I gave a reasonably definite view - both of what might be the usual response within an Aristotelian metaphysics, and then a more contemporary Peircean version that expands on that in a way remarkably in agreement with modern science.

You can respond with counter arguments to that if you like. But if you simply want to run around the village shouting your usual "metaphysics is bunk" slogans, then dung will naturally be flung in your general direction. It is indeed another game that we can find entertaining.

If it is, it might be the only one. — Banno

Yes. And so it might not be. Hence my request that you get beyond assertions and offer arguments. Of course I have zero expectation of that.

Or rather in the usual fashion of Metaphysical reasoning, we are seeking the dichotomy that breaks apart the question in its most perfect possible logical fashion. The distinction of the potential and the actual attempts to meet the standard of being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

They might not achieve that as a dialectical opposition. The attempt may be found wanting. But at least it is understood what the essential game is here. The meaning of terms of art are defined in this mutually grounding fashion.

To order coffee and seduce their beloved. But not to do metaphysics. — Banno

So the answer to my question is this? Metaphysics shouldn't exist? And you can't see that is already a metaphysical proposition?

Great, a straight answer to one question at least. No.

So what about that Lewis guy, eh? Modal logic produces the craziest of all crazy Metaphysical shit.

Science seems to be happening and thriving despite your belly-aching. People talk about path integral and multiverses quite happily. Ideas about everythingness have become research projects as we understand them in terms of ontologically rational limits or constraints.

The way metaphysics usually wants to use it though, as a reduction of all the world to a singular idea, is just incohrent. "Everything" cannot exist. To exist means to be distinct from other things, a seperate state to anything else. We might say that any state is is defined by NOT being everything. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yeah. So that is why metaphysics would in fact be so concerned with the obvious demarcation between everything possible and everything actual.

Have any of you guys ever studied any basic metaphysics?

Evasion.

So can you answer a straight question for once: how ought a metaphysician use words?

So when metaphysicians agree on usage, or when they differ, do they not seem to think there might be some essential ground for doing so? Is it really "just a word game" within that linguistic community, or is only within philosophy of language that a word game is actually a word game in the way you intend to use the term here?

Hmm. Isn't that a profound Metaphysical question you're asking?

So how ought a metaphysician use the word?

This now seems an entirely different question. Are you asking how anything in fact comes to exist? What causes being? Why something and not nothing?

In my Peircean approach to that, individuation is symmetry breaking. The story, being developmental, is triadic. You need the three categories of a vague potential, an emergent regularity of habit or law, and then the third thing of a resulting world of actualised particulars or real possibilities.

So possibility divides into the unformed or vague and the formed or lawfully shaped. The vague state is a true everythingness that is a nothingness in its pure symmetry or indeterminacy. But as that vagueness is broken by organising principles, then you have crisp alternatives where events have either happened or they have not. Counterfactuality exists.

Thus talking about an actual world - as a container - is talking about a state of habitual emergent order in which local events or entities now can be said to concretely exist in a counterfactual sense. It is now the case they might not have existed - as either the global laws of nature, or simple material accidents, might have determined they do not.

So in our world at least, the possibility of rivers flowing uphill is not an actuality due to natural laws. And then the possibility of this river forking there rather than here is a possibility denied merely by some material accident of history. It is impossible not in the formal sense, but in the sense of a material fact.

Thus actuality itself is an irreducibly complex state - hylomorphic. And possibility is a word we use that in fact reflects the various elements it takes to be actualised. In Peircean jargon, you need the hierarchical organisation, the triad, of firstness, secondness and thirdness. You need pure vague potential, then the emergent habits that organise it into a definite state of being which then becomes a world of actual localised events.

In the beginning, anything is possible and nothing is actual. After the symmetry is broken, only some things are possible (due to laws and history). The rest are now possible in only the apophatic or suppressed sense of the counterfactual might have been. There is now a definite fact of the matter that they don't exist (either due to law or history).

How could any entity that was actually actual - ie: a materially individuated form - not be individuated within a world. Where would this material thing be? How could it be considered individuated except by virtue of a context of all that which it is not?

You seem very confused. The actual arises as a limitation or constraint on the potential.

Do you not agree that the actual is some numerical subset of all the possible forms of organisation plus all their possible material accidents?

If we are talking about architecture for instance, surely there would always be more design possibilities and potential flaws and defects of execution than actually ever physically expressed.

The mutual definition of the categories themselves is a different issue - which I also highlighted.

If we are talking about actual things in a world then the essential difference is that the possible forms are materialised. We are speaking of substantial being.

It would be usual to distinguish between every thing potential and every thing actual. One would be a subset of the other.

Then the potential itself could have various levels of definition. If you are talking about the existence of possibilities, that could be in this exact world, or a world similar, or in any notion of world at all. So it might be just all the worlds with our same laws of nature, but then different in all the possible accidental ways. Or it could be worlds with different laws - different necessities - too.

So the task of defining what "everything" might mean can be systematically decomposed via a number of standard Metaphysical dichotomies like actual~potential, particular~general and chance~necessity.

If you keep unravelling the notion of everythingness, you get eventually to the notion of vagueness or the indeterminate - the everythingness that is also a nothingness.

So we can define what we mean, but the question has quite a few levels to dissolve. And so our use of the word is quite context dependent. We are usually thinking of some already bounded form of "every thing", which is why you do have people like Tegmark trying to classify levels of multiverses for instance.

That's the rhetorical advantage of founding your "metaphysics" in the ineffable. No one can call you out for your failure to speak about it meaningfully, let alone provide the material evidence. ;)

Do you believe that a tornado practises semiosis? I think that this is totally unfounded, and therefore your dissolution of the division between animate and inanimate is also unfounded. — Metaphysician Undercover

I said what I believed is that a tornado is the product of semiosis. As a dissipative structure, it is formed almost entirely by constraints outside of itself. It has no self-stabilising level of memory. So it can't "practise" semiosis.

So my ontology both picks out the critical difference and yet still speaks to the semiotic commonality.

For you, there is an abyssal gap perhaps. But that is simply the product of you not reading what I actually say.

That is something each has to decide, and it's a risk. We might get it wrong, and that is part of what we have to deal with (which is one of the lessons from existentialism). — Wayfarer

Fair enough. But then that is the essence of the scientific method. Have a guess and see how it fares in terms of inductive confirmation.

That is Peirce's epistemology in a nutshell. And then that was his pansemiotic metaphysics - his definition of the summum bonum as the universal growth of reasonableness.

So while as usual you are keen to frame me as dealing in Scientism to legitimate your transhuman perspective, when you have to make sense of your own ontology, it winds up sounding classically semiotic.

Thus yes, we both reject the idea of an engineer God. And humans are somehow - naturally - a deep reflection of the form of existence at the cosmological level. Which is the thesis of pansemiosis. The difference is that pansemiosis also makes sense as actual scientific inquiry now. We have begun to talk in constructs that we can physically measure.

So what is it about the values of satanism, for instance, that convinces us of its claims to being a superior basis for philosophy?

Where in the great anthropological variety of transcendent belief structures and moral values am I going to find "the right one"?

And then, to tackle the OP, what is the value of being animate vs inanimate? Is one better than the other, more foundational than the other? What exactly is your argument?

At the end of the day, you are talking religious conviction.

What about providing a basis for values? — Wayfarer

It gives a naturalistic and immanent basis to value or purpose.

Your other choices are then either the arbitrary or nihilistic answer given by regular materialism, or the transcendent and mystic answer given by the many varieties of religious/romantic belief systems.

I of course have explained many times how both materialism and mysticism are in fact disguised dissipative structure. They both are simply reflections of human social entrainment to the desires of the second law of thermodynamics.

What's the significance of 'dissipative'? — Wayfarer

The same structure or pattern or organisation is sustained by its production of entropy. So it exists because it can waste.

Animate vs inanimate was not my choice of jargon. I don't need to defend it - as it is what I've been cricitsing.

Sure biology is different from chemistry in some fashion we would want to pin down.

Now either one can argue that the differences are somehow metaphysically accidental - so life is "metabolism" or dissipative structure with a bit of extra DNA organisation - or one can take the view that there is a metaphysical strength difference worth noting here. And that is the hylomorphic position I take - information or semiotic constraint being as fundamental to being as material action.

To be honest, I can't remember what holistic properties you reduce things to. Was it God or spirit or some other kind of mystical transcendent cause?

Certainly, I choose the semiotic approach precisely because it is a holism which is immanent and natural. You have an ontic dualism in sign vs matter. And yet you also have the causal machinery to connect the two sides of the equation.

This is why it is important that physics has just found itself describing the world pansemiotically - as in reaching an equivalence at the fundamental level between Shannon uncertainty and Boltzmann entropy. My metaphysics isn't handwaving. It is the new universal basis for the scientific measurement of nature.

Yep. The standard definition of metabolism is the "chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life". Which leaves then the informational processes that stand apart to regulate that chemistry.

Er, no.

You seem confused. I explained the speculative thesis of pansemiosis. It is based on the dichotomy of sign and matter. So it says that the animate and the inanimate are alike in being hylomorphically semiotic. There is formal and final cause acting by way of top-down constraint to shape substantial being. And what is new here is proposing a mechanism - semiosis - by which that interaction generally happens.

Now it is clear how boundary condition information or habits of interpretance impinge on material organisation in animate systems. That information is encoded locally by membranes, receptors, genes, neurons - a range of physical structures that deal in messages or signs.

But it is not so clear how the laws of the universe are encoded. Except that there is a striking shift happening in fundamental physics where information itself seems to have substantial existence. Cosmology is understood via the constraints of holographic boundaries or informational event horizons. Quantum collapse is understood via the thermal decoherence of information - again a limit imposed by the constraints of a context.

And generally, all inanimate systems - especially those that grow, move, self-organise and self-optimise to meet the global purpose of the second law - can be understood as dissipative structures. Which means they must be informationally negentropic to be able to maintain the entropic flows that sustain them. I mean, keep them inanimately alive. :)

So you are welcome to argue against that speculative metaphysics. But it does require you to be able to define what you mean by inanimate. As current physics has radically redefined what it might mean by inanimate.

In particular, I refer to those advancements which have created the categories of animate and inanimate things. — Metaphysician Undercover

So inanimate is a category? But it lacks a definite essence? A tornado can move, grow, die, dissipate energy, sort of like something animate, but we can't yet put a finger on why it is in fact inanimate?

Sounds legit.

What your monadism implies, my dualism (which in fact unfolds to a hierarchical triadism) seeks to make explicit.

I'll take that as a "No". — Galuchat

I gave a lengthy answer. You can pretend I didn't if you like.

So forget matter (or rather, substantial being) and give me your definition of inanimate. I presumed you thought of it as some kind of predicate of substantial being. Indeed, surely it is? But now you are being even more strangely evasive.

And you have yet to make the case that life requires something other than metabolism--whatever the metaphysical underpinnings of metabolism might be. — javra

Obviously, metabolism being unstable, it needs the further thing of a stabilising overlay of informational machinery. I think you are presuming that other aspect of a living system as part of your understanding of metabolism rather than breaking it out explicitly.

I still find reason to uphold that metabolism is a sufficient definition of life (granted that it includes the self-generation of the metabolizing self which, in part, requires nucleic acid replication, obviously). — javra

Yep. Metabolism + repair. You can have a metabolic network of components and processes. But the components don't last so some higher level memory must know how and when to replace them. Which is where a hierarchical or semiotic modelling relation is required. It is the instability of the metabolic parts that require some longer term machinery to provide the stability.

Accounts such as those of Evan Thompson in the book Mind in Life (2007) have it otherwise. — javra

Of course Thompson defends autopoeisis. This is a contentious issue with two sides. And it is not that autopoeisis is wrong - it accounts for dissipative structure level self organisation. But the criticism is that it doesn't adequately define life, which has the extra thing of an epistemic cut to separate the self (the auto) from the production (the poeisis) in proper semiotic fashion.

The battle does still rumble on in the background for some - here are papers from both directions...

https://biologyofcognition.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/autopoietic_mr.pdf

http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net/Index/DocumentKMOrgTheoryPapers/HallNousala2010AutopoiesisCognitionKnowledgeSelfSustainingOrganizations(final).pdf

If you are addressing nucleic acids replication, isn't nucleic acids replication part of metabolism to begin with? Such as in the production of proteins, etc. It is as far as I know.

Makes it sound as though you are addressing reproduction in general. But, then, mules would be non-living organisms by definition--to list just one example. — javra

I'm addressing what I've been addressing all along - the separation of the model of the self from the production of the self in organisms. Now we can call those the replication and the metabolism, so long as those terms are understood in this generic sense. More precise to me would be Pattee's distinction between rate-independent information and rate-dependent dynamics.

So you are getting bogged down by particular expressions of informational control - the functional ability to repair cellular processes, or reproduce individual cells and whole organisms, or to enter into the evolutionary race first by the free exchange of genetic fragments and eventually via whole genome replication.

But I am talking about the code-matter duality at its most general or abstract level as understood within theoretical biology.

And some of the new points I mentioned - given the excitingly rapid advances being made at the moment - were the proof that there is a thermal quasiclassical zone where this kind of semiosis can physically take place, because that is the scale where material dynamics is so critically poised (between autopoeietic remaking and thermal dissoloution). And so in turn organismic information can tilt action in directions of "its own choice" from safe in its haven of DNA and other information capturing mechanism.

So the point of that is we don't just have to talk about high level functional concepts like replication and reproduction. We can talk about this infodynamic duality right down at the nanoscale level of the molecular machinery. We can see that definitional distinction in action down there - where life really begins.

And what you were asked for was the essence of inanimate matter.

Does it not have its own form of nous - its reason for being - under Aristotelian hylomorphism? Is it not Platonically necessary as the indeterminate chora to accept the impression of the eternal ideas?

Remember it was you who brought up the distinction between animate and inanimate. And you are proving my guess that it was an empty distinction as you can't now define what you actually mean by things that lack animation.

You claim that you only won't provide your definition because I would obstinately just then reject it.

I call obvious BS. You don't have one. So there is not even a definition of yours to accept.

Yeah. We will know one way or the other by 2050 - the global bottleneck represented by "peak everything". Population, fossil fuel, probably even medicine the way antibiotics are going (and pandemics still rating higher as a global existential risk than nuclear war).

So this is a great time to be alive if you are the curious type. It is the moment in history when we finally get to see how a lot of exponential growth trends must surely end. :)

Not surprisingly, the major criticism that theoretical biologists would have of autopoiesis is that it undercooks the informational aspect of dissipative structure. It doesn't account for the repair or replication aspect by which an organism is able to maintain its existence through having a model of itself.

So autopoiesis was great - back when mainstream biology was doing the opposite of undercooking the dynamical or developmental aspect of life. After DNA was discovered, the self-model became the big deal. And autopoiesis was one of the many responses, tugging at the mainstream's sleeve and saying, no guys, hang on a minute.

But still it remains the case that both information and dynamics are required to explain life and mind (as well as "inanimate, because lacking a self-replicating model" dissipative structure). So a balanced definition of life - such as to be found in the works of Rosen, Pattee and Salthe - stresses the complementary duality of metabolism and replication, or the material processes and the informational constraints.

I note that you still seem unable to define what you mean by inanimate. That is pretty telling.

Is it possible to extrapolate a definition of inorganic mind from what we know about organic minds using functional and/or semiotic terms without resorting to metaphor? — Galuchat

In science, talk about any quality ceases to be metaphor to the degree the quality can be measured or quantified. And my pansemiotic argument is that the two sides of hylomorphic nature - its informational form and its material dynamics - can be measure in the one shared coin of information (canonical degrees of freedom).

So metaphorically, Shannon information is "mindful" and Boltzmann/Gibbs entropy is "material". And the two can be brought together in a common semiotic framework such as Stan Salthe's infodynamics - https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol7/iss3/art3/

The idea is that all existence can be understood in terms of a systems ontology. That is, everything is a case of downwardly acting constraints shaping upwardly constructing degrees of freedom. And so we have Peirce's triadic system of interpretance. The constraints are Shannon information. The degrees of freedom are Boltzmann entropy. The message of one acts on the uncertainty of the other to create a substantial world.

This general pansemiotic framework thus allows you to talk about dissipative structures like tornadoes or the Cosmos itself in terms of the "mindful" constraint of "material" freedoms. There is a common coin of measurement - Planck-scale bits of information. Or to dig deeper, there is a canonical scale of (quantum) indeterminacy - ie: Apeiron, firstness, vagueness - that constraints collapse to classical actuality (the definite microstates that thermodynamics counts).

So pansemiosis has become a pretty concrete proposal for a generalised metaphysics in that it ties any talk of mind - or matter - to a more foundational notion of being ... bits of information. And then even the bits of information are explained in terms of emergence or symmetry breaking, the collapse of indeterminism.

People think they know what they are talking about when they speak dualistically about mind and matter. However the purpose of science is to inquire rather deeper into the true nature of existence. And so it is no surprise if this folk ontology distinction - the oh so familiar Cartesian framing of the question - will come out sounding very different once science has been used to precisify our concepts in ways that actually make them measurable.