It would be nice if the metaphysical detail of these kinds of positions felt better worked out.

If this intelligent creator is outside of time and space, then that seems to preclude the possibility of him showing any change. The other side of seeing all the Universe in one block history fashion is that the creator's thinking or intending or intelligence would have to be frozen in a similar fashion. And can intelligence have that quality?

I mean are we crediting this creator with daydreams or boredom or the sudden realisation that he has a better idea?

Isn't it more rational to imagine a creator who sees all existence at once is instead more akin to a pantheistic universal tendency towards existence - an urge to manifest? Then having accepted such a vague notion of the divine - with is mentalistic connotations - just drop the divine part and get on with the naturalistic account?

If God always existed, then time is one thing He didn't create. Problem?

Knowing something to be unintelligible still counts as knowledge. It's the unknown unknowns you gotta loook out for. ;)

Utter lack of determination is a logical contradiction, for it aims to be a determination itself and fails. — Agustino

Well either you believe in the relativity you advanced or you don't. Or is inconsistency OK in your metaphysics? [rhetorical question]

The very fact of determination would demand its dialectical "other" of indeterminancy. How could determination arise except as a departure from the undetermined?

You have shown you get the logic. So be prepared to follow it through in every argument. If individuation is a thing, then so is vagueness.

You may think of absolute chaos as two balls moving in empty space absolutely chaotically, without any rhyme or purpose. — Agustino

I can't help it if your ability to imagine "absolute chaos" is so improverished.

The question whether the first cause is "immanent" - what does that even mean? - hasn't been addressed — Agustino

You are just prevaricating. It is clear that an evolutionary metaphysics is very concerned with "first cause". And it's standard answer (as old as metaphysics) is that the triggering event becomes indistinguishable from chance.

That is what we should expect from an acceptance of dialectical reasoning. If what emerges is the opposition of two things - here, the necessary and the contingent, or purposeful creation vs meaningless existence - then the vagueness which spawned them must be a state where we can no longer tell the difference. The first cause must look as much like one as the other. The first action must be both deliberate and accidental - and so also, the least of either.

As you would expect, science now gets it. In the theory of spontaneous symmetry breaking, it all starts with "a fluctuation". We can define "first causes of the vague kind" (sounds like a movie title, hey?) in terms that are as much a definite action as a definite accident.

So science brings dialectical precision to metaphysics. And it cashes that out in terms of the measureable.

We now actually know that there is a "quantum Planck-scale" at which definite actions and definite accidents blur into each other indistinguishably. We can give a size to "a fundamental fluctuation". And this starting point is chimeric. It is as much the one thing as the other. And so really neither, if we are being honest.

You. That's what your argument entails. It entails that statistically, lower degrees of order will lead to higher degrees of order. And that's precisely what is under the question. You take that as a brute fact, while it clearly asks for explanation as shown by the OP first of all. — Agustino

I only argue that the degree of order is that which is matched to the degree of disordering. Thermodynamics is all about balance and equilibrium. Surely you've heard that mentioned?

So human society is negentropy that is matched by its capacity for entropification. For every city built, a matching amount of frictional heat must be produced. There are no perpetual motion machines.

It is telling that you need to misrepresent my argument to this extent to keep your religious argument going.

LOL! No, the scientists themselves are not that sure. We don't understand dark energy very well. We can't even predict what the weather will be in 5 days very accurately, you think we can predict what will happen to the Universe in many billions of years? — Agustino

What can I say? I thought you were a smarter fellow. But when you resort to arguments as weak as these, it just looks like you have run up the white flag.

The intelligent designer solves a problem. — Agustino

As I've argued, you have to show first there is still a problem. Science is explaining the emergence of order very nicely. The ancient metaphysics of a dialectically self-organising cosmos - metaphysical naturalism - is proving true. Exhibit A is the quantum fluctuation. Exhibit B is Big Bang cosmology.

So now the focused attention is going towards the question of "the first fluctuation". The point at which the "triggering cause" becomes indistinguishably a composite of Aristotelean final and efficient causes.

If you want to keep doing metaphysics at this stage of human history, you've got to do a better job of keeping up with the play. The question about "first cause" goes beyond the dichotomous categories you thought were fundamental.

I was responding to your argument of the universe being 'fundamentally a process of disordering'. I pointed out that an order might be said to exist, prior to any process of 'disordering'. — Wayfarer

That is why you need to pay attention to the actual science. Prigogine showed how order arises emergently and so is not prior but immanent.

We know that is true from observation. So if you want to argue that order might exist prior, then it is up to you to formulate that as a particular hypothesis which takes account of emergent order as its constraint.

We have a world in which we observe order emerging from disorder (as negentropic dissipative structure) everywhere we look. Even human society/global warming is direct evidence of this natural story at work.

So if you want to posit something else in addition, then you need to provide a better motivating basis as there is so much of our actual world that doesn't need your kind of deus ex machina explanation now.

No knowledge with regards to the very far future and the very far past counts as "strongly" supported. — Agustino

So you just ignore the evidence of the Heat Death being all around us? And you ignore the fact that we can look out into the sky and see the start of the Universe because it takes billions of years for distant light to reach us? And you ignore the fact that we can create both the early and final states of the Universe to some degree in a particle collider or other experimental apparatus.

Is there no limit to your ability to ignore the observable so you can maintain your articles of faith?

Why did 'negentropy' become a factor of consideration? It was because it appeared anomalous, in an analogous way to altruism appearing anomalous to selection, until Hamilton came along with his mathematical rationalisations. So there's a motivation here, or a theoretical axiom, which is brought to bear on the question, namely, the requirement to conform to physical laws. — Wayfarer

I don't get it. You are complaining because science presumes that "anomalies" have rational explanations?

The requirement is not to make nature conform to some particular law. It is to discover the laws by which nature is ruled.

Thermodynamics has had to be rewritten because it was realised that the early set of laws did not explain the counter-action of negentropic structure. Prigogine got a Nobel for getting the rewrite going.

So as usual, you are complaining about science being a process of rational enquiry rather than sticking to its prejudices come what may.

Only science is founded on a method of systematically challenging its prejudices. It is designed to uncover its own errors. And after everything has been doubted, then that is why there can be confidence in what has managed to survive.

But go ahead and keep sticking up for a method of enquiry that avoids self-critical examination.

A natural theologian could easily point to the 'six numbers which are said to be indispensable for the existence of anything whatever, and ask 'why those? Had it been all a matter of chance, then nothing would exist at all. And those values don't appear to "fall out" of the equations of physics - hence the "naturalness problem" — Wayfarer

Bleeding hell. The "problem" for science is that those fundamental constants do seem to be "chance numbers".

Everything else about the Standard Model is Platonic-strength maths. The particles are what they are due to the unbreakable regularity of symmetry maths. It is a case of 1+1=2 in that out of maximal disorder arises fundamental invariance. Symmetry maths says when every permutation is permitted, what emerges is the realisation that some arrangements can't be randomised out of existence.

So it is in the face of this fact - disordering creates deep order, the very order that accounts for the formal properties of the discovered constituents of nature - that the material constants of nature seem a strange accident.

The metaphysical questions raised by fundamental physics thus begin at a very clear and specific question now. Can the material constants be reduced to formal arguments. Can they be explained the same way as mathematically emergent necessities or invariances? Or are the material constants "just chance" - contingent facts? And that makes sense as that accepts chance or spontaneity to be a basic fact of existence too. It is metaphysically logical that there would be this dialectical or dichotomistic division at the root of things.

So the foundational question is clear enough. We actually know what needs to be explained. And then the debate within physics gets divided over how the contingency of existence is modelled.

Some go back to ensemble thinking - crisp possibility. For every possible value of a material constant, a world expressing that will exist. That leads to multiverse stories.

I prefer a unitary story where our Universe must be the best of all possible universes. In evolutionary terms, it must have the optimal balance for persisting existence. It out-competed all the other possibilities to become "the one".

It doesn't really matter which of these two choices is correct. The point is that science has arrived at some very clear questions. And done that in less than a century.

That makes a joke of theism that has waffled for thousands of years and got nowhere. World religions couldn't even make up their mind if the Cosmos was born, or was eternal, or recycled endlessly.

And now we have folk stamping their feet impatiently, saying why hasn't science cracked the final mystery? Yet these same folk seem to have no understanding of the very focused and particularised questions that science is now tackling, let alone the metaphysical implications of what now counts as strongly supported knowledge.

So the 'entropic' theory is this - according to thermodynamics life ought not to exist at all — Wayfarer

Why do you persist in misrepresenting the science? Thermodynamics says life must exist if it raises the local rate of entropification.

Science has measured this claim and found it to be true. Stick a thermometer in the air, and yes - thanks to all this human "order" - the planet is warming nicely. :)

Calling something 'First cause' is ignoring the paradox of creation and existence, not solving it. — CasKev

Somewhat missing in these discussions is that science is the one that has demonstrated the Universe had a beginning. The Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago.

If you want to talk about Creation these days, it means something pretty precise and physical. That should be a clue as to how helpful a bunch of religious folk tales gathered from various random 2000 year old cultures are going to be.

The designing intelligence is a required element to account for reality as we perceive it, but we have no grounds to that would require the designing intelligence to "come about". That's why it is "First cause". Now you will say why can't universe be first cause? That still doesn't change the fact that this first cause needs to be intelligent. — Agustino

So the way to get rid of a stain on the carpet is to disguise it with a bigger stain?

Great thinking Batman! Wrap your mystery in a bigger mystery. Pretend something useful was said.

Chaos is a relative term. Something is chaotic in comparison to a higher degree of order. But absolute chaos, as I've mentioned in my first post in this thread, is incoherent. A minimum of order is always necessary. — Agustino

I certainly agree with that. But it points to a "first moment" that is a vagueness, an utter lack of determination.

Once you accept the basic relativity of all metaphysical categories, then already you are accepting emergence as being what it is about. You are offering the best argument against intelligence design. Any "God" must now be a form of immanent pantheism at best, not some supernatural deity with a grand purpose in mind.

Of course what works is what survives. But why do higher degrees of order work better than lower degrees of order? — Agustino

Who says they do? Surely it is more logical that the degree of order would be the least possible to do what needs to be done?

Again, another strong argument against a supernatural creating deity. If you want to talk about "the divine" in a rational way, there is a reason why "God" gets diluted down to a pantheistic vague striving tendency.

The end of the Universe is itself speculative. — Agustino

Well in fact it is well constrained by observation now. We know - because of dark energy - that a de Sitter state Heat Death is pretty much looking inevitable. And anyway, we are not even 3 degrees away from absolute zero right now. So we know a hell of a lot about the outcome, even if most of this knowledge is less than a century old.

Maybe quantum fluctuations would re-create the Big Bang. — Agustino

What, now you are appealing to emergent chance? Not God descending in chariots of fire to reboot the Heat Death cosmos?

Talk about consistency. :s

Says our observations. Pick a quarrel with the facts for a change.

That in any case is the basis of the various arguments from natural theology, as they will then say that the conditions for the emergence of life were woven into the fabric of the Cosmos, which they take to be the evidence of a higher intelligence — Wayfarer

Unfortunately for theists and their claims of higher intelligence, the Cosmos turns out to be fundamentally a process of disordering. It is a cooling/spreading bath of radiation. So it is a misdescription of nature to talk about its order except as the least amount emergently needed to organise the most efficient entropic flow.

The real question is why are things (the universe) such that statistically, they will tend towards the fastest dissipation of energy? — Agustino

But what is a statistic except the canonical example of order emerging from chaos?

And could even an omnipotent God make a world that lacked the intelligibility of evolution as a general statistical principle - the inescapable logic of stating that what works is what survives?

So was it a or b? Why are you suddenly silent here?

Keeping a straight face is the problem here, Rich.

Just give a straight answer. Is the new born mind (a) the result of the development of another infant nervous system or (b) a projected mental quantum hologram just like Bergson-Bohm said?

You've told us your story, remember. Have you suddenly lost faith in it after all? That's good to know.

So you are saying the nervous system is not the cause? On what grounds?

Oh that's right. All reality is a mind field projected hologram.

No, but you do need to invoke some faith that "mind just happened", — Rich

So a foetus develops, the child is born. We kind of know that another mind just happened due to the growth of a nervous system, don't we? Or do you have evidence to the contrary.

You still don't get it do you? Possibility doesn't do anything. It is not actual, it cannot do anything, by definition. — Metaphysician Undercover

In physics, we have got used to considering possibilities as "virtual particles". So the possibilities we can count - as in quantum mechanics - are also "actual" in a special way.

This isn't empty metaphysics. We can actually measure the physical contribution that a cloud of ghostly possibilities adds to any physical property. It is why the vacuum has an irreducible zero point energy, why the magnetic moment of the electron has an added quantum correction.

So I'm not making shit up. Our most accurate theory of nature forces us to take a constraints-based, sum over histories or path integral, view of material being. We can count the effect that unlimited possibility has on the actuality we then measure.

If there is a God, he designed this system we observe. And it is constraints-based self-organisation all the way down to the Planck limit.

Your alternative account - a classically-inspired tale - is experimentally proven as wrong.

That is really the issue with MWI of QM. See how this premise leads to irrational ontological principles? — Metaphysician Undercover

Well MWI is just an interpretation of these proven facts. It is one way of preserving the kind of classical metaphysics you also hold dear. Just as you say you have no choice left but to believe "God did it", so MWI-ers say they have no choice but to believe every virtual possibility must then be something really happening in some other actual world (or mumble, mumble, another branch of the infinite wavefunction).

Again, a logic of vagueness is the way out of this metaphysical impass.

Define emergent product without having a hidden dualism — schopenhauer1

What again? And were you meaning without the explicit dichotomy - the bleeding "apokrisis" that I even choose as a user-name? >:O

Dimensionality is itself a constraint. A "3D flat space" is a constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that was what I was saying.

Why do you suppose that 3D space comes into existence from infinite possibility? — Metaphysician Undercover

As that is itself an emergent geometric constraint on infinite dimensional possibility.

3D space has special properties that make it the only thermally/energetically stable arrangement. It is only 3D space in which the strength of interaction dilute according to a log powerlaw. Force weakens with the square of the distance. In less dimensions, interactions would be too strong. In more, they get weak too fast. So 3D is a special Goldilocks state of dimensionality - stable enough that it out persists other possible arrangements.

This is what is at issue here, we can always ask, "why is there what there is instead of something else?". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. We have to allow anything could have been possible and yet something particular is what survived all attempts to constrain it, supress it, or eliminate it.

So the answer is that what exists is what worked in an evolutionary sense. That is what Peirce and a developmental metaphysics is all about. You don't need a creating hand, a prime mover. Possibility itself will eliminate its own variety just by trying to express its every alternative at once. That is the essence of constraints-based causal self-organisation.

But when you posit infinite possibility you deny that there is any answer to that question, and this stymies philosophical investigation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. It pats you on the head and points you in the direction of the better alternative you've been ignoring.

As I said, constraints change, but to posit constraints coming into existence (emerging) from an absolute lack of constraint is nonsense. — Metaphysician Undercover

If constraint begets constraint, then what begat the first constraint?

Oh I forgot. Must be God. :’(

He explicitly refers to mind — Rich

Err yeah. The word gets said. :-}

And now we are doing the big boy thing of reading a whole sentence all in one go.

The critical part of that sentence is: "...tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth..."

So you get what is being said now? The regularity that we call mind is also an emergent product of (semiotic) growth, like the regularity we call nature.

The point of the die example is that constraints do not emerge, they change, so that a new constraint comes into existence from an already existing constraint. — Metaphysician Undercover

If constraints don't emerge for material being, then provide me with a die that is five or seven sided. Why is six-sidedness a limit on this kind of materiality? Are you not in fact free to change the number of sides composing a regular solid? How could any limit exist in advance of our free potential to tile a volume with regular faces? Surely God at least would be able to ordain the real possibility of a five or seven sided die?

In a realm of infinite potential, apeiron, there is by definition, no constraints whatsoever. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. That is the definition. That is also why I call it the limit of definite existence.

As soon as you have any dimensionality - on free action in some number of particular orrthogonal directions - you also have the complementary fact of constraints on the resulting geometric possibility.

From as soon as you have 3D flat space, five and seven sided dice are an impossibility. And six sided dice a matchingly definite possibility.

That is why Apeiron is not strictly a "ground" of being but its " lower limit". Go in that direction and crispness loses its crispness to become vague. The Apeiron would be the pure vagueness that then "doesn't exist".

Always better to go to the source: — Rich

But you've got a problem, Rich, if you don't understand what you read. :)

So: "tychism must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth"

It seems only a minute ago that you were being snarky about Tychism. And perhaps you haven't even stumbled across its complementary of Synechism yet?

And note here that it is both nature and mind that arise as the semiotic "taking of habits". It is neither mind arising out of (material) nature, nor vice versa. Instead it is a triadic story of both emerging from tychism (Firstness, vagueness, spontaneity) and arriving at their constraining limit (the continuity of synechism or inveterate habit).

and to a Schelling-fashioned idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially deadened mind." — Rich

Yep. There must be some reason Peirce found Schelling's Naturephilosphie both a historical inspiration, yet also rather in need of fixing up.

Schelling did have a similar take in many ways. And Schelling scholarship likewise raises the further question of "which Schelling?" as his arguments evolved and changed over his own lifetime. But Schelling was more clearly idealist as he did not put semiotic/universal methods of reasoning at the centre of his thought. But then who else was a foundational logician like Peirce in the history of metaphysics (besides Aristotle)?

Googling for quotes doesn't replace scholarship I'm afraid.

the universe is in some sense possessed of awareness. — Wayfarer

Yes. And I am asking you to define what that might actually mean - in Peirce's view especially. What does such a statement commit to you in ontic specifics.

If you think Peirce is a panpsychist for example, support that. Does he anywhere say that fundamentally consciousness is a universal property of material being?

Peirce seems very concerned with the idea that existence is somehow bound up with "the universal growth of reasonableness". Hence the emphasis on interpretation and habit. But where is the "self" - the experiencer of experiencers - in his metaphysics? There seems no particular ontic commitment to that coming through in his writings.

Not as 'substance' as he rejected Cartesian dualism. — Wayfarer

Yes. He really did, didn't he. A big clue, surely.

The Wiki entry on 'objective idealism', — Wayfarer

That is a poor summary of what Peirce proposes. Peirce argues that even the material world emerges (via semiotic reason as a universal process of constraint-formation).

So that Wiki entry makes a distinction between objective and subjective idealism. And objective idealism is suppose to accept the reality of a material world, yet reject a naturalism where mind then emerges from that material world.

But Peirce was arguing for a "total emergence" naturalism. So in the beginning, there is neither matter nor mind in any useful concrete sense. Everything that comes to exist arises because of sign relations.

There are, I agree, some big inconsistencies about this. Peirce equivocated about Firstness. Sometimes he described it in very physicalist language, sometimes very mentalist. He was working his way to an abstract logical description - his unfinished logic of vagueness - and also, late in life, he took a definite religious turn of mind that coloured his writings from yet another direction.

So you can keep triumphantly waving this one little phrase - "matter is effete mind" - and yet my question to you is show that you've really understood what Peirce was saying, and how that evolved even over the course of his life (in response to how his life was going).

You can have momentary realisations that are utterly real, — Wayfarer

Again, the fact that these states of "heightened disembodied blissful sense of complete insight" can be mechanically stimulated must produce something more than this casual shrug of the shoulders if you are being honest.

It seems to me, from the reading I have done of Peirce, — Wayfarer

Cool. So perhaps you can sum up what "mind" then means in Peircean terms. What actual ontic commitments follow?

Do you think he is actually idealist, dualist, panpsychic, or what? Is reality immaterial for him? How is mind defined for him? Is it disembodied reason? Is it a substance, an awareness field, something else?

But I do think the state of 'sama-sambuddhasa' (perfectly realised enlightenment) is real, not reducible to various forms of psychologism or evolutionary-grounded illusions, at which point the individual realises him/herself as being in some essential manner, beyond death. — Wayfarer

But if you find the same states of oceanic feeling or religious ecstasy can be the result of temporal lobe epilepsy, or drugs, or magnetically induced stimulation, what then?

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

To talk about unbounded awareness is incoherent. There is only awareness-of. Or the lack of that particularity, and so a lack of a definiteness of concepts and impressions at some moment.

We know from observation that the intensity or power of awareness goes with the complexity of the modelling, the complexity of the neural processing, taking place so as to give an organism its first person point of view. To then argue that awareness would reach some even higher state by becoming unbounded from such located structure is a logical nonsense. It is not an extrapolation from the evidence.

A notion of universal mind makes no sense because the prime quality of being sharply conscious is to be in a most particular state of minding. Awareness-of, in your terminology.

Individual brains can then also be defocused, inattentive, even vigilant - norepinephrine-tuned in terms of noise~signal firing threshold so as to be standing ready to pick up events coming from any direction. All explicable in information processing terms.

But that just reinforces the fact that a memorable intensity of experience is due to the moment to moment development of highly particularised states of information. To posit an oceanic state of disembodied love, a cosmic awareness, is unsupported romanticism. Yes, a popular idea in culture. But not one that reasoned inquiry supports.

What's uncertain or vague about a die? It is an engineered cube with clearly marked faces. Are we in doubt that it must land on one of six numbers when it finally comes to rest on a flat surface?

Oh yes. We in fact add the constraint that maximises our uncertainty over which number will turn up by throwing it in a way that is as if we don't care. In any dice game, that is the rule - the principle of indifference. And thus a constraint that emerged at the dawn of dice games so as to make them even intelligible.

Pure random unintelligible infinite potential cannot give rise to intelligible constraint, because this would mean that it negates itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Err, yeah. That was the point. The self-negation of unintelligibility (the constraint on chaos) is what Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness" is all about.

Can pure, absolute randomness suddenly become ordered? The order must come from somewhere. — Metaphysician Undercover

Back to efficient causes, hey? Good luck with that.

Or maybe I have replied a sufficient number of times in the past?

I see no problem in presuming the "ground of being" to be instead the "limit of being". Indeed, that is what makes sense given that I am talking about emergence and challenging a brute existence based ontology.

If intelligiblity is what arises, then the foundational limit to that developmental trajectory is "the unintelligible".

Sure, the story picks up at the first inkling of intelligibility. The whole epistemic approach is internalist or immanent. But that is the bleeding point.

We actually have to start from the "subjectivity of our being". And we can't hope for some transcendent leap to a God's eye point of view of the facts - the Kantian thing in itself. So internalism - a la Peirce - is just good metaphysics.

Happy now?

Sounds legit.

You know how it goes, MU. If one finds oneself going in the opposite direction to you, then one is definitely not getting it backwards. So thanks for that (backwards) vote of confidence. (Y)

Nevertheless, what you seem to be missing from the terminology of Ein Sof (and related terms from other cultures) is the very plausible (at the very least, quite fitting to all works in which it is mentioned) metaphysical interpretation of the intended referent being that of awareness sans awareness-of. — javra

Not missing, but explicitly rejecting.

Although I'm certainly also sympathetic to the idea that all differences disappear as we work our way back to vagueness.

So we are both arguing from opposite sides of the fence. In the end I am speaking in a physicalist register, you (I assume) an idealist register. But I agree also that "in the end", experience is what is epistemically primary (for us). Dasein, Firstness, or whatever term one uses. To talk about grounding experience in the world is the beginning of an explanation. But we never transcend the limits of the fact of being grounded in .... not mind, or even awareness, but whatever is experience as vague being.

So there is something to meditation and other such ego-shedding spiritual practices even within my scheme. I am indeed talking of vagueness as physics. I have the explicit project of pan-semiosis where even "the world" is organised by a "mind-like" process - both world and mind being recognised as labels we apply to an experience thus divided. So pan-semiosis is ontically idealist to the extent it is not brute realism (and reciprocally, not brute idealism to the extent it its realist).

However, in terms of experience itself, as we can discover it to be, then shedding structuring thoughts and returning to some bare ground of "just being" is a legitimate project from the idealist side. I guess that was exactly what interested me a long time ago when I was getting started.

I did spend a lot of time investigating actual phenomenology - uncovering the fact that the organised mind is a busy place, and so how it could be relaxed back into a generalised nothingness, a vagueness, by zoning out, or a floatation tank, or that point where one falls asleep, or what it is actually like in the depths of deep non-dreaming sleep.

So I say Zen is bunk because of the notion that it is a self-mastering path to personal power. I realise that also there are varieties of Zen. The particular one I encountered at 10 was all about martial arts. It was about centering the mind so as to be able to muster strength and speed in action. And I thought sod that as the mosquitoes descended. Finding that kind of mental focus is not difficult in a sports situation. It's practical training. No need to dress it up with transcendent significance.

But then being able to still the mind - or rather empty its attentive foreground so as to allow a background natural restless manifest - is a useful trick when having to be creative in your thinking. You have to be able to strip away existing mental organisation, go back to a vaguer mental state, and catch the novel ideas or associations that flower.

So in a pragmatic way, understanding this about the mind is a useful thing. The ability to control our experiential vagueness has value, even if it is not of transcendent significance (no deontic dimension).

You do seem to want to defend the crisp existence of bare awareness - the generalised state that is about nothing in particular, and thus quietly, restlessly, about potentially everything.

And I would say something similar, but with different emphasises because of my own interests. It is the restless potential - the everythingness rather than the nothingness - which would lie at the end of my naturalist phenomenology.

So the Zen I criticise (which you may rightfully say is a caricature in speaking of the Westernised new age take) is wrong in making nothingness the goal. Somehow even the inkling of thoughts and urges must be stilled to the point of not existing. And this impossibility is why you might get a smack over the head from the Zen master, or spend a lifetime never achieving this idealised state.

My view - which fits with the neurology - is that the whole point of foundational mental being is to be a rustle of a billion possibilities. You need the mind as a sea of fluctuations - a Peircean Firstness of flashes of uncontexted thoughts and bare sensations - to then have some Tychism or creative spontaneity to shape up into an organised structure of awareness-of.

To me – and no doubt the arguments will persist on this – you seem to reify epistemological vagueness into a sub-stantial Apeirion and then proceed to make conclusions with use of this Apeiron as a premise. — javra

In fact I am trying to avoid the usual substantial take on the Apeiron, just as I am of Mind.

But also, I am a physicalist in that I accept the scientific evidence that consciousness is emergent from complexity. It is not a simple. We know that because there is such a clear explanatory connection between brains and behaviour for a start. Drink and you feel drunk. It becomes foolish after that to deny mental states are not supervenient on material ones.

So to talk about what could be "the fundamental" - the foundational vague potential - we have to reason via whatever we know to have popped out of it emergently. And that boils down to the duality of matter and form (according to our founding metaphysics). So there must be some kind of materiality, as well as some kind of organisational structure, present in the Apeiron - at least as its unexpressed potential.

That is the argument that leads back to the notion of the Apeiron as a sea of chaotic fluctuations. Actions with a direction.

Of course, that is already "too much" in terms of an actual vagueness. But also, it seems the least possible form of definiteness. A bare action with a direction unrelated to any other is a nothing really.

It is like standing on top of a fog-bound mountain and stabbing a finger as if towards a path. It seems a meaningful event, yet it just ain't without a larger context that can make it so in relational fashion. Pointing in any other direction, in any other way, would have been just as good at that first moment.

So yes, hylomorphic substantiality is what emerges. And that is then how vagueness must be modelled or understood. We can roll our imaginations back to the very first breaking of its symmetry by the most meaningless possible fluctuation, the most relationless relation between a material action and a formal direction or organisation.

Talk about the Apeiron will thus always have to carry an air of substantiality. But the Apeiron is then formally the vague limit to substantiality. It is the boundary to reality, not itself a further state of reality. That is the subtle further bit of the story.

Your system explains awareness thermodynamically; my system starts off with awareness as ontic, brute, fact. — javra

My system starts off with symmetry-breaking and hence there must be some duality from the first moment. If there is awareness, then there must be equally also its "other" - however that is then correctly conceived.

As argued, mind and matter just don't pan out as that dichotomy. This is obvious from all the problems that bedevil ontic dualism. There is just no way to see each as the cause of the other in interactive fashion.

But another dichotomy - constraints and degrees of freedom, or information and matter - does have that intrinsic complementary machinery. We can translate from one to the other in a way that shows they are causally related. Each crisply exists to the degree its "other" is absent. The metaphysical relationship is not one of opposition or negation but instead of the inverse or reciprocal. The symmetry-breaking is not one that just brutely exists, but one that has to develop with the fullness with time.

According to you, accepting that there is inner experiential qualities of (at least certain) processes is somehow antithetical to your theory. — schopenhauer1

Hardly. My question to you is how is that not explained (in at least some tentative fashion) by agreement that a modelling relation with the world seems the kind of process that simply ought to "feel like something".

Even just a crude "picture in the head" representationalism, says there is something inner. There is the outer world and the inner picture of it. The problem is that representationalism is homuncular. It sets up the expectation that there is still "an experiencer" required to look at the pictures.

The modelling relations view aims to get past that in the fashion of ecological, enactive or embodied theories of cognition. Or Peircean habits of interpretance.

First, human consciousness needs to be deflated. We have to see that self-consciousness - the further habit of self-regulatory introspection - is a socio-linguistic skill. The ego, the self, is a verbal concept which we learn to apply. The "experiencer" is now a social-level selfhood, a view of our biological self taken from an externally anchored vantage point. We learn to view our actions, our behaviour, our "animal" urges, our accomplishments and acheivements, as if from a third person point of view - the generalised judgement of our family, peers, betters, and indeed entire cultural milieu.

So that social self is still a result of semiosis. Our cultures have some idea of the right way to be a human. And that becomes a constraint "we" learn to apply to our behaviour. In the Western romantic/individualist tradition especially, this social self becomes reified as an actual being living inside our heads.

Anthropology finds that simpler tribal cultures know right from wrong as simply being about how they would be judged if their actions were visible to their peers. But the Western way has been to make right and wrong a property of "the self". Sin and saintliness are properties of an inner soul. The third person social point of view gets internalised as part of the general modelling relation with the world.

That is why the psychology of modern man is so complex and existentially fraught. We live life through society's eyes. Our heads are crowded places with complex decisions. We find ourselves being pushed about by a confliction of selves. That is, "we" wind up in the middle between the social super-ego and the biological id, as Freud put it.

So first there is the socially constructed sense of self that worms its way into our heads to structure our experience. This illustrates how "points of view" are semiotically constructed. When we talk about "the experiencer", we are really talking about a system of constraints that kick into organise the flow of action.

We may personalise that machinery - call it "a self". But really it is just a machinery of constraints that reliably kicks in to focus action. It is a habit of interpretance. And that then contrasts with the individual novel acts of interpretance which may be how we form a point of view from one monent to the next. So every state of impression is some particular point of view in which an experiencer vs experience dyad is formed. It is another fleeting state of orientation in which we imagine an external or detached angle that makes "personal sense" of some particular state of the world.

Now I'm getting on to the biological level of semiosis or selfhood.

It just is the case with neural modelling that a discrimination between "self" and "world" is core to the process. If I am chewing, I have to have a constant sense of what is food, what is tongue, in my mouth. Confuse the two and it is painful. So right at the foundation of perceptual processing, there is a self/other discrimination that starts the show.

A "self" is implicit in working out constantly where the boundaries of our bodies and their intentions, their capabilities, lie. And then, from the same computation, the world - as everything "other" to that - is also implied. The world exist for us not because it is there, but because we understand it to be there as that which brutely resists our wishes and interests.

This is what an embodied approach to cognition is about. What comes first is neither self, nor world, but the unbounded and so vague experience of the infant. It is only as habits of interpretation are built up that we become practiced and secure at making an automatic, subconscious level, running discrimination in which there are the two things of a self and a world. We divide things into the experiences of what is "out there" and the experiencer which is "in here". Self and world co-arise as the definite categories of experiencing.

So the "experiencer" is revealed as a processing habit. There is no "I" at the fundamental level. But I-ness is what arises in conjunction with other-ness. We get a reified notion of there being a homuncular experiencer, an inner witnesser and willer, along with an equally reified notion of "the world" as a place of brute physical facticity.

So a good theory of mind is one that can track the semiotic reality of how both self and world co-emerge via a modelling relations process. They are both "inner" - as Kant argued. Which leaves the third thing of actual world outside, the thing in itself.

And Peirce then turned that into a more concrete formalism - a triadic description which correctly sees that what is going on is a habit of interpretance that forms for itself the signs by which it responds.

The fact that we can talk about "the self" and "the world", and find that meaningful in terms of knowing what to usefully do next, shows we have indeed reified these things as the signs that are needed to anchor acts of interpretation.

If my elbow knocks over the crystal display in crowded shop, I can immediately determine who is to blame. Well, at least I will know the grounds of the complicated debate that must ensue in my head. Was it me being clumsy? Was it my troublesome id acting out deliberately? Is it is the shop's fault for crowding its wares and almost ensuing an accident like this would happen? Maybe the shop is even being sly and deliberately setting customers up for costly breakages?

A whole host of third person points of view. Pick one as the correct first person experience of the situation.

So far I've seen plenty of experiencers in your model, but they are hidden. — schopenhauer1

Of course you have. That is how conception works, remember? It shapes your impressions. You always feel like you find what you are looking for if you look hard enough.

All of these are kind of like place holders for "and experience happens"... — schopenhauer1

Or maybe they're not. Maybe they are how we might label aspects of experiencing. Maybe that's how we talk structurally about a process.

For you its all reified nouns. I'm trying to get you to think in verbs. But I can see that ain't happening.

They have the quality of being experienced by an experiencer. — schopenhauer1

Ah, up pops your "experiencer". Because of course if you have experiences, then an experiencer is there already just waiting for his Cartesian theatre to roll. It's "logical" says the simple-minded "cause an effect" reductionist.

Talk about horse and cart.

When it comes to getting semiotics, its like you are trying to play Blind Man's Buff and everyone has left the room. Vainly your outstretched fingers grope for something to clutch hold of.

In crude but familiar psychological terms, general concepts shape our particular impressions while those particular impressions in turn build up our habits of conception.

Sorry that this still doesn't answer your Hard Problem for you. But you haven't even decided if green is a concept, an impression, or even the interaction of the two. You are not even taking baby steps away from a rigid substance ontology.