If there is nothing much in particular at stake, then we can all gather around the campfire and sing Kumbaya. Differences of opinion can be shown to b...
Yep. The Ted Sider paper references some of these. So my point is that structural realism is either guilty as charged - it fudges the issue on relata....
If you bothered to read with care, you would see the claim is that some changes make a difference and others don't. And if you understood physics, you...
Genes, neurons, words, numbers. The basis of a symbolic modelling relation aren’t a secret. So what goal is served such that it “works”? In what sense...
You mean that obscure theory about all the many ways to arrange some system that are differences that don’t make a difference? When a system arrives a...
But my claim is that nature fails to limit those differences - they are simply accidents that don't change anything - while your claim is that nature ...
What is it about the physical interacting that meets a definition of working and a definition of system? And when do you start talking about processes...
Because it doesn't care enough about preventing differences. Of course you do. If you learnt to stand the right way round, everything might look the r...
No it bloody isn't. The psychological process produces the difference between a "self" and a "world". That is the function. To become an agent by gain...
A perception is an act of measurement. A conception is the theory being tested. The whole of this would constitute the psychological function that is ...
It is Bateson. Cybernetics was biosemiotics back in the 1950s. But a difference that matters fundamentally or a difference that is instead fundamental...
The issue is how we view a "mind". And the contrast here is between viewing it as some kind of process or instead as some kind of property. Is "substa...
What you want to say isn't very clear. But I guess it boils down to a panpsychic claim that there is such a thing as "the mind" and our minds particip...
If facts are definite things, then they would have to obtain by being judged in terms of some metaphysical strength dichotomy. We would need an essent...
Yes. Metaphysically what matters is that process thinking sees instability as fundamental, and atomistic thinking sees stability as fundamental. So bo...
Good post. I agree it is about finding the (pragmatist) middle path. So in my simple-minded way, the debate is about the interaction between the forma...
My argument is that conception and perception would be the two extremes of the one process. To speak of one versus the other is merely to highlight th...
But where is any connection to Hoffman's computational idealism? Then as to algebra and geometry, I don't buy evolutionary contingency as the explanat...
So who is defending a reductionist notion of utilitarianism? I was arguing in favour of the irreducible holism of pragmatism. Sure. Atomism reigns. Bu...
Of course. Animals don't have a linguistically-structured conception of the world - so one that reflects a higher level social organisation. But they ...
They are formed apophatically. They arise as the opposed choices of some dichotomy. And then they are proved "true" retrospectively because the system...
What I questioned was your notion of "experience of a world". If you accept that experience is an Umwelt - conceptually structured from the get-go, th...
Naive realists are always saying that. They like to under-think the metaphysical complexities. Oh please. I press hard on the desk with my finger. I p...
I'm trying to say something more subtle. I am saying that number - the general thing of construction or composition - is emergent rather than basic. B...
Same old, same old. Semiosis says what you "experience" is your Umwelt. Sure, the "world" must stand in back of that as a noumenal constraint, some ki...
Sure. That was the surprising new thing. Human thought could be organised by this new kind of logical structure. Maths cashed out a fully constrained,...
I'm baffled by your reply. What else did you think I said? And where yet did you say anything useful about the nature of this "energy density" which y...
Sure. Two stakes were stuck in the ground. And so suddenly the landscape had your chosen metric imposed on it. Yeah. But what I was arguing is that yo...
A train journey is a substantial act. So it is hylomorphically intantiated. My point is that we can unpack this in a general fashion by abstracting aw...
Is it just that? The claim would be that it is some quantity of something. So the structuralism of the maths still leaves open the question of how to ...
Sure. Relativity falls out of the greater symmetry that results from switching from a distance preserving metric to an interval preserving metric. We ...
Rather than imagining counting train journeys, what about counting holes in a sphere. There is something perfect and absolute about the distinction be...
But there seems to be an obvious lack of a material principle in the formal realm of maths. Maths is spatial, or at best, spatiotemporal, and doesn't ...
Yep. Constraints act top-down. But the tricky part - which the maths of hierarchy theory realises! - is that the causality has to go both ways. There ...
Yep. The issue is that reality and maths can seem very far apart when one is being understood in terms of the physics of constraints and the other is ...
Yep. So one is the view I would be arguing for, the other would be the one I would be arguing against. Stability was not my stated premise. It was the...
This was your original point. And note how it relies on a notion of "net force". So the Newtonian view already incorporates the kind of holism I'm tal...
So did you study the physics of spontaneous symmetry breaking? Did you get to the bottom of the buckling beam problem and other examples of bifurcatio...
My OP was explicitly directed at the issue of spontaneous symmetry breaking where the situation is so unstable that any old accident is going to produ...
You missed the point. Read what I wrote and reply to what I wrote. The framework is Aristotelian. Material/efficient causes are being opposed to forma...
It is not that they can't be identified. It is that the identification would miss the causal point. It is the inability to suppress fluctuations in ge...
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