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.

Uncertainty on the part of whom? — Mongrel

Depends. It could be a particular inquiring mind or it could simply be the world physically.

That would be the advantage of my semiotic approach. It applies the same way in either sphere.

The question is going to be ambiguous as you can talk about it either in terms of formal logic or physical causality. And then that leads to the issue of how much the two are really the same.

To jump then to what I think is the usual confusion is that most people want entailment to be a story of efficient causes. One particular thing causes that particular thing. This step dictates that step in mechanically necessary fashion.

But the larger view of deduction or causation is the holistic story where the process is one of constraints upon freedoms (or uncertainties). So the argument goes from the general to the particular, not the particular to the particular.

If Kermit is a frog, and all frogs are green, then Kermit is green by logical consequence. That is, the general constraint of "being a frog" is a limit on the colour some particular frog can be. But Kermit could be light green, forest green, aquamarine, and still meet the constraint. The actual shade of green becomes the residual freedom, the further fact about which the statements so far appear indifferent.

So reasoning deductively is about boxing in uncertainty. Information is added to limit the scope of the (Kantian) unknown. And even physical causality has this general nature - according to quantum physics now.

Practicality, social commitments, fears, inner tensions can hinder that impulse but psycho-behavioral coherence doesn't seem like something learnt. — aporiap

Well, given that we are cultural creatures, yes "psycho-behavioral coherence" is learnt behaviour. We do have to discover a balance in terms of what we are neuro-biologically and psycho-socially.

To be psychologically coherent with US culture is very different from being different with Indonesian culture, say. And even within these countries there are huge local variations in approved cultural style.

I think there's a disconnect between individualism and authenticity. One can value communal living or strongly identify with some over-arching socio-cultural label and work to align with the norms and pressures of that. I think -if that's what one feels aligned to- then that counts as living authentically. — aporiap

That's fine if "authentic" is defined at the sociocultural level.

So one could indeed be authentically "Bostonian" or "Javanese" because there is actually a cultural recipe made explicit in local art, folklore, language, etc.

It is hard to be authentic as an individual as what do you ground that on - your distinctive neuro-genetics?

So I would agree that "authenticity" only applies qua cultural norms. And "being true to yourself" has become just such a meme - but paradoxically, one pretty much impossible to live up to literally and thus the source of a lot of modern angst.

But that web doesn't necessarily have to align with what's valued by the person in the centre. And so while there might be a more stable; more comfortable way of being, it takes energy and emotional untangling to change that. I feel like that fear and reluctance and the like comes from that. — aporiap

I agree that change is difficult - when it is viewed as radical rather than incremental. But I don't think we have to say that it is fear that stands in the way of changing habits. Habits just are hard to change by definition. That is their natural psychological status.

So what changes habits is not overcoming fears but learning the skill of mindful attention. You have to recognise that what you are doing is a habit. Then you can figure out an incremental path that could achieve the learning of a change.

So what you are expressing is the standard propaganda of modern individualist culture - the "you can be anything you want" school of thought. And part of that standard message is "only your fears stand in your way".

Of course this feels true. It is natural to dislike uncertainty. But another thing you can learn in life is that you can set big goals and reach them with many small incremental steps. Or you can even learn an entrepreneurial mindset where you are willing to throw yourself off cliffs in expectation that you will land on your feet. I mean, this is what they teach at school these days, right?

So my argument here is with the rather inauthentic way that authenticity is portrayed in popular culture (and the Romantic and Existentialist philosophy it channels).

Authenticity - properly understood - is about achieving personal balance in the socio-cultural arenas we all have to play in.

But ultimately there can be more 'stable' states that one can be in. — aporiap

But again the question is whether the goal should be to transcend sociocultural limits or to completely commit to them?

So the changing course is one thing. The real question is what is the right course? And I don't see aiming for sociocultural transcendence is likely to be a recipe for personal stability. I'm not sure there is much psychological evidence for that. (Heck, I know that the opposite is true in fact.)

So I think of authenticity as being rooted in something more innate/biological. We tend towards stability. Stability involves inner coherence. Inner coherence for a human involves alignment of action with values or strongly-held beliefs. — aporiap

I agree that it is basic to brain architecture that brains want to discover a coherent understanding of the world. So yes, of course we want to pull everything into cognitive focus.

But then humans are socially-constructed animals and so coherence is about social and cultural coherence as well. That is the world we want to play a role in. So "authenticity" is primarily about our alignment with the values or strongly-held beliefs of our cultural millieu.

All that has changed is that people used to live narrow lives in traditional communities but now must do much more work to "figure it out for themselves".

And what do you do when modern society gives you thousands of ways of "being authentic"? :)

There're values, deeply held beliefs, feelings. Acting / living / habituating oneself in accord with those -and being unafraid to express one's 'creative unpredictability' — aporiap

But acting in this fashion is learnt behaviour. So "authenticity" is another social script. And wouldn't you say that a problem in modern society is the very pressure it creates to live up to rather extreme standards of individualism?

If you are urging the need to be "unafraid" of something, that should be your clue as to what most people might have a deep seated natural inclination to avoid doing - actually standing apart from the herd.

Your argument relies on a representationalist view of perception - one where the brain "displays data", leaving open the question of "to who?".

Any modern neurocognitive tale would instead want to take an ecological or ennactive approach where there is no such homuncular set-up. There is no entity experiencing the experience. There is just the process of experiencing via the process of entification. What "we" experience is a discrimination of a self from a world.

Well because the nervous system controls movement and bodily processes, and so does consciousness. — darthbarracuda

What? Do they take turns or something?

Certainly I am supposing the phenomenological experience of being a self of sorts. But I don't really have an ambitious metaphysical structure of the world. I find idealism to be theoretically satisfying but not entirely believable in some sense, while I see a real, external world as probably existing in some form or whatever. A giant abyss of darkness, with matter bouncing into matter on the macro-scale and random events happening on lower levels. But basically I hold a position I suspect most people do: the universe is a spatio-temporal container and we are one of its many contents. — darthbarracuda

So your ontic commitments amount to a bob each way. Cool. :-}

Well, I said that then existence of a nervous system would be a starter. — darthbarracuda

Yes. But why? What difference does that make?

And you of all people should know that "naturalism" is such a vague buzzword that it literally is meaningless outside of esoteric circles. — darthbarracuda

Did you mean outside philosophical circles? Being immanent and not transcendent, being holist and not atomist, seem to be fairly clearcut and familiar ontic commitments to me.

Where, according to your pan-semiotic theory, does qualitative experience reside? — darthbarracuda

Let's not jump ahead of the game. You have yet to understand why this question doesn't even make good sense in terms of the ontic commitments of pan-semiosis.

I am questioning your use of words like "my experience", or "experience residing". You are simply presuming the dualistic mind~world framing that becomes the locked cage of your thoughts.

My argument is that to start unpicking that paradigm, a good place to start is to seriously address the issue of what might make life and mind actually different in your scheme of things? As a biological process, where does any claimed divergence in terms of causality arise?

You seem at least persuaded consciousness is a biological phenomenon rather than a theistic one. So you should be happy enough that this question is legitimate even within your ontological framework.

So again, what's your own answer? If you understand life according to some notion of causality, is there some essential difference that marks it off from mind? And if so, what is it?

To simply repeat "subjectivity" is to retreat back into Cartesian dualism and abandon your tentative naturalism here. And even in the end to reject naturalism, you would first have to demonstrate understanding of its best case.

Rather I am saying that there is a distinct difference between the firing a C-fibres firing (an outdated theory nowadays but one that continues to be used out of tradition) and the experience of pain. Whatever is going on in the brain when I experience something is different than the experience itself.

The point being, however, is that a numerically-distinct experience can only be experienced by one subject at a time. A teleporter kills me because the copy of me at time t+1 is not identical to me at time t.

Only one mind can exist in a single perspective at a time, just as how only one object can exist in a single space-time location. Access to the mind would be akin to access of the exact same perspective as another person at the exact same time - impossible. My head cannot co-exist with your head at the same time. The perspective I have is unique. Of course, you can make perfect copies of my mental experience, just as you could make perfect copies of the perspective I inhabit at a certain time. But they would not be identical - it would not be true access, but rather access by "cheating". — darthbarracuda

Everything here you are arguing to be true per definition. You don't seem to realise that. So that is why I have tried to focus your attention on the issue of definitions. How could we more fruitfully frame the dichotomy so as to not talk past the differences that might actually make a difference?

I of course have repeatedly said that the way to make sense of mind~matter duality is to re-frame your inquiry as one based on the semiotic symbol~matter distinction instead. That then allows you to see how - causally - mind is just life. A more complex version of the same modelling relation. And even material existence can be accounted for pan-semiotically.

So I certainly have my own deflationary answer.

But not at the same time nor place, i.e. perspective. — darthbarracuda

That just ignores the thought experiment I described. I specified that the "perspectives" would indeed be exactly alike. I offered a "plausible" mechanism - you might be having the "real" experience, I might be hallucinating all its features. But that doesn't really matter as you already admit in the OP that your own perspective of the world could be an idealist illusion. So you can't both allow for such disembodiment in your own arguments, yet insist on the facticity of embodiment when it comes to mine.

Well, it is this kind of inconsistency that is indeed rife right from the OP.

So mind just "arises" out of structure/process? This doesn't explain anything really. Just seems all hand-wavy and actually kind of poetic. — darthbarracuda

That is not what I said, was it? I said rather than talking about the structure - the materials from which brains are composed - let's talk about the processes taking place, the dynamics of the organisation.

You would be accessing a duplicate copy of my brain state, not my brain state. — darthbarracuda

So what makes it yours?

Do you want to point to something material ... like nervous systems and physical locations? Or did you have in mind a soul?

Let's get to the bottom of what you actually think you are claiming. What does "access" even mean in your book?

If I were to suddenly flash into your exact state of mind for a moment - due to some extraordinary brain blurt, say - then how is that not accessing your state of mind?

What else would access look like according to you?

My mind does not seep into the world, or at least I don't think it does (re: externalism). It doesn't come out of my ears. Mind is the one thing that I am certain about having, yet I cannot locate it in the world I assume surrounds me. — darthbarracuda

So doesn't that make it more phenomenally accurate to say that the world seeps into your mind? And the same world seeps into my mind? So we both share access to the same world. Thus again, the critical issue is not that I can't access your mind. If our current accessing of the world happens to be indistinguishable at some instant, then we are of one mind.

So a better analogy would be that I have my own container filled with stuff only I have seen. You can take an x-ray and get a general idea of what is inside. But you cannot actually see the contents. Only I can see the contents, only I am allowed to. Nobody else is allowed inside. Mind is subjective. Like a Liebnizian monad. — darthbarracuda

It is this resort to physicalist conceptions of substance to explain states of mind that seems so muddled. You can't both describe the mind in substantial terms while simultaneously rejecting that same substantialist ontology.

Well, you can. It's called Cartesian dualism. :)

So it is an analogy. But a completely question-begging one.

If we look at the brain, we can presumably see the structure of fatty tissue and analyze the various synapses and whatnot going on. We can dig through the whole brain, but we'll never find mind. There's hair, skin, scalp, skull, brain tissue, then skull and scalp and skin and hair again. So where is the elusive mind? Where is it located? — darthbarracuda

Again you are thinking like a physicalist and trying to capture the essence of the mental.

You have to start thinking like biologist and see structures as processes. Mind is not located in stuff but in action and organisation.

I mean, you are familiar with Ryle's ghost in the machine category error argument? It's pretty slam dunk.

I don't think the explanatory gap shrinks more than it is just flat-out ignored. — darthbarracuda

Do I seem to ignore it? I'm showing you why its importance is greatly exaggerated because people like to bypass the question of whether there is any real metaphysical difference between life and mind.

Dualism depends on the presumption that animals can be dumb automata and humans are inhabited by a witnessing soul.

Great. Everyone loves an interesting hypothesis. Now support it by showing that life is not already mindful from the get-go in any useful definition of mindfulness. Where does this claimed metaphysical duality first arise in nature?

And the question can't even be addressed until you have meaningful definitions of both phenomena so that they may be compared and constrasted in counterfactual fashion. (That's the actual explanatory gap here.)

The point was that the reference point that we inhabit ourselves - mind - is inaccessible to anyone else but ourselves. It is our personal, private sphere. — darthbarracuda

It in fact seems an important point that consciousness has this character of being a highly particular point of view.

So you are presuming that makes it "inaccessible". But think it through.

Even for ourselves, to be in some particular brain state at this very moment is not to be in a near infinity of states we might also have been in. With a few trillion synapses, there's a lot of potential neural patterns. And yet one brain state is picked from that universe of possible states (or more accurately perhaps, all the other states are suppressed or inhibited by competitive feedback mechanisms).

So being highly located as a particular point of view, a particular mapping of a sensory and intentional state, is what makes even all the alternative states of mind we might have had now inaccessible to us (to go along with the homuncular language that is unfortunately conventional in these kinds of consciousness discussions).

Now following that same logic, I could conceivably be in exactly the same brain state as you right now. I could be accessing your private point of view by exactly mirroring your neural activity. Of course there are all sorts of practical difficulties to do with the fact that I would have to be hallucinating your surroundings and falsely remembering a past that is identical to yours. But given that you are easy going on conceivability, we can say that I could indeed physically access your subjective point of view in these exceptionally unlikely circumstances I've just outlined.

So again, a little biological realism can go a long way to changing the tenor of the questions. If we take a deflationary view of mind - treating it less like an ectoplasmic substance and more like a complex state of world mapping - while also giving rather more credit to the actual biological complexity of a brain with its capacity for picking out highly particular points of view, then the explanatory gap to be bridged should shrink rather a lot. Earlier concerns will start to look redundant as more meaningful questions are revealed.

I'm having a mental cramp over it. — Question

Just keep chanting "all branches of the wavefunction are equally real" until you are a paid up member of the cult of MWI. That way you will never have to trouble yourself with real metaphysics ever again.

As far as I can tell, anything lacking a nervous system cannot have a mind. — darthbarracuda

Well. And why is that? What is causally significant about a nervous system?

There must be something or else why else have you just singled it out?

So my thoughts on this are that, since mind appears to be so wholly different than ordinary material objects and processes..., — darthbarracuda

But now you are immediately back in the weeds because as soon as you mention nervous systems, you just as quickly abandon them to repeat the claim that the mind "appears wholly different" from "ordinary processes".

The nervous system is an "ordinary biological process", no? And yet you agree that nervous systems - on any reasonable view - are at least a necessary condition of phenomenal states.

So how is the nervous system different from other ordinary biological processes in your view? Surely the answer to that should go a long way to solving the dilemma you express?

Then there's also the question as to what purpose consciousness actually serves to an organism. Presumably everything necessary to survive could have been done without the use of subjectivity. — darthbarracuda

Why on earth would consciousness serve no purpose? Is that your own experience? You function just as well in a coma or deep sleep? Does paying attention rather than acting on automatic pilot not help you learn and remember?

A decisive, yet accidental, mutation in genetic information created an organism that accidentally happened to live alongside more simple organisms. — darthbarracuda

Again, where is there any scientific or commonsense evidence for these wild assertions? Doesn't everything already point to degrees of consciousness associated with complexity of nervous systems? Can't we tell that just from the way animals of different sized brains behave - their apparent liveliness?

Again, as I said at the outset, the only way we have judge the probability of consciousness in others is the degree to which they seem living. Is their behaviour complex and interesting?

The rise of complex, sentient creatures was entirely unnecessary and accidental, not inevitable, but happened anyway thanks to goldylocks luck. — darthbarracuda

More rambling unfounded assertion I am afraid.

As you may have noticed Occam's razor flies out the window when confronted with the infinite amount of realities in the world. Everettian QM is an elegant solution when confronted with apparent infinities, which supersedes Occam's razor. — Question

Well something sure flies out the window once you deny the measurements that might locate you in some actual world rather than leaving you to fluff about in a sea of infinite possibility.

The point of the OP was that the phenomenological experience of being a black box is in friction with a universe that is seemingly open to observation, and vice versa. — darthbarracuda

Fine. So now try to answer my question.

I'm drawing attention to a presumption your OP embodies. The way to understand it is by considering why you might seem to think that "merely being alive" does not result in phenomenology.

If you have a good causal grounds for making this kind of categorical distinction, then great, wheel it out.

So far as I know, the only reason why you would look conscious to me is that you would look alive to me. If you could explain why and how the two are in fact ontically disconnected in the fashion you appear to presume, then I might think the OP had a better actual point.

Mind is of life, but life is not mind. — darthbarracuda

OK. That's your claim. Now make sense of it causally. What is the mechanism that underpins your categorical distinction?

It's a question. Do you find mind problematic for physicalism but not life? If so, why exactly?

The point of the question is that the origin of life must mark some kind of causal divergence in your
notion of physicalism. So have you in fact understood the nature of that divergence in a way that says it doesn't also explain the divergence you claim as problematic - that of mind?

If you can quickly say why life and mind are different in ways that make sense, we're good. Otherwise your presumed dualism already founders.

The question - and I'm channelling the biologist Robert Rosen here - is whether or not this type of system has a rich enough 'entailment structure' to model the world in it's entirety. — StreetlightX

Yep. Rosen did a great job on highlighting the logical impossibility of "computing nature". And the holographic principle now shows that it is materially impractical as well. The speed of light creates absolute event horizon limits so the world itself doesn't even have the physical resources to nail down every event in super-deterministic fashion.

And then there is the flipside to the issue of modelling the world. It is not just that computation can't nail every event down - Rosen's issue of incommensurability. But instead, modelling is based on the principle of nailing down the very least amount of information possible. The aim of modelling is not to simulate the world - re-present it in some veridical sense - but to reduce an "understanding of the world" to its simplest possible collection of habits.

So less is more when it comes to modelling. And that is what the practice of creating physical laws follows. That is why the mechanics of Newton, and all the other varieties of mechanics that came after, feel so pragmatically right. The messy dynamical world can be reduced to the simplicity of timeless universals and particular acts of measurement. You measure how things begin, and then the equations predict how they will unwind forever.

So the current computational bandwagon - the digital physics - is wrong both in believing the entirety of the material world (including its fundamental indeterminism due to holographic limits on decoherence) is actually computable, and wrong also even in presuming this kind of veridical simulation would be "a good thing".

Instead, for modelling minds, it is clear that efficiency arises from the opposite of being "completely consciously aware of every detail of the world." Minds actually arise as a "orthogonal subjective dimension" because of an an ability to pretty much detach from such detail. And that detachment is based on the materiality of the world being reduced to a well-worn system of sign or habit.

Then this biosemiotic insight - this efficiency principle - can now be extended to the physical world in general. That is pan-semiotics. Quantum decoherence is an expression of the same thing. The world is seeking its simplest informational states. Classicality is what emerges as its simplest self-model, the one that minimises the messiness of the causal tale it is telling in terms of its own evolving temporal history.

So there is a duality that pervades all these levels of discussion - the matter~symbol distinction - for a reason. There is a single causal mechanism at work that links it all from quantum to mind.

But that mechanism is also irreducibly complex or triadic in involving the third thing of an axis of development - the vague~crisp distinction.

The matter~symbol distinction is pretty easy to understand. But the vague~crisp distinction is far subtler in being "beyond standard logic" as well as "beyond standard physics". :)

The OP displays a basic epistemic confusion which is indeed fairly widespread in physics since it has jumped sides and gone from a materialist ontology over to an informational ontology. This bedevils all "interpretations".

This passage from Howard Pattee is a typically lucid analysis of the epistemic issues - and an introduction into how a pan-semiotic metaphysics (one that sees physical existence in terms of matter AND symbol, nor matter OR symbol) is the path out of the maze.

This matter-symbol separation has been called the epistemic cut (e.g., Pauli, 1994). This is simply another statement of Newton’s categorical separation of laws and initial conditions.

Why is this fundamental in physics? As I stated earlier, the laws are universal and do not depend on the state of the observer (symmetry principles) while the initial conditions apply to the state of a particular system and the state of the observer that measures them.

What does calling the matter-symbol problem “epistemological” do for us? Epistemology by its very meaning presupposes a separation of the world into the knower and the known or the controller and the controlled. That is, if we can speak of knowledge about something, then the knowledge representation, the knowledge vehicle, cannot be in the same category of what it is about.

The dynamics of physical laws do not allow alternatives paths between states and therefore the concept of information, which is defined by the number of alternative states, does not apply to the laws themselves.

A measurement, in contrast, is an act of acquiring information about the state of a specific system. Two other explicit distinctions are that the microscopic laws are universal and reversible (time-symmetric) while measurement is local and irreversible.

There is still no question that the measuring device must obey the laws. Nevertheless, the results of measurement, the timeless semantic information, cannot be usefully described by these time-dependent reversible laws (e.g., von Neumann, 1955).

http://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

So the gist is that the "space" in which maths or computation takes place is physically real - in the sense that material spacetime is a generalised state of constraint in which all action is regulated to a Planckian degree of certainty ... except the kind of action which is informational, symbolic, syntactic, computational, etc.

Physics can describe every material characteristic of a symbol ... and none of its informational ones.

And in being thus an orthogonal kind of space to physical space, information is a proper further dimension of existence. It is part of the fundamental picture in the way quantum mechanics eventually stumbled upon with the irreducible issue of the Heisenberg cut or wavefunction collapse.

So the mistake is to try to resolve the irreducibility of information to physics by insisting "everything is computation", or alternatively, "everything is matter". Instead, the ontic solution is going to have to see both as being formally complementary aspects of existence.

Aristotle already got that by the way with his hylomorphic view of substance.

So nature keeps trying to tell us something. Duality is fundamentally necessary because there is nothing without a symmetry breaking. But then we keep looking dumbly at the fact of a world formed by symmetry breaking and trying to read off "the big symmetry" that therefore must lurk as the "the prime mover" at the edge of existence.

The logic of the principle of sufficient reason fools us into believing that only concrete beginnings can have concrete outcomes. Therefore if we see a broken symmetry, then this must point back to an equally physical (or informational) symmetry that got broke.

But that simple habit of thought - so useful in the everyday non-metaphysical sphere of causal reasoning - is what blinds almost all efforts at "interpretation".

The duality of existence will never make sense until your metaphysics includes a third developmental dimension by which beginnings are vague or fundamentally indeterministic.

Clinging onto a belief in the definiteness of beginnings, the concreteness of initial states, is just going to result in the usual infinite regress stories of creating gods or universal wavefunctions. Folk are very good at pushing the question they can't answer as far out of sight as possible.

So is there a difference between life and mind in your book? Is one "just physics" and the other "something else"? Or does life start the swerve away from the brutely material. Is it a good philosophical place to start looking for the answers you seek?

Under realist no-collapse quantum mechanics, measurements are no different from any other type of interaction - they are reversible. — tom

Well, at least they are reversible all the way back to the first instant of the Big Bang and any other such event horizon. :)

So you are appealing to an infinite regress and I guess some God eventually provides you with the measurement basis you need to define your universal wavefunction.