Intelligible on the other hand you could claim has - it follows a logical structure. — Agustino

Intelligible is something that makes sense according to the prevailing worldview/culture - in other words, an action that others can understand. — Agustino

I agree that your definitions are too fuzzy. Intelligible means logical structure to me. It is not about being in accordance with custom. It only make sense to others because it is rational.

But anyway, the issue seems to be that creative intelligence is clearly something more than just "pure intelligibility". Reasoning is not merely computation.

And we can see this in the computer chess example.

Intelligence is the ability to recognise and exploit intelligible patterns - discover the generalities that predict the particular.

A computer is not really being intelligent if it is merely making an exhaustive search of every possible combination of moves to find the winning choice. To be like the human player, it would have to start to generalise in a fashion that would allow it to constrain its play so that it is limiting its possibility of making bad moves.

The need is to restrict the patterns of the pieces so they leave the player in "a strong position" - one that, in complementary fashion, steadily reduces the options of the opponent until s/he only has bad ones.

It is impossible to "figure everything out" - especially in an inherently unpredictable world. And even in the highly regulated and predictable world of a board game, it is more efficient to limit your scope for mistakes. while attempting to force your opponent into a realm where there can only be "mistakes".

It is just the same on the tennis court or any other sport. You want to move your opponent into places where all the choices are weak ones.

So you seem to getting at the point that intelligence is not strictly intelligible because reality offers always a near infinite variety of "intelligible" paths. If you focus on trying to predict particulars, that is in fact cognitively quite dumb. The better approach is to work to constrain uncertainty. Do that, and eventually the smart path is going to pop out, all the less smart options having been filtered away.

Of course that still leaves room for the smart flashes of insight in which a pattern of connections can suddenly be recognised.

But insight always comes to the prepared mind, as any psychological study of creativity shows. Hard work constrains the possibilities. Then it becomes easy work to make the last step.

I would agree that outside of Pragmatism - which of course argues for abductive reasoning - philosophy shows a poor understanding of this constraints-based approach to reasoning or problem solving.

Philosophy is largely either analytic (in love with deduction and suspicious of induction), or continental (in love with romanticism and thus itself). ;)

Analysis is a good thing. It is a mode of thought that is great for producing machines like computers. But life and mind have a holistic or Bayesian approach to reasoning that is based on the ability to constrain possibility in fruitful fashion.

Logical structure is great for churning out concrete possibilities. A computer is a machine for generating every conceivable alternative.

But the world already has an over-abundance of possibilities. Real intelligence is about reducing them by applying generalisations. To locate answers, we just need to trap them into some tight enough corner.

You can be authentic as an individual because you hold a unique set of values. No two people will hold all of the same values. — aporiap

And yet still that variation would be measured in terms of cultural norms? So there has to be something collective there as the backdrop against which you can then claim to find (pretty minor) variation.

I think striving to act in accord with what you truly, viscerally feel or believe is part of authenticity as well. — aporiap

That's the traditional romantic notion of selfhood. And the problem is that it is very easy to change your "visceral" reaction by reframing whatever it is you happen to be thinking about.

You can go from finding a squawking baby "repulsive" to "cute" just by viewing it with a different set of cultural attitudes. So to rely on visceral responses is dangerous. Feelings follow rather too easily in the wake of how you construct some situation.

Is the wind in your face spendidly bracing or nagginaly annoying? Is that kitsch art marvellously ironic or dreadfully uninspired?

You can find authenticity in your visceral responses because they always simply go along with whatever habits of thought you have developed via socialisation.

If a person asks your opinion on how they are performing or how they are dressed or some current event or other subject-matter, you respond with what you honestly feel is correct or true. You don't modify it because your opinion may be offensive or controversial, etc. — aporiap

So choosing to be nice is inauthentic?

You see the problem. If you are trying to lock yourself into some single mode of operation - the search for the "real you" - you lose all the natural complexity of being a self within a community. It is a recipe for rigidity, not creativity.

This is compromising! I think we certainly have to balance -- but that balance would need to take into account our own interests and values. — aporiap

Most people have way more personal freedom than they will ever know what to do with these days. Folk get by on minimal compromise. And they are mostly not that happy because of it.

What I'm trying to say is that living in a more 'stable state' doesn't necessarily mean you have to transcend sociocultural limits. It just means you have to find a niche/web-of-relations that better aligns with your own values. — aporiap

That's why people are so stressed in modern life. Everything is changing and developing over all scales. It is hard to find a stable backdrop against which "the self" can find its "authenticity". Kids can't even decide their sexuality anymore in simple terms.

The search for personal meaning made some kind of existential sense 100 years ago when an industrial/military society created a lot of hard restrictions. But we are in a completely different era now, with different issues.

There is more freedom and creativity, and thus personal uncertainty, than most can cope with. Hence Trump. People yearn for brutal simplicity even if it is a dangerous pretence.

Striking a balance may involve doing what you enjoy doing in certain contexts (i.e. within the context of a job or career), but that doesn't mean you're sacrificing your interests for the sake of something else. — aporiap

But in what sense is modern culture forbidding you to pursue your own interests? Isn't it instead telling everyone to get off their arse and do their own thing?

So the Romantic dream is what modern culture aims to offer. But it has its predictable consequences. Things fall apart if everyone is too busy striving to be individual.

How to achieve balance in such a slippery world is the new philosophical question. Existentialism is old hat.

No, I think they exist but they have be predicate-able. To me, it doesn't even make any sense to talk of something that has no discernible nature but somehow is causally relevant. — darthbarracuda

So you don't think that things can be predicated of formal and final causes?

And the Peircean distinction between real and existence seems to have gone over your head.

Peirce says:

"I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.”

"I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched."

So to exist covers the usual material case of substantial being. And to be real covers the usual notion of universals.

Why can't we say that there are some properties that exist thanks to a history and some properties just are, brute fact? Saying that a "principle" exists and yet denying that abstract transcendental properties exist seems like word play. — darthbarracuda

Good job I don't say principles "exist". Or that they are "brute facts".

And saying that about properties would be inconsistent too.

You realize this is, as of now, an unjustified opinion? — darthbarracuda

Sigh...

You said yourself that there are some persistent basic ingredients — darthbarracuda

Well, only the one. Apeiron. Or however we would best understand that appeal to material principle in our best physicalist theories.

I agree there is an issue here. I'm the first to point it out when ontic structural realism is raised, for example. String theory and quantum field theory have precisely that problem - the material action to breath life into the formal descriptions (of symmetries and symmetry breakings) do still have to be inserted by hand.

But the whole point - following triadic hylomorphism - is that whatever the material principle is, it can't be itself substantial in the kind of sense you have in mind. It can't already possess properties, as positive properties are the product of formal causes, or constraints.

Then what would you consider him to be? — darthbarracuda

A mystic. A pseudo philosopher.

Yet this becomes a monism. You reduce substance to process, in the same way Aristotle would reduce process to substance. — darthbarracuda

A "monism" that is irreducibly complex in being a triadic process.

So, the fact that you think beauty, goodness and truth can best be modeled in physicalist terms ... cannot ever be more than a person belief that is not demonstrably true. — John

Well that's hardly a problem given that universal scepticism is no longer an issue once you have already given up the pipedream of "demonstrable truth".

I happy with states of belief that are open to falsification while demonstrably minimising uncertainty. We seem to be uncovering the secrets of existence at an exponential rate doing that.

Remind me of some actual question that is in fact being begged.

You might not like the answers that physicalism gives when used as a framework to analyse beauty, good and truth, for example. But that's another matter.

And again, those physicalist universals can tested because they are mathematical-strength concepts. They are not vague ideas that are "not even wrong".

So you complain about the self-contained strength of my approach. Yet that is why it is epistemically better. It does make an argument that actually could be wrong when we test it against reality.

Well it all depends on how you think about phenomenological observation. It's always going to come down to the question of whether you prefer one set of presuppositions or another. — John

Yeah. And I have reasons to prefer one set of presuppositions. They are the ones that happen to be demonstrably better at making phenomenological predictions.

If something exists, and if this something can be known to us, then it must be able to be predicated upon. The predicates latch on to properties, or at least describe a collection of simpler properties. — darthbarracuda

I'm not getting your difficulty. Once things start to get stabilised, they become the platform for further development. Its hierarchy theory 101.

So after the Big Bang, the bath of radiation cools enough and massive, slower than light, particles emerge. A lucky asymmetry means that nearly all of the negative anti-protons have gone, likewise nearll all of the positive anti-electrons. That lets you have some persistent basic ingredients - oppositely charged electrons and protons. From there, you can get stellar physics and planetary chemisty.

So the emergence of complex materiality - stuff with properties - is no big deal at all. What is a big deal is getting behind that to the story of how anything could emerge to start the story in the first place.

Well cause I remember sometime in the past you thought people like Whitehead were too extreme in their metaphysics and that there had to be a middle ground between process and substance. — darthbarracuda

People call Whitehead a process philosopher. I don't. I am arguing pansemiotics, not panpsychism.

And you don't need a middle ground between substance and process as the argument is that substantial being is a process.

Being a triadic or hierarchical metaphysics, the middle ground is what you get automatically. When constraints interact with freedoms, something arises as the persistent equilibrium balance of that action. And we call that "something" things like substantial being, particularity, or actuality.

You said they were similar to Plato's realm of ideas - are they "less real" than the concrete stuff we experience everyday? — darthbarracuda

One can only face palm at a comment like this. Does this everyday concrete stuff exist, or is it simply how we construct our experience of it?

I thought you didn't like the binary between substance and process. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean? I'm saying substantial being is a process. And that is opposed to the view that substance has fundamental existence rather than pragmatic persistence.

Right, I agree. There are no such things as enduring objects — darthbarracuda

Great.

In truth, I think the only proper atheistic response to theology ought to be sheer indifference, right up to the point where it starts making claims about naturalism or the sciences. — StreetlightX

I agree. And I'm even quite sympathetic of theism to the degree it puts forward a coherent opposition to Scientism and hardline reductionism.

Religious philosophers were the early leaders in the revival of Peircean scholarship for example. It is quite possible for theists to be reasonable people.

Given physical principles derive from phenomenological observables, it is pretty obvious which way round things in fact arose epistemically.

So physical principles ARE used to analyse the Platonic triad. Cool.

But also because you use a framework to explain the same framework. Universals exist, because symmetry is a universal. — darthbarracuda

Where did I make that circular argument?

You need to explain why universals have to exist without just ignoring the actual question — darthbarracuda

I tried instead to show you why your "actual question" doesn't even make sense in my holist and pansemiotic paradigm. And I mention infodynamics as the particular current scientific project that takes a broadly Peircean metaphysics seriously.

So it would be circular for a metaphysics to try to account for dynamical particulars in terms of "just more dynamics". A semiotic approach to metaphysics is different precisely because it accounts for universals in terms of sign relations. The realm of symbols - or informational constraints - gives the "universals" a real place to exist, much like Plato's realm of ideas. The difference is that this informational aspect of existence is thoroughly physicalist and doesn't need the mind or ideas to be a second kind of substantial being.

And I hardly need point out again that actual physics is undergoing just this entropic or information theoretic revolution. Event horizons - as informational limits - are so "real" that they structure the cosmos and may even account for forces like gravity. It is bit, etc.

So for a start, I have a positive thesis about the physical basis for "the existence of universals". Modern physics is cashing out Peirce's notion that the cosmos is the self-organised product of a triadic sign relation.

Whoosh. I hear the noise of words flying right over your head again. But you can hardly claim to be saying anything interesting about metaphysics these days if you throw up your hands in horror when someone mentions holographic bounds and least action principles.

And then another important point is that Peircean realism would not regard the particular as particularly "existent" either. Like the quasi-particles of condensed matter physics, or the actual particles of the standard model, the uncuttable atoms of material existence turn out to be merely the excitations or localised frustrations of a field.

So as it says on the bottle, this is process philosophy. And both the particular and the universal are things that only "exist" in the sense of being features of processes.

The best way to ontologise that view is then - as Peirce did - to divide reality into constraints and freedoms. Universals are the contextual reality. They are the general habits, the global tendencies. And particulars are the events that are regularly produced, the outcomes that may share family similarities but also express an irreducible spontaneity or indeterminism.

So in a church, there is a fairly fixed propensity to burst into prayer. The context shapes the behaviour. And if for some reason the prayers begin to cease, the church is no longer really a church. The mutual relation between the universal and the particular is what gives birth to the physical whole. If that reciprocal interaction falters, then the whole dynamical structure fades away again.

Reality is the process of becoming real. And reality is characterised by its general stablity - its long-run, self-sustaining, dynamical equilibrium. To exist is really just to persist in a way where continuing change does not result in significant change.

And that kind of reality, that kind of existence, is now something we have exact scientific models for. Dissipative structure theory (as the next step along from "far from equilibrium" thermodynamics) has given us metaphysics we can go out and measure.

To call that huge advance in human understanding "esoteric" is simply to be ignorant of modern progress.

The question is, how much of Aristoteleanism remains without a 'first cause'? If you retain some notion of telos then indeed many of the issues around reductionism are ameliorated, but I can't see how to square that with the idea that life is really just a heat sink (or a way of maximising entropy), or for that matter with a lot of current thinking in evolutionary biology. — Wayfarer

It's the scholastics who need that first cause. And also some high flown purpose for human existence. So we can park those prejudices one side,

The supernatural is also excluded in the sense of an appeal to the external or transcendent. Naturalism is an ontic commitment to immanence or bootstrapping existence.

Review of Pierce and the Threat of Nominalism Notre Dame Reviews. — Wayfarer

Have you got some spellchecker that keeps insist on misspelling Peirce's name? (It rhymes with purse.)

From the various musings on the 'naturalness problem in physics' which is closely related to, or might be simply a perspective on, the 'fine-tuning problem'. That is, the universe has just those attributes that are required for stars, matter and living things to form. Those constants can't themselves be explained - hence the 'naturalness problem'. — Wayfarer

So you offer the kind of problems that bug a reductionist in answer to my holist position?

The reductionist issue here is that because they are only imagining a constructive or additive picture of causality, it seems "natural" that either every quantum contribution adds to infinity (as there is nothing to stop it), or else all quantum contributions should symmetrically cancel to nothing (as everything time you add anything, you have to add a plus and a minus value).

But my holist position is all about the production of definite reality through the suppression or constraint of vague possibility. And so it is now "natural" that you get left with some minimal residue. Variety is suppressed to the point of indifference - but still, that leaves some irreducible variety or quantum spontaneity.

It is like trying to reduce noise in analog electronics. You can minimise it but never eliminate it.

Sure, explaining constants is a big problem for reductionists. Explaining everything about boundary conditions is a big problem when you are determined to view existence solely in terms of bottom-up material and efficient cause - acts of construction.

But for the billionth time, my model of causality is Aristotelean - all four causes in play. And Aristoteleanism is the kind of metaphysical naturalism I'm talking about, not the very recent adoption of the term within particle physics.

Ego boundaries in a person with high self-esteem are well defined along with a deep understanding of one's natural talents and limitations, which brings me to my main point. — Question

Confidence in your competence is the phrase that immediately sprung to my mind. So I agree.

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said? — John

The search for symmetry, equilibrium and the minimisation of uncertainty - the usual physical principles?

But there has to be order for anything to emerge whatever. — Wayfarer

Order is explained within thermodynamics as the negentropic investment that is made to increase the production of entropy. So it is order that emerges and that allows there to actually be something - a dissipative flow.

Q: Why does expanding spacetime exist? A: To give the Big Bang something to spill all its heat into.

Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind. — Wayfarer

Where are you getting this definition of naturalism from? Clearly I'm talking about process philosophers like Peirce and Anaximander who cottoned on to the fact that in nature, order can emerge from disorder so long as it serves the global purpose of disordering.

Yet talk of rates, limits, self-optimization, flows, regularities, symmetries, all that stuff is still referring to something. — darthbarracuda

That's right. That's why I am arguing against nominalism.

What we want to know is that properties themselves are without a regress into vagueness. — darthbarracuda

But how do properties emerge into crisp being if vague being isn't what they are leaving behind?

The problem with your kind of ontology is that it can't explain existence as a causal development. Existence is just some dumb brute fact. Or maybe God invented it.

My approach takes the evidence that existence evolves seriously.

We already know that stability occurs and habits emerge, but nominalism doesn't deny this. It simply denies that these habits are actually repeatable entities that are multiply instantiated. — darthbarracuda

Shame that hypothesis doesn't fit the facts then. The evidence that the cosmos keeps spitting out the same entities, the same patterns, can be seen everywhere we look. (Have you heard of fractals or powerlaws?)

The problem shouldn't be on the existence of universals but the nature of universals themselves, i.e. abstract transcendentals vs immanents or something else. — darthbarracuda

So why the problem when I take something like universals to be real, and then offer a modern infodynamic account?

Were there not such constants as Planck's constant and so on, then there would be no 'symmetry-breaking' in the first place, would there? — Wayfarer

Constants emerge as the rate limit on self-optimising flows. So they describe the regularities that a process of symmetry breaking creates. They don't cause the action. They are a measure of it.

If so, then the question of universals is the wrong question. It's not why things are similar, it's why they're different that needs explaining. — Marchesk

Yep. But I would really call universals "habits of individuation". So the stress is on being as a process. Universals aren't celestial things - abstracta or Platonic ideals - but names we give to physical regularities or states of constraint. And viewed that way, differentiation becomes much less of an issue. Producing individuated being is simply what a universal process does. Symmetry breaking is the deal itself.

This is why the true "metaphysical-strength" universals would be dynamical principles - a highly general "truth" of any physical action like the least action principle or, indeed, universality (the onset of chaos).

I just happen to have started reading Adrian Bejan's latest popularisation of his constructal theory - The Physics of Life ... http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/physics-evolution-life-constructal-law-bejan-ngbooktalk/

So when people talk about universals or ideals, they are normally thinking that every thing has some perfect form - there exists the Platonic cat or coffee mug. Which is of course rather silly. Or they think about the number three or the equilateral triangle.

But these tend to be static conceptions of ideal substances. Catness exists as a eternal essence.

Instead, a modern scientific take on universals (which goes all the way back to Anaximander) would see that we are really talking about the regularities that "must" emerge to regulate any material flow. So we are talking about those deep physical principles like the least action principle - if every path is free to be taken, then even so, a flow will wind up taking the path that is in some measurable sense the most efficient possible way of connecting A to B.

This truly universal way of looking at universals can then be applied to cats and cups as rather more contingent regularities of nature. Cats and cups are still processes - material flows. But they reflect a more specific history of such flows - that is, genetically or culturally constrained flows.

Then mathematical ideals, like numbers and shapes, can be seen as expressions of things like the least action principle.

A perfect triangle is both a broken symmetry in being some particular kind of shape (three cornered polygon), but also "special" in being the most symmetric example of a three cornered polygon. It both reduces triangle-ness to its least effort state - three equal sides producing maximum compactness. And also then stands as the essence, the ideal, against which all other triangles have higher entropy/greater imperfection.

So universals only really start to make physical sense when they are seen as basic dynamical principles - the fundamental rules for organising flows (ie: material symmetry breakings).

And then you can build up from those fundamentals to also explain cats and cups as informationally-constrained material flows. They are genetically or culturally encoded habits of individuation that thus both produce something universal - cats and cups - while also producing those cats and cups in their permissable variety.

Now that you mention it, I think that evolution may possibly also have a role in the type of logic we mostly tend to use - eg a preference for including double-negative elimination in our rules rather than restricting ourselves to constructivist logic, but I am less sure of that. — andrewk

Strewth. If formal logic arose within the gene pool of ancient Greece, how on earth did all of us without Mediterranean bloodlines manage to master it? Incredibly speedy convergent evolution?

Also, there is a distinction between cognition and re-cognition. Although it might also be said that cognition must always already involve recognition. In any case recognition is not merely the registering of a pattern, but the knowing of that pattern as being the same as or alike to another. Such a thing obviously cannot be rationally deduced, so I conclude that it must be intuited. — John

Pattern recognition or pattern matching is more evolutionarily basic than cognition or deduction. And it follows from inductive learning. That is Hebbian association or Bayesian prediction.

You don't even have to think to recognise. It works at the level of habit.

So intuition would be what Peirceans would call abduction - the flash of insight which counts as inference to the best explanation. It is being able suddenly to see how a deductive account could supply the correct explanation. So rather than working it out step by step, the whole of the answer can be seen as if retrospectively.

And yes, that is an advanced form of recognition or pattern matching. Studies of creative thought show how we can juggle ideas about until they suddenly snap into place - finding a suitable fit with a schema or conceptual structure already in use for something else.

So we can recognise "this current problem" as a variant of "that old familiar problem". But it is the deductive structure we recognise as having a probable fit - so rather abstract features and relations, rather than concrete details, like the feathers, beak and tail that allow us to categorise a bird as a bird in a flash of pattern matching.

On this definition, I maintain that something logically contradictory is conceivable, and while I do not expect you to accept this assertion, I would request any proof if you continue to maintain that "if x is contradictory, then x cannot be thought of" — maplestreet

That a contradiction is conceivable is to say we can conceive of what - for reason of contradiction - can't possibly exist. So not sure how this helps with any issue regarding inconceivable existences.

If you tell me that: "I do tend to think of being or existence in terms of tangible beings or existents that can exert tangible forces that work as efficient or material causes", then the box fits you mighty well.

If you find the label of substance dualism inconvenient, you will have to explain why in light of what you wrote.

So substance dualism then. And yet Aristotle did such a good job of deconstructing the very notion of substantial being. :)

Universals are more vague than particulars. — darthbarracuda

Says who exactly?

If you are thinking that universals are ghostly forms or epiphenomenal ideas, then your claim is that they definitely don't exist. So they are not vaguely existent. They are sharply inexistent.

But if you are taking my approach, then universals and particulars are as real (or ideational) as each other.

Theology doesn't try to be a science, because it's subject matter isn't scientific. — darthbarracuda

So they don't both talk about the world and our place in it? What are you on about?

Such fine distinctions are always going to be, at least to some degree, terminological issues. — John

Would you agree that talk of existence, being, or reality, is talk about causal potency? It is "stuff" that has an effect?

So the problem is that most want to confine the notion of causal being to material being. But it also seems reasonable to allow for formal being, or ideational being, or symbolic being - the other kinds of causal being that really do appear to act in the world?

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine — Wayfarer

Exactly. There is the counterfactual hypothesis. And where does the evidence currently stand?

"Dark energy" is telling us that there is only a one way ticket to the heat death, no eternal recurrence. And even most cyclic models require the second law to be obeyed somehow. There are theorems that even a spawning multiverse can't be past eternal.

So science must conceive of other possibilities. Then reality tells us its answer.

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always. — Wayfarer

And better yet, it is not theistic mumbo-jumbo but testable hypothesis!

Divine will is capricious. God can forgive you or smite you. And either will be claimed as good evidence of His causal reality.

But thermodynamics is counterfactual. You can prove it wrong by filing your patent for a perpetual motion machine.

Likewise laws and principles are causal in the sense that the provide the matrices of possibility along which things tend to unfold, but they are not causal in the sense that efficient or material causes are. So your description of what is real being 'entities with causal potency' is still physicalist. — Wayfarer

I've already said often enough I take a "constraints and freedoms" approach to causality. So that combines top-down and bottom-up causes in the one whole - the formal and material causes of being.

The point about scholastic realism (i.e. acceptance of universals) is that it provides a connective principle, a telos, which has on the whole been lost to modern thought: — Wayfarer

Yep.

So I take it that you are just agreeing with me then? But for some reason, you don't want to accept the telos that science has discovered - entropification?

If your divine will could show itself more clearly, more consistently, then we might believe in it with more confidence. Until then, let's stick to what we are finding written into the fabric of nature everywhere.

In my view, insofar as those things are real (again, read "extramental"), you can have an encounter with them. — Terrapin Station

Yes, in practice our talk about the reality of things is talk about them being causal entities. They are "things" if they can make things happen. So the weather can be a type of causal thing. Even a reductionist still talks of things with emergent properties.

but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probability of the Mets winning the World Series. Some are abstract but have real consequences, others are 'real possibilities'. — Wayfarer

This is also sort of right in that all these things are real in a sign or symbolic causal sense, more than a material causal sense. They are things that are meaningful at a semiotic level and so cause us to react in appropriate ways.

Ultimately symbolic entities and material entities are causally connected. Entropy ends up being created as we jump up and down in joy, cheering when our team wins. Forests get mown down if someone is concerned over GDP.

So claims about things being real seem best understood as claims about entities with causal potency. And the world is complicated enough that there are both material and symbolic entities to take seriously.

Although we can then also tighten the definition of real when it comes to the symbolic or semiotic as it is not just about something as detached or dualistic as "an idea". A sign must be related to the material world for it to be actually a causal entity. Symbols must be grounded. Entropy must be expended, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, the mother of all causality.

So people conventionally want to draw a strict line between physics and information, matter and mind, when it come to talking about reality. And clearly they are quite different classes of thing.

But if reality is defined in terms of being causal, and symbols are understood as being causal in this parasitic or pragmatic fashion, then - invoking the overall reality of the second law, the most universal of constraints - we can see how minds or ideas are also fully real as part of the world's complex causal being.

For the record, I don't think it's necessarily true, much less trivial at that, that all the typewriter-monkey-brains would eventually think up anything possible. — maplestreet

Well I don't either. And so my point is that focusing on conception as "that which can be said" is trivial. It is clearly not sufficient.

I guess I'm unclear on a lot of things you find important or relevant here. — maplestreet

They go to the issue of what would even count as sufficiency when it comes to this apparently rather nebulous thing of "conceivable".

Or equivalently, just because we can mash together all the words in the world in any sort of combination doesn't mean that there is something possible out there that is unexpressable in any sort of string of words... — maplestreet

The missing argument there is why words couldn't be invented as fast as the need arises. Clearly, words and conceivability go together somehow. I was focusing on that how. The relation is tricky.

Physics is either inaccurate, or is just a few specific types of perceptions. I dislike it on a whole as an enterprise, because it is often used to conclude far more than the actual perceptions it is based off could conclude themselves. — maplestreet

People never like what they don't understand.

Definitely not in agreement with the notion of physics determining what is possible or with the notion of self-consistency determining what exists either — maplestreet

Well given physics is what has examined this question in the most exhaustive fashion, I'm not sure what you would be basing your reluctance on.

o give you a better idea of what I take conceivability to mean, I interpret 'x is conceivable' to be more or less equivalent to 'x can be thought of' (even if for reasons of practicality, no one ever actually DOES think of it) — maplestreet

But that is merely the trivially true "random combination of words" approach to conception. An infinite number of typing monkeys would surely generate every conceivable truth on that score - but leave the whole question of why any one conception would rate as carrying any reasonable force quite untouched.

So even if you deny it, you are still in fact going to be seeking not just conceivable in a bare propositional sense divorced from any likelihood. Surely you would want to be talking of conceptions with some kind of further motivation behind their utterance.

And then, as I say, practicality does come into it. There is always going to be a conceiver with both a purpose and a matching level of indifference. You can't simply ignore that aspect of the question and expect any sensible comment.

It would seem hard to affirm this, since it seems hard to know the limits of conceivability. — maplestreet

Well what about turning it around a little? It could be that conceivability is the limit on possibility. It is basic to notions of existence that being must be intelligible. The self-contradictory is impossible to start with. It already rules itself out. So if something actually exists, it must have been possible because it had this kind of essential reasonableness of conceivability.

So it hinges on your definition of conceivable.

If you just mean are there things that we humans could never really imagine, yet they also exist, then of course this seems true for practical reasons.

We might lack access to the scales at which these things exist in a way that might give us the usual clue to get conceiving. They may simply escape our notice, rather than being actually inconceivable.

And also we might only ever get an imperfect grasp of something that can attract our notice. We can still conceive of the thing (as an explanation for some phenomenon), yet that conception might be held as extremely general, or partial. However again, that is a practical issue of either effort or access. There is some level of conception that is going on even to know that there is a phenomenon in need of explanation.

But at the deeper level of metaphysical possibility, we would have arguments that any forms of existence must depend on the kind of possibilities which are conceivable - that is, which meet rational principles like being not self-contradictory.

However then after that we get into the tricky area where possibility itself is defined in terms of self-contradiction. A potential - like say electric charge - can exist because it is the breaking of a symmetry. You can have positive because you can also have the contradictory state of being negative. And neutral is neither - in being both.

Get down to the quantum fine grain of things and the neutral vacuum seethes with matched pairs of virtual particles having temporary (measurable) existence before mutually annihilating. At least that is one useful conception that seems a good way of accounting for the phenomenology.

So the message there is that if conceivability is taken as something stronger than a "mere combination of words" approach to imagining possibilities - if it is in fact taken as a logical constraint like the principle of non-contradiction - then physics suggests that only that kind of conceivability has a strong relation to the facts of material existence.

A "hot planet raining gemstones" is a "random combination of words" type conception. It suggests an actuality but is too vague a proposition to be answered without further information.

However the proposition that "there must be a solid gold planet the size of Jupiter somewhere in an infinite universe" can be ruled out as self-contradictory from known physics. We can know from general relativity that a mass that heavy would collapse under its own gravity and turn into a black hole.

So a ball of gold the size of Jupiter becomes only possible if the Universe is other than what it is. Issues of conceivability limit the actual possibility, even if the statement itself - there is a gold ball that large - is easy to say.

For example, "It claims states of constraint"--I'm not sure what "It" is given the way you've constructed your sentences. — Terrapin Station

"It" is "entailment", of course. And the construction of the sentences indeed entails that interpretation on any reasonable view.

"Entailment" is the subject of the first sentence. So under normal grammatical conventions, the use of the pronoun "it" continues to refer to "entailment" unless some other information is introduced.

Your reading has already been epistemically constrained by the mention of "entailment" and so the meaning of "it" is logically entailed - even if, as you point out, what could stop and protest that your understanding of "it" is not absolutely constrained. There remains still a possibility of uncertainty.

Thus you illustrate my points nicely. Even if that is the last thing you want to do.

I just can't follow you most of the time. — Terrapin Station

But that's not because I'm a poor writer. It's because you never seem to put much effort into understanding things before you tap out your replies.

Yet if I remember correctly Peirce included second-ness and third-ness. So first-ness would be vagueness (which is a vague term itself - a placeholder for what is impossible to predicate?), second-ness would be universality and third-ness would be the "crisp" particularity. A crude image would be gas-liquid-solid. — darthbarracuda

Firstness is logical vagueness. But secondness is particularity - the particularity of some fleeting relation or event. And thirdness is then generality - the regularity of some habit in which the said relation or event is reliably produced (due to the development of some system of constraints).

But phase transitions certainly illustrate the point.

A gas is vague possibility. Particles are not in interaction. A liquid is a collection of events. Some kind of organisation arises as every particle has some individual interaction with other passing particles. Then a solid is the emergence of a global rigid order that puts every particle into a final entropy-minimising state of organisation.

Universality comes before particularity simply because we particulars cannot exist without universals, i.e. constraints and repetition. The very class of particulars is a universal. So indeed you are correct that we never come across universals "by themselves", but this is well-accepted as the instantiation relation objects have with their properties. — darthbarracuda

Talking about before and after runs into big difficulties if your notion of "time passing" is already based on a notion of time as a dimension, or a constructable string of particular instants.

So in the systems view, time is both global and local, general and particular. Universality is identified with final cause, while particularity is about efficient cause.

Thus one can say that universals are structural attractors. They exist in the future of a pattern of development. They are the goals towards which events tend (with retrospective necessity).

So you can say the universal exists even before it exists. It is there already waiting when things first start as the future outcome. But by this point it should be clear that the whole conventional notion of temporality is becoming more confusing than useful.

Again, trying to say one thing is definitely in existence, or definitely more primary, than its other, is where the monadic or reductionist approach to metaphysics quickly goes wrong.

Holism depends on getting past those 101 stage paradoxes.

Thus universality is ultimately prior and foundational to particularity. Particularity emerges from universality as various combinations and configurations of universals. — darthbarracuda

But universality or generality is the product of induction or generalisation from particulars. So really it is a two-way relation - a symmetry-breaking or dichotomy - that is being described.

It is true that the particular derives from the general (via downward constraint - a limitation). And it is true that generality derives from the accumulation of the particular (thus via upward construction). So in being mutually derived in this fashion, both the general and the particular, the universal and the instance, must arise from something further - a third thing - beyond themselves.

That is where vagueness, apeiron or firstness enters the metaphysical picture. The general and the particular are themselves the complementary limits on being which result from breaking the symmetry of a vaguer "everythingness" that is neither the one, nor the other, just the potential for the logical division that develops.

So as usual, the instinct is to reduce two choices to just one - either it is the case that the general or the particular is the primary.

But metaphysical two-ness has to be a dichotomy to be logically possible. To definitely have one thing, that can only be the case if it brings along the concrete possibility of the exact thing which it is not.

And from there, the only way out is to see the whole thing as a triadic development - a transition out of vagueness where it is possibility itself which is being metaphysically divided towards its logical limits.

The general and the particular can only exist in relation to each other. And then that definite relation can only exist in relation to yet a third thing which is the same relation at its other limit - a state of maximal vagueness, a state where it can't meaningfully be said whether there is the general or the particular.

A: I said, "I have a dog."

If one knew everything about my dog, one would know all sorts of things about how she relates to aspects of the universe... that she likes tennis balls, that she weighs 15 lbs, how far she is from Neptune, and so on. These are truths entailed by A. Is that right? — Mongrel

Things follow from "I have a dog," but it's easier to understand first if you understand it in terms of an argument, so that we have a set (>1) of premises. — Terrapin Station

This illustrates how entailment is "mechanical". It claims states of constraint that are absolute. And speaks to the way such states can be constructed.

So as I say, the physical reality is different. Constraints can never be absolute. Freedoms - either as ontic material entropy or epistemic informational uncertainty - can only be minimised, not eliminated. It is an important discovered fact of nature that it is indeterministic in the final analysis.

Also, constraints in nature tend to be contextual or holistic. A mountain or an earthquake are events produced by circumstances not of their own making. It is the accidents of plate tectonics and other geomorphic forces that entail the building of a mountain, the fissuring of a fault-line.

So there is a way that nature is.

Then life and mind come along and can play logical (or semiotic) tricks. They are modellers in a modelling relation with the world (a model being a formal system of entailment connected to the world by "acts of measurement").

So a modeller seeks to impose constraints on freedoms (ontic or epistemic, material or informational) in pursuit of some overarching purpose. There has to be a reason for being reasonable. And while it is still impossible for such constraints on nature to be absolute, it is not that hard for constraints to be "good enough" to achieve a purpose. A model can be indifferent to any difference which doesn't make a difference (to it).

And where a modeller really wins out over nature is the ability to construct states of constraint. A modeller can stick bits of an argument together to form some strait-jacket arrangement which forces nature into some tight corner.

That is the basis of the mechanistic view of reality. Petrol vapour explodes given a spark. But if you wrap that explosion around with pistons, cylinders, crankshafts and all the other bits of an engine - plus have control over the timing of the vapour puffed into a cavity, and the spark that ignites it - you are in business. You can drive right over nature in your SUV.

All life constructs these kinds of mechanisms. A bird makes a nest to protect its eggs. A spider spins a web to trap flies. At work is a mind that can build something that serves a purpose in mechanical step by step fashion.

So if we are looking for the origins of logic, for the reasons why it might be an abstraction that works, it is easy enough to see those origins in the rise of life and mind as a semiotic modelling relation.

First comes the ability to impose some state of constraint on nature (one that serves a purpose and is not merely an accident). And then comes the ability to assemble systems of constraint, step by step.

Thus entailment is indeed all about implication. It is about constructing states of constraint (material or informational) that restrict nature to such a degree it has no choice but to behave in a desired way. The rules of logic are all about encoding that biological imperative - the modelling relation - in the most abstract and universal set of rules we can imagine.

Again, the fact that nature is at base indeteministic - incapable of being completely constrained, is something that is left out of normal discussions of logic and thus results in great confusion when it comes to non-pragmatic "theories of truth".

But pragmatically, it's not a big deal as naturally all the attention of logic-users goes to what logical thinking can achieve. So it is the ability to construct arguments - formal systems of entailment - that gets celebrated. It is a remarkable fact that modellers can regulate the world to the degree that their desires can be reliably cashed out in systems of logical necessitation.

We can just get in our cars and ... drive.

You ignored that I specified ignorance due to indifference. So that is where my position is based on a full four causes analysis. Purposes are alway in play. Thus even physically, there can be differences that don't make a difference. We could call them thermal fluctuations or virtual events.