... However, If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular... — StreetlightX

Yep. So precisely as I say. Intelligibility is claimed on the basis of establishing a dichotomy.

It puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general — StreetlightX

I forgot though that Pomo likes to a lot of denouncing as well as paradoxing and its other messed up shit.

. In its essence, repetition refers to a singular power which differs in kind from generality, even when, in order to appear, it takes advantage of the artificial passage from one order of generality to another." — StreetlightX

Oh there's the paradoxing. So predictable.

Becoming is necessary a relation and also primary. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Indeed. It is the necessary relation of becoming (crisply) unrelated and so no longer "singular" (or vague).

Only once possibility is divided into some "this" and "that" can those opposed categories of nature start to mix in more interesting fashion.

So in vagueness, all possibility is of the undifferentiated type. It is all "related" by being "all indistinguishably the same".

And then follow the differentiation and integration (the dichotomy and the hierarchy, the symmetry breaking and its going to mixed equilbrium balance) which is the coming into definite being. Now you indeed have the whole show of actual relations between actual relata.

Also, regarding Ollie. So yes, an intersection of the accidental and the necessary, sure. But, then (s)he isn't just the intersection of the Accidental and the Necessary. (S)he's precisely how the accidental and the necessary intersected in just this way. And, that's the singular. — csalisbury

I'm guessing that capitalisation makes some really big difference that is over my head. You are going all Platonic in response to my un-capitalised pragmatism?

You do understand that a process metaphysics is happy with the modesty of self-organising emergence. It doesn't believe in transcendent being?

You can say whatever you like, "square circle", or whatever, but unless you can support what you say, it's meaningless. So you can mention "notions of relations that exist outside such constraints" all you want, but until you give an example, or describe what you are talking about, you may as well be talking about square circles. — Metaphysician Undercover

So did time exist before there was space or matter? Explain that in a way that seems meaningful.

I don't know why you're obsessed with describing everything by referring to its "other". That's not how we describe things, we describe things by saying what the thing is. So we can say what time is, by describing a relation between past and future, and there is no need to say how it stands "other" to something else. — Metaphysician Undercover

How does the future relate to the past if neither - right now - exists? Are they relating "outside" (spatial/material) existence in relating "within" time?

Is the singular x everything - the totality, the cosmos, what is, the world etc. - or some particular thing? If it's everything, then what is this y which is a second singular which is the pure antithesis of everything taken as a whole? — csalisbury

You are asking me to make sense of the use of terms in an OP that made no particular sense to me. But being charitable, I am trying to make the best sense of SX's foggy mention of "the singularity of becoming" - and presumably, the singularities of metaphysical terminology generally.

If you understand SX as saying something different, please explain what he apparently can't. All he will tell us is that the singularity of becoming is a "strange and specific notion". But unless he can say strange and specific in relation to what, I can find no proper meaning in what he says - just like everyone else who has responded so far.

So in my version of this tale, I never use the term. But I point out how I do have it covered in the "1" that the maths of reciprocals employs as its "anything goes" hinge idea. And I said explicitly that in metaphysical reasoning, it stands as a first abductive guess at "what goes". (If you don't know what abduction means in a Peircean context, you can look it up.)

So in speaking vaguely and abductively about "whatever the hell it is - that we will just call the singular one which is now the target of our inquiry", that is merely to say that I at least feel I have latched on to some kind of difference that makes a difference. I dimly sense something that could be right - as a foundational "direction" or dimension of nature. And having found one way to go, antithetically, I can immediately start thinking deductively of its "other" - what it would be to go in the reverse (or rather, dichotomously, inverse) direction.

So intuitively - like a newborn babe even - one can discover that there is the "thing" that is to turn right. And then that is exactly now matched by its opposite - going left again. Dyadically (Peircean secondness), for every action there is a reaction.

And look, I can go up and down and back and forth. Amazing. Reality seems crisply divided so that it always has three orthogonal spatial dimensions no matter where I go, wherever I stand.

But oh? Why only these three directions. Why not four, five or an infinity? There is now a new problem of living in a reality that is bounded by three dimensionality. And yet higher dimensionality seems mathematically unconstrained. What new dichotomy could account for that?

So "singularity" - as I am attempting to deal with it in the logic of dichotomies - is the process of uncovering the constraints that could (retroductively) account for the particular state of the world. It is leaping into the future based on an inkling of a dialectial structure which can account for "what is" (the first thing to smack me in the face as a "brute fact of existence") in terms of "what is not" (the context of everything else that has in turn been constrained, suppressed, restrained, or in other ways bypassed by historical development).

I can only go left, because going right has been negated in the completest sense possible. (Going right has just been made 1/going left - the thing I can be most sure I'm not doing right now.)

But as you say, singularity is a thoroughly bad term because it is ill-defined in the OP. Everyone is already confusing it with the particular. And so you in turn - being diverted down that wrong path by a misreading of SX - must interpret me as talking only about the maximally general.

To be accurate, I am describing how the machinery of the dichotomy is the way to make it clear what we might in fact being talking about - or whatever the hell it was SX might have vaguely understood himself to be saying.

If there was any meat in the OP, dichotomisation is the only sure way to extract it. The singular must be defined in terms of its "other". And the reciprocal relation is the way to force the issue. If there is anything meaningful to say, it will be obvious once the singular has been placed in some definite relation with its proper "other".

So temporal relations might appear to be constrained to relate inside time. But what prevents more general notions of relation that exist outside such contraints?

Didn't you just accuse me of an unwillingness to question these kinds of kneejerk givens of metaphysics? How can we speak of time with any counterfactual definiteness or particularity if we can offer no story on how it stands "other" to some suitable context?

Weren't you talking, literally, about any thing at all? ... Again, I get what the whole 1/x thing for Being/Becoming etc, but I still haven't the foggiest how it's being applied to singular things. — csalisbury

In the context of the OP, clearly I thought not. I was talking about metaphysical generality - which could of course start abductively from anywhere. So if we are talking of that particular rock over there, or this particular cat at my feet, then while they may stand at the long and complex end of a trail of constraint or symmetry breaking, they are clearly not simple dichotomies.

The "other" of that rock or this cat is not going to be some metaphysical strength generality - given the rock and the cat are not themselves metaphysically general. That would be illogical. :)

Even Platonic ideals suffer from not properly getting that individuation is a hierearchically organised business of increasing degrees of constraint. So there is no ideal cat or boulder up there in Platonia. But geology does conform to fractal erosive principles. Cats are the individuated product of a genetic and developmental history.

I already stressed that when talking about individuation, the key dichotomy is this one of the division between constraints and degrees of freedom - or necessity vs accident.

My cat is my cat according to the necessity of some history that makes it impossible for it to be considered anything else (like - for real - that I got the right black cat back from the pet shelter when Ollie went missing for several months as a roving juvenile). But then there is much that I would consider accidental to Ollie being Ollie. Like that he might have lost or gained weight, broken a leg, got covered in muck, is mostly a completly different set of atoms every few months due to molecular turnover, or sadly, he's been dead a few months now. Even the immaterial Ollie remains resolutely real - at least for me.

So the particular - your word for the singular - is the intersection of two forms of information (as made clear in the semiotic version of thermodynamics that would be, for instance, Pattee's epistemic cut or Salthe's infodynamics). There is the formal information and the material information. That is, the information which describes the constraints that produce some particular x, y or z, and the information that describes the accidents that compose particular x, y or z - the little differences that don't make an essential difference, like Ollie losing a leg, changing all his atoms, or becoming part cat/part tumour.

Well the last did matter for Ollie's existence. The information that held him together was eventually over-run by accidental growth rather than self-sustaining growth. But you get what I mean. All particular are dichotomistic in being some mix of the necessary and the accidental - and there has to be "enough" of the one to balance out the other. That is the nature of a self-organising state of equilibrium.

But such a relation would be outside of time, so we can dismiss that relation as unreal. — Metaphysician Undercover

Aha. So time has an outside! (Or spacetime has an outside! - if you are indeed talking relativistically.) It is itself a definite thing and so is embeded in .... something else.

What are you calling that something in which time (or properly, spacetime) resides (presumably as a more local constraint on its more general degrees of freedom)?

You're saying that proper pragmatism is an ontic inquiry; you can always ask "why," but once you do this past the point of universal invariance, you hit a wall because there's no answer in terms of a more general kind of invariance. — Pneumenon

I mention invariance as Nozick did a good book on that (if you want a more contemporary reference to answer Rorty).

But yes, invariance is the natural limit of skepticism. It defines the point where asking "why" no longer makes a difference. And so you might as well be quiet.

And indeed, Witty was channeling Peirce via the proddings of Ramsey if you check out Cheryl Misak's lastest retelling of the history. So quietism does not simply have to be an epistemic cut-off, it can become the ontic terminus. Invariance is the equilibrium state where further detail cannot disrupt the global whole.

This gets tricky because it is about reaching a metaphysics where both epistemology and ontology are saying the same thing for the same reasons. The grand project is to re-unite what has become philosophically divided.

So Rorty is saying pragmatism means goals are entirely personal. And models of reality are completely socially constructed as a result. The distance between the phenomenal and the noumenal is .... an unbridgeable chasm in the end.

But Peircean pragmatism says, hey look, the universe itself has a "reasoning mind". Our best model of epistemology is thus our best model of ontology. It is the same modelling mechanism (or semiotic sign relation) at work in both cases. It is just that our human or Kantian-level relating is indeed highly specific and personal, while that of the universe is at the other end of the spectrum in being maximally general and "disinterested" in any particulars. That is why the universe can be described in terms of the most generic physical laws, or statements of mathematical symmetry and symmetry breaking.

So sure, this "pansemiosis" of Peirce (he called it objective idealism) sounds pretty mystic ... if you are still a reductionist. But it is a grand unifying project that makes plenty of sense. It accounts for what science has actually found (in itself needing to re-unite observers and observables to achieve any final theory).

Basically, a qualified Principle of Sufficient Reason with a restriction on the kinds of explanations allowed, viz. they must be in terms of more general invariance. — Pneumenon

Well it is more complicated as you have a point of departure - vagueness - as well as one of arrival, in generality. So the genesis of questioning begins with the breaking of one (vague) level of symmetry and ends once continued questioning (or perturbation, or fluctuation) fails to make a general difference.

And Peirce defined that in terms of the Laws of Thought. Vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction does not apply. Generality is that to which the principle of the excluded middle does not apply. So at the heart of logic, these are well defined terms.

Now I want to talk about something else here: why that particular restriction? I would assume that this is motivated by the success of natural science, but that's a guess because you have not yet said so. Does this methodology bootstrap itself out of scientific pragmatism, from "Let's do this because it works" to a more general method, a sort of conceptual ascent? Or is it some other reason? — Pneumenon

The success of natural science does prove that there is an epistemology (of modelling relations) that can lift humans out of their self-interested rut long enough to discover the disinterested invariance of existence "itself".

And historically, the "Let's do this because it works" version of pragmatism came after - if we are talking about the highly utilitarian kind of pragmatism that James made a big hit of, by tapping right into that Enlightenment point of view which then became the familiar Yankee disconnect between the social and economic spheres of life.

So it is crucial to point out that including the very idea of "doing this for a purpose" in pragmaticism is what makes it possible to think that the everyday desires of biologically-evolved and culturally-situated humans are far from an invariant fact of nature. Instead they are highly particular. But then also, by the same token, pragmatism can then model the notion of purpose in general. And thus it starts to make sense that even the universe is formed by its (thermodynamic) desires.

So yes, the whole argument is immanently bootstrapping in any direction you might care to slice it. That is why it is "naturalism". There can be no transcendent get out clauses. It all has to self organise.

Clearly for Peirce, it did arise out of scientific practice. He was - rare for a philosopher - a top scientist. But his metaphysics arose as a holistic and organicist retort to the overly reductionist and mechanical understanding of reality that Enlightenment science - the classical world of Newton - had produced in popular thought.

So Pragmatism proper is about the unity of things. It steers the middle course by being inclusive.

You can see the way philosophy went after the Enlightenment split things apart. You have the analytics who ran with the reductionism. They went for stories of bottom-up material and efficient cause, rejecting top-down formal and final cause as "spooky".

Then you have the Romantic-counter reaction that particular reduction engenders - such as Post Modernism. Now - reacting directly to the popular success of techno-analytic reductionism - you have the alternative camp that says form (or structure) and finality (or meaning) are the true foundation of things. Analytics are just "weird" because they have no soul, don't get poetry, and are generally just uncool and nerdy. Purpose must again be at the metaphysical centre of existence (even if existentialism says that just means purpose as it is to be understood multfariously by "any individual".)

But Peircean pragmatism unites by telling the Aristotelan systems story where existence is the result of a free interaction between bottom up and top down causality. The Universe is holistic in that it really is formed by all four of Aristotle's causes. They are all real and to be taken seriously.

So I get the feeling you want to read a historical direction to this - from science to metaphysics.

But Peirce was rejecting science as it had become (even for analytics and continentals) in order to return it to the more complete thing it once was (and is now becoming again).

So pragmatism is a foretaste of that future science, and a return to the roots of metaphysical understanding we see across many ancient cultures in fact - not just the Greeks with Anaximander or the Hesiod, but Buddhism, Taoism, even Judaism (as in ein sof).

The popular pragmatic answer to this is just to stick with a reference point until it is falsified, which is more or less how science works. — Pneumenon

The problem of goals .... This, I conjecture, is the big problem with trying to analyze the whole history of science, because the people involved may not have even had the same goals. — Pneumenon

Pragmatiism highlights the place goals have in rational inquiry. So that in fact defines "reference points in nature" in explicitly self-interested fashion. Reality is the "view from us". Our goals become an active part of the triangulation.

Vulgar pragmatism says the world-defining goal (the purpose that forms the umwelt of sign, to use the semiotic jargon) is personal utility. The questions about existence are guided by the ultimate anchoring question of "what's in it for me?".

But a scientific pragmatism - that tries to speak as nakedly and disinterestedly of nature as it can - instead might seek the goal of generalised invariance.

If one could imagine the distillation of all possible points of view, then what would emerge is the invariant characterisation of being? Lets look at a rock or a star from the point of view of the "universe". What would we see if we were that kind of "mind".

So in full blown Peircean pragmatism, you get that final ontic shift. The Universe is granted a mind in the sense that it stabilises its being by having a generalised point of view .... that is guided by some central purpose.

Cue the second law, equilibrium dynamics and entropy maximisation.

What you call "a fixed reference point" seems just another way of talking about the invariance of a symmetry. So relativity arises simply from a demand for the symmetry of universal co-variance. The world should look the same at any spatiotemporal scale of observation. So the "special interests of observers" - their particular states of acceleration - have to be factored out as localised, very personal, symmetry breakings.

This extends beyond science, by the way. The history of modern society is the history of us (ostensibly) trying our hardest to be good little children of the Enlightenment. — Pneumenon

Yep. Except the Enlightenment was based on atomism and Newtonian physics. And that reductionism - which presumes material being as brute existence, and spatiotemporal symmetry as transcendently fixed - has long since been revised by more holistic theory.

So society still understands existence in these classical terms. Science - pragmatically - has moved on.

Hypothesis: pragmatic solutions to this problem do not work, because no matter how much time people like Rorty spend asserting that we should just ignore the idea of ultimate goals or transcendence or what have you, there is simply no way to stop humans from constantly asking "Why?" — Pneumenon

Rorty is hardly a pragmatist. But I guess even in his own time Peirce was having to relabel himself a pragmaticist because folk like James could only understand a simplified "Enlightenment" version of his holism. :)

But anyway, again one can always ask "why?". Yet if one's answers achieve the invariance of universality, the questions become merely repetition of differences that don't make a difference. The questions become about chance particulars and not about deep universal laws (or symmetries and the reasons for their breaking).

And note that the goals are emergently immanent. That is the point of pragmatism proper, the ontic kind - to show how the regularity of universal habit could arise.

This is exactly the problem which StreetlightX is trying to bring to your attention. You have transformed "becoming" into a form of "being", and in doing such you leave real "becoming" aside, claiming it's unintelligible so there is no point in guiding the mind toward that direction. — Metaphysician Undercover

And this coming from you who can never deal with the notion of vagueness, or emergent temporality, or finality that is not prior to what it calls to, or prime matter that is not already substantial.

It is you that can't shake the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not I.

Its just the term that a group of us were using as we were discussing bio- and pan-semiosis a decade or so ago. I think Stan Salthe coined it.

And I think it does admit to degrees of development more easily. But also it just has a pleasing ordinary language match to vagueness.

So we could talk about definiteness and indefiniteness, or determinacy and indeterminacy. But those are explicitly just negative formations - the thing and it's lack.

A dichotomy - as a reciprocal deal - is instead a symmetry breaking so complete that you appear to have two different fully realised things in opposition, So it feels more appropriate to give each its own full name, like vagueness and crispness.

That more than just the continuum issue would be why the pairing sounds right to my ear. So like discrete and continuous, or one and many, it is about making a clear statement that both limits are real and different enough to have their own distinct character. The continuous is not merely the in-discrete. It is the positively completely continuous (as a maximal exclusion of the discrete).

The usual epic whinge....

There's another point to be made: No reason a singularity has to be a 1. It can be a historical situation. Something crazy goes down, rewrites the coordinates, you walk outside, not knowing what's what anymore, then you try to act, in that. — csalisbury

Calling it 1 is again just to say that there is something, abductively, which is just whatever the hell it is. By then going through the further steps to discover the reciprocal relation that can work to clarify what we might have actually been talking about, the 1 is transformed into the scale factor that then specifies the measurement basis.

Does it help to give the equation in more complete form?

1/infinitesimal = infinity/1.

You see that the 1 in fact appears on both sides. But on one side it scales the parts and the other it scales the whole.

On that note - & I'll admit thermodynamics isn't my wheelhouse -but how is the steady march of entropy an increase in crispness? .... Doesn't the possibility of that fade as the world grows cold and dispersed?) — csalisbury

The baseline condition of the Universe is that it was born as a spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So at the heat and smallness of scale near the big bang, by quantum uncertainty, everything is maximally indeterminate. And then roll forward to the heat death, everything is instead so cold and large that it is as classically definite at it can get.

Thus crispness is defined in the sense that the dimensionality of the Universe - its degrees of freedom - are as generally limited at they can get. And this is due to the duality of expansion and cooling. The dichotomy consists of the reciprocal actions of heading towards asymptotic spatial flatness and asymptotic thermal coldness (each being the means by which the other can happen).

Of course the actual universe is a cascade of other symmetry breakings. So it gets complex. At the electroweak symmetry breaking scale, massive particles condense out of the generalised entropic flow. They make the whole universe suddenly somewhat colder than it should be "ahead of time". And those massive particles then have to give back that negentropy at a new rate - one which more complex structure still, like stars and bacteria, can in turn pay for their existence by accelerating the return of the stolen negentropy.

So the early smooth flow breaks up into a hierarchical mess of complexity - but all still entrained to the same final purpose.

It is all essentially or logically exactly the same thing - dissipative structure - but existing parasitically on multiple scales of being (due to there being these further symmetries able to be broken as things cool/expand enough for them to also be revealed).

Deleuze was of course supposedly influenced by Prigogine's ground breaking work on this kind of far from equilbrium dynamics. But I only see a garbled version in any of his writing so far. Not that I've felt the need to dig that deep myself given the science of dissipative structure, and also basic physics, have moved on so much in the past 30 years.

It's still a strange thing, tho, if neither extreme (pure vagueness/pure crispness) can be fully realized, than we're always stretched out between two infinities (infinitely free, infinitely constrained), always have been, always will be. — csalisbury

In what way are we actually ":stretched out" if we are always falling in the one direction (or more accurately, accelerating the world in that direction so as to pay for the right to exist ourselves as passing negentropic organisation)?

And also, remember the subtle difference between how we can think about these things and the thing in itself.

In the end - in Kantian fashion - we can only "know" the world we model. So the dichotomy - with its story of both things having an irreducible degree of its "other" in it - is only our best metaphysical conception. It is the theory we can produce following a dialectical logic. But no theoretical map is ever going to just be the territory it navigates.

Although, again, the evidence is certainly supporting the theory. The "surprise" of quantum physics is the kind of radical confirmation that says classical mechanics - the "physics of predicate logic" - just doesn't predict the world we've actually found. Quantum physics is incomplete, but already it bears out a metaphysics based on vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.

It just doesn't look anything like any process I know. — csalisbury

And yet - from my natural science background - it looks exactly like every process I know.

Like what's the pure antithesis of my mother/Beethoven's 5th/this bottle in my room/'Swann's Way'/ ? — csalisbury

Here you are talking of complex negentropic objects and not the metaphysical generality of existence itself.

All particular things are full of accidents - differences that don't make a difference to nature in general. just possibly a difference to some also rather particular observer.

Look. My favourite cup is cracked. The second law doesn't give a stuff (it's entropy in progress my son). And yet for me it feels the end of the world.

So thesis and antithesis don't operate down at the level of the particular or accidental. They speak to what is generally necessary - the only kind of conflicts or symmetry breakings which don't simply cancel themselves away and so can survive to be "things" that exert constraints.

I understand the 1/x thing for big ol headliners like Being/Becoming Determinism/Chance etc. but I'd really need some concrete analysis of some singular thing to understand how it works at the level of singularity. — csalisbury

OK. But it is confusing to now talk to individuation (or particularisation, or contingent being) as "singularity" when singularity was instead some kind of claim about monism over dualism or triadicism (who knows what SX really thought he meant). And I've just defined my acceptable understanding of singularity as the bare abductive "well what ever the hell it is" which of course is the spur needed to get any metaphysics started. And that sense of singularity then explains the third thing of the 1 that has to be introduced to talk about dichotomistics X and Y - becoming the vague possibility that gets divided by the familiar maths of reciprocal or inverse relations.

So if we are talking about individuation, it is absolutely key that not everything in existence is determined. The point about constraints is they encode finality or purposes and so they only limit chance to the degree there is a reason to care. That then leaves abundant scope for accident to play its part in actuality.

Of course we care that the world's highest mountain happens to be in Nepal. But does plate tectonics - as a vicar of the second law - give a fuck? It is a complete accident that that is the particular case. On the other hand, it is completely necessary that hills and valleys form in a way that conforms with fractal statistics. Growth and erosion are the reciprocal actions that must be balanced.

But isn't this just stipulating non-reciprocality (non-dialecticity?) as a fixed absolute in order to hold stable an equally absolute system of reciprocal/dialectal dichotomizing? "Everything has to be defined reciprocally EXCEPT reciprocity which exists in a non-reciprocal asymmetric relationship with non-reciprocity." Can't we use this same template and generate any number of metaphysical systems, depending on our tastes? Essentially what you've done is exempted your own model from the metaphysics of everything else, by carving a special metaphysical niche for it. — csalisbury

But vagueness doesn't need to lack reciprocality. It just has to say there is no order or organisation to it. Any beginnings are just as fast ended as vagueness is a state of perfect symmetry, and thus a perfect condition of constant self erasure.

Again, this just describes the quantum physics of the vacuum. It is exactly how nature is. The vacuum, due to uncertainty, could spit out any kind of possible particle at all. Yet by the same token, there is the same likelihood it will spit out its exact anti-particle - and the two virtual particles will annihilate immediately to leave the vacuum looking still a blank, non-fluctuation, symmetry.

So vagueness can have every possible reciprocal action going on, but none of them have any bite.

Of course, it is also the case that this symmetry breaks - lucky for us. And we thus have to identify - via symmetry maths - how this could be the case.

A big clue for example is that the Universe has just three dimensions. And theorems from network theory tell us that every more complex network can be reduced (constrained) to interactions of three edges. But you can't have a network of lower dimensionality than that.

So it is easy to see that once a self-simplification gets going (of the dichotomous kind, which for networks is the crisp thing of "connections and nodes"), then it will go to its limit. And the limit may have irreducible structure. Hence something is left existing despite all attempts to self-erase. Not everything actually can cancel. (And if you want to be technical about it, now we are talking about the mathematical definition of a singularity!)

So yes, my approach as I've outlined it is metaphysically bootstrapping. And that's its feature, not a bug.

You are basically saying that my metaphysical model doesn't accord with your belief about the thing in itself - the thing in itself not being allowed to bootstrap ... because that then is in conflict with your own metaphysical logic.

But you can see how that is not an acceptable complaint. The "thing in itself" is that for both of us. So all we can do is propose our various models and see which turns out to work best as the map that allows us to navigate reality.

I mean I have no trouble using good old fashioned predicate logic. Classical physics works for everyday engineering. Reductionism makes normal life very simple. So in its domain - roundabout the human scale of physical existence - it works fine, nothing better.

But it should be no surprise that if we are dealing with the extreme scales of existence - the vanishingly small and the incredibly complex - then actually we need a metaphysical logic that deals directly with the very issue of scale extremes. Hence hierarchy theory ... which in turn needs dichotomies that produce separations ... which in turn need vagueness as the foundation on which the rest can get started.

You are just assuming the extensibility that for modal logic - in wanting to include the dichotomy of possibly vs necessary - is what it must establish.

So the general ontic issue here is that the choice (following holism) is either to accept the actuality of vague objects, or (insisting on reductionism) having to suffer the ill fate of having to swallow many worlds in some guise.

If you insist on the absoluteness of the law of identity - no even counterpart fuzziness when it comes to being - then you have to multiply worlds to fit in the infinity of infinitesimally different versions of any object that is the logical result.

This is exactly the problem of quantum physicss. Every fork in the pathway has to bifurcate a new pair of worlds. You can't in fact tell which is the real Algol or Willow whose future had two possibilities to choose from. So both paths were taken and the dog and its master continue in their two worlds.

Yes, it doesn't make any sense at all to duplicate entire world histories at the drop of a hat. So if you want to talk ontology, vague objects dig you out of that hole. You only need an Algol or Willow that fits their description to the degree any differences don't matter.

Willow puts his eye out with a stick. Algol is now a stray not a pet. Yet being objects still of the same world - individuated by its particular history, its particular steady accumulation of constraints - that history alone can still determine whether Willow is still near enough Willow, or Algol is Algol.

On the microscale, they both are certainly vague objects. Most of their molecules are turned over each day, breaking down and getting remade. Functionally (that is, teleologically) it makes no real difference to anything if microtubule a is replaced by microtubule c rather than microtubule b deep in some cell of Willow in the next five minutes. And yet that is a haphazard possibility.

So a "functional actuality" has no logical problem at all with vague objects. Near enough is good enough for a making call on identity. Because that call is made from a higher level of organisation. And semiotically, it is founded on a principle of bounding indifference.

he origin and the destination, in your account, both stretch asymptotically away, so are we not ever in-between? What's wrong with the quote? — csalisbury

I don't follow. The only place we are is inbetween. My position is internalist.

And also - a further aspect of symmetry breaking - there is indeed a global directionality for becoming. That is what the vague~crisp distinction describes. Vagueness is the point of departure, crispness (the crispness of dichotomistic separation and hierarchically formed habit - are the terminus. At the end of time is when individuation has most fully happened.

I don't really understand this. A singularity is the limit for that which would limit it? Would you be willing to illustrate this by means of an example? — csalisbury

Once again, the singular here is the bare abductive guess. So I am agreeing - as is explicit in Peirce's epistemology - that Metaphysical conception would have to begin with some dimly grasped "something". We can call that - vaguely - some inkling of "whatever the hell it is". The principle of non contradiction does not yet apply because so far we might have a name for this guess - let's call it concept X - but we don't really understand it in any properly intelligible or counterfactual sense.

So the next step is to sharpen our definition so as to make it pragmatically measurable. And we can do that by seeking to define it in terms of its own inverse.

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

If this combinations of intuitions works out, we will find that the formula works. They will form the complementary limits on possibility. And we will wind up inside those limits in a way we can now directly measure.

This is how all the complementary Metaphysical pairs work. Chance is the lack of determination, and vice versa. And soon through all the other standard dichotomies that work (even if PoMo has got into the habit of thinking them dazzling paradoxes).

(also: If it's meaningless to provide a term unless you also provide that which reciprocally limits it, wouldn't reciprocity itself have to be reciprocally limited by non-reciprocity? But how could non-reciprocity reciprocally limit anything?) — csalisbury

But triadicism or hierarchy theory is an internalist approach. It puts us inside a pair of complementary limits. So those limits can be pushed away "infinitely" - or more accurately, asymptotically - but there is by definition any possibility of stepping outside the world they make.

So the term - if it describes a limit - describes itself fully in saying that it has within it the least of the other. And the other term for the other limit does the same thing. So the reciprocality is mutual or reciprocal in itself. Non reciprocality is then the third thing of vagueness - vagueness being reciprocal with crispness in being the undifferentiated vs the fully dichotomised.

Algol of another possible world is in fact an entirely different dog. — TheWillowOfDarkness

So you didn't read the article or failed to understand the point?

The counterpart argument is that even under the concrete reductionist interpretation, Algol is near enough the same dog as makes no possible difference. So to talk about an entirely different dog would be one that is no longer even a counterpart version.

It seems, by your own lights, like you're stuck with two options - either we can speak cogently of something self-sufficient, even if, in speaking of it, we have to oppose it to something else. Or there is ever only the dichotomous, and its quite right to say there's no origin, only an in-between. — csalisbury

I should add that the whole story is triadic. So you have to add in the hierarchy that stabilises the dichotomy which is breaking the vagueness.

The simplest symmetry breaking results in easy reversibility. It has no stability because - just as you can erase a turn to the left by now swivelling right - if there is passing time, the next fluctuation is just as likely to cancel the last one out.

And that is the whole reason for the need of the further thing of pansemiosis or the habits of constraint that hierarchical development allows.

For symmetry to stay broken, you need it to be self sustaining. Like Apeiron presumed as a property it had, any breaking must continue due to its own contextual feedback. The breaking has to become "inexhaustible".

Again this is a mathematical subtlety that goes over heads. But who studies the actual maths of hierarchies?

In arguing that absolute distinctionless poetentiality is "left behind" musn't there be a time when there was no distinction? (bc otherwise what would 'left behind' mean?) But wouldn't that be then its own self-sufficient other-lacking term? So wouldn't it be more correct to say that pure poeteniality can only be a term 'after' the symmetry is broken (or that there is no pure symmetry that was broken, only one that has always already been broken?) — csalisbury

You are quite right. Except of course time then becomes another distinction. As does the notion of space that is invoked in talking of something being left behind. So the argument is a little more complex.

In my lingo, this absolute becoming is the perfect symmetry of the Apeiron or vagueness. I prefer vagueness as a term because it is self evidently opposed to the crispness of being. Although if you know your Greek, then - a peras - being without limit naturally points to its other of coming to be limited.

So yes, the Apeiron would have to "exist" in a way that is the least like any form of existence to stand as the metaphysical other of existence. And the only way we could know of it is by retroduction - looking at its broken parts and seeing there must have been the perfect whole.

If we take our existence to be completely and fully realised - at its limit in being real, as we do without even really thinking about it - then Apeiron, vagueness, potential, becoming, or whatever we want to call it, is the exact opposite. Whatever we take hard, cold, crisp, determinate Being to be, then already in that lies our best possible understanding of what could be the other of Becoming.

So it just is always the case that our Metaphysical strength conceptions seem strong because they are not self-defining, but defined in terms of everything they are not. Dichotomies form categories that are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive. So they are the only completely rigorous way to form conceptions themselves.

The difficult thought - the one that eludes pretty much everyone - is that the dichotomous relation is not in fact oppositional but reciprocal. If expressed mathematically, x become its other of y by y being 1/x.

Normally of course, the relation is understood in terms of subtractions - A vs not-A. One turns into its other via negation. And this can be constructed by taking away every essential property in a way that might satisfy the atomistic logic of a reductionist.

But I am taking the holist view where existence is the product of constraints on freedoms. And so a different maths expresses that.

For example, the opposite of infinity is the infinitesimal - that is to say, the infinitesimal equals 1/infinity. And vice versa of course.

And critically, each then becomes the others limit. So neither the infinite nor the infinitesimal actually exists. Instead we have made it clear we are talking about the complementary boundaries of existence (or in this case, counting all the way up vs counting all the way down).

So apply this to the dichotomy of being and becoming. Each is now the others limit. And each achieves its own status as a limit by being as far away from its other as it can get. But by the same token, neither can ever break the bond that (semiotically, meaningfullly) connects them. In yin yang fashion, each must retain an irreducible element of the other within itself to have that essential property of being always measurably other to its "other".

What that in turn means is that even Being - that which we take to be fully and unambiguously actual - is itself (by logic) always still to some inifinitesimal degree in the act of becoming.

And hey, what does quantum theory now tell us? This is exactly the world we observe. Zoom in on crisp classicality and it turns out to have in the limit vagueness or indeterminism. Science has cashed out metaphysics yet again. Peirce in particular was right about tychism in relation to synechism, to use his jargon.

So when it comes to talking definitionally about a state of pure potential, we are having to define it terms of what it is not, while also, we have to remember that - like being - it must still be infinitesimally a bit like its other. The unbroken symmetry must already be broken ... to the least possible degree.

So dichotomy thinking - done correctly as a reciprocal forming of limits and not the usual dialectical opposition of absolute "things", concrete abstracta - says neither being nor becoming are ever truly disjunct states. They are only maximally separated in terms of being as minimally like each other as possible.

Think again about the reciprocal argument. Note the 1 that gets employed. We are saying in effect, whatever is the thing we have in mind, let's start by calling it a singular one, a pure standalone whole.

Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.

So that is the way that in Metaphysical conception, one deals with singularity. It is an abduction awaiting its proper deductive framing.

Thus Becoming is 1/Being. It is whatever it is that would be the least possible when it comes to the complementary "thing" of being. Beyond that, talk about becoming becomes meaningless because it has snapped the connecting thread and left us talking merely about a singular and contextless one again. Which is - technically speaking - unintelligible.

.... the dialectic [is] a false movement, that is, a move­ment of the abstract concept, which goes from one opposite to the other only by means of imprecision. — StreetlightX

This just again confirms Deleuze to be a donkey. There couldn't be a more precise movement than a reciprocal or inverse relation.

Again, if you could present a valid example of a singular conception - one that somehow exists alone without being reciprocal to a context - then you might have something to get started with here. But you don't.

Draw me a square circle.

That's nonsense because it says what conflicts can't exist. So histories lock in destinies.

So for Hegel, becoming is elemental and not derived? Yet being is then derived and not elemental?

How are we to understand his thesis precisely. Is the contrast with antithesis our best avenue?

Did someone mention limits?????

So you don't recognise this as a distinction between syntax and semantics?

A new syntactical medium - one with fewer constraints/more dimensionality - opens up also more expressive possibilities.

Hence McLuhan makes my usual point that dichotomistic relations are mutual. For singular or reductionist thinkers, that might be surprising. The relation might be thought to be strictly one way (from the message wanting to be expressed, to the constraint thus exerted to form the suitable medium).

That was a little too easy. Give us another.

Huh? Metaphysics discovered the dichotomies through rational argument and then science cashed the relationships out empirically - while continuing also to refine the categories.

So what branch of metaphysics successfully deals in the singular? Your OP was founded on dichotomies - being~becoming, relations~relata, rational~empirical, probably a few more. So in what sense is any philosophy ever not framing itself dichotomistically? Even singular is opposed to multiplicity so as to make sense. 8-)

compentaste for an inability to think the singular. — StreetlightX

And yet the whole wonderful edifice of science arose based on metaphysical dialectics. Curious.

If becoming has any cogency at all, it must not be thought of as occurring between two terms, but as a concept self-sufficient unto itself. — StreetlightX

But what justifies that when any one term can only have cogent definiteness or counterfactuality in terms of its "other"? You have to be able to say with certainty what your term is not otherwise your term is merely vague in not admitting to the principle of non-contradiction.

Self sufficient terms are a dangerous pipe dream. Metaphysics is done with dichotomies for good reason.

Consider Deleuze: "[in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself." — StreetlightX

And so this is particularly wrong headed.

Becoming can best be defined in terms of symmetry breaking - pure dichotomisation. So what gets lef behind is the initial absolute lack of distinction - the symmetry of a pure and unbroken potential.

And what becoming arrives at is the equilibrium limit. The division that is the symmetry broken as much as it can possibly be. You have two complementary aspects of reality standing in orthogonal or asymmetric relation - as "far apart" as they can logically be. Like chance and necessity, matter and form, flux and stasis, discrete and continuous, etc, etc.

. This is because relations, like becoming, always stand outside the identity of any one thing. For example, while the predicate 'blue' might belong to the subject 'sky', the relation "taller than" does not necessarily 'belong' to the subject Peter — StreetlightX

Predicate logic is for reasoning about individuated particulars. Metaphysical generality needs dialectical logic. So while relations might seem extrinsic extras floating above individuated particulars, if you are really talking about becoming in a metaphysically general sense, relations instead have to intrinsic. It is the action and reaction involved in symmetry breaking which organises what eventually emerges as the being.

So taller than is a relation that makes sense only in the context of its antithesis, shorter than. Peter has no "height" to speak of unless there is already - intrinsically - a reasoned point of comparison.

One way to understand the scope of these claims is to recognize in them some of the central principles of empiricism. — StreetlightX

Frankly you lost me with that leap. I see no connection with what came before.

Probably the mistake is trying to drive a definite wedge between rationalism and empiricism when clearly they are locked into a mutually definitional relation as theory and measurement, or generalised symmetry and particular symmetry breaking.

A Platonically idea triangle is defined by it maximal possible symmetry. Every real material triangle can thus be measured by its approach towards this ideal limit. The ideal defines also the complementary thing of some particular lack of symmetry.

So again, yeah nah, nothing is adding up. Becoming is of vital Metaphysical import. But symmetry breaking and a logic of vagueness is still the way to go.

The possible world is not an manifestation of constraint, but rather freedom or radical contingency-- — TheWillowOfDarkness

You are jumping ahead to the claimed result and not thinking about how the framework is developed. The OP article in fact is a very good one. It makes the issues explicit.

Recall the informal picture that we began with: a world is, so to say, the “limit” of a series of increasingly more inclusive situations. Fleshed out philosophical accounts of this informal idea generally spring from rather different intuitions about what one takes the “situations” in the informal picture to be. A particularly powerful intuition is that situations are simply structured collections of physical objects....

So the informal picture is that worlds are constructed by going from the particular to the general - recognising the increasingly generic constraints that can still bind a set of parts as a whole.

This is just the reverse view of how particularity develops - by the world becoming increasing crisply formed as it gathers ever more localised or specific states of constraint.

And then to keep the game going, Lewis had to argue for the notion of counterpart likeness.

Roughly, an object y in a world w2 is a counterpart of an object x in w1 if y resembles x and nothing else in w2 resembles x more than y.[19] Each object is thus its own (not necessarily unique) counterpart in the world it inhabits but will typically differ in important ways from its other-wordly counterparts. A typical other-worldly counterpart of Algol, for example, might resemble her very closely up to some point in her history — a point, say, after which she continued to live out her life as a stray instead of being brought home by our kindly dog-lover John. Hence, sentences making de re assertions about what Algol might have done or what she could or could not have been are unpacked, semantically, as sentences about her counterparts in other possible worlds.

So the argument is that what constraints don't care about can be treated modally as accidental rather than universal properties. If a difference doesn't make a difference, then what it "actually is" becomes logically a matter of indifference.

If you are applying this to individuation - the prime target of predicate logic - then it says we know Algol well enough not to mistake her for any other dog even if we were to encounter her in some entirely different world. There is something essential about her that defines her.

Or at least - reductionism being desperate to cash out nominalism - there is so little different about her (our "mental" idea of her, heh, heh) that we are content to take this counterpart Algol as a token of a type. I mean, a sign of a thing.

Oh dear. I seem to have slipped again into the semiotic account that reveals the full extent of the semantic games being played. :-O

Great. I will be sure to address him by his correct title of Professor Terrapin when I have to explain to him how to go Google all these long words he doesn't seem to know.

Was it a very long time ago you did a course or two of philosophy at uni? Did you get your high grades because you answered your exam questions like you were down at the pub discussing random shit? 8-)

I just did.

And you earlier proved my case in seeking the choice among the interpretative options given in the OP that could function as the sign, the big tick, your nominalistic ontology demands.

You could point to 2 - abstraction - tell us all it was close enough, get in, get out fast, and say once again the world is exactly as you expect it to be. Prejudice confirmed by unassailable logic.

I certainly have been to philosophical talks for instance where people bandy about phrases like 'logically impossible' rather readily — mcdoodle

Perhaps it makes sense to understand that the ambition of classical logic is to establish a rigorous syntax in which to speak about the world. The world, in the end, is irreducibly semantic, so logic can in fact only approach this ideal. And yet still, logical laws can be framed which reduce the scope of semantics to pretty much binary, yes or no, answers.

The formal theory says existence reduces logically to these two options. Then it becomes a matter of observation - the informal act of measurement - as to what reality replies.

So logic is all about a syntax that - by application of rules, the modelling of constraints - can reduce our questions about existence to their most telling form. Slipping now into the subtleties of the Peircean view, logic forces us into the realm of pure sign. Instead of looking about the world and taking it in any old way, we get shifted into the mode of seeking the signs that logic says are indexical of the noumenal.

It's the number on dials story. The real world is irreducible semantic - vague, entangled, messy, continuous. But logic gives us the grounds to ignore the real world and focus on the numbers or other "truth values" we can attach to it. We can convert reality back into a series of symbols, a collection of counterfactually definite measurements, that allows us to get on with a computational level of thought.

So we construct the two world relationship described by triadic semiosis. We have the logical world of a clean syntactic play of symbols and the real world of messy entangled dynamics. Measurement - the act of transcribing one reality into the other - is then made as constrained as possible. As fast and simply as we can, we read off the numbers that we can accept as indicative of reality.

The less we are actually caught up in the world during this tricky act, the better. Smash and grab. Get in and get out. And that is why good logical syntax wants to reduce our observations of nature to simple binary ticks. Hanging around in the realm of the thing in itself means getting energetically entangled and losing the modeller's detachment from the modelled. You don't want to start merging with the world you measure. So logic gives you the rules to form the fastest binary dial reading. That way you can return to the realm of thought and get back to the security of its syntactical rigour.

Anyway, the point is to show that the practice of logic has this inherent problem. It cannot afford to tarry in the world of the real,too long. It's goal is to maximise syntactical order, and so even measurement or observation must be made as syntactically constrained as possible.

And - as your reference describes - the problem for the acceptance of modal logic was that it didn't seem sufficiently distant from messy real world semantics. That is what necessitated work on constructing a suitably syntactical notion of possible worlds. Logic needed its Procrustean rack to ignore the reality of reality and trim it to fit as the kind of reality with which it could compute.

The result is too simple for doing actual metaphysics. But hey, the technological success of computers and digital thinking means that syntactic mechanism has become the dominant Metaphysical paradigm over the past 50 years. It has become irresistible to project the manifest image of modal worlds back on the reality from whence it was derived. The map becomes what we believe the territory to actually be.

Perhaps I was a fiction writer for too long, there's something about 'logically impossible' that gives me the urge to respond with 'Ah, but what if...?' — mcdoodle

Such fiction might not need to be constrained by physical coherence - time travel or use telepathy if you like - but generalised emotional and social coherence would surely be a must?

If the characters are imagined clearly, they should write the story themselves pretty much. There's a logic to what they would and wouldn't do.

Sure I did this merely because you were unwilling to engage in dialogue and instead took your views as the definite and undeniable truth. So if you can do that, why shouldn't I? — Agustino

That's silly because all my claims are framed in terms of observables. I've talked about ideas that are factually tested.

The thing is you misunderstand the science of history if you think that in history we have undeniable evidence one way or another or if we can empirically test claims except by resorting to documentation we have from the past. — Agustino

But I am talking about Big History. So that includes the evolution of the Cosmos, Life and MInd. :)

If you want to understand the rise and fall of empires, of course thermodynamic, biological and cognitive models are relevant if you indeed aspire to a generalised understanding of history as a natural developmental process.

So sure, history is also a search to uncover "the facts of the past". You need the phenomenon that motivate grander theoretical narratives.

But history has suffered as a science in not being terribly mathematical in its theoretical thinking. That is what importing the mathematical tools of other sciences is all about.

Such understanding for example doesn't show a leader how to start a nation in "a burst of youthful zest and energy", how to ensure that it has "just enough" organisation to be cohesive, and how to ensure it "has a new lack of constraint in terms of some source of power". This understanding doesn't provide guidelines. — Agustino

I'm not sure then why people form rational policies around ideas of creative destruction, flat hierarchies, the value of managerial retreats, campaigns against red tape, skunk works, and a thousand other completely standard approaches to loosen up organisations, foster youthful energy.

Do you believe in neoliberal politics and not understand it?

but people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etc. who create a new and powerful organisation — Agustino

Not perhaps great examples as they understood the power of monopoly. Which IBM taught them was the way to go.

A general is better off with understanding the principles expounded in the Art of War than learning systems theory. — Agustino

But the Art of War is applied systems theory. It talks about the mature stage of systems development - flexible and not hidebound, energetic but not rash.

There are just a few in society who remember the old discipline and who warn about the dangers of its abandonment. — Agustino

Yes Cato. :)

But also "the old discipline" is not about rigidity but capability. The ideal is people who can think for themselves - along the lines proven to strength coherent social action.

So if the world changes, the "right stuff" also has to change. And your problem - as a social commentator - is telling the difference when change is now happening within one's own lifetime.

Now more than ever we need a scientific, and not a heuristic, definition of decadence (and its obverse). We can't wait for the new mindset to prove itself in another generation. We have to be able to predict that things are on track or headed for the dogs.

Being conservative corresponds more to concentrating on avoiding loss instead of gaining - realising that one loss is more significant than one victory. "Make sure you don't lose first, then think about winning" is a conservative principle. — Agustino

Yep. After you have been around long enough you will by definition have accumulated stuff that is of value - wisdom, property, power, resources. So attention does turn to risk-avoidance. It's classic investment behaviour. And senescent.

You don't take risks if you intuitively understand you have long lost the youthful powers of recovery from destructive perturbation.

But life should look very different from the perspective of a youthful "investor". Failure itself becomes the valuable learning opportunity - as every Silicon Valley entrepreneur chants as a mantra.

So my argument is that the right place to be is somewhere mature inbetween risk-seeking and risk-aversion. That should be the politics and economics of a society hoping to be resilient enough make the longest run at history.

And again, if you hang around the circles of political or corporate power, that's their understanding.

human beings have a natural tendency towards immorality and dissolution - they have a tendency towards entropy. Negentropic structures ultimately collapse. — Agustino

That's more hyperbolic nonsense. Humans have the opposite tendency - if you check the anthropological evidence - to accumulate negentropic structure ... because it is negentropic structure that allows a successful acceleration of generalised entropification.

A car that works is the one that is on the road and burning fuel. The broken car just sits in a field and rusts. Measurement tells us which achieves the greater rate of entropification.

So structure can always collapse. And theory tells us that collapse grows steadily more likely with senescence - the loss of recuperative powers in the face of unexpected events.

That is indeed a natural lifecycle. But humans - being intelligent - can now hope to form the new goal of persisting in a state of maximum adaptive resilience.

And as I say - illustrated with that government risk management chart - this is the new frontier for political science. It is what people are actually doing as they think about coping with sea level rise, antibiotic resistance, aquifer depletion, peak oil, and all the rest.

I don't think the powerful need a justification - except to throw it in the eyes of the fools. — Agustino

Well, they got too big to fail, didn't they. They used to buy governments. Now they dare governments to act against them.

The whole world sits on zero interest rates because governments are too scared to impose normal financial discipline.

I think that as much trouble as Trump is, Clinton and her ilk would have been much much worse. — Agustino

But that just shows how badly US needs youthful reform. It's like having to choose between McDonalds and Taco Bell for dinner. Same shit in different wrapper.

there are three broad options. — mcdoodle

It must be noted that this is all going off a nominalist, reductionist, predicate logic, view of "the world".

So sure one can define a world in these mechanical terms and find its a useful computational tool for argument.

But if your concern is ontology - of what worlds really are - then this logicist's view leaves out the very things that physics might think definitional - like generalised coherence (that is emergent organisation via the interaction of globalised constraint).

If worlds - as arrangements - are dynamical balances, then modal logic only applies as the useful approximation after a generally persisting balance, or lawful state of affairs, has been achieved.

So sure. One can look for the ontic implications of taking predicate logic seriously as actuality. But any answer is going to be wrong if real worlds - like our Universe - just don't work like that.

Therefore I think your question would be better stated as "what is the actual world", as any logically consistent description is a possible world, but what is unknown is what makes a given possible world the actual world. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. But again, there is a big difference between local counterfactuality - whether or not some particular statement is true or false of our observably factual existence - and the kind of global logical consistency which matters for "a world".

So at the level of the existence of "a world", anything might be possible, yet then in that being so, a ton of those possibilities are going to be self-cancelling and thus unable to in fact manifest. Each is the contradiction of the other, so their own being ensures their mutual non-being. As reals, they can only be virtually real - mutually annihilating as fast as they present.

So modal reasoning concerns itself only with independent and unentangled possibilities. That is the kind of world it imagines.

But process philosophy, based on good old fashioned dialectics, deals in interactions, relations and histories. So that is where global consistency takes over to shape things. The demand is for generalised coherence. And it then becomes the incoherent that is the "not even possible" counterfactual for such a "worldly" state of affairs.

So in reality we have no idea how and when the universe began, or how and when it will die, if atall. Because we are not in the full possession of the facts, or the extent to which we are in ignorance of them. — Punshhh

It is silly to claim we have "no idea" when patently we have very a clear and empirically supported set of ideas. There are many things we can speak with definiteness about because they have been established by counterfactual inquiry.

And yes, there are always the unknown unknowns. We even know that too - if you accept Kant and Peirce's approach to knowledge. Inquiry is epistemically open ended and can only indeed target nature in light of actual concerns.

It is not just that there is no complete knowledge of the thing in itself. We don't even really care. What matters is the intellectual relation we form with the world - which itself is a two-way street in that discovering what matters to "us" is how "we" are formed.

So the epistemology of Kant and Peirce is extremely sophisticated. We construct ourselves via our concerns - our modelling relation with reality.

I'm not here to defend the naive realism of Scientism or Reductionism any more that I'm here to defend the naive idealism of Romanticism or Theism.

It would be nice if you finally realised that.

But you admitted that it was you who misread me.

"Novelty - which I mistakenly understood you to be asking after...."

So it is your illiteracy which is my problem here. Apparently seeing "spontaneity" written, you were replying while thinking about something else.

But of course I don't believe you did in fact misread me. You are now just weaseling with terms because there was the danger you might have to be seen agreeing with me.

That's where this started. I'm sure I was surprised by how strongly you spoke out about the irreducibility of spontaneity in a PF post last year. I remember because I agreed strongly too - yes, a novelty!

So at first you confirmed that memory, and then very quickly you decided to backtrack. Now you are intent on rewriting history when your own words still remain to show what was said.

My objection is that the QM description of truly random events is incoherent. — Hanover

To be fair to QM, it is deterministic at the wavefunction level of description. Indeed, extremely so (as it extends this determinism all the way back to the beginning of the Universe, and all the way to its end, according to some interpretations).

So QM describes the world as rigidly bounded by a set of statistics-producing constraints. It just isn't the "regular" statistics of a classically-conceived system.

As I mentioned, the "sign" of pure quantum randomness or spontaneity in particle decay is that it exactly conforms to a Poisson distribution. The chance of a particle decaying is unchangingly constant in time.

And hence also the radical indeterminism, the depth of surprise, when a decay occurs "for no reason".

A constant propensity for a decay is a state of symmetry, or maximum indifference. One moment is as good as another for the decay to happen. There is no mounting tension as there is in a classical system - pressure building until the bubble must surely burst sooner than later. So a decay isn't caused even by a general thing, let alone a particular thing. It really does "just happen" ... in a way we end up describing in desperation as due to an internally frozen propensity.

So we know particle decay has this radical nature because a collection of identical particles will tend towards an exact Poisson distribution - a powerlaw pattern which is characterised by its absolute absence of a mean. There just is no average time to wait for the individual particle. It could happen in a split second, or at the end of time, with the same probability. As exceptionality or novelty, it is literally unbounded.

On the other hand, we were just talking about the ideal case. And the real world is much messier. So observation or measurement, for instance, can disturb the statistics. Decay can be prevented - futher constrained - by the quantum zeno effect. The watched kettle cannot boil.

So the pure case that produces the Poisson distribution may be an ideal description that nature - its symmetry already broken - never achieves. Yet then also we have to say that nature comes unmeasurably close as far as we human observers are concerned.

Certainly, when we employ atomic decay as our most accurate clock to measure the world, we are relying on the ideal being achieved so as to in fact be able to tell the time. :)

Anyway, what QM really does is take the contrasting notions of determinism and chance to their physically measureable extremes. And it then quantifies the degree of entanglement or non-separability that irreducibly remains - the Planckian uncertainty.

Classical dynamics can't make sense of this because it just doesn't recognise the notion of "degrees of disentanglement". It takes the all or nothing approach that things are either completely free or completely controlled, completely one or completely divided.

This is useful as it has great simplicity. And a particular statistics results - that based on the assumption of completely independent variables.

But quantum physics recognises that issues of separation and connection are always irreducibly relative - each is the yardstick of the other, as described in the reciprocal logic of a dichotomy. And so quantum statistics has to allow for variables that can be entangled.

Mathematically it is not incoherent. Well, at least not until you want to recover the classical view and disentangle your variables by "collapsing the wavefunction". At which point, the famous issue of the observer arises. It becomes "a choice" about how the epistemic cut to separate the variables cleanly is to be introduced. The maths is incomplete so far and can't do it for you.

So quantum mechanics takes a step deeper into the essential mystery of nature. It differs from the classical view in putting us firmly inside our metaphysical dichotomies. Randomness and determinisim are not absolute but relative states. The new question that comes into focus is relative to what?

Relative to a human mind is a bad answer (for a realist). Relative to each other - as in a dichotomistic relation - is logically fine but also incomplete as it does not yet explain the real world which is full of different degrees of randomness and determination. (All actual systems are a mix of constraints and freedoms.)

So that is why eventually you need a triadic, hierarchical and semiotic metaphysical scheme. You need to add in the effects of spatiotemporal scale. A local~global separation produces a "fixed" asymmetry in the universal state of affairs. Action is now anchored according to a past which has happened and so determines the constraints, while the future is now the space of the remaining possible - the degrees of freedom still available to be spent or dissipated on chance and novelty.

And this is the way physical theory is indeed going with its thermal models of time -
http://discovermagazine.com/2015/june/18-tomorrow-never-was