So if there is a God present, it is the God of semiosis. Although I agree you would be quite justified to ignore it as existing. — Punshhh

Sorry. Gods that exist in ways that don't make a difference don't exist according to my definition of existence. So all you are doing is trotting out the modern theistic formula which seeks to avoid the cold hard facts of science by pretending cold hard facts can be both true and yet not really matter.

Which is why the only consistent position I could hold is that if God does in fact exist in ways that don't make a difference, then my metaphysics is holed below the waterline. No lame excuses.

If I don't accept lame excuses from theists, I can hardly accept them from myself.

How does one go about balancing the needs of the individual vs. the collective? — Nick Sousa

It starts by recognising that there are two complementary needs that both ought to be maximised. So the balance is about doing justice to both sides - both sides being inherently positives, and so that makes the calculation more complex than if one side is the positive, the other the negative.

So the two positive values - as recognised by standard social science - is the balancing of individual competition, or creative freedom, and global co-operation, or collective constraints. A flourishing system is rich both in integration and differentiation.

So the dynamic is easy to describe. It is what normal moral codes seek to achieve. And complexity theory would allow you to model it. It would be the basis of modern theories of community resilience or "third way" political reforms for example.

Yet Aristotle posited the Prime Mover... — darthbarracuda

And that didn't work out so well, did it? Modern physics finds itself dealing with the inverse issue of how to regulate the inherent dynamism (or indeterminacy!) of existence.

The problem is not starting "movement". It is stopping it. Regulating it. Structuring it.

If gods exists nothing would change, or be any different. — Punshhh

So could God have made circles simpler. Or even more complex?

And remember that in semiotic metaphysics, that which does not make a difference does not exist. So either your God has to make a difference or talk about him is meaningless noise.

Do you accept the necessity of a first cause? — darthbarracuda

For fuck's sake. Why would I accept the very thing that shows a mechanical model of causality is fatally flawed?

(And God-talk is of course all about pretending to have fixed the problem with incoherent hand waving and incantation.)

how does the existence of God disqualify your system? — darthbarracuda

My system - being all about material self-organisation - says there is no God. So His existence would be a terminal fact.

That's one of the advantages of my semiotic physicalism. It's not wishy washy on such matters like conventional physicalism.

If the territory the map covers is everything, then the map has to include itself - the map become a part of the territory. That's what makes me a little wary of all theories of everything, this kind of recursive implosion. — csalisbury

You will first note of course that Pattee is saying the map is an atemporal truth. It is the rate independent information or model used to constrain the rate dependent dynamics, ie: the world of material possibility.

And then why does the map have to include itself? Semiotics is expressedly about a modelling relation. It is irreducibly triadic in that regard. That is its major distinction from other more simplistic and familiar metaphysical frameworks.

So what semiotics talks about is the functional wholeness of a relation between map and territory.

You also have to respect the shift from epistemology to ontology. So if we are talking about ontic strength semiosis - as biosemiosis and pansemiosis do - then the map is actually in a relation that is adaptively making the world. It is not just a description (to be interpreted by a transcendent mind) but the act of interpretance itself by which a world is achieving crisp and stable existence.

You could think of the map more as a blueprint - an encoding of formal and final cause along the lines of a genome. It describes the landscape as it is meant to be.

So selfhood becomes the entire production - just as it is in standard biology. Selfhood is immanent in the modelling relation. And selfhood is only even possible due to there being the kind of semiotic epistemic cut that Pattee, following von Neumann, describes.

A scientific or metaphysical theory of everything would then - in the semiotic view - have that same character. It would be a "map" of the modelling relation, or sign relation, itself. It would be a representation of the fundamental algorithm of self-organisation if you like. So it would be speaking about physical existence in terms of emergent selfhood or universal individuation.

You fear the recursive implosion after I have advertised the advantages of what is in fact a recursive explosion - the open ended generativeness of a fundamental relation. But perhaps you can see that is not an issue now. Simplicity can beget complexity, but simplicity can't get simpler if it is already as simple as it is possible to get.

To use another analogy, a circle can be distorted in all sorts of ways to make more complicated shapes. But you can't get simpler than a perfect circle. So a circle doesn't suffer a recursive implosion. It instead emerges as the crisp asymptotic limit on any implosion.

Pleasure has a twisted way of tricking us into existential continuation. — darthbarracuda

That makes it the worst harm of all in my book. At least the others are honest harms. Pleasure is positively malicious. And without pleasure, how could we truly suffer?

Damn you to Hell happiness.

Either list some real harms or move on. — schopenhauer1

Laughter, children, orgasms, contentment, reaching the top of the mountain - these are all harms because they are all clever illusions and distractions momentarily interrupting our cultivation of a habit of pessimism, our proper philosophical appreciation that the root of all being is suffering.

Not necessarily — Punshhh

You're being kind. But of course it would mean that my position was complete nonsense. And worse still, according to your pet-keeping God metaphysics, I've been actively fooled about the nature of existence for the old fool's twisted pleasure.

So is this particular one now also on your list?

So pessimism isn't a harm? But what if being surrounded by it is one of life's great unpleasantnesses?

Did you mention pessimism?

Perhaps we will at some point start to pay some heed to what may be behind our veils and start to ponder the bigger picture. — Punshhh

Yep. If God exists, my metaphysics is utterly screwed.

Often what people want is not answers, but the illusion of solution to problems or fears... — TheWillowOfDarkness

Yep. Pomo in a nutshell.

It's a complexity which the lovers of structure cannot stand. — TheWillowOfDarkness

As usual, you are talking about someone else and not me.

My brand of structuralism is about accounting for the emergence of complex structure. So it is triadic in that it involves the hierarchical process of possibility encountering necessity and resulting in actuality. The messy real world in fact is an expression of simple needs that explain "everything".

What could be more chaotic than chaos? And yet what do we now know that has simpler generative rules?

So the wheel has turned again (while philosophy hasn't been watching) and the time reads "post-post-structuralism".

But I am extremely wary of Craig Venter and his ilk. — Wayfarer

And the biosemiotic crowd were the loud critics of Venter and genecentrism.

I mean that's why folk like Salthe and Pattee are practically invisible. Society is not set up to fund and honour those who explain why its most grandiose technological dreams are doomed to ecological failure.

Whereas the kind of approach I'm pursuing, is not actually trying to create an alternative or competing model, but to cultivate a different cognitve mode, or way-of-being. — Wayfarer

It would be great if we could all be happy and just get along. But as you know, my pan-semiotic view is that humans are secretly driven by the desire of fossil fuel to entropify. And you can't fix what you can't properly diagnose.

You live in Australia. Which country has better education? Which country is worse at greening its politics? So how the hell do you plan to cultivate a better collective mindset when it is coal-mining putting most of the dollars in your pocket?

Your model appears to paint the world as an unfurling dialectical play of flux and stasis which relation is intimately tied to potential/constraint (is that right?) But the model, however, can be reached once and forever. A model is something constructed, but once constructed it appears to be provide atemporal truths. — csalisbury

Your characterisation of my position is accurate enough here. But I don't see the problem.

Surely a model by definition is going to be an atemporal truth? The map is not the territory, and all that....

The other thing is you seem to get something out of reasserting its principles - in distilled terms -over and over again, in all sorts of diverse threads. — csalisbury

Again, where is the problem if what I am asserting is itself paradigmatic? My organicism is developed at a level that undercuts the familiar discursive norms. So it always finds itself encountering that which it must speak its objections to - the brute classical materialism of the analytic mind, and the dazed romanticism which is the continental reaction to analytical sternness.

What makes philosophy enjoyable and worthwhile, for me, is the uncertainty and periodic aha moments - but so having found the right answers, why still do it? — csalisbury

First, its fun. Second, its useful to expose something I now hold with such certainty to the most randomly varied kinds of response. If I talk with fellow semioticians, it's quite boring because everyone understands and agrees with the generalities. So it is useful to stand up in front of a tough and disbelieving crowd. I've got so lazy that I need that stimulus to be bothered enough to continue the attempt to refine my position.

So you would be wrong in thinking that I have arrived at some actual terminus. As I say, for me personally, biophysics is currently taking off semiotically in the same exciting way that dissipative structure theory was rattling along in the 2000s, or complexity theory was in the 1980s.

And even for the crystalline metaphysical nub, there are huge issues still to sort out. It may be the case that Peirce, Rosen, Pattee and Salthe (plus 100 others) are all blindly feeling the same elephant, but each of these has developed their own particular slant on the central machinery of organicism.

So they may be good on the hierarchy theory aspects, the modelling relation aspects, but they don't really bring out the dichotomy aspect, the symmetry breaking aspect. And famously they also don't have properly worked-out models of vagueness either.

Thus when I talk about the necessity of fully mathematical treatment, that is as much a goad to myself. It sets the target - a unitary description that is actually mathematically crystalline.

Hierarchy theory, non-linear dynamics, statistical mechanics, etc, are all mathematical enterprises. But to use the elephant analogy, that's still talking at the level of trunks, tails and legs. It is not yet a maths of pan-semiosis, a maths that captures the essential generative seed in fully abstract or universalising fashion.

And maybe, like all theories of everything, we can never get there. It's a mirage, an impossible dream. I'm perfectly willing to listen to and respond to rational arguments in that direction. But then in my own lifetime all I've seen is a rollercoaster of scientific thought heading in this direction.

I mean who knew before the 1970s that you could mathematise chaos? And its been one damn thing after another in that regard.

As though - this is the insinuation - your model feeds on its difference from false models. and has to keep feeding. — csalisbury

Another thing I've often said is that I don't in fact reject the classical reductionist paradigm. Pragmatically it works and is widely believed for very good reason.

So the actual situation is that reductionism (or mechanicalism) fits in as a necessary part of my organic whole. And indeed, that is precisely why semiotics is about mechanism - stuff like codes, switches, boundaries, memories, networks, hierachies, etc. Semiotics simply inverts the relationship where the "messy organic dynamics", the "vague apeiron", is what is ontically fundamental, and mechanism is emergent regulative structure or habit.

So my position is based on the proper othering of the mechanical - the one that incorporates machines into nature. And it thus opposes itself to the kind of mechanicalism that wants to pretend that nature just is some kind of machine.

That is why I am not strongly opposed to the enlightenment and its resulting machine-model of reality. Turn it around, invert it in proper fashion, and it slots right into the bosom of a properly mathematical and empirical organicism.

But romanticism and its philosophical offspring? Sorry, but that is simply a tale of muddled wrongness. It is false in fundamental ways.

So to deal with your insinuation, of course my argument is going to be that every crisply developed view must achieve that development by "feeding off" the matchingly definite image of its "other". That is simply being self-consistent - matching ontology with epistemology.

Now maybe one must manufacture that counter-image in some sense. Perhaps it dosn't really exist. And to the degree it doesn't really exist, then I would have a problem. It would reciprocally weaken the image I was hoping to sharply develop.

So I am happy to consider that possibility. Indeed, I am here doing just that. But then it is up to you to show that the anti-crystalline nub fails to exist in the normed discourses of, say, AP or Pomo. If my diagnosis is so faulty, you can point to the faults.

When it comes to Contiinental philosophy, you may even have a point in arguing it can never be pinned down in the way I require because it is explicitly post-structure! Anything goes. There is no core to defend.

But that is to miss my criticism. To the degree that continentalism fails to be explicitly romantic, my argument is that it is being quite deliberately - that is crisply - vague.

Just open up any PoMo text at random. You get all these very definite seeming words, sentences, jargon, patterns of textual reference. It certainly looks crisp - an attempt to pin down ideas. But really you are dealing with a formless chaos, a dissonant noise, that folk with furrowed brows form a tight tribal circle around and make respectful murmurings. Genius is that which no one could understand.

Whoops, the accusation of romanticism is back in the frame again. How eristic of me. ;)

I think it is the case that Apokrisis' philosophy is essentially drawn from and based around the life sciences — Wayfarer

I don't really claim anything as mine or original. That is why I am at pains always to start with Anaximander - the first bloody metaphysician! :)

If you want the path I followed, it began in ecology, shifted to computer science, then paleoanthropology, then neuroscience/philosophy of mind, then complexity science, and finally arrived at the nascent field of biosemiotics. At which point I then took a decade detour through cosmology and the possibility of pan-semiotic approaches to physical science generally. And right now, I'm sort of back to biology, completing the circle with biophysics and abiogenesis having really started to shift into top gear intellectually.

So you are right. Early on I accepted the argument that biology is bigger than physics, and that science's failure to deal with the problem of mind could be put down to a lack of a suitable organicist metaphysics.

But then it turns out that we didn't even understand life properly in the 1970s and 1980s. So it is revolution stacked on revolution. What could be more thrilling?

I still don't understand where i levied an 18th century romantic stance othering you as 'mechanistic.' — csalisbury

So do you accept that my approach is "clenched and curled up super tight" because it describes the generative algorithm at the heart of my "semiotic organicism" and not - as you implied - simply because I suffer from some stubborn unwillingness to consider any other metaphysical possibility?

Your charge was that I am guilty of holding to "a set and sedentary framework". I am replying that is hardly unreasonable if that framework happens to be the right one - and I can happily show how I've arrived at it by a process of elimination.

If you want a scholarly discussion, you can have it. But by your own admission, you "haven't read" any of the relevant scholarship. Let me know when you've made a start.

I didn't understand your suggestion that my asking after the ontological status of your model meant that I was thinking in mechanistic terms. I still don't. — csalisbury

Your line of attack was "your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce".

My reply was that my model is like that only in the sense of a seed waiting to unfurl. So it is in fact a recursively open-ended and hierarchically generative model - a properly organic one.

Mine is a semiotic approach that is based on the search for a core symmetry breaking process. And this core process has been identified by a series of key writers - starting with Anaximander and his notion of apokrisis or "separating out". :)

In modern times, Peirce's semiotic, Rosen's modelling relation, Pattee's epistemic cut, and Salthe's basic triadic system, are all even sharper approaches to an answer based on the understanding that reality is a product of "matter and sign".

So my claim is that semiotic metaphysics is the "true" model of organic causality. And then that this model is best understood in terms of its "other", which is going to be the standard issue lumpen materialism that can be generally classified as "classical mechanics".

The mechanical view of causality revolves around a familiar family of principles (and their "others), namely reductionism (vs holism), determinism (vs contingency), monadism (vs anti-totalising), locality (vs quantum nonlocality), atomism (vs continuity).

So what I said was that in your attempts to criticise me, you tried to use the notions of mechanical discourse to show me as "other" to what you implicitly hold to be "the correct position". And I replied by pointing out that that only shows you are wedded to that mechanical discourse. You rely on its "truth" to ground your "truth". But to deal with my position, you would have to appreciate how it stands quite outside this little 18th century romanticism vs enlightenment spat you might be imagining.

And I'm still curious what your theory of truth is. Or if you even care about that kind of thing? and, if not, why not? — csalisbury

How can you still be curious, honestly? What more do I need to say except Peircean Pragmatism? Or Rosen's modelling relations?

Truth is a triadic sign relation. It is a process of constraining uncertainty using semiosis.

The biggest problem I have with this explanation is that it's not really true - you constantly use 'crisp' and 'rigorous' and 'mathematical' to refer to non-mathematical neat dichotomies, as with that true detective analysis way back when. — csalisbury

True Detective turned out to be shit as philosophy, so I don't even remember whatever it was that has got your goat here.

And note that "crisp" is a technical term that a biosemiotician would oppose to "vague". So it has a particular communal meaning. Although I like it because it is also quite a self-explanatory everyday language term.

So when I use "crisp", I do mean it "mathematically". That is I am defining it dichotomistically as the "other" of "vague". And thus formally, I am saying crisp = 1/vague - the relation being the reciprocal or inverse operation that is a dichotomy.

In case you don't follow that, crisp = 1/vague means that crispness is defined as being the least possible amount of the vague. An infinitesimal quantity. Or the furthest possible countable distance away.

odd. 'dialectic' is certainly not a 'crisp formal mathematical concept.' — csalisbury

Perhaps you see by now that it can be?

There's this thing you have with 'crisp' - which is very interesting. I mean it's interesting that the word you use most, and seem to find immense satisfaction in, is not itself any more 'crisp, formal, mathematical' than 'selection' or 'hinge.'

Do you find that interesting? What do you think about it? It seems interesting right! — csalisbury

I'm guessing you might be feeling increasingly embarrassed at your half-arsed taunts by now.

No, the government and even large corporations like Google censor the internet to prevent any such information from becoming widely known. — wuliheron

So how did you yourself become acquainted with this fact that you cite so often in your posts?

US federal government has finally admitted they have classified a few jokes as "Vital to the National Defense — wuliheron

You've written that the government has finally admitted this. You quote some actual words. So where and when did this happen? Tell us the story of how you come to know about this unusual fact.

They don't provide references for classified information — wuliheron

But you can provide a reference to support your clam about this being a fact? This is something you know because it has been reported somewhere credible you can now point too?

But mathematically it starts with an infinitesimal rather than a zero if we are talking about the other "end" of infinity.

It never tells us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter, in so far as its 'intrinsic nature' is more than its structure. — Wayfarer

Well does matter have an intrinsic nature? Hasn't structural realism been the answer since Aristotle's hylomorphism?

Whereas, I think naturalist methodology assumes the reality of the objects of experience, — Wayfarer

Not sure why scientists call themselves modellers then.

Its essential character is that here all opposites are undivided, or one.

That's why Parmenides is so useful as the dichotomous contrast to Heraclitus in teaching Ancient Greek philosophy 101.

But remember Heraclitus was actually a dichotomous thinker - flux and logos, or local degrees of freedoms and global "ratiional" constraints. While Parmenides only leveraged Zenoian paradox and made zero sense if taken literally.

So I'm happy if Parmenides has to be crossed off the list of proto-system thinkers. He was never on it to begin with.

I don't understand the significance of your mechanic/organic distinction here. — csalisbury

If you want the full answer from the biosemiotic perspective, that would take some explaining. You might want to google howard pattee + biosemiosis, or stan salthe + infodynamics, for the sharpest analysis in terms of dissipative structure theories.

But the simple systems science answer - which bases itself directly on Aristotelean naturalism - looks at it in terms of the four causes.

So the mechanical is reality modelled in terms of just material and efficient cause. In other words, formal and final cause have to be supplied by an external creator, a transcendent mind. Then the organic is immanent by contrast as all four causes, including formal and final, arise internally through self-organising development.

Are you just dumbing it down for those of us who can't do math? and, if so, why are you doing that? It's a little patronizing. — csalisbury

If you have no problem coping with Pattee and Salthe, then great. Let me know how you go.

But he wouldn't pretend that a crisp distinction between x and y is 'mathematical' because he respects his interlocutors well enough not to pretend that stark differentiation *is* math. I assume, based on your assurance, that you have similar mathematical facility (right?) so i wonder what accounts for the difference in approach? — csalisbury

I'm not talking about maths as maths. I'm talking about the particular maths I would employ - such as symmetry breaking, statistical mechanics, hierarchy theory, quantum mechanics, non-linear dynamics.

So there are certain mathematical/logical structures that I would appeal to here, not maths in some general sense as a practice.

And remember my response to the OP was that SX ought to use crisp formal mathematical concepts in place of his vague terminology. I said he should think in terms of reciprocal relations - as in dichotomies - rather than his "selection". Or hierarchical relations rather than his "hinges".

So if you want examples of what a more mathematically rigorous approach looks like, that was already it.

Huh? You are confusing an epistemological point with an ontological question. Hume ain't relevant here as this was about specific models, not the underlying possibility of modelling.

Well, if as the OP says, 'to have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'; and if you say that the 'kinds of things that exist' are limited to 'the kinds of things that the natural sciences are able to discover' - then is that an open or a closed model? — Wayfarer

Open. By design. So it is axiomatic. The process claims only to minimise our uncertainty.

If you believe in some different epistemology derived from an alternative axiomatic basis (one less idealist perhaps) then go for it. Justify away. (Revelation, Platonism???)

A convenient explanation need not always be the correct explanation. — darthbarracuda

But also if you advance a positive doubt here, it needs to be constrained by what appear to be the facts, dontcha think?

You seem to be claiming that causality fails in some generic sense. I ask where are the facts that suggest that?

Your worldview determines what you will regard as 'data'. — Wayfarer

So do you choose a closed worldview that doesn't update its beliefs, or instead an open one that builds in continuous inquiry?

Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference — StreetlightX

Don't you mean he argued for generic sameness?

That's the logical point. The general and the particular are asymmetric or dichotomous in that one is about sameness, the other about difference - in the familiar "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive" fashion required by fundamental thinking.

What I'm interested in is your understanding of the status of this model in relation to all the other fragile, tenuous structures out there. Is the model itself of their kind? — csalisbury

My argument would be that I describe the meta-model. So it is the most general level description that captures the abstractly utterly necessary. And then - as the model itself models - it would support a hierarchy of increasingly less specified, increasingly freer, sub-descriptions. Thus the model indeed models itself in all its potential for local variety as well as its central certainty.

So if for example the discrete~continuous defines some ultimate dialectical bound on existence - in the limit, everything would be either discrete or continuous - then that also then means everything can then in actuality be some kind of mix of the continuous and the discrete. Everything would be intermediate cases in a freely various fashion.

So it is not a bug that the core metaphysics is a tightly curled mathematical knot that then becomes the generator of rich organic variety. That epistemology exactly mirrors the ontology it claims. It is its important feature.

If you think you have spotted a weakness in this regards, it shows that you are operating from - ironically - a classical, mechanical, mindset. You understands machines and their weakness. But then you still remain trapped in that paradigm in making that the antithesis you hope to reject.

You have accepted your enemy's legitimacy in his own terms by engaging me in those terms. Yet I've already long moved on to a fully organicist point of view (in which machinery, of the semiotic variety, is the useful emergent feature).

Let's get romantic and non-crisp and quote yeats: — csalisbury

I'd rather stick to mathematical rigour. It's more beautiful and true in the end.

But is your model that kind of non-natural enamel bird? or is it of a piece with nature? — csalisbury

It arises out of biophysics, for instance. So it is based on particular nano-scale facts that we couldn't even hope to measure 10 years ago.

Doesn't it worry you that you might be building your own confident world-view on very obsolete data?

If we argue from Big Bang models, i.e. extrapolate to a definite earliest time, then other infinites just show up instead, infinite density and temperature. — jorndoe

I certainly agree with a thermal approach to time. But other infinities don't show up at the beginning. Instead, all things have the same Planckian scale.

So even temperature or energy density is not infinite at the Planck scale. It has a size - at least when measured against an extrapolated version of a Newtonian system of clocks and rulers with scales that go "all the way up" to zero (just like Spinal Tap's amps!).

but then you say you're a physicalist, — Wayfarer

But not in a strict materialist sense. I would be a pan-semiotic physicalist - meaning that my ontology involves both matter and sign (or matter and symbol).

So signs and symbols are "made of material" in some sense - but in the most minimal possible sense, as a sign is that which manages to isolate itself from the thermal entropic flow.

Thus a sign is the forrmal inverse of matter in the pan-semiotic scheme. It is "anti-matter" in the truest possible metaphysical sense, ;)

In any case, though, the notion of causality has been attacked, many times. — darthbarracuda

That's a little hand-wavy. Where do we have evidence that on the whole causality fails the locality principle?

Yes, we definitely also have good evidence that "at the quantum scale" causality breaks down in a particular fashion. But we rely on causality being pretty conventional at an emergent classical scale.

So this is why we would want an emergent model now. It is not a reason to just throw away classicality. That still "works".

US federal government has finally admitted they have classified a few jokes as "Vital to the National Defense." — wuliheron

References please....

Probably all wrong, but anyway it's striking that your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce (or add subtle shading to or furnish new examples of) a set and sedentary framework. — csalisbury

Alternatively, this is what all the possibilities distill down to. If you understood the natural sciences in their broad sweep, this is where we are at.

Physics, however, does make a declaration about what is considered a valid object of analysis, namely, something which can be physically measured, something which registers on an instrument or plate or bubble-chamber. — Wayfarer

So physics is then idealist in saying reality is only what can be measured by someone? If it ain't a number on a dial, it isn't real? :)

I think if you get beyond Scientism you will see that science (pragmatically) takes idealism more seriously than anyone else.

And again, I question whether C S Pierce sought to ground his metaphysics in what we take to be 'the physical'. — Wayfarer

As I say, the whole point is giving up on the lumpen materialism of the lay person. Do you think quantum physicists can believe in the reality of "stuff" anymore?

Quantum field theory - our most advance formulation yet - doesn't even pretend to deal with "real fields". The "field" only describes a spread of observer probabilities. It is a calculus of how we might expect the needle on the dial to bend.

And how many times have you now wheeled out that exact same Peirce quote and apparently forgotten my lengthy response on its proper contextual interpretation?

Even though 'the way our knowing operates' seems to be more the subject of epistemology, — Wayfarer

Yes. Metaphysics divides according to the classic dichotomy of epistemology and ontology - or the observer and the observables.

And Peirce was radical in finding a pan-semiotic metaphysics that could unite the two again. Quantum physics shows that now to be absolute necessary for any further progress.

The problem is modern western science has focused on her beauty to the exclusion of humor — wuliheron

So beauty = ideas with mathematical precision, and humour = measurement uncertainty? Where then is there a problem if science has mathematically precise models of measurement uncertainty?

That's the kind of "dancing wu li master" nonsense that gives serious systems science such a bad name.

It seems to depend on the idea that time moves forward in one direction; an intuition that is theoretically refuted from deduction of scientific observation (I can't remember the specificities, perhaps someone like apo will). — darthbarracuda

You are right the argument would be suspect simply because it depends on a particular notion of time. And while modern science might not be able to offer a concrete "better model of time" right at the moment, it does have plenty of evidence to doubt the kind of simplicities the argument assumes.

Why a temporal mobius strip would be the way it is, I have no idea. It's just a funny idea I've been toying with. — darthbarracuda

But the problem here is that you have just destroyed causality, and causality is something we would expect to be able to extract from "a better model of time". Causality is what we observe in the world - it is why we believe it to be "time-like" - and so at the very least, an arrow of time ought to be the emergent feature of any good model of time.

That was the problem of Newtonian time, and the reason for recent thermal models. Newtonian time could not build in a direction. As a result you can get insane metaphysical notions like "the block universe", or "eternal recurrence".

An odd argument I came across recently: — jorndoe

A modern version of this argument is used to show the Big Bang could never have happened. If eternal Time exists (in big-T Newtonian dimensional fashion), then there would have had to have been an infinite amount of time elapsing before - suddenly, in a bright flash - our Universe got created. So therefore never enough time could pass to arrive at that point.

A better answer is that the Big Bang was the start of time, as well as space. So we can't think of the pre-Bang as a temporal dimension - except in some far simpler metaphysical sense yet to be articulated scientifically.