I do not see how the real existence of "the army" could be understood as anything more than individuals acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. I get you don't see it and likely never will.

There are individuals who chose to act together toward a common goal, and we goal this an army. — Metaphysician Undercover

So there are freely chosing individuals and then ... somehow ... the separate thing of a common goal.

Let's put aside your fanciful notion that drill sergeants offer raw recruits a lot of free choice during boot camp training. We call an army an army (and not for instance a rabble or a rout) because it really is being regulated by some actual state of form and purpose.

And again, my account explains why soldiers exist individually such that they can exhibit collective behaviour. It explains the atomism involved in terms of global limitations on personal freedoms, such that the individual also becomes the interchangeable.

So what you think is so critically important is exactly what I explain for you in causal terms.

Then we seek the internal source of this causation rather than looking for some phantom external top-down causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what I said in the end, eh?

Therefore the two views are not necessarily in competition. — Michael

Well they are. One is coherent, and the other incoherent (according to the position I have taken on physicalist explanation).

Again, my position is distinctive in recognising (nay, necessitating) vagueness as a further category of existence or being. And so dualism - in simply failing to talk about being in properly counterfactual terms - can be classed with the explanations that are merely vague, or "not even wrong".

So my employment of counter-factuality cannot be used against me in the way you appear to be attempting. Again, it is moot whether your imagined unicorn of a position either shits or doesn't shit as a necessary further corollary of its non-existence.

Your disagreement, then, would seem to be simply a terminological dispute. Whereas you use the term "physical" to refer to everything that is self-organising and closed for causation, the dualist uses the term "physical" to refer to just some of the things that are self-organising and closed for causation, with "mental" referring to the rest and something like "real" referring to both. — Michael

Well, in fact consistency demands that in the end I don't really believe in "mind" or "mental" as an ontically foundational category.

As I have said often enough, my physicalism is semiotic. So the deep and foundational distinction would be that between matter and sign, not matter and mind. "Consciousness" is just a word that people bandy about. A metaphysician is going to get a lot further talking in concretely counterfactual terms about habits of interpretance rather than states of experience.

I'll say it again. The inability to think of the "mind", or the "mental", except as another dualistic kind of stuff - a witnessing soul, a phenomenal display, a state of experience, a substantial property - is where philosophy so regularly goes off the rails.

It is just reductionist materialism doubling down, reducing formal and final cause to more of the same old materially-effective "stuff".

In practice.

I don't know what you mean by this question. How would you make sense of the causal connection between one physical thing and another? — Michael

I'm losing interest if you are going to start pretending there is no causal issue regarding mind~matter dualism.

If you define the physical as "self-organising and closed for causation" then you must understand the claim "the mind isn't physical" to mean "the mind isn't both self-organising and closed for causation". I'm just asking you to confirm that this is what you understand the dualist to be saying. — Michael

Again, the incoherence of dualism starts before we even get to such niceties in my view. So I'm struggling to see the relevance of the question. It is like asking whether the non-existent unicorn either shits or doesn't shit.

The claim "the mind isn't physical" is not a claim that holds up under my definition of physicalism. So it becomes moot to worry about whether or not dualism then has self-organisation or causal closure as well-formed properties of its position.

So yes. My approach demands that there be always a self-organising and causally closed dichotomy at the heart of things. But by definition, that is an internalist perspective that stands in opposition - an actual rejection - of any externalism.

So dualism is simply moot - so ill-formed as to not even be dialectically opposed in my view (even if there is a religiously-inspired tradition in philosophy that takes the dichotomy of mind and the physical with all apparent seriousness).

And thus it appears does physicalism. It welcomes light, quanta, emotions, qualia, consciousness, all types of forces including dark forces and dark matter under its umbrella. If we sense it, if we feel it, if it is conjectured, if it is needed for mathematical equations, if it is anything other than God or angels it is welcome. — Rich

I think you skipped over the crucial bit - if it can be measured. So in the end, physicalism reduces to pragmatism.

Quit being an idiot. You said reductionism vs holism lacked rigorous definition. I supplied my rigorous definition. You started bleating in irrelevant fashion. I can't give a fuck about how you might self-identify until you can state it in a fashion that might be relevant to the discussion.

This proposed dichotomy between the mind and the world is a false one. Rather the dichotomy is between the mind and the physical, with both making up the world. — Michael

So again, what is the causal connection?

I myself prefer the dichotomy of mind and world as its speaks to the semiotic modelling relation that is our fullest causal account of physicality.

Your switching it to a dichotomy of mind and the physical suggests you are stuck in the mode of thinking of Being in terms of two imcompatible kinds of "stuff" or substance.

Also, what counts as a physicalist fashion? Presumably a fashion that is both self-organising and closed for causality? Well, that's the question I asked of you. Is the dualist claiming that the mental is either not self-organising or not closed for causailty? — Michael

I confess that I can't make substance dualism a coherent metaphysical position for you. And if you can't manage it on your own, then I suggest you simply abandon it as a bad job.

So what are you calling yourself and what is its rigorous definition?

Can this dualist account for the causal basis of the apparent interaction between mind and world in physicalist fashion?

I'm sure you will launch into an explanation at any minute. X-)

Yep. I am defining physicalism as opposed to the transcendental/supernatural. So I am claiming immanence and naturalism.

How do those terms then cash out?

Well immanence in the end has to be a claim about a self-organising or bootstrapping existence. And that riddle has to be solved through its own dichotomy - the developmental concept of the vague vs the crisp.

And naturalism is a claim about existence being a system closed for causality. So again, it is about self-organisation and bootstrapping. But also it stresses the naturalness of hierarchical organisation as the crisply developed outcome. So the dichotomy that gets recognised is that of complexity vs simplicity, or negentropy vs entropy.

So physicalism has to stand against something. And in being a totalising claim, it has to stand against the brokenness of any actual dualism.

Yet it can't achieve that monadistically - through actual reductionism to material being. Instead it must incorporate all valid dichotomies within itself. So physicalism - as holism - winds up being irreducibly triadic (triadicism itself having these two "internal" complementary moves of vague beginnings vs hierarchically organised outcomes).

Great. So you are talking about people like yourself who would call themselves something, but then who aren't able to define why they would call themselves that something.

Sounds legit.

But physicalists can be both reductionist and holist. I would say I am resolutely physicalist in rejecting any transcendental or supernatural causes of Being. Yet I treat telos and mathematical form as proper physical causes of being.

And then I go one further in being a semiotic physicalist. So it is important to Being that sign or symbol also really exists by virtue of the fact that it (pretty much) escapes or transcends its own physicality to become a source of regulation over the physical.

Even within its own house, the very fact of "strong physicality" conjures up its own "immaterial" other - even if all codes must be a system of physical marks,

So what you describe is physicalism as reductionism or materialism. You are taking the position of a physicalism that wants to reject all the "otherness" that seems dualistically to betray a desire for monadic oneness.

So every time a metaphysical dichotomy arises, one of the complementary terms must be rejected and cast into the wilderness.

Your kind of physicalism wants to be atomistic, local, mechanistic, deterministic, and therefore not holistic, non-local, organic, probabilistic.

And given quantum theory is what we have discovered to lie at the end of the trail of our atomistic inquiries, don't you think your definition of physicalism ought to take that into better account? The material reductionist project ran right off the road about a century ago now.

So you said holism vs reductionism doesn't necessarily have a rigorous definition.

I supplied my rigorous definition (one that I have to say is commonplace among the systems scientists and hierarchy theorists I know).

You continue to reply with fatuous irrelevancies. And there we have it. :)

Thanks for illustrating my point about how a reductionist would want to conceive the causal story.

Mine would be story about cranes rather than sky hooks because I am saying that the constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

So reductionists have changed the definition of reductionism since Bacon so famously defined it?

Perhaps you can explain what has changed?

Why would I be under the impression that I was describing some common definition rather than providing the rigorous one?

Again, if you have a complaint about my definition, then back it up. As usual, your complaint amounts to "this is all news to me".

But I guess from your comments that you haven't even caught up with Bacon's definition of reductionism in the New Organon. (And who do you think wrote the old Organon?)

If you have a quarrel with my rigorous definition, take it up with my rigorous definition.

Maybe you meet all your "holists" down at the yoga retreat. But your arguments from personal incredulity are not actually any kind of argument you realise.

Most people haven't looked into the issue rigorously so they would share your lack of rigorous insight.

...reductionism versus holism isn't necessarily defined that rigorously. — Terrapin Station

Reductionism aims to reduce all causality to material and efficient cause - ie: bottom-up constructive cause. The story of substantial parts in contingent combination.

Holism reduces causality to Aristotle's four causes. So formal and final cause are taking to be (physically) real as well. And together they are the downwardly acting constraints. So a difference in kind is recognised (as cause via constraint is fundamentally difference from cause via construction).

Advanced holism shows how upwardly acting material freedoms and downwardly acting formal constraints are then each other cause, so closing the circle. Each is the emergent product of the other.

Constructive cause is made possible by a restriction on local material degrees of freedom (parts gain particular properties because they are prevented from trying to do "everything").

Global constraints are then the states of general coherent organisation that collections of these parts must consequently exhibit, or perpetually re-construct.

I'm asking in what sense strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism are not forms of dualism, as laid out in the OP. — Marchesk

They certainly all suffer the same issue of severing causality and so creating disconnected realms. But strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism would still presume that mind arises from material systems "somehow" (a material system is all that is needed for the magic to happen) while dualism usually would be taken to be a claim about the need for a proper "other" to the material ... ie: the spiritual, the divine, etc.

So it boils down to whether mind is being considered as a property of material organisation, or a property of an immaterial substance. And both break down in the same way because they do reductively think about nature only in terms of "substances with properties".

That is, they both fail when it comes to explaining the causes of causes. They both in the end point only to the existence of "brute unexplained properties".

You offered to make sense of your post.

Might be a reach, but sure, give it a go.

To put it another way, the physical state of the universe does not logically determine strongly emergent or non-reductive properties. They could not in principle be deduced by all the rules and facts of the entire state of the universe before they came into existence. — Marchesk

This is the advantage of a pansemiotic physicalism.

The meaning of symbols cannot be read off the physics of marks. The realm of sign or code is opaque from the brute physicalist point of view.

And yet physicalism predicts the constraints to which the freedom of any naturally arising code system will respond. Any symbolic form of existence will have to have the general purpose of furthering the goal of the second law of thermodynamics.

So physicalism predicts the existence of symbols - the zeroed dimensionality of a code being a physical freedom that can't be constrained (because how can you restrict dimensionality to less than nothing?).

And then physicalism predicts what will happen as a result of the evolution of symbolic complexity. Global entropy will be significantly increased.

By say that the particular is a generality you have denied that there is a dichotomy between the particular and the general. — Metaphysician Undercover

Idiotic. THAT particular is A particular, but THE particular is A generality. It's basic grammar - the dichtotomy of the definite and indefinite article.

Dissolved? Seriously, WTF?

Strewth. What's so difficult about seeing that "general" and "particular" are both names for generalities?

One, or both of us, is not making the required effort to understand the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

Give me strength...

A dichotomy opposes generality against generality. So it is not about the other thing which is the hierarchical division between the general and the particular, or the universal and the singular.

So when it comes to viewpoints, the dichotomous contrast here would be between the notions of the one and the many, or the fixed and the variable.

The Newtonian view presumes one fixed spatiotemporal backdrop. The Relativistic view presumes as many variable backdrops as you like (because now, under relativity, local mass is what breaks the symmetry and fixes "some point of view").

. The abstracted ideas "space" and "time", exist within the human minds. This is what you continually neglect, and overlook in your semiotic descriptions, the necessity for a human mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. So why do I/semiosis call it a "sign"? In what way is that ignoring observers rather than invoking them?

No, there is no time operator in quantum mechanics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Really? Or do you just mean that it doesn't completely work out because in the end, Newtonian continuous time is something QM has to assume as its backdrop. So the fact that there is indeed - empirically - an uncertainty relation is further evidence against the correctness of the Newtonian conception.

So what kind of an ontology is that then, if you have no approach to the material aspect of existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

How is a model of vagueness as unbounded action not an approach? I'm just not over-claiming about what in the end explanation might achieve.

Until you recognize the weakness of this attitude, you will never recognize how often it is that "everyone" is wrong. See, the vast majority are followers, the leaders are few and far between. — Metaphysician Undercover

Uh, yeah. Nah. You've given an accurate description of the typical crank.

The principle called "relativity of simultaneity" demonstrates this very well, the importance of the point of view. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who calls this an example of a metaphysical dichotomy apart from you?

The observer is making a judgement about a pair of events (so that's three things already). And the observer could now have "any" momentum - which is a new lack of constraint on "material content" that leads to the viewpoint being a "relative" variable.

So yes. You are showing you really, really, don't get it.

Well, if we assume that there is consistency in the amount of time that it takes for the repetition to occur, then the "amount of time" is something other than the repetition itself. Therefore time is something other than the repeated change, it is derived from it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Amazing, clocks and rulers measure space and time and yet only take up some interval of space or time. One would almost think that signs of things were not the things themselves. What inspired insight.

Actually you very distinctly said that spacetime is God's way of causing the separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was very distinctly being facetious. Its an old joke in physics.

If the temporal separation is only determinable by us through the means of a spatial separation, how does this produce the logical conclusion that a temporal separation is necessarily a spatial separation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Who said it was a spatial separation. Isn't it an energetic one? Doesnt quantum physics take time and energy as the two complementary operators of an uncertainty relation for that reason? Doesn't time stop for a body travelling at light speed while its energy density goes reciprocally to infinity?

Isn't this exactly what you do, "duck" into the symmetries necessitated by the general theory of relativity? — Metaphysician Undercover

But as I say, I don't pretend that this explains the material side of the deal, only the ontic structure of reality. Of course suitably advanced physics might even explain matter by maths. But everyone who does even string theory knows the matter fields still have to be inserted into the compactified dimensions by hand. They don't fall out of the maths as yet.

.

Any random designation of "it is not this.." could be wrong if we have not first made a designation of what it is. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again this is just you not getting the logic of a dichotomy - what if means to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

It was neuroscience/philosophy of mind that led me to biosemiosis as the best ontic model. So it is the empirical support that convinces me.

It explains things like the very fact that our models of the world are not driven by the kind of philosophical completeness that you hold up as the only criteria. Modelling is Pragmatic.

And so right there again is the counterfactuality. You may not have framed your opinions in that fashion, but I have.

It could be the case that brains evolved to faithfully re-present the noumenal. So phenomenology becomes some sort of knowledge failure.

Or it could be the case that phenomenonolgy - the world reduced to bare signs - is precisely the way that minds ought to work. That is, semiotically.

Given two sharply contrasting paradigms, my approach can positively compare itself to others - even the shrill hermeticism of the circle SX is won't to form wiith himself. :)

So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong — csalisbury

I missed this. You're wrong because the Peircean system is a hypothesis set up counterfactually. If it fails to accord with nature, then nature will make that plain.

So for instance a prediction of Peircean metaphysics is that the universe and its laws evolve. Peirce actually suggested experiments to measure the curvature of space as Euclidean flatness shouldn't be taken Platonically for granted. And his whole philosophy - based on a metaphysics of propensities - foreshadowed the current quantum probabilistic conception of nature.

So sure, the metaphysical model has pleasing completeness in comparison to other schemes. It is much more mathematically definite in what it claims. And by the same token, that makes it empirically testable. It could be wrong - where the majority of metaphysics ought to be dismissed as the "not even wrong".

Poor SX. Not waving but drowning.

When we count a repetitive change, to provide us with a notion on passed time, there is an assumption that each repetition takes the same amount of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. And....? (I mean if that's how we design a clock, then what else do we expect?)

To represent the cause of separation as "spacetime" is what I affirm is a mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I said that the requirement for separation is the cause of spacetime.

So separation must be first, then (temporal) order, then (spatial) relation. Notice that the primary separation is therefore not a spatial separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

We've been through this a thousand times. Separation does come first. Time and space (or change vs stasis) is then what separation looks like.

You are just doing the very thing you complain of in reducing your notion of "separation" to "not being spatial separation". Your attempted apophatic definition of temporal separation in terms of not being "a spatial separation" ends up resting on a spatialised notion of separation as its primary distinction.

That is why I prefer to make vagueness primary. In immanent fashion, it avoids that error of metaphysical reasoning.

The Peircean or systems view is that possible difference becomes actual difference as it is regularised by constraining habit. The further category of repetition makes sense once there is sufficient similiarity (in terms of the freedoms that have been suppressed) to talk of the the freedoms that concretely remain in play. What incompossibility weeds out becomes the definite variety that compossibility enforces.

And (tricky ain't it?) this compossible variety is itself dualised into the purposeful and the accidental. There are the acts that are desired by telos - even if it is the dilutest possible form of constraint in the being the second law's desire to entropify. And then there is - by mutual definition - all the other compossibilities that are beneath the notice of any such active law or constraint. I can buy a blue car or a red car. It makes no real difference to anything really.

Anyway, can we make any sense of the Deleuzean project to reduce existence to bare difference? Clearly - as a self-proclaimed inversion of Plato - it as least foregrounds the "other" to constraining sameness. And so it is going to sound Peircean in at least also taking difference or development as fundamental.

SX is hopeless at explaining the actual machinery that might link virtual differencing (this frozen sounding multiplicity) to actual "almost repeating" difference. It is dangerous for him to even to attempt an explanation of course as the whole metaphysic project will immediately unravel. He will start to have to talk about the dichotomous othering that is used to achieve a reductionist monism. And once you start talking openly about dichotomies, well that leads to the inevitable triadicity of a hierarchically organised relation. Holism has arrived and your dreams of monistic finality have just gone up in smoke.

So how do others handle this. I'll look at Todd May's "Gilles Deleuze, Difference, and Science" - www3.nd.edu/~hps/May=Deleuze.doc

We start - as is PoMo convention - with wisdom as paradox. We know we are really being deep when our very words contradict themselves.

...seeking to understand what Deleuze means when he says that “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.”

Then fair enough, the issue is to get away from tales of transcendent perfect order to talk about the "imperfect" immanent order that can arise via self-differentiation (and self-integration of course). For Deleuze, this is achieved in Spinozian univocity (noting Peirce was also a big fan of Duns Scotus for the same reason).

What is the significance of embracing the concept of a single substance and thus the univocity of Being? It lies in the abandonment of transcendence. Here we might recall Nietzsche’s critique of transcendence, a critique with which Deleuze is in sympathy. The effect of positing any form of transcendence (of which the transcendence of the Judeo-Christian God would be the prime example) is to set up a tribunal, a judge that is not of this world but that nevertheless evaluates it and always finds it wanting. The transcendent is always the more nearly perfect (or the Perfect itself). It is always pictured as higher, above this world. It is the ideal toward which this world must strive through self-denial but which, because of some inherent flaw—be it the existence of the flesh or the finiteness of its creatures—it can never fully achieve.

Now note two bum notes in this reading of univocity. Already we are lapsing back into substance talk - the ontology of form materially actualised. And we are setting up an illegitimate grounds for rejecting the eternal "other".

Dichotomies are being read as always having to generate a good guy and a bad guy as thesis and antithesis. But it is a bad dichotomy that does that rather than producing two generalities that are of equal (because necessarily complementary) status. Instead of focusing on what makes a good dichotomy (as I do), this is clearing the ground to reject dichotomies in toto.

Then the sensible question...

With the embrace of the univocity of Being, however, two questions arise. First, how is it that the perceived world exists as a manifold of differences in continuous evolution when there is only a single substance that comprises them? How can the univocity of Being be reconciled with the manifoldness of existence? This, of course, is the traditional philosophical question of the One and the Many. The second question, bound to the first one, is,What is the relation between the single substance and the manifold of existence? As Heidegger might put the question, what is the relation between Being and beings?

Yes indeedy. Where is the mechanism that connects? (In Peirceanism, it is semiosis.)

And here the beginnings of a bad answer.

The first question presents no insurmountable conceptual barrier if we jettison the idea that a single substance implies some kind of identity. For Deleuze, the single substance of Spinoza must be conceived not in terms of identity but in terms of difference. Substance, Being in its univocity, is difference itself. “Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.” Difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing. If substance in some sense contains or comprises the differences that manifest themselves in the world, then there is no difficulty reconciling the One and the Many. The One is many; it is difference, difference itself, or, in the later term used in the collaborative works with Guattari, it is multiplicity.

So now we are talking from the point of view of actuality - already formed materiality, or substance.

Yes, it does make sense in the usual Aristotelean fashion in that substance is actuality with attributes and properties. A dog has the characteristics of its species. It has that family resemblance than means it is quite liable to chew your shoes, piss on your fencepost, slobber on your carpet.

But this is metaphyics and the question is how does substantial being itself become? How does it develop as informed or constrained materiality? And therefore, how do we account for the sameness that is form, the difference which is material haecceity?

Peirceanism explains them by putting them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Materiality is brute firstness or potential. Form is the regularity imposed by the seiving necessity of compossibility. Each is placed at sufficient distance from the other for them to have a formally inverse or reciprocal relation. (Remember, form = 1/material, and material = 1/form.)

Anyway, this indicates why SX wants to treat the virtual as itself a species of substance. Which is also then why he cannot in fact explain anything in terms of some actual developmental relation. Difference becomes just a property of a higher level notion of substantial being. Repetition is as repetition does.

Luckily May is alert to these issue. An urgent paradox arises....

For if Being is difference, doesn’t it collapse into beings themselves? If Being is as manifold as the beings that it comprises, doesn’t Being just reduce itself to nothing more than the manifoldness of our particular world?

The day is saved by capitalisation - or dichotomisation that conceals its "othering" by using the same term, just discretely denoting generality by using a big B (while continuing blithely to undermine generality's ontic connection to formal cause by treating Being as already formed Univocal Substance!).

Deleuze denies this reduction, claiming instead that the kind of difference associated with substance or Being is distinct (different) from the kind of differences associated with beings.

Then follows a Bergsonian analysis of time vs space which we can skip as I sort of agree. Let's get on to where there is some attempt to account for an interaction between virtuality of differencing and actual substantial differences. ;)

The relation between the virtual and the actual is, however, very different from that between the possible and the real. As Deleuze uses these terms, the real is the mirror of the possible; it has the same structure as the possible, with the sole but ontologically crucial exception that it is real and not merely possible. So there are two ontological realms, a realm of the possible and a realm of the real. By contrast, the virtual does not lack the reality; it is part of the real. There is only one reality, comprising aspects that are at once virtual and actual. The virtual actualizes itself in order to become actual, but in actualizing itself it does not gain in any reality it had lacked before, nor does it stand outside or behind the actuality that is actualized. It is not part of the actual, but it remains real within the actual.

OK. So does this work, anyone?

The virtual contains the structure that produces difference. Then material difference is what gets actualised.

So far, so Platonic.

But then the virtual is a substance. It "actualises itself". So not only is the virtual the general form or the general structure of difference-generation, it seems to possess its own material means too.

Where I would have a more traditional conception of the virtual as a principle of formal necessity - expressing the telos of the least action principle in interaction with the material restriction that is the complementary principle of generalised compossibility - Deleuze wants simply a tale of a "ground difference" that substantially exists as a generating mechanism (a hopper complete with the materiality to fulfil its desires) and only needs to be turned on so that it starts spitting out actual instances bearing a family resemblance to the originating seed (or - snort - rhizome).

So we see why SX strains so hard to find a generating seed difference in calculus. Materiality is the obvious issue for this Deleuzean scheme (as it is for all metaphysical schemes I agree - even Peirceanism). If you duck into maths - the science of patterns, the conjuring with pure immaterial forms - then you can simply sideline the very issue that your metaphysics must address. You can appear to be speaking about substantial actuality when really - in shifting into the register of the model - you most definitely ain't.

(How does Peirceanism answer the foundational question of materiality or primal action - the question of "why anything?". Well as I say, it doesn't in the final analysis. But it does make it explicit that it is a different kind of question and does not try to subsume in into a substance ontology like SX/Deleuze. Instead, it set it out apophatically - it approaches it via a model of vagueness or firstness.)

OK, so having emphasised some differences, let's look for some reconciliations....

In his discussion of Spinoza, Deleuze utilizes the term “expression” to indicate the relationship between the virtual (substance) and the actual (attributes and modes). In contrast to medieval creationist or emanative theories of causality, in which God is said to cause the beings of this world either by explicit authorship or by emanation, Spinoza holds an expressive view of causality, in which that which is expressed is not ontologically distinct from its expression. Attributes and modes may explicate, involve, and complicate substance, but they do not emerge from it on a distinct ontological plane.

Again, this is utterly wrong ( :) ) from a fully holistic point of view - the synchronic view of a development of regularity out of vagueness. But it is - in Aristotelean hylomorphic fashion - quite reasonable once understood diachronically as a slice across temporal development (so as a slice not across a moment in time, as such, but across the transition from vague to crisp "coming into being").

Once substantial being arises, it can of course host further development in the usual hierarchically complex fashion. Physics - in closing off one set of possibilities or differences, as it does with describing some universal telos like entropification - then itself creates the further possibility of its own counter-action. In the case of life and mind - or even just dissipative structure in general - that reaction is of course negentropy as a counter-telos.

But anyway, this hierarchical logic holds as a generality. It is precisely the system's take of constraints and the further freedoms they can't help but create. In - via compossibility - imposing a limit on free variety, that produces the now far more definitely defined freedoms which can start to do their next level of interacting and habit formation.

So yes. Examine reality at any particular level (look at it either side of some "singularity" or symmetry breaking critical point) and you will find that substantial being is "intrinsically" dual. An object is both a species of a genus (it has attributes due to a context), and it itself possesses further properties or freedoms of actions (as that is why we would indeed distinguish it as a concrete object - it has been transformed into the context for new happenings, or novelties.)

But what do you do when faced with the need to make substantial Being univocally fundamental still....

First, the virtual is not a mirror of the actual, as the real is of the possible. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze marks this by saying: “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualization of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.”

...you quietly change the spelling of the word just a little bit to hide how big an explanatory gap you want your fanboys to vault.

A proper dichotomy is one that openly proclaims the absoluteness of its reciprocal transformations.

If you invert the continuous, you bloodly well get the discrete. You don't just get the discontinuous, let alone the continious, or some other rat-swallowing circumlocution. You get an upfront assertion of a proper categorical difference.

In contrast to the possible/real distinction, the virtual/actual distinction involves three kinds of difference. First, there is the difference in itself of the virtual; second, there are the specific differences of the actualization of the virtual; finally, there is the difference between virtual and actual difference, between differentiation and differenciation.

Oh hold up! Not triadicism to the rescue?

Does this sound like 1) vague difference - the raw possibility, 2) reactive difference - actual particulars now having actual reactions, and 3) habitual difference - the stably broken asymmetry of a hierarchically developed organisation between globalised or general differencing vs localised or particular differences to you?

Well yes indeedy. Got there backwards, but that is now where this line of thought has arrived.

I think we can leave it there for the moment. SX - being the tough samurai kid he is - is probably doing the honorable thing of self-evisceration right about now.

But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well we can count the changes, can't we? Or is "sequence" a notion alien to you?

And the reason we can count changes is because they are locked into as history. When changes stops (when it is equilibrated and looks to change no more) then we can count the change as "being over" and "part of history, not part of the future".

A metre is not the same as a thing which is a metre long. — Metaphysician Undercover

Merde! The French bureau of standards have a problem with that strip of metal they've got locked up in temperature controlled vault then.

It is the fact that the vast masses of humanity accept this relation as ontologically sound, without referencing ontologically sound principles, which horrifies me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. MU right. Humanity wrong. Sounds legit.

But you don't seem to get that spacetime relativity is God's way of preventing everything happening all at once. It creates the separation between events that is ontically essential for there to be anything interesting in the form of a "world". If forces acted instantaneously and without dilution across any span of time and distance, where would we all be, hey?

So if you want to talk about sound principles, begin with the fact that physical action needs to have an interesting structure. Things must divide and connect, differentiate and integrate. There must be separation, but only relatively speaking.

Plato was a dualist. Deleuze wanted to collapse his dialectical distinctions to be a univocal monist. Peirce was a triadicist who argued instead for an irreducibly complex or hierarchical relation as the basis of being.

So for Peirce, actuality is a process, an eternal coming-to-be. It can be talked about as being monistically "one relation". And it also "starts" with a monism in the grounding notion of Firstness, or Vagueness. But through a principle of incompossibilty - not everything that might want to be, can be, because it clashes and contradicts in a way that suppresses its actualisation - it describes how regulation or constraint emerges to organise a world bound by habits.

So similarity or generality emerges to organise difference itself. Vagueness is not nothingness, but chaotic everythingness - unbounded fluctuation without structure. In Deleuzean fashion (it seems), vagueness is multiplicity - but more than multiplicity as it includes even the actions that coming-to-be must suppress (through incompossibility).

Vagueness is thus an ultimate kind of difference - the difference of an infinity of disconnected impulses that sum to nothing.

And then from that chaos you have developing the regularity of actuality. The raw energy falls into dissipative patterns as the wildness of possibility falls away and the sum over possibility - the least action path - emerges. Difference changes character so that now it is regulated and well behaved - repetitive in the way that properties and attributes are the developed habits of concrete beings. Development ends up producing a classical world of atomistic material objects at play within a blank void - the spacetime backdrop that is all those other now well-suppressed fluctuations or opportunities for action.

So that is the triad. Vagueness is every possible difference (and thus a state of utter indifference and lack of constraint). But as soon as differences start to react against each other (the Secondness that follows Firstness), you get a collective or emergent effect. Some differences cancel each other away, other differences reinforce each other by feedback. (This is all standard non-linear physics or chaos theory.) And so in short time you have the beginnings of self-organising global regularity or generality.

As with the water draining out of your bath, a vortex begins as a slight suggestion of a symmetry breaking. In the beginning, the twist could be to the left of the right. Both are going to be happening - it doesn't make any difference which way the symmetry breaks. But the breaking of the symmetry - spin left or spin right - then makes a big actual difference. It quickly locks itself in, completely suppressing its "other" as an accidental fact of history.

In Peircean terms, the world (or the draining bathwater) is now ruled by the Thirdness of persistent habit. But Thirdness itself is a monism in that it incorporates Secondness and Firstness. We are talking about the wholeness of a relation. So just because there is one symmetry breaking that gets things started doesn't mean that the new state (this singularity, as SX terms it after the notion of a phase transition) can't break again.

Vague potential will still remain within the system. Reaction could set in. A higher level of organisation could break out that regularises this grounding action, gives it shape, turns it into a repetitively generated action that constructs a more complex state of habit or law.

Biophysics shows how life and mind arise as that kind of further semiosis. The "vortexes" of chemico-physical gradients can be harnessed and turned into the complex hierarchies that are bodies with cells and organs.

Anyway, it is foolish to talk of doing away with similarity to found metaphysics on "pure difference". Instead we must recover difference from difference by way of similarity. Vague difference (that is of course not even a difference, being a differencing lacking any relations) must be turned into crisp difference by a general relation (a habit of constraint, a principle of least action) that sorts difference into its various forms of dichotomous actuality. So for instance, we can speak with definiteness of differences that are purposeful versus those that are accidental.

So Deleuze gets some things right. If we are going to make something fundamental, it has got to be process, change or development. Plato needs to be inverted to make sense.

But then just to invert is only half the story. It is the invertibility of all things that is the foundational relation. So really, Being is still founded on stasis. It is just that it is equally founded in flux. While your metaphysics has to explicitly include an axis of development (as in the vague~crisp), it also has to have within itself a matching axis of "equilibrium balance" (as in the stable local~global, or part~whole, hierarchical structure that Thirdness describes).

So Deleuze makes the mistake of simply "othering" to arrive at a reductionist monism. And the error can be seen in that he ends up - like Plato - lacking the resources to account for how differencing actually happens. Plato could only say rather weakly that matter ends up "participating" in the ideal forms to achieve an imperfect repetition of similarity. Deleuze - as channeled by SX - is burbling something about virtuality as the (Platonic sounding) multiplicity which generates difference as its eternally different actuality.

The Peircean view places differencing - or dichotomisation, or the secondness of reaction - in the middle of a hierarchical sandwich. It is the individuated or particularised actuality that arises from vagueness - possibility in its rawest sense - in interaction with generality or habit, the emergent order which provides the other "eternal" thing of a system of constraints or "transcendent" necessitation.

But emerging is an activity which necessarily requires time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or instead, emergence IS time, time being what we call a sequence of change or development.

Apo wants time to emerge from space-time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I would want a model of thermal or thick time that is consistent with the theory of relativity. And spacetime really is a thing in physics, despite your horror of all metaphysics that is post Newtonian.

And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; — StreetlightX

Biggest laugh of the day. But whatever keeps your spirits up sunshine. :)