OK, but the issue was whether or not it is possible to have a perfect circle, such that you could not tell its rate of spinning, or even whether or not it is spinning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why is that not what I was discussing?

That's what I am trying to get at, the nonsensicalness of this notion of spinning, which appears to be totally incompatible with the pure symmetry of a circle. — Metaphysician Undercover

You see a featureless disc. How do you tell if it is spinning or not? Would you see anything different if a stopped disc started to move, or a moving disc stopped?

The difference between a spinning vs motionless triangle, pentagon or - most especially - any irregular shape is always going to be obvious to the eye. And yet a circle is an unbroken symmetry in that regard. So that is a mathematically important and distinct property - hardly a nonsensical one.

And then - surprise, surprise - rotational symmetry is one of physics foundational facts. Nature can't prevent what it cannot see. And so rotation is built in as an inertial property. Any object - in the absence of impressed forces - will continue to spin at the same rate forever, in just the same way as it will move in a straight line forever due to translational symmetry.

So again, the notion is hardly nonsensical. The theorem linking the maths to the physics is pretty famous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem

It is the fact that you construct your reality in terms of these binaries which gives the game away. You are having to now justify your Tiger parenting extremism in terms of its equally bad "other" - the anti-Hanover who would be passive mummy to the mummy's boy.

So I get it. I just don't buy it. Good parenting would be something else beyond your dire alternatives.

I've not suggested living with mom isn't a short term solution, but it's not a lifetime plan. It's no plan. It's easy and lazy. Quitting is shameful. Deal with it. — Hanover

Jeez, what a dick. But clearly it simply reflects your own cultural upbringing. You do as was done to you. And so repeateth the cycle of dickery.

But all your comments about quantum physics have been grandly sweeping and lacking in metaphysical precision. That is the substance of my complaint here.

And you have failed in particular to make it clear how the field's notable epistemic humility - the Copenhagen Interpretation for crying out loud!! - makes it guilty of over-reaching any descriptive account of the world.

Surely only a true scientist would accept a humiliation as complete as CI. :)

Quantum physics is a new way of thinking about the behavior of fields and matter, but much is still left to be discovered and understood. It doesn't appear to be absolute or final, and it appears to be evolving. Beyond this, it appears to be practical for certain types of applications. — Rich

So what's new? Isn't science meant to be self-correcting inquiry in that fashion. You are simply now criticising science because it is in fact epistemologically modest and doesn't go about claiming ontic absolutism (those guys represent the modern religion of Scientism).

So science could only be failing in its goals in your eyes if you yourself are a supporter of an unreasonable level of ontic absolutism. (Just another bloody fundamentalist :) )

Wouldn't further spin increase the rate of spin? Do you think that the rate of spin is not an actual difference? If not, then there is no difference between spinning and not spinning either. Your statement seems to imply that there is no difference between a static circle and a spinning circle. But surely there must be, and if there is a difference between these two, then the rate of spin is also a difference which needs to be considered. — Metaphysician Undercover

As soon as you break the symmetry of a circle - put a nick or a mark on its circumference - immediately you can see (from this imperfection) that it has some relative rate of motion (or rest).

So you are simply now describing the situation in terms that are crisply different - where the disc is semiotically marked and the symmetry quite radically imperfect.

A marked spinning disc can no longer be confused with a marked still disc ... unless - sneakily - its spins so fast that the mark becomes a grey blur, and we restore a symmetry because our eyes become indifferent to "the reality". (You see, as usual there is no escaping the logic of hierarchical order. Go to either extreme and it all looks the same again - just for exactly the opposite reason!)

Law, as commonly used, implies an invariance... — Rich

...and an invariance is a symmetry.

So everyone is talking about the same thing, sort of. But there is a historic division between those who think about nature in terms of self-immanence versus those who conceive of limits or constraints being transcendentally imposed (and freedoms as being transcendentally created).

Greek metaphysics started out with an immanent story - Anaximander's tale of the Apeiron. And Aristotle cashed that out in his four causes model of development. He understood causality as a matter of constraint. And so Aristotle was happy with a reality that largely lives by its habits, yet is still capable of spontaneous accidents. Things can happen that "break the rules" in a way that doesn't make a difference.

But even in ancient Greece, the alternative view was brewing. The Stoics adopted the atomistic view that chance was simply ignorance of the deterministic detail. Fate rules the future by force of necessity.

And so the debate went back and forth through metaphysical history. It turned out that - being simpler in eschewing formal/final top-down causality - a reductionist approach to lawfulness was the most pragmatically effective ... in looking at existence purely in terms of material/effective cause.

This was in particular the Newtonian breakthrough. The laws could be up there in the mind of God. Then down here on Earth, everything was some tale of impressed forces. A curious dualism crept in where science appeared to both need and eschew universal constraints.

But in practice, it was useful. You frame some Platonically invariant description of a symmetry relation - like change in motion being temporally proportional and directionally orthogonal to impressed force - and then you can get on down here on Earth measuring such changes as particular events and imputing the materiality of the effective cause needed to bring about those states of observation.

So local observables came to stand as signs of global unobservables. The Lord or the Law of Gravity operated in mysterious fashion. But as Michael doesn't tire in saying, all we actually see right here and now is some behaviour, some event, which we read off in terms of an "unreal" universal abstraction. ;)

However the bigger picture of causality never went away. And following the thermodynamics revolution in particular, science has started again to think about causation in contextual or holistic fashion. We are getting back to self-organising immanence with our Big Bang cosmology and more thermally-inspired, condensed matter style, models of quantum gravity. Formal and final cause are back in the picture, along with the possibility of spontaneity or accidents as the class of physical behaviour that quantifiably doesn't make a difference.

That again is why it is irritating that you draw the wrong conclusion from quantum indeterminism. We can now measure "pure accidents" with complete precision. It is the law that there is an irreducible degree of lawlessness in the world. It is simply a corollary of the fact that classicality can fulfill its determinstic desires to the degree it makes any real difference.

The analogy referred to a spinning circle, and by this description, "spinning" implies necessarily that it is actual. Therefore the analogy refers to an actual circle, which according to your statement above, cannot be a perfect circle. However, the description in the analogy described the spinning circle in a way which could only refer a perfect circle. Therefore the situation described by the analogy is impossible, contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not that difficult.

If you want to talk about actual circles, then the form of a perfect circle represents their exceptionless limit. So it is what actuality can both aim for, yet never completely attain.

And yet by the same token, actuality can attain effective perfection if it gets close enough so that it makes no bleeding difference.

So if we grant actuality the purpose of being circular, it can get there as close as can possibly be measured. The very idea of "having a purpose" entails the further idea of "there being a point beyond which there wouldn't be continuing reason to care". Which is the pragmatic fact that saves us getting hung up on Platonistic paradox - ie: purposes can be satisfied, at least relatively speaking. :)

So pragmatic purposes already pre-suppose their limits because a purpose definitely conceived is one conceived in terms of what then counts as a matter of generalised indifference. Logic says eventually, a purpose gets satisfied and so further action in that direction becomes an irrelevance.

Which is what spinning a circle (or talking about rotational symmetry) illustrates. You can spin until you create a circle. But continuing to spin then doesn't make any actual difference. Once action has expressed its limit, further action doesn't change anything.

And that is the way to understand why nature develops lawful or habitual behaviour. In breaking symmetries, it eventually arrives back at symmetries. We exist in a Newtonian classical paradise of inertial freedoms because - in the end - the two principal symmetries of translation and rotation can't be washed away by any conceivable spatial action. And then relativity includes Lorentzian boosts in this picture - uniting the spatial story with the energetic or temporal one.

Finally along comes quantum mechanics to scale the actual size of the fundamental indifference our Universe displays. Our spatiotemporal geometry is effective or emergent. QM says here is the Planck ruler which we can use to measure the actual gap between what reality can manage to achieve and the classical perfection we might think it was always striving after.

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

Which is why fundamental is a word that a process metaphysician would only use in quotes.

An ontology of self-organising habits sees everything as instead emergent. Instead of reality being constructed bottom-up from irreducible parts, it instead arrives at its own irreducible limits by way of a generalised constraint on free possibility.

Suppose that I am holding a stone. If I were to let go of it, then it would fall to the ground. This proposition is true, regardless of whether I ever actually let go of the stone. It expresses a tendency or habit - a conditional necessity - that really governs the stone's behavior in an inexhaustible continuum of possible cases, so it is not reducible to any actual occurrence or collection thereof. — aletheist

Yep. There was no comeback on that.

Michael wants to focus nominalistically on instances of behaviour, and yet at the same time, he accepts that the behaviour in question is exceptionless. If we let the stone go, there is zero expectation it will rise, let alone float. So we would have reason to talk about laws or habits of nature unless there were constraints defining the very freedoms we are pointing to.

We can call the behaviour of the stone an example of universal gravitational action because the stone apparently has many directions open to it, but moves - indeed accelerates - in always only the one. And if we have both freedoms and constraints, that is two things to talk about. You can't just label them the one thing of "instances of behaviour".

I like your circle metaphor. However, how does one get from “unlawfulness” to a (perfect) circle? — Querius

The circle simply illustrates the basic principle that a symmetry is defined by differences not making a difference.

Unlawfulness comes in once we start talking about symmetry in the sense of dynamical equilibrium states - or broken symmetries that can't get more broken and so ... become effective or emergent symmetries again.

And this is better illustrated by a gas of particles. At equilibrium, every particle is as likely going forward as going backward. So all action settles to a collective average.

But if you really want to get into it, you could consider the physics of Goldstone bosons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_boson - which are local spinless excitations resulting from global symmetry breakings.

The usual crude description of this is that this kind of irreducible excitation arises like the way a ball balanced on a Mexican hat. The ball has no choice but to roll down the slope (breaking its initial symmetry). But then nothing stops the ball rolling around in a circle in the trough of the hat. It makes no difference to the energetics of the system which way a broken field actually points. And so - being free - it must happen. The ground state becomes a new effective symmetry - the ball rolling around in the circle of the trough - which the world then reads off quantumly as a new degree of freedom or an actual particle.

Also I don’t see how the circle metaphor elucidates the existence of various fundamental constants, which could have been very different; see the multiverse hypothesis. — Querius

Are you talking about laws or constants? Or laws with different constants? That is, do you have a clear story on how they are the same or different kinds of things?

Personally I'm not a great fan of multiverses precisely because of the muddled thinking on these issues.

Consider again a circle and ask whether pi, as a constant expressing the ratio of radius to circumference in Euclidean space, could be different in a different universe? Doesn't pi have to be pi in all conceivable (flat) universes?

The constants of nature scale the actions of nature. So they put a ruler on the local degree of symmetry breaking. It should be no surprise if they turn out to be effective balances - themselves "geometric ratios" - as, for instance, string theory might suggest from the internal structure of compactified dimensionality.

Another simple analogy is random sphere packing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack

You can take a bunch of balls and stack them carefully - with maximum order - and fill 74% of the available space with balls. So 26% always remains free space. But if instead you are only allowed to shake the balls into place - do things nature's way, the probabilistic way - then you can only get down to a 64% to 36% ratio of ball to void.

So naively, nature ought to be able to achieve its absolutely orderly ground state. But instead - there always being irreducible jitter - one would expect ground states to only be effective. They would reflect an average behaviour that emerges because freedom is as constrained as possible, and yet that average is itself based on a free symmetry.

With sphere packing, that emergently "grounding symmetry" is the ability of the balls to still slip about. If any balls happen to get stacked for an instant with ultimate crystalline regularity, that can't last long as the greater mass of balls will jostle them back towards the more typically random and loosely packed arrangement.

So in nature, you have to start with a global symmetry (that gets broken). But also end in a local symmetry that puts an effective limit on that breaking. Otherwise you really would end up with nothing rather than some fine-grain groundstate blur of action that is the thermal differences that can no longer create a real difference.

If accuracy is defined by a probability wave then accuracy had taken a left turn. Physics is very useful but hardly precise. — Rich

Huh? Our measures of reality now have such precision that we can even measure the residual indeterminacy that persists despite our living in an era when the Universe is now so large and cold.

I'll say it again. We can now quantify uncertainty to about as many decimal places as you might require.

Perhaps you remain unimpressed. I merely then point out that you communicate with me using the resulting quantum technology and not ... telepathy or carrier pigeon.

As history has shown, nature is constantly changing, our knowledge of nature is constantly changing, mathematics is constantly changing, mathematical equations to describe our knowledge of nature is constantly changing, the ideas that the mathematical equations represent are constantly changing and debated. — Rich

You mean history has shown that our scientific models just keep getting remarkably more comprehensive in scope. Our ability to describe the world accurately has been improving exponentially.

After all, if there can be a single 'big bang' event, what 'law of nature' says that it can't happen more than once? — Wayfarer

The second law of thermodynamics is the obvious one.

Of course the second law is itself framed rather mechanically in terms of reversible Newtonian motions. And so it is quite easy to "prove" theorems about eternal recurrence ... given that time symmetry is being taken axiomatically for granted.

Yet meanwhile back here in the real world, the Universe expands and cools eternally. We know that from observation rather than theory - the discovery of the hyperbolic curvature due to "dark energy". So we already had the problem of writing time asymmetry into theories like GR and QM by hand - we have to add a directional time signature that is not to be found in the symmetry-describing equations. And dark energy is another observable that shows we really do have a big hole in current theory.

But anyway, at the very least, the expanding and cooling is now certain to reach a heat death, an actual Planck limit on entropification. So while it might be highly probable (with a certainty of 1) that a quantum fluctuation as hot and dense as the Planckscale would result in a big bang universe (as argued by spawning multiverse scenarios, for instance), it is matchingly (reciprocally) improbable that a heat death universe would be able to re-produce a Planckscale fluctuation of that requisite magnitude.

Once you have struck a match and burnt it out, it is "quantumly possible" if you kept striking it that it might eventually catch fire again. Some probability can be attached to anything happening. But I think we could also say that a probablity of "almost surely zero" is zero for all practical purposes, even for metaphysics.

We can never rule out a story of the universe as the original perpetual motion machine. On the other hand, we can empirically assert that it is screamingly unlikely to be the case. It is far more likely that we just haven't figured out the problem rather than that we can extrapolate from the success of simplifying our models of the world by presuming time symmetry - and writing in the right direction for time in ad hoc fashion to make the models actually fit the world as we experience it.

Pity that it has to come down to ad hominems, isn't it? — Wayfarer

You can take it personally but it was the collective "you" I was addressing.

I think it's a near-certainty that the universe will turn out to be a cyclical process of expansion and contraction, as is everything in nature — Wayfarer

Again, on what grounds - except a belief that time symmetric laws support a time symmetric reality, thus ignoring all the evidence that that time symmetry is irreversibly broken back here in reality?

What if there is no beginning? — Wayfarer

I prefer to get beyond such claims of definiteness. You can't be radically indefinite unless you abandon a lack of beginning along with the beginning of beginning.

the universe is indeed a cyclic process of expansion and contraction, starting from beginningless time. — Wayfarer

Yep. So like Tom and everyone else, you are stuck with a classical notion of time as a space in which there is an endless symmetry of succession. And yet we know that time and energy are in a reciprocal relation which the goal of a replacement quantum theory is to explain.

Cycles are what you end up with if you can't get passed the symmetry of your own mathematical equations. If you can go forward, you can go back. And then from there you can repeat without making a difference.

So sure, cyclic metaphysics seems very logical. But that's the problem. It shows you aren't ready to break out of the mental box you have constructed for yourself. A final theory is going to have to figure out what time really is. And if the theory is cyclic or reversible, then it still starts your ontology with a Platonic symmetry and not an Anaximandrian potential.

Moreover a bottom-up process from bosons to physical laws would be in need of constraints (laws?) in order to produce a limited set of universal laws — Querius

Nice question. I really like Paul Davies but that column is mix of the good and bad.

The way I would look at it is that the fundamental laws describe mathematical symmetries - which are in effect the limits on un-lawfulness. With a circle, for example, disorder can do its damnedest - spin the circle at any direction at any speed - and the circle will still look unruffledly the same. All that disordering has no real effect as the very form of the circle is indifferent to every kind of action, or attempt to break its symmetry.

So this is a standard thing. Symmetries are emergent equilibrium states on the larger picture. They are the constraints that can't be broken because there is no possible action that could make a substantial difference. And we can apply this to a dynamical process like a Big Bang universe or other entropic systems.

An ideal gas has particles going off in all directions, but they can't change the overall temperature or pressure of the system - its global symmetries ... (unless all the particles decide to all go in the same direction - something that can't happen in a Big Bang universe that is always cooling/expanding of course.)

Anyway. Davies makes the useful point that most laws or constraints are "merely effective" - locked in due to symmetry breaking. It is easy to see that as the Universe has cooled/expanded, bosons have attained stable local identity and so have behaviour that is accounted for in terms of symmetries that got broken. Antimatter and matter were once in thermal equilibrium (a state of symmetry). Now all the antimatter has fizzled away leaving matter as "the law". Effectively we can chuck away the right-handed interactions of the weak force because only the left-handed ones exist to result in physical laws.

And now my suggestion is to just roll effective law all the way back to the beginning. We don't have to work our way back to a fundamental Platonic state of being which is a perfect symmetry. Instead - if we understand laws to always be the emergent limits of disordering, the dynamical equilibrium balances that must always develop because "continued differencing makes no further difference" - then we can start the whole shebang with both disordering and ordering being the "symmetry" in play. We don't have to pick one over the other - disordering, or the quantum action, over order, or the symmetries of spacetime. Instead the two co-arise as themselves the deep asymmetry. The story is simultaneously bottom-up and top-down.

So this is synergistic. The laws need disorder (or violent physical action - quantum fluctuations) to exist. They represent the equilibrium limits that regulate the Cosmos in being the effective symmetry states that "just don't care". Disorder loses its teeth because it can spin a circle all it likes and the circle already immanently exists as the limit of that very possibility for action. Try every form of disruption and in the end, what can't be disrupted is what is left as necessarily being the case.

Of course that still leaves plenty of mystery in trying to track things back to the beginning. Physics can now describe a whole sequence of emergence when it comes to the development of effective laws following the Big Bang. There were a whole series of phase transitions to produce more complex states of order as the energy density dropped and the scale factor increased. However we are still trying to work out whether gravity was part of some vanilla quantum force and so there is some grounding symmetry state for reasons that will seem self-evident once we have its number.

Yet the metaphysical problem here is that Davies (although he is big on top-down causation) is still too wedded to a Platonic conception of symmetries as "substantial things" - like something that might break like a plate if you drop it on the floor.

If instead you go the completely effective theory route - where any foundational symmetry would itself have to be emergent along with the disordering it "ignores" (that is, the quantum action that is needed to manifest it as "a real physical thing"), then you have an elegant way past the usual "first causes" and "prime mover" quandries of metaphysics.

The thing is we absolutely understand the nature of effective law. It is not a mysterious thing. So why not extrapolate backwards from that (as some major metaphysicians, but really no modern physicists, have done).

Hello. What does it mean for something to exist? Does existence have an essence? — mew

As you can see from the confusion of replies, you are asking for a simple definition of something that has irreducible complexity.

The essential idea is that to exist is to have actuality. And as Aristotle argued, that kind of individuated substantiality is a combo of material and formal cause. There has to be some kind of materiality that explains the reactivity. And it has to be constrained in some fashion that gives it its particularity.

So even thought about in simplest terms, two things have to come together in a way that results emergently in a third. Reactive potential has to be given a particular shape. Then we have some thing that is individuated - that is in physics-speak a degree of freedom. Or in semiotics-speak, a difference that makes a difference.

So one can point to ideas or the things we might agree to talk about. They are certainly part of the story of the road that leads to substantial existence. Even a fairy story might be true - if made material.

Likewise one can start over at the other side of matter. Something definite exists when quantum indeterminism is organised into an observable state - like a field's potential for a particle. But unformed potential does not actually exist in itself. It needs to be formed to have the kind of actuality that allows definite causal interactions.

So existence should be considered as the highest state of hylomorphic development. It is the concrete limit of a process of emergence. And we do then also want to grant reality to the two factors that are in interaction - the formal and material causes of being. They seem to "exist" in that they both really have an effect. But metaphysics has to respect that they don't themselves exist in a substantial fashion, otherwise it all collapses into a confusion of jargon.

Geometry is the study of possible spatial relations. — Agustino

But only as conceived in terms of relata like points and lines. Or at a deeper level - one that includes the reality of material being. - in terms of least actions and the global symmetries they break.

So geometry certainly started out as a maths of space (thus excluding time/energy). But that turned out to be an incomplete view of spatiotemporal reality.

So, I think there is both a transcendental aspect of the phenomenal, and beyond that a transcendental noumenal. Of the latter I don't believe it could be appropriate to refer to it as either ideal (in the sense of being a function of our minds) or real (in any empirical sense as a phenomenal existent). — John

This is all pretty compatible with my triune metaphysics which would call the noumenal a vagueness - a naked unformed potentiality. The noumenal would thus have no character apart from that which develops via phenomenology - that is, shaped up into intelligible divisions by a (perceiving and willing) mind.

So beneath the jargon, there looks to be a lot of compatibility. All metaphysics of any interest tends towards a triadic or hierarchically organised view - the only kind of metaphysics that can do justice to the three things of observers, observables, and their shared developmental or causal history.

As I have said a million times, Non-Euclidean geometry does not refute the axiom that the shortest distance is the perpendicular - among many other axioms that aren't refuted. So you have to explain to me where does this axiom get its certainty from, because it seems that regardless how our space is, it can't be refuted. — Agustino

I'm confused about exactly what you want to argue. But it seems reasonable to derive the least action principle from empirical experience of the world. If a geometry appears to offer many paths, it is rational to suggest one will involve the least effort of all the alternatives. So once energy is included in our picture of physical reality, non-Euclidean geometry should pop out.

If we fire off two objects into empty space on parallel tracks, we can then observe whether they diverge, converge, or stay the same distance apart. The behaviour can then be interpreted either in terms of interactive forces or geometric curvature. And both would be complementary views of a world understood to be organised in terms of the deeper synthetic a priori of the least action principle?

So if the question is does non-Euclidean geometry change anything about our ability to grasp the essence of existence through a leap to rational generality, then it seems not. We just needed to drill down another level beyond Newtonian physics to a view where space, time and energy are combined in the form of the idea of a path in which the least energy gets expended (or equivalently, a space that is globally expanding or shrinking at a non-accelerating rate).

So does this then boil down to either all similarities being a matter of accident vs all differences being a matter of accident?

If so, less Metaphysical violence would be done by extreme realism as there doesn't seem such a problem in differences being accidents of history. Whereas to account for the global organisation of the world as "just an accident" would be more of a stretch.

Of course many worlds would then be invoked to make the observed organisation of our world just a lucky nominalistic accident. In Humean fashion, there is no reason why the way things are couldn't fall apart in the next second or two. The laws of,physics might suddenly cease to obtain, for all we know.

However then it seems reasonable (to a holist) that the organisation of the world is self-perpetuating - a state of regularised habit - and so we would be back to saying extreme realism is the more plausible. Difference could be just accidents - matters of global indifference. The world would have enough sameness to actually be a world, and why should it care beyond having achieved that?

Even many worlds is still a hypothesis that presumes a substantial sameness in the overall shape and organisation of things. So in fact it only supposes localised differences - of the kind that doesn't really matter materially.

Thus extreme realism wins. Extreme nominalism always falls apart because of a lack of metaphysical glue. :)

We infer that space is curved; we do not experience it as curved. — John

So what are we experiencing when we employ gravitational lensing to see distant planets circling distant stars? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing

When John mentioned this on p2, you dismissed this rather too glibly - talking about spacetime curvature in a way that was out-of-date since Gauss first defined the notion of intrinsic curvature.

We cannot perceive what it would be, because that would entail having 4D eyes. But - we can perceive what it is by analogy to other dimensions (and hence we can conceive it) — Agustino

3D space doesn't require a fourth spatial dimension in which to curve. The Universe could be a hypersphere - a compact curved spherical 3D space - but it wouldn't mathematically need to float in a larger space like a planet in a void.

So if we are talking about actual modern physical concepts, then even watching a falling rock accelerating in a gravitational field counts as "seeing spacetime curvature". A frame of reference is only "flat" to the degree that energy potential differences have been globally constrained to make that the case.

The non-Euclidean argument really ought to be reversed.

The early assumption was that flatness was natural as the simplest state. And that did mathematically appear to accord with the world as experienced at a "classical scale" - a scale of a temperature and extent convivial to human existence. You could build things using Euclidean geometry and experience would seem to say that you could achieve a perfect carpentered fit. A picture really could be absolutely level to some idea of a horizontal plane.

But nowadays, the more natural presumption would be that flatness is the surprising answer to the ontic question of "how much is everything curved?". Naively, spatial extent could have any curvature value. What's stopping it not? And yet our Universe has this remarkably fine-tuned balance where there is this incredibly tiny deviation from perfect flatness - the hyperbolic curvature of a universal "dark energy" - that means there is in fact something rather than nothing.

A Universe that was actually flat couldn't even exist because it would be too unstable. It would shrivel up under its own weight with the slightest nudge of any local fluctuation.

I'm not sure what this says about TI - as the whole issue of synthetic a-prioris makes sense to me only as saying something about the fact that we find mathematical abstractions to be a way to grasp the symmetry principles reality must employ to organise itself.

So you can see why mathematical abstractions seem a special kind of deal - a way to transcend the epistemic and grasp the ontic. But also just as clearly, for humans the grasping of the relevant maths has been a work in progress.

We started by glimpsing the principles in the near at hand, classical scale of empirical experience. Euclid showed how flat spaces could be constructed from straight lines and stationary points. And from there we have reversed around to see existence from its other end - the view of spacetime (and energy even) as the product of top-down organising constraint.

Again, naively (in this more sophisticated ontic view) the Universe could have, so should have, every kind of spatiotemporal curvature. That means a theory of everything has to aim at discovering a mathematical-strength reason it is instead the case that the Universe is - almost - absolutely flat and classical over at least 140 orders of magnitude of empirically-observable scale.

That is a pile of crap of biblical proportions that I am not going to even try and clear up. — unenlightened

I would say that aletheist has it bang on so far. So it is a shame to see you capitulate this way given the thread has been pretty instructive.

Aletheist is showing how our claims about objective reality always wind up being founded on subjectively reasonable seeming beliefs. People get used to talking about knowing stuff - like what's not in their pockets, or what they know they put in a bag, or included in a pack of cards. But in the end, that confidence is rather manufactured - a play of signs that we ourselves create to replace the world (whatever it is as the thing-in-itself).

My own key point in support of aletheist was to draw out how we do in fact go about manufacturing the "objective" grounds of our own certainty using games of chance. We make a physical determination (in shaping a die or printing a pack of cards) that then underwrites our claims to a concept of "randomness", or "accident", or "probability" based on a principle of indifference.

So we have a model of probability that is derived from subjective actions. We construct a machinery that divides the world sharply, counterfactually, into the bit we care absolutely about (some device like a coin that can only land on one of two sides), and then the bit we claim absolute indifference about (the spin that lands unpredictably). And then we compare this construction against the behaviour of the world to talk about "how the world actually is".

What is going on should be transparent. But people seem to hate their metaphysical realism being undermined even slightly.

A universal statement is one in which no individual names occur. — tom

That is certainly right. But it illustrates the bigger issue of how logic relates to the world - which you, as a student of Popper, would understand.

Popper nicely brought out how the universal and the individual (or singular) are formally reciprocal bounds ... or a dichotomy. So really, when it comes down to it, each "exists" only in distinction to its "other". Thus both universality and individuality remain always relative concepts. They are never standalone absolutes. And from that, we can understand the need for a triadic epistemology where the universal and the individual are the bounds "to either side" of the actual thing in question - the entity we invoke by calling out its proper name.

So here is my raven called Raven. We have the three things of some actual "bird" I own (a substantial instance), the form of that being (the generality that constitutes "a raven"), and the matter of that being (the individual materiality or collection of properties that allow Raven to be classed as an actual instance of a universal idea).

The world is thus hylomorphic. The debate about universals and singulars, generals and particulars, only repeats the metaphysical causal debate over the nature of substance at the level of the logical modelling of real things.

Anyway, getting back to the point about universal statements not naming individuals, this is how generality would be achieved - by managing to put as much distance as possible between the universal and individual sense of a word like "raven". And yet by the same token, the distancing achieved is only ever relative to itself, never actually absolute. But people then treat the logic as if it has achieved this absolute (deductively valid) status. And the same people look back at the world and see that it is still (inductively) relative to a history of observations.

As Popper says, scientific laws take the "negative" form of proscriptions or constraints when they are expressed as universal statements. The law of energy conservation sounds like it asserts an absolute generality of nature, but in practice it has to be cashed out in terms of the actual observation or measurement of its "other" - the particular or existential claim that "there are no perpetual motion machines". So universality - in practice, in the real world - obtains only by a failure to find otherwise. The absence of not-A as a particular, is inductive confirmation of the presence of A as a generality.

This reciprocal deal - the reason why scientific certainty boils down to lack of falsification - is why universals do get pushed in the direction of a-temporal and a-spatial statements. It is not good enough to talk about my empty pockets, or whatever, "right here and now". To be as absolute as possible, a statement would have to show that it has pushed away to the extreme margins of observation absolutely everything that could be considered individual or particular in relation to that statement. So that shifts us decisively out of the realm of the actual and into the realm of the possible.

That again is why we have to end up with a triadic or hylomorphic logical system. We want to speak about, and reason about, substantial or actual being. And to do that, we find ourselves having to strike out in both directions "beyond" the actual. We have to head towards universally constraining necessity by simultaneously manufacturing its complementary "other" of completely individual or particularised material possibility.

Thus the (Peircean) triad of firstness, secondness and thirdness - as possibility, actuality and necessity. Or individuals, proper names and universals.

And as I say, the thread seems to revolve around the fact that people can see that the absolutism implied by the standard syntax of logical form does not match the relativity of the world being described.

But this is not paradoxical. It is simply evidence of what I keep saying - that the work of logicians, if they hope to talk about existence with true metaphysical generality, is not done. And you only have to go back to Aristotle and Peirce to see how it is triadicy, or hierarchical organisation, that must be the next step to breath relativity back into the dyadic syntactical forms that have been frozen into static absolutism by Frege and others.

I hate to say it Tom, but this is why the many worlds interpretation, computationalism, digital physics and a whole bunch of other bandwagons are metaphysically doomed. They are "illogical" in this sense. They are extrapolations of a logical absolutism where the Universe is going to have to be a case of logical relativism - the kind of triadically self-organising "universal reasonableness" that Peirce was on to, and which Popper was following up on.

If by "vagueness and propensity" you mean what Peirce called 1ns and 3ns, then yes, that is the working hypothesis that I have currently adopted and continue to explore. So by "ontic uncertainty," I assume you mean what he called "absolute chance." — aletheist

Yep and yep.

Again, it depends on exactly what you mean by that. As should be clear by now, I am opposed to using the term "probability" when what we really mean is (subjective) "confidence" or "degree of belief." — aletheist

This is the tricky bit. I think you may be arguing towards the subjective as being real, and indeed the ultimately real. And I can't deny that Peirceanism heads in the direction of embracing frank idealism or panpsychism of that kind.

But I instead go in the other direction which would attempt to deflate "subjectivity" and reduce it to a scientific notion of pansemiosis. So there is a divide between the objective and subjective, the ontic and epistemic, the observables and the observer. But it is not a dichotomy of matter and mind, but matter and sign. The human observer becomes thus simply a highly complex and particular example of an ontologically general semiotic relation. And there is nothing causally mystic about a sign relation.

So when I talk about nature exhibiting the principle of indifference, it is in that deflationary sense. Nature really is a kind of mind, but only in the sense that minds are a kind of sign relation.

And with quantum physics especially, science now supports that. Quantum theory is not probabilistic in the standard sense (ie: there are hidden variables, so any sense of surprise is simply due to our epistemic ignorance of the details). Instead it supports the more radical view that events like the decay of a particle actually are just propensities. The world is set up in a general way as a state of constraint. Then after that, tychic chance or pure spontaneity takes over - because the world just doesn't care when some atom actually does go pop.

So when it comes to human concepts of probability, as I say, there is this sly trick going on. We impose deterministic constraints on the world (notions about what constitutes a fair coin toss, a fair roulette wheel spin, a fair shuffle of the deck) so as to ensure maximum epistemic uncertainty about the outcomes.

And that kind of modelling of randomness is great for pragmatic purposes. It really helps in constructing the human realm to divide our reality so clearly and counterfactually into the determined and the random.

But now getting back to metaphysics, we have to see past the very instruments we have constructed to "see the world more clearly". And that leads to the radical holism of firstness, secondness, thirdness, as you say. However then there is still a difference between accepting the traditional metaphysical dualism of objective and subjective as talking about world and soul, or matter and mind, and instead making the further radical break of following through pan-semiotically and seeing the mind as a species of sign.

My objection was that probability is not the same thing as epistemic uncertainty. — aletheist

Out of curiosity, how do you deal with ontic uncertainty? Do you treat vagueness and propensity as elements of reality? Would you go as far as extending the principle of indifference to nature itself?

The problem here, as I see it, is that logic and probability as used in this thread depend on strict counterfactuality - the validity of the law of the excluded middle. So either side of the argument still presumes that it deals with a world that is crisp and particular, not vague and therefore also capable of being truly general.

In our mathematical models of probability - like coin flips, roulette wheels, packs of cards and other "games of chance" - the world is ontically determinate. Or at least we attempt to create mechanical situations that are as constrained, and therefore as determinate, as we care to make them. And in constraining nature to that degree, we then grant ourselves the privilege of maximising our own epistemic uncertainty. We can make it completely a matter of our own indifference that we don't know what the outcome of the next flip, spin, or shuffle, is going to be.

So there is a sly transfer from a real world with actual uncertainty (perhaps) to our ideal world where the world is made "ontically determinate" by an act of care, by deliberate design, and therefore we make it safe to assign all uncertainty to epistemic cause - that is, our own personal indifference about outcomes, our own lack of control about whether the next flip is heads or tails, the next swan black or not.

So there is a real danger then to take this rather artificially manufactured state of epistemic uncertainty - one modeled after games of chance - and use it to prove something about ontic reality. Just as it is a similar error to apply standard predicate logic to the real world without regard to the artificiality of the counterfactual determinism that is the LEM-style pivot of its modelling.

I have a black cat. But when it sits in the bright sun, it looks more chocolate brown. If I am reasoning about black cats, or black swans, or the ace of spades, I ignore such quibbles as a matter of indifference - for the sake of modelling. And yet back in the "real world", it could always be a (Gettier style) issue of whether some black swan is really black (their feathers too look chocolate brown in bright sun), or really a swan (maybe it is a plastic toy, or some visiting alien, that is the next example that crosses our path).

The OP, as I understand it, is concerned about how to model the world. So it talks about inductive evidence and the bolstering of states of belief (or epistemic certainty). And that in itself is best modeled, I would say, by Bayesian reasoning. So it is not really paradoxical that green apples might count as evidence in some inductively strengthening sense - even if at a huge remove. Instead it seems quite sensible that if As can be consistently B (apples keep turning up green), then by generalisation, it is more plausible that other As have their own consistent Bs (swans are black, fires are hot, cats have claws).

But predicate logic can't prove inductive beliefs, it can only sharpen their test by deductively isolating the putatively counterfactual. Swans either have blackness as a universal property ... or they don't. The problem then is that reality itself isn't so black and white. Instead - we might have good reason to believe - it is ontically vague and therefore only rises to the state of having certain well-formed propensities. Black swans are highly likely to be always black (given a certain shared history of genetic constraints). But also - as propensities express goals or purposes - at some level there will also emerge a degree of indifference. Blackness might be a matter of degree (some swans might be more chocolately than others - and evolution "doesn't care").

So green apples don't relate to black swans in any direct deductive logical fashion. Only in an inductive one. But deduction itself is founded on the un-reality of black and white counterfactuality. It is "pure model" that by design cuts the umbilical cord to the world it models (that being not a bug but a feature: the formal disconnect of the LEM is why it is so semiotically powerful a move).

And our standard models of probability - games of chance - do the same trick. They are ontically unreal in that they are manufactured situations where it is the absolute determinism (of a sign!: the suit of a card, the heads or tails of a coin, the number of a roulette slot) that underwrites a completely epistemic state of indifference (as to which sign we might next read off a device as "an unpredicted state of the world").

So we have an elaborate machinery of thought - one that by design excludes the very possibilities of ontic vagueness and ontic propensity. Both predicate logic and probability theory depend on it for their epistemic robustness. We can know the world to "be that way" because that is how we have constructed our formal acts of measurement that become all we know of the world. We reduce messy existence to some internalised play of marks - the numbers, or colours, or other values we read off the world as "facts".

But then in realising that is the semiotic game being played, this re-opens the question for metaphysics about what is really the case for ontic existence itself. If we could see past the very instruments of perception we have constructed for ourselves - these rational counterfactual modelling tricks - what would be the reality we then see?

Which is where we have to start constructing a better model - like an understanding of probability that is expanded by notions of ontic vagueness and ontic propensity (which of course is where Peirce comes in as a pioneer).

Yep. It's the "living in a bubble" effect - zeroing in on the particular human weakness of confirmation bias.

People will swallow your lies if they are crafted to match their expectations. The Enlightenment was all about fostering the social institutions of critical thinking. Now Facebook is ushering in the new Dark Ages. The world of checkable facts is turning into the echo chamber of your own opinion. :)

So yes. Targeted messaging is nothing new. And yet it makes a difference when the ability to target folk is increasing at an exponential rate.

It is a good sign that the story of Cambridge Analytics has been picked up and exposed in this fashion. I've just started getting the Vice channel and have been very impressed by its Gen Y journalism.

So long as freedom of speech is allowed to exist, at least there can be a reaction to match the action.

I'm not knocking your theory, at least not here. I'm genuinely interested in - if a little uneasy with - your approach. I'm still browsing the philosophical market and probably will be for some time yet. But don't you see the joke? — csalisbury

I see the joke. But also the issue of the aha! sensation was largely the subject of my first book. And Peirce came along about 20 years later for me.

So for me, it was the neuroscientific story that meant I could feel that shock of happy recognition on discovering Peirce's writings.

It is not the case that I have had to shoehorn all my facts to fit some Peircean template. The reality is that those facts came first and I continue to be surprised how well Peirce anticipated them.

Brain scans reveal that in fact humans need a team of such beings to execute all their various functions.

...a freedom inherent (immanent) within my material being? — Metaphysician Undercover

Who is this "my" you speak of? I only see a reductionist accumulation of cells.

You've lost me in your contradictory ways. Free will is a constraint? That's the problem with your position, you portray the creative results of free acts as the effects of constraints. Do you not see the inherent contradiction? Or are you a determinist denier of free will? — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would you think that is what I said?

As Rich says, we can certainly treat our own freewill as a constraint over our actions and their intended outcomes. That is why we credit our "selves" with top-down causal agency.

I mean you believe you exist, right? You're not just a collective fiction of the independently-acting cells of your body.

Finally! We agree on something. — Metaphysician Undercover

Probably not so much. It was the bit about you not seeing where I was agreeing.

Yep.

The most simple way to choose not to suffer the consequences, is to choose to follow the orders. — Metaphysician Undercover

So by choice ... one simply chooses not to have freewill and the constraints are thus rendered an abstract illusion that you never really took seriously. Gotcha.

Just like if you disobey the law, it is certain individuals who will seek to have you punished. It's not the law itself which acts to punish you, it those who enforce it. — Metaphysician Undercover

So these avatars of the global order - do they have the same kind of freewill. It is their choice to line you up against the wall and shoot you? The constraints are no more real for them either.

Gawd, I would feel really pissed off about that firing squad that just decided to make an example out of me for the hell of it, or whatever.

I don't see how this notion of the whole constraining the parts is a valid notion. — Metaphysician Undercover

True that.

lol, I don't mean this as a dig ( liked the post) but if you wanted to capture apo in two quotes, couldn't do better than this — csalisbury

What do you want? That I should invent some completely different metaphysical system for every post?

Logic is like water to fish. Because most folk only operate in the one register of thought, they can't even see that they rigidly apply just the one version of "the truth". All they know is reductionism and predicate logic, so they just get on applying it willy-nilly.

I can appreciate two complementary modes of thought - the reductionist and the holistic. And while "reasoning about the concrete particular" is admirably adapted to dealing with the near-at-hand, everyday, classical or mechanical conception of reality, reductionism is always going to be the wrong tool of thought as soon as we get anywhere near an issue with metaphysical generality.

So there is a reason I'm always saying the same basic thing. People trying to do metaphysics are always locked into the wrong habit of thought and I'm just constantly being helpful in pointing towards the exit.

Peirce of course most fully developed a metaphysical-strength brand of logic. It's not my problem that it remains a post-grad and not under-grad subject of study.

Therefore, Can we really be sure that the mind needs the world in order to exist? — GreyScorpio

After a few hour in a sensory deprivation tank, people can lose their minds and feel like they cease to exist. So there is good neurocognitive evidence to argue that the patterning the world provides is very much needed for our having an "inner world" of differentiated experience.

Of course, idealists may argue that the experiments that prove such a thing are further fictions of their minds. You can't in the end get anywhere with an ardent idealist anymore than you can with a naive realist. ;)

Any raw recruit can choose not to follow the instruction of the drill sergeant, and suffer the consequence. — Metaphysician Undercover

So they can't choose not to suffer the consequences?

The consequences are thus quite real as the corollary of their choices. It is all a bit like choosing to jump of a tree and fly, then having to accept the consequences that the law of gravity mandates. Nothing you can do will change anything about the consequences in either situation.

You reveal with your words what you really believe, that it is not the army which is doing the regulating, the army is the passive, artificial thing, which is being regulated by the intentions of human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. You just again show a problem with reading skills.

This contradicts constraints arising "immanently", which implies that the constraints come from within the individual part, as I described by referring to intention and free will. So you haven't explained how two apparently opposed processes, "constraints arise immanently", and "constraints of downward causation" are supposed to be the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another thing I have explained to you a thousand times, a thousand ways.

My position is based on the causal notion of synergy. So parts construct the whole, and the whole shapes the parts. There is a dichotomistic mutuality at the heart of all things systematic.

Things are happening in both directions. You only notice them happening in the one direction.

But essentially I'm thinking about the feeling you get when you know you "get" something but aren't sure how to articulate what exactly you "get". — darthbarracuda

That's Peircean abduction - the leap which can be recognised as already the coherent answer as it is still crisply forming.

And it can be explained neurologically in terms of symmetry breaking. Answers form in the mind as we organise a field of uncertainty. The brain starts to suppress some possibilities as "noise", focus attention on other possibilities as "signal". If it is working - the symmetry does want to break itself in that direction - then rapid feedback drives both kinds of action. What counts as noise, and thus what counts as signal, become ever more strongly felt to us as we "tune into" the best inference to an explanation.

This is important to the epistemology of reasoning of course because it shows how induction does ground rational insight. We are searching for a deductive truth. But we can only get there on the back of a snowballing process of inductive confirmation. Each step, as noise and signal start to be divided in the brain, has to feed back either positively or negatively as a "test" for the germinating concept. As an attempt at symmetry breaking, it either finds that it works and so runs to self-justifying completion, or it stalls and dies, quickly forgotten.

Gestalt psychology of course celebrated this as the aha! experience. Or perceptual pop-out. So it applies just as much to our phenomenal impressions of the world as our rationalistic conceptions.

It is pretty much definitional of why brains (in their creative organicism) are not like computers (in their rigid mechanicalism).

What am I missing? It seems pretty simple. — Michael

Well, for a start you made a huge swerve and avoided my actual question about unicorn dung. Let's see how you would run the actual argument I posed to you.

We can see how your own carefully chosen examples - hinging on socially accepted fictions like legalised monogamy and legalised citizenship - are just a dodge to avoid dealing with any physicalist ontic commitments.

So if you are not going to try harder here, what's the point?

I don't know if they understand the mental to be self-organising and closed for causation. But that's not relevant to my question. — Michael

Of course it is bloody relevant. And who is this mysterious "they"? Why are you being so shifty here?

Again, given that you define the physical as being self-organising and closed for causation, it must then follow that you understand the dualist's claim "the mind isn't physical" to be the claim "the mind isn't self-organising and closed for causation". — Michael

I've already explained why it doesn't have to follow in just the same why that it makes no real difference if unicorns shit or don't shit.

Do you take a firm position on unicorn dung? Perhaps you can run me through the irrefutable train of logic that demands that imaginary shitting is something imaginary beasts must do.

I just wanted you to clarify this. You don't seem to have given me an answer. — Michael

You just didn't like the very reasonable answer I have given.

So at the moment you haven't explained how your physicalism differs from their dualism. — Michael

As I said, I can't agree or disagree with the "not even wrong". It doesn't even achieve the threshold of intelligibility.

But if you want to now flesh out the views of this mysterious "they" who can offer a counterfactual account of how their notion of the mental is "self-organising and closed for causation", then I'm all ears. What do "they" mean exactly when they say that (if it is ever in fact actually said).