my point was only that we have no alternative to the laws themselves to focus our investigations; — Janus

Agreed. We have to identify the invariances as the essential features of the landscape. They start as the surprises in need of an explanation.

Which again gets back to the fact that brain's operate inductively. For nature's regularity to be such a surprising fact - something we could even notice - we would have had to have been expecting something rather different.

There is a tendency for "just so" stories. Everything becomes an instinct rather than constructed via the virtual world of concept formation. We have to be careful what to delineate as a true instinct and what is culturally-linguistically based in our behaviors and habit-formations. We are so ready to place ourselves as "just another animal" that we often overlook the complicated way that linguistic-minds shape us. Let me add, I am very much a naturalist in terms of science essentially and materialist explanations are what I see to be the best structures of explanation. However, I don't jump the gun in explanations that reduce assumed instinctual behavior into instinct when in fact, it may just be a cultural trope that is so embedded and assumed, it seems like instinct. — schopenhauer1

So the question becomes whether we are still engaged in a generally natural game? Despite developing the new "mind-expanding" thing of conceptual thought, are we still essentially thinking in ways that are being shaped by evolutionary forces?

Your goal of making a metaphysical-strength argument in favour of anti-natalism requires a particular answer on that. So where is the specific evidence?

Now it is the case that being conceptual creatures, we have progressed to the point where even our own existence - individually, or collectively - becomes something we can question the value of.

But then that in turn raises the question of how we value the alternatives that we can imagine?

Is there a way we actually do value them - ie: one that speaks to a practical evolutionary logic. Or some other metaphysics?

So the whole instinct vs cultural deal is waste of time here. We know we are an evolved blend of the two. They have both been constrained by the same general Darwinian forces. Nothing much has changed in terms of the overall game being played.

The question now is have they become unstuck in some meaningful fashion. Have we become so enlightened about certain metaphysical facts that we should volunteer to strike ourselves from the evolutionary record? If that is your case, then present the argument.

Another possibility is that modern culture has predictably reached a super-organismic status. The good old days of small hunter-gather tribes which had a happy collective balance has been surpassed first by agrarian empires, then by industrialised nations, and now by globalised social media. Individuals have been reduced in status in some - arguably - catastrophic fashion where the only logical response is to bring the whole procreating enterprise crashing down.

Again, if that is your case, then make that argument.

But trying to both draw a sharp line between instinctive and encultured behaviour in a way that denies a historic continuity of evolutionary logic is a waste of time. Bad philosophy from the get go.

If you want to argue for the legitimacy of anti-evolutionary ethics, then that is what you should stick to as the focus.

We take these premises on faith simply because there are no viable alternatives; we cannot even begin to imagine what an alternative could look like. — Janus

I would say not quite. The Newtonian breakthrough involved a metaphysical presumption about invariant laws. And now the modern presumption is that all such invariances must be emergent regularities. All the forces of nature are patterns that emerge in self-organising fashion from collective action.

So Newton talked of transcendent laws. Modern physics is aiming at a story of immanently self-organising constraints.

And the two different ontologies map fairly obviously to a generally deductive or computational and deterministic metaphysics, and generally inductive or probabilistic and developmental metaphysics.

So we do have two alternative metaphysics in play. And each would generate its own particular kinds of hypotheses when it comes down to scientific theory.

Its utter pointlessness? I mean, if you've already helped yourself to induction, what's the point of circling back to "justify" it via one of its purported consequences? — SophistiCat

You are not making sense. How does inquiry even get started unless you are willing to hazard the concrete guess that you are then committed to checking via measurement against the reality you are modelling?

What is it that you are attacking here? I can hear your angry noises, but the target of your unhappiness is very unclear.

Even Hume said we reason inductively because that is what is natural to our psychology. So we only "help ourselves to induction" in the sense that we find ourselves already the products of an evolutionary process. We were born to be pragmatically successful at predicting our worlds.

In Hume's day, there wasn't a lot of science to back up that evolutionary view. But now our best models of neurocognition are explicitly Bayesian. We took the hypothesis and ran with it. The results confirmed the guess.

I interpret it to mean that you are in fact a monist. A dialectical monist. Yin-yang philosophy. You want to unite the opposites. Uncontrolled interaction is not enough. There must be a central force, some kind of God, controlling the antagonism. — Magnus Anderson

No controlling hand is needed. The dichotomy or symmetry breaking just goes freely to to its equilibrium balance. It finds its own eventual rest state where it is evenly broken across all scales of being. Hence the final state of a natural system that is just forever freely growing in evenly-paced fashion is going to be fractal. It will have the structure of a scalefree hierarchy.

Hence your focus on trichotomies, triadic conceptual structures. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. The triadic structure is the balanced hierarchical relation that emerges from the symmetry breaking.

A hierarchy represents a state of maximum local~global asymmetry. You have opposing limits of scale appearing as a system develops its own history. It becomes a world organised into the general and the particular, the global constraints or laws and the local degrees of freedom.

You have a center and two extremes. Left, middle and right. — Magnus Anderson

No. The dichotomous extremes are the local and the global. The middle is then the spectrum of scales that span the space (and time) inbetween.

So for instance, the Universe is bounded at one end by the Planck scale, at the other by the cosmic event horizon. Then we humans sit about exactly middle.

So in the case of order~chaos dichotomy, you want to subsume the two to a third category which is basically that of order (which explains why you make a distinction between constraints and patterns or regularities which you say are merely observable.) — Magnus Anderson

Well now this is talking about how the whole thing develops.

So in the beginning - as Peirce describes - it starts with the symmetry of a Firstness or Vagueness. There is just the purest kind of chaos. Unbounded fluctuation.

Then you get secondness as fluctuations start to collide or react with each other in deterministic fashion. You get local events happening.

Then, after some time, you get enough local events happening to start to sort things out and create some kind of common history. You get regular patterns or habits emerging. The system develops a memory. A bunch of random local events start to add up in ways that build a general regulating pattern.

This situation is modelled by scalefree hierarchies. Take a case like the network of world airports. An airport could be freely built anywhere. But as the network starts to grow, it becomes convenient to begin to hub them. You will get certain airports becoming very large as the critical node in larger network. The airport system will develop a clear stratification - a hierarchy of airport sizes that is optimal in terms of achieving a total flow of air-traffic through the system.

So in the beginning, there are just a random scatter of airports all around the same size. By the end, there is a stratified and organised system that emerges in a random fashion to satisfy the general constraint of needing to maximise the flow.

No controlling hand is needed. Just a general constraint of having to optimise the dynamics.

So you're acknowledging the dualism and then reducing it to monism under the guise of trialism. There is chaos but this chaos is subsumed to order. — Magnus Anderson

Nothing is being hidden. But one of the difficult mental changes in gear needed to understand Peirce is that Thirdness is the third stage that incorporates the other two stages. So Thirdness is not monistic but irreducibly triadic. As it says on the box. It is only "monistic" in the sense of being holistic - speaking about the oneness of an irreducibly complex whole.

Monism is usually a substantialist's ontology. It is all about a metaphysics of a single stuff - whether that be materialist stuff or spiritual stuff. So quite different from a Peircean metaphysics where all stuff is the emergent product of an irreducibly triadic process.

Likewise, vagueness of Firstness may sound like a monistic stuff, but it ain't. It sounds like some kind of material being, and yet it can't be that. It is just an unformed potential. Substantial being is what it starts to become - once we get to the dyadicity of Secondness, or brute reaction.

Right, circular reasoning again. Induction -> Science -> Fanciful metaphysics -> Induction. — SophistiCat

What's wrong with a circular argument if it takes the form of the scientific method?

The circle is that of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. So "induction" gets split into the assuming of some hypothesis and then the assessing of the evidence in favour of that hypothesis (or the lack of good reason to doubt it).

The metaphysics is then informed by that. In Peirce's case, it led him to challenge the prevailing ontic determinism of his day. He argued that the logic of how we reason is in fact the logic of how nature itself must develop its regular habits. So that revised metaphysics - one that sees probability and chance as fundamental in nature - becomes then the new hypothesis.

And what do you know? Shortly after, quantum mechanics was born.

*Or you could do something even more convoluted and put your faith into some religious or metaphysical narrative (a la apokrisis) from which the regularity of nature would then fall out. — SophistiCat

So you are saying that the problem of induction doesn’t hinge on the metaphysical assumption that causality may not be invariant? Curious. What other motivation does it have?

And so I simply say go with that same assumption. Permit nature to vary. And then understand it’s apparent invariance in terms of the self organisation of limits.

After all, that is the world as science has found it to be, if you’ve been keeping up.

Yes, I think modern physics makes it seem plausible that invariance is not deterministic, but instead probabilistic; yet it seems that invariance on macro scales does look, for all intents and purposes, deterministic. — Janus

You don't need invariance. You just need a limit on variance. And probability theory models limits on variance.

So i’m Going to suggest that invariance is something of what Sam called a hinge proposition. — Banno

A better "hinge proposition" - as it is gives its own founding reasons - is the view that invariance is the emergent limit to variation.

And from that metaphysics, the reasonableness of inductive inference follows quite naturally.

Induction only needs extra metaphysical bolstering if invariance is taken as the metaphysically fundamental condition. But if your complaint against the invariance of induction is that nothing prevents nature varying, then a view of induction based on the fact that variation itself can suppress variance means induction has no case to answer on that score.

Deduction, on the other hand, has a metaphysical problem once you grant that nature is fundamentally variable.

If people want to have a child, it is a desire just like any other desire. That is to say, it originates with concepts (I, raise, baby, development, nurture, care for, etc.) and concepts are purely in the realm of linguistic-cultural. — schopenhauer1

So all human desires are merely linguistic social concepts?

You seem to have a very deep seated need to argue that this is the case. ;)

Constraint is, as I understand it, simply a limit to what is possible. The opposite of it is freedom. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. Simple really.

The world we live in, in other words, is stable enough to make induction good at making predictions. This makes perfect sense. — Magnus Anderson

Yep. You got it again.

The holographic principle probably explains many things about our brains, which in some ways show signs of being holographic. — Sam26

So the holographic principle - the one that current physics is talking about - is concerned about the fundamental dynamics of spacetime. It speaks to a limit on the information content of a region that is either highly curved, like the event horizon of a black hole, or expanding at light speed, like the Hubble radius of a light cone in a flat expanse of the Universe.

Which of these stories apply to a flesh and blood organ like a brain I wonder. Is a brain more like a black hole or a Hubble region? :-}

What we need to remember about Popper's version of Peirce's triadic modelling relation is of course that Popper makes the leap from merely a psychology of reasoning to claims about a transcendental or objective truth. The signs are cut adrift from their interpretant..

Popper seems to take his three worlds more ontologically seriously than I had assumed. It is more than just a metaphor or a convenient figure of thought. He credits Plato with the discovery of the third world, but differs from him as to it divine origin and claims that it is too restrictive in its scope. The stoics, he recalls, took over the Platonic realm of forms and added to it, not only objects, such as numbers, but relations between them, such as expressed by theorems. Problems too were to be part of it as well.

https://www.researchgate.net/file.PostFileLoader.html?id=59ae71f3ed99e178ec7dd8b6&assetKey=AS%3A535179471343618%401504608137511

That's what I suggested happens in statistical inference. But even there some folk are asserting that stats is based on induction. — Banno

Hmm. You mean like ...

In rejecting Bayesianism and the method of inverse probabilities, Peirce argued that in fact no probability at all can be assigned to inductive arguments. Instead of probability, a different measure of imperfection of certitude must be assigned to inductive arguments: verisimilitude or likelihood. In explaining this notion Peirce offered an account of hypothesis-testing that is equivalent to standard statistical hypothesis-testing. In effect we get an account of confidence intervals and choices of statistical significance for rejecting null hypotheses. Such ideas became standard only in the twentieth century as a result of the work of R. A. Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and others. But already by 1878, in his paper “The Probabilitiy of Induction,” Peirce had worked out the whole matter.

Corresponding to AAA-1 (deduction) we have the following argument: X% of Ms are Ps (Rule); all Ss are Ms (Case); therefore, X% of Ss are Ps (Result). Construing this argument, as we did before, as applying to drawing balls from urns, the argument becomes: X% of the balls in this urn are red; all the balls in this random sample are taken from this urn; therefore, X% of the balls in this random sample are red. Peirce still regards this argument as being a deduction, even though it is not—as the argument AAA-1 is—a necesary inference. He calls such an argument a “statistical deduction” or a “probabilistic deduction proper.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce/#logic

As you know, though, false premises do not entail that deductive arguments are invalid, just that are unsound. — Janus

Apparently reason don’t care about semantic truth. Only syntactical correctness matters.

All you need to know is the bishop moves on the diagonal. The reason why it moved to that particular square is of no interest.

Sound move, unsound move? Banno no bothered.

Inductive logic: Every crow ever seen is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is probably black.
Deductive logic: Every crow is black. Joe has a crow. Joe's crow is black.

It's set out now.

Statistical analysis is validated empirically and is therefore rooted in inductive logic. Primacy rests with inductive logic, not deductive. Deduction doesn't even tell us what crows are, black is, or who Joe is. — Hanover

Interesting that Banno pretended not to hear this.

I always quote Wiki. Wisdom of the crowds. Meta-induction works.

I don't object to Bayesian inference.

But that's not induction. — Banno

Wiki says:

As a logic of induction rather than a theory of belief, Bayesian inference does not determine which beliefs are a priori rational, but rather determines how we should rationally change the beliefs we have when presented with evidence. We begin by committing to a prior probability for a hypothesis based on logic or previous experience, and when faced with evidence, we adjust the strength of our belief in that hypothesis in a precise manner using Bayesian logic.

SO folk think that by dismissing induction I am dismissing science. Noting could be further from the truth. — Banno

SO how strongly do you doubt an inductive conclusion? Do you doubt it absolutely? Or is that unreasonable?

It’s a funny thing. Folk can really hate Cartesian doubt being applied too liberally. They bang on about not denying what you believe in your heart, not doubting the knowledge you are prepared to act upon.

Yet they talk as if there are no grounds to believe inductive methods of reasoning. And this red herring of deductive validity is all that is offered as an excuse. Whereas the beliefs we are prepared to act on are all derived from inductive generalisations.

The version you give is one version, but as you know there are multiple versions for the origins of the suppression of fertility signals. — schopenhauer1

But then any version exhibits a belief that the biology counts. Biological evolution suppressed it. Not culture and its impact on cognition.

It's like plastic tits, fake bums and trout pouts. You can blame modern culture for amplifying instinctual signals, but not for creating them.

Okay, so you recognize that the ability to have more possibilities of thought (due to our lingusitic-cultural architecture) has provided us the ability to reflect on existence itself. Something no other species can do. The exaptation that comes from this is we can also see the absurd nature of living. We can have those existential angst moments and see things as repetitious, meaningless, etc. These are things which evolution did not necessarily provide for, but which is a result nonetheless. — schopenhauer1

And then to the degree that there is cultural evolution - a continuation of the Darwinian game - a failure to successfully reproduce will lead to elimination from the meme pool.

If only anti-natalism could have some meaningful braking effect as 7 billion people become 10 billion by 2050 (give or take a few planetary catastrophes along the way).

Well, this is the assumption you make that annoys me about your self-group argument. You have an assumed (or hidden) underlying teleology in your theory. The group through dynamics is not just "doing" but somehow "progressing" and this is a value judgement that is inserted in the story you present. Though, I understand you do think that "progress" may lead to "extinction" due to fossil fuel overload (and it is almost too late). — schopenhauer1

Huh? I am always explicit on the telos.

What we are doing is the unthinking expression of the thermodynamic imperative. We find all this fossil fuel just sitting in the dirt. We can't help just building a great big bonfire out of it.

If we were thinking - and hoping to progress - we would realise that the fossil fuels are driving us. We are blindly responding to their open invitation. If we had any real utopian dreams, we would get back to living off the solar flux. Or waiting until we had the technical means for something actually long-term sustainable, like perhaps fusion power.

Thank you for your concern (or what looks like concern). However, existential thinking is squarely what is most important as it is our day-to-day lives and evaluations of our lives. — schopenhauer1

Well I am saying being passive is another choice. And one that relies on a faulty understanding of human nature.

If you complained quietly to yourself, you of course would get no reaction. But instead you post thread after thread with the same self-pitying lament.

To the degree you have some biological depression (brought on by a social situation), then sure you may get sympathy. And advice.

But a few of us may be here just to discuss actual philosophy. So a BS argument then deserves a good kicking. No apologies or excuses required.

Shh! - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/150979

I know, you'll argue that Deleuze's rhizomatic machinic assemblages begin from difference, but if Protevi is any judge, we've seen how a gestalt can act for him via something like 'distributed cognition' as a structural whole whose meaning can be determined beyond particular cogntitions of its participants.

If difference really precedes identity, then a gestalt can never encompass its particulars via distributed cognition, but rather each particular is already its own gestalt. This is how the social field functions in relation to the individual for Heidegger and Derrida.

What's not to love about PoMo? :P

Was Kant's transcendentalism not rationally derived from the foundation of all possible forms of intuition? "Empirically real but transcendentally ideal" — Perplexed

That's a different issue. I was talking about the belief in mind-independent truth - the world as it would be experienced even when not being experienced. :)

Do we have to assume here that the concerns of the knower are paramount? How can we be justified in stating that further details cease to matter? — Perplexed

We know that further details cease to matter because they cease to make a difference. How we understand things to be has become sufficiently invariant.

So yes, we are the ones drawing that line. But also, we can do it in a methodical fashion. That is what the scientific method seeks to codify as best as it is able.

Collectively we get together and develop some standards of acceptable evidence. We can get pretty rigorous - like when insisting an experimental effect must pass five sigma significance to be publishable.

We know our inquiry has been exhaustive when we feel sufficiently exhausted by it!

If we are searching for our lost house keys, we might look in the bread bin twice or maybe even three times just to be sure. But much more is OCD. Doubt becomes pathological when it ceases to achieve a different result.

I'm not a primatologist, so won't pretend to know all these instincts but a major one I can think of is chimps have estrus and cyclical reproduction. They can't help but have a mating season- which implies they cannot help but have offspring. — schopenhauer1

That's a good example. And one that I was going to mention as an argument in the other direction.

It is theorised that the human shift towards the extreme K strategy end of the mating spectrum - the heavy investment required to being able to raise babies born neurally half-baked and utterly helpless - meant that something had to change to foster strong pair-bondings. Dads had to be given a biological incentive to stick around with the mum.

So the suppression of fertility signals was a neat trick. A male wouldn't know when a female was in heat. There wouldn't be the fighting over the right to mate, and instead the strategy would be to stick close with a female and bond by mating continuously. Females of course still might feel sexier at certain times of the month and go do a little cheating - playing the evolutionary game to their own advantage.

So yeah. Check the literature and all these kinds of things have been well debated.

In this case, it says dads can't help getting roped into being dads, even if the babies may frequently be secretly someone else's. The biology has been set up to nudge behaviour in that direction.

Thus there is an innate raising a child instinct along with a learned aspect of how to raise the young, but still seems to not be a choice. — schopenhauer1

It is good that you are steadily backing away from your original claim of some abrupt evolutionary leap from instinctive to linguistic behaviour.

But in your determination to make anti-natalism a valid philosophical viewpoint, you will still pretend that the desire to have children, the positive joy it can bring to lives, is somehow unnatural.

So far you are not producing the evidence.

The simple logic of Darwinian selection says that producing the next generation has to be the game, whether we are talking of that selection applying at a biological level or a socio-cultural level of evolution.

Sure, there is a sense in which society has become a super-organism with its own existential desires now. You can make that argument - as I do. So as individuals, we are being swept along by forces beyond our control.

But then the other side of that is that this aways was the case. We always were being swept along by evolved and successful cultural structures. And the idea that we have an individual choice is a new feature of the contemporary social order. It is an extra wee trick inserted into the game to increase the possibilities of cultural control while also increasing the requisite variety that evolution itself needs to feed off.

We are culturally evolving to become more culturally evolvable. And that could be a rewarding or unpleasant thing - largely depending on how well it integrates or conflicts with our biological heritage.

The other point I always make is that we can only understand this current phase of our cultural evolution of a species in terms of the exceptionalism of being in a period of exponential, fossil-fuel enabled, species growth.

If there are stresses and strains, it is hardly surprising as this is - right now - a historical rupture in the evolutionary trajectory. In about the space of a century, we are deeply changing what it means to be Homo sapiens.

I'm dubious about the Singulatarian argument. But we can see how one thing follows another with accelerating pace. Social media is producing a world of people with a different mentality.

I guess this is what particularly annoys me about anti-natalism. There is this furious change going on right now before all our eyes. It should be fascinating as well as scary. And then we have all this whiney self-absorbed pessimism.

I understand why there might be an actual epidemic of depressive illness. I understand why there might be a feeling of existential helplessness. But those are symptoms of the more general rupture. And philosophy ought to be focused on where that is all heading. We don't know how to judge it because it is still happening. Meanwhile if you are depressed and helpless, seek treatment. Learn how to dig yourself out of your hole as best you can. Don't use philosophy as your excuse for inaction. Don't use it to block the possibility of making your own life better.

...the fact that he may not have had much (acknowledged) influence on the mainstream thus far says more about the mainstream than it does about Peirce. — Janus

The social reasons for his relative obscurity are well documented. And many factors combined.

It did not help that he was American in that era of European domination. It did not help that most of his best work was unpublished jottings and he never wrote a cannonical book. It did not help that he was overwhelmingly ambitious in the scale of his metaphysical project exactly when the mood was harshly against that. It did not help that he was also a real working scientist and approached philosophy from that direction. It did not help that he was plunged into great poverty and academic disgrace by having an affair - something scandalous in prim Harvard, which would have been laughed off back in Europe.

Personally, I thought Peirce was pretty cranky when I was first introduced to his stuff. Then I thought, well some of his ideas certainly seem to foretell of what we are discovering now. And then eventually I found that on any deep issue at all, Peirce seemed to have it covered.

Give it another 100 years. His due will be given.

The thing is, if we concede that knowledge is only practically rational does this not mean that there is truth only with regards to certain ends? — Perplexed

That is how you attack the Jamesian strawman version of pragmatism.

The actual story here is that truth is the limit of rational inquiry. It is what we will believe in the end following an exhaustive pursuit. And so it is what becomes invariant within our belief structure.

So yes, this is not the good old fashioned truth of the transcendental kind - that which is true even despite there being no one around doing the knowing. The rationalist pipedream that has had such a manic grip on so many.

It is truth defined in terms of the concerns of a knower. It is a search for justified answers to the point of exhaustion - which itself is in turn a search to the point that further details cease to matter.

Pragmatism only seeks to constrain uncertainty. It can't be eliminated. And so truth - as a natural limit on a reasoned process of inquiry - is found at the point where we can afford to become indifferent to the uncertainties not yet eliminated. Our purposes - in whatever sense they exist - are sufficiently satisfied. We can't then pretend to continue to doubt - to be entranced by the remaining uncertainties - if that is merely unsatisfied knowledge that is also held by us to be of no account.

So pragmatism includes the self in its world. Truth is defined relative to the wants of the observer.

Of course that then does bring in a new issue. We can distinguish between the highly subjective view and the highly objective one. Most folk think of "true truth" as being the kind of completely invariant knowledge that scientific-strength inquiry will bring.

But even this is very slippery. The invariances that pop out of science are general principles - ideally, the mathematical symmetries encoded in foundational equations. They seem rather ... abstract. Platonic even.

The material particulars of the world become numbers - more abstracta! - that we plug into the equations. The subjective observer is suddenly rediscovered at the heart of this maximally objectivised knowledge as the entity who must informally carry out an "act of measurement". To turn the phenomenal experience of the world into the values input into an equation is a tricky and un-formalisable step.

This is what strikes directly at the fantasy of deduction being somehow foundational. A valid syllogism is only ever going to be as truthful as the semantic cargo we plug into it.

But anyway, we have quantum theory now. Nature is really rubbing our noses in the impossibility of knowledge that is objectively true in the absence of an observer who actually does something to constrain the outcome with a choice.

We know the rationalist pipedream to be physically impossible in a foundational fashion.

The basis is not purely rational (unless you follow Kant's solution) but practically rational. What more do you want? — Janus

Heh. The glass that pragmatism knows to be 99.99 percent full is always going to be frustratingly empty for those who still ache for Platonic certainty. If you believe in all or nothing, then that's what you want to be the case, despite the facts.

I had a quick look and Peirce hardly gets a mention in Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery. Pragmatism is only mentioned in passing. — Banno

As to Peirce's influence on Popper; I seem to remember reading about it in Unended Quest, but its a helluva long time since I read it and I could be mistaken. — Janus

Popper wasn't directly influenced by Peirce, but did recapitulate the same line of thought. They were especially close on propensities. And Peirce of course was concerned with a much larger metaphysical project of how epistemology could be also ontology.

Later on in his career, Popper found Peirce had been saying the same things and acknowledged this in saying he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier (Of Clocks and Clouds) and that Peirce was "one of the greatest philosophers of all times" (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach).

Similarly when Bertrand Russell learnt about Peirce in later life - having waged his war against Jamesian pragmatism - he took the view, that "beyond doubt [Peirce] was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."

Cheryl Misak has now documented the subterranean influence that Peirce had on Wittgenstein via Ramsey and Lewis - https://jhaponline.org/jhap/article/view/2946

Peirce was so much ahead of his time - and also working in unfortunate circumstances - that it is only recently he has started to have his rightful impact on academic thought.

I was in a similar position. Via cognitive neurobiology, theoretical biology and paleoanthropology, I had arrived at a generally semiotic position. And then decent digests of Peirce's voluminous unpublished thoughts began to pop up. Along with a whole circle of biologists and systems scientists, it just became obvious that Peirce had sorted out the metaphysics 100 years earlier. Within a few years, we were all calling ourselves biosemioticians.

So compared to our closest non-linguistic relatives, like the chimps, bonobos and gorillas, which instinctive behaviours have we lost? Be as specific as you like.

(Birds have brains that evolved as elaborations of the basal ganglia rather than of the primitive olfactory association cortex as in mammals. There is a reason why they might have more stereotyped inherited action patterns.)

The decoupling of instinct from general processing is not an easy story. I'd like to see this. — schopenhauer1

But it is your contention that there is a decoupling rather than an integration. So frankly I have no idea what you are on about. Just as I don’t know where you are getting this general processing notion from.

But if you can provide the references, that would be sweet.

So now you want a free seminar on cognitive neurobiology? What’s in it for me? :)

The human brain works more like generalized processor, with the vehicle of linguistic conceptualization as a way of integrating memories, thoughts, images, etc. How can these concepts said to be pre-linguistic (i.e. innate)? — schopenhauer1

Well no, the brain don’t work that way at all.

But do these preferences come innate or only after being enculturated in a social setting? — schopenhauer1

Given that the individuation of a psychology is a blend of both influences from birth - as I said - then you can see why this is a silly question.

The default answer on any aspect of psychological being is going to be "both, together, resulting in an integrated whole".

The best I can do in this case is to ask further questions for the purpose of clarification. — Magnus Anderson

But I asked you for clarification about this "relevance" of yours. For me, there is a background metaphysics that explains the specific relevance. For you, there must be likewise some background metaphysics - given that it seems you must have some good reason to reject my metaphysics as a relevant grounding.

So what is this metaphysics exactly? Put it on the table.

I am just trying to understand why you place so much emphasis on it. — Magnus Anderson

So did I make a big thing of it, or have I just replied to your continuing questions about it?

I don't see why such a concept is relevant. — Magnus Anderson

Fine. And yet you kept asking anyway. And I kept explaining why I do find it relevant. And so far you haven't rebutted my reasons for finding it relevant. And importantly so. Yet you want to keep telling me you don't find it relevant - despite offering no supporting reasons.

And if what I say appears to be an attack then it's merely due to the possibility that some of the things you say are no more than smokes and mirrors. I have to entertain such a possibility. — Magnus Anderson

I'm not bothered by your attack. I'm more disappointed at its lack of bite.

You don't have to if you don't want to. — Magnus Anderson

It's not a case of not wanting to. You have simply failed to supply an argument that could be evaluated.

But instead of talking about induction, or more generally intelligence or thinking, you talk about abduction. — Magnus Anderson

I'm not following you. I've talked about all those things. You seem to want to make some campaign against abduction as a concept. And I am interested in how abduction fits into a holistic and naturalistic scheme of reasoning.

You will have to explain why I should be concerned by your problems with seeing a relevance in abduction. I've already explained why it would be relevant to a metaphysics that is irreducibly triadic (rather than dyadic or monadic).

And instead of speaking in terms of regularities or patterns, you speak in terms of constraints. — Magnus Anderson

Constraints generate regular patterns in a probabilistic fashion. So that is how science understands physical systems. And it is how we would speak of nature if we take a systems view where we grant generality a reality as a species of cause.

So again, it is simply a reflection that I am arguing from a consistent metaphysical basis. It is how reality would be understood if you believe in an Aristotelean four causes analysis of substantial being.

OK. So you have recapped the gist of Ancient Greek metaphysical dilemmas. Let's jump to the resolution.

Individuation is always true from some point of view - some scale of observation. The world is a process. It is always either relatively individuated in some fashion, or relatively not individuated. But for the sake of simple world modelling, we like to construct a sharp dichotomy that separates all things into two categorically opposed baskets - flux and stasis, change and stability, potential and actual.

We can begin to see the fluidity of this interplay - this oscillation between the limits of two poles of being - once we understand every individual, every substantial being, in a multiscale fashion. That is, a hierarchically-ordered point of view which spans all the "cogent moments", or integration scales, of any entity that appears to exist in space and time.

So look over there. I see a river, a mountain, a wave, a wind ripple passing through the grass.

The mountain must have existed forever - from our typical human-scale perspective that also sees the wave as not really a proper entity at all but just a momentary disturbance in the water.

But if we had eyes to watch a landscape over millions of years, we would see a geography as fluid and turbulent as the surface of the sea. The rivers would snake and twitch, disappear and reform, with even greater abandon.

Likewise, if we zoomed in on any fleeting entity, its existence would start to stretch out so that it seemed completely permanent and substantial compared to our scale of individuation.

So a modern metaphysics would see everything as a process. And what differs is the characteristic rate at which some part of the world becomes individuated from the general backdrop in some significant fashion - before disappearing back into that backdrop.

A graven image. It should have an all-seeing eye at its centre. Another odd example of the obsession with trinities that helped kept Pierce from mainstream approval.

None of which should be taken as disparaging Bayesian analysis and other legitimate and excellent work around this topic. Unlike the philosopher's notion of induction, and even worse, abduction, Bayesian approaches have a strong standing. — Banno

Rock it like it's still the 1970s!

The question is: do you agree that abductive reasoning is a specific type of inductive reasoning? — Magnus Anderson

I'm not getting too hung up on the divisions. There is the more familiar dichotomy of deductive vs inductive argument - necessary inferences vs probable inferences. That kind of works in the sense that deduction proceeds from the general to the particular with syntactic certainty while induction does the reverse of going from the particular to the general with provisional hopefulness.

But then a triadic view - one where a dichotomistic separation resolves itself into a hierarchical structure - is the special twist that Peirce brings to everything. It is the next step which completes the metaphysics.

So that is why it is a neat result - one that hierarchical structuralism predicts - that the actual process of human reasoning splits itself so cleanly into a trichotomistic process. It makes reasoning not an arbitrary business but one that works in the same basic way as the nature it wants to describe.

This is obviously a huge metaphysical deal - for those who still have faith in metaphysics as a grand unifying project.

So is abduction a specific form of induction? The Peircean question is instead where does abduction fit in the basic semiotic triad.

And it slots in as Firstness. A hypothesis is the first free and spontaneous act, which then leads to the "deductive" secondness that is mechanically determined reaction, and followed then by the thirdness which is the generalisation of such individual reactions to the form of some regular and enduring global habit.

Here's an example of abductive reasoning:

1. The grass is wet.
2. If it rains, the grass gets wet.
3. Therefore, it rained. — Magnus Anderson

But is it?

The classical deductive syllogism is:
Major premise (or the general rule: All M are P.
Minor premise (or the particular case): All S are M.
Conclusion (or result): All S are P.

Abduction then rearranges the order so that the argument is: All Ms are Ps (rule); all Ss are Ps (result); therefore, all Ss are Ms (case).

So you would have to say something like:
- Rain makes things wet.
- This grass is wet.
- Therefore, the grass was (probably) left out in the rain last night.

It is quite apparent to me that abductive reasoning is a very narrow form of reasoning. By definition, it only forms conclusions regarding events that took place in the past. This means that abductive reasoning is restricted to making "predictions" about the past. In other words, it can only be used to create retrodictions. This is unlike induction which can be used to form beliefs of any kind. This suggests to me the possibility of you defining the concept of induction narrowly as pertaining only to making assumptions about the future. — Magnus Anderson

I'm not sure why it seems a problem that abduction is retroductive - that the past is being assumed to hold the key to the future. To the degree the world has actually developed some stable intelligible being, it will have developed those general constraints which serve to restrict freedom and spontaneity to give the world its predictable shape.

This is the point concerning the metaphysics. Rather than going with the classical metaphysics which thinks reality is some God-given realm of law and deterministic material action, Peirce is up-ending that view to build a logic that arises out of a completely probabilistic model of existence.

So again, induction is not a problem as it sits on the side of probability. Deduction is now the problem as the shallowness of a deterministic or mechanical metaphysics stands exposed. The issue is really why would deduction function at all? And clearly - just as we find with computers and other machines - they can't stand alone. They are helpless if it weren't for us to bookend them and makes sense of their furious syntactical whirrings.

So if you sit on the side of a probabilistic ontology, now the whole picture can snap into place properly. Abduction seeks out the constraints that must underly any observable regularity in the world. A classical/deductive/mechanical/deterministic/atomistic world is merely the emergent limit on this probabilistic description. So the task is to guess at the rules that stabilise things sufficiently that the probability of causal certainty approaches arbitrarily near 1 (or 0) for the things we might care about as fundamental facts of the world.

Will we always fall down rather than up when stepping off that cliff? Well thermodynamics says all our atoms could fluctuate upwards at that precise moment and give us a surprise. Yet also, that is almost surely never going to happen - even given a really vast number of lifetimes for our Universe.

Thus abduction does seek to recover rules already formed. And inductive confirmation seeks to show our guesses are correct. And it is all couched in probabilistic language. We no longer believe in a classical Cosmos - the one of Newton and Hume. We are presciently already into a quantum reality where concrete classicality is an emergent and inherently probabilistic limit state.

When I guess that the next value in the sequence 1 2 3 4 is number 5 I do not necessarily do so because I am aware of the underlying pattern. Rather, in most cases, we do so because we know that the superset {1, 2, 3, 4, 5} has the highest degree of similarity to the superset {1, 2, 3, 4} among the supersets that have the form {1, 2, 3, 4, *}. — Magnus Anderson

I'm sure the rule you abduce is the simper one - 1+1=2. And so on, ad infinitum.

So you abduce a deductive rule, an algorithm that blindly constructs. You are recovering the set theoretic approach that is already the axiomatic basis for number theory.

A cherry-picked example which is a textbook case of deductive thought is hardly a good way to illustrate an argument about the true nature of induction. :-}

Regarding AGI research, most of the research has been dedicated to modelling how the world works rather than to modelling how thinking works. I think that's the problem. Rather than having a programmer create a model of reality, an ontology, for the computer to think within, it is better for a programmer to create a model of thinking which will allow machines to create models of reality -- ontologies -- on their own from the data that is given to them. — Magnus Anderson

Well that is why I always say forget Turing Machines and symbolic logic. It is neural networkers who have been thinking about how to properly mimic the Bayesian principles by which a brain actually makes inductive predictions.

OK. But I am finding your whole position a struggle to follow. So this would seem the missing link.

And yes, a proper understanding of what we might mean by the consciousness is central to having a position. I've been making that point. People hereabouts have been using Wittgenstein as if he absolved us of a need to have a background metaphysics in this regard.

We talk about facts using the concept fact, and that concept refers to states-of-affairs, but even without the concept, or without minds to apprehend the facts, there would still be states-of-affairs in the universe. Those facts have an existence quite apart from a mind, and quite apart from any linguistic reference to them. So there is an objective reality in back of our language, but how we talk about that reality takes place in a community. — Sam26

We don't need to be idealists to see that this is wrong. Talk of states-of-affairs only makes sense in relation to talk of points-of-view. And whether we talk of the point of view being subjective or objective, it is still a point of view.

Of course, in practice, we live in a world where it is full of mind-independent events and objects and voids. We don't need to be idealists in our ontic commitments.

But still, we can't then also deny that the very idea of "a state of affairs" is a world description that demands a viewer or interpretant of some kind. That is why a maximally objective point of view is often called the God's eye view - the view from nowhere which is also the view from everywhere.

It gets worse for the naive realist as, in practice, this maximally invariant viewpoint has to start to see the "laws of nature". It has to transcend the nominalist particulars - all the medium-sized dry goods that seem to populate a world that is "a state of affairs" - and focus on what is maximally general or universal about the world being viewed. The local particulars become the contingencies or the accidents in being just the individuated variety contained within the general constraints or invariances.

So the concept of states-of-affairs carries with it both the need for some viewpoint - the maximally objective one - and also a viewpoint that then adds a nominalist fixation on the contingently individuated. It is the viewpoint that reduces the world to some instantaneous collection of concrete particulars.

Thus the very idea of a "state-of-affairs" incorporates a complex metaphysical position. There is nothing direct or simple about it. And to say that the facts of the universe exist in a mind-independent fashion is both true - in regards to an idealist metaphysics - and untrue, in regards to a properly holistic metaphysics such as the triadic model afforded by semiotics.