Surely worlds have logical properties that ordinary logic does not capture - because ordinary logic doesn't make general rules about spacetime and material action.

So the key constraints on actual worlds would seem to be the principle of locality and the principle of least action.

That is not everything can happen at once. All the action has to be spread out and take time. There is spacetime with its locality so that the world can logically exist via universalised differentiation.

And then in complementary fashion (where would metaphysics be without foundational dichotomies!), there must be also the logical rule that action follows its shortest possible paths. It spreads out and takes time, yet does so as little as possible. Hence the world is organised by a principle of universalised integration.

So even the simplest world is irreducibly complex in having to be this kind of unity of opposites. It must mathematically (let's call it Platonically) express the symmetry breaking that is differentiation~integration. Or in other words, it must be structured rationally as a self-organising fractal to exist ... because to exist, there must have been the possibility of a development, a symmetry breaking, and fractal maths describes symmetry breaking over all possible scales, or the development of maximal asymmetry.

Thus quite neatly, the world explains itself through some bare logical principles - the inescapability of the duo of differentiation and integration. You don't need extra stuff like creating gods messing up the picture. Disorganisation requires its own organisation to develop.

Either you accept we live in a natural world with immanent logic or not.

If we are part of nature, then all that asks of us is a pragmatic response.

Instead you want to make some kind of transcendentally absolute deal out of suffering. The least amount of pain or effort is sufficient reason to wish for non-existence. Which is riidiculous of course.

You can marginalize the failures all you want, this doesn't mean they don't exist or haven't existed for the past countless eons. — darthbarracuda

But you are again straying from nature's own logic. Failure spells non survival. So the ability to persist is definitional of what it is to flourish. That is the actual structure of the world.

It isn't me who marginalises failure. Failure marginalises itself. And thus antinatalism is simply being unwittingly proactive in stepping up to the plate, putting its head on the block sooner rather than later.

Whether you said it or not is irrelevant, — darthbarracuda

When I say I didn't say it, perhaps you ought to take note?

This hand-waves the issues away by trying to make life seem like a mixed bag of goods and bads. We've been saying it from the start, we are not meant to be happy, we are not meant to be secure. We are meant to survive and survival requires us to suffer. Suffering is the structural integrity of life as experienced by those involved in it, i.e. the phenomenological natural-ontology. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, we are meant to flourish. Or same thing, flourishing would be what would be meaningful. (Try and deny it.)

So you are simply building your conclusion into your premises, which is why you make such bad arguments.

So you're coming from the perspective that being is generally, if not intrinsically, good. — darthbarracuda

Why do you keep trying to make out that I say things I don't say? Is it because your argument is otherwise so weak?

Even if antinatalism is pragmatically self-defeating (which I doubt, of course)... — darthbarracuda

Hah. I hear your discomfort and note you have no counter-argument on that point. You are promoting a philosophy that is self-defeating in only securing what it hopes to avoid. And that fact exposes a basic failure of analysis.

You are opposing pessimism against optimism. Yet nature is structurally a mixed bag in the end.

Yet you don't address the solution to the problem of the vicious circle. — schopenhauer1

Must I keep repeating myself endlessly for your pleasure? Just do some reading on hierarchical organisation.

You focus too much on the efficacy of antinatalism, and not what it provides as consolation — schopenhauer1

Yep. I've been pointing out the self-defeating nature of anti-natalism in that it in fact must result in the eugenic strengthening of the pool of willing breeders. So it really blows as a practical philosophy in that sense.

But yes, it is a consoling thought, that antinatalists might inflict their pessimism on everyone they possibly can, but at least not on their own kids. That counts as a small blessing I guess.

This project causes 100% causalities, and 100% fatality, 100% guarantee of harm for all, is something forced on 100% of participants, and is only around due to a viscous circle (surviving to survive, maintaining to maintain, experience to experience). — schopenhauer1

Oh alas, alack. Render the clothes, tear the hair.

I have to laugh as life is interesting because it is complex, both in terms of its responsibilities and its delights. Yet you choose to be as crudely reductionist as possible so as see it as structurally black.

This is the actual philosophical sin here. Mistaking absolutism for profundity.

So your argument against antinatalism is based on a dubious empirical prediction about the consequences of adopting antinatalism in a non-ideal environment? — darthbarracuda

Try and keep different thoughts separate. I was addressing Schop's OP about the "puzzle" of self perpetuating social institutions and noting the irony that antinatalism would only strengthen what it hopes to end. So the actual strategy would have to focus on increasing the structural inefficiency of the social machine.

Stick around, act helpless, be a drag on the rest. Then the whole thing might indeed collapse (only to be reborn much the same - sorry, nature and the second law are relentless like that.)

You don't have to agree with everything the pessimist says to understand the principle behind antinatalist arguments. Choice. Had I payed for a bad concert, it wouldn't be right for me to complain about its quality. I knew what I was getting into. Not so much for life. — darthbarracuda

Why must you keep misrepresenting what I say? I'm not arguing for optimism in place of pessimism, but instead pragmatism.

And also you can make your antinatalist choice if you wish. My reply to the OP was about why it would make no difference as that just creates more room for those with a wish to perpetuate their kind.

I don't expect it to be anything. That's you putting words in my mouth and assuming pessimism is merely a reaction of disillusionment. — darthbarracuda

You have yet to pull words out of your own mouth that would make a coherent case as to how a structurally black world could be quite fun and meaningful in practice.

Your best attempt was to label people who might have a different opinion "the inheriting zombies." Nice.

There is first the historical artifact -- some sort of a relic -- that we may think of as "the ship of Theseus" and which is such that we do care very much about its retaining at least some -- and maybe most -- of its original constituents. — Pierre-Normand

That would be the ship with all its "accidents". So to get the metaphysics right, it has to be sortal (or constraints-based) in Peircean type fashion. Our notion of identity has to include the accidental or contingent in smooth natural fashion too.

So that is where the causal notion of purpose pays off. A purpose - in its potential for satisfaction - also spells the further possibility of indifference. After a while, the details cease to matter because the general purpose is being served (and aught else then makes a real difference).

Thus it can be accidental that one of the ship's planks is made of kauri rather than oak. The different woods achieve the same purpose from the ship's point of view. And therefore it continues to make no difference if the ship eventually becomes all kauri, returns to all oak, or gets made of some other wood of equivalent sea-going, ship-making, qualities.

So it is possible always to get fussed about preserving the accidents of history. From the ship's point of view (ie: in terms of the formal and final causality that are the people who designed something for their own purpose), the actual wood is a matter of indifference - if it serves its purpose. All further difference gets classed categorically with the accidental. And yet there is still (say the metaphysically obsessive) another point of view ... the god's eye or transcendental view of history where all accidents are fixed in the memory of existence and never forgotten or erased. So beyond particular purposes (like wanting a ship to cross the sea) there is going to be a metaphysical level generality in which even accidents are essential to notions of identity.

But you can see the trap inherent in claiming accidents as essences. The nominalist path that leads to the Society for the Preservation of Historical Accidents really doesn't want to make claims about the reality of essences. Yet in trying to skirt the existence of differences that don't make a difference, nominalists in fact double down on essentialism without realising it.

So a Peircean style triadic approach can smoothly handle this little problem with the accidental as a component of the purposeful. Pragmaticism says that everything starts in pure contingency or accident. and then limitations arise to suppress most of it. So sortal concepts or constraints cannot eliminate the accidental - that must always be present as history gets fixed. However constraints can limit the accidental aspects of identity to the degree that it matters in terms of some global essence or sense of purpose. So continuity can be defined in that way, regardless of the continuing presence of innumerable localised accidents - the differences that don't make a difference, like whether a ship's plank is oak, kauri or teak.

And then, secondly, there is the functional artifact -- the seafaring vessel -- that retains its identity through carrying forward its function (through maintenance and repair, etc.) — Pierre-Normand

Yep. It is the telos or function that is the source and determiner of continuity. That is what would have to be extinguished.

This accounts rests on David Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependence of identity, whereas the account earlier suggested by Wayfarer relies on the thesis of relative identity, defended by Peter Geach. — Pierre-Normand

So I have defended an equivalence between sortal concepts and constraints. But then also they speak to quite different metaphysical orientations as well.

Constraints make it clear how they operate - as the limits on freedoms. Thus they rely on proper holism. Whereas sortal concepts are the product of predicate logic - the reasoning from the particular. It rather avoids the central issue to simply point out - in circular fashion - that having more than one of some thing suggests a further thing of which it is "a sort".

Circularity is bad. Hierarchy is good. Recursion needs to transcend scale to make sense. Hence you need an inherently reciprocal metaphysics in which to frame an understanding of identity - one in which the globally top-down and the locally bottom-up are each other's natural inverse.

That's the sad thing - the world has and always will be inherited by the zombies. — darthbarracuda

Rubbish. The bar on what counts as being properly human has simply been set impractically high by institutionalised Romanticism. That is the subcontract causing all the problems.

If you expect your life should be Picasso, Einstein and Pele all rolled into one, you might indeed view your lot rather pessimistically.

Or if you expect reality ought to be heavenly bliss, no harm experienced by even a fish, a bacterium, a blade of grass, then again there is this silly belief in a transcendent value that rules from beyond the realm of the immanent.

One has the educated choice of either understanding the real structure of reality or perpetuating various socially institutionalised myths.

So the tropes or Romanticism are fun, even escapist. And also politically useful. They do underpin a certain way of life during a certain time (like right now in the blindly consumptionist West). But nature will always win in the end. It knows what is real in being the definition of reality.

Yep. Either the grey is an illusion, or the black is a delusion. So pick your poison.

How can you see grey in a world that is structurally black? What is going on there?

We are beings that are never satisfied for long, frequently harmed, and we keep institutions going that help us survive and keep our complex mind entertained . We are the maintenance crew for these institutions. We maintain these institutions simply to maintain them, just as we survive to survive.. But that is not a justification of why we continue to do it. — schopenhauer1

You say you personally see no purpose. A greater number - those that actually put their back into strengthening those social institutions - certainly do see a purpose. So who are you to call them blind fools?

And as I asked earlier, where's the problem. Those who don't believe can refuse to perpetuate any cooperative system of survival and so remove themselves from the stage. Just doing that in itself will strengthen the identity of the institution that remains.

What you advocate - if it is antinatalism - is voluntary social eugenics. So the irony is that you serve the institutional purpose in seeking to deny it. Suicide is a logical thing to encourage biologically as a way to deal with the diseased or malfunctioning. Cells are built to destruct themselves for this reason - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apoptosis

So self perpetuation is no evolutionary mystery. Voluntary eugenics can only ensure the strengthened identity of what you claim to detest. You are only making yourself part of the process of institutionalised self perpetuation in trying to promote the self annihilating trope of anti natalism.

If you really want to bring down the system, then what you actually have to do is become a source of constant friction. You must be the silt that gums up the works, the accumulating waste that eventually kills the whole.

So aim for inefficiency, dependency and wasteful consumption if it is the institutions that you want to bring down. Have as many kids as possible and bring them up to be as entropic as they can manage. Hope that they grow fat, useless and deeply in debt, as frictional on society's maintenance system as can be imagined. That way everything will surely fall apart as is the goal.

(Wait, does this sound something like the world we know?)

You are missing the point. It would be your conception that lacks coherence with your perception.

If you see only grey, yet you claim that the world has black structure (and thus a complete lack of white structure) then this is an incoherent claim about the world. Your honest impression doesn't match your professed idea.

So ship A becomes ship B, but remains "the ship of Theseus" because people continue to call it that, despite the replacement of all its planks. As apokrisis would say, echoing Bateson, for most people having one new plank - or a lot of new planks, or even all new planks if they are replaced gradually - is not a difference that makes a difference for the purpose of referring to the ship. — aletheist

Yep. It is the purpose, the finality, that causes the ship to be repaired and so there is unbroken continuity in the identity - for all practical purposes, as they say.

And even if the boat was replaced in toto instantly - as in Parfitt's Star Trek transporter: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox - then still the intent is what perseveres through time and maintains identity.

If the transporter works by dissolving your molecules at one end and then - via a transmission of information completely specifying your form - recreates you at the other, then your identity is preserved.

But note now that the logical requirement is your body at the departure point must be destroyed. There are problems if the goal of transporting you leaves this earlier you still stuck at the other end - or now this dopplegager replicant at the arrival end.

So make the change instant and the erasure becomes as important as the replacing. And so really even with a slow change of the parts, the rotten planks of the ship should be burnt to secure the identity of the new.

But I don't see the world as generically grey, I see it as structurally black. — darthbarracuda

So you agree that your perceptions and conceptions are incoherent. Great.

There's nothing incoherent in having a generally euthymic equilibrium while simultaneously having negative beliefs about life and existence. — darthbarracuda

Of course it is incoherent.

If you see the world is generically grey, you can't coherently claim it to be black on the grounds it is not white. Just as the pollyannaish reverse is also an incoherent claim.

When we divide the line, or divide time between past and future, it is not that we insert a point into the line, or insert "the present" into time, we assume that these points of potential division are within the line or within time itself, and we utilize these points for division. — Metaphysician Undercover

But semiotics transcends physics because it can imagine its marks as having zero dimensionality. So we have to recognise the computational aspect of this too.

For the hardware of the computer, a bit - the state of switch - is a purely physical thing. It has materiality and thus a cost involved in switching it back and forth. Eventually it will even wear out.

Yet then the same switch, the same bit, can also be a symbol, a sign, within a software's system of interpretance. The programmer can encode some model (representing a purpose) in a syntactical structure (a logical form), then run it on the machine. The switch flips back and forth, doing its entropic or material thing. Meanwhile - in a place with zero material constraints, as the hardware doesn't care if what it computes is meaning or noise - a system of signs does its thing, crunches away to some symbolic end.

So when talking about a mathematical model of the continuum, we have to allow for this fundamental distinction between the real world (which is materially dissipative) and the sign world (which can pretend what it likes, so long as it costs the hardware nothing extra to switch in one direction instead of the other).

Thus in the real world, cutting a material line quickly gets messy. Our knife eventually gets too blunt and starts mushing when the cuts are getting fine. And there is no such thing as an infinitely sharp blade.

But in the imagined world of maths - Hilbert's paradise - we can imagine infinitely sharp blades and cuts made ever finer with no issue about the cuts getting mushed or vaguer and vaguer.

Yet while there are two worlds - matter vs sign - in semiotics they are also in mutual interaction. So that gives you the third level of analysis that would be a properly semiotic one ... where sign and matter are in a formal, generically-described, relation. Or pragmaticism in short. The triadicity of a sign relation.

And that is when we can ask about a third, deepest-level, notion of the continuum - one in which the observer, or "memory" and "purpose" are fully part of the picture. It is no longer just some tale about either material cuts or symbolic marks - a bare tale of observables.

I don't see how this is relevant. — darthbarracuda

It is relevant that in one breath you tout the mood enhancing benefits of pot, the next you imagine it as the very worst advice I might give you and Schop (when it is as far away from sensible as any advice from positive psychology would get.

So the protest is double, You both strawman me and also do that in a way that is inconsistent with your own expressed views.

Thus the relevance is illustrating what awful arguments you make.

So why are you hanging around a philosophy forum instead of being out there jiggling your booty. Is dance ... not enough?

Strawberries are red, pixels are blue,
Indirect realism still isn't true — unenlightened

So another vote for idealism? Michael will be pleased.

Direct experience is what is required not a constrained set of incomplete and inadequate symbols. — Rich

Ah. Direct experience. Good luck with that. :)

Question: I would have thought that the ability of the mind to heal itself from brain injury, by re-routing its activities to other areas of the brain via 'neuroplasticity', demonstrates the ability of mind to 'rewire' the brain. That is the substance of the book 'The Brain that Changes Itself', by Norman Doidge. — Wayfarer

Hah. That's a dreadful book in terms of its over-egged celebration of plasticity.

But remember that my own take on neurology is semiotic. So I don't explain the mind as a material state of affairs. The mind is a system of signs. It is an interactive model of the world. So in some sense, the brain has a distributed or holistic memory of how it needs to be to continue to function the way it normally does. This is how - top-down - it reconstructs itself even after serious insult.

So in the semiotic view, what is important is that the material parts of the machinery are maximally unstable. Life depends on molecules that are always on the verge of falling apart (and equally, just as fast reforming). That is, the hardware of life is the precise opposite of the hardware suitable for computing. Life needs a fundamental instability as that then gives signs, or encoded information routines, something to do - create stability.

So from the get-go - down at the nanoscale quasi-classical scale of material process - "consciousness" or semiosis is giving the biophysics just enough of a nudge to keep the machine rebuilding itself. Proteins and other constituents are falling together slightly more than they are falling apart, and so the fundamental plasticity is being statistically regulated to produce a long-running, self-repairing, stable organism.

The brain then just repeats this basic semiotic trick on a humongously complex scale of organisation. That is how brains can effect repairs - rearrange and regrow to keep doing what they have learnt to do.

Holistically, they have to be able to regulate plasticity the whole time anyway. The half-life of structural elements of neural tissue like microtubules is about 10 minutes. A large proportion of what was your brain this morning will have fallen apart and rebuilt itself by the time this evening comes around. So viewed on the nano-scale, you might say the brain's ability to maintain its identity in the face of the chaotic thermal flux that is the molecular level of cellular machinery is far more remarkable than any recovery from stroke.

That is not to deny that physical changes don't lead to affective consequences, but it is to question the degree to which this is a one-way relationship. — Wayfarer

It is absolutely a two way relationship. But one of sign and matter, not mind and matter.

If you don't know, just admit it! — tom

You need to try harder to keep up with the thread. You are still wanting to construct your numbers, and yet the point being made is that the continuum needs to be cut or divided - which is an act of primal constraint, not construction.

So every cut of the continuum must leave behind a continua that is capable of being cut again. Thus every naming of some "first number" must allow the naming of yet still earlier numbers ... as the continuous can never be computationally erased. Constraint isn't just subtraction or negative addition. It is what it says, a limitation marking continuity. And the divisibility of the continuum is inexhaustible. Every named number - in attempting to cut a part of the line away from the whole - still leaves a bounded line segment.

So the answer in terms of a constraints-based understanding of number is just obvious.

And if your own constructive viewpoint actually could account for the numberline, then you would be granting a zero dimensional point some actual size. Which is why the paradox implicit in your constructive viewpoint was also the bleedingly self-evident since Zeno first put stylus to wax.

Contingency means that "either P or not-P might not be actual." — aletheist

So to complete the pattern, 2ns would need to be characterised by a failure of distribution of the principle of identity. And you are saying 2ns is really to be labelled contingency rather than actuality?

I can't really agree with your framing here as my point was that P is only truly actualised to the degree that not-P (as its generic 3ns context) is also actualised.

Returning to my original remark about a "tension", vagueness is pure contingency while 2ns is constrained or contextualised contingency. That is, 2ns is about actualised degrees of freedom - a degree of freedom being a determinate direction of action, or an existent with a predicate.

So it is confusing to call 2ns contingency when 1ns is usually regarded as the maximally contingent. Really, 2ns is contingency limited, regulated, contextualised.

My argument has been that the principle of identity makes a claim that a thing is the same as itself by definition - it appears no context or larger relation is needed and no contingency or uncertainty could be involved.

The laws of thought make identity the concrete and completely uncontingent starting point for then reasoning about the particular. Particularity is claimed as an atomistic fact and so off logic can merrily trot to derive its further two laws.

Peirceanism then stands against that with its holism. Now the concrete particularity of identity - the category of the actual - is instead the emergent intersection of the possible and necessary, the local potential and a wider context of constraint.

So actuality or 2ns becomes the transition zone. It reflects the mixing of the polar extremes of being - vague possibility and crisp generality. Or total freedom vs total constraint. Actuality is actualisation - the process of coming to be framed by the limits on being. A developmental arc is being described that (for me, if not for you) goes from vague 1ns to generic 3ns via the concrete foothold or symmetry breaking which is bald 2ns - a difference that can make a difference in that it does serve to construct, or at least continue to reinforce, some large state of 3ns habit.

The emergent nature of 2ns or the concretely particular is what makes for ambivalence. We are talking about actuality - but the concreteness is secured by the 3ns it anticipates. Context is what gives the particular its definite character, what allows it to be seen and remembered as an occasion that is the same as itself/different from aught else. And this in turn means the particular has been sharply formed by the pruning away of all unnecessary possibilities. Identity is arrived at apophatically.

So there is a pattern to be completed. The law of identity ought to have an exact apophatic definition in the "true meaning" of 2ns, or actuality.

And what does identity presume most? It presumes brute existence instead of emergent development. It presumes a pure state rather than a mixed state. It presumes it stands at the beginning rather than arriving at the end.

Yet then "actuality" in semiosis requires the wholeness of 3ns (the 3ns that incorporates the 2ns and 1ns). So the identification of 2ns as actuality - or better yet, actualisation - has to be understood in that light.

Thus in terms of your logical formalisation - "contingency means that "either P or not-P might not be actual" - it seems to me rather that we are talking not about contingency but about actualisation. So the category of contingency reduced to its deterministic minimum by the constraint of a generality - ie: a freedom that has a direction.

You simply seem to be re-stating the fact that the PNC does not apply to the vague (the vague being the radically contingent).

So Vagueness means that "both P and not-P are possible." = Vagueness means that "either P or not-P might not be actual."

Although, as I say, vagueness defined directly is the degree to which P and not-P are co-jointly not actual. This captures the anticipated 3ns which is the further rule that actuality is irreducibly contextual. So it takes a matching degree of P and not-P for actualisation. And a matching absence of P and not-P for there to the maximum indistinctness or lack of identity.

In vagueness, P is indistinguishable from not-P. In actualiity, they are as distinct from each other as possible. And in generality, that actualised counterfactuality is not merely a one-off event but a habit, a law, a routine state of affairs, an irreversible fact of history.

So again, explain stimulants.

Oh, yes. matter can definitely deaden or kill consciousness (physicians do this all the time when they prescribe opioids) , but it takes consciousness to know this. — Rich

So you have changed your claim now? Consciousness no longer creates matter. Instead matter can kill it, yet not create it?

Yet what is happening when physicians prescribe stimulants? And consciousness finds itself enhanced, enlivened? What are the consequences of admitting that matter appears to affect the state of mind in predictable fashion in either direction.

Apokrisis appears to be saying that there is no use in assuming such a principle of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

This seems to be the way that apokrisis speaks of identity, we give a thing an identity relevant to the purposes at hand. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem uncertain that this is my actual position for some reason. Is that because you know you're just making up things I never would say?

- if you can entertain the notion that consciousness creates matter which is far more likely than matter created consciousness. — Rich

Yeah it's just so obvious. Alcohol doesn't cause drunkeness, drunkeness causes alcohol. Lobotomies don't cause a destruction of integrative thought, a lack of integrative thought cause lobotomies. Etc, etc.

So perhaps contextuality means that "P is whatever is distinguished from not-P." — aletheist

Or formally, each is the other's context. As in the logic of a dichotomy - that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

So mathematically, it is a reciprocal or inverse relation.

X = 1/not-x. And not-x = 1/x.

This is why I say the degree each secures the other contextually is strictly relative. Each is only as precise as its alter ego allows it to be. If not-x is vaguely defined, then x remains just as vague too.

This ties identity directly to the strength of the answering context. And so put together, it allows for a controlled way to go from 1ns to 3ns via 2ns. You have every degree of mutual definition on the way from one limit (the 50/50 completely vague state of not knowing which is which), to the 1/0 limit which would represent absolute counterfactuality or completely secured identity).

Following on from the point about Brouwer, memory and action, I am reminded of Landauer's erasure principle - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

This ties computation to physical actuality in a helpful fashion here.

Memory or history is irreversible symmetry breaking created by some expenditure of energy. So 3ns can be neatly defined in information theoretic terms as the erasure of 1ns. While 2ns is a still locally reversible state - the dynamics can be read off in either direction until fixed by a 3ns context.

Hence the continuum does model time as memory and action. The past is 3ns - the information fixed by irreversible acts of information erasure. What was possible as 1ns is now decided with counterfactual definiteness one way or the other.

The present is then 2ns, the instant when there is just an event that could be read in either direction. Which is action, which reaction? All we know is that there is an event - a symmetry breaking - that could be about to be fixed as something definite and 1ns erasing in the 3ns memory of a developing history.

Then the future is 1ns or the vague. It is open possibility. It is the freedom waiting to be dissipated by acts that steadily rob the system of the energy to locally distinctive rather than globally generic.

So the continuum can't just be freely divided or counted without limit. Computation has been defined by Landauer in terms which spell it out as a game of diminishing returns. The Brouwerian requirement that the actual numberline needs a memory (context being primal) means that constructing the memory is dissipative. It costs to erase possibility.

In our universe, this is captured with complete precision by quantum mechanics. There is a holographic limit on computation. Try to do too much of it and the resulting heat would even melt spacetime, turn it locally into a black hole.

Of course maths can simply ignore all these issues - imagine numberlines as spatial things with no time, no memory, no action, no dissipation.

But while that might make a paradise for Hilbert, mathematical physics might believe that it wants mathematical conceptions much more in line with reality as it is observed. Which is where a Peirce comes in.

The difference is infinitesimal, however, so it is in principle indiscernible. If the difference is indiscernible then we might easily say that A and B are the same.

So MU, you quote Peirce in a way that directly contradicts you and directly supports me.

Interesting argumentative strategy.

The point is the difference is meaningful, no matter how much you might pretend otherwise-- a thing's identity is not found in what it is to you (i.e. your experience of it, semiotics, your "epistemic cut" ), but rather itself. There is a difference ( "This one dies, not the other" ) no matter if you care about it. Your generality is a myth, a dishonest story you tell yourself to eliminate subjects in the contexts of your "practical" concerns. — TheWillowOfDarkness

If you could define meaningful in a meaningful fashion here - ie: in a way that makes a quantifiable difference - then there might be something to talk about.

So how do you define meaningful exactly?

I'm liking Brouwer's "two-oneness" intuitionistic approach to the continuum that Zalamea mentions. It gets the pan-semiotic point that existence depends on memory (or 2ns on 3ns).

So the first mark (or cut of the line) anchors the second mark by becoming the memory - the context in which a difference can now make a difference.

This introduces the direction of time, and hence energy and dissipation, into axiom-level mathematical thinking. The past is spent (gone to synechic 3ns), and yet the future is still open (still primal or tychic 1ns).

So the continuum does have this neighbourhood property - this extra hidden dimension - which is its memory. The first cut becomes the context for a second cut (and together they underwrite an endless repetition of cuts). And this is where counting and even ordinality gets justified. Effort has to be spent in constructing a history of what has happened. But the future extends to infinity and beyond - underwritten by its own past success.

In appreciating the intuitionistic approach to the continuum, we can see what the set theoretic approach simply freezes out and takes for granted. The Cantorian infinity is timeless and effortless - and thus patently unreal on that score.

If maths wants to speak more truly of nature, we can see how memory and action must be added back into the mix.

Cantor was the first to rigorously define the continuum in 1870s and all the dissenters have been forgotten. — tom

You really do live in your own private Idaho. Underground like a wild potato.

Yes of course it would make a difference. The one I chose would be the one that I eat, the one I didn't choose would not be eaten by me. Do you think the difference between being eaten and not being eaten is not a difference? — Metaphysician Undercover

But how did it make a difference to you that you ate one and not the other? And how even did it make any difference to the world, if the world had any discernible interest in the matter.

So - as has been repeated ad nauseum by both me an altheist now - it is not that there isn't a difference, but there needs to be a difference that makes a difference ... which is the difference that makes a difference in this discussion.

You are talking about meaningless differences and claiming they are now meaningful. But you can't say why that would be so (except you would then be able to count some points being scored on your private anti-apokrisis metre ... Bing! MU scores another (own) goal!)

Information, of course, needs to be accurate. — darthbarracuda

Or meaningful in fact.

And this is the semiotic point. Information is not noise but a message when it is a sign connected to our desires.

So there are two views of information. One is that it is a material difference. That makes even noise countable as bits of information.

The other says differences have to make a difference. And that happens when there is a context of purpose which interprets a difference in terms of its meaning. A signal now also has a message.

There is a science of these things you know...

If everything was perfectly known, there would be no need for a mind. No thinking would be required. Thinking is the process in which we evaluate different sorts of information and construct a path of action. — darthbarracuda

I often drive long stretches of road with no conscious memory of a lot of pretty technical and dangerous actions. We are designed to automate our awareness of the world so that we can do everything at the most habitual and inattentive level possible.

So attention and thought are reserved for dealing with the unpredicted, the novel - the things we hope to turn into habits in the future.

That is why the old are wise. They know all the answers already. Correct thought appears effortless.

. If we wanna go the psychoanalytical meta-psychological route, then consciousness is the (painful) method in which the unconscious satisfies its endless depth of want and need in a temporal world of insufficiency. — darthbarracuda

No. Let's not go into the bogus science/dressed-up romanticism of psycho-analysis.

So apo is right in that for biological organisms, less tends to be more. Efficiency is what's up. But of course the mind has to be modelling the world somewhat accurately, otherwise theories like apo's wouldn't even make sense themselves. — darthbarracuda

You just don't get the nuances correctly yet.

The whole notion of "re-presentation" is a psychological fallacy. The mind - as a modelling relation - wants "efficiency" in always knowing the shortest path between its desires and their fulfilment. So it is that shortest path which fills awareness, not the totality of all the world's facts.

To denote science (or anything else) as the "highest" form of consciousness is sort of ambiguous in my opinion. Higher than what? What measuring system are we using here? — darthbarracuda

I defined it - going the furthest in reducing awareness of reality to a matter of signs - that is, the theory we create and then the numbers we read off our instruments.

The soccer goalie does just the same in the end. Success or failure is ultimately read off a score board ticking over - the measurement of the theory which is the rules of a game.

One-nil, one-nil, onnneee-nilllll-ahh! Comes the happy chant of the home crowd.

If anything I would have to say philosophy is the "highest" form of thought, since it deals with abstract concepts in a purely possible modality. Or, hell, even just daydreaming. — darthbarracuda

You are forgetting the role of measurement. Ideas must be cashed out in terms of impressions.

Science is the metaphysics that has proven itself to work. It is understanding boiled down to the pure language of maths. And so measurements become actually signs themselves, a number registering on an instrument.

What? — darthbarracuda

This.

Smoked some weed for the first time last night at a concert. — darthbarracuda

Then.

I'm legitimately curious as to why you think it's alright to blatantly ignore everything I just wrote by pretending it's the words of a seasoned stoner. Is it the impersonal culture of the internet, cognitive dissonance, or do you have some wisdom from above that isn't just scienced-up "suck it up"? — darthbarracuda

If you can't join the dots between the superficiality of Pessimism as a philosophy and the superficiality of pot as a solution to life's problems, then maybe you shouldn't risk knocking off even more neurons.

MU wrongly attributed it directly to Peirce and claimed that the latter relied on it to support the proposition that a continuum is divisible. — aletheist

MU's thoughts indeed form an undivided continuum. :)