Maybe it's the contingency of the world he find absurd. It is absurd. "Why is there a here here?" — Hoo

Yeah sure. But that in turn is based on the presumption that contingency is somehow not natural.

So there are three positions here.

At one extreme is the theological/Platonic one where every tiniest thing is a detail that matters. Either God has some point of view about it. Or there is some perfect form mourning the imperfections of its material shadows. Everything counts.

Then the flipside of this perfectionism and necessitarianism is the view that it is all just contingent and meaningless. No one in fact gives a damn so there is nothing to anchor our existence.

Which then leaves the middle course - the naturalist view - that reality is a fruitful interaction of constraints and freedoms. And that makes contingency or spontaneity a natural part of the deal - along the generality of everything in the end being orientated by a sense of purpose.

So when it comes to humans living a life, there are a lot of different things we can be doing that don't in the end make too much difference. And yet also by the same token, there is stuff we really ought to be focused on as that which does make a difference.

So humans can come to believe any of these three conceptual frameworks - and affectively value their lives in that light.

The point I would then make is that the conceptual analysis comes first. Affect is not a reliable guide as to whether your life is indeed futile or ecstatically fulfilling. Instead, how you frame things is how you will seek to feel.

The Christian will expect to feel everything is God's will. The Pessimist will expect every action to be in the end pointless - a grand pretence at caring. Then Naturalism will take the view that life is about a dynamical balance.

So you have to prove your case at the metaphysical level, not simply claim your (socially constructed) feelings are legitimate or authentic.

the affect or feeling I am getting at- that of absurdity — schopenhauer1

Absurd in comparison to what? Is it absurd as living creatures to have the goals that define life? Should I feel it is unnatural to be natural?

Not my problem if your OP is a rambling bleat about the problem that any kind of action - even deliberate inaction - seems to betray a goal state. And you can't have that because you need to support your presumption that all goals are futile.

It cannot be based on studies of the brain because that is only possible via the very perception that he claims does not show things to be anything like what "they really are". — John

There is a rational argument at the base of this. The brain evolves to represent the world in terms of our interests. And so our own interests get baked into our states of perception. We are not in the business of seeing things as they really are, but only as they really matter.

I'm wondering if this can be taken seriously with most people without being dismissed as juvenile or simply a product of post-modern society. — schopenhauer1

Sadly, it just is juvenile. For you to be able to do literally nothing (feed yourself, wipe your arse, turn you over to avoid bedsores) would require others to do everything for you. So you are advocating for a parasitic state where your idleness forces more busyiness on those around you.

Existence is a natural cycle which includes birth and growth as well as decay and death. So life has its own natural logic - one of dynamic adaptation rather that static contemplation - and philosophy should address it on those terms.

Of course philosophy, being dialectic, always will produce the "other". But in being able to talk about what life is not (ie:death), this should only highlight what life is. It then becomes perverse to want to "play dead" before your time is up.

apokrisis — darthbarracuda

Typically I'd say we value personal value over impersonal value anyway so the idea that we ought to kill miserable people for the sake of some abstract impersonal value is a bit convoluted. — darthbarracuda

But don't you routinely extrapolate from the personal to the general in this fashion? It is not the suffering within your own experience that is the issue for you but the impersonal fact that suffering exists. So yes, this is "convoluted". Which is what I thought I had argued.

Do you really believe you have the right to force a future generation to fix what our generation is failing to fix? i.e. instrumentalizing future generations without their consent? — darthbarracuda

I talked of their right to a choice in the matter. So equally they could decide to make their existence as miserable as they like.

But clearly, if it is admitted that suffering exists due to things that can be changed, then the fact we seem to be doing a poor job - your claim, not mine necessarily - doesn't give us the right to take away that opportunity from future generations.

This is also where antinatalism can be a potential gamechanger in this debate. We don't need a procreative population ethics because we don't need to procreate nor have a population to begin with. — darthbarracuda

But it could only be a personal choice not to have kids. And should your partner and family, or even society, have no say at all here? It is not clear you automatically would have this right. And indeed, a society in which its population ceased to breed might be within its right to take a more coercive stance. Or if the cult of antinatalism got to widespread, again a society might want to protect itself against such an antisocial threat.

So to the degree you define this as a personal choice, then this leaves open the ethical issue of what kind of choice does social and biological level organisation in all this?

No, it wouldn't be for their own good, it would be for an abstract impersonal good. Which I also find to be repugnant. — darthbarracuda

But you are giving them the gift of removing their suffering according to you. No amount of pleasure could justify even a paper cut or the risk of a horrible death in a fiery car crash, remember? So it is entirely for their own good.

No, suffering in nature is the affirmation of life without the person suffering consenting to life. It's the body's way of forcing a person to do something, i.e. enslavement, i.e. instrumentality. — darthbarracuda

OK, it gets weird when you talk about personhood as if it could be disembodied. All natural logic breaks down here.

clearly a suicidal person who jumps off a building is suffering, and clearly this is not an affirmation of life nor an affirmation of the value of life, rather the complete opposite. — darthbarracuda

Err yeah. But now we are into a position where suicide is taken to be the right choice and so all sufferers should be assisted off the top of the nearest high rise if they can't do it for themselves.

So either you respect the majority choice or we are into the business of removing that choice because we can't tolerate people being self-deluding and enslaved to their own corporeal bodies.

And no, it's not eugenics, because eugenics is all about finding the perfect, ideal organism, and antinatalism is usually focused on the fact that there are no perfect, ideal organisms. — darthbarracuda

It is eugenics because it shows a fascist intolerance of imperfection. The goal is to eliminate unwanted population traits. And the solution is as final as it gets.

To answer your question, a proponent of the Asymmetry would likely respond by saying that helping miserable people get better, is better than just killing them. — darthbarracuda

Well we would all agree there. But that then admits to the possibility of a socially-organised escape from misery. Which ought to put us straight back into ordinary utilitarian style discussions.

Indeed many symmetry-advocates have outright proclaimed that they deny the Asymmetry despite finding it incredibly appealing. — darthbarracuda

But how can it be appealing if it's bare calculus warrants active subtraction just as much, if not more, than the prevention of addition coupled to natural wastage?

Over time, the asymmetry would only result in a nullity. Whereas the subtraction of miserable people from the population results in a perfectly happy populace. And +1 is clearly better than 0 when it comes to the sums. Not to kill off the miserable while producing as great a population of the happy as possible would be a positive crime, if we take this kind of calculation at its face value.

It's why I think the Asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why I think David Benatar's antinatalistic asymmetry is so intuitive, it's why the mere-addition paradox is so repugnant, etc. We seem to have, regardless of what we consciously argue for, an inherent negative utilitarian-like disposition. — darthbarracuda

Who is this "we"? Personally it strikes me as a PC version of fascist eugenics. Humans are against nature and therefore should be extinguished. Give the planet back to the bugs and fungi.

So yes, we can take a compassionate view about the suffering of others. We can wish for a better world. And feeling inadequate to the task of making it a better world, we can then decide the final solution is to remove the problem by removing the sufferers - antinatalism merely seeming to be the kindest approach to this holocaust against folk having a freedom to choose and act on their own accord.

Do you really believe you have the right to deny a future generation to fix what your generation seems to be failing to fix (and I say "seeming" as the evidence being given is so slight that it is routinely talked up to the skies)?

Perhaps you can re-describe the asymmetry in a way I can follow its intuitive appeal. I still only see that its natural logic demands we start subtracting the miserable immediately for their own good.

That is of course a repugnant idea. But largely because you can't create a happy world in that kind of binary fashion. Talk about happiness as an ideal, as opposed to the ideal of the adaptive balance - some notion of social flow and fit - is where the whole analysis starts to go wrong. It is not even the proper measure of anything here. And so therefore neither is this obsession with pain and suffering.

Suffering isn't the end of the world, just a normal aspect of life. Or to put it another way, it is what it feels like to be pointing towards death instead of life. If you are getting pain that intense, that's your signal you are getting down to your last chance to stay alive.

So suffering - in nature - is affirmation that life is in fact valued. It is the fate better than death. And yet you want to take away the gift of life for untold generations of the unborn! Isn't that PC eugenics?

In a nutshell, the Asymmetry is a population ethics intuition that we must make people happy, but not make happy people (i.e. giving birth to happy people), i.e. the world is made worse by the addition of a miserable person but is not made better by the addition of a happy person (as if the happy person is entirely irrelevant). — darthbarracuda

Not to derail your thread, but why - given this equation - is it not justified to go around killing off all miserable people? (Or equivalently, tanking them up on heroin, giving them lobotomies, or whatever.)

As an asymmetry, it still harbours the symmetry with would be subtraction instead of addition. And subtraction would seem to have the advantage of fixing things right away rather than waiting to make the desired change over time.

Anyway, in terms of your thread, I think "why anything?" is as good an obsession as any.

I think it's hard to to say "Good art is meant to x" — csalisbury

Yep. It is hard to assign it a specific purpose or even a general one. The question becomes why would we even want to separate it out as an aspect of human existence. In a traditional culture, art permeates everything and is something everyone is involved in.

So what I highlighted are two ways that art has been pulled out of the ordinary in modern life - first as a product to consume, and second as a new ground for status games.

So this betokens perhaps meta-art, a new level of self-consciousness that we humans "are creatures characterised by doing art". And in being self-conscious, the note of falseness and artificiality intrudes. Suddenly we also become aware of art that is just unthinking participation in human symbolic culture and then art as something we individually can have control over as consumers and purveyors.

Thus I am right with you regarding Tarkovsky and the skill with which it both unsettles and soothes. It has the subtlest intensity. But I am not saying we can pull even Tarkovsky out as a noble exemplar of what defines good art in some Platonic sense. Although I am sympathetic to the argument that the ability to truly appreciate Tarkovsky would be highly correlated with intelligence and visual imagination. :)

But maybe the idea that "Fine Art" is a balm in Gilead, or maybe it's baloney. — Bitter Crank

Isn't great art meant to make you think? Isn't it meant to unsettle rather than soothe? Isn't it there to stir to action as well as calm the nerves? Isn't it meant to lift us to refined intellectually while, at other times, reduce us to primal intensity?

In other words, art is a cultural tool for extremising the variety in our emotional and intellectual responses. It offers social viewpoints that constrain everyday experience in a way that seems to tap into some aesthetic essence.

That and it is provides something even more important to a social animal - an arena for status display.

Anyone can aspire to money or power these days. But taste and refinement are much rarer commodities precisely because they are invented rather than real. Snobbery is about staying a step ahead of the game in dreaming up new kinds of social distinction.

So art is something to be consumed just because it is fun. We like being pulled in directions that take us out of the ordinary, or extract its essence.

And art is a status game that is especially attractive to those not winning status in more traditional ways, like money and power.

Ok, so prior to symmetry-breaking there must be symmetry? — Metaphysician Undercover

Logically prior at least. The question then becomes what this means in terms of a physical model of time.

If symmetry is the maths and modeling of the real world stasis, then what is the symmetry which is prior to symmetry breaking, other than stasis? — Metaphysician Undercover

I say it becomes a model of vagueness once we shift from talk about what currently exists to how existence itself might develop.

To turn vagueness from a metaphysical to a scientific concept, we need good mathematical formalisation. And symmetry maths becomes useful here because of its rigour. But symmetry maths is not a direct intuitive image of developmental processes (such as symmetry-breaking) as it presents a spatialised and timeless picture of nature. It is nature already gone to equilbrium or stasis.

Models of symmetry-breaking are derived more from physics than pure maths. And so the physics invokes further material features - things that bring in time and energy now - such as "spontaneous fluctuations" and "infinite correlations" that both create a dynamical balance, and cause that balance to be tipped.

So now the task for the cosmological emergentist view is even larger. It is not only time, but space, energy, and their interactions, which must all develop into crisp being as well.

Which is fine because at least it fits with the most recalcitrant physical facts of nature we have yet discovered. Everything boils down to the uncertainty (or vagueness) relation encoded in the triad of Planck constants that scale spacetime, energy density, and lightspeed (or the limit on actual material correlations).

The Planck scale tells us there is a "size" below which any normal talk of spacetime or energy density ceases to be physically meaningful. So like it or not, that ought to be factored into any modern discussion of metaphysics.

I am only proceeding now according to your assumptions. You claimed that time, and change are emergent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if you were following my argument, you would have to bring in its other side - the emergence of stasis (as encoded in the further notion of space).

Don't you assume symmetry, and isn't symmetry a form of stasis? — Metaphysician Undercover

As I've said, symmetry is a way to model stasis because it is the maths of differences that don't make a difference. And so it is a model of physical equilbrium situations, where there are differences, and they don't make a difference.

Math's problem is that it is timeless and energyless in being basically a spatial or geometric conception of things. So symmetry maths has a static character just due to the way maths is derived. You are risking confusing the stasis of the method with the stasis (and flux) of the world the method is used to model.

You are the one who takes stasis for granted, — Metaphysician Undercover

Hardly. I've said it is emergent as an equilibrium state - flux arriving at its own inherent limitations. And "time" speaks to the time it takes to run down a gradient of symmetry-breaking. Time emerges from the fact that such a change can't be instant when it comes to our Universe.

It is, generally speaking, I was just simplifying for the sake of discussion. — Aaron R

I appreciate that you even mentioned it. Treat my post as mostly a trigger for my own self-clarification.

What I was trying to get at it is that since the mind-conceived 'mind-independent world' is always, obviously, conceived; then it is always conceptually articulated. — John

Well that is different in focusing on the epistemic angle rather than the ontic. And pansemiosis is an ontic claim in saying, essentially, that epistemology becomes ontology here. The structure of the modelling relation we have with the world (what you are talking about) is in fact the structure by which the Universe also "knows things" - that is knows things like what its laws say about how its parts ought to be behaving in conformance with developed habit.

So what I would say in reply here is that while we need - epistemically - to be aware that the "mind-independent world" is in fact a free creation of the mind, just an idea, it is also true that the "mind" is also a construction of this kind. It is also "just an idea" we hold to explain things.

So both the world and the self that is imagined as its observer are articulated concepts. Together they form the very epistemic relation, the sign relation, which is what "we" then claim to believe in as our "objective truth".

What we can't get beyond is the need for a conceptually articulated view in general. And talk about the mind vs the world is what that articulation looks like.

Of course there is, we must imagine, 'something' independently of human being. — John

But strictly, we consider reality to start exactly where imagination fails. Imagination makes experience depend on "us". We can imagine flying for instance. So it is when experience comes to depend on something other than "us" that we can experientially say, well this is not "us" now. And let's call this other thing mind-independent reality.

If something is conceptualizable, then it is articulated in the same, or an isomorphic, manner as concepts are, i.e. logically. So, it seems that we are committed to thinking there is a logos in nature independently of human being. — John

Now we are back to ontic commitments. And the question is whether the structure of thought and world are the same in some way that is exactly as we conceive it, or whether - because we know we are manifesting an image - in fact it still remains likely that we are just projecting our articulate concepts.

And my own point about self and world as equally conceptual at root, should point towards the latter, in fact. There is now even less reason for the workings of our minds to be true to the thing-in-itself.

This is probably surprising, but it is already basic to psychological science. The brain is not there to re-present reality but to ignore it as much as possible. Attention and habit are filters set up to limit our physical connection to the world (so as to achieve the separation which constitutes the modelling relation's epistemic cut). Being a mind is all about constructing some minimal symbolic encoding that simply has the job of leaving us effective physical actors. Like DNA's relation to the metabolism it models, the contents of experience must be essentially unrealistic to be effective as semiosis.

If you want people to stop at road junctions, you put the stop sign to one side rather than erecting a physical barrier in the middle of the road. Or at least that is the simple and cost-effective way to co-ordinate driving behaviour. The stop sign looks nothing like a physical barrier. It doesn't represent the world. Yet as a symbol, it articulates a concept about how the world "ought to be".

So this is very tricky stuff. We have every reason to be suspicious of every articulate conception as their whole point is not to be true in some veridical "thing-in-itself" sense. That is not even the ambition. The ambition is to be pragmatically effective. And that is achieved by a capacity to leave just about everything material out of the concepts. Classic reductionism to theory and measurement in other words.

However then - having properly understood this psychological apparatus, this epistemic truth - that is the structure of the modelling relation which pansemiosis would project onto our imaginings of reality. The thing-in-itself has the form of wanting to self-simplify in terms of concepts like particles or waves ruled by dynamical laws of motion, for instance.

People always complain that we look at reality but then talk about the abstracta that aren't really there. We end up treating a logos as the essence of the real (while the actual physical stuff is reduced to mere appearance).

Pansemiosis - in transferring the psychological account into the space of cosmological accounts - gives us a formal way of accounting for just this. It says, nope, logos really is what is most real here. The thing-in-itself is not just some bunch of stuff, a state of affairs. It does boil down to an encoding relation where there is a cosmic purpose expressing the desire to produce the simplest definite actions.

Anything might be quantumly possible. But semiotically, existence arises due to the collapse of all this potential being to some historic collection of binary-framed choices. Was the electron spin-up or spin-down all along? Who can know. But history remembers some now fixed answer.

Yes, that's a good example, actually. — Terrapin Station

If you like that, then I would highly recommend Salthe's two books on hierarchy theory - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution.

Even in this last post, I just can't make sense of "You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale" — Terrapin Station

Again, Salthe's books explain this in detail. He coined the term cogent moment.

http://projects.isss.org/doku.php?id=principle_of_scalar_levels

So how would change emerge then? — Metaphysician Undercover

By the emergence of its other - the lack of change that stands as the backdrop which makes it, with counterfactual definiteness, "a change".

If time and change emerge, as you say, then prior to change, there would be no change. — Metaphysician Undercover

But also no lack of change either. There would be no stasis to speak of.

Perhaps there was absolutely nothing before time and change, — Metaphysician Undercover

Well that ain't logical is it? What would this "nothing" measure its nothingness against?

But if it is eternal, it must be an eternal changelessness, so how could change emerge from eternal changelessness? — Metaphysician Undercover

You see how you keep dropping stasis out of the discussion. You simply presume the thing that gives the idea of "change" any crisp meaning can be taken for granted.

Once you start honestly asking yourself about how stasis could be the case, then the lightbulb might go off.

Hey, you made the blanket statement, "you can't argue with science after all". I wasn't referring to cosmological designations, — Metaphysician Undercover

But clearly I was.

It works for me as the most reasonable cosmology. You can't argue with science after all. — apokrisis

I was referring to more simple, basic things like 40 or 50 years ago when science determined that butter is bad for you, and margarine was supposed to be the saviour. Now it seems like science says the opposite. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or maybe the science was never binary in this fashion. It was simply the science reporting, meeting a simplistic public expectation, that presented such a crisply binary answer.

I often wish you'd provide references to companion literature, — Terrapin Station

You mean like....? http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/NatPhil_of_entropy.pdf

Well, is it just identical to the world and the mind? In that case, calling it a "deeper structure" doesn't make much sense. — Terrapin Station

You are trying to fit things into a view of existence that lacks spatiotemporal scale. You are imagining reality as an atomistic state of affairs in which "everything that is" is crammed into the one place at the one time. You are adopting a synchronic or present tense view of existence when its reality is integrated across a hierarchy of "cogent moments" or spatiotemporal scales.

This is a really fundamental ontological difference here. And until you can understand what it would mean to take a holistic point of view on the issue, you are just going to keep talking past any post I might make.

Right, but the "thoughtless world", although it doesn't 'possess thoughts' is always already in the form of thought. To put it another way, 'anything' that is not in the form of thought is as nothing. — John

The use of psychological terminology here is to risk blurring pansemiosis with panpsychism. So it has to be done carefully.

But I would point out that thought for humans is both thoughtful (that is articulate and attentional) and thoughtless (that is automatic or habitual).

So you could say - as Peirce did - that the world is inveterate habit. It has the character of thought turned thoughtless and completely fixed in its ways.

So there is a common form in play - the triadic structure of a sign relation. But even in ourselves. there is a sharp contrast between the freshly thought, the creatively free thought, and the thoughts which have long fossilised into stable pragmatic habits, the reactions or relations "we" no longer have to think about, and so which in fact now constitute us psychologicallly as this "we".

Applying this to the Universe, you can say then that all its spontaneity has been pretty much spend. There is only a Planck scale uncertainty that remains at base. The Universe is not thinking actively anymore. It has no "we" separate from the inveterate physical habits which pretty much completely constitute it now.

Again, this is all a very psychological kind of description of the metaphysics. Pansemiosis as a putative scientific project would want to tie in with physical science more than psychological science (while also insisting that the two are structurally "the same").

And this is what looks to be happening because fundamental physics has taken its decisive turn towards an information theoretic and thermodynamic formulation. What could be more perfectly poised as a balancing of the mental and the physical than to render a description of reality in terms of "information"?

Information means both at the same time the quantification of mental uncertainty and material certainty. It measures both sides of the equation the same way, and allows their exact conversion.

This is why pansemiosis is now something worth talking about. Physics is already there (even if it wouldn't describe itself in those terms just yet).

I wonder where the heck that "deeper structure of semiosis" is supposed to be located in that case. — Terrapin Station

Perhaps it would be more fruitful to wonder where the deeper structure is exhibited? (The answer being in both the world and the mind.)

See also the notion of "pansemiosis" that has become in-vogue among some of Peirce's successors in contemporary semiotic theory. The story being told in both cases goes something like this: there's no problem of how thought maps to the world because the structure of the world matches the structure of thought. — Aaron R

I think pansemiosis has to be more subtle than that. It says instead that the structure of thought and the structure of the world both share the deeper structure that is the structure of semiosis, or the sign relation.

So in practice, existence is still divided into thinking creatures and thoughtless world (by the epistemic cut of a modelling relation). Otherwise pansemiosis starts to become indistinguishable from panpsychism.

To emerge requires time, so things only emerge if there already is time. This means that it is contradictory to say that time emerges, because there must be time prior to anything, including time, emerging. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my view, time is change. So time as we know it is part of change as we know it. Thus time as we know it is wedded to space and energy. It doesn't then make sense to talk about time existing alone before there was space and energy. So it doesn't make sense to talk about time in a conventional way before the Big Bang. (Or even a divine creation, if it comes to that.)

Eternal means changeless. And that raises the question of what could be both changeless yet result in a change? A vagueness is neither changing or changeless. It is simply vague regarding such a dichotomy.

But that in turn means a vagueness has the potential to become divided into the changing and the changeless. The least bit of flux or change must produce also the least bit of stasis or the changeless as that which makes the change apparent as in fact a change. For there to be a disturbance, there must be then the something which is by comparison the still.

So we know we exist in a world where change and changelessness are both crisply real. That is not a problem. We know that there is flux to act as the yardstick of stasis, and stasis to act as the yardstick of flux. And that is what legitimates an inquiry into how this mutually exclusive state of affairs must have looked if we add the requirement that it had to develop or arise.

The alternative of course is to accept that sharp distinction as brute fact - claim existence never began but is instead eternal - changeless. And already in saying that, we can see that such an assumption not only contradicts the facts (either scientific, or biblical), but it also contradicts itself in saying there could be the crisply changeless (an eternal existence) in the absence of a contrast - a changing existence - that would be the definite yardstick needed to make the eternal a crisp fact.

Without the presence of its "other", characterising a world as eternal is a hollow notion. An eternal world can only exist in that kind of sharp contrast to a non-existent world. And as I say, we know that our world exists, so to talk about nothingness as a real possibility is the ultimate empty talk. And if that is so for talk about nothingness, it also becomes that for talk about the eternal as its ontic contrary.

So logic returns us to the fact something exists in a certain way. We are in a world that is divided into the relatively changeable seen against the backdrop of the relatively changeless. Then the only way to resolve a division is to seek its origin in some more primal state. That primal state must merge the oppositions that arose out of it. And so change and changelessness must have looked the same - been indistinguishable - at the point "just before" they started to separate.

If they are now crisp polarities, originally they must have been just one unbroken vagueness.

It appears to me, like many things which "science" presents as truth, change to be not true, after fifteen or twenty years. — Metaphysician Undercover

What important cosmological discoveries did you have in mind here?

And given that you cling on to a classical Newtonian conception of time, space and force, don't you appreciate the irony in doing that?

Look, you place "final cause", as the end of change. — Metaphysician Undercover

At the cosmological level, time itself is emergent and so talk of before and after doesn't work out for me quite the same as it does for you with your Newtonian concept of time as its own eternal backdrop dimension.

But finality is called finality for a reason. Change can cease once it has achieved its purpose.

Again, because you think the cosmological issue is to get change started from a position of stasis, to tip existence into motion, you are always going to want to place some cause at the beginning of a change.

But I take the opposite view that the cosmological issue is how to place constraints on chaos. So now we have a symmetry breaking or phase transition story where finality begins with imperceptible first hints of regularity, and then develops until finality is fully expressed.

So finality is there from the first instance as the barest hint - but like the butterfly wing, you would never spot it. And it is there at the end as the clearly satisfied purpose. Now there is no mistaking the intention as change has ended.

But placing "bare potential" as first, only stymies any such progression, because one then proceeds to build an ontology on this unreasonable premise. . — Metaphysician Undercover

It works for me as the most reasonable cosmology. You can't argue with science after all. ;)

No, you're missing the point. I asked what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does, and you replied that it means that it must be open to public demonstration. But if that criteria is baked-in to the very idea of truth, then it seems to me you haven't answered my question, and the qualifier 'objective' still doesn't do anything. — StreetlightX

You are being very confrontational given that I was obviously being ironic.

My point was that in being "a public demonstration", this means that even empirically "objective" is really "subjective", the only difference being that the agreement expressed is collective.

This is of course standard pragmatism. But whatever.

Would truth that is not open to public demonstration be truth? — StreetlightX

Did you have an example in mind? Aesthetics for instance? And would it be a problem for you if that were contrastingly qualified as subjective truth?

Or if you meant Platonic or rational truth, or even deductive logical truth, then that becomes another discussion again.

So truth may have many modalities or multiple methods of inquiry. Truth really just describes our willingness to ascribe a state of certainty due to an act of interpretation properly carried out.

It is in the end is a state of mind, even when that state of mind is collective, as I said.

One wonders what kind of conceptual work the qualifier 'objective' in 'objective truth' does. — StreetlightX

It implies publicly demonstrable. So a collective subjective agreement. ;)

So you see truth as a destination, as opposed to a property of statements? — Mongrel

A statement has to be interpreted. It doesn't understand itself. So yes. True or false are semantic judgments. A proposition is merely a sign awaiting interpretation.

I agree, the Aristotelian solution doesn't really work. The Neo-Platonist solution does work, while respecting the principles of the cosmological argument. Your solution is to throw away the cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. My solution is to focus instead on other models of development within Aristotle's writings - like the symmetry-breaking of potential by the separation towards contraries.

In that view, finality acts as a final cause in being the global limit that thus emerges to mark an end on change. Or at least an equilbrium state in which change no longer makes a difference.

So we are on opposite sides of this argument still.

Are there different sorts of truth? Is "objective truth" meaningful? — Mongrel

You really are missing Banno! But anyway, my starting point would be that arriving at truth would have to be the result of a process - an epistemic process. So that would normally imply already that "subjectivity" lurks in there somewhere.

And then for "objective" to be meaningful as a qualifier, that would have to be so in the usual fashion of being held up against its intelligible opposite, its "other", which again is usually regarded as "subjective".

And if subjective means fundamentally epistemic, then objective implies in contrary fashion that something is fundamentally ontic.

From there, we can talk at cross-purposes forever. To talk of objective truth is naive realism if it ignores its own epistemic conditions by which it came to be - the process that was followed such that it might be held separable from the ontically subjective!

What you say that this is a sort of poetic act? That beings are disclosed by/as new concepts of things-background pairs? — Hoo

Personally, I wouldn't because it would be something I believe on rational~empirical grounds rather than poetic or aesthetic. And a Peircean pragmatist in particular would take the ontic view that reality itself is rational~empirical in its own process of coming into being. Existence is summed up as the universal growth of reasonableness (or intelligibility).

So sure, one can certainly have feelings about this fact. You can find it awesome, surprising, exciting, or whatever. But a Peircean wouldn't appeal to aesthetic grounds as such. Indeed, Peirce was a little notorious in struggling to have much to say about aesthetics beyond that it boiled down to ... the universal growth of reasonableness being the highest good.

That would be one reason why Pragmatism seems "dry" and "unromantic".

But on the other hand - taking a social constructionist view of human emotions - it also seems pretty plain that such emotion talk is essentially coercive. Humans use this kind of language to make people conform to socially-sanctioned behavioural scripts. An appeal to "aesthetics" as the grounds for why another should behave in a way you want them to behave is essentially fascist and totalitarian (see what I did there. :) ).

So I can enjoy romanticism as culture. It makes good escapist entertainment. But I think we differ in that you strongly self-identify with the existentialist hero script, where I would take it ironically.

Wouldn't you say that life often feels like being on stage in a melodrama where you know the part you are meant to be playing, the poses you are meant to strike - and it is all kind of fun. But also it is a bit worrying to be surrounded by other actors who are taking it all a little too literally? They actually believe they are the characters they are playing?

Anyway, that is why - when it comes to actual philosophy - aesthetics has no place. The fact that aesthetics has many "philosophers" in its grip is simply evidence that philosophy is a fairly tolerant academic club. Its "open mic" tradition lets the romantics have their turn in front of the crowd.

If at one moment, the object has X value of momentum, and at the next it has Y value. We need to assume that a change has occurred between X and Y. We could assume an intermediate, Z, but then we head to infinite regress. — Metaphysician Undercover

As John points out, to make these kinds of measurements is no simple because it presumes taking a snapshot view of a world in motion. And to do this, we - as the measurer - have to plant our feet firmly somehow to take that measurement.

So right away we are into the physics of the observer issue - the way relativity demands the fixing of a reference frame and quantum theory demands the mysterious collapse of the wavefunction. You are continuing to apply a Newtonian conception of measurement that has had to be abandoned.

This is exactly the position which he worked to refute with the cosmological argument. As I've explained, according to Aristotle the naked potential is impossible, that is why he assumed eternal circular motion. The eternal circular motion is an eternal actuality which he assumed because he concluded that naked potential is impossible. — Metaphysician Undercover

As I understand it, Aristotle's argument was that change could not have a beginning in an efficient cause. So the alternative had to be that there was no beginning to change and the cause of change was instead the eternal finality of a prime mover that thus acted constantly to "stir things up" from the outer edge of cosmic existence.

So I think you are mixing up two things. Aristotle did talk about change in general terms of the symmetry breaking of a potential, and so that is a view that fits well with the world as we know it today. And then he also had this other first cause issue with cosmic existence itself - and came up with an answer there that doesn't really work.

The problem is the same, or very similar whether you take reality's basic condition as stasis, or flux. The problem is the problem of change. Whether it is a static thing which changes, or a motion which changes, the issue is the same. As a static thing, the issue is the intermediate between being and not-being of the thing. As a motion, the issue is acceleration, the intermediate between moving in one direction, then moving in another direction. Just like there must be a cause which acts in the interim between being and not-being of the thing, there must be a cause which acts in the interim between moving in one way, and moving in another way. — Metaphysician Undercover

But flux is much more than merely motion.

Motion is a first derivative of rest or stasis, acceleration the second derivative. And you can keep stacking up more such departures without really arriving at an ontology of flux. Acceleration presumes constant speed as its static baseline. So every derivative is starting with the stasis of some reference frame and not doing the other thing of accounting for stasis as a constraint on chaos.

The problem is completely different depending on which end you come from. You can construct motion bottom-up from stasis, or you can constrain flux from the top-down to arrive at an equilbrium (the stasis that results from continuing change no longer making a difference).

So two different start points and two different end points to how we imagine ontology unfolding. They are fundamentally different ontic hypotheses.

There's a notion of the real as "that which resists." — Hoo

That is certainly right. It is the way we sort out the self from the world in terms of the actions we can freely take vs the reality which is their constraint. And this is how the image of the real manifests - either for ordinary biological consciousness, or for our "scientific" image resulting from theory and measurement. The epistemic method is fundamentally the same, even though one is neurally encoded, the other linguistic and socially evolved.

There's something like primitive science that we learn as children. Push some things they will move. If somethings getting bigger and bigger and louder and louder, it's coming to get you, or you're coming to get it. — Hoo

Yes. The biology has the same logic, the same method. So science just takes what already works and makes it explicit or self-conscious. We can know the method and appreciate why it works - and why it is also in the end "just an image that is manifested", not "the thing in itself".

Anyway, it seems that sophisticated science (science proper) depends on this bodily, sensual "child" or "animal" science. — Hoo

If we didn't exist biologically, there wouldn't be any science happening.

And yet there is also something about science/metaphysics/maths being able to leave the realm of concrete intuitions behind. If we stay anchored in the sensuous - believing things like colour is "real" - then that becomes a hindrance to real abstract thought. Part of becoming a theoretician of any kind is being able to let go of intuitions once some useful-feeling start has been made - the abductive leap - as from there we have to get into the formality of deducing consequences and inductively bolstering hypotheses. The models and the measurements must be allowed to take over.

All of this is hard to shake, though the farther reaches of abstract thought temporarily escape them. Maybe, too, it was as simple as curve fitting. Screw intuition. Fit a curve and extrapolate. Perhaps these escapes are most effectively "captured" for general use exactly by sign systems that boldly leave intuition behind (SR, GR, QM), which then are used for the machines that convince us on the "child science" or ur-science level. — Hoo

I agree. But with QM in particular, that now really challenges intuition.

Now of course we should still want to have an intuitive interpretation of QM, so as to make some further abductive leap towards an even greater level of generality in theory (and measurement). But also, QM works to so many decimal places that there is not a lot of use in querying it on some prior intuitive basis (like mechanical determinism and localism). If you start wasting people's time like that, they are in their right to tell you to shut up and calculate.

This is how I remember the demonstration. When an object comes into being, there is a change from the not being of that particular object to the being of that particular object. ....We never get to the point of actually describing change, or becoming, by following this manner of logic. Instead, we must simply assume a change, or becoming, which takes the middle position between the not-being and being of an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

This sounds like his discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. But I would say that more generally Aristotle takes the position that nothing comes from nothing. Being begins in potential and actuality is about the move or change from there towards contrary or dichotomous limits. So non-being becomes then a privation or lack of some predicate - a positive kind of absence or negativity! If a horse can be white, it also can be not-white. That is a potential change that can take place, being a complementary and LEM-like crisp possibility.

So in its way, Aristotle's take is the kind of Anaximander/Peirce tale of organic development in which we start with a naked potential or vagueness and then this becomes crisply something by separating towards its own logically dichotomous limits. Change inheres in potentiality in metastable fashion because potentiality is already poised, suspended, between two alternative states of development. The question then is what tips the balance so things move in one direction or the other?

The answer for the process philosophy view is that pure chance can be the initiating spark in this fashion - a fluctuation (as modern theories of spontaneous symmetry breaking explicitly presume). When a river forks, it is a matter of chance where some slight deviation bubbled enough at just the right moment for feedback to cause it to develop into a full-blown bifurcation. As they say about the beating of a butterfly wing, it can cause the storm that appears halfway the other side of the world.

But also - as a world actually does start to develop a history - then a different potential-tipping source of cause comes into play. Instead of pure chance, you now have memory or habit starting to dominate. This is the thesis of pan-semiosis. And it is the flipside of pure chance of course.

If you look at why that particular butterfly caused the storm rather than a billion other butterflies active at the time, now you can say well the world had some particular physical arrangement that determined it to be the case that a chance event right at that point would tip everything else over like a chain of dominoes. Now the world as a whole is seen as being in a state - a state of memory and hence constraint. It was poised in some actual way - a holistic way. So it was awaiting the spark that was inevitably going to happen.

Anyway. The point is that Aristotle's general logical analysis holds. He takes the triadic developmental view that potentiality is metastable, being poised to break in two complementary directions. Nothing can come from nothing. But actuality comes from potentiality as the breaking of its symmetry.

However where Aristotle goes wrong is that he takes reality's basic condition as stasis rather than flux. He was trying to do rigorous physics in an era where it seemed obvious that the basic condition of reality was substantial and material. The world was composed of objects made of stuff, making change the fundamental mystery. The deep question became what could animate this frozen realm of static being?

Today, however, it is quite clear from physics that the mystery is exactly the other way round. The issue is how could stasis emerge from flux.

The most natural state of the universe is that it is a generalised bath of radiation, spreading and cooling, with no action happening at less than the speed of light. So the further symmetry-breaking that created gravitating mass, clumping and blundering about at speeds as slow as "rest", and with temperatures as low as "absolute zero", was the mystery.

And that is why Aristotle's further arguments about things like the prime mover have to understood quite differently to make any sense. In a way, he was quite right to get at the primacy of circular motion as nature's most fundamental kind of symmetry (and so the first symmetry with the potential to be broken). But Aristotle then put this source of change at the fast rotating edge of the physical universe - the outer boundary that causes the largest celestial sphere to spin. Now however, particle physics puts that rotation at the frozen centre of being - point-like quantum spin being the immovable object around which everything else revolves. :)

Anyway, the better way to understand the ontological story is that the unity of potentially becomes dichotomised actuality via the emergence of stabilising constraints - Peircean habits that regulate spontaneity. So the generality of change that is a potential or a vagueness becomes transformed by a polarisation of the sources of change. We get change now of two crisp kinds - chance and determinism, or freedom and constraint.

Stability then emerges from the balancing of these two opposed species of change. Over time, spontaneity becomes increasingly subject to constraint or memory. The Universe gets larger and so colder. The particles in that Universe thus get more stable in themselves and less disruptive of the spacetime that contains them. Change in the end pretty much vanishes.

Throwing the PSR out the window is not something to be taken lightly. This allows for randomness. Once you allow randomness into your schema, you can't get it out. Then you are left without the means to account for any consistency or coherency in the world. There cannot be a reason for consistency. In other words, any form of apparent consistency in the world would actually be the result of some random, chance occurrence. And this is absurd to think that consistency could emerge from randomness, without any reason. — Metaphysician Undercover

Obviously I take the opposite view. But that is also because I am saying randomness is not opposed to potentiality. It is opposed to determinism or constraint. So it is classed with the crisply emergent and not the vague potentiality from which both the determined and the random arise in complementary fashion.

Randomness in the real world is always the product of some system of constraints. It is not pure freedom. Even "chaos" can be exactly calculated from a description of a system's boundary conditions - a description of the global container within which some measure of stuff is being allowed free rein.

If you have a box of particles, you get one kind of emergent statistics - a Gaussian distribution. If you open the lid of the box and let the particles wander, you get another - a fractal or powerlaw distribution.

So any description of randomness turns out to rely on some crisp set of boundary conditions. There is no such thing as true chaos. An utter lack of order becomes simply the vague - the potentiality that grounds these constrasting kinds of order that we might call the crisply "chaotic" (as in mathematical models of powerlaw distributions) versus the crisply "determined" (as in mechanistic action where the constraints are so fixed, the context so mapped out in terms of a domino-like cascade, that a particle or beating butterfly wing has no choice about the sequence of events it appears to initiate in hindsight - as the principle of sufficient reason likes to demand).

I agree. If we are pursuing the emergent distinction seriously, we can't favor either of the children. So maybe "matter" for you is just the signs we use in physical science? Or how is it approached? — Hoo

I guess this is where semiosis becomes close to idealism in that the "material world" feels like that which we can know the least. We only have the play of our own signs, never direct access to the thing-in-itself.

And we see this in science. We only have our representations in terms of theories and measurements. The structure or form of things is there in our formal descriptions, but the materiality is imputed largely as an act of imagination. We talk about force and action because we can see a structure of change in our models. But then the one thing we don't actually see in any real sense is this force, this action. They are off-stage and their existence only appealed to on logical grounds.

Are you telling me to lie to myself? What happened to Diogenes' "truth above all else"? — darthbarracuda

Every papercut turns into the Holocaust with you. Did I tell you to lie to yourself or did I say stop presuming that you own the truth?

This is hardly a challenge, as you have ignored the point I made several times about how pain is not equivalent to suffering. — darthbarracuda

So define suffering for me - in a way that doesn't include everything (like being tickled, vaguely bored or uneasy, laughing until it hurts, satiated until its uncomfortable, etc).

And also define pain for me - in a way that is different from your usual claim that it represents suffering of the worst kind, and hence the most important suffering to mention (as in torture, being left trapped in a car wreck, etc).

My pessimism isn't comfortable, nor does it feel natural ... when I am in a relatively serene state I usually end up wondering what made me forget about all the bad. — darthbarracuda

You should have been a Christian monk. You would have loved the hair shirt and flagellation. God forbid that you might have a positive outlook on life here among all us unholy sinners.

As soon as you realize just how endemic Pollyannism and magical thinking is, you become disillusioned with the concept of happiness and security and realize that they're built on a throne of lies and concealment. — darthbarracuda

Yes, beware of false gods. There is only room in Heaven for the self-abnegating.

I will need to have a good reason to believe that I am self-deluded, otherwise it's: — darthbarracuda

So the worst that could happen is that you might have hope and that you would end up disappointed all over again?

Yeah. I can understand why that is a risk not to be endured, a fate ten times worse than remaining convinced that a life in a hair shirt, scourge in hand, is best preparation for a likely horrible death.

...except when you start to argue that the overall holistic context can replace the immediate specificity of immanent objectivity, thus somehow "disproving" my pessimism by ignoring phenomenology entirely. — darthbarracuda

The biological and social context challenges that phenomenology in a basic way. Even pain can be pleasure as any masochist knows.

So the counter-argument is that your pessimism is based on a particular social construction - a negative habit of thought which you have mastered to the extent it seems completely real and undeniable to you.

Are you willing even to consider that you are the victim of this kind of self-delusion? How are you going to demonstrate that you are not?

Your holism ignores the specifics in favor of a global analysis. When in reality phenomenologically consciousness is it's own universe in itself, regardless of what contingency factors exist in the environment in which it presides. — darthbarracuda

That's silly because instead I have pointed out that the phenomenology - particular feelings - are shaped or individuated within a socio-cultural, and a biological, context.

So my approach is not just contextual in a way that connects the world and the ideas. It recognises the different levels on which this is happening - the biological and the social - as well as then talking about the further fact of their integration.

If your unrevealed scientific arguments are good enough to diffuse my own, then you wouldn't have to result to clearly unscientific arguments handwaves like "stop being childish" or "stop exaggerating". Instead you have participated in these handwaves and thus your critique of my argument as being unscientific (which it's not) applies to your own argument as well. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, you actually are parroting childish and exaggerated "philosophy" here. And you talk past any science I mention rather than answering it.

Don't forget that it is you who started this by telling me how I ought to feel about the facts of my own existence. And that if I claimed to feel any other way, then I was simply being delusional.

So you have gotten the robust response which that kind of tripe deserves. Suck it up.

Where in the world can that happen? What are instances of that? — Wayfarer

I wrote that PF post about the nanoscale convergence zone where this has just been discovered to be the case for biology.

But take again another example I have mentioned to you many times. Speaking words is an action that lacks material constraints. It is physical action shrunk to have zero physical dimension because the same expelled breath could be used to mention "the universe" or "that cat".

Articulating a word has some cost of course. But hardly any cost for an able-bodied human. And importantly, what cost there is is always the same. So its physical dimensionality is zeroed. A word takes up space and energy in the world, yet the world is exerting no constraint on what just got said. And that is the new possibility - existence's hidden dimension - which is the source of "mindfulness" in the world. Now ideas and memories can form in another place, take shape in ways that then seek to regulate the world.