attempt to support an untenable position, just like Whitehead's prehension and concrescence are.
Quoting apokrisis
No, there is no time operator in quantum mechanics. The time-energy uncertainty relation is neglected by quantum physics in favour of the Heisenberg uncertainty relation. Von Neumann could not find a way to make time an observable, which was necessary in order to make time an operator. This means that quantum mechanics is inapplicable in the domain of a very high energy in a very small space, due to an inability to deal with the time-energy uncertainty.
Quoting apokrisis
So what kind of an ontology is that then, if you have no approach to the material aspect of existence? If all you are doing is describing physical existence in terms of structures or forms, then all you are doing is physics. And since you've strayed outside the institutional discipline of physics, what you are doing is bad (undisciplined) physics.
The op specifically directs us toward the primacy of becoming. If the material aspect is apprehended as primary, then we must approach that material aspect as active in "becoming". If your approach can only bring us toward an understanding of structures which have become, then we need to find a new approach, for the sake of the op, which wants to get at the primary becoming.
Quoting apokrisis
Is this meant to be insulting? Concentrate on the principles, understand them for yourself, that is what the discipline of philosophy is directed toward. Don't accept the lazy man's attitude of "if everyone says so it must be the case". Until you recognize the weakness of this attitude, you will never recognize how often it is that "everyone" is wrong. See, the vast majority are followers, the leaders are few and far between.
Quoting apokrisis
Actually, I think this is you not getting it. The primary description must be prior to any logic of dichotomy. The logic of dichotomy must be applied to something, material content, and this material content is the primary description. The primary description is not confined by any logic of dichotomy, and that is why we can have competing descriptions of the very same thing. "Competing descriptions" is a function of perspective, "point of view". The principle called "relativity of simultaneity" demonstrates this very well, the importance of the point of view. If the point of view were dichotomous, then it would be impossible to establish compatibility between multiple points of view, different points of view would be mutually exclusive. Each point of view would exclude all others. However, experience has indicated to us that we can establish compatibility between multiple points of view, and this indicates that different points of view are not mutually exclusive. Therefore the point of view is not to be understood as dichotomous. So it is clearly a mistake to insist that the primary description must be restricted by the logic of dichotomy. It is only when we seek compatibility between multiple points of view that the logic of dichotomy is applied. It is applied to determine what is not proper to a point of view, i.e. to exclude what is impossible, as not proper to any point of view. But this cannot be done from one point of view. Therefore it would be mistaken to produce a dichotomy from a single point of view.
The primary description, as derived from a point of view is something passive though, a described state, as observed from a particular point of view. To understand the primary becoming, we need to see the point of view as active.
Quoting John
Consider what I just wrote to apokrisis in the preceding paragraph, concerning points of view. When we as human beings develop compatibility between what is evident from one's own particular point of view, and that of others, this is called justification of our beliefs. In common epistemology, justification is a necessary requirement for knowledge. So you being "conscious of living" is not sufficient for your claim, "I know I am living", by common epistemological standards. What you are conscious of must be justified before it can qualify as knowledge. This is to mitigate the fact that we can be mistaken in our own interpretations, of our own experiences, in our unified quest for knowledge. So we seek corroboration. That is why I say that before we can say that you know you are living, we need some determination of what it means to be living. Otherwise "living" could refer to anything, and you're simply making things up.
Quoting John
Quoting John
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
In other words, you need to know what "living" is before you can determine what living well is, just like you need to know what "behaving" is before you can determine what behaving well is, or you need to know what "eating" is before you can determine what eating well is. That is the "additional thing" you need to know, what exactly do these terms refer to. For example, how you define "eating" dictates what "eating well" means. If you define it as putting food in your mouth and swallowing it, then the person who is capable of doing lots of this will be eating well. If you define eating as providing your body with the nutrients required for subsistence, then eating well means something completely different. Likewise, depending on how you define "living", "living well" will have a variety of different meanings.
I was asking for an example of the kinds of additional things you imagine we might come to know, such that we could then know that we did not previously know we had been living, and that we now know we are living and also know that we know that we are living.
If all you want are "specifications", as with your example of eating, then we can already do that with living just as we can with eating. You know, we are living when we have been born, are breathing, our hearts are beating, we are experiencing sensations, feelings, even emotions, desires and thoughts and so on. What other different kind of knowledge do you imagine we could possibly have that would tell us more about our living, or more extremely, enable us to know we are living, when according to you we don't currently know this?
Yeah. So why do I/semiosis call it a "sign"? In what way is that ignoring observers rather than invoking them?
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Really? Or do you just mean that it doesn't completely work out because in the end, Newtonian continuous time is something QM has to assume as its backdrop. So the fact that there is indeed - empirically - an uncertainty relation is further evidence against the correctness of the Newtonian conception.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
How is a model of vagueness as unbounded action not an approach? I'm just not over-claiming about what in the end explanation might achieve.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Uh, yeah. Nah. You've given an accurate description of the typical crank.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Who calls this an example of a metaphysical dichotomy apart from you?
The observer is making a judgement about a pair of events (so that's three things already). And the observer could now have "any" momentum - which is a new lack of constraint on "material content" that leads to the viewpoint being a "relative" variable.
So yes. You are showing you really, really, don't get it.
I can't see how anything in your post is at all relevant to anything I've said. In fact, I had a difficult time finding any relevance in your last post. Now it appears like you have interpreted what I've said in a way completely different from what I meant, and I believe that I may have interpreted what you said in a way completely different from what you meant, in order that such a confusion has been created. In any case it's obvious to me that we are now referring to completely different things. One, or both of us, is not making the required effort to understand the other. Disinterest is not conducive to good discussion.
I don't understand your question then. My point is that to know that you are living, you must know what "living" means. The "additional things" then are the necessary and sufficient conditions for "living".
Quoting John
But how are these the necessary and sufficient conditions for living? Plants live, but they are not born, nor do they breathe, they have no hearts, nor sensations, feelings, emotions or desires. How is it possible that these things are the things which indicate to you that you are living, when plants are living yet they have none of these things?
Give me strength...
A dichotomy opposes generality against generality. So it is not about the other thing which is the hierarchical division between the general and the particular, or the universal and the singular.
So when it comes to viewpoints, the dichotomous contrast here would be between the notions of the one and the many, or the fixed and the variable.
The Newtonian view presumes one fixed spatiotemporal backdrop. The Relativistic view presumes as many variable backdrops as you like (because now, under relativity, local mass is what breaks the symmetry and fixes "some point of view").
So where's the dichotomy? If each one is the same as each other, then there is no dichotomy between the one and the many. We are talking "generality against generality", so you cannot make the one a particular and the many a generality to create your dichotomy. Consider numbers for example, let 1 represent the one, and 4 represent the many. How is there a dichotomy between 1 and 4? Now apply this to the following generality, a point of view. Whether there is one point of view, two points of view, or five billions points of view, how would you derive a dichotomous difference? The only potential dichotomy I can see here would be between something which is a point of view, and something which is not a point of view. But to create this dichotomy we need a description of what a point of view is.
Why should it be thought that the "necessary and sufficient conditions" for plants to live would be the same as those for a human? That seems obviously ridiculous! Are you seriously interested in sensible discussion? :-}
OK, if you're having difficulty with my English, I'll say that you've denied that there is a dichotomy between "general" and "particular" by saying that they are both generalities. Can you apprehend that? By say that the particular is a generality you have denied that there is a dichotomy between the particular and the general.
The problem with your metaphysical perspective is that you are claiming that "difference" must be fundamentally understood in terms of dichotomy. Then you make statements like that, which deny that there is a dichotomy, yet claim that there is a difference, and you leave yourself unable to understand what you have said. If you would allow yourself to understand difference in terms other than dichotomy, then you wouldn't have so much difficulty with Deleuze's "repetition".
Well if they are not the same thing, then when we say that a plant lives, and that a human being lives, we are talking about two distinctly different activities and using the very same word, "lives" to refer to those distinct activities. I'm not prepared to make that concession. I believe that living is something which plants and human beings have in common. That is what I learned in biology, and it is inherently tied to the theory of evolution. Therefore if we are going to state what it means to live, I think it should be something which both plants and animals do.
If you want to define "living" by referring to things which only animals do, then you deny plants from the category of the living. Then we would have to create a new definition of living, such as self-moving, or self-nourishing, or self-subsisting, so we can say that plants live too. But if animals do this as well, then why not just adopt this as the definition of "living", so that all things which are living are doing the same thing under that name? Then we avoid the ambiguity of "living" referring to something different for different species. Then the things which you mentioned could be specialized forms of living.
My position seems "obviously ridiculous" to you, but your position seems obviously ridiculous to me. Is it possible to reconcile?
Idiotic. THAT particular is A particular, but THE particular is A generality. It's basic grammar - the dichtotomy of the definite and indefinite article.
It seems to me that under your way of consideration, living is an entirely abstract virtually empty concept. 'What does it means to live?' is an empty question unless it is given some context. 'What does it mean for a whale to live?', 'What does it mean for a bacteria to live?' 'What does it mean for a human to live?'. Obviously what it means for a human to live will have more in common with it means for a whale to live that it will with what it means for a bacterium or a plant to live. What it means for me to live and what it means for you to live will not be exactly the same but the two will have more in common than either will with what it means for a whale to live.
Is there one essential quality that all living things possess such that we can say that if we know that,we will know what it means to live, per se? Probably not. But why would we need to know such an abstract essence anyway in order to know what it means for a person to live well? And what use would it be? Although there would certainly be some general principles in common, what it means for me to live well and what it means for you to live well will not be the same. So obviously this must be determined by each for him or herself; it is not an abstract enquiry at all, which would seem to be what you are attempting to characterize it as.
Don't you see yet? To create any kind of moral standards, which I am assuming is what you mean by "live well", (to live ethically), we need to establish some principles of equality. What kind of moral ethics are you considering, if, for you to live well, is something different than, for me to live well?
Quoting John
I do not think that this description of "to live well" would be acceptable to any moralist at all. Are you really claiming that each of us should determine for oneself what living well is? What about the thief, the rapist, and the murderer? Should all these people determine for oneself what living well is? If not, then why should you and I get to determine for ourselves what living well is, but these people should not?
You keep talking as if you think that I am looking toward some ridiculous ideality, some pie in the sky abstraction, but it's really just basic morality, the foundation of equal rights. You seem insistent on making morality unintelligible. Each person should determine for oneself what living well is? Come on, should we burn all the laws, demolish the courthouses, and disband all the police forces as well?
Obviously no one who wants to live well with others (and not as a hermit, for example) will do unwarranted harm to other members of his community, because it will cause them to hate him or her, and he or she will consequently be unable to live well. This is just commonsense.
On the other hand the details of what it means to live well must differ from person to person. I do not live well if I love playing music and hate football, and yet play football, and fail to play music. For you it might be the other way around. Again, this is just commonsense. To live well we must develop phronesis, the practical wisdom that enables us to know how to organize our lives to maximize our creative potential. It is not a matter of slavishly following moral rules. For many individuals there are unique needs for exceptions to moral rules.
This doesn't mean that laws or the justice system should be abolished. The law is one thing and moral rules are another; they should not be conflated.