At the end of the day, your version of understanding nature amounts to you standing there and saying the words "I understand nature". There is nothing more to show.

Science demonstrates its control over existence in everything that in fact makes your own modern existence possible.

So your cry of protest here could hardly sound more feeble.

The continuum was discovered via set theory! — tom

You need to get out more. The mathematical world is larger than just set theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(topology)

The continuum made of glued together points is complimented by the continuum made of glued together relations.

And the true continuum of Peirce (or Thom, or Brouwer) goes beyond that duality in being the source of that duality.

The specific language of "a difference that does not make a difference" comes from apokrisis, not Peirce — aletheist

Bateson must get the actual credit - http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/

If course we must rely on symbolism to communicate, since mind to mind communication is not available, but before such communication is performed, one must first probe nature directly and then admit in any use of metaphors that the metaphors are incomplete. — Rich

But why do you presume the job of the mind is to see reality "as it is"? That makes no evolutionary sense.

So pragmatism/semiosis is a realistic theory of the epistemic modelling relation we have with the world (and then ontologically - the surprising bit - that reality has with itself so as to indeed form "itself").

This flips everything around. Now the job of the symbolising mind is to take as little note of the actuality of the world as possible. To the degree the mind has detached itself from brute actuality, then it is starting to see the world only in terms of its future possibilities.

So for consciousness - as attentive level processing - less is more. The goal is to reduce awareness of the surrounding to the least amount of detail necessary to make successful future predictions, and thus to be able to insert oneself into the world as its formal and final cause. We gain control in direct proportion to our demonstrable ability to ignore the material facts of existence.

This is why science is the highest form of consciousness. It reduces awareness of the world to theories and measurements. We have an idea that predicts. Then all we have to do is read a number off some dial.

The fact that reality might be continuous is the reason why psychological mechanisms evolved to extract semiotic discreteness from it - a tale of distinct signs. The mind is designed to zero in on some single telling point of view in any moment - to attend. And in doing that, everything else can be ignored as noise. The world outside the focus of attention is simply ... vague.

My point is that you, like MU, are arguing from a particular set of presumptions. There is this wrong idea that the mind should see everything exactly as it really is. But that is illogical in evolutionary terms - in terms of the principles of modelling. The mind wants to do the exact opposite - transcend the world, so as to gain the power to re-imagine the world.

Of course the world still exists in brute continuous fashion. It has its recalcitrant being that ultimately acts as a constraint on our desires. Yet that doesn't mean we should just give in and give up. The highest state of consciousness is the one that is most semiotically developed - the best able to impose its own reality on reality through the creativity of a sign relation.

Therefore, apokrisis' claim, from Peirce, is that two distinct things can have the very same identity, if we allow that there are differences which do not matter. But of course these differences really do matter, because these are the differences whereby we distinguish the two things as distinct. And it is simple contradiction to say that these differences do not matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

If I offered you the choice between two McDonalds cheeseburgers, would it make a difference which one you picked?

If there are differences that don't make a difference, then there are differences that do. And on that logical distinction would hang the pragmatic definition of a principle of identity.

You may insist on your own unpragmatic definition. It would be interesting to hear what it might be. How does difference end for you? What makes something finally "all the same" for your impractical point of view?

You might as well just tell pessimists like me and Schop1 to go hit up the bong. — darthbarracuda

You smoke your first joint yesterday and today you talk like a seasoned stoner.

For Spinoza possibility is necessary. It never ends or ceases. — TheWillowOfDarkness

If that is truly Spinonza's view then at least we can cross him off the list. ;)

Spinoza understood the need for pure potential more than anyone else. He realised it must be beyond "firstness" (or "secondary" or "tertiary" ), finally realising potential's poisonous grip on metaphysics, where it thought to be something a force (i.e. a final cause) must "add" to the world for anything to make sense. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It would be nice if you could support your claims with references or quotes for once. This sounds wildly made-up.

But of course this better place has to be existence, right? — darthbarracuda

And that existence is what you make it.

Of course Pollyannaism is as superficial as Pessimism. There are limits to what any individual can change. So Pragmatism accepts the necessity of working within limits.

Yet in accepting responsibility for playing a part in the making of a better world, at least we start acting like a grown-up. And that responsibility starts at home with ourselves - hence positive psychology.

What's the point of repeating what you can't understand?

The very thing of a purpose defines its own epistemic boundaries - the point at which differences don't make any difference. And if you can't follow that argument, then that's your problem.

Some excerpts....

Peirce observed that, among those metaphysics that recognize all three categories, “there are other philosophies which seem to do full jus- tice to Categories Second and Third and to minimize the first, and among these perhaps Spinoza and Kant are to be included” (PPM 172). However, by the next lecture, Peirce had changed his mind. He listed as proponents of the ontology that recognizes only Secondness and Thirdness “Cartesianism of all kinds, Leibnizianism, Spinozism, and the metaphysics of the Physicists of today” (PPM 190), but listed Kantian- ism and especially Aristotelianism (to which Peirce this time paid particular attention) as among the metaphysical systems that accept the reality of all three categories (PPM 190).

So the Peirce initially thought Spinoza didn't get firstness, then later wanted to change his mind...

Thus, Peirce not only identified metaphysical systems that embrace all three categories as fundamentally Aristotelian; he also linked Aristotle’s metaphysics (and, by extension, those metaphysics that embrace Firsts, Seconds and Thirds) with evolutionism.16 During the same period, he made the difference between real Aristotelianism and the “imaginary” Aristotelianism of the scholastic period to rest in the for- mer’s evolutionism and the latter’s rejection of same. Finally, in a text from the same period, he praised Spinoza’s “slightly modified” Aris totelianism, maintaining that Spinozism shows no trace of influence by the scholastics.

So the true Aristotle got it, the scholastics didn't. And Spinoza was lucky in being uninfluenced...

[Peirce...M]y chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology. This theory is that the evolution of the world is hyperbolic, that is, proceeds from one state of things in the infinite past, to a different state of things in the infinite future. The state of things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu, the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity. (CP 8.317)

So here, from logical considerations, Peirce describes the trajectory from a hot Big Bang to a cold Heat Death about 50 years before science confirmed it....

Elliptic cosmologies accept the reality only of percepts and reject both the origins and the telos of those percepts as fictions.24 Peirce in more than one text identified this position with Epicureanism,25 although we might think of Humean and statistical mechanical cosmologies as likewise exemplars of this type.

The second possible cosmology also accepts the reality of percepts but sees these as emerging not randomly but from a real origin. This position is, however, analogous to a parabolic curve in that its origin and terminus are coincident. Parabolic cosmologies hold that the universe’s telos just is its origin—that the universe will end as it began. For parabolic thinkers, there is no genuine Firstness, only Secondness and Thirdness. Peirce labelled this position pessimistic.26 However, those infused with Nietzschean amor fati would call it optimistic. It is a position with considerable Stoic affinities,27 and one, it is worth observing, that most would identify with Spinoza.

The final cosmology that Peirce laid out is his own. This is the view of those who regard Absolute Firstness and Absolute Secondness as both real and as really divergent from one another. In geometrical terms, the curve described by two points infinitely distant from one another is hyperbolic. On Peirce’s account, if you hold “that the whole universe is approaching in the infinitely distant future a state having a general character different from that toward which we look back in the infinitely distant past, you make the absolute to consist in two distinct real points and are an evolutionist” (CP 1.362).

And here Peirce employs non-Euclidean geometry to model the various metaphysical cum cosmological alternatives in explicit fashion. He really was running rings around absolutely everyone....

In an 1891 article for The Monist, entitled “The Architecture of Theories,” in a section on the nature of space, Peirce inferred from the revolution in geometry an anti-deterministic revolution in metaphysics. “It is evident,” he wrote, “. . . that we can have no reason to think that every phenomenon in all its minutest details is precisely determined by law. That there is an arbitrary element in the universe we see—namely, its variety. This variety must be attributed to spontaneity in some form” (CP 6.30).

In your face MU. :)

But then the paper struggles to identify any grounds by which the Spinozean absolute is Peircean firstness in another guise. It shows Peirce thought Spinoza wasn't fooled by his own "Euclidean" concreteness. But the reasons for being so charitable are not then adduced in any convincing fashion.

Dea says this...

Spinoza’s commitment to conatus underwrites his criticism of Cartesian mechanics. On Spinoza’s account, Descartes was mistaken to regard matter as inert. For Spinoza, matter, like mind, is active; it is in its very essence dynamic. The important role that Spinoza accords to dunamis in his physics no doubt influenced Peirce’s linking of Spinoza with “historical Aristotelianism.” And, since Peirce cites Aristotle’s own principle of dunamis in support of his
attribution to him of evolutionism, so the traces of Aristotelian dunamis in Spinoza’s principle of conatus almost certainly played a role in Peirce’s association of Spinozism with hyperbolic cosmologies.

Then offers a sketch....

To say that Spinoza was a possibilist is not to deny that he was a necessitarian. He was a necessitarian in the sense that he recognized necessity as real. However, he was also a possibilist, who regarded possibility as real and as extending beyond actuality—just as Peirce did. The details of Spinoza’s possibilism go well beyond the scope of this essay, and will have to wait for another time. However, here is a sketch of how the story goes.

For Spinoza as for Peirce, being is at bottom indeterminate; individual things are not substances. Indeed—and here we glimpse another aspect of Spinoza’s pragmati(ci)sm—they are only individuals to the extent that they have effects. For Spinoza, however, for a thing to have a determinate effect is for other possible effects to be closed off to that thing. Thus, to be an individual thing, on Spinoza’s view, is not to perdure (like a substance) but to have limitations....To be a substance, for Spinoza, is to be utterly unlimited—to be pure possibility.

Yep. But now Spinoza in his own words - where it gets less convincing....

All of the passages that are usually adduced in support of the necessitarian, mechanistic-deterministic account of Spinoza confirm this. CM 1,iii: “The Possible and the Contingent are not affections of things [rerum].” E1P33: “Things [res] could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case.” E1P33S1: “I have shown here more clearly than the midday sun that in things [rebus] there is absolutely nothing by virtue of which they can be said to be ‘contingent’. . . . a thing [res] is termed ‘contingent’ for no other reason than the
deficiency of our knowledge.” These passages all explicitly make reference to things [res]. Things are not possible but fully determined. In Spinoza’s idiom, this is not a grand metaphysical claim; it simply follows analytically from the definition of “thing.”

So we seem to end up with the claim that Spinoza defined substance in untraditional fashion - not the formed secondness of hylomorphism or even Peirceanism - but as the pure potentiality of a vagueness.

Yet I don't think that adds up. At best, Spinoza might have dimly realised the need for pure potential (he was Aristotelean), but still made the mistake of thinking Firstness was still some kind of "material stuff", hence already in the hands of thirdness or the habits of form/purpose.

And this is not surprising given a theistic goal where the stuff of existence must be an expression of some mind's meaning - even immanently.

So summary is that Peirce certainly said by the end that Spinoza seemed a fellow triadicist. But so far no evidence to show that Spinoza really got it at a deep and explicity level. The similarity stems mainly from being a developmental process philosopher trying to make an immanent conception of the divine work out. So any logical properties of the metaphyics are consequences of that general orientation - that goal! - not well worked through arguments that carried the day in their own right.

But when one is forced into a negative situation due to social challenges of the existing structure, and then when one realizes that at the end of these challenges there are only vague notions of entertainment experiences- this is not very consoling. — schopenhauer1

You seem to view this arse about face for some reason. You appear to treat misery as an inescapable end rather than the escapable beginning.

So misery exists (in nature) as a signal to get changing. It says you are in the wrong place and need to head to a better place.

Of course pessimism thrives on the claim that misery (for us, in this era of history, due to the way we live) is inescapable.

But that is what makes it superficial as philosophy.

If you want to be taken seriously, talk sense.

Thanks, but none of that really clarifies the issue.

There looks a good article on exactly this topic - Firstness, Evolution and the Absolute in Peirce’s Spinoza by Shannon Dea - http://files.bloodedbythought.org/texts/On%20Peirce/Dea-44.4-Peirces%20Spinoza.pdf

I'll give it a read, but put the link here in case you want to consider it too.

Yeah, so you will be with those who feel that nature frustrates you with its fundamental quantum indeterminism and general relativity. You want existence to be exact and totallly knowable, even if that has already been discovered to be a kind of mania.

So the idea is that the context of x is not-x, and defining the identity of x as not-not-x recognizes this, rather than making it a contextless tautology? "x is x" does not apply to the contextual, but "x is not-not-x" does apply as an apophatic alternative? — aletheist

Your understanding seems not incorrect.

If it matters to you, then you have a reason to enquire. So where is the difficulty.

Mind you, if you claim that everything actually does matter to you, excuse me if I think that is patent bullshit. Does it make any difference to you if I wear a red or blue shirt tomorrow? Do you need that to be another determinate fact ... or do you believe in free will in contradiction to your what you just posted?

Which statement? Which terms? I want to make sure that I clearly understand what you are saying here. Also, how would you fill in the blank with some formalized version of the principle of identity? — aletheist

If x is not not-x, then it just seems straightforward that it is claiming its identity apophatically. I don't get that there can be any difficulty.

I am what I am because I am not what I am not.

But the difference is that now I have made the natural relativity of the question of identity explicit. I can suggest some feature as a characteristic that is "me" - like I am male. Because I'm not female. Then I can start to measure my maleness in terms of its,distance from femininity. Like perhaps I'm really hairy, so more truly male. Or perhaps I've got shapely legs, so that seems more ambiguous.

A silly example but it illustrates the principle. To state I am male is not very helpful. To state that I'm not female is to anchor the statement in a Universe of relative measurement. The context is now made fully part of the deal.

While I am at it, do you agree or disagree with my other "first cut" definitions of "contextual" that parallel what Peirce wrote about "vague" and "general"? — aletheist

But contextuality leaves it open whether the further possibility is 1ns or 2ns. It could a future condtional (the coming battle with the Persian fleet) or it could be some event already fixed by a determination (what will I discover when I finally check my ticket for the lottery drawn last week?).

So contextuality is simply 3ns or the generality of a constraint. And possibility divides into two kinds - that already determined by the past yet simply unknown or unmeasured, and then the true spontaneity of an undetermined future. Newtonianism talks about the first. Quantum theory is our best model for handling the latter.

Which is what, in your view? — aletheist

Following the second law of thermodynamics, I put it quite simply - to dissipate vagueness.

This is of course a very weak kind of telos from a theist point of view. But there you are. The world exists because vagueness proved to be intrinsically unstable. To the degree it existed, it already contained the possibility of regulation that could organise it to turn it into a crisp nothingness - a Heat Death void.

And throw all the Peirce quotes at me that you like. Semiosis starts with 1ns and so is radically at odds with any conventional transcendent monotheism - any 3ns notion of a higher purpose or creating mind or pre-existent harmony.

This is one point at which I am having consistent trouble tracking with you. I understand 2ns in Peirceanism to be about brute reaction/resistance, the absence of freedom (1ns) and reason/purpose (3ns). — aletheist

Why should any reaction be determinate in itself? Two things may collide and bounce. But how do you know which hit which, or who came off worst? You need some kind of fixed backdrop to close the story - give it a context against which the elements of the reaction can be measured. So that was what Newton's three laws of motion were about (and the triadicity was hardly an accident).

As I say, once we talk about 3ns or generality as constraint or purpose or law, then 2ns becomes the constraint of 1ns and hence the determinate thing of constrained possibility ... or a material degree of freedom.

Any point particle has six degrees of freedom - three directions of translational symmetry or straight line inertial motion, and three directions of rotational symmetry, or inertial spin. So Newton captured this fact that the fixing of a Euclidean flat backdrop then left these irreducible degrees of freedom. Constraint could stop everything but these last, now crisply definite, forms of local symmetry breaking. A rolling ball or spinning top - in a frictionless world - would remain in motion without change forever.

So Newtonianism is about a set of absolute freedoms. And thus also the corollary of absolute constraints.

Of course then along came relativity to demonstrate all this classical definiteness was relativistically contextual and quantumly indeterminate. That is why Peirce gets credit for foreseeing the physical revolutions about to come.

This is the basis on which I have elsewhere suggested "extreme realism" as the view that reality consists entirely of generals, or at least that everything real is general to some degree. — aletheist

This of course is what I deny. There is only relativity, never the absolute.

However, vagueness can't be absolute either. And generality can approach its own limit asymptotically. So certainly the Universe can be expected to wind up as totally generic as possible - the shorthand description of its ultimate Heat Death.

[edit:] So where I agree is that it is "constraints all the way down". There is no foundation of actual material being, just always a constraint acting to suppress free variety. Reality is thus always contextual (while remaining also irreducibly tychic). And if that's what you mean here, then I guess that is extreme realism in deny non-emergent or transcendent reality to brute particulars.

As a second cut: If x is contextual, then it is not necessarily true that under all circumstances, x = ¬¬x. — aletheist

Huh? X is being made its own context. That is the tautology here. The assertion is being made that the context is crisply existent too.

The upshot then is that the statement is true only to the degree that either term is true. But also each is true in direct proportion to the truth of its "other". So as least we do have a definite form of relative truth in play. Each term is as true as the other, even if neither might never be a perfect truth ... and that also is stated in the reciprocality of the relation. If either one was perfectly true, it would negate its other - erase it from existence and so lose the other as that to which anything was being related. So it is a limit statement - with each limit having to have the positive existence of its other (in familiar yin-yang fashion).

So yes, in the end, it is a statement of contextuality. But contextuality "absolutely divided". So that is why 2ns is about emergent particularity or individuation and the 1ns of identity is about the brute facticity of the same. The triadic scheme makes the middle the last thing to emerge from an organic process of constraint on absolute possibility. Monadic reductionism presumes it is the first brute fact to get the mechanics of construction started.

Hence if one or the other does not apply, negation is left undefined. — aletheist

Yep. I have said that there must be this coupling of constraints and unbounded freedom that then leaves the third thing of determinate possibility - material degrees of freedom. So it is a pincer movement to arrive at where reductionist ontology wants to start itself.

There is nothing to prevent almost any sort of difference from being conventionally neglected in some discourse ... — CP 3.63, 1870

So note Peirce argues here by implication for the pragmatic principle of indifference. If we are now talking cosmology, it is the Universe that is indifferent to any difference that doesn't make a difference in being beyond the needs of its genenralised purpose.

Of course the theist will run into real difficulties here because beyond the Universe is some further 3ns of a god with a mind. Peircean semiotics was heading so nicely in the direction of pure self-manifestation on the logical grounds that "nothingness is impossible". And then the theist has to do a sharp 180 when this dangerous final answer eventually does show itself. 1ns can't be the true initial conditions of existence as Peirce's own logic makes necessary. And from that balking at the final hurdle, the whole point of the metaphysics falls apart. Transcendentalism re-enters to claim its false dominion.

Anyways...

This distinction between the absolutely indivisible and that which is one in number from a particular point of view is shadowed forth in the two words individual {to atomon} and singular (to kath' hekaston); but as those who have used the word individual have not been aware that absolute individuality is merely ideal, it has come to be used in a more general sense. — CP 3.63, 1870

So this is dichotomistic reasoning. The general and the particular are defined via their mutual opposition. And so they both only exist in a relative fashion. Nothing ends up real - except to the degree its own reality is secured by a sufficient distancing from its apophatically reality-erasing "other".

Thus you have not fully surrendered to the essence of semiotics. Everything is ultimately emergent, immanent, a matter of relative development. Even the universals that are real under semiotics are only historically realised - ideal only relative to their own developed degree of expression.

So any law is not exceptionless. It may approach the Platonic ideal, but it can't arrive there. That makes even laws or 3ns emergent and not really real (in that wishes can change things still - as we humans demonstrate in defying laws like universal gravitation with wings and aeroplane engines.)

Thus when we are talking about the mirror that are the three laws of thought and the semiotic triad, it is this kind of immanent mutuality we would seek on each level. And in your language, you keep wanting to talk about generality or vagueness in unsuitably specific terms. You are treating the categories as hard and existent, not developmental and relative to the business in hand.

So as I say, there are three laws of thought that constrain naked possibility so that only brute substantial actuality appears left. The world is a nominalistic totality of facts, a cause-transcending state of affairs. We only then need a mechanical mode of reasoning - the atomism of predicate logic - to make complete sense of existence.

But then Peirceanism is the counter to that - the counter that doesn't destroy the particular, but instead flips the perspective to show how it is the irreducibly emergent and not the brutely foundational.

So that then is how generality and vagueness emerge as the "other" of the LEM and PNC.

Generality denies the LEM by saying that particularity is always contexted by a purpose. So middles have to be excluded to the general satisfaction of some constraint. There has to be a semantic act of judgement, an act of measurement.

But then that purpose can be satisfied often quite easily in practice. So constraint is self-limiting in its essence. There is always a point beyond which even the universal law doesn't in fact give a bugger. So indiscernability arises for that self-interested reason.

The 1ns of vagueness then stands against the "2ns" of the PNC. With generality vs the LEM, it was 3ns against 3ns - top level against top level. But now we have an odd mixing of levels that seems confusing.

However it seems to work out right. Where the PNC talks in terms of crisp possibility, vagueness says no, crispness is only relative to its "other" of the vague. So what the laws of thought treat as having simple existence - bivalence - semiotic shows to be an emergent property that has to erupt via a fluctuation of vague suggestiveness, followed up by the solidification of established 3ns, or universalised habit.

Then we arrive at the 1ns of the laws of thought - the principle of identity. This then is made to stand in dichotomous contrast to what? It stands in apophatic relation to 2ns/actuality ... whatever that really means in Peirce-speak.

So in fact we already find this a well traversed issue in Leibniz's doctrine of indiscernibles. But where the reductionist thinks that the differences that make a difference are atomistically unbounded - there is no reason why we could ever in principle cease the pursuit of further detail, chase down the last decimal of the expansion of pi until we are exhausted - the Peircean system offers principled relief. We can stop when the differences cease to matter to our over-riding purpose. And the same goes for the Universe (whose primary telos is thermalisation as far as we can discern).

So the laws of thought presume the brute existence of the indiscernible difference that secures the principle of identity. And Peirceanism flips this to say indiscernability kicks in at the point where some 3ns ceases to have a reason to care, and so 1ns is left undisturbed.

Thus indiscernability describes some prevailing state of equilibrium where there is enough 3ns to create generalised order, and enough 1ns to generate freedoms to be regulated. 2ns as actuality is the fractal balance where we can put a definite number on the real actions of integration vs differentiation (flattening and curving) going on.

So again, 2ns in Peirceanism is about the emergence of crisp possibility or determinate degrees of freedom. And this then stands "other" to the 1ns of the laws of thought in denying their assertion that crisp possibility or determinate degrees of freedom are instead the brute foundational facts in nature.

The laws of thought in turn try to dismiss vagueness as merely semantic, not ontic. Any vagueness in logic is due to informal issues like measurement error ... or indifference to the finer facts, an insufficiency in taking care.

So quite neatly, the laws of thought also employ the same dichotomistic othering. They just take for granted what semiotics demands be tracked via some developmental history reflecting a "growth of reasonableness".

Both effectively deny the identity of indiscernibles, the first by virtue of the different "hecceities" that two distinct individuals must have, and the second because no two reacting things can have the same spatial (or, I would add, temporal) relations.

The latter is what I had in mind when I suggested as an example of contextuality, "This object from one point of view, or at one time and place, is not the same as this object from another point of view, or at another time and place." — aletheist

Again, as already said, semiosis goes further. It defines indiscernability as a pragmatic issue - the principle of indifference that underlines probability theory.

So indiscernability is not ontic, but epistemic. If the Universe has a purpose, then that in itself creates a boundary, an event horizon, where it will cease to sweat the detail. It meets that purpose and then everything beyond that is a matter of generalised indifference.

So maths is hung up on radical openness. Counting seems something that extends to infinity because the very definiteness of any first step seems to already to guarantee the openness of that. And then the radicalness of that openness leads to a desperation to also produce a matching closure. Philosophy of maths ties itself into knots to discover global bounds on unbounded construction - the 2ns of already determinate degrees of freedom.

But semiosis already comes with the closure to match the openness. If there is openness due to their being a purpose, then there is a closeness in the way that also creates the possibility of its own satisfaction.

Thus at the level of 1ns, the continuum is neither an open or closed set. It is a clopen set - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clopen_set

Or as I said earlier, a scalefree situation like a fractal. If you are seeking either points or their contextual neighbourhoods, they exist with perfect evenness across every possible scale of being (and so, like a fractal, there is radical openness). And yet at the same time, the perfection of that evenness is a scale symmetry or the definiteness of actual closure. You can use a single number to capture the exact (symmetry broken) dimensionality of the resulting structure. The Cantor set for instance has an "angle" of ln(2)/ln(3) or ≈ 0.631.

Peirce's definition of "real" is that which has characters regardless of what anyone thinks about it. — aletheist

So then the actual only has character to the degree that reality has thought about it. That fits.

What materialists call the actual is only that which physical pan-semiosis has secured as some persisting mark of being.

If 3ns is real, it is real because it can't be wished away. Likewise the ultimate tychism of 1ns is real in the same fashion.

But 2ns is only real in that it is the emergent result of the other foundational reals - the actual causes of actual being. So it is not itself really real in being the product of pansemiotic "thought", or the universal growth of reasonableness. Matter is effete mind as they say. Or in other words, any material event could have been thought otherwise. Newtonian mechanics was always about inserting ourselves and our desires into reality. We want to discover the "hard facts" of atomistic events so as to then be able to rearrange the machinery of existence for our own convenience.

The first requires determinacy with respect to every general character, and thus - as he wrote elsewhere (see below) - can only be an ideal limit; while the second makes individuality a matter of reaction, and therefore existence. — aletheist

I already covered this where you first made your objections about my mention of an unresolved "tension".

If 3ns is the constrained totality, then 1ns and 2ns stand constrained by it as first, the 1ns of in fact unconstrained possibilty, and then second, the 2ns of now constrained or determinate possibility.

So actuality from this standpoint is simply regularity of spontaneity. Energy or fluctuation has become so ordered by global law or habit as to be fixed in its dimensionality and thus completely determinate and countable as a physical degree of freedom.

This is where we actually are in quantum cosmology. We can count the total number of physical degrees of freedom in the visible universe at its Heat Death - there are 10^122.

So in including energy in the physical picture closes it, turns the apparently open or infinite into a tale of the inherently finite.

This means the continuum is "grainy" under a quantum gravity "theory of everything" view of the Universe. But grainy doesn't mean definite or determinate discontinuity - as in the points of a line, or the pixels of an image. It means that the necessary duality in terms of the forces of integration and differentiation - the constraining generality of global 3ns and constructing actuality of local 2ns - are already present in germinative fashion in the vague potentiality of 1ns.

So again, 1ns is unconstrained possibility. 2ns is constrained possibility (local actual constructive freedom). And 3ns is the constraint of both kinds of possibility.

Another way to put it is that if generality and vagueness are real yet not actual, then the actual would be the not real. Or if the first two are the ideal limits, then actuality is the thus limited.

That sounds paradoxical but makes the point that actuality - as the 2ns of substantial events - is the emergent outcome of the two real causes of being, the material potential of 1ns and the formal constraint of 3ns. So actuality is not real in being merely an effect, not a cause.

Zalamea p23 highlights that points are the limits on actuality - and so actual actuality is an unreal possibility in being completely or Platonically ideal. Existence can approach but not reach the perfection of discontinuous actualisation that the principle of identity demands.

Indeed, the actual, the given, the present, the instant, are no more than ideal limits: limits of possibility neighbourhoods which contain those actuality marks, those points impossible to be drawn, those fleeting presents, those impalpable instants.

Zalamea also highlights the irreducible mutuality that is thus at the heart of spatiotemporal existence when he goes on to talk about Peirce foreshadowing a modern desire for possibilitia surgery techniques.

For me - coming at this from a more physical perspective where energy or action must be made properly part of any world geometry model - you can understand energy in terms of spatiotemporal curvature. So now we can understand the continuum - that blackboard that is already determinate in being definitely dimensional - in terms of its own more primal pre-geometry.

Briefly, you have the two things going on as a reaction. We start with the unboundedness of disconnected curvature - a roil of hot spacetime indeterminate fluctuation. A chaos of directions all erasing each other. That is, an infinity of scraps of hyperbolic curvature. Space as energetic action is buckled maximally at every point and so curves apart from itself to lack all actual connection. The only continuity is this sea of rupture. 2ns exists only as the reactions that are immediate hyperbolic divergence - fluctuation dyads that are breaking apart as soon they connect, leaving behind no history or memory, no 3ns of some context of continuity.

But in the very fact of chaotic or locally hyperbolic curvature, you then have the latent possibility of a constraint to flat and simply connected Euclidean space. If only 1ns could be cooled and its wild curvature could start to join up to share a common story - each point or rupture be flattened just enough for a history of ongoing relations to start to form. Ie: the birth of 3ns as now a telos. Euclidean flatness could become the thermal goal. If definite dimensionality begins to form - like the three dimensions of the universe in which it concretely expands - then you can establish the feedback loop that drives the primal chaos towards the flat connectedness of a true continuum state.

So a world gets born by starting with unbounded freedom. From every possibility of a point or locale there is the possibility of a momentum or curvature. You just get these two complementary things together in the pregeometry as a necessity. If there is a locale as spontaneous fluctuation of pure possibility or 1ns, then it come automatically with the equally phantom possibility of its motion or action. And given no restrictions or bounds as yet on that other possibility, it would have to be as unrestricted as possible - hence hyperbolic curvature, or Planck scale divergence.

But then given also we are presuming there must in fact also be interaction or constraint going on between these extremophile locales, these unbounded fluctuations (a reasonable conclusion as it must be the case as otherwise we could not be here to question its existence) then it only takes a little bit of interacting to provide a little more persistent for the fluctuations, the ruptures, to start to cool and start to line up in flatter fashion.

Given such an interaction - a state of 3ns - constraints would provide a generalised flattening force, while the vagueness with its unbounded curvature would provide the energy to be disposed of as a developing extent of spacetime. We start with a lump blob of energy - a wodge of fluctuations going off in disconnected directions. Then like a ball of pastry, it gets rolled flat and spread very thin. It tells the story of a Big Banf becoming a Heat Death via an asymptotic story of self-equilibrating cooling and expanding. At the Heat Death, the fluctations or local curvature is almost completely dissipated, leaving just a Euclidean actuality of a maximally cold, dark, even, and perfectly connected void.

So if we are to get deeply physical about the mathematical continuum, we have to wind the story back even pre-dimensionally or pre-geometry. Peirce's blackboard analogy talks of an infinity of flat dimensions. But even vaguer would be an infinity of hyperbolically curved fluctuations that lack all connection or communication, and so flatness can become part of their telos if flatness is also a latent possibility of that pre-geometric beginning.

And it must be because any curvature at all is already speaking to the otherness that would be flatness and connectedness instead.

Meanwhile, our current PM used to be a real climate change warrior - and now he's talking about 'clean coal' and mocking the Opposition for overselling the benefits of renewable. — Wayfarer

What does Australia makes its living from? Coal and minerals. Who owns the media. Coal billionaires like Gina Rhineheart. Who owns the politicians? The same.

Same in the US. Trump will be tolerated until the right laws have been passed that favour established big money interests. After that, people can impeach him if they want to.

As a first cut: If x is contextual, then it is not necessarily true that under all circumstances, x = x. — aletheist

Or x = not not-x is true. That employs the context to derive the specificity via a dichotomy.

Check out the Spencer-Brown's laws of form. Or Kaufmann's note on Peirce's sign of illation - http://homepages.math.uic.edu/~kauffman/Peirce.pdf

Would "contextuality" be a good descriptive term for this characteristic, as the second member of a trichotomy with vagueness and generality? What about "substance" to go along with matter and form? — aletheist

I don't think it is essential to arrive at one perfect word. Peirce called them one, two, and three precisely because the same basic triadic relation could have its many manifestations.

But if vagueness is the best term for 1ns, and generality the best for 3ns, then another term for 2ns (after hierarchy theory) would be specificity.

Now the issue is that you think that 2ns needs to be contradicted by (or there be a failure of distribution concerning) the law of identity. So somehow 2ns itself should mean the opposite of the individual, the specific, the determinate,

But the Peircean triad actually wants to give the particular its real place in the scheme of things. So we don't need to contradict identity itself to contradict the principle of identity.

I mean 2ns looks the most like the regular reductionist notion of the atomistically and mechanically determinate - in simply being Newtonian action and reaction.

That is why I said the contradiction lies in the genesis of specificity. Peirceanism says it is a contextual deal. The laws of thought say it is brutely tautological. So the opposition is there between the holism and atomism, but Peirceanism would still call 2ns "actuality" or one of its synonyms, like particular, local, substantial, specific, determinate, individual, etc. The difference is that what the laws of thought presume as the brute foundations - nominalistic identity - Peirceanism shows to be the emergent final product.

Positive psychology is not a panacea, if it was, everyone would literally be promoting it all the time. It's like the 19th century cure-all — schopenhauer1

Yeah, lets go for a proper 20th century cure like pharmaceuticals or ECT. Have a lobotomy while you're at it.

Should we gloss over the fact that there is no justification to keep institutions going? — schopenhauer1

That's the beauty of it. We can each do our own thing. You can be miserable and die, leaving behind nothing. I can live a life expecting a mix of the rough and the smooth, bring up kids of a similar mind.

At the end, we would both fulfil our wishes. You would find the ultimate exit door and I would perpetuate something of like mind. So what's there to complain about?

It's severely lacking in compassion and understanding. — darthbarracuda

How can that be so? Your life has to be a vale of tears or else your personal philosophy would be contradicted. I sometimes worry I'm not doing enough to confirm you in your pessimistic opinions.

So once more with feeling - suck it up.

It is peak cheap oil that is the economic issue. So the EROEI (energy return on energy invested). And cheap oil did peak. We are now in the era of stagnation to be followed by scramble.

Of course, renewables could come on stream faster than expected. But the world is doing a poor job in paving the way for a smooth transition. Hence Fortress America. Steve Bannon has been openly rubbing his hands about the inevitability of the destruction from which the US will arise great once again.

I said — Banno

Yeah. But anyone can wiki the set theoretic definition. Keep up.

Yes, Spinoza's concept of substance is contradictory to Aristotle's concept. Spinoza denies that there can be many finite substances and contends that there can be only one infinite substance. — John

Yep. The problem with Spinoza is that he was right about there having to be a "One", but wrong in conceiving of that basic materiality as a singular substance rather than as the vagueness of unbounded action. So it is material cause ... in its most insubstantial form. So action utterly lacking in form or purpose. An everythingness that is a singular being only because we call its fundamental disunity or lack of direction a single property or characteristic.

Vagueness is the canonical many. And when the question is asked of how many manys there are, the answer that comes back is "I am only counting the one".

But in what sense, then, is this distinctive of 2ns, in the same way that the inapplicability of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle are distinctive of vageness/1ns and generality/3ns, respectively? — aletheist

Vagueness and generality are defined as not being constrained in two of the ways that actual particulars are constrained. So materiality can be vague and not substantial. Form can be general and likewise not substantial.

Although given 3ns, these categorical distinctions are themselves all just aspects of the single triadic, irreducibly complex, sign relation. So that is why forms or universals can be real but not actual. And more unusually, the same is being said of the material principle. Materiality (as the vagueness of pure tychic spontaneity) is also a real potential, but not actually substantial 2ns (as it lacks yet the regularisation of habitual form or 3ns).

You see here that I go back and forth between hylomorphism and semiotics as of course the two are essentially the same metaphysical scheme with semiotics doing the better job of explaining the "how" by its foregrounding the mechanical role played by the sign relation in producing a world of suitably "deadened" substance.

Anyway 2ns would stand in relation to the law of identity as this same kind of protest - I am not constrained by that constraint which is said to be required to produce the brutely particular.

So 2ns instead talks about the deeper process that produces the brute particular. It points to the materiality and the formality, the vagueness and the generality, that have to be in interaction to produce actual substantial events, or differences that make a difference. 2ns treats actuality as what you get in the limit (with full 3ns). So actuality does apply to 2ns ... in the limit. But then 2ns is thus not actuality as brutely conceived by the law of identity. It is completely contextual once you step back to see the full 3ns scheme of things.

And this becomes more acceptable if we choose our intuition pumps more carefully and stop imagining reality in already presumptively Newtonian terms - like billiard balls rattling about on green baize.

What happens when two clouds collide? Where does any one cloud stop and start? What is the definite shape of any cloud? What is the physical logic of cloudy objects?

Clouds surely have actuality - we talk about them enough. But really, the law of identity fails to apply in a big way. And we can now specify the nature of that failure in the language of fractal maths. The contextuality of identity stands completely exposed these days.

I mean even Cantor was on the right track without really understanding it.

Have you checked - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor_set

Here is an analogy. You can simply talk about a disease in terms of all the chemistry and mechanics involved (dynamic or mechanical or other), and you can talk about disease in terms of the individual experience of the disease. — schopenhauer1

Hence positive psychology. Once you realise that it is all about contextual framing, then the obvious next step is to take charge of your own psychosocial framing. You stop belly aching about the life that has mechanically been forced upon you and take charge of creating a life as you want it.

Of course then if you think you can have a life of untroubled bliss, you don't understand the point of life at all. So there is no point making romantic transcendence your goal. The nature of nature is pragmatic. Suck it up. It ain't so bad once you do achieve that kind of harmonious flow.

What remains unclear to me is what it means to say that the principle of identity does not apply to something. Zalamea helpfully formalizes the principles of vagueness and generality on page 21 of his paper; he describes them as failures of distribution of the principles of contradiction and excluded middle, respectively. Is there an analogous way to formalize the principle of identity and/or its failure, which would show what you have in mind here? — aletheist

So 2ns is dyadic reaction. Actuality is being defined in terms of a difference that makes a difference. This is quite in contrast to a tautology where the actual is simply a difference. It is not about what the world can see and remember as a concrete happening - a unique event that produce some further change. It is simply presuming the existence of some thing as that which is "the same as itself" - absolutely secure in its difference from other things without further determination. Nothing has to be actually shown or remembered by way of the demonstration of some reaction.

Thus it is not hard to see secondness contradicting identity in a big way. Actuality is about some relative change that is definite due to a context. A thing must be reacting to at least one other thing.

And then when does such an interaction ever exhaust all properties. If I bump into a car in the pitch dark, I have some idea perhaps of an encounter with something metal and solid. But is it a Porsche or a Fiat. Might it just be a lamppost?

So identity is only approached in the limit by the dyad of actual interaction. And Newtonianism said at the end of the day, the limit itself dissolved into the purely relative. In space, am I drifting away from the rocket, or is the rocket moving away from me? The mechanics of the situation are fundamentally reversible or symmetric. We can't any longer use local differences as the guide to what is actually the case. The identity of individuals can't be arrived via the exhaustion of their observables, even if it can be approached with arbitrary closeness in principle.

So 2ns switches things in flipping it so that actuality is not real in the sense of a limit state having been concretely achieved - the usual classical notion of identity. Instead a limit is a limit - the place that "exists" in the apophatic sense of never actually being arrived at. So 2ns is substantiality approaching its exhaustive limit, not substantiality in and of itself, nothing further needing securing.

Only substance is, according to Spinoza, conceived through itself. Modes are conceived through their relations to other modes and, ultimately, through substance. So existence is of the essence of substance, but existence is not of the essence of modes. — John

This would be what Peirce's secondness challenges. Uniqueness would still be defined relatively. Inidividuation or identity is a difference that makes a difference. So - following Aristotle - the substantial is has some particular matter and some particular form. That is, it stands in relative contrast to the absolutely vague and the absolutely general.

This secondness or substantiality then shows itself in the sharp possibility of a reaction. One thing can react with definiteness to another thing. We have the dyad of some relation. We have a difference that is distinctive as part of a context and so can go on to be remembered as changing its developing history. We have the uniqueness of some difference that actually made a difference to the whole.

In the OP, I suggest that institutions may be self-perpetuating and the individuals are simply instruments for the perpetuation of the institutions. They become a maintenance crew, but why the maintenance crew has to keep maintaining in the first place, is never really answered, especially in light of the possible harms on the maintenance crew. — schopenhauer1

Well I've already explained the reason why this is naturally logical. The whole arises from the parts it shapes. So of course the parts would have to feel aligned with the purpose of that which is their global cause. Yet constraints are about the limitation of the accidental. So the parts can only be approximately aligned. Some degree of variety or non-alignment is to be expected. A system could break down if its parts are too roughly formed and they begin to fail to reconstruct the context of constraints that are meant to be forming them correctly.

So to use your jargon, as long as overall the maintenance crew is happy in the world they are constructing, the system will self-perpetuate. And also harms are always possible as the accidental or the various can only be limited, not eliminated.

Another systems point is that parts are meant to have critical instabilty. The best parts are those that are the most perfectly poised in a conflicted manner - balanced at the point of going in completely opposite directions. This is what allows it to be the case that top down constraints can make the parts easily switchable - turned on or off in various directions.

So the usual presumption is that parts must have stability for the whole to function. But this is not natural at all. It is mechanical and not organic.

Check out humans, and you can see this is the case. Biologicallly we are evolved to be poised between dramatically different states of mind. Fight or flight. Anxious or calm. Active or passive. Dominant or submissive. Empathetic or cold. A lot of what you call harms is simply a requirement for this kind of quick switching between sharply different responses to circumstances. We are made to be unstable because that is the source of a system's power. A slight touch on the controls is all it takes to turn on a dime.

So yes, if you think about this philosophically, it may seem weird. But only because you are framing the situation mechanically and not organically. You are treating humanity like a mindless maintenance crew perpetuating some giant machine that exists for no apparent purpose.

But nature is organic, not mechanical. You are applying a model of things that has the fundamental flaws I've outlined often enough.

An exemplar is simply an ideal instance. The general particular. It is the essential example in having the least that is accidental about it, and so the most that reflects necessity.

If we were illustrating a kid's reader to give the ideal notion of a cat, it wouldn't be three legged or suffering other accidents of fate.

And more sophisticated notions of metaphysics would view the general and the particular as being a matter of constraints and freedoms.

Now it becomes more clear that the exemplary is defined by a limit on the accidental. Constraints don't have to "generate the essential". They only need to limit the accidents or degrees of freedom in sufficient fashion (and constraints always embody some purpose, hence sufficiency follows directly from that satisfaction).

So we wind up with exemplars as a least action or symmetry breaking principle. They illustrate the shortest distance to the thing in question because there are the least accidental details encountered along the way.

So you didn't realise that tautologies exclude semantics so are no use when it comes to making actual sense?

why do individual humans care about the species' survival — schopenhauer1

They might say that they do, but the majority certainly don't act as they do.

Why should the human not care that the institution perpetuates individual suffering any more than they should ignore their own harm to keep the institutions going? You do not seem to have a justification. — schopenhauer1

Given you are arguing that there is a general contract as well as these subcontracts, there is no reason individuals couldn't find society generally ok but problematic in certain regards.

Of course if you now deny your own thesis...

I note you never got around to talking about the fate of the point but instead wandered off to talk about something else.

However, in the West at least, we have the notion of individualism and being our own person. — schopenhauer1

Yes. So this subcontracted notion has evolved because it works and we naturally seek to perpetuate it - even if it doesn't always make us happy.

But evolving to challenge elements of the subcontract - a conscious creation of variety that drives human cultural complexification - is not the same as challenging the contract at the general level. That would be unnatural and maladaptive.