So I see a disoriented penguin in Herzog's film.

A few years ago I was standing next to a penguin researcher when a whole gaggle of Adeles came waddling past us in the wrong direction in McMurdo Sound. They looked happy enough even though the researcher said there goes another lost bunch headed towards certain death.

Animals are always wandering off because it makes sense to explore the world for new territories. Especially in a changing environment like sea ice where a randomly calving shelf can float in and block off your feeding ground that summer.

Still regurgitating his factoid?

Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being the beginning of (space)time, it is also the beginning of the dichotomy that we call old vs new, past vs future, change vs stasis.

To talk about things as they were "before" the time there was a "before" is nonsensical. Or at least, only a logic of vagueness - which talks about things "before" the principle of non-contradiction applies - can make sense of such a statement. :)

But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? — Metaphysician Undercover

What's the problem if the whole with no parts is formally equivalent to the parts with no whole? That's what vagueness - as standing prior to the PNC - says.

The article of course does not mention the actual mainstream hypothesis of modern biology - which is that life arises as an expression of the more general purpose of the second law of thermodynamics.

People now go out to measure the temperature of the air above rain forests and other complex ecosystems these days. The hypothesis is quite testable. It can shown that life is driven by the imperative of maximising entropy.

Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation.

So the triadic part~whole relation goes from being something dormant as a pure possibility to something which actually starts to happen - a division that becomes crisply developed as it is self-sustaining due to feedback.

So yes, this still leaves metaphysical questions. But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. There is a concrete limit on any "beginning" which the "perfect symmetry" of vagueness marks.

As soon as you have the slightest bit of the one (wholes, constraints, global "formal" organisation), you also must have already the same degree of its other (parts, degrees of freedom, local "material" action).

Dialectical logic gives you no choice about this. Every action has its reciprocal reaction. Every thesis is intelligible only in the light of there being its antithesis.

Varela in 'The Embodied Mind' made an impassioned plea for scientists to open themselves up to first-person narrative, but it seems to have fallen on stony ground so far. — mcdoodle

You can blame the scientists. But it is the scientists who actually investigate and support the idea of a placebo effect. Its a huge area of research.

Who you really ought to blame are the public who are so susceptible to woolly mystic beliefs - like that antibiotics can fix their viral infections. Or SSRIs can take away their depression.

You could also give big pharma a kicking. It is in their financial interest to foster a mechanistic view of pharmacueticals.

So your fingering of "science" as the problem could hardly be wider of the mark. Science actually pays regards to the evidence in forming its views. You would never have heard of the placebo effect unless it had come to light as a result of research.

I go back to your example of a vortex in water. You can't just scoop out a vortex. Similarly I have a hard time visualizing what a constraint is supposed to be independent of a material basis. — darthbarracuda

So are solitons and electron holes material things in your book? We can use them for computing. They obey the quantum rules of particles.

And for the millionth time now, this is not about imagining reality independent of a "material basis". Why do you find a hylomorphic understanding of substance so difficult?

The difference is in the view one takes of the material side of the deal. For you, the material basis is itself substantial. Matter is already matter - which begs every important metaphysical question.

But my view explains materiality as emergent from contextual constraints - formal and final cause. It is the limitation on possibility that crystallises substance as something "physically actual".

Protons and electrons exist because the cooling/expanding Cosmic context freezes them out as expressions of broken gauge symmetries. They have actual mass and move about at less than the speed of light because the further global Goldstone symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism.

So modern particle physics says the basic substance of existence - quarks and leptons - are made substantial by material possibility (pure radiation) being trapped into formal regularities (broken symmetries) which they can no longer escape (because the Big Bang has removed that freedom with its cooling and expanding).

If you want to "visualise" a constraint, just think of the symmetries that underlie the standard model of particle physics. As forms, they have a logical necessity.

You can't get simpler than the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetic charge - the symmetry of a circle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_group

So that puts an irreducible limit under Cosmic existence. If you have a reduction of degrees of freedom going on of the kind that produces particles as the minimal possible states of excitation, then EM winds up being the bottom level particle property for the very good reason that nothing could be simpler.

And yet even that simplicity still has a structural complexity - exactly as Peirce's triadic view of relations argues.

So in any form of existence which involves the kind of constraint on action which produces an organised dimensionality (ie: a universe), the realist thing is the fact of mathematical form. Matter can try to do whatever the heck it wants. At the Big Bang, matter fields could fluctuate in ways to contain every kind of symmetry-breaking particle. But as a context develops - as the Universe expands and cools - then only the simplest modes of being can actually survive. And so everything reduces down to whatever mathematical form says is the simplest kind of ... mathematical form.

If I sound frustrated, its only because the first time we corresponded, it was about ontic structural realism. You seemed to love the idea - yet clearly reading the Ladyman/Ross book has left zero impression on your thinking.

Fraid not. But there is now a real industry of secondary sources. So things are miles better than even a decade ago.

Cheryl Misak is good for a summary that puts him in context. She's done a new book as well as papers.

Peirce's populist articles for The Monist are a good introduction in that they clearly written.

But because Peirce never summarised his mature ideas in book form, only left a heap of notes that went unread for decades, there just isn't a canonical text that everyone can focus on.

You just keep repeating the only question that makes sense from your own reductionist ontology. What is it made of, what is it made of, what is it made of?

As explained, a constraints based view of materiality sees matter being produced via the limitation on possibility. So solidity arises as freedoms of actions are removed.

This is why Peirce notoriously described matter as effete mind. When spontaneity is deadened by the accretion of constraints, you wind up with what we call matter.

So what is material/efficient cause made of? Top down constraints on possibility.

Holism requires material cause too. The point is that there is always more than just that.

The fact that you have to resort to arguing your case in terms,of an engine demonstrate that you are only thinking mechanicallly and not organically.

A clue: machines are designed to operate only by efficient/material cause. Formal and final cause is engineered out of them so that these facets of reality are made a matter of human free choice.

So try again with my earlier example of scooping a vortex out of a flow in a bucket.

Yep. Self-awareness is narrative and hence propositional and deductive. It is essentially backward looking retroduction. If I just pushed that button, I must have made that decision.

So humans have an extra level of socially constructucted rationalising habit, based on language, that we use to structure experience - force it into rationalistic patterns that can account for everything in retroductive fashion. And also of course, a habit which we also use to control the body and its responses by setting up the novel states of constraint to which it must respond. So we can tell ourselves not to push that button until the light also turns green, or whatever other narrative constraint we might have reason to construct.

And then there is the biology of consciousness itself. The brain is an inductive predictive engine. It is always forward modelling to predict the future - predict the constraints on behaviour that will be coming from the direction of the lived environment.

So in terms of temporarility, the biological brain is pointed inductively at the future. It doesn't dwell on the past. It can't even dwell on the past. Animals don't reminisce. And the present only exists as the sum of a history. It forms the constraints that are the basis for future predicting. What has happened is done, but it in turn leaves open new possibility - the possibility into which the animal miind can creatively insert itself as an imagined player.

And then humans developed their new level of semiosis that allowed them to step outside of this natural flow and reconsider it in reasoned fashion. Through the structure of narrative, we can talk our way backwards in time to create a reasonable story about the past. That then gives us - or rather our cultures - the opportunity to build a quite different kind of psychology on top of the neural one. We can learn to think of our selves as "free willed, autonomous selves" ... who then can creatively insert themselves into the rather more abstract workings of a social community as an imagined player.

So the habit of retroductive explanation gives us the ability to now construct our own internal states of constraint. We can regulate our behaviour in a way that animals just can't. We can construct this thing of a personal identity, a collection of meaningful memories, a series of persistent purposes ... all done in our own name, but actually just reflecting our social construction.

Awareness is entropic induction. Self-awareness is negentropic retroduction. One looks continually to the future and runs down whatever is the easiest path. The other learns to act from "the past" and instead starts to devote itself to larger projects - the negentropic needs of the society which wants to shape "selves" as its tightly-regulated component parts.

So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality.

But it is also true that part and whole have their most definite state of existence on quite different spatiotemporal scales. So what you are seeing is what you would expect to see as an observer existing inside what is happening.

To you - looking at the story from the middle ground scale - the parts coalesce first. The whole is present largely as a desire to be achieved in the long run future. So the parts shed any vagueness fast and the whole remains vague for the longest possible time.

But as I say, this is an optical effect. It is what you see when you regard creation from some scale intermediate between its local and global limits. Of course the parts look small and definite "by now", while the whole looks large and mysterious, still to make itself absolutely clear to us.

Hey, that paper is in fact a pretty decent defence of Panpsychism. But you are right. Being a pansemiotician myself, I would fundamentally disagree with it. :)

So the guts of my objection would be that nothing can be solved by positing a dualism of substance. In metaphysics, progress is always achieved by discovering the formal complementarity at the heart of every phenomenon. And arguing for two kinds of substance is making a brute claim about there being two types of the same general thing (a substance) that have no particular reason to be locked into a mutually formative interaction.

So positing a microphysics of matter plus mind cannot work. It has no internal logic. There is nothing to show how the existence of one requires the existence of the other. There is no holism or unity that binds these two ontic catergories. This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking.

With pansemiosis on the other hand, we are talking about the symmetry breaking that is matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And now the two categories are related as a symmetry breaking dichotomy. The two-ness is a fact of logical necessity rather than merely a brute and arbitrary claim.

Materiality is all about material degrees of freedom - the entropy to be dissipated. It is physical dimensionality.

But then the very fact of materiality makes room for its complementary opposite - information or the immateriality of symbolised meaning and sign relations. As I have argued in another thread, the universal expressiveness of a language is due to an extreme constraint on dimensionality. When materiality is reduced towards the ideal of a zero-D point - as it is with any serial code - then this active lack of materiality becomes the birth of the something different, the something opposite, that is the "immaterial" realm of symbols. Or negentropy.

Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity.

So the pansemiotic view can argue it's merit on first principles. Matter and symbol are formally complementary in that the existence of one makes the existence of the other a necessity. You couldn't have a material world and not then have "immaterial" sign relations with that world as a logical possibility.

So in general you start by arguing that reductionism is a failure - its reliance on a rather mystical notion of emergence being a symptom of that. I of course agree. Emergence is always itching to be reduced back to supervenience in the mouths of reductionists. A reductionist only wants to believe in an emergence that is sanitised by quote marks.

And then you argue that if monistic reductionism fails, then maybe mind - that horribly ill defined notion - is the second substantial ingredient that must be discovered in the microphysics. And yes, if all else fails, perhaps we have to accept such a brute fact posit.

But all else hasn't failed. Science already has a science of sign. It is perfectly normal in neuroscience or biology to treat the phenomena of life and mind as sign relations with the material world.

And the matter~symbol dichotomy has the required Metaphysical validity. Sign - living in its zero dimensional realm of digital bits - can be shown to be the outcome of material constraint taken to its physical limits. Negentropy is defined as the inverse of entropy.

The rapid emergence of an information theoretic approach to "everything" - microphysics and cosmology too - shows that this is the universal Metaphysical duality that is working. Information encodes the Janus face relation between sign and matter. Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognised as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit. ;)

But Panpsychism has not fared so well. There is still no metaphysics, let alone physics, connecting the brute and disparate categories of matter and mind. As a possibility, it was raised a century ago and has proved a complete dud.

Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences.

So now you recognise that to "have a collection" one must add the further thing of "a container for the parts"?

Cool. You have conceded my point in regards to taking a set theoretic approach.

But this is metaphysics, and metaphysics is an area in which all is speculation and belief. — mcdoodle

But demonstrably, historically metaphysics is founded on the assumption that nature is intelligible, rational, logical, organised by mathematical patterns.

It is then a speculative turn - only possible given this positive central thesis - that nature might be other.

I said part or aspect to try to bridge the obvious gap between my holistic point of view and the reductionist language which DC wants to conduct the conversation in. So understand my use of "thing" as part of the same effort. Start by presuming it is being as neutral as possible in terms of its ontic commitments.

Good luck with your creative mysticism - which you seem to have faith in without even being able to justify it as a method.

Meanwhile scientific reasoning - as defined by Peirce - started producing extraordinarily powerful insights from the moment the ancient Greeks first got going with it.

So no surprise that the "two dimensional polarity" of Metaphysical dialectics and hierarchical organisation are what folk stick with. It's success has been "unreasonably" spectacular. We know how and when the Universe began, how and when it will die.

The standard model of particle physics is based on the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking. Relativity likewise is derived from imposing a demand for general co-variance on nature - a global spacetime symmetry.

So it is a particular branch of maths that does the heavy lifting. And all physics reflects its essential natural logic.

You could consider symmetry and symmetry breaking as ur-physics rather than just a branch of maths. It is the "realty" that breathes fire into any equation, even QM. (And note an equation is a statement that encodes a symmetry, or unity, in terms of the components it can be broken into.)

In language evolution, the puzzle was why did we all not end up using sign language - hand gestures are naturally more expressive and quicker to learn than making croaky noises. The has been the fad of signing to your kids as it gets them communicating sooner.

But again, the restrictions of articulate speech - the way a serial flow of words is more restrictive on the forming of thought - is in fact its advantage. In filtering out more of the potential semantics, having to make a single step at a time really focuses the meaning that gets expressed. It makes every sentence special that you chose to say just that and not all the other things that could have been said (and at the same time too in a language with higher dimensionality).

As the dimensions of written language increase its functional repertoire should (I think) increase. — TheMadFool

Consider again the essential trade-off. Using SX's example, you could create a language for talking about organic chemistry using 3D plastic molecular models. And we already do. You can buy colour coded balls to represent the different atoms, little sticks to represent the atomic bonds. We can thus speak about organic chemistry in a fully dimensional fashion that conveys essential information better than flat drawings or serial verbal descriptions.

But being so physical, there is not a lot else you could ever talk about with this particular language.

On the other hand, a binary code able to express a pattern of Boolean switches has an expressiveness that is computationally universal. It is a language that can be used to talk about "anything" because it is not bound by the physicality of any thing.

A computer language can code for a 3D virtually reality display that simulates little plastic ball and stick models of molecules - and add animation to give the further dimension of action in time. But a second later, the same computer speaking the same binary code could be "talking" about any other 4D virtual reality one could possibly imagine.

So fewer actual dimensions for a language results in a greater power to then speak about (that is, reconstruct) any number of dimensions.

Note how if you really do what to imagine 4, 5, and n-dimensional worlds, you need to speak the even more pared down language of maths. Less is more because the simplest building blocks have the fewest constraints on their freedom of combination.

Wouldn't a 3D script/alphabet kind of release us from restrictions inherent in 2D scripts? — TheMadFool

I would question your presumption that extra dimensions would increase the information content of a message. Instead it works the other way round.

A code gains power by a constraint on dimensionality. DNA, neurones, speech and computation show that by the way they reduce syntactical structure to a one dimensional sequence of zero dimensional bits.

You can't get more minimal than binary code - a mark and its absence. Yet in representing the least amount of physics, it has the fewest limits when it comes to encoding physical states.

One has to step outside the world that one wants to describe. So reducing representation towards zero dimensionality is the natural trend, not seeking to increase it so that the message has to physically occupy more of the world.

As usual with pragmatism, the proof is in the pudding. The right ideas measurably work.

Did you have some other criteria in mind?

You might have missed it, but the Metaphysical hypothesis of Peircean semiotics is that existence is explained as "the general growth of reasonableness".

So epistemology is ontology. The triadic sign relation explains the development of the Cosmos as well as accounting for the human observer.

You lost me round about where we have to embrace the logic of solipsisms, regressions and the necessity of relations, but then beware of falling metaphysically into precisely the same triad.

Shome mishtake shurely?

So you accept the irreducible triadicity of relations ... and now want to change the subject. Sweet.

I just think your confidence is unwarranted as your theory isn't sufficient. — darthbarracuda

Again, just show how a relation can be reduced to less than three parts even under reductionism. So far you have failed to make your case.

So then describe to me how a relation could involve less that three different component parts or aspects. And in particular, a hierarchical relation.

Sure you can count three things. But none of these things are the same thing, nor can exist without the other two. So your reply is pretty flippant.

Physics gives us different intuitive ways of imagining parts. What do you think is different when you switch from a mental image of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum field excitations?

At least I know who Pattee agrees with.

I don't have to defend theistic versions of naturalistic metaphysics. But sure, the good would equate to notions of balance, equilbrium and optimality. Good is what works best to achieve the long run aim of a self-sustaining structure of flow.

And while you say the one was talking about a oneness of quality, that quality was still being quantified in a way that justified it as special.

If everything else is counted in terms of "many", then being counted as "one" is clearly an argument for how the one is to be measurably distinguished.

Again, it is simply a requirement of intelligibility that we form ideas of qualities in terms of quantities we might measure. The two aspects of epistemology go together automatically. The question then becomes, is this also the way we find reality to be organised?

So YOU can only understand a relation as another part. Yet how many things must you have to have a relation? I count a minimum of three ... even for the reductionist.

And if the job is to reduce complexity to something, surely it is simplicity. And the triadic modelling relation is the simplest possible story. Less than three things makes no sense in an ontology founded on dynamical relations.

What Pattee does, is take this right back to the most primitive form of messaging, molecular switching, and claims that this switching must have come into existence within the context of a pre-existing "language" — Metaphysician Undercover

You have it back to front. The primitive condition would have to be some kind of self activating network of connections - like an autocatalytic network.

So the point is that it would start with an accidental physical situation - like an ocean floor geothermal vent reducing sulphur in a biochemical series of steps. And then the physics would happen also to represent a simplest form of computational network - one that naturally generates cycling patterns that connect end states back to inputs.

In this pansemiotic fashion, the separate realms of Platonic form and material dynamics would be accidentally connected, the blue touch paper on biological development would be lit, and the rest becomes history.

So a language - in the sense Pattee employs - is about this happy conjunction of symbol and matter. The precondition is that computation is a form always in waiting. And that likewise, materiality could be patterned enough to accept yet further restrictions on its degrees of freedom.

So material dynamics is already organised by nature to run down biochemical gradients. But it then takes the addition of negentropic information - computational mechanism - to keep returning a cycle to its initial conditions, ready to repeat.

These conclusion, again, makes quality metaphysically prior to quantity — javra

Not really. It makes possibility prior to actuality. And if you then give pure possibility a name like Apeiron, you seem to be pointing to a quality - and saying I count just one of these.

That's why Plotinus did call his version "the one". The quality was named after its quantity, as it seemed it's most essential characteristic to him - the undivided that logically must stand at the end of a trail of divisions.

I know you call the relation irreducibly complex and triadic, but this means that existence is not basic, that there is "something more", "below" existence, that makes up the relation. A relation without parts makes no sense. — darthbarracuda

But that is just immediately denying the irreducible triadicity that you just cited.

To start searching for the monism that is "beneath"', or to start trying to decompose a relation into parts, is simply to go at a holistic answer in usual pig headed reductionist fashion.

Your complaint is that it is not coherent with your own ontic commitments. And we already know that.

So when you say that existence itself is a modelling relation, this is using an ontic phenomenon to explain all ontic phenomenons. It's just ontic all the way down. That doesn't make sense. — darthbarracuda

It doesn't make reductionist sense you mean. So ... great!

You have a lot more in common with speculative realism than you might think. — darthbarracuda

Well if Aristotle, Peirce, systems science, etc, hadn't already figured it out in far more complete fashion, then I guess I might be impressed by speculative realism.

If the apeiron is perfect symmetry, then it—in and of itself--would by definition be a non-quantity. It would thereby also be immeasurable. Despite this, it would yet be qualitatively different than anything non-symmetrical. As I understand it, to the extent that symmetry occurs within space and time, this same non-quantitative quality would also be present within realms of existence. — javra

Yep. A Metaphysical dichotomy like quantity~quality is not an either/or story but about mutually dependent origination. They would be the two complementary faces of a process of symmetry breaking or coming to be.

But then logically, as the grounding symmetry that could beget such a division, the Apeiron, or a state of vagueness, would have to lack both quality and quantity in any definite or actual sense. The Apeiron is the potential for both those things, but cant be considered as iteself one of those things in any determinate fashion.

So on the one hand we want to characterise vagueness in a way that is useful for reasoning. And the maths of symmetry is the obvious way to get started. So we can say the Apeiron has the quality of perfect symmetry ... and hey, the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking then allows us to talk about the degrees of any departure from that symmetry state. So in fact by talking of the quality of perfect symmetry, we also bring with that the tools to make justifiable measurements.

It's a negative space or constraints based argument. We define perfection in terms of the observable absence of imperfection. But it does mean that we can treat the Apeiron as a quality which we know how to quantify.

You are a funny one. Let me know when you realise that the only way out of a state of deep ignorance is to get reading.

Measurement is experience. But it grows in rational sophistication as we go from the firstness of naming some brute quality - exclaiming "I see red" - to the thirdness of some habit like reading numbers off the dial of an instrument.

Ontic investigations are inherently tied to a human-world relation. But surely the human-world relation is "not all there is". Surely we must go "beyond" the human-world interaction and investigate what the world is actually like independent of perceivers, — darthbarracuda

Well remember that Peircean pragmatism is distinguished by the fact that it does indeed generalise the notion of the perceived. So existence itself becomes a modelling relation - a kind of pansemiotic state of mind.

So pansemiosis is the ontic argument that there is no such thing as "unperceived existence". And thus it fits with quantum physics and it's demand for "someone" to collapse the wavefunction.

So your natural presumption - the standard reductionist position - is that reality could be observer independent. Acts of measurement don't disturb what they claim to exist.

But Peircean metaphysics says all that can happen is a separation of indeterminate possibility towards the complementary poles of the observer and the observables - the interpretation and its sign. It is a very different ontology.

And the proof of which ontology is right is in how fundamental science is turning out. Observeless worlds don't make much sense.

Given you admit you don't understand the first thing about holism or hierarchy theory, you show surprising confidence in your scattergun replies then.