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.

There will not be, and more importantly, cannot be a utopia on this planet. — Thorongil

There is no dealing with it at a social level, I agree with that. No perfect society — Agustino

But that still leaves the natural philosophy argument that "perfection" involves only a constraint on variety in pursuit of some global goal. So the goal could be achieved "perfectly" - as in some system level flourishing measured in natural terms, like growth or entropification - and yet individual variation in terms of achieving that goal is not a problem. It is not evidence of some imperfection or failure, but a necessary feature of it being a natural system we are talking about - the "requisite variety" that underpins adaptive tracking of said goal.

Now human society may have sufficient freedom to decide it wants to pursue loftier global goals - like happiness, freedom, creativity, religiosity, military prowess, or whatever. Within the constraints of physics and biology, it can self-define its own cultural utopia.

Yet still the same systems logic applies. The cultural system needs variety to actually be capable of tracking its goal adaptively.

So pessimism fails because it expects reality to be unnatural. Or supernatural. Perfections and utopias are defined in ways that are brittle and mechanical, not fluid and organic.

Randomness can be described equally well as either epistemic uncertainty or ontic indifference. We don't know which number the roulette wheel will roll. And the design of the roulette wheel has a symmety that makes it indifferent as to which number it rolls.

It doesn't make sense for you to classify x as the unknown unknowns and then start to tell me about all the known unknowns that constitute x. Besides which, even knowing there could be unknown unknowns constitutes the pragmatic beginnings of knowledge.

So in dividing knowledge this way - into y and not-y - you remain completely in the ambit of scientific reasoning as practiced by Peirce.

That experience happened in 1892; he wrote "A Neglected Argument" in 1908. — aletheist

But he does rely on that kind of direct experience of the divine - that firstness - in making the neglected argument. Yet a "community of minds" approach to pragmatic inquiry would logically require everyone to have the same kind of experience in repeatable fashion under the same conditions. And I'm pretty sure no amount of musement is going to see me finding theism an idea too wonderful not to believe.

So I do take the sceptical view here. I would look at Peirce's madcap business dealings and other evidence of his apparent unworldliness and poor social judgement. As a pragmatist, he could be very impractical - or just so brilliant that, like a lot of mathematical thinkers, he couldn't fit into the everyday.

Of course the neglected argument needs to be considered on its own merits. I'm just rationalising why Peirce could also write something I find so weak.

This is a popular claim in some circles, but it is refuted by Peirce's explicit and emphatic statement in three different drafts that he did not mean by God something "immanent in" nature or the three Universes of Experience, but the Creator of them and all their contents without exception. — aletheist

You may be right. You have made a particular study of this and I have skipped over it because life is too short.

But I don't see how this argument can possibly be consistent with the actual pragmatic/semiotic philosophy that Peirce produced. A does not lead to B. And that is what always most impressed me about Peirce - the completeness of how his central scheme connected up.

With all due respect, this is nonsense. Peirce was no doctrinaire Christian, but he was quite clearly a theist, and there is no evidence to suggest that he was intellectually dissatisfied with that position. — aletheist

But that is why I wish he had stuck with an atheist version and arrived at a through-going pansemiosis.

Newton, Einstein and plenty of other intellectual heroes all believed in God. But that helps my own case. The logic of nature still can speak through even when blinkered by personal theism. The method of scientific reason is that powerful.

So sure I wish Peirce was an atheist as the result of his style of reasoning. But also it doesn't matter. Peircean metaphysics is interesting to me primarily as it forsees the way modern science has to go.

Sure, and so do I. — aletheist

If your essay gets published, send me a link. Its been a long time since I read the neglected argument and you may have ideas how it makes better sense in the context of a metaphysics of semiotic self-organisation.

Abductive reasoning is always reckless! But as you say, then comes the deduction and induction which justifies it as the right thing to have done.

And the honest truth is I need to be pushed.

I'm basically so lazy I need to be made to justify my views by plunging back into the literature to make sure I actually understood what I thought I knew.

So there is a method here - even if it grates on some.

I make dangerously bold statements knowing that I'll really look stupid if I get the basic facts wrong. I make the stakes very high for myself so as to give myself no choice but to go do the homework and make sure I'm right.

But that's enough explaining. Everyone knows this is the internet and that naturally polarises people so they either excessively agree or disagree - and take it all completely personally either way.

If you want threads on the biophysics of substance or the thermodynamic imperative, I could start providing those again. But be careful what you wish for. ;)

Hey, you go on a philosophy forum and not just your arguments, but your premises too, get picked apart. Get used to it.

You made the assertion that science just systematises commonsense. I provided a counterargument. Now apparently I'm guilty of not just sitting here nodding in encouraging agreement???

I find myself tediously re-explaining the same things to you. Good job I enjoy rehashing the same story in various ways. :)

Firstly - at this level of metaphysics - the question of how could something come from nothing already faces the problem of being nonsensical and incoherent given that there is in fact something.

Nothingness could never be the actual state of affairs. It is bad enough that, logically, nothing can come from nothing. But also, it is a brute empirical fact for would-be nihilists that existence exists. And so talk about nothingness as something "actually possible" is redundant.

So that leaves metaphysics having to move on to more coherent lines of questioning.

Perhaps existence is just a brute something - accidental and eternal. There is no logic to it all - even though that is in utter conflict with the fact that the Universe is so strongly intelligible. Intelligible to the point that it conforms to the simplest mathematical forms we can imagine as being self-evidently true - such as the lie group symmetries which exactly explain by force of necessity why the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces have their particular observed character.

So it could all be brute eternal somethingness. Yet even that is in strong contradiction to the tightly mathematically constrained Cosmos we observe. And of course, a Cosmos that was also born as a "Big Bang" symmetry breaking or phase transition some 14 billion years ago.

So we move on - if we are logical - to the further, and most ancient, of metaphysical tales. It was possibility itself that was the symmetry that got broken by actualisation. A state of vague everythingness had "no choice" but to produce the regularities that would actively suppress the wild chaos - the undirected dynamism which made it a vagueness - and leave behind the orderly state of dichotomy (constraints and degrees of freedom) which we observe all about as scientists.

And why was this foamy apeiron stuff there? Where did it come from? — darthbarracuda

Stuck record. The fact that you still have to talk about Apeiron or vagueness as "a stuff" shows you are presuming a substance ontology and just don't get hylomorphism. You need to keep thinking harder.

Why this outcome? Was it inevitable? — darthbarracuda

Yes. The argument is that the Comos is the product of mathematical strength necessity. If you are going to break a symmetry, you wind up with only a single simplest way of doing that - like the circular U1 of EM I cited.

But another great advantage of a Peircean, or emergent constraints-based view of actuality, is that it explains chance too. The contingent, spontaneous or accidental is all the kinds of possibility which escape constraint. If a possibility is not being actively suppressed (through self-cancellation, as described) then it not only can happen, it must happen.

And again, this is exactly why quantum mechanics turns classical notions of the causal machinery of the Cosmos on their head. If a particle can self-interact, it must self-interact in every way possible. And using QM, we can sum those contributions to account for physical phenomena - like the magnetic moment of an electron - to a ridiculous number of decimal places.

So the idea that existence involves the suppression of possibility - and what can't be suppressed like that, is then exactly what exists - couldn't be more certain according to our best experiments.

That's the story at the fundamental quantum level. But the same logic applies to the development of Cosmic complexity - dissipative structure like life and mind in particular.

The general constraints in this case are encoded in the (still classical and mechanical) laws of thermodynamics. So no material system can exist that is not entropy producing on the whole. It is absolutely forbidden. The possibility is utterly suppressed.

And yet "on the whole" is a constraint that doesn't care if you gain a little negentropy for yourself by wasting a suitable extra amount of heat. You can do what you like within that limit.

And if something is possible, it must happen. Biological complexity doesn't just do the least amount of dissipation it can get away with. It just grows - like bacteria in a petrie dish - at headlong exponential rate until it bashes it head up against the limits of the possible under the second law.

You're still implicitly avoiding the question of Being: why does anything exist? Why something, rather than nothing? We can always ask "why"? — darthbarracuda

In fact I am explicitly demonstrating the logical hollowness of the question you keep insisting on asking.

You can always keep asking "why?". You certainly do that. But you are just asking the same old incoherent and nonsensical question based on bad metaphysics.

What do you make of Peirce's theism? It was unconventional, to be sure, but he still explicitly affirmed the reality (not existence) of God as Ens necessarium and Creator, most famously in his article about "A Neglected Argument." — aletheist

Difficult one. I see his theism as firstly a product of his environment. His family and the Massachusetts of that time was intensely religious. US academia was notorious in resisting Darwinism, atheism wasn't tolerated in John Hopkins faculty, etc, etc.

Also - as his career and state of mind disintegrated in later life - there was financial incentive to sound more theist as that was his last hope of publishing income.

And then his neglected argument was a very poor paper - quite un-Peircean in its lack of rigour. I don't want to blame the drugs and the mania, but his moment of ecstatic transport on entering a church at a particular low point may be both an important personal phemenological sign for him, yet clearly the weakest kind of evidence for the kind of scientific pragmatism he espoused.

So I discount the neglected argument as an argument.

For sure, if you contemplate the very fact of existence - both personal and cosmological - it does have to evoke some strong state of response. To exist is ... such a surprise ... once you also have a scientific point of view in which you know pretty much how complicated and arbitrary it all is, yet also full of direction and organisation.

But to then cash out that abductive sense of generalised awe as "God" seems such a cop-out. Calling existence divine or mindful - the much vaguer hypothesis of immanent pantheism - you could get away with. And that was more what Peirce, in his religious unorthodoxy, was really going for.

But in my view, if he had been less culturally influenced, and more faithful to his own metaphysical insights, he would have stuck with a strictly atheistic and anti-Cartesean pansemiosis. Even the mind and the divine would have dropped out of the equation so that existence would be understood to arise directly out of the generalised sign relation - formal constraint on material possibility that is the evolutionary "growth of Universal reasonableness", and nothing else.

So Peirce's actual metaphysics is holistic. He stood against the mechanicalism represented principally by Descartes (and the dualism of mind and matter this then forced an old school theist like Descartes into). Peirce was adamant that reality involved finality - a mind-like organising drive that emerged from material chance to produce an existence of stable habit.

And he argued this from science - as in his Monist articles. He already saw where thermodynamics was going in terms of self-organising complexity.

So the philosophy which argues rigorously is all to do with semiosis and providing a scientific view of teleology as immanently self-organising habit - existence as matter and sign.

Yet Peirce then does weaken - through both cultural constraints and personal needs - to pen some bad stuff about traditional transcendent creators.

If you read his objective idealism as a metaphorical pantheism - because. after all, actual full-strength pansemiosis is a really tough proposition to wrap your head around - then you can focus on his strong writing and ignore his weaker "crowd pleasing" efforts. Semiotics just doesn't lead to any conventional notion of a creating God.

But on the other hand, if you were the theistic scholars searching for pantheistic arguments by clearly the smartest philosopher of modern times, then Peirce could seem a god-send. Theists don't see the science that grounds pragmatism/semiotics - the fact that Peirce was arguing for a scientific organicism against the prevailing scientific mechanicalism. They hear some sympathetic ramblings that "put the scientific atheists in their place".

Of course, anyone would say I read my own biases into Peirce. But I can't find a strong logical argument in his writings for jumping from semiosis as an atheistic explanation for how existence can develop finality, to any normal notion of a divine creator, or even some kind of luminous, panpsychic, immanently divine, universal mind (as that kind of psychism falls straight back into the trap of treating "mind" as a dualistic Cartesean substance, and not a sign relation - a structuring process - at all).

Could be a mild case of it, I'm an audio engineer, but I was more referring to anechoic chambers where supposedly you can hear the sound of your nervous system because it's so quiet — Noble Dust

A true fact .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoacoustic_emission

Spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE)s are sounds that are emitted from the ear without external stimulation and are measurable with sensitive microphones in the external ear canal. ... The relationships between otoacoustic emissions and tinnitus have been explored. Several studies suggest that in about 6% to 12% of normal-hearing persons with tinnitus and SOAEs, the SOAEs are at least partly responsible for the tinnitus.

Haven't I explained this to you before? If everything tries to happen at once, most of it will be contradictory and so will self-suppress its own existence, cancel itself away to nothing.

You are familiar with Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics, and the least action principle of physics generally? You understand what cosmologists mean when they talk of the Universe as the result of collapsing the universal wavefunction?

Emergent order is basic to modern physical thought. As is the idea of things starting in a state of "maximum indeterminism".

Physics still hasn't managed to crack the quantum gravity issue to general satisfaction - explain spacetime via a wavefunction collapse of pure quantum possibility. But it sure is widely accepted that being able to explain time as an emergent regularity has to be part of any real unifying Theory of Everything.

...to me it's common sense knowledge that visits to the healer, with the culture's beliefs and expectations built into the encounter, sometimes make people feel better even if the healer's potions are made of sugar or wood pulp. — mcdoodle

But what is the source of this "commonsense" understanding of magical thinking? It can only be that you are benefiting from a tradition of scientific rationality.

So you are talking about a sense that was decidedly uncommon outside of a scientific metaphysics.

What science does is take such common sense knowledge and systematise the study of it, — mcdoodle

You invert the causality for reason of polemics. It was the systematic study of nature that has resulted in naturalism (rather than supernaturalism) becoming widespread commonsense in modern society.

Medical science for a long time had a physical, physiological bias, and resisted scrutiny of what have become known as placebo effects. — mcdoodle

Doctors are the most mechanical of thinkers. I found it quite horrifying as a biologist to start doing neuroscience and be exposed to what seemed the most primitive thinking about natural causality.

So yes, medical science does have a particular problem. It is after all a discipline that earns it keep by "fixing things". And treating the body or brain like a broken machine is the simple place to start on when you don't really understand the complexity from a deep biological point of view.

However again, even medical science is science in that in the long run it will be pragmatically self-correcting. So paradigm shifts are possible, and will happen if they deliver better outcomes.

Indeed there seems to a new phase of bright young researcher-practitioners who are trying to bring first-person accounts into the frame. — mcdoodle

Yep. A good doctor in the front line knows it is about dealing with people holistically. And modern medical training gets that too.

So your argument boils down to there being a problem with Scientism and an overly-reductionist, overly-mechanical, approach to understanding nature. And it is easy to agree that that mindset has become widespread - especially in popular culture.

But actual scientists are rarely that dogmatic. Even that arch-reductionist, Francis Crick, replied that he pushed his more wacky hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness simply in the spirit of putting up ideas that others could actually knock down.

And my position remains that all phenomena - including ethics and aesthetics - are expressions of natural principles, hence comprehensible by the methods of scientfic reason. Which to be precise, is the triadic cycle of abductive creative guessing, deductive theorising, and inductive confirmation, as outlined in Peircean pragmatist epistemology.

So indeed, one method to rule them all. :)

However Apeiron doesn't seem to answer anything either, since it doesn't exactly explain why anything started at all. — darthbarracuda

But Apeiron - when understood as primal chaos - says that everything is already happening. It doesn't need starting, because it is already an infinitely rowdy state of dynamism. What it needs is taming. It needs settling by the emergence of stabilising regularities.

Of course we then also modify the rather substantial understanding we would have of this ferment of fluctuation. We have to see that time itself is part of the emergent order. So the chaos is a chaos of possibility rather than actuality. A chaos of form and direction as much as matter or reaction.

So the whole notion of "starting" becomes vague when talking about vague beginnings. There is no "before" before before itself becomes an actuality in being a meaningful distinction in terms of talking about "after".

Personally, I discount Aquinas as he latched on to what was most wrong about Aristotelean metaphysics - the idea of the need for the further thing of an unmoved mover.

Self-organising organicism officially starts with Anaximander's story of the differentiating and integrating Apeiron. So in the beginning was vagueness, not a divine first cause.

The dichotomy is thus between those who believe existence is change created against a static, eternal, backdrop and those who take the process view that existence is enduring regularity emerging out of chaotic variety.

In the beginning for one is stasis. For the other, flux.

So Aristotle got the emergent story right - how existence looks once it has developed a mature causality. But his story on causal origination was confused (or rather his writings were cherry-picked for what fitted the needs of Christian belief best).

if you're talking about a metaphorical supercomputer creating the world, you're basically talking about God. It's just a crappy metaphor. — Noble Dust

Or maybe it exposes the essential incoherence of that familiar notion of a creating God?

It seems nuts that anyone would want to create our flawed world as some kind of "interesting experiment". Why would any super-being - alien, computational, or divine - give a stuff about doing something like that?

So if the computer simulation explanation seems lame as it lacks any sufficiently high-minded motive, then maybe it is a metaphor that focuses attention on what seems lame about a monotheistic creator.

At least the ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be a bunch of binary divisions that naturally led to love, strife, and general gameplaying. And in the beginning was a chaos that god-hood brought the basics of organisation to.

I was wondering if we are forgetting a possibility that theism and atheism may converge into the same conclusion after figuring everything out about the universe. — FLUX23

The argument is over causality - what could cause existence? And both conventional theism and conventional atheism flounder in the same way. They think about causality from the point of view of a reduction to material and efficient cause. They both want to put formal and final cause in "the mind of the maker" - the only difference being atheists see that maker as a human person, theists see it as a supernatural person.

Where theism and atheism could then start to converge is by starting to understand formal and final cause in terms of metaphysical naturalism. Design and purpose would become immanent features of nature - the machinery of self-organisation.

That "full four causes" approach to metaphysics has a long tradition - starting with Aristotle. And it has flickered along in the background of thought ever since - showing up for instance in the organicism of Needham and the systems science of von Bertalanffy. Also of course, Peircean semiotics.

And you do indeed find both theist and atheist scholars having a lot in common once they start talking at this level.

But still, I think theists have much more to lose in this four causes resolution. It is much easier for atheists to give up their conventionalised notion of materiality than it is for theists to give up their conventional notion of the divine or spiritual.

Or at least, for the scientist, it is expected that their fundamental ontic conceptions will change in the light of better evidence. For the religious, the game is based on faith and being "other" to that very practice of methodological reasoning.

Yep. Sort of.

The argument would be that accelerating entropification would be the most general of all imperatives - the one rule that all existence is driven by. But constraints aren't absolute. They irreducibly have their associated freedoms. So humans - as the most complex and rationalising form of dissipative structure - can do "whatever they like" within that most general constraint.

Every material action of humans just has to be entropy producing by physical law. No perpetual motion machines allowed.

But for example, it is open that a choice could be made to produce as little entropy as possible. So one could withdraw as much as possible from the race, so to speak.

On the other hand, if you actually measure the collective material actions of humans, our entropification activities are on an exponential curve. All the evidence points at us in fact having the goal of maximising our global rate of entropification.

So a few people might form a personal goal - like having the smallest ecological footprint possible. However that so far has put no visible brake on humanity as a whole.

So the thermodynamic imperative is alive and well. Burn, baby! Burn!

Yep. It will keep on going in the wrong direction. The definition of disoriented.

And they go off in whole groups. There were 15 in the group that walked past me.

So you can believe a film-maker or you can believe a scientist. But your "video evidence" is a joke to me.