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

And I do believe that spontaneity is a part of nature, but probability or possibility isn't the best way to go about thinking it... — StreetlightX

Novelty - which I mistakenly understood you to be asking after - is my preferred term, and in any case, if I were to make a point about randomness here, it would simply be a negative one... — StreetlightX

So perhaps you can explain how spontaneity and novelty are the same or different in your book? How is one to understand you when you keep shifting your jargon?

I mean it is clear that novelty has an element of the surprising or unpredicted, and yet also "a good fit" when it is "a creative act". So novelty would be contrasted with chance or accident in terms of its relation to finality. Novelty is symmetry breaking that retroductively serves a purpose, while accident is symmetry breaking that serves no partiicular purpose - it is meaningless novelty.

So yes, as we consider causality in a full sense - the four Aristotelean causes - then the variety of terms we employ start to come into focus in terms of their ontic commitments. And if we continued to a Peircean semiotic analysis of nature, we could eventually cash out the crucial hinge that is the epistemic cut - the role that sign plays in crisply deciding those ontic boundaries.

We can roll a die and physically it must land on just one of its six faces when its spinning stops. But we still have to read off the resulting number correctly. The die doesn't "say" anything until its physical state has crossed over into the observer's epistemic universe in this fashion.

So novelty is connected with complexity as it demands the question of "who finds this predictively surprising yet retroductively fitting?". It implies an answer seeking mind at the centre of it all.

But signals must be extracted. And noise is that which is suppressed. Noise doesn't exist in nature as a purely physical fact. It is the name we give for everything about which we (now) no longer need to care - like the five other sides of the rolled die.

So what we keep finding is that it is all organised according to the logic of dichotomies - the separations achieved by symmetry breakings. If we speak of things like chance and necessity, random and determined, signal and noise, these are always the constraining limits of possibility rather than actual states of being. Existence is always happening between the extremes. So rightfully we can only speak of that which is more or less determined, more or less random, more or less spontaneous, etc. Even more or less ontic, or epistemic.

However with all this jargon-jumping by you, one will never know whether you have a well thought out position in this regard.

And random~determined - as the metaphysical dichotomy speaking most directly to action and causality - is of course pretty much right at the heart of metaphysical inquiry. It is not the place to be muddying the waters.

OK, I think I get how random and ethical might be very different categorisations. But I'm asking you to explain how random and spontaneity are different categories in your book.

I think you just don't know.

So an event can have no cause at all? Or a general cause and no particular cause? Or a particular cause that comes from ... self-determination?

You are still transparently avoiding my question. It doesn't matter that you treat randomness as epistemic unpredictability and spontaneity as ontic unpredictability. My question is that how do you - as always the observer of nature - know which you are supposedly looking at?

If they both look the same, what justifies your claimed categorical difference? And if they don't in fact look the same, how does their observable difference manifest?

Look, that rock just fell off the face of that cliff. Was it random in the sense that I don't know the triggering cause, the straw that broke the camels back? Or was it spontaneous - in perhaps a Bergsonian sense in which it made up its own sweet mind?

Or are spontaneity and randomness two ways of talking about the same thing - the equiprobability that is the fluctuations which contexts of "restraint" don't manage to suppress?

So there are a variety of things you might be trying to say. And you could clarify by starting with my question of what would I see as different if an event were spontaneous rather than random?

After that we could move on to this new weirdness of a-random. Perhaps you mean that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply? Ie: vagueness.

So when one observes the world, how can one tell the difference between a random event and a spontaneous event? How do we know that the one is the result of what you call equiprobability, which you say is likely in the mind of the observer, and the other due to spontaneity, which apparently has something to do with wilful nature?

What is it that you are really trying to say?

So again - if the issue here is merely epistemic vs properly ontic sources of unpredictability - how could we know when nature is being random and when it is being spontaneous?

You didn't answer the question, just introduced the further thing of abstract possibility.

And in mentioning Bergson, are you really wanting to treat chance as a matter of panpsychic will rather than pansemiotic indifference or equipotential?

Again that is confusing as I didn't think you were in to woo.

So how is spontaneity ontic unpredictability but randomness only epistemic unpredictability?

Not sounding very thought out.

Anyway, presumably metaphysics as a philosophical inquiry is concerned with what exists, rather than knowledge. — Punshhh

Metaphysics includes both epistemology and ontology usually.

I have not divided knowledge into y and not y, this is my charge, that scientism etc, does just this and then ignores the not y. — Punshhh

Yeah. But ever since Kant....

I have done this because there is an implication that the whole of nature is within the purview of people, in scientism, or materials based philosophies. — Punshhh

So your beef is against Scientism and not science. Cool.

Are there probabilities in nature, or is probability an epistemic concept that has to do with the motivations of an inquirer? I lean towards the latter answer, but there you go. — StreetlightX

That's surprising. I'm sure you said once you believed that spontaneity was a proper part of nature. Or is equipotential in fact physically impossible for some reason?

(And "restraints"? LOL. What is this weird jargon you've picked up?)

You're a peevish kind of chap, aren't you? But I see that at least you haven't attempted to deny the implications of your choice of words.

Would be an accurate assessment that this response was just a blunder and not an example of wisdom? — miosim

So you think the wisdom of modern maths is that infinity is just another number? And not something more that that? X-)

You start counting and tell me when you get there.

So why mention lunar influences except that it seems reasonable that they might be influences?

If you actually thought you were suggesting the kind of constraint on the physics of tumbling dice that is patently irrelevant, you should have made that clear. The fact you mentioned it can only be taken to imply you felt it was a likely, if not a definite, ontic possibility.

Sorry to be so logical about this. To be taken seriously is obviously not what you really want here.

Humans are part of nature so if they do, then nature does. — Jeremiah

But nature is an emergent mix of constraints and freedoms. So humans are free to do stuff that nothing else in nature can manage.

No, I am not. I never made any such claim. — Jeremiah

OK, well you can make it clearer exactly what your ontic commitments are when you say stuff like.....

For all we know the cycle of the moon, or the time of the day could affect the number it lands on. So is it our inability to see all the variables and how it plays out that makes it unpredictable? — Jeremiah

he explicitly grounded this assertion in the admittedly dubious assumption "that my own intellectual disposition is normal." — aletheist

Heh, heh. I would have loved to meet the guy because even biographical accounts don't paint a picture that make sense to me - even as in the classic mold of "eccentric mathematical genius/borderline autist".

It's not our conservative habits, but rather the financial interests involved. — Agustino

But we are talking about the US here, aren't we really. So the formula is conservative/religious social norms and economic liberalisation.

Yes, that might seem a curious mismatch. But clearly the two are interlocked because ultimately the only justification for Goldman Sachs and its ilk being allowed to rape the world is that the US is God's chosen people.

And yes, Trump's election shows that the dim and brain washed masses of the US have woken up and discovered that ever since the 1970s - as the US flushed the easy money of its gushing oil wells down the toilet of hippy decadence and world domination - they too are up for grabs by an unholy social system.

Of course I'm being hyperbolic here. The US is still scraping into the top 20 on national prosperity indexes - http://www.prosperity.com/globe/united-states

But any outsider can see that its political system is deeply dysfunctional now. It is powerless to actually "drain the swamp" when all it can do is appoint a nespotic buffoon who exists in a bubble of bias-confirming Brietbart factoids.

But yes, loss of motivation causes loss of cohesion, not the other way around. — Agustino

You are happy to just make assertions without evidence. You describe the facts as they need to be to make your version of reality correct.

But the very fact you must still present "evidence" in the form of these imaginary facts gives the game away. You are only pretending be doing what you know you ought to be doing here - supporting your "history" by empirical test rather than simply expressing some personal cultural stance born of long unquestioning habit.

You can choose your own bias-confirming scholarship instead of engaging with the literature and people out there who disagree with you. There is no way to "confirm ideas empirically" in history. You don't make experiments in the past. — Agustino

You are welcome to show that "loss of motivation" trumps "loss of cohesion" in the literature. So thanks for that paper by Glubb Pasha.

But don't you see that the very notion of "empires" is already a conception of the "natural human order" which is one of the things to be questioned. Colonisation - as a more economically efficient version of nomadic barbarism - could indeed be another stage we want to evolve past. Not that neoliberalist trade globalisation is really post-colonial. :)

And then, more relevantly, where General Glubb expresses your lament against social decadence, it in fact is an an amateur's way of getting at what theoretical biologists understand as the canonical lifecycle of organised systems.

Glubb: The life-expectation of a great nation, it appears, commences with a violent, and usually unforeseen, outburst of energy, and ends in a lowering of moral standards, cynicism, pessimism and frivolity.

So yes, that describes how things start immaturely in a burst of youthful zest and energy. The history of the world has been written by the rise of social groups which have "just enough" organisation to be cohesive, yet also a new lack of constraint in terms of some source of power - like horse riding, better ships, social mobility, or whatever. The group can ride out and take over their more conservative and hidebound neighbours.

And then a maturity develops. Even the Mongols and other "barbarians" got quite civilised, leading to a more balanced and persistent state of existence.

But inevitably - in a society that can't foresee the danger - conservative habit starts to create social rigidity and immobility. A fossilised elite develops. Folk start worrying that they aren't the stout stoics that laid the ground for cultural success. The focus goes to the lack of the old discipline, the decadence that is taking over.

Yep, too much flows to the centre which holds the power. And that indeed has an infantilising effect. It returns a mature state of development to an immature one, with too many degrees of freedom to expend. There is energy to burn, and it gets used in unconstructive fashion because individuals are disconnected from the general social project delivering that energy to them.

But equally, the critical problem of the system is the senescence represented by the conservative elite. It naturally thinks the answer to new problems is the answer to old problems. If what is seen as a symptom is decadence, then the cure must lie in exerting even greater control - applying old habits with even more effort.

But social habits make sense because they work. To enforce them is to try to crank a broken system harder. Instead, an intelligent society is one that seeks to evolve new forms of general cohesion. It encourages social experimentation as it needs to strike on whatever it is might be the new better balance.

So of course old values may still be worthwhile. Personally I am pretty conservative in my habits. No one would ever mistake me for a hippy. So I agree with a lot of your own social norms most likely.

But where we differ is that I'm in favour of the right kind of liberality - a science-based freedom of thought. Political and economic systems need to be evidence-based and aimed at the general good. So the fossilised thought habits of religious conservative elites are a clear and present danger for a modern society that wants to avoid its "inevitable" collapse.

All it takes is one sufficiently bad leader/administration and things will be over - for any civilisation. — Agustino

I agree Trump is a good test of civilisation's current level of foresight and resilience. But surely you can rely on the CIA to arrange an accident for the sake of the prevailing neoliberal elite?

Right - so if human beings statistically have a tendency towards immorality, that means that given technology, their immorality will have much greater consequences now than ever before, because it too will be amplified. This pretty much suggests that we're going to end all of human civilisation in nuclear war. — Agustino

OK, back to seriousness.

Is war immoral? Or just not a very helpful expression of the natural imperative towards productively competitive behaviour when it is taken to a globally damaging level.

It is not immoral to defend yourself by blowing up your own species and planet. Just a rather impractical way of achieving the flourishing co-operativity that is the basis of any long-run persistent social identity.

So again - seriously now - Houston we have a problem when the nation that controls half the world's military power can vote in one person of doubtful decision-making who apparently has ultimate say over whether the red button gets pushed.

Trump has surrounded himself with generals. So maybe we can rely on a military putsch in extremis. Although some of those generals seem as much bad decision makers (the technical term is "bonkers") judging by background reports.

But in the end, the world has managed to avoid nuclear war, while also collectively waging war on the various causes of pandemics.

Now I am far from an optimist about the human capacity for wise self-governance. But that is simply because - as with the Roman Empire - we may again have outstripped the technology of governance which we have currently put in place.

However - and I'm pretty involved in the detail of what governments do - humans also show an impressive ability to respond intelligently to what they actually understand as threats that must be faced. We could easily fix climate change if we could manage to overcome conservative habits and take the problem seriously.

I fail to see how naturalism would fail to note the inability to alter man's character, — Agustino

Naturalism - as in the sciences of psychology and anthropology - notes the great maleability of human character.

Of course, some outliers may have some kind of biological stubborness or conservative propensity. They are rigid for neurobiological reasons (just as others might be "too flexible, too liberal".

Yet you only have to look at the average behaviour of immigrants - such as I believe yourself? Just how quickly does a Korean become an American, especially if they arrive young and are allowed to mix freely with their new native environment.

Not only this. If you read accounts of the fall of Rome from historical sources you will see a multitude of factors among which loss of discipline, and loss of motivation which permitted them to be defeat by barbarians. — Agustino

Yeah sure. There are lots of ways the symptoms might present. But no serious (scientific) historian is going to talk about a loss of motivation when it is instead a loss of cohesion, or the senescence of habit, that removes the possibility to act.

If you're referring to Guns, Germs and Steel, I've read it and I'm not impressed. My reading of history shows that these weren't the main factors. The main factors were always social - in the evolving social mentalities. Baghdad at the height of the Islamic golden age lost its virtues - people became like today - many academics, many scientists, lots of musicians, a flowering and promiscuous culture, loss of motivation amongst the youth, a very extensive compassion, an anti-military hippie kinda culture etc. Then it collapsed. — Agustino

Yep. If it is a choice between your own bias-confirming scholarship and the actual scholarship of scientists who have to go out and confirm their ideas empirically, then surely we are all going to agree ... with you.

Don't you see how ridiculous this sounds?

The point I'm making is that understanding such lifecycles does not help prevent them at all. — Agustino

That's a sweeping claim.

All earlier examples of social collapse (as evidenced for example by Jared Diamond) were societies that didn't understand their natural basis sufficiently.

So your sweeping claim is yet to be empirically tested.

You think technology can overstep man's morality. But it can't. — Agustino

Technology is a tool for amplifying human action. The moral issue (in terms of a naturalistic perspective) is that we've let technological possibility also make the choices for us too much. So "utopia" would be about striking a better balance in actively choosing the actions we ought to amplify, not simply plug our traditional values (like an eye for an eye, eat until you burst, or whatever) into whatever is the lastest technical possibility.

Too much good and people lose motivation. — Agustino

I know it is your thing to play the conservative. But again, I have outlined the grounds on which I am founding a view. It is the one supported by science and philosophical naturalism. So just repeating your own paradigmatic assumptions in reply is otiose.

The Roman Empire didn't disappear because of natural disaster and pandemic - it disappeared due to internal reasons. Internally it became unstable. Why? Because of depravation and loss of moral values - loss of the virtues. — Agustino

Anthropological bollocks. It over-ran its ability to control an empire. It ran out of new grain fields to occupy.

So it had a brilliant social formula - for its time. But then fell apart because it over-ran what its hierarchical organisation could contain.

So it arose on things like speed of communication, coherence of action. And fell apart after the social technologies involved could no longer cope with the scale of the task.

Except that pandemics and the like aren't the biggest danger. The biggest danger is within man's own heart. — Agustino

Pandemics are definitely ranked by national governments as the biggest actual threat they face (on the timescales/consequences that matter most to them).

See a standard indicative national risk model....

I think people are actually more dumb than ever before on average. Sure, they have more knowledge than ever before, but certainly not more intelligence - too much comfort dulls down their intelligence, and all that is left is mere knowledge. — Agustino

The Flynn effect is well known by now.

But you are arguing from your own personal vague definitions of intellect and morality. As a naturalist, I aim higher. If nature is in fact intelligible, these are things we can properly define and measure. They are not just matters of opinion.

On the contrary, pessimism succeeds as it recognizes sentience to be "unnatural" and ill-equipped to deal with the oppressive forces of nature. Instead, sentients have to pretend reality is different than it actually is. To be sentient, then, requires one to live in a fantasy. Everyone has their crutch. — darthbarracuda

Yep. That would be the counterfactual that my position makes possible as its antithesis.

And history shows sentience evolves.

So your pessimism loses if that is what you believe is its proper basis.

(And if you believe in suicidal penguins, aren't you taking evolutionary continuity to a much greater extreme than I would ever argue for?)

But there are various variables that influences the number it rolls, which we simply are unable to see. We assume symmetry, but how precise is that symmetry? — Jeremiah

Nature doesn't produce dice. Only humans do. However they still illustrate the essential principle of how to understand randomness or spontaneity in nature.

So you are making the standard Laplacian complaint that, in principle, complete knowledge of nature is possible, and so all future events can be calculated from determinate microphysical laws.

Well firstly, we now know that Newtonianism in fact fails at the limits. Quantum mechanics says existence is irreducibly indeterministic - and that ontic claim can even be phrased epistemically in terms of this being due to the fact we can't ask two different (non-commutating) questions of reality simultaneously. Like where are you exactly/what is your momentum exactly?

And complexity theory shows that the very idea of calculation is also self-limiting in this fashion. Because calculation is a digital way of describing an analog world, there is always round-up error in any attempt to model real world events.

No computer could ever specify the initial conditions of a calculation to an infinite number of decimal places. And if error compounds exponentially while the calculation proceeds in linear time (polynomially), then error must swamp any claims to accuracy in a few steps if it is describing a non-linear or chaotic event (one with less constraints than the kind of regular dynamics that Newtonian mechanics was designed to describe).

So we know that this idea of a mechanically deterministic universe is itself an idealisation. It is not the "natural state" of nature. Newtonian physics describes the world after it has reached the limit of a process of symmetry breaking and thus spent its many degrees of freedom. It is the world in as determinate state as it can get - yet not actually determinate, as quantum physics and complexity theory reveal.

Anyway, back to dice and how they illustrate this.

We make dice as perfect and symmetrical as we need them to be. Which in turn means we are matchingly indifferent to imperfections that are beyond what might affect our purposes in having a die.

What we want is a die that a thrower can throw in a fashion which leaves them with no way of telling what number will roll. So it must spin easily (bevelled edges) and yet fall flat on one face (break the symmetry of spinning) without favouring any one outcome. So if you are really concerned about dice being fair, you buy machined dice. You pay extra for the engineering and certification.

You insist on certainty that the die will break symmetry in a way that is entirely spontaneous to you.

But if you wanted to insist on that level of spontaneity in terms of nature itself, then you would have to get down to harnessing some kind of quantum noise or quantum emission process. Even nature doesn't know when an atom will decay - just that it has a completely exact and predictable poisson distribution. (The propensity to decay remains constant in time - which tells us something deep about the constraints that form nature, that is, our particular Universe.)

For all we know the cycle of the moon, or the time of the day could affect the number it lands on. So is it our inability to see all the variables and how it plays out that makes it unpredictable? — Jeremiah

When it comes to dice, we could in theory measure these further variables. But until gamblers start troubling casinos with such high tech approaches to beating the house odds, no one has reason to care.

So the human situation shows directly that randomness is about how much we have practical reasons to care about constraining the physics of events. We don't let gamblers drop dice. They must roll them properly.

The difficult mental leap - the one I've argued for - is to see that this principle is true of nature also. And quantum physics is the best argument. Nature can only ask questions of itself (hey little particle, what's your exact location/momentum?) to a limited degree of precision. And yet this doesn't really matter on the general scale of things.

Quantum fluctuations only disrupt nature on the tiniest or hottest possible scale of being. The Universe itself is now so cold and large that it is pretty much entirely classical in practice. There is infinitesimal chance of it doing something "quantum" like winking right out existence, or fluctuating into some other bizzare arrangement.

So indeterminism is basic to existence. And yet existence has become a place where everything is more or less as good as determined.

The question then becomes, why do humans still find randomness useful? Why do we invent ways of introducing chance back into the world of dull mechanical routine?

Obviously it is because we enjoy creating zones of freedom in which we can pit our wits. Games of chance are a way to practice our skills at strategy and prediction against "unpredictable nature". And so the kind of randomness we are really modelling there is the unpredicability, or non-computationality, of complexity.

We can try to calculate the future. But also such calculation is impossible. Which is where the pleasure and pain of being lucky/unlucky comes in.

But what if we select something at random out of say 10 possible choices? Then we know what we are gonna get; we are gonna get one of the 10 possible choices, but it was still a random selection. Is that saying we have simply removed the decision form our hands, and allowed variables we can't see to make the selection? — Jeremiah

Yes, you are describing epistemic uncertainty - something we have got mathematically and mechanically good at "manufacturing".

And then the deeper issue you want to address is ontic uncertainty - the randomness of nature itself.

And as I say, we can either rely on our own actions to result in our desired level of uncertainty (as i insisting gamblers roll dice properly, and don't bring moon gravity measuring devices with them into the casino). Or we could try to harness uncertainty by tapping into nature's own level of physical indifference. We could get down to quantum level processes. Or step up to uncomputable non-linear or chaotic processes.

Of course, people will still insist that at the bounding extremes of nature - the micro-physical and the macro-complex - Newtonian determinism must still reign.

But that is simply old-hat physics. We know that at the limit, things are actually different. The physics of the classical middle ground - the computationally simplest possible physics - no longer applies.

I think we're talking about something different - I'm talking about the fact that no society can be eternal - societies grow and die, and necessarily so. — Agustino

There is the long-run issue too. But a "perfect" society - that understood itself in these organismic terms - would understand such lifecycle issues and thus know how to guard against them.

The necessity of rise and fall of negentropic structure in nature is due to a three-stage natural sequence of developing organisation. A system develops from immaturity to maturity to senescence.

In the beginning it burns bright and grows fast because it knows little and so is highly adaptive. Young bodies heal fast because they grow fast.

Then you have the mature phase where there is a steadier balance between stability and plasticity.

Then comes senescence which is in fact the highest state of adaptedness to an enviroment. The cleverness of youth has been replaced by the wisdom of age - a collection of habits that have the best fit with the world.

But the drawback of being so well adapted is the rise of a matching brittleness. Now if something big and unexpected happens - a perturbation like drought, war, disease, climate change - the system is so locked into one way of living that it can't adapt to the new situation. That is what leads to the inevitability of collapse.

But a self-aware society - one informed by the science - can strive to maintain itself in the mature stage of development. It can avoid becoming too stereotyped or over-adapted as part of its "perfect way of life".

I'm not saying it wouldn't be difficult. But in fact modern society does a pretty good job at planning for pandemics and climate resilience. It is exactly this kind of organic lifecycle thinking which is starting to be applied (if perhaps not nearly quick enough to actually save our particular neoliberal/globalised/fossil fuel based "utopia"). :)

Now you (the individual) can be a sage all your life. But the whole lot of mankind can never be sages - there's always a tendency towards what is low. — Agustino

But this is the point I query. You are saying that perfection is defined by the statistical outlier - perhaps the freakishly athletic, intelligent, beautiful, empathetic, or whatever.

No. I'm arguing that perfection is defined in terms of the whole society, and thus its averages.

So who could argue with a modern society that is producing ever smarter, fitter, better-looking and civilised folk - on average?

And IQ scores, life expectancies, plastic surgery and PC values certainly seem measurably on a steady rise in recent world history.

Of course, we could also say that there is an ever increasing polarisation or inequality about such outcomes. The dumb seem excessively dumb these days. The fat excessively fat. Isis may exceed the past in terms of thinking barbarity.

Yet still, natural science allows us to quantify that also in terms of complexity theory. There are two primary statistical attractors in nature - the bell curve of the central limit theorem and the scale free or powerlaw distribution of log/log growth. So rightful levels of inequality, and excessive levels, can be clearly defined in those terms.

My point is that we now have a sophisticated understanding of natural systems and the reasons that drive them. We can model these things in mathematical detail. So the claims of pessimism can be quantified - so long as it is first agreed that humanity is indeed a natural system and not something else, like a failing divine creation or a fall from Platonic grace.