Again, dark energy would be inherent in space - the quantum vacuum - itself. That is why it could create a basic tension or negative pressure that accelerates expansion. But it would also have to be everywhere evenly. Space couldn't be full of cosmic scale holes, could it?

But if you love bubbles, they appear in a variety of cosmological scenarios, like reheating - https://arxiv.org/abs/0707.0839

As a mechanism, it is not outlandish.

I can't help it if you don't get the difference between direct and indirect.

And just now, typing expansion of bubbles (to see if I could simulate the push) gave me this. — MikeL

Hah. I wasn't going to mention that to avoid complicating things. But you realise that is a way to do without dark energy at all? So a patchy distribution of regular matter would leave under-dense regions that could expand faster.

Why it is conserved in space?- is that it? — MikeL

The proper answer is very technical - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s_theorem

In linear non-gravitational space I think the conservation rule holds. — MikeL

Yes. And then energy is not necessarily conserved under GR as the reference frame is free to flex. That is, GR doesn't provide you with a fixed geometry that could make local symmetry a hardwired thing.

When we have a rapid drop in pressure things bubble — MikeL

You mean if they contain dissolved gas. So a quite specific phenomenon, called cavitation, that has no real connection.

A bubble would be an area of less dense space, which would want to collapse back out, thus providing a push. Punctuating the area around the bubbles would be higher density areas where matter formed (gravity) - like the parts giving shape to the inside of an egg carton. — MikeL

Unfortunately for that theory of yours, the Universe looks fantastically even in its expansion. That is what the CMB maps are about. So the dark energy must be evenly spread. Your approach says everything would instead be remarkably patchy. That would be obvious too see.

Hierarchies are triadic structures. Semiotics is a triadic process. So two views of the same thing.

That is why Pattee, Salthe and other hierarchy theorists get semiotics.

Your questions are gibberish. So I'll leave it there if you are so unwilling to start with the biological simplicity of Pattee's epistemic cut before leaping straight back into the neuroscience. Get it figured out for life, then you can see how that lays the ground for mind.

(I mean even just the way you call it the "split" rather than the "cut" tells me you aren't really bothered by precise thinking here.)

I don't know why you persist in thinking that I don't trust in the empirical sciences or that I don't get the general gist of how complex systems arise. — schopenhauer1

It is not what you trust, it is how you would understand. I'm pointing out that your line of questioning immediately reveals your ontological framework. So you are asking the right questions if the brain were a computer. When you understand how they might be the wrong questions is when you will start to know that you might be getting the organic approach that is biosemiosis.

You actually have to give something up to be able to go forward here. And I agree it is not easy.

How is it written, stored, and read. — schopenhauer1

You mean how should you understand semiosis as if it were Turing computation? Yeah, that'll work just fine. That'll will let you preserve the mystery of the writer, the storer, the reader.

Really, if you want answers, spend weeks or even years getting to learn a different way of thinking. And Pattee is a really good and clear start.

Have you found time to read up on Pattee's epistemic cut? Yes, there is something novel about life and mind according to biosemiosis.

Right. Let's plunge back into the mysteries of how appearances can be felt. Let's not stop to think how this is itself a division of your reality into "self" and "world" - the feeling bit vs the appearing bit.

Semiotics sees both sides of the equation as mutually emergent and synergistically persisting.

At the psychological level, it is self and world that emerge to organise experience, give it a useful phenomenological structure.

Then pan-semiotics would be the general metaphysical level that sees this emergence in terms of formal constraints and material degrees of freedom.

I simply call that experience and more specifically "qualia". — schopenhauer1

On what grounds do you make that generalisation?

I think you say it is because that is all kinds of "mind", whereas I say it is all kinds of "minding" - or actually more generally, all kinds of semiotic world modelling.

I don't think there is a privileged brute fact scale. — schopenhauer1

Well that is what your talk about "mind" must imply. Although I agree that framing matters dualistically turns "minding" from an embodied process to the name of a reified and disembodied realm. Res cogitans.

You do not want to recognize this because it is not quantifiable and that doesn't compute for you. Instead of dealing with it, you will simply go back to what is quantifiable. This is a dodge. — schopenhauer1

Ad hom away. The fact that you refuse to think about this the proper way is your problem.

Qualia is qualia is qualia. Electrons are electrons are electrons. — schopenhauer1

That is hardly anything I would say, is it?

Why do you have to build this fictional me? ... apart from your need to have something symbolic to tear down in my place.

The physical correlates are important, but looking at the correlates won't ever answer the qualia. — schopenhauer1

Here we go. Back into the physical causal correlates having just been claiming causation is irrelevant to your "deep ontological question".

You again just ignore the fact that semiotics doesn't even presume "the real physical world" as its ontological base. Remember, semiosis starts with phenomenology and recovers the naive realist/idealist divide as the dichotomy of matter and sign.

I reject brute materialism just as much as I reject brute mentalism. Instead, both of these complementary aspects of reality are the polarities that emerge via semiotic development.

It is a different logic than you are used to. That's what gives you so much trouble.

We agree that a process can be given a name.

But what you are missing is that I am asking about the degrees of generality or particularity in the processes that we might want to name.

I want to be able to label the most absolutely generic process. I call that semiosis. The conscious human mind is a particular example of that (although a most hierarchically developed and complex example).

Or I might want to talk about some sub-process of the human mind, like visual encoding. This would be a story about semiosis - the general process - in some much more particularising context.

Then in moving between so many different available levels of "semiosis in general/semiosis in particular", your presumption that "the human mind" is in fact some critical level becomes challenged by the facts. It no longer carries any conviction when I hear you speak of "the mind" in this privileging fashion.

Sure there is the undeniable feeling of a "point of view". To be a self is to be located ... in a world that is experienced as being the other of just that.

So the mind becomes defined in terms of this boundedness. There is a persistent identity that develops by a self/world distinction becoming engrained habit. Even if someone cuts off my leg, I will still feel a phantom limb until someone cuts out that bit of my brain as well.

So again, why being an embodied self feels like being an embodied self is something we can explain in terms of some persistent habit of semiosis that does occur at a particular level of organisation.

But more generally - when the issue is what is continuous across all the hierarchical scales - the idea that mind only exists at some one privileged brute fact scale of being is one that carries remarkably little weight. It just becomes an obvious habit of reification, a way folk have got used to talking about mindfullness, points of view, and selfhood.

So here we have limit- a very deep problem and you are saying simply back off from it. — schopenhauer1

No. I'm saying get off your damn chuff and approach it properly, or not at all.

Spend enough time studying the relevant science. Then see what you feel like saying on the matter. Stop saying you can't see a finishing line and therefore you are not even going to get started.

It is a question of what it is in-itself- its ontology, not its causation. — schopenhauer1

It's about a reification, not the process, you mean.

Well, the idea that the Hard Problem is not about a failure of causal explanation is certainly a new wrinkle, I have to say.

You seem to only go back to causitive answers and then don't want to be bothered with the hard question of ontology. Sorry, but that's the question at hand here as it relates to physical processes that are not "what it feels like to be a process". — schopenhauer1

Again, you might want to check with Chalmers on this one.

But if you now want to adopt a faith-based ontology - one that thinks ontology is "brute fact" rather than intelligible account - then of course nothing I say could impact on that. Reason has left the room.

The modelling obviously feels like something to be doing that. — schopenhauer1

Great.

But what is "feels like that" aspect of the process in the first place! — schopenhauer1

What it is like to be doing that. No need to reify the feeling as something further that must be caused, or worse yet, have brute fact existence and yet you still demanding of me its causal, intelligible, reasonable explanation.

Have you never heard of the concept of free will? This is a cause which is not an efficient cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

I have explored that cultural fiction in great detail.

You can call free will miraculous if you want, I prefer to call it final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. I call it a cultural fiction.

Where do you find this "smartest modern metaphysician"? If you mean Peirce, I can only take that as a joke. — Metaphysician Undercover

You have to pretend to be laughing. Otherwise you might have to reconsider your views.

See how freewill works? It is mostly the power to say no even when by rights you should be saying yes. It is the way people justify their irrationality.

So, you don't mean that what I am arguing for is a 'poisonous myth' and 'social parasitism'? — Wayfarer

Romanticism is certainly a mythology. And I agree it can be quite poisonous. At first it entertains, or even improves. But if taken seriously as a metaphysics ... well you mentioned Nazism first. As well as making the nihilist statements.

Then yes. Parasitism is your word. And not really technically correct as parasites are little critters sucking your blood, not corporations that own your soul. But I am happy to talk about institutional religion in the same terms as any other globalising entity that exerts an unhealthy degree of control over individual lives by decoupling that life from its natural local context.

How can it be sane to live your life according to actual abstractions? Surely you see the inherent madness in wishing you were already dead and at one with your maker, or better yet, never born?

So as I said, I am not against religion as a social institution. At the community level, belief can encode a highly functional way of life. That's the nice thing about a Chinese temple. They have room for everyone's gods, just like the way Roman's used to worship, or everyone use to worship, before corporate brain-washing religion came along and smashed all the rival "false idols".

It is just like Trump and his "respect the flag". We know it is abhorrent when the elite cement their power by removing the right of community expression by waving about some abstract symbol.

There can be perfectly healthy religion - to the degree it doesn't insist on the absoluteness of its metaphysical abstractions, and doesn't in turn achieve that domination by symbols by turning the individual inwards, setting themselves at war within their own "hearts". The place that reason can't then win.

See flag. Feel patriotic. It's called operant conditioning. Message transmitted. Thought short-circuited. Job done.

What is this "feel" qua feeling? If you are going to say it is a metaphysical limit that cannot be answered, then does that qualify "feel" as a basic property of the universe like charge or spin? — schopenhauer1

Yeah. Having said let's not start reifying any processes, I would then immediately agree with you about reifying a process.

I talk about "to feel". You want to turn that into "a feeling". Can't you see that your nominalism must have its metaphysical limit?

I've explained that limit in terms of counterfactuality - the limits of intelligible explanation. I've also said that in practice, that epistemic limit is at the very far end of a lifetime's worth of biology, neuroscience and social psychology. Gorge yourself on the knowledge that is available. Stop obsessing with that knowledge running into some ultimate limit. The details we can't know turn out to be insignificant.

Why is red so red, and not instead ... well anything whatsoever? Why do we need to care? Have we already understood the story of colour processing so well that we have arrived at this issue as a scientific matter?

As I say, my view is that people who promote the Hard Problem are generally looking to put down that vast weight of scientific achievement. They want the last laugh - without having to get their hands dirty reading actual neurology textbooks.

So my response is that - knowing all that there is to know about how brains model worlds - why would we say it wouldn't just obviously feel like something to be doing all that?

Of course, if you haven't seriously studied the science, there is going to be no reason it would. That is the other side of the message I hope you can see by now.

But notice that anything that deviates from what you take to be the correct, scientific approach, is treated with scorn and opprobrium. You can't even discuss it without the spleen rising. My way or the highway, right? — Wayfarer

Note how you turn a rational and science-backed analysis into venom and spleen. You are trying to read emotions into my words so as to explain their message in your own preferred terms.

If we are not communicating, it is because you are misreading me in a deep way. Sure, I use emotional language - an internet forum is that kind of place. I've also published the same basic argument in an academic journal as it happens. So horses for courses, as they say. And surely you have picked up my ironic use of emotion-talk.

I am always laughing when I speak of the "thermodynamic imperative". There may be a serious rational point that I'm making, but where is the fun in putting it dryly? And everyone complains about any use of more technical language anyway.

So I appreciate that this might seem to strike at you personally. It is indeed what makes us "persons" that I am talking about here. My position is that it is our pragmatic webs of social relations, not some supernatural guiding spirit that hides in the shadow of material being.

I actually find it unbelievable that you might believe that you were born alone, will die alone, and must discover any meaning to your existence alone. I never thought of you as that kind of nihilist. So yeah, I will call you out on that. Just as I will be very sorry if I learn that this is in fact how you see things. It is a very self-destructive point of view.

In return, if you want to consider my feelings, you could stop just labelling me as your ideal enemy, the reductionist materialist. The insult itself is water off a duck's back. But I'm somewhat irritated by the way you keep wheeling it out to prove that whatever I say has to be wrong because I'm a signed-up member of Scientism.

The "empirical facts" are the product of theoretical systems of measurement. So if you want to question them, you actually have to offer a better theory that could question them.

As I say, you are just making half-baked attacks based on your own intuitive beliefs. That is not how science works. It is how psychoceramics works.

But it is not sufficient simply to understand such truths purely through society and culture, they also have to be understood in one's own heart, mind and experience. — Wayfarer

One of my favourite examples from the social psychology of "higher" emotions is accidie - what it feels like not to be able to believe with the heart. Monks in the middle ages were troubled that the fervour of their belief might be lacking. They might just be going through the motions during their day-long rounds of prayer and contemplation.

These days of course, you can be an Anglican and not have to worry. The outward forms are all that need to be preserved.

So anyway, I think you are completely wrong in burdening yourself with the extra requirement that one has to understand rational truths in some continually beatific and personally uplifting way. It is one of the myths of Romanticism.

Institutionalised religion exists by creating a disconnect between people and their local community. By de-socialising beliefs about origin tales and moral custom, the Church (whether it be Christian, Buddhist, whatever) creates the space in which it can insert itself in people's minds, hearts and experience. The Church gets to take over and run the show.

It is exactly the same as neoliberal globalisation and its exploitation of the romantic myth of the self-made individual. Every person is born an entrepreneur - your sorry standalone story of existence. We have to stand on our own two feet and make something of ourselves economically. When we die, there is only the money to mark our passing.

The name of the game has changed, but institutional religion is institutional religion. You break people apart from their socially-constituted being, their natural fabric of relations, and sign them up to an impossible ideal of self-actualisation which then turns them into puppets being manipulated by a system of interests far beyond their possible control.

That is what gets me here. You are arguing for the very poison that causes the problem. By situating meaning "deep inside the spiritual self", you are just letting yourself get conned by a highly materialistic system. Yesterday it was the Church. Today it is the consumer society.

Never give a sucker an even break, as they say.

The first cause of intention of a creator, which is commonly referred to as "final cause", does not produce an infinite regress. — Metaphysician Undercover

Creation by a creator is efficient cause masquerading as something else. It doesn't offer a causal explanation because if creations demand a creator, who creates the creator? The infinite regress is just elevated to a divine plane of being.

And it doesn't even explain how the wishes of a supernatural being can get expressed as material events. Sure, somehow there must be a "miraculous" connection if the story is going to work. But there just isn't that explanation of how it does work.

So anthropomorphic creators fail both to explain their own existence and how they achieve anything material.

Yes, I know that this then gives rise to thickets of theological boilerplate to cover over the essential lack of any explanation. But I'm saying let's cut the bullshit.

But to proceed from this, to the assumption that there was a time when there was not such a reality, is what I see as irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover

So causal stories of development and evolution are irrational. Claims of brute existence are rational. Gotcha.

The "development" of a universe with intelligible order, emerging from no order, does not make any sense without invoking a developer. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean constraints? Those things which could emerge due to development?

Why revert to talking in terms of efficient cause - the developer - when the missing bit of the puzzle is the source of the finality? You already agreed that efficient causes only result in infinite regress.

The Big Bang theory only demonstrates that current, conventional theories in physics are unable to understand the existence of the universe prior to a certain time. — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean where physics has got to is knowing that a Newtonian notion of time has to be inadequate. That is the new big project. Learning to understand time as a thermal process.

The search for a final theory of quantum gravity is the search for how time and space could emerge as constraints to regulate quantum fluctuations and produce a Universe that is asymptotically classical.

So exactly what I've been arguing. And what Peirce foresaw in his metaphysics.

When our smartest modern metaphysician and the full weight of our highly successful physics community agree on something in terms of ontology, that seems a good reason to take it seriously, don't you think?

(I realise you will reply, nope its irrational, while Augustino eggs you on from the sidelines with some frantic emoticon eye-rolling.)

At least you stay focused on the matter at hand. You aren't just seeking to divert the discussion to safe irrelevancies.

We don't have to agree. And where would be the fun if we did?

You're not actually interested in having your views questioned and thinking through them honestly. — Agustino

I'm waiting for you to get the ball over the net. I see a lot of swishing and grunting but not much result.

To remind you of the essence of where the argument had got to, your own point about engineering is that it can't trust perfect world maths. Even statistical methods are risky as they still coarse grain over the metaphysical reality.

A linear model of average behaviour is going to be fundamentally inaccurate if the average behaviour is in fact non-linear or powerlaw. At least a Gaussian distribution does have a mean. A powerlaw (or fractal) distribution has exceptions over all scales.

This gets quite critical where engineering has to engage with real-life dissipative systems like plate tectonics. Earthquake building codes and land-use planning really have to do some smart thinking about the true nature of natural hazard risks.

So how engineering papers over the cracks in mathematical modelling is important here. That is a heuristic tale in itself. Eventually even statistical methods become so coarse grained they no longer offer a concrete mean. The central limit theorem no longer applies.

But I was focused on the foundations of the modelling - the starting presumption that there is some definite micro-level of causality. My argument is that it is coarse graining all the way down. What we find as an epistemic necessity is also an ontic necessity.

Now you can argue that the mathematical presumption of micro-level counterfactual definiteness - atomism - is in fact the correct ontology here. Great. But it is mysterious how you don't pick up the contradiction between you saying that the presumptions of maths can't be trusted epistemically, and yet those very same presumptions must be ontologically true.

Your position metaphysically couldn't be more arse about face - the technical description of naive realism.

So really, until you understand just how deeply confused you are about your own argument, it is hard to have much of a discussion.

No, I do understand dimensionless quantities quite well, — Agustino

Clearly you just don't.

a dimensionless quantity (or more precisely, a quantity with the dimensions of 1) is a quantity without any physical units and thus a pure number.

You are convincing me it is essentially pointless discussing this with you as you are either just being pig-headed or you lack the necessary understanding of how maths works.

Material accidents are not "uncontrolled fluctuations" :s — Agustino

Just stop a minute and notice how you mostly wind up making simple negative assertions in the fashion of an obstinate child. No it ain't, no it ain't. Then throw in an emoticon as if your personal feelings are what concludes any argument.

I find replying to you quite a chore. You try to close down discussions while pretending to be continuing them with lengthy responses. It is like hoping for a tennis match with someone who just wants to spend forever knocking up.

That would be a methodological limitation of our manufacturing techniques, it would definitely not be an ontological limitation of reality itself... — Agustino

So you claim in unsupported fashion, ignoring the supported argument I just made in the other direction.

Right, so you are willing to accept ontological contradictions. Why aren't you going to accept square circles then, and other contradictions? Maybe at the level of those fluctuations squares and circles aren't all that different anymore - there's some vague square circles — Agustino

And your problem is?

Vagueness is as much circular as it is square. The PNC does not apply. Just like it says on the box.

The point there was simply that any object has to potential to become another - the elephant is made of atoms, as is the chair, now supposing there are sufficient atoms in one as in the other, all it would take would be a rearrangement of them - in other words, a new form. — Agustino

Ah right. Atoms. :s

Oh look, I just disproved your argument with an emoticon.

Get back to me when you have figured out that atoms are a coarse grain notion according to modern physics.

That is why there are cowards that only choose what seems to make them sound right, and refuse to look at alternatives. — Hachem

Perhaps you could justify your approach based on an actual philosophy of science argument? Science is happy to consider alternatives. But they do need to be scientific ones - some formal proposal, not simply angry arguments aimed at apparent intuitive content.

If you have a formal alternative, I've certainly missed it. But then I quickly gave up reading your posts after responding with care to your first and finding you seemed only interested in manufacturing bizarre interpretations of existing successful models.

I am not saying it is not. I have no way of knowing that. — Hachem

Well actually you do if the predictions of the models match the experience of the observations.

All my threads attempt to show that this is far from obvious and beyond doubt. — Hachem

That is why they are crackpot in the sense of just not understanding the nature of scientific claims.

You are always aiming your doubts at the apparent intuitive content of scientific theories, when it is only their theoretical structure that counts. That is the very definition of tilting at windmills.

So, there we have it. Einstein's equation shows that the universe must be expanding, and this expansion has been observed. — Sapientia

That's an over-simplification by Rovelli.

As he does state in his first sentence, general relativity's field equations don't define a direction. The Universe could be expanding or contracting.

And Einstein's first thought was that - because of the Universe's gravitational content - it would naturally be contracting. Einstein believed the Universe ought to be eternal and standing still, so he added an extra term to his GR equation - the cosmological constant - as an extra mystery force required to exactly counteract that gravitational collapse and so allow the Universe to be static.

It was an embarrassing kluge factor. It couldn't even work as this static solution was so unstable that the universe would have to tip over into gravitational collapse with the slightest inhomogeneities in the spread of gravitating matter.

But then it turned out from observation - red-shifted stars - that the Universe was in fact expanding. So that wasn't predicted by anything in Einstein's equations. Although it was certainly allowed. And the Big Bang theory was born, where now there had to be a fantastically accurate balance between the outward force, the kinetic energy, of "an explosion", and the contracting force of any gravitational contents - the total mass of the Universe.

Roll forward and the Universe proved to have only about 30 per cent of the required mass at best. Then observation suggested the solution - dark energy, a repulsive force creating a faint acceleration at every point of space. And now this had to be incredibly balanced or fine-tuned ... due to some quantum explanation so far eluding physics.

So expansion is certainly a reasonable conclusion. It is what we see when we look at the stars and galaxies.

But gravity says basically things ought to be contracting. And then a static Universe - the most "obvious" presumption - is impossible. Eternal existence is ruled out as a maximum improbability.

And if there is the third option of expansion - as there really must be just because it is both what we can see, and what is most probable given the Universe has been around long enough for us to be even wondering - then this expansion must be most remarkably fine-tuned. The expansion - or indeed now, the acceleration - is adjusted to be exactly the amount needed to make the Universe almost perfectly flat and future eternal.

The details are worth going into as this is a cosmic scale whodunnit. It shows how poor our metaphysical intuitions can be. It shows why proper science is actually needed. :)

So MikeL I would credit for at least having a go at being bothered by the basic claim - why is the Universe expanding rather than shrinking?

The actual physics has long moved on. The question now is why is it faintly accelerating by some precisely correct amount to make up for the 70 per cent of "missing mass". There is plenty of speculation about possible answers, but right now it is simply a really big and interesting gap in our scientific knowledge.

Okay, but I fail to see how this changes anything — Agustino

So you don't understand dimensionless quantities. Cool. https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionless_quantity

So there is an actual cause for why they buckle - just that we cannot pin-point it. It's epistemologically, but not ontologically vague. — Agustino

Whoosh. Ideas just go over your head.

Imperfections are just another name for material accidents or uncontrolled fluctuations. The argument is about why the modellling of reality might be coarse graining all the way down. The reason is that imperfection or fluctuation can only be constrained, not eliminated. Hence this being the ontological conclusion that follows from epistemic observation.

Our models that presume a world that is concrete at base don't work. In real life, we have to have safety margins. Even then, fluctuations of any scale are possible in true non-linear systems with powerlaw statistics. So we can draw our ontological conclusions from a real world failure.

in other words, the radical potentiality for a chair to change into an elephant, as an example. — Agustino

Now you are really just making shit up.

Well and good, but we’re born alone, and we die alone. The ultimate questions have to be faced alone. — Wayfarer

That's bleak. And nothing like I see it. Pretty much the opposite.

the difference between the world being the expression of timeless ideas, and it being the quickest possible route to maximum disorder, — Wayfarer

But it's both. And while preferences shouldn't dictate answers, I find the alternative - some state of confusion about a world that is divine yet mechanical - unappealing. It Is pleasant to see the entirety of existence as one organic form.

Is this the difference? How can you feel at home in the world if you think you have wound up in the wrong place, stuck in the mechanical realm of physical being when you believe true being is somewhere else?

Yes, absolutely loved every second of it. And have been rewatching the earlier series again.

You are likely right that the main idea, as much as Lynch would be that concrete, is life is more like a dream (or that's a refreshingly different way to understand it).

We spend so much time fitting events into narratives, weaving a life that had some proper plot arc and resolution, that this is the anti-view - life lived with that particular character of dreaming, the anxiety of chasing meaning, apparently even grabbing hold of fleeting meaning, and finding things have morphed, altered, eluded our understanding.

So it is not surrealism as shock and surprise, but surrealism as relief and antidote.

But how does one break out if the Bubble if "science" is all that is permitted? — Rich

But Rich, first you have to break into it. That's the hard part, eh? :)

But the issue is, a pre-commitment to scientific methodology narrows the scope of the kinds of answers that will be considered. — Wayfarer

Is that the issue? Really?

Or is scientific reasoning (as Peirce carefully defines it) just remarkably effective at pruning away unnecessary speculation and unfounded belief? We stick with it because it actually works.

In the last 100 years, the advances in understanding absolutely everything have been just incredible. Granted popular understanding may also be 100 years behind that.

Anything that sounds vaguely ‘theistic’ - well that’s knocked right out of the park, before the conversation even starts. — Wayfarer

It's certainly a reasonable strategy. If someone is advancing a theory that is "not even wrong", reject it from the get-go on those grounds. Even if feelings might be hurt.

The decision has already been made as to what might constitute a scientific analysis, and what doesn’t. Entropy is in, telos is out. — Wayfarer

But there you are reacting to the atomistic, reductionist, mechanical, deterministic, etc, metaphysics of Newtonian mechanics. The hot news of 500 years ago.

Boltzmann's thermodynamic proof that atoms must exist - his equipartition argument that “if you can heat it, it has micro-structure” - was the last hurrah of classical mechanics really. So the existence of matter was proved as an informational necessity. Entropy came first, particles second. Many physicists of his time were outraged about the claim atoms were real and not fictions. It got heated, if not vicious.

He had a long-running dispute with the editor of the preeminent German physics journal of his day, who refused to let Boltzmann refer to atoms and molecules as anything other than convenient theoretical constructs. Only a couple of years after Boltzmann's death, Perrin's studies of colloidal suspensions (1908–1909), based on Einstein's theoretical studies of 1905, confirmed the values of Avogadro's number and Boltzmann's constant, and convinced the world that the tiny particles really exist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Boltzmann

Then of course quantum mechanics came along and - among other things - showed that Boltzmann's constant of entropy, k, was derivative of Plank's constant h. Or rather, there was a fundamental duality of action and particle. Or better yet, missing information and material uncertainty.

So entropy physics or statistical mechanics was both the end of the old and the start of the new.

To quote Planck, "The logarithmic connection between entropy and probability was first stated by L. Boltzmann in his kinetic theory of gases."

So admittance of Platonic ideas appears to to let ‘a divine foot in the door’, so to speak; it’s the thin end of the wedge, right? — Wayfarer

Again, this is fair enough to the degree that invoking divine feet or supernatural/transcendent causes amounts to a claim that is "not even wrong". A belief must have counterfactual consequences to be justifiable.

If this is the position being taken, then it is a reflective hostility, not an unthinking one.

my interest in philosophy is Platonic in the sense of it being an existential question, — Wayfarer

Yes. I can see there is also the personal question of how to live one's life - now that the choice is being increasingly forced upon us by modern culture.

But my reply on that is to seek the answers at the social level where life actually has to be lived, not in metaphysics. And religions have tended to be pretty wise about how to actually function socially.

So religion can be a great guide on one score, a poor guide on the other. Your spiritual dimension may actually say something about how best to organise society, while failing in its claims regarding the world that is society's context.

Religion seeks some kind of absolute authority for its moral and aesthetic codes. It should chill out and leave that job to objective investigative techniques. It is enough if it works as social practice. The Good does not have to have Platonic existence to still be a pragmatic goal that we might have every reason to cherish.

So my objection is conflating two different things - tales of metaphysical origination and tales of healthy social practice. You don't need divine authority to back up intelligent moral arguments.

Huh? People only began to talk about the Big Bang when the evidence began to build for it. They had to start making the best sense of the observed facts.

Even if you want to pretend to be a strict idealist here, there would still be the same need to account for the structure of our experience. We can't just wish all those red-shifted galaxies to instead be blue-shifted.

So sure, it is important to understand scientific knowledge is socially constructed. But that doesn't mean it's just some fantasy story with no basis in reality. It means that there is in fact a right way to socially construct knowledge if the goal is "objectivity". And that way is ... science.

And you don't see your performative contradiction in again asserting that it is your ultimate truth we must believe in here?

It is not the existence of ultimate truths that I am questioning. It is about how we go about identifying them and then accepting whatever answer thus emerges.

The question I keep asking is, how can you preserve the functionality of formal and final causes and top-down causation, if there is no 'top'? Or, in other words, if the final end is mere non-existence? — Wayfarer

It is what it is. I don't think the job of metaphysics or science is to tell us whatever story we find the most reassuring or familiar,

You keep saying you reject a Heat Death as an ultimate goal because you don't like the sound of that conclusion. Your personal preference here ought to be irrelevant.

Besides, my approach does not deny that negentropy is a freedom permitted by the very fact that there is a universal entropy tendency. Indeed, it guarantees the existence of negentropy as the structure required to do any dissipating.

It is just that the top - in terms of negentropic complexity - arises in the middle of time and space.

So again, you should be pleased. Humans are peak negentropy in that regard. We are poised fairly precisely in the middle of creation. We are as far from the Planck scale as we are from the cosmic scale.

The universe revolves around our Being after all. Our existence is as special as it gets. We are the height of creation, at least in the direction labelled peak complexity.

(Is that enough spinning in favour of the thermodynamic imperative yet? ;) )

Any blinking at all would require the dimensionality that would make it a thing. So the blinking would itself be the first symmetry breaking - a raw first emergence of an action with a direction. Then after that would come the second distinction of actions that conserve rotational symmetry and actions that conserve translational symmetry.

At the Planck scale, rotation and translation would look the same - just a blink, a pulse of action or energy, as you put it. But as soon as space started to grow in scale, there would be these two energy conserving directions in which things could spill.

Spin then gives shape to the particles which are the located excitations. The standard model describes the fundamental gauge symmetries that allow particles to exist. Then translation allows those localised excitations to propagate and disperse.

So one direction of motion produces particles. The other lets them spread and fragment to create an en-mattered void that is running down an entropic gradient.

but that does not mean the unobservables used within the approach actually exist out there. — antinatalautist

You are confused about the philosophy of science. As a method, it is explicit that it simply forms theories of the thing in itself.

Having laid that epistemic foundation, it can then get on with developing theories that have maximal objectivity - ideas that are measurably the most viewpoint invariant.

Fractals always have some size. Even the simplest ones like Koch curve start from some definite size of a simple line segment. — Agustino

Sure. To model, we need to start at some initial scale. My point was that log e, or Euler's number, shows how we can just start with "unit 1" as the place to start things.

It may seem like you always have to start your simulation with some definite value. But actually the maths itself abstracts away this apparent particularity by saying whatever value you start at, that is 1. The analysis is dimensionless rather than dimensioned. Even if we have to "stick in a number" to feed the recursive equation.

You have redefined the terms, but this redefinition does not save you from the requirement that there is a prior act to all potency (using these terms to mean what Aristotle meant by them). — Agustino

Nope. This is the big misunderstanding.

Sure, irregularity being constrained is what produces the now definite possibilities or degrees of freedom. Once a history has got going, vague "anythingness" is no longer possible. Anything that happens is by definition limited and so is characterised by a counterfactually. Spontaneity or change is always now in some general direction.

So there is potential in the sense of material powers or material properties - the things that shaped matter is liable to do (defined counterfactually in terms of what it likewise not going to be doing).

But Aristotle tried to make sense of the bare potential of prime matter. As we know, that didn't work out so well.

Peirce fixes that by a logic of vagueness. Now both formal and material cause are what arise in mutual fashion from bare potential. They are its potencies. Before the birth of concrete possibility - the kind of historically in-formed potential that you have in mind - there was the pure potential which was a pre-dichotomised vagueness.

Prime mover and prime matter are together what would be latent in prime potential. Hence this being a triadic and developmental metaphysics - what Aristotle was shooting for but didn't properly bring off.

It's absurd to have a macro theory that cannot be shown to emerge from the micro level. — Agustino

You keep coming back to a need to believe in a concrete beginning. It is the presumption that you have not yet questioned in the way Peirce says you need to question.

Until you can escape that, you are doomed to repeat the same conclusions. But its your life. As you say, engineering might be good enough for you. Metaphysics and the current frontiers of scientific theory may just not seem very important.

Yes, the phenomenon of buckling is more complicated than our lower bound calculations suggest. — Agustino

But you still do believe there is a concrete bottom level to these non-linear situations right? It's still absurd to suggest the emergent macro theory doesn't rest on a bed of definite micro level particulars?

I mean, drill down, and eventually you will find that you are no longer just coarse-graining the model. You are describing the actual grain on which everything rests?

People say that the storm in Brazil was caused by the flap of a butterfly wing in Maryland. And you accept it was that flap. The disturbance couldn't have been anything smaller, like the way the butterfly stroked its antenna or faintly shifted a leg?

I mean deterministic chaos theory doesn't have to rely on anything like the shadowing lemma to underpin its justification of coarse graining "all the way down"?

In other words, the maths of non-linearity works, to the degree it works, by coping with the reality that there is no actual concrete micro-level on which to rest. And that argues against the picture of physical reality you are trying to uphold.

The beam buckles because of a "fluctuation". Another way of saying "for no discernible reason at all". Anything and everything could have been what tipped the balance. So the PNC fails to apply and we should just accept that your micro-level just describes the vagueness of unformed action.

Actually, real world engineering projects most often are overdeisgned. — Agustino

I wonder why. (Well, I've already said why - creating a "safe" distance from fundamental uncertainty by employing informal or heuristic coarse-graining.)

Real world structures which do collapse or fail likely do so because they involve an upper bound method of calculation, and the lowest failure mechanism wasn't thought about or taken into account. — Agustino

Thanks for the examples, but I know more than a little bit about engineering principles. And you are only confirming my arguments about the reality that engineers must coarse-grain over the best way they can.

Now I know you might object on the basis of it being 'Platonia'. — Wayfarer

I don't object to Platonia is some sense. And I am specific about that sense.

So yes, mathematical form, and even The Good, captures something essential about nature - its barest level of syntax. There are regularities - symmetries - that are just unavoidable as the deep structure of being. So a very few things qualify for Platonia. There are the ur-forms that become the subject of our metaphysical inquiry.

Semiosis - as a triadic mechanism - was of course the core one uncovered by Peirce. That is what put intelligibility itself - as a meaning making process - at the centre of reality creation. Existence arises as a dissipation of vagueness by hierarchically organised constraints. The Cosmos is rational in that carefully specified sense. It is like a mind in that fashion.

So we can talk about Platonia as the set of forms or ideas that are not merely contingent - accidents of nature, accidents of history - but in fact completely necessary in being completely unavoidable. In trying to do anything and everything, nature would still have to find itself regulated by certain emergent global principles.

Given this stricter definition, Platonia begins to make sense. We don't have to suggest it lies in some unphysical realm of its own or exists in the eternality of a divine intellect. It is just always latent. It is the regularity that simply must always emerge from irregularity itself.

So Platonia is defined by the barest syntax that can be imagined to have historical inevitability. Nature's deep forms. It is about the rules that are immanent in potentiality itself.

Whiteness, horses, men, and a billion other Platonic ideals are simply accidents of history. They are local phenomena that certainly have to express the over-riding deep principles, but also they are the kind of complex developments which freely incorporate accidental elements into their design. They are not the pure syntax that is a Platonic-strength constraint on existence. They are the free variety that can develop within the highly general span of those constraints.

So the usual way to think of Platonic forms is that they completely specify the shape of some entity in informational, point-for-point fashion. Like an architect's blueprint. In other words, the forms are taken to construct material organisation atomistically - a patent contradiction of what forms are really about.

Instead the forms function (pan)semiotically. It only matters that a horse, or a man, or a tree, or a mountain, work as signs of the world that the forms mean to create as an act of regulatory constraint on the irregularity of unformed potential.

Again, information loss. The forms are what arise as the ultimate constraints as they can afford to sweat the least detail. A horse or a man is good enough as an example of an entropy-accelerating agent. All Platonia has to see is this basic box has been ticked - objects A and B are meeting the basic criteria of Being itself, the thermodynamic imperative. They are examples of dissipative structure. Beyond that, Platonia doesn't need to care. Irregularity has been tamed to the degree that makes sense. There is an intelligible material world out there, as can be told from these signs of its being.

The question I posed was, if the physical representation changes, and the information does not, then how can the information be said to be physical? — Wayfarer

Well, as you say, there is always some physical representation.

But there must also be rules - syntax - to ensure the proper translation of the message from one physical representation to the next.

Then there must be the third thing of some habit of interpretance that can make sense of the syntactically structured signs. The message must be read, understood, acted upon. So there is semantics too.

But note how syntax itself has irreducible semantics. A rule can permit only the one reading. That is how computers implement Boolean logic. Semantics can begin in a machine like and reflexive fashion. Just like the way the chemoreceptors of a bacterium are set up to permit no other choices in terms of behavioural responses.

So semantics evolves from the first hardware syntactical beginnings. In a complex brain, any message can be misread, distorted, doubted, refuted. A complex brain may have its habits - it will just read a message in the accepted way and respond without question - or it also can find endless ways to question that information it appears to be getting. It can imagine the world as being other than what it has just been told.

So it is not that semantics lacks complexity in the human case. There really is an interpreter at work as the interpretation is not in fact completely constrained by the syntax of the sign. However also we can see how that complexity gets built up due to recursive or hierarchical elaboration.

Your OP example depended on the claim of mechanically faithful transmission of a message. And in fact also the unambiguous creation of the original meaning, and its final interpretation. It only ended up talking about syntax, the rules of the game. That is why more complex metrics of information are needed - like self information - to start to model the semantic plasticity that makes life actually interesting.