The laws of logic were produced, and developed by human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure we framed them to explain the world as we have found it. The deeper question is why the existence of that intelligible world? If the laws were merely social constructs, they would hardly hold a foundational place in our methods of reasoning.

. The claim that there was a time when the universe didn't consist of a collection of objects would need to be justified — Metaphysician Undercover

Fer fuck's sakes. If existence isn't eternal, it must have developed or been created. Being created doesn't work as that leads to infinite regress in terms of claims about first causes. So development is the metaphysical option worth exploring - rather than being pig-headed about, as is your wont.

And then cosmology gives good support to that metaphysical reasoning. Look back to the Big Bang and you don't see much evidence for the existence of a collection of objects.

The laws of logic are rules of predication, how we attribute predicates to a subject. If your subject is the general notion of a triangle, the rules apply. The subject is identified as the triangle, by the law of identity, and the other two rules of predication apply. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are avoiding the point. Peirce is dealing with how the laws could even develop. You are talking about the laws as they would apply when the world has crisply developed, when everything is mostly a collection of objects, a settled state of affairs, a set of atomistic facts.

So sure, generals can have universality predicated of them. They can be said to cover all instances of some class. They can themselves be regarded as particular subjects. That is what make sense once a world has developed and generals come to be crisply fixed within the context of some evolved state of affairs.

The PNC and LEM rely on the law of identity, the identification of a subject. Until you ,move to identify a particular, it is a foregone conclusion that the laws of logic do not apply. — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct. Except now I'm talking about how crisp particularity itself could develop. It is hylomorphic substantial being. And it develops out of what it is not - vagueness and generality. Peirce's version of prime matter and prime mover.

So the laws of thought don't apply until they start to do. That is what a developmental ontology is claiming. Peirce described the Cosmos as the universal growth of reasonableness. The lawfulness the laws encode are the product of evolution and self organisation.

There is no point you just telling me you don't see the laws as a product of development. I already know that you just presume their natural existence. You have never inquired how the laws might come to be as the result of a larger ur-logical process.

So why not set aside your predudices and actually consider an alternative metaphysics for once? Make a proper effort to understand Peirce rather than simply assert that existence exists and that's the end of it.

The quantum spin that creates the frequency of the Planck scale temperature, does it still exist or is it conceptual? The rest of the radiation of the universe is the result of the growing expansion of the wheel? — MikeL

This particular part of the story is more my speculative argument. I'm not really aware of any explicit development of it in the literature.

But anyway, the argument would be that spacetime has its two critical symmetries once it is expanded and flat. Rotation and translation are the two inertial forms of motion that are symmetry preserving actions and so not entropic. Any material body can move in a straight line at a constant speed forever. And also rotate in the same spot forever. So even in classical Newtonian mechanics, this duality of translation and rotation is a very deep fact.

And then all the particles of nature are explained as varieties of fundamental spin symmetry. And their spin is complex as a massive particle - one able to be moving slower than the speed of light - could be spinning in three possible directions. A massless particle - which must travel at c - can only spin in two (for the complicated reason you can never accelerate faster than the particle and "reverse its spin" in its forward direction of travel by looking at it from in front.)

So if we start with the Big Bang as a primal fluctuation - just an action and a direction - then it might be both a primal rotation and a primal translation at the same time. (After all, why discriminate by labelling it one kind of action or conserved symmetry rather than the other?) But the translation - a free action involving moving in some straight line - is as small as it ever could be in this first moment. While the rotation is as big as it ever could be already. A full turn is possible in the tightest space.

Then as the Universe expands and cools, you have a swing the other way. Now any remaining translational action can travel as far as its pleases. But all rotational action - in terms if intrinsic quantum spin - is left behind, located in an increasingly shrunken fashion. Translation's gain is rotation's loss.

Radiation - as particles travelling through a void - of course combines translation and rotation. A photon is a wave with a rotating phase. The spin carves a helix along a path. The spin stays constant in size - the quantum spin of a particle just has a number (0, 1/2, 1, 1.5, 2). But the path is being stretched by the expansion of space, and so the helix or wave form is redshifted and loses effective energy.

You can imagine the difference if spin could change its rate. If the spin rate increased to match the stretching effect, then the helix would write the same corkscrew on the universe. It would be like shrinking the rolling circle that creates the sine wave to tighten up the frequency it is losing.

(And if spin could slow, it would be like the rolling circle getting bigger, so delivering the red-shift in a non-expanding universe - the kind of complementary effect you were going for with contracting spatial co-ordinates. Again, the sign that a view is fundamentally right is that it can be inverted and still give you the same essential story. This formal duality principle is the big thing that sparked string theory's second revolution and is why AdS/CFT correspondence in holographic theory is such a big result. So seeking duality is definitely the approved way to think.)

So to sum up, any primal action at all requires also the dimensional container to give it shape. So quantum action and spatiotemporal structure must go hand in hand from the get-go. And the Planck scale encodes that dichotomy in incorporating both the h that scales quantum action and the G that scales gravity (and so defines what counts as a flat container).

Then a second primal dichotomy is the one between rotation and translation as actions that are both conserved due to spacetime symmetries. Both are possible, and thus both are happening, from the get-go of the first Big Bang fluctuation. But rotation starts with the volume turned up to 10 and then gets "lost in space". And translation starts with no room to express itself, but eventually comes to be the dominant mode of action. Particles which then carry both kind of actions (as little rotatable and translatable packets of excitation) carve out helical paths that looked increasing stretched and red-shifted as spatial extent grows while rotational possibility remains rooted right where it started.

Bear in mind that quantum spin is a lot more complicated than I've just described it. I've just stuck to the story of photons as the simplest possible case.

It would have had a frequency of one meaning it was a line with a point moving vertically up and down it. — MikeL

Think also of the fact that a sine wave is formed by the rotation of the unit circle....



So taking the particle viewpoint - the fundamental U1 symmetry that accounts for the nature of radiation - there is a duality here that explains things. The shortest frequency is also the quantum spin - a rotation with Planck scale.

A limitation to spatial extent - a fundamental smallness - is cashed out in the other direction by a matching largeness of the rotational confinement. Spin starts out with its highest possible value. And so the first sine wave echo to resonate in the Planck-scale cavity is as hot as it gets in being also as curved as it gets. (Spacetime curvature equalling energy density in the general relativity view.)

Once you put the bits and pieces together, you begin to see the pattern of relations that compose the Planck scale. All the aspects of the Cosmos that seem broken apart and unrelated are unified, different ways of looking at the same thing, at the Planck scale.

This has become explicit in the way modern physics has evolved. It is the reason why quantum gravity would count as a final gluing together of the Planckian parts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGh_physics

You say that any particular triangle, must be one of a number of different types of triangles. Where does the LEM not apply? — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course the LEM applies to any particular triangle. It doesn't apply to the notion of the general triangle.

It doesn't make sense to say that the concept of triangle in general must be a particular type of triangle, — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly.

It doesn't make sense to attribute a species to the genus, that's a category error, not a failure of the LEM. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. The LEM fails to apply. It doesn't even make sense to think it could. It is definitional of generality that it doesn't.

Your claim seems to be that if there is no particular triangle, then this particular triangle the potential triangle, may be both scalene and isosceles. — Metaphysician Undercover

Before a particular triangle has been drawn, it may be scalene or isosceles. That is the potential. And so while still just a potential, it is not contradictory to say this potential triangle is as much one as the other. That is, what it actually will be is right at this moment vague - as defined by the PNC not being applicable and any proposition that pretends otherwise being a logical failure.

It's difficult to make sense of what you're trying to say here because you're using words differently from Aristotle it seems to me. — Agustino

Well yes. I must have spent quite a few pages in this thread making it plain that my claim is that prime matter would be an active and not inert principle. Then the prime mover would not be an active principle in the normal sense of effective cause, just "active" in the sense of an emergent limiting constraint on free material action.

There are quite a few difference I would have with a scholastic understanding of Aristotelean metaphysics. That was rather the point.

Matter is inert, it is form which is act, and actualises. So form is imposed on the inert matter (which is potential), and this form would be the fluctuation. But note that form must be independent to and prior to matter. — Agustino

Now you are repeating what I have disputed. And I have provided the rationale for my position. So instead of just citing scholastic aristoteleanism to me, as if that could make a difference, just move on and consider my actual arguments.

Right, so then the mathematical concept of space as infinitely divisible isn't how real space actually is. It's important to see this. — Agustino

It is also important to see that Peirce's mathematical conceptions are based on the duality of generality and vagueness. So you can both have a general continuum limit and also find that it has potential infinity in terms of its divisibility. In fact, you've got to have both.

And funnily enough, real space is like that. Just look at how we have to have the duality of general relativity and quantum mechanics to account for it fully. One describes the global continuity of the constraints, the other, the local infinite potential, the inherent uncertainty that just keeps giving.

Yeah, so reality eliminates all those infinities that are inherent in our mathematical models. Our initial predictions that blackbodies would emit infinite amounts of UV were based on the mistake in our mathematical model of assuming an infinite continuity going all the way down, while the truth is that things are cut off at one point, they become discrete. — Agustino

It amusing that you talk about this as some mathematical mistake.

You are trying to paint yourself as the commonsense engineer that is never going to be fooled by these crazy theoretical types with their dreadful unrealistic mathematical models. And yet an engineer has a metaphysics. He believes in a world of clockwork Newtonian forces. That is the right maths. And on the whole it works because the universe - at the scale at which the engineer operates - is pretty much just "classical". There is no ontic vagueness to speak of.

Of course, the beam will buckle unpredictably. An engineer has to know the practical limits of his classically-inspired mathematical tools. The engineer will say in theory, every micro-cause contributing to the failure of the beam could be modelled by sufficiently complex "non-linear" equations. The issue of coarse graining - the fact that eventually the engineer will insert himself into the modelling as the observer to decide when to just average over the events in each region of space - is brushed off as a necessary heuristic and not an epistemic embarrassment.

Even proof that the model can't be computed in polynomial time won't dent the confidence of "a real engineer". Good enough is close enough. Which is why real world engineering projects fail so regularly.

So forget your engineer's classically-inspired commonsense understanding of maths here. Peirce was after something much deeper, much more metaphysically sophisticated.

Regarding the recursive eq, are you talking about fractal dimensionality? As in log(number copies)/log(scale factor)? — Agustino

Yes.

If that’s correct, then it would seem to follow that the expansion of space would cease once that figure is reached (the Heat Death is reached) - but I know that the cessation of expansion isn't supposed to happen. This can only mean that the full conversion never happens. — MikeL

This is getting into very tricky to explain areas but we now have evidence of a "dark" energy or positive cosmological constant that is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. So that faint extra push in fact ensures a heat death at some future predictable moment in time.

Our corner of the universe is bounded by a still expanding event horizon - what we call the hubble radius that defines the visible universe. So because the universe is expanding spatially, everything towards the edge of our point of view just gets faster and faster until it is effectively going faster than the speed of light. At that point it vanishes from view. It disappears over the horizon of the hubble radius. We can no longer have any interaction with it.

In a universe without an extra dark energy push, a perfectly balanced universe would be coasting to a halt at the end of time. Eventually everything that has been disappearing over the horizon would reappear because the metric expansion would be steadily slowing, running out of steam, and that would give time for even the most distant light to start reaching us again.

But with dark energy, instead the hubble radius/event horizon would still be there. The larger universe would still be super-luminally out of reach for us. However the horizon itself would cease to expand and instead come to a halt at a fixed distance. And that then means the entropy of the visible universe could not physically get any lower. A fixed horizon means as much would entropy would be re-entering as leaving. So the total becomes a final condition.

Think about it as running down an up escalator. At some point, you are running at the same speed as the escalator going the other way and so you just stay in the same place. Despite all the action.

And we can measure where we are in this story using the principle of holographic event horizons.

The existing entropy content of our visible universe is represented by the "container" of an event horizon that has swallowed up 10^122 degrees of freedom. Eventually all the cosmic back ground radiation will add to that, swell the horizon. But only by a surprisingly small amount - a contribution of just 10^88 extra degrees of freedom. That's a round-up error of 34 decimal places.

Even the evaporation of all the super-massive blackholes in our corner of the universe would only add 10^103 degrees of freedom - a clerical adjustment to the 19th decimal place of the total sum.

So we pretty much are at the Heat Death as things stand, even if those super-massive blackholes are going to take about another 10^103 years to fully decay.

Do you know the problem. Is it the wavelength of radiation - can it never become linear and thus disappear back into the initial condition? The exponential curve that never hits zero? Why would it keep expanding do you think? (I don't buy momentum from the Big Bang) — MikeL

The momentum of the Big Bang explains most of the story. The little extra contribution from "dark energy" has become the new mystery. But it could just be a tamed remnant of inflation or the simple product of quantum uncertainty at the vacuum level. There are certainly plausible theories.

The other bit of the new physics is realising that event horizons radiate. That is why the universe would be able to reach some actual final heat death temperature - as the only thing glowing would be the "container" itself. The cosmic event horizon at its fixed position would emit black-body radiation as a normal quantum process. It is just that the photons would be so absolutely cold or stretched that they would have a wavelength the size of the visible universe itself.

Which is what I pointed out about the symmetry between the Big Bang and its Planck scale heat, and the Heat Death, where once again the energy inside the container matches the size of the container in its frequency.

So some new deep connections have been discovered. Even physicists and cosmologists are still trying to figure out a definite meaning for them.

If you are interested, check out Charlie Lineweaver - of your favourite university, ANU. He wrote a good Sci Am piece and has a ton of great papers on his webpage.

This sounds reasonable, but isn't the surest way to minimize surprise to reduce the information content of your beliefs? — Srap Tasmaner

Hah. Surprisal, or self-information, is one of those more sophisticated measures of information I've been talking about - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surprisal_analysis and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-information

And the same basic approach underlies the free energy minimising model of the Bayesian brain - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_function

So the argument is that we attempt to predict our future sensory inputs to minimise our need to actually process anything. And then what we fail to predict is where we retrospectively have to put the further attentional effort in.

So overall, a brain with good habits of prediction will be able to get the most work out of the least effort.

Yes. I see that you are making the sly joke that the way to never be surprised is to in fact just be ignorant. That also works of course - to the degree that it has no real life consequences.

Note the more subtle point about fractals. As a dichotomous growth process, they directly model this issue of convergence towards a limit that I stressed in earlier posts.

Think about the implications of that for a theory of cosmic origination. It argues that a world that can arise from a symmetry breaking - a going in both its dichotomous directions freely - does in fact have its own natural asymptotic cut off point. The Planck scale Big Bang is not a problem but a prediction. Run a constantly diverging process back in time to recover its initial conditions and you must see it converging at a point at the beginning of time.

This has in fact been argued as a theorem in relation to Linde's fractal spawning multiverse hypothesis. So if inflation happens to be true and our universe is only one of a potential infinity, the maths still says the history of the multiverse must converge at some point at the beginning of time. It is a truly general metaphysical result.

Another way to illustrate this is how we derive the constant of growth itself - e. Run growth backwards and it must converge on some unit 1 process that started doing the growing. Thus what begins things has no actual size. It is always just 1 - the bare potential of whatever fluctuation got things started. So a definite growth constant emerges without needing any starting point more definite than a fleeting one-ness.

So from a variety of mathematical arguments we find that any tale of infinitely diverging processes tells us conversely also the tale of a convergence to some necessary cut-off limit. Run history backwards and we must arrive at a common point.

Surely it could be a fluctuation I do not care what it is for the purposes of this discussion, but it must be something actual, not an infinite potential, vagueness and the like. — Agustino

As the first fluctuation, it would have as yet no context. History follows the act.

So as I said before, the fluctuation is the birth of both material action and formal direction. But it takes longer for direction to seem firmly established as that requires a history of repetition.

It seems the mistake you keep making is to forget I am arguing for the actualisation of a dichotomy - the birth of matter and form in a first substantial event. You just keep talking about the material half of the equation.

Aha! Exactly. Now we're getting onto something. So the phenomenon is very similar to this. — Agustino

Sure. You get infinite outcomes if your model offers no lower bound cut-off to limit material contributions. So your example illustrates my points quite nicely. Our measurements coarse grain over fractal reality. We are happy to approximate in this fashion. And then even reality itself coarse grains. The possibility of contributions must be definitely truncated at some scale - like the Planck scale - to avoid an ultraviolet catastrophe. Vagueness is required at the base of things to prevent the disaster of infinite actualisation.

Also how much do you understand fractals? Note how they arise from a seed dichotomy, a symmetry breaking or primal fluctuation. That is what the recursive equation with its log/log growth structure represents.

There cannot be any primordial chaos, infinite potential, vagueness and the like - some minimal degree of order and act are always required. — Agustino

You mean like a fluctuation?

If there is a fluctuation it seems to me like there is some act already. — Agustino

And a direction too. The degree of order is also minimal, remember.

why would there be any sort of fluctuation in the first place if there is a necessarily inert vagueness in the first place? — Agustino

Why would inertness be necessary? The very fact something exists shows that by necessity it couldn't be.

Of course vagueness doesn't even exist according to your own map of reality. You rely on God to kick things off. Or divine circular motion to swirl things about. Or something equally bizarre.

I will make an argument once you explain to me how you go from the vagueness in the map to vagueness in the territory. — Agustino

The usual way. Measurement.

For instance, engineers are always telling me that my definite models of reality turn out not to fit the world in vague ways. Quantum wavefunctions still need to be collapsed. Chaos turns out to forget its initial conditions. The way the maps keep failing look to be trying to tell me something deep about the essential spontaneity of the territory.

I only have to find that my states of belief are reliable in minimising the surprises I encounter in the world.

But I do have an issue if you want to claim that vagueness is ontological, and exists at the level of the terrain, not just of the m — Agustino

Well you would have to make that argument then. So far you have only told me about your own map of the territory. And that turned out to have separated togethernesses.

Err. Wayfarer had just said Shannon published in the late 1940s. So I was referring to something specifically just mentioned.

This is pretty much what cosmology says. The Big Bang started in a state of thermal equilibrium - an even bath of radiation with all the same temperature. Then the radiation cooled to a point where a fair chunk of it condensed out as matter.

In that respect, the universe fell out of equilibrium and so there is an entropic equilibrium to restore. All the matter will want to find ways to turn back into radiation and catch up with the general cosmic flow again if it can. Hence stars, for instance. And black holes can also radiate so will eventually evaporate over sufficient time.

As an aside, consider how heat content and spatial extent are mirror images of each other at the Planck scale of the Big Bang.

The Planck temperature is defined by a wavelength with a frequency of one Planck distance. So it is all about the size of a single energetic vibration that can be packed into a single unit of space. This single wave is so compressed that it represents the hottest or most blueshifted light.

So the lack of room for light to move at the moment of the Big Bang is also what set its heat to the maximum energy scale or temperature that radiation can have.

You can see there is a very direct connection here between the container and its contents.

The Heat Death is then likewise defined by a Universe arriving at a state where any remaining photons are so redshifted that they are a single wavelength stretched the size of the visible universe. The radiation now has a temperature of virtually absolute zero degrees K.

So it is absolutely the case that there is a relation between the available space for radiation and its consequent energy scale.

Hey, you're welcome.

That being said, we must define what the debate is. The debate is the nature of mental events. — schopenhauer1

Again, I am content with useful explanations. I don't see consciousness as a monistic substance and so I'm not expecting some kind of magic causal mechanism of completely unexpected kind that suddenly switches it on. I see it as a particular kind of process - a modellling relation - and so awareness is simply about how such a relationship is going to feel.

If there is visual modelling, then there is the appropriate kind of visual experience. As would be expected. It is hard to imagine it would not. Especially when we now know so much detail about how visual processing works.

The neuroscience explains so much about our visual phenomenology. It is not a mystery why we can experience bluish red but not greenish red. The design of the nervous system tells us why this must be the case.

Multiply that kind of exact causal account of phenomenology by a thousand other examples and really there just doesn't seem a basic mystery. There is no reason to treat awareness as a reified thing, a dualistic substance, which is the form of description you keep reverting to. It is just so obvious that the mind is whatever integrated set of habits get put together to forge a useful modelling relation with the world.

So your version of the hard problem hinges on consciousness being a substantial entity or state. It is, as you keep repeating, a particular quality.

I just don't feel the force of that argument as the level of mindfulness so clearly correlates with the complexity of the processing going on. Dennett would state it in more extreme fashion, but it is in the end a composite of multiple modelling processes tacked together to achieve a job. There is no one magic way of "doing consciousness", no special threshold to cross. It is a kitbag of useful habits that have evolved and yield whatever they yield.

So it boils down to our contrasting expectations. You want the one big answer that creates sudden causal magic. I instead see a ton of little answers adding up.

For me, it is about finding a metaphysical framework that best accounts for "mental" type processes whether they are very simple or instead a highly evolved collection. And that is what semiotics or the modelling relations approach targets. The commonality of the kind of process in question.

I'm stifling a yawn. How could your replies become so anodyne so fast?

Yes, click the link where it says "expanding universe" and you will find Wiki understands this too....

The metric expansion of space is the increase of the distance between two distant parts of the universe with time.[1] It is an intrinsic expansion whereby the scale of space itself changes. It means that the early universe did not expand "into" anything and does not require space to exist "outside" the universe - instead space itself changed, carrying the early universe with it as it grew. This is a completely different kind of expansion than expansions and explosions we see in daily life. It also seems to be a property of the entire universe as a whole rather than a phenomenon that applies just to one part of the universe or can be observed from "outside" it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space

Sorry, you are wrong. Wiki has spoken....

In a hypothetical universe undergoing a runaway big crunch contraction, a cosmological blueshift would be observed, with galaxies further away being increasingly blueshifted; the exact opposite of the actually observed cosmological redshift in the present expanding universe.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueshift

Seems to work very well around here ;-) — Wayfarer

So Information theory has been around 70 years and ignorance remains an excuse? Cool.

You are resorting to non sequiturs now.

If experience is there all the way down, experience is accounted for as a foundation. — schopenhauer1

Yes, this is attractive because it sounds like it is saying something. But unless this being the case makes some reasonable causal difference, then it is just empty words.

So in what way does the presence or absence of experience make a difference at the microscale? What would we expect to observe as a reasonable or causally-motivated counterfactual.

What I fear about your brand of semiotics philosophy is that it has a hidden dualisim (because it is not accounting for the nature of the difference between quality and material interactions) in that there is a spooky-like quality that results from the semiotic process. — schopenhauer1

Again, please remember that I am not claiming to answer this question. I only simply aim to give the most useful account. And a big part of that is starting with a deflation of your implicit assumptions about the nature of experience - questioning what you believe about observers, representations, qualia, etc. I also state up front the limits of any explanation I might have - the stone wall that exists if counterfactuals can't be imagined.

So sure. Anything I say is going to be understood by you of falling short of your explanatory requirements. But my reply is that your requirements are the result of faulty epistemology.

However, this hard ground at the bottom of the well, it really doesn't say much- thus the very speculative and imaginative answers to this question. — schopenhauer1

Except that my approach does travel a long way before a lack of counterfactuals kicks in. There is a huge amount of textbook science to traverse before one begins to feel any sense of the air growing thin.

Most folk love the hard problem because it means they can prattle on about the mind without having to actually study much mind science. Because no can know the answer - according to the hard problem - then no one need feel guilty about not even making a start on the vast amount of understanding that does exist.

Now, perhaps ideas like sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc. may be the light which leads out of this cave, but it has to be done with at least keeping in mind what I stated earlier about how the experientialness of certain processes should not be taken for granted as just "there" as the result of a series of processes without account for what "there" is. — schopenhauer1

Or translated: even if there is a lot of heavy duty theory to be mastered, luckily I can just ignore that fact as I've misrepresented how pragmatic explanation works.

I've given you the simple answer many times. If you understand how the brain models the world in a really detailed fashion, then it is hard to imagine all that being the case and it not feeling like something.

Yes, that may not mean much to you. But how much neuroscience have you mastered?

The counterfactual here would be if you knew as much as me on that front and still just saw no reason to think it would feel like something. Willing to conduct the experiment? Got 40 years to spare? :)

Are geometric forms, or Euclid's axioms, subject to entropy? Do they degrade over time? — Wayfarer

Silly question. Does the Platonic apple wither? Does the Platonic white horse grow old and grey?

If you want the serious answer, the connection that makes these mathematical forms "real" as physicalist constraints is the symmetries they encode. So triangles and circles are eternal, timeless, necessary, etc, as they capture the basic symmetries of Euclidean dimensionality. And likewise, fractals, chaos, and other dissipative patterns capture the basic scale symmetry of a dimensional existence.

Permutation symmetries then are metaphysical-strength forms in accounting for the fundamental possible local excitations of nature - the standard model particles.

So access to Platonia is through a door marked fundamental symmetries. It is not as if we don't now know why some mathematics is "Platonic" or unreasonably effective.

It seems to me that you are also insisting on some naive realism every time you talk about reality being a triad, as if it were ultimately true. — Harry Hindu

I am spelling out the ontological commitments of a model. So no, I am stating upfront that this is indirect realism, the proposal of a theory that can be falsified.

What I'm saying is that the contents of a mind are just as real as everything else. Colors are real. Sounds are real. They exist. They are both effects and causes themselves. They are the cause of me saying, "The apple is red.", or eating the apple because I like red apples. But colors are also an effect - the effect of light interacting with a visual sensory system. If they weren't then how can I say anything about the apple's state (like it being ripe or rotten)? — Harry Hindu

And I am pointing out the conceptual confusion that kind of talk produces.

The question I asked (also evaded) was that the distinction between the symbolic and the physical that you generally refer to, seems to originate with Von Neumann's idea, as then picked up by Pattee, in the paper, Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiosis. I am saying, this is distinction that only appears evident in living systems - that is why, in scanning the universe for life, NASA has some idea what to look for. There is a particular order which is characteristic of living systems, is there not? And that is where the symbolic/physical distinction really comes into play. — Wayfarer

More bullshit. I have agreed umpteen times that the epistemic cut is where life and mind properly kick in. There is actual semiotic machinery involved, like receptors, membranes, pumps, channels, let alone the core stuff of codable memories - genes, neuons, language - that can read/write the information that stands for the purposes and constraints of a biological system.

A non-biological system can still be a dissipative structure. Now the world at large - the thermodynamic context - is the memory structure that represents the purpose and constraints. So there is no located epistemic cut - one internal to the self-describing or self-replicating organism. The cut is now only a distributed pattern of environmental information. This is when we get into the importance of event horizons as encoding the order of nature at a physical level.

So yes, we can also define pansemiosis as this more generalised type of metaphysics. And physics has been doing exactly that too.

But stop pretending that I am not clear about the fundamental difference between biosemiosis and pansemiosis in this regard. It gets really tedious.

I have no idea what that means, sorry. — Wayfarer

Bullshit. Plato's Heaven. Plato's realm of perfect ideas. This other place where you claim meaning finds its reality.

So again, are you willing to grant entropy the same Platonic status as negentropy, to summarise the nub of our long standing disagreement?

You argue information is only really information to the degree it is a signal, not noise. But I argue that the erasure of information - the very thing you cited in the OP - is also just as meaningful in being that which is the erased, the ignorable, the definitely meaningless.

It is inorganic precisely because it is not ordered in the way that living things are ordered, and so the distinction between symbol and matter is not evident in it. — Wayfarer

So the flow networks of the body, like our vascular system, are fractally organised and so exhibit the pure forms we associate with nature at its inorganic level. It is the kind of pattern we read as "noise" - literally. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_noise

And I note how carefully you are evading the more important point directed at your position.

Are you willing to grant access to Platonia for these other forms of nature which are just as mathematical - chaos, entropy, and other patterns of nature that you prefer to call bad on the grounds they "lack meaning or purpose".

The story remains the same.

1) It starts with the proper nature of explanation. An explanation of nature in terms of causality is a model - a rational account with observational consequences. This is going to happen because of that. The account thus depends on posited counterfactuals. If the particular predicted events don't happen, then something must be a problem with the general statements which are the theory.

On that score, it follows that you can't even have a theory if you can't identify counterfactuals. There has to be something to measure in terms of the claims being made.

So as I have said quite a few times to you, I agree that any theory of nature encounters a "hard problem" when it runs out of factual distinctions. About the Cosmos or Being itself, we can ask "Why anything?" and that question drops down a great big silent well to the degree we can't offer a measurable counterfactual. Show me the alternative to the simple fact of Being and then we can start to account for its existence employing counterfactual argument.

The same applies to other ultimately self-referential lines of questioning like "why is the mind a mind?", "why is red red?", etc. I accept a terminus to explanation - a hard problem of epistemology - if we run up against the brute factness of qualia, just as much as if we run up against a brute factness in regard to being.

But then you would have the complementary responsibility of not presenting me with "theories" that are "not even wrong". You can't employ brute fact to attempt to prove some naturalistic causal account.

That is precisely the problem with any variant of panpsychism. It presumes experience as a brute fact in a way that defies counterfactual analysis. It says be sure that matter has an experiential aspect, the intrinsic property of being aware, but there is then no way to measure that, to demonstrate that, because I have also constructed the theory in such a way that the presence of experience at the foundational level of matter makes absolutely no bleeding difference to anything you could observe.

The theory is just a tautology. It claims its results in a way that admits to no possible test. It founds itself in brute fact and then hides that while happily agreeing with anything a physicalist might have to say about the correlation of mentality with the complexity of material structures or the functionality of information processes.

Frankly, it is either a case of intellectual stupidity or intellectual dishonesty to advance panpsychism in any of its familiar forms. A theory isn't a theory unless it can be falsified. And panpsychism makes its claims in a way that put it beyond falsification. It becomes a tale of mind all the way down. And then mind does less and less until it is apparently doing nothing. We have the mind of a rock. But that is OK. because all the counterfactual heavy lifting is granted by the panpsychist to the standard material side of the equation.

The rock is a bunch of disunified occasions of experience, or some such utter guff. Brains have the material structure to produce a monarchy, a unity, of these occasions. Or more utter guff.

I'll stop there before even attempting to defend semiotics (sign processing, the epistemic cut, hierarchical complexity, systems causality, etc) as our best candidate theory of mind. The misunderstanding you have is at the most basic level of epistemology - what would even count as "a theory" or causal account of nature.

Unintentional noise. — Wayfarer

And how do you know that except you can read the clear sign of a "mindless physical process"?

The point is that a lack of meaningfulness is as much a matter of interpretation as the presence of meaning. Which blows a big hole in any belief in a "Platonic realm of meaning". Unless that Platonia also contains chaos, friction and entropy as part of its stable of perfect ideas ... all partaking in The Good.

Are some of your good things that are up in Platonia also bad things? Seems problematic.

There have been huge efforts to detect life on other planets, under the acronym SETI. That search is looking for the telltale signs of life. So far, other than a few anomalous messages, and the strange behaviour of some distant stellar objects, no such telltale signs have been found anywhere in the vast universe - it would be a huge news story if they had been.

So aren't these searches looking for a particular kind of order, the existence of which indicates a footprint of biological order? And it was in the context of that order, in which the division between 'symbolic' and 'physical' was made, wasn't it? How can that be extended to any old matter? — Wayfarer

I don't get how you don't get that you are restating my argument.

Look, here is the unmistakable evidence of intelligent life on Mars...



Is that physical information a deliberate signal or unintentional noise. You decide. Or rather, it is matter of interpretance. Which belief is going to minimise your capacity to make wrong predictions?

How can you go about testing your theory when the outcome of any test will have your purpose imposed on it? All you are saying is your theory is the result of YOUR purposes and your interests, which means that it is only useful to you, not anyone else. — Harry Hindu

My argument was against naive realism and in favour of indirect realism. And indirect realism accepts both the fact that knowledge is grounded in the subjectivity of self-interest, but can then aspire to the objectivity of invariant or self-interest free "truth" by a rational method of theory and test, or abductive reasoning.

So there is available to us a method for minimising the subjectivity of belief. We know how to do that measurably. It's called the scientific method. Pragmatism defines it.

You seem to both accept and reject indirect realism. It sounds as though you want to insist on some naive realism at base in talking about a cause and effect relation between the dynamics of the world and the symbols then generated within the mind.

The thing in itself is actually a pattern of radiation. The experience we have is of seeing red rather than green. Somehow that is veridical and direct as there is a physical chain of events that connects every step of the way.

But even the fact that the world is constituted of patterns of radiation - everything can be explained by the different possible frequencies of a light wave - is simply another level of idea or conception. It is a further level of theory and test.

Naive realism fails. It is indirect realism all the way down. All we can say is that a particular way of looking at the world is proving to be a good habit of interpretation over some larger scale of space and time.

This can be explained by conservation of energy. Natural selection must make compromises in "designing" sensory systems as the amount of energy available isn't infinite, and it would probably take an infinite amount of energy to be informed of the world in it's completeness. So, we would be limited by the amount of energy, not some self deciding which parts of a sensory system are more useful than another part. — Harry Hindu

Sure, the availability of energy is some kind of ultimate limit. But you are missing the point - which is how meaning even arises granted no particular limit to information capacity.

Meaning or semantics arises by a symmetry breaking of information. The information must be divided into signal and noise. The greater the contrast - the more information that is discarded as noise - the more meaningful the remaining information which is being treated as the signal.

So that is what the information theoretic approach is about. First establishing a baseline understanding of information in itself - as a physical capacity for variety, as some actual ensemble of possibilities. And then we can get to where we want to go - a principle for extracting the meaning of a message (or the physics of the world).

Semantics can be defined in a measurable fashion as the differences that make a difference ... because they are not a matter of general indifference.

That is why Landauer's principle was one of the important advances in turning attention to information discard or erasure. In the real world, eliminating noise is a big energetic cost.

Well if you want your vagueness to apply only to mathematics and epistemology that is fine, but I thought we were talking about ontology. — Agustino

It is about logic - reasoning itself. So it is mathematical in that maths is our most rigorous language of reasoning. It is epistemology as the right way to reason is mission critical. And then it is ontology, because equipped with the right reasoning, the right logical framework, we can hope to make the best sense of what reality actually is.

You were asked in the conversation with MU to provide an example of vagueness which showed that vagueness was ontological, not epistemological. In other words, that it belonged to the terrain, not to the map that we have. — Agustino

This understanding of what is required just confirms you are a naive realist. Peirce established the proper pragmatic basis for a logico-scientific understanding of reality.

Rather than just a map and a territory, there are the three things of a modelling relation. The "map", or mediating level of sign, is a living and adaptive "umwelt".

So the map isn't the territory of course. But more than that, it doesn't aim to re-present the world. It aims to ignore that world as much as possible. So the map comes to be a map of our own interpretive interests as much as a map of the external reality. It is a picture of ourselves as much as it is a picture of the thing in itself.

The famous example is the London Underground map. It is a picture of our interest in getting from A to B in terms of changing trains. It does this by ignoring the actual geography of the world as much as it can.

So the Peircean argument is internalist. All we can know of the world is the beliefs that we are prepared to hold about it, the beliefs we are prepared to act by.

This doesn't deny the thing in itself. But it should also alert us to the fact we don't really care about the world in some disembodied fashion. The maps we make are as much a self-portrait - indeed, the very act of creating that "interpretive self" - as they are a re-presentation of the world as it might be said to be in terms of its own set of interests.

The map faces both ways. It mediates rather than represents. So our realism is psychologically indirect. And that is a feature not a bug as otherwise "we" - as a packaged set of interpretive habits - could not even "exist" unless we could find ourselves in the very maps we create. Our maps make our purposes concrete in a way we can then actually talk about ourselves as a further ontological fact of existence.

I'm an engineer (by degree anyway), and so it's been very well-ingrained into my blood to be sceptical of mathematics and mathematical models and to be aware that they are very limited in describing reality. You seem - coming from a background of theoretical physics/science - not to have this awareness of the limitations of mathematical modelling. — Agustino

Nice try at boxing me in. But that pragmatic intersection between theory and practice is exactly what I have a good meta-theoretic understanding of.

But say you could establish a contraction scenario that is exactly symmetric to the expansion scenario, what have you achieved but another way of saying the same thing? It wouldn't advance the science if it hasn't changed the science.

Under general relativity, the universe could be expanding or contracting. GR equations famously have symmetry in that precise regard. They don't specify a direction, so both directions make sense.

However the two directions make different predictions once we add in a conservation of energy constraint. Now one direction will cool radiation by stretching it, or redshifting it. The other will heat radiation by contracting it, or blue-shifting it.

So we looked up in the sky and saw unambiguously which it was. The Universe is redshifting evenly in every direction. At most, this would mean the earth just happens to be standing still as it sits right in the centre of the universe and everything else is for some reason moving away with ever greater speed according to it distance. So everything else is not just moving with some constant velocity but is carefully arranged so that velocity is faster the further away the object happens to be.

This kind of Copernican special arrangement doesn't generally make good science. It is simpler to believe that space expands the same for everyone everywhere at the same local rate. There is no centre to the expansion, and so no need to locate the earth in exactly that one spot.

Then again, even if the earth is in this special Copernican situation, we are not seeing the blueshift a generalised contraction ought to predict. The stars are not carefully arranged so that the most distant look to be rushing towards us the fastest.

So your version is that we have two lines that are touching but separate? Seems a little self contradictory given the definition of a line is that it has zero width. Does the PNC apply somehow? Something that doesn't extend in a direction, and so is definitely separate, also still extends in that direction, and so is able to touch?

I can see that you might be struggling to follow the logic of Peirce's example if you are unfamiliar with the philosophy of maths. This is a good clear primer on the continuum issue - why Peirce was following Aristotle in treating the numberline and dimensionality generally as the potentially infinite, not actually infinite - http://uberty.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Zalamea-Peirces-Continuum.pdf

But another example of the vagueness/PNC~generality/LEM dichotomy which is basic to his logic is the triangle. A triangle is a general concept that forms a continuum limit - a global constraint - that then can't be exhausted by its particular instances. An infinite variety of particular triangles can be embraced by the general notion of a triangle.

So the LEM does not apply to this generality as a triangle can, in genus~species fashion, be equilateral, isosceles, or scalene. Of course the triangle must be a three-sided polygon, but that is talking of a still higher level generality of which it now partakes as a definite particular.

Peirce's point was that a general represents one notion of the indeterminate. As a description of a global constraint, the LEM fails to apply to it because contrary possibilities are not being excluded. Family resemblances are allowed within it.

Then vagueness is defined dichotomously to the general. Where generality allows you to say any particular triangle can be either scalene or isosceles, vagueness speaks to the indefinite case where there is as yet no triangle specified and so there is no fact of the matter as to whether it is scalene or isosceles. It is not a contradiction to say the potential triangle is both.

So the general is the global continuity that absorbs some category of all difference or particularity. The vague is the local generativity or spontaneity that produces all manner of difference or particularity.

You've leapt into a conversation without understanding its metaphysical intent, trying to turn it into a "commonsense" view of deep matters - commonsense representing the reductionist view of reality where crisp particulars are simply taken for granted, and so all causality is just a matter of composition or construction.

Peirce, like Aristotle, was fundamentally challenging that with a holistic or systems view of causality. So the laws of thought - in talking about the logic of definite particulars - are taken as being emergent. They have to develop their counterfactual definiteness within the two bounding and complementary limits of the vague and the general, or metaphysical Firstness and Thirdness.

(Y)

Anyone can simply say to go read their favorite philosopher and end the conversation. — schopenhauer1

Yeah. I mean anyone woulda thunk dis was a philosophical forum or sumthink. Next people will be making their case by posting large slabs of impenetrable text from blogs called larval subjects, or suchlike. I mean it's not like we can just google unfamiliar terms and start to educate ourselves.

Get over yourself man.

The thing is though, you are so close to being on the cusp of saying that, like Whitehead, the triadic hierarchies are experiential in their prehension and novelty all the way down — schopenhauer1

In your wet dreams. Even when arguing for pansemiosis, I am clear that life and mind are different in having an epistemic cut that puts hierarchical constraint "inside" the organism. I am arguing for the evolution of autonomy, not against it.

I am just rejecting your mental substance just as I would if you argued for elan vital.

You want to treat consciousness as some pure quality. You take it for granted there is a self who introspects on a Cartesian theatre of ideas and impressions. You argue that there is all the physical complexity of some information process - and then for no known reason, there is the added radioactive glow of phenomenal experience to light up the brain's dark circuits.

But then you turn out to be undecided on whether your ontology is one of dualist correlation or panpsychic monism. How could I be close to agreeing with you if you find it hard to agree with yourself?

I tried to be clear where I agree with Whitehead - on the generality of a holistic systems causality. Then where I fundamentally disagree - on experience or agency as a fundamental property or constituent of nature. Just go with the positions I actually argue when in doubt.