They're regularities of those particulars. We're not positing something other. — Terrapin Station

Nominalism vs realism is a pretty archaic metaphysics on both sides of the debate these days. Science has moved the conversation on.

In particular, a pan-semiotic approach based on hierarchy theory accounts for the way that particularities have regularities due to downward acting constraints - downward acting constraints being the modern version of formal/final causes, and thus the modern version of a realism that believes in universals.

The key idea is that global constraints make the particulars - a system's degrees of freedom - what they are. The global regulative action shapes the parts by limiting their possible actions, forcing them to become the "kind of things" that must re-construct the globally-prevailing state of constraint ... the thing that makes them.

So it is a classic cybernetic feedback story. The whole shapes the parts so that the parts make the whole.

The key metaphysical shift is switching from thinking of existence as a mystery of how something appears from nothing to instead an account of how it is inevitable that regularity will arise to simplify variety.

If everything is possible, then everything is also going to have its reaction against everything else. Most of these reactions will cancel each other away, leaving only some simple general form of reaction that dominates as the steady equilibrium actuality.

And this is hardly an esoteric way of thinking. It is central to science from evolutionary theory to thermodynamics and quantum field theory. Variety is self-winnowing. Generic simplity is what the least action principle requires of any natural system.

So the particulars of any system are emergent. They are variety pared down to form a part. The regularity of particulars is due to the higher level fact that to exist means being made to fit.

Why is sand composed of billions of the same tiny grains? Is this really a mystery to anyone?

In regard to the OP, this has been my favourite analysis of Trump's political "philosophy" so far....

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/13/putin-paradigm-how-trump-will-rule/

Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself...Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality...

Both Trump and Putin use language primarily to communicate not facts or opinions but power: it’s not what the words mean that matters but who says them and when...

Then there is also this that explains the post truth phenomena ... algorithmic news feeds create self-reinforcing bubbles of opinion where data is mined for the facts which best support some subset of prejudices.....

But perhaps the most important insight came from Buzzfeed, which analyzed over a year’s worth of Trump’s tweets to figure out where the president-elect gets his information. Trump’s mental universe, as it turns out, is dominated by Breitbart...

It appears that Trump receives a view of the world that is vastly different from that not just of the “liberal bubble” but of the majority of Americans: on one hand, The New York Times seems not to figure in his world, but on the other hand, neither does network television and, it would seem, CNN.

There is no reason to think that Trump will broaden his world view once he is president. He has shown a notable lack of interest in daily intelligence briefings and in the State Department, whose expertise he has entirely ignored in his initial contacts with foreign leaders....

Which also speaks to a basic issue of ADHD in Trump's case ...

The real-estate magnate and the KGB agent share a peculiar trait: both seem to be lazy and uninterested in the world they want to dominate. Putin, as a former intelligence man himself, has not been known to shrug off intelligence briefings, but he prefers to take information in small doses, and in large type. He does not use a computer. With rare exceptions, he does not spend much time preparing for meetings, and he takes few meetings. But he makes grand public gestures, often ones that are at odds with established policy....

Trump, much like Putin, has neither views nor priorities: he has a thirst for power, and he has interests.
He is interested in the military, which is why he appoints generals. He took an interest in the secretary of state job in particular, taking the time to interview multiple candidates and maintaining an Apprentice-like intrigue around the process before finally announcing early Tuesday morning that he had chosen Tillerson. But he is not in fact interested in foreign policy as such, which is why the post of the American ambassador to the United Nations was handed out quickly, to Nikki Haley, the South Carolina governor who has no international experience and no history of supporting Trump...

And for those who don't like the fascist tag - which indeed smacks too much of Germanic dedication to a cause - then this seems accurate...

The best available definition of the kind of state Putin has built is provided by the Hungarian sociologist Bálint Magyar, who calls it a mafia state: it’s run like a family by a patriarch who distributes money, power, and favors. Magyar uses the word “family” to mean a clan of people with longstanding associations; it is important that one cannot enter the family unless invited—“adopted,” in Balint’s terminology—and one cannot leave the family voluntarily. In this model the family is built on loyalty, not blood relations, but Trump is bringing his literal family into the White House. By inviting a few hand-picked people into the areas that interest him personally, he may be creating a mafia state within a state. Like all mafias, this one is driven primarily by greed.

And then another dangerous ingredient of the mix is this ... a facist/romantic antipathy to intellectual social order (very appealing to those with ADHD or feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of modern society(...

Many of Trump’s cabinet picks have one thing in common: they are opposed to the very mission of the agencies they have been chosen to lead. For secretary for housing and urban development an opponent of public housing; for secretary of education a foe of public schools; for health and human services a Congressman who wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid; for labor secretary an executive who is opposed to labor rights, for energy secretary a former governor who wants to scrap the department of energy, and for attorney general, a senator who was once denied a judgeship, is an opponent of civil rights laws giving protection to minority groups. These appointments may or may not be broadly consistent with Trump’s vaguely expressed political views, but they are clearly consistent with the core belief he shares with many of his voters and with Putin: the government ruins everything.

So Trump could be summed up as a sloppy corporate raider.

The US government was a fat opportunity just lying around. He rode a public mood of dissatisfaction - quite legitimate given the level of inequality and loss of social capital in the US - and grabbed something which was on offer. However Trump isn't really interested in his latest acquisition any more than he ever really cares about the business side of his businesses. They are simply vehicles to fulfill a narcissistic sense of personal destiny.

So Trump will peck away at this and that crisis to keep his ADHD entertained, with no long term strategic intent in mind. The US will drift in confused fashion like all his investments as a result.

nstead we need to grow up and start talking about reducibility of the properties of water to the properties of its atoms that in most cases is fully reducible and therefore no need to talk about emergence. — miosim

So say we have you, and then standing next to you, a small vat of chemicals - a vat of carbon, water, nitrogen, phosphorous, etc - that is absolutely identical in atomic composition.

What is missing that is present In one but not the other?

Perhaps you don't meet many politicians in real life?

Or more likely, I'm not talking out of my arse.

Its nothing to do with cynicism and everything to do with psychological science. And I've never known a politician who wasn't behaving in very human fashion. So nothing you are saying is making sense.

I will agree this far about Trump: he has a certain something to his personality that other candidates don't. They, for lack of a better term, look weak compared to him. Not on certain policies, but just like weak people, or maybe sub-people, in that a politician doing their job can never really be a person. It's difficult to put into words. Trump creates an uncanny valley alongside other politicians who we realize are behaving quasi-humanly when they speak, whereas Trump as a celebrity out of politics seems inured to this and only has one register of speech he can't turn off. This might be what gives him the illusion of 'heart' in his speeches that even an Obama can't have, since an Obama still has to be a faux-folksy smiler, whereas Trump once in a while genuinely laughs, and sometimes in derision. Trump bullshits about facts, but Obama is a deeper bullshitter, a bullshitter about himself, he himself is entirely false as a constructed quasi-human being that faces the public, and when his masks slips, the impression I get is one of barely veiled disdain for the general public, whereas Trump's 'true self' seems to revolve around living large and doing whatever he wants and being the big man. — The Great Whatever

What guff. Romanticism is the go-to justification of the fascist. And politics is a social construction, so of course a skilled politician is going to be presenting a mask to match the occasion.

The very idea that people have "true selves" is where your attempted psychoanalysis goes wrong.

Is fascism being used here as a term of political philosophy, or is it being used as a pejorative? — The Great Whatever

Authoritarian, paternalistic, xenophobic, rabble rousing, anti-intellectual ... not really spotting the fascist boxes that Trump's not ticking.

I have been talking about real possibilities as an inexhaustible continuum of potential individuals - general, not particular. Do you disagree? — aletheist

I agree in that a continuum is the continuity of a habit or global constraint.

But a wrinkle may be that I'm avoiding treating a continuum as causally generative. So rather than creating possibilities - like a line producing always more points - it is all about suppressing vagueness, with crisp possibility being then the degrees of freedom that get left over.

So if the continuum simply generated the points that populate or construct the line, then where is the secondness, where is the reaction? The points are being imagined as static existents - at which point the reductionist will just say forget all the other causal apparatus and just take the points as real, treat the line an emergent fiction.

But I am stressing that the nature of the point is open ended. It is characterised only in terms of what about its spontaneity or tychism is actually constrained.

Of course in geometry, there is nothing more constrained than a zero dimensional point. Except it then has the open ended inertial freedoms of Newtonian mechanics - specifically the freedoms to translate and rotate.

So rather than calling the continuum inexhaustible - which suggest it is itself the generator of endless distinction - I would stress that it is instead a limit, and quite exhaustible. It can't restrict what is not within its scope. And what is unrestricted is the truly free.

Well, you might state it like that, what lies between the actual and non-actual is the possible. But that's simplistic, and incorrect, as the possible is the non-actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, this way of thinking is only true if you are locked into standard issue reductionism. In a holist, four cause, view of causality, existence becomes self organising development.

So we begin with a vagueness - everything is possible, anything might be the case. And yet embedded in that is the further constraint that most of these possibilities are in fact going to be contradictory and so cancel each other out.

Thus given an initial condition where everything is possible, that most general possible state is already going to suppress the actualisation of most of that possibility.

If I can shift a foot left just as easily as I can shift a foot right, then freely doing both will immediately cancel each shift, leaving me not able to move at all in effect.

So possibility is only actual when it meets the general constraint of being inteligible. It has to pass the test of not being self contradictory. Or rather, not being self cancelling in regards to some more general condition or constraint.

This is why you need a metaphysics that can distinguishes the two classes of potentiality - the possible vs the vague.

The vague is that state of everythingness to which the law of non contradiction fails to apply. In vagueness, there is no possibility that is not intelligible - because, symmetrically, there is also nothing to rule a possibility intelligible.

But a real possibility is a degree of freedom shaped by a context. It is something that actually could happen, in that it's happening is not already ruled self-defeating.

What then, distinguishes between a real possibility and an unreal one. It cannot be something real, nor can it be unreal, because it has to create a boundary between these two. In your system of definitions, what creates that boundary between a real and an unreal possibility? — Metaphysician Undercover

A real possibility is an intelligible, or non contradictory, particular. So it speaks to the reality of constraints or generals. A real possibility is what the general conditions of regularity allow - or more accurately, can't forbid.

Yeah. The first rule of Metaphysical club is that you never talk about Metaphysical Club.

A few of the actual top guys missing. Aristotle makes it on, but not Anaximander or Peirce. Heraclitus should get a mention. And no atomists??

I think that Peirce would disagree. He categorized all brute facts of existence under 2ns, but all generals under 1ns (qualities) and especially 3ns (regularities). — aletheist

Again, I used "brute fact" in it is usual philosophical sense. And it would also apply in the Peircean sense because my point is that laws, symmetries and other notions of thirds are just as much something human minds will run smack into as examples of secondness, like an actual brick wall.

So mathematical-strength regularities like circles are as resistant to our efforts to think them otherwise as the stone we attempt to kick. Although the modes of that encounter may be more rationalist in one, more empirical in the other.

To clarify - universals or generals are not real because they themselves are brute or objective facts of nature, but because they govern the brute or objective facts of nature. Right? — aletheist

My point - in response to mtheory largely - was that they are as much a brute fact of existence as the material particulars which they govern.

But then I am arguing for a process ontology and so there aren't really any brute facts of existence anyway. Everything is emergent.

So if you are thinking of the Peircean position on real/existing, then I would reserve the term, existence, to mean substantial form.

In this sense, any potential aggregate of possible points that are all in the same plane and equidistant from any other single point is a real circle. — aletheist

Yep. Ideals like perfect circles, or the principle of relativity, represent bounding limits. They are as real as it gets in terms of bounding material actuality. They are continuums in the sense of being complete symmetry states with no brokenness.

So they show how "reality" is dichotomous. Nature has to be divided or separated in this actual way to have the possibility of being.

If there is be material action, some kind of process, then its bounding limits are also just as real, but real in the complementary sense of being the continua or symmetry state that is the formal limit on that materiality.

So if the criteria for being real is that we are encountering some brute or objective fact of nature, then universals or generals are real as limits on being. Action - being symmetry breaking - has to have a real symmetry that it breaks.

It is the assumption that there is an objective reality. — m-theory

It is a rational hypothesis about the nature of reality. We presume - because of the success of earlier models - that the reality is best described in terms of symmetry and symmetry breaking.

Thus we eventually elevate these ideas to the level of general principles. We insist on the most general possible symmetry with the principle of relativity just as we do with the least action principle as the most general description of symmetry breaking.

We hardly have to presume the existence of an objective reality. Being a modeller makes no sense except as purposeful interaction between a self and a world.

But being a modeller also means accepting we only form self-interested understandings of that world.

So you are going too far if you think that minds somehow reflect reality in some true fashion. As I say, you are leaving out the self-interested reasons of the modeller, as well as the modeller's desire for modelling efficiency.

So sure, the principle of relativity is a useful pragmatic maxim. And it is pretty true of the reality in that assuming the Universe is organised by its symmetries and symmetry breakings has turned out to be both a rationally intelligible idea, and one that has kept delivering results.

But the "objective" world could still be different. That is highly unlikely, yet also a possibility. So we can't assume our assumptions to be objectively true. It is core to the epistemology of science that all belief is provisional.

Relativity is a theory precisely because it could be violated. And it is especially celebrated as a theory because the equations can fit on a t shirt.

So I'm failing to see your point.

What results are produced by the model that we cannot know what is really real?
Does this foundational assumption produce any results?
Does it unify different theories under a single model or produce better predictions than the models that presume the principle of relativity? — m-theory

Given that all of science is conducted under this kind of pragmatism, yes, it has produced results.

Yes, but what does this belief contribute?

What breakthroughs has it lead to?

Also I pointed out that if we can't know what is real because everything is a mind artifact then we can't know that those artifacts don't model reality accurately. — m-theory

The important contribution this makes in modelling theory is that it makes it clear that models involve a reduction in information. If our goal is to make a sketch that captures the essence of a person or scene, the best artist is the one that can do so in the fewest and simplest strokes.

So the "accuracy" is not about the faithful reproduction of all the available information. That is a simulation rather than a model. Instead, what is "accurate" is the reliabilty with which a model allows the world to be traversed in terms of a purpose.

So epistemically, the purpose shaping the modelling relation is itself subjectively separate from the world. And then the relationship has the goal of being efficient - reducing the information involved to the bare minimum for the sake of reliable habit. The model wants to minimise its need for any physical interaction with the world - a single act of measurement to get the equations rolling is ideal.

The world then is whatever it is - some set of constraints that are reliably encountered.

Thanks for your appreciation.

Fodor's claim is understood as which Mentalese is prior to natural languages. English sentences have no meaning, but Mentalese gives meaning to them. — mosesquine

The problem with this kind of old fashioned cognitivism is that it is based on a simplistic computational model of mind and reasoning where states of information are mapped to states of information.

The idea is that - just as with a mechanical computer or Turing machine - input arrives, it gets crunched, an output state is displayed. So thought and conciousness is seen as data processing that results in states of representation ... setting up the homuncular question of who gets to see, understand and consciously experience these output states?

The best counter position to this computationalism is an enactive or ecological view of the mind/brain, especially when fleshed out by a biosemiotic understanding of language use.

Basically it starts with an inversion of computationalism. Instead of minds converting inputs to outputs, minds begin by predicting their output state and using that to ignore as much input as possible.

If you already know that the door knob isn't squishy jelly, the door swings away from you rather than slides up into the roof space, and beyond is the bedroom you've seen a million times rather than the far side of the moon or something else unpredictable, then you can ignore pretty much everything to get from a to b. You filter the world in a way that only leaves a tiny residue for a secondary, more intense, attentional processing.

So it starts with a back to front logic. The brain begins in a state of representation - a representation of the world already being ignored and handled automatically in a flow of action.

In terms of computation, it is a forward modelling or constraints based process. A case of Bayesian inference. The brain is looking at the word in terms of its predictable regularities or signs. By filtering out the noise of the world in predictive fashion, signal is produced automatically as "that which wasn't so predictable".

If you are wandering in the woods, you aren't really taking in the tres and leaves. They become an averaged, expectable, flow of sensation. But a sudden animal like movement or noise will catch your attention. And any bark, squeak or squawk will really pop out as a sign of something demanding closer attentional focus - an effort to constrain your resulting uncertainty by seeking further information.

So you don't need mentalese to construct chains of thought. The brain is going to have a natural flow of predictions that then focus attention on the unexpected. And that focus in turn only has to reduce future states of uncertainty.

A bird squawk in the forest may be dismissed as soon as it is understood as a sign of what it further predicts. But a bark may create ongoing uncertainty.

Anyway, the first thing is to turn the basic notion of information processing on its head, Brains operate as uncertainty minimising devices. They don't start with nothing and build up to something. They start with a well founded guess and wait for the world to force an adjustment. And even the adjustments come fast and easy if the world is being read in terms of signs for which there are already established habits of action.

If a dog sees its owner make a move to put on his shoes, it may recognise the sign that spells walkies.

Which brings us to language and how it functions as a further level of syntactically structured constraints on human thought processes.

The animal brain is designed to work in the flow of the moment, seamlessly predicting its world by reading the available signs and so always arriving at a state of mind that has minimal uncertainty.

But words can act as symbols - a higher, more abstract and spatiotemporally displaced, level of sign than indexical or iconic signs. So words can be used to produce constrained states of mind that are available "off line", or freely at any place or time.

If I mention "that koala bear the size of a buffalo swinging on a palm tree", then you (and I) can form an anticipatory image of such a thing. Suddenly it would be a small surprise to actually be in the presence of such an experience. Only details would differ - like the facial expression of the giant koala as it swings, or the amount the palm tree bends.

So the point is that an anticipatory model of brain computation does most of the heavy lifting. You don't need a mentalese that pre-computes the thoughts that then get translated into overt speech. There just is no such input/output computation going on. Instead, like any animal, we can do a great job of predicting the world and reacting appropriately on an uncertainty minimising basis.

And then along comes the secondary skill of structured language which does have a computation-like grammatical structure. On top of a feedforward mind, we impose a cultural habit of explaining our thoughts in logical, sequential, fashion. We imposed a causal tale of subjects, objects and verbs - short tales of who did what to whom - on the events of the world.

So the brain computes in one direction. Language then encodes computation in the opposite direction. It allows us to do the something new of constructing piece by piece, word by word, a reasoned chain of thought or state of mental imagery in a suitably trained mind.

So talk of mentalese sort of intuitively gets at the fact that there is a rightful brain level of "computation" going on. There is thought separate from the words.

But the cognitivism or representationalism of Fodor's era got it utterly wrong in thinking the brain was an input crunching machine. The cognitivists rejected the connectionists and neural networkers who argued the brain instead had this feed forward, Bayesian reasoning, design.

But then the connectionists were weak on the difference that language makes. So it takes a full modern biosemiotic approach to the issues to get both sides of this story tied together.

There are plenty of examples in nature where abstractions occur.

Golden ratio, fibonacci sequence, and an animal gives birth to a litter of 7. — m-theory

The first two are proper constants of nature - nature being ultimately dissipative or growth based processes.

To call them abstractions is misleading as the ratios involved could not be more physically real as limits on rates.

The 7 in a litter is a stochastic process so the number is not special in a universal sense. It is just related to some particular genetic constraint.

Good luck with your tale of infinite regress.

And who commands/institutionalises the individual commanders. Cmon, this ain't so hard.

Yep.

The point though, is that intention is the property of the individuals, it does not come "from the whole", it comes from the individual parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confusing what was a simple point.

Under hierarchy theory, the whole is more than the sum of its parts because it has the power to make the parts less than what they were. The whole constrains the parts with a common purpose and this limits the freedoms they may have "enjoyed".

If you believe this is not how armies are, then you must have no clue about military life. Why do you think boot camps were invented? To aid recruits in discovering their truest selves? ;)

The army's capacity to "turn people" into "uniform components" is dependent on the willingness of the individual to be turned this way. — Metaphysician Undercover

It may help if the individuals don't actively resist. But the army is what has the idea of what it needs the individuals to be. Point one. And the reduction in behavioural scope shows how components are created by a selective force subtracting degrees of freedom. Point two.

Following your example then, if it is true that wholes actually "shape those parts to serve higher order purposes" they must do this through the intention of the part. — Metaphysician Undercover

But the intention comes from the whole and it's common goal, as you just agreed. So the most you can argue for is a lack of effective resistance - some other goal in play. Materials only need to be pliable.

One could believe anything constrained by demands for consistency, too. — Terrapin Station

And if one's beliefs are constrained by empirical correspondence AND rational coherence, then one has truly arrived at the pragmatist's nirvana of it getting as it good as it gets.

Not everyone has the same views on what's consistent, and folks can rationalize any conceivable belief. — Terrapin Station

Yep. You need empirical test too. But logical coherence is a good place to start.

No--I don't think it would make any difference if space and time were discrete rather than continuous. — Terrapin Station

Being unconstrained by any demand for consistency, one can indeed claim to believe anything.

the form of the particular is the essential properties as well as all the accidentals. — Metaphysician Undercover

But my constraints approach to form would simplify this so that particular forms are simply more constrained versions of general forms. So even a particular form is "all essence". And then accidents are simply aspects of form which are a matter of indifference. They are "particulars" that don't particularly matter.

So you in fact get the largest number of possible accidentals under the most general forms. Generality can afford to be the least fussy - by inductive definition.

That is why the most general law or telos of nature - the second law of thermodynamics - winds up being the "law of the accidental". It is all about randomness and disorder.

Particular forms have to be the most particular, by contrast. A crucifix is a particular form. It can still vary a fair bit but you have to have at least two lines crossing at about a right angle.

So all form is tolerant of accidents to some degree. And particularity arises from generality by narrowing the definition of the accidental - making it also more particular. Or crisper.

I don't think this "triadic/development" is the right direction. What you propose only reinforces the designated status of matter (potential) as unintelligible. it asserts the position of the unintelligible (matter) as more fundamental than the intelligible, placing it out of reach of the intellec — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet it contradicts dialectical reasoning to not accept that there must be the unintelligible for there to be the intelligible. It can make no sense to claim the one except in the grounding presence of its other. So as soon as you commit to crisp intelligibility, you are committed to its dichotomous other - vague unintelligibility - as a necessity.

And that's great because it explains the mysterious nature of matter as naked potential. Material cause ends up being complete, yet undirected, action. Just limitless fluctuation. Then material cause becomes efficient cause when it's chaotic dynanism becomes directed, or in-formed.

Efficient cause thus is the material cause made substantial - concrete and crisp in its identity. Now it is transformed into the kind of static stuff that reliably does things.

Likewise, we have the same move from final to formal cause. Finality is a pure action principle - a vague desire. It may be all direction, in contrast to material cause, but it lacks any means as yet. Finality needs to be cashed out in the shape of some formal cause, some organised and enduring and anti-chaotic structure.

So the deepest causes - the material potential and the telic potential - are both active or dynamical. Then they cash out as static enduring substantial actuality by resulting in in-formed matter (efficient cause) and en-mattered purpose (formal cause).

This will bring matter (potential) out from the designation of vagueness, the apeiron, into the category of intelligible. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you need vagueness to make its inverse an intelligible possibility. The difficulty is then to represent this in some fundamental metaphysical framework.

I've just accounted for it with the familiar four causes organicism of Aristotle. Peirce offers an even more compact representation in his triadic sign relation, or semiotic.

Now in this view we have the three things of vague potential, definite reaction, and constraining habit. You get an actual developmental account of how substantial being occurs.

But it is very densely packed. And it requires familiarity with the new category of the vague~crisp, as well as an understanding of formal and final cause as constraints in a system, not constructive degrees of freedom.

And I should add that Peirce also brings in yet another foundational dichotomy in terms of matter~sign. So at the level of substantial actuality, he discovers the difference that divides the realms of the physical and the mental, the real and the fictive, the entropic and the negentropic.

It is all a bunch of dichotomies. And a triadic metaphysics is the only way to "rotate" them so they map to each other in a completely self consistent fashion.

An entertainingly blunt assessment of this kind of "strict individualism" is www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/o'hara/csp-plato.htm

It talks of how Peirce viewed Plato's take on universals - how the late Plato was foreshadowing the mature Peircean understanding. :)

Or are there - as I would see it - different levels of abstraction appropriate to different forms of analysis, without the supposed component parts being in some way 'superior' or 'more fundamental'? — mcdoodle

Yep. And a telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.

Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

It seems to me that the concept of 'elementary particle' can't really be sustained any more. The original idea of the atom was literally an 'indivisible particle', but I think it's really been rendered untenable by physics itself; fields are now said to be fundamental — Wayfarer

Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.

That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.

Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.

Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.

The various difficulties being raised disappear if you treat finality as a global constraint. To have a goal is to accept a constraint towards which all material and efficient actions must tend.

As a person, it is clear enough that to have the intention of winning the championship is the cause of of some collection of steps I take (or actions, like getting drunk, that I avoid). And the goal has to be clearly foreseen to be effective as a general constraint on my actions.

But finality as a causative constraint is then also something that can be unintentionally accepted. It doesn't have to be a conscious and "freely" chosen thing. Animals follow evolutionary goals that have become embedded in the habits of their genetics. Weather patterns follow thermodynamic goals that are meet the least action principle of entropic material systems.

So telos simply is a way to talk about the reality of constraints as causes.

Because of the great pragmatic success of classical mechanics - treating nature as a reductionist "machine", a blind web of deterministic cause and effect - we find it very easy to accept the notion of causation as nominalistic construction. You take a bunch of Lego bits and build them up into something - the form and purpose of that something being now an arbitrary whim of the human mind.

But through biology especially, we can see that nature is organic. It has a developmental character based on all four of Aristotle's causes - the two upwardly constructive ones of material and efficient cause, balanced by the two downwardly constraining ones of forrmal and final cause.

So the notion of purpose can be generalised to nature by pointing out that nature does serve generalised purposes. And having those purposes results in necessary forms - the ones best designed to serve then. That understanding is now central to modern physics. It is why thermodynamics and the physics of dissipative structure has moved to centre stage as folk try to work out a final theory to unite the dichotomy of quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics.

Then as to which comes first, which comes second, the whole discussion becomes rather moot if time itself has to be re-thought to make it possible to unify physics.

In a developmental view of the situation - where the trajectory is not so much from the past to the future as from the vague to the crisp - then both existence and essence, both the "material" constructive causes and the "formal" constraining causes, start vague and develop strength as the way they must work together to produce something stable - like a Cosmos - comes into focus.

So neither is first or last. Both mutually co-arise (to pinch the Buddhist term).

Yet also, because the constructive causes are the most local or smallest in terms of spatiotemporal scale, they seem to become established first. They are crisply existent "from the get-go" - even if they happen to be contextless fluctuations or one-off dyadic reactions (Peirce's firstness and secondness) when they first appear.

Then it takes longer for the constraining causes - the forms and the telos - to emerge into view because they are the long-run or global states of being. The essences actually have to develop historically, even if retrospectively, they will be seen as always having to have been a necessary result.

So the paradox is that finality has to undergo an actual history to actually be real in the end. But that end was always immanent - the only real possibility at the start.

Didn't Hegel make that kind of argument for God and the Cosmos - there had to be a journey via "our" imperfection for there to be then the "other" of a heavenly perfection?

So it is a boot-strapping cosmology which Peirce did an even better job on. And now we can appreciate its physical truth as we come to understand the Cosmos as beginning in the chaos of a quantum foam state, the Big Bang, and running down the entropic hill to arrive at its super-dissipated, crisply final, outcome, the infinitely cold and vast Heat Death.

The One can be pretty much be read as the argument for vagueness or Apeiron as the foundation for dichotomous or dialectical being.

For contrarieties to constitute existence, then there must be some deeper symmetry state that they break. The dialogue makes that (triadic/developmental) argument. For there to be flux and stasis, etc, there must be a "prior" state that is neither yet has the potential to be so divided.

And note that the quandaries presented in Parmenides were resolved in the late Sophist in fully triadic fashion. Both sameness and difference, generality and particularity, have being. Dichotomies are separations towards mutually logical limits and so where there is distinctive being, it is the result of a successful process of division. Being needs the emergence of the two ends that thus bound a concrete spectrum of possibility.

It is transparent that you are adopting the tactic of wasting my time by demanding definitions of the obvious. Respond to my original point - that wiki page is all you need.

So you didn't mean the usual Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities? :-}

Well we got there in the end. You understand my point. So what was your clear and precise reply?

If you had in mind Planck length or Planck temperature or "the Planck scale," you know what might be a clearer way of communicating that? If you'd write "Planck length," "Planck temperature," or "the Planck scale." — Terrapin Station

Sorry. I was fooled by your pretence at having some familiarity with the topic in question.

So what causes the experience of motion if it isn't necessarily actual motion?