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.

None of what I have written depends on a dualistic notion of anything aside from the identification of powerful phenomenological experiences that cannot be dissolved under investigation, which is more in line with idealism than anything else. — darthbarracuda

Err....so nothing dualistic in your position because it is claiming the reality of "phenomenology" in terms of the idealistic?

OK.

Honestly whenever anyone argues against you you always either pull the science™ card or the dualism card without explaining anything else.... — darthbarracuda

Yeah. I never explain how my philosophical naturalism and pragmatism is quite different from Scientism, or reductionism, and other authorised forms of dualism....

It's quite annoying that no matter how many times I explain the difference, you keep jumping to one side or other of your good old dualism. Either my metaphysics is insufficiently phenomenological, or insufficiently material, for you.

To say that the PNC does not apply to bare potential, is the Hegelian conception, not the Aristotelian conception. — Metaphysician Undercover

And that was what I explained. Aristotle was talking about potential in a different sense at that point - crisply formed possibility rather than actual bare naked potential.

Although Aristotle elsewhere certainly got the point about Anaximander's apeiron and the impossibility of actual prime matter as already substantial being.

Under the Aristotelian conception, becoming is the middle, between being and not being. — Metaphysician Undercover

Can you provide citations that make that clear? I think the point was to avoid the idea that something could come from nothing in fact.

"Bare potential", such as prime matter is ruled out, as impossible, by the cosmological argument. — Metaphysician Undercover

Is this really Aristotle now - who offered a variety of analyses - or more the latter scholastic overlay?

I always see Aristotle as being more open-minded in summing up the various strands of thought as they existed in his time. Then church scholarship read into that the "authorised version" of the causal story that most suited itself.

If the pre-individual is a state of pure potentiality, then there is no reason for the thing which comes into being, to be the thing which it is. The principle of sufficient reason would not apply, there could be no actuality to cause that thing to be any particular thing, it would come into existence as any random thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly. But it is the feature rather than the bug. It brings back spontaneity or Peircean tychism back into the causal picture. The way individuation turns out can include a lot of accidents.

A river "must" have a fractal branched structure. But where it branches is then contingent. So individuation expresses some general constraint - like the second law of thermodynamics - but still, any actual river comes to incorporate a collection of historical contingencies.

In breaking symmetry in a general fashion - as the second law does when it comes to time having a dissipative direction - we can say individuation has a necessary form. With a river, it must be fractal as a Platonic-strength mathematical ideal. But then within that, there are a whole lot of further symmetry breakings that will occur at a fine-grain level which really doesn't matter. The river can fork at any moment in time with equal probability. That becomes a local accident. But it doesn't matter as the overall outcome is still fractal - in fact, that is how the precise pattern we call fractal arises.

So the principle of sufficient reason (with its focus on particular causes determining every particular effect) goes out of the window. It is replaced by a theory of general causes (or global constraints) and particular accidents (or local degrees of freedom).

If we could imagine a point, prior to the passing of any time, at which point no time has passed to create any sort of actual existence (no constraints), this would be pure potentiality; the possibility for absolutely anything. But assuming this point is unjustified and unwarranted. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's your view. I just gave the counter-view. Time in thermodynamics is an emergent constraint - the development of a generalised rate of dissipation that creates a background "dimension".

So time is already being rethought in this fashion as we do our best to leave behind classical Newtonian metaphysics. A thermal view of time is that it is a global regularity that emerges, against which localised departures can be measured.

That is why we can now measure the age of the universe in terms of its general temperature. The cosmic background radiation is spreading and cooling at a constant lightspeed rate. That then becomes the "time" against which local physical degrees can be measured in terms of being "hotter" or "slower".

Yeah, anti-supernatural naturalism has to be embedded in a metaphysics that founds it. A generalized naturalism, for which the supernatural is not coherent, can be presented as a description of human thinking. — Hoo

My position agrees fundamentally with Kojeve when he says: "Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective reality” (Wirklichkeit) nor “empirical existence” (Dasein)."

But the difference is that I would say that the idea of the supernatural only arises within a naturalism lacking in sufficient generality. It is reductionist materialism - the claim that the real is just "observable matter" - which begets its equivalently strong "other" in the subjectivism and mentalism of the claim that there is then also the reality of the "immaterial observer".

So that was the point of Peircean pragmatism - to include observers in nature in a fully "material" fashion.

And now this new more fully generalised naturalism creates a foundational or ontological level distinction between matter and sign, or matter and symbol, instead of matter and mind.

It also fixes up a few basic problems in being at base an interactive perspective - a process philosophy - where matter and sign can be in causal interaction in unmysterious fashion. So you no longer have the dualism of matter and (epiphenomenal) mind, but an explicit way the two sides connect.

And even the "immaterial" aspect of sign is self-explained. The possibility of a symbol arises as material dimensionality gets maximally constrained. When the number of dimensions for action is shrunk towards the zero dimensions of a point, then a mark or sign is born - the mark or sign, the bare difference, that can now freely stand for anything. As a bit of information, it is no longer (or as little as possible) part of the material world, and so free to act as a part of a play of symbols.

So through semiosis - as a fully general naturalism - you lose "the mental" or "the observer" as a particular kind of realm standing in disjunction to "the material" or "the observables". And folk find it really hard to give up trying to explain the "other" to the material in terms of (equally substantial) notions of mentality, or experience, or dasein, or whatever.

But replacing mental substance/res cogitans/thinking and feeling stuff with a more abstract dualism - one of matter and sign - is what it would mean to actually start explaining the particularity of the observing human mind in cosmically generalised fashion.

So yes, there is still the third thing out of which either matter~mind, or matter~sign, must logically emerge - Hegel's geist or Peirce's firstness, maybe even Heidegger's dasein. But this primal ground can't be a form of pan-psychic proto-mind in standard idealist fashion. For matter and sign to be the sharp contrast that emerges, the primal ground has to be also talked about as itself a third kind of abstract.

In talking of geist, firstness, dasein, apeiron, vagueness, ungrund, ein soft, or whatever, we are trying to speak of the unspeakable - which is tricky, yet also do-able, in being now the "other" to the othered. The equally-abstractly described origin of the dialectic distinction.

Indeed this was kind of the point of this thread to begin with. From a phenomenological perspective, we don't seem to belong. We're aliens to the world. We're able to self-reflect. Existentialism 101. How the hell is the universe even capable of hosting something like us? — darthbarracuda

I've answered all this already. So you are simply returning me to your assertions rather than dealing with my arguments against them.

You can see this applied in psychology by learning about Terror Management Theory and the psychoanalytic/humanistic theories of Rank and Becker. — darthbarracuda

Yes, you can certainly make a case that there is a socially constructed fear of death because there is also the precondition of a socially constructed sense of self. Culture must react in some way to the sharpness of failing to exist, after leading to a sharp notion of being a self in existence (in a soul-like fashion).

The question then is what metaphysically is the correct way to respond - responding in terms of notions of souls and other traditional social mythology not being a very naturalistic/scientific way of framing the issues.

So again, we are back to the same situation. I defend a naturalistic/scientific ontology. You seem to take the other road - the romantic, dualistic, idealistic path. For you, the organic whole that is the world is divided ontically into brute material objects and sensuous being. And from that broken duality, all kinds of confusion flows.

This is the root of Simondon's (and Deleuze's) critique of Hegelian dialectics, which, according to both, begins from individuals and then tries to think their becoming through negation, rather than beginning with the process of ontogenesis, and inscribing negation 'positiviely' within that process. — StreetlightX

That was Peirce's switch on Hegel too. First the bare potential - the vagueness as that to which the PNC does not apply - and then its symmetry-breaking dichotomisation and eventual transformation into the stable regularity of a habit.

Simondon says this clearly here...

It is never a step or a stage, and individuation is not synthesis, a return to unity, but rather the being passing out of step with itself, through the potentialization of the incompatibilities of its preindividual center." — Simondon

...so stability is what open-endedly arises when a symmetry-breaking goes as far as it can go in producing the hierarchically organised state of being an asymmetry - a local~global distinction such as represented by a figure marking a ground, an event disturbing a context.

So individuation is a process of coming into being. And it is shaped by the emergent limits of what is possible. The figure or event is possible in being the least like, the furtherest away, from its "other" of the ground, the context. And thus - departing from usual mechanistic thinking - the ground and the context are also coming into being via the production of the figure or event. The symmetry-breaking is a deep one in making a potential duality or asymmetry an explicit or actually present division.

Compare Deleuze: "Difference is not the negative; on the contrary, non-being is Difference.... — Deleuze

Compared to Simondon, this seems a lot of blather.

For Simondon - and this is his revolutionary contribution to philosophy - one ought to think of individuation not from the perspective of the individual, but from the perspective of the process which gave rise to it. — StreetlightX

But revolutionary? Metaphysics started this way with Anaximander. Process thinking just got over-written by mechanical thinking - the metaphysics of technology replaced that of biology.

Unity (characteristic of the individuated being and of identity), which authorizes the use of the principle of the excluded middle, cannot be applied to the preindividual being... — Simondon

[Aristotle] insisted that the law of non-contradiction ought to be upheld, and defined the category of potential, in which the law of excluded middle was to be excepted. Hegel offered another understanding of becoming, in which the law of non-contradiction becomes inapplicable. These are two distinct understandings of "becoming", which appear quite different. — Metaphysician Undercover

Peirce employed a triadic logic where the failure of the PNC was definitional of vagueness, and the failure of the LEM was definitional of generality.

So we can sort out things this way.

The pre-individual is the state of pure potentiality where the PNC does not apply - as Hegel and Peirce and Anaximander all agree. Before a symmetry is broken, the two poles of contrary or dialectical being that the breaking will reveal, are not in existence, just in a state of potentiality. So the PNC does not (yet) apply.

The LEM of course also doesn't apply. But the LEM is a stronger constraint. The PNC is a constraint on vagueness, and the LEM a constraint on generality - the constraint that then produces the individual or the particular. So to keep things rigorous, one should only worry about the PNC in defining the pre-individual.

Then we do get the breaking of symmetry which is the dichotomous transformation or phase transition that produces the crisply local and global - the individuated particularity of the event or figure seen against the asymmetric or orthogonal backdrop which is the now also revealed generality of the ground or context.

And here is where the LEM comes into play in more Aristotelean fashion.

The specific example Aristotle used was the problem of the future contingent - who would win the battle tomorrow. The LEM fails to apply to such "potentialities". But this is now potential in a quite different sense - the well-formed and substantial sense of a crisp possibility. We now already live in a world mechanical and organised enough that it offers concrete bifurcations in advance of anything happening. The context is such that the world is going to have to make a choice - even if it has a contingent nature.

So there will be a battle. Two navies are already heading towards an enagement. And there will be a winner. Again, all the grounds for a conflict followed by a resolution are crisply developed and set in place. Thus the LEM doesn't apply right yet, but it soon enough must.

Thus before the battle, only the general statements apply. There will be a battle. There will be a winner. The particular statement that X won, and not Y, fails until the crisp possibility has become actualised.

This Aristotelean way of thinking led him to put being before becoming (and MU to put material cause before final cause). But it is not a wrong way of thinking so long as it is realised that it is logic as applied to a world already crisply individuated and so already constrained to an ensemble of crisp possibilities.

However the modern problem is that the whole of existence is understood as having this character. The world is a state of affairs, an ensemble of trajectories. The symmetry is already broken, now all the rest is a playing out of a deterministic collection of parts thus unleashed to have their chaotic pattern of collisions.

But in talking about the pre-individuated, Simondon is picking up on the deeper notion of Apeiron or vagueness - the ground that is not yet even a ground as individuation is what dichotomously must produce its own ground as part of its deal.

Logically, this is a very difficult and complex concept. That is why it no doubt keeps getting discovered, forgotten and re-discovered. What would be revolutionary would be if the realisation stuck for once. :)

such problems are existential, i.e. structurally unremovable from life, i.e. a necessary condition for life as we know it. — darthbarracuda

Yes, they are part of the structure of life. We both agree that. But I say necessary for a reason, while you claim it to be an unreasonable fact.

I ask how you can talk about "life" when you don't even seem to believe in life's naturalism in this regard. The logic of your position requires you to argue that life is unnatural in some deep fashion. I'm waiting for you to resolve that paradox.

Deconstructing our experiences doesn't just dissolve them away. — darthbarracuda

My argument is that we would be simply replacing one construction with another in switching out your ridiculously negative construction for a more balanced view of existence.

I don't know, you're setting the precedent here. I mean, we can a more cordial discussion, or we can descend into useless name-calling. — darthbarracuda

The core issue seems to be that you treat phenomenology as brute fact - we can't help what we feel - whereas I say scientific naturalism supports the position that what we feel is controllable on many levels. So if a feeling is a problem, it is also a problem that can be tackled. Or at least solution seeking becomes the first natural response.

So there are two models in play. And in mine, getting completely rid of suffering, pain, anxiety and other negative signals is self-evidently an unnatural desire. What is natural is obviously behaviour that seeks to minimise the signal. But you would still want to be able to feel it as a possibility.

You on the other hand are taking an abstracted, cosmological and dualistic approach where "bad feelings" stand alone as concrete "mental things". Pain is just pain in an uncontextual, Platonic ideal, way. That is the basis on which you could even want to rule it out as a class of being by fiat.

Pain is a bad thing because it can grow to any scale and become the worst thing in existence. So even the most marginal forms of pain - like unease or boredom - need to be banished too. Hence your continual resort to slippery slope argumentation. One minute we are suffering a papercut or aching neck, the next thing we know, it is going to be genital electrodes and the Holocaust.

So we have two quite different metaphysics in play. And where I lose patience is when you claim that your ontology is also founded on scientific naturalism. Just be honest. It is not.

You have avoided dealing with my arguments against your simple-minded phenomenalism. It is basic to my position that phenomenology - as an introspective level of awareness - is a socially constructed linguistic habit. And all you say in reply is that you can't see the point in talking about social constructionism (as it is indeed "pointless" in within your mind-stuff paradigm).

Likewise you have not dealt with my claim that a natural evolutionary understanding of the brain would see it as a problem solving organ. The importance of that is this is what makes it necessary to be able to evaluate alternative actions in terms of - broadly speaking - reward and punishment. So to imagine a world without punishment is to make being a problem solver impossible.

Thus in my view pain is both necessary and controllable. The existence of pain is mostly not a big deal because there is a bigger game that should be going on - the one of living a life. If you focus on that, pain can be put in its proper perspective.

But you are arguing for some simplistic calculus where pain should not exist, and so from that premise, life should not exist. Yet it is an unnatural claim to treat pain as if its degrees of difference make no difference. And as if it is not controllable in practice.

So your position relies on a number of socially constructed delusions. The obviousness of that is why one would ask what it is exactly that you are psychologically shielding yourself from?

Yes, you don't like the tables being turned in that fashion. You want to be the one calling the rest of us self-deluded and unable to see the truth of existence. But there you go.

This does not change the fact that torture can occur beyond human interaction. — darthbarracuda

Only if you change torture's definition.

Yes, indeed if I had the choice I don't think I would condone abiogenesis. — darthbarracuda

Could it get any more laughable?

Let me know when you are ready to deal with nature in terms of what is natural rather than imagining yourself sitting at God's right hand, tugging his sleeve as He is doing his creating, and murmuring: "Do you really think this last little DNA thing is wise?".

Telling a person who is being tortured that it's just a bunch of signals in their brain meant to solve problems does nothing to help them. — darthbarracuda

But treating torture as an issue that can be tackled via social institutions is pragmatic - of much more use in real life than telling the same torture victim that "yes, you are right, life is shit for everyone from the get-go, so don't think you are anything special in the fact you have electrodes attached to your gonads right at this moment."

So stop straw-manning my position.

This is quite literally Zapffe's claim: we are both over and under evolved. We have an over-developed intellect and an under-developed signal mechanism. — darthbarracuda

I can't help it if you are wedded to extreme simplicity. All I can do is point out the structural complexity of my own position. I am careful to separate the biology of the "under-developed signal mechanism" from the sociology of the "over-developed intellect" so as not to make these kinds of basic ontological blunders.

There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about torture. There is nothing socially constructed or linguistic about boredom or repetition. Telling someone that they aren't actually experiencing any "qualitative" experience a la qualia is not only asinine but insulting. — darthbarracuda

Or instead, it means you don't understand psychology well enough to understand what is meant by social constructionism.

And once again we have you diagnosing pessimists as being "unnatural" or "pathological", as if they are some sort of oddity in the universe. No, we are part of the universe, and therefore it stands that the universe is capable of producing these kinds of ideas. — darthbarracuda

The only kind of universe that can produce these kinds of ideas is one where life has become so generally safe and easy on the whole that the self-indulgent have to pathologise the very fact of their own existence.

Why is there a need for problem-solving in the first place? What is so great and special about life, other than the pleasure you experience? If you accept that it's pleasure that makes a life good, then you have to, on pain of contradiction, accept that it is pain that makes a life bad. — darthbarracuda

Even if you want to be supremely simplistic in this fashion, that still makes it a problem to solve.

The rub of pessimism is that there is no way to solve this problem. Suicide doesn't solve the problem, it just eliminates it. — darthbarracuda

Exactly. Suicide solves something in the case of an already imminent painful death. But generally, solving the problem involves getting a life and learning to stop whining.

Pessimism is so histrionic that nothing can fix its psychic state. Time would have to be wound back to its beginning and existence itself annihilated to make things right.

Emos wondered why people laughed at them. It wasn't only the bad haircuts and wristbands meant to signal "potential cutter here".

Absurd, the reason Lovecraft is so famous is because he made such provocative observations. — darthbarracuda

Great. But I was trying to turn this discussion away from romantic histrionics towards science-backed naturalism.

As I said, show me that the brain isn't evolved for problem-solving. And that being so, it then follows we have to evaluate biological signals of pleasure and pain in that light.

In any case this does not matter very much considering the main focal point - phenomenology - is still being pushed aside. — darthbarracuda

Well hardly. My point is that phenomenology at the level we are discussing it is socially constructed and linguistic. That is the human condition.

The question then is whether culture is integrated with biology - whether as humans we are still essentially pragmatic problem-solvers and that is the basis for any philosophising? Or instead, there is your alternative hypothesis - the rather romantic and Freudian one - that the ego is culturally manufactured as some kind of self-deceptive bulwark against the death instinct, or some such garbled rubbish. If only we could shed the scales from our eyes and see existence as bad from the get-go, you wail - because for some it ends in torture and holocaust, even if you seem to have a life that only stretches as far as boredom, anxiety and some mild discontent.

Your argument is akin to telling a person who is afraid of heights that "it's just a chemical reaction" - that doesn't change anything. — darthbarracuda

Well again hardly. As a semiotician, I would say it is just a symbolic reaction - a state of interpretance.

It is natural to have some fear of heights if you don't want to fall. What is pathological in problem-solving terms is to become so overcome by the very idea of the possibility of falling that it takes over your entire life. Or what would be ridiculous as a philosophy would be to construct a whole ethics around the possibility that someone somewhere may fall in a really bad way, while ignoring the converse fact that mostly people manage to stand in a world that is well-organised - by a problem-solving attitude.

So it's easy to dismiss all of what I'm saying here by telling me to "grow up" or "man up" but that's all it is - easy. — darthbarracuda

Yep. It is easy. Your whole position is built on catastrophising. I'm just waiting for you to make an argument that brains are not meant for problem-solving and so require some way to tell whether they are getting hotter or colder on that score.

How can it make sense for suffering not to exist for a mind that has to be able to make its mind up?

And sure, if such a mind decides the solution to its problems is suicide, that makes sense. A rational society supports voluntary euthanasia for terminal illness.

But I return to my point - the one that supports me saying "man up". Problem solving is meant to consider all its options. So show me the bit where your philosophy is doing that. In what way is it constuctive to become so obsessed by the very worst things that can happen - especially when you personally claim your life is quite content.

Well, I mean I doubt most other animals have existential crises like we do. But certainly they have instincts that keep them from doing things that would destroy them. Like Lovecraft said, the first experience was fear. We don't get to decide whether or not life is to be continued - we are forced by our more primal instincts to continue whether we like it or not. — darthbarracuda

Nope. Not getting much sense of science there. Lovecraft? :)

LOL, go read the neurophilosopher Thomas Metzinger and his associates over at the ASSC. — darthbarracuda

I've read him. I don't find him particularly insightful as he conflates the issues of biologically evolved consciousness and culturally evolved self-regulatory awareness.

And my argument is that this smart brain evolved this tendency in order to trick its captive self-model into continuing to exist. — darthbarracuda

Good lordy. What did you say about bubbles and psychological science? Do you believe animals have to be protected in some way from their existential dread and the constant temptation of suicide?

The phenomenal self-model is the brain's way of enslaving itself. — darthbarracuda

Get back to me when you can link such lurid claims to real neuroscience.

UN is one of the fundamental misconceptions of inductivism. It is a principle in that no one has ever been able to properly formulate, beyond vague notions such as "the future will resemble the past" or "the seen resembles the unseen". Your suggestion that it might be formulated "the regularities of experience are universal regularities"? — tom

It is hard to know what you are driving at but science is comfortable with the cosmological principle for good reason.

Why do we need to give people problems? — darthbarracuda

Who is this "we"? Are you thinking of some malign god?

If you are going to claim your view is science-backed, it is going to have to be naturalistic. And so we can contrast two hypotheses here.

My argument is that brains evolved for problem solving. Pleasure and pain must exist to mark out the symbolised limits of that. We have to actually get feedback on whether we are getting hotter or colder in our problem solving. And nothing about such signalling is simple. For instance, a smart brain must be able to trade-off the short-term pain vs the long-term gain, and vice versa. Hence stuff like endorphins to help you keep climbing through the suffering.

Your argument is something about pain or suffering having phenomenal existence as a class of qualia. Somehow you treat situated feelings as if they were cosmic abstracta. Having thus separated them from reality, you can weigh their "existence" in isolation.

Welcome to Platonism, goodbye to realism, naturalism, science and commonsense.

Eventually I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have and realize that life is not meant to be fair, balanced, or comfortable. — darthbarracuda

Right. It is instead a goal that has to be worked at.

But we seem a long way now from your original thesis that the very possibility of a nasty paper cut is sufficient reason to unwish the entirety of existence.

I know a lot more than you do, apparently — darthbarracuda

No, suffering is not intrinsic to having fun, — darthbarracuda

And yet pain, stress and suffering can cause the release of endorphins, serotonin and adrenaline - which feel pretty good. So you are not respecting the complexity of the neuroscience.

Zapffe was a prolific mountaineer, who climbed mountains because he thought it was the most pointless thing to do. — darthbarracuda

Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to life.

Note I'm not defending sports or climbing particularly. They are rather self-indulgent pursuits of course. The issue is instead that they show that suffering is intrinsic to having fun.

Climbing a mountain is as optional an activity as it gets. So it is not as though we have to go through the pain because life leaves us with no choice. Instead it must be the case that when modern life removes all real hardships and dangers, we - or at least a lot of us - go in active search of such risks. They make us feel more alive - being a natural part of the psychology of living.

So I am waiting for you to account for that with your narrow pessimism.

That's how you solve an existential crisis in the usual way, isn't it? Surround yourself with your comforts and securities and distract yourself for long enough that you eventually forget what was bothering you. — darthbarracuda

People usually solve their existential crises by growing up and getting stuck into life.

I agree of course that there is plenty to criticise about the way life is supposed to be lived in the modern consumer society, lost in romanticism and hedonism.

But to have that grown-up conversation, you have to be already past needy pessimism.

No...it's not. Get out of your bubble and read some psychology, and none of that positive psychology bullshit. — darthbarracuda

What do you know about psychology or positive psychology? Get out of your own bubble.

Now of course Auschwitz is an extreme example, — darthbarracuda

That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case.

Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce human existence to some calculus of joy and anguish weighed on a set of scales. A life is a construction in which happiness and pain are useful signals. We need to focus on the nature of that construction - it's good or bad - rather than on the signals. This is because the signals themselves will be interpreted quite differently, depending on the kind of life being constructed.

I mean why is a rough sport like rugby so enjoyable. Why would anyone punish themselves climbing a mountain. How does suffering of this kind become the most fondly remembered aspects of a life?

Or for a more ordinary kind of basic hard work, who would have kids, a garden or a farm. These are tough gigs. Yet also what make life the most worthwhile.

Now you will just repeat your mantra that I am talking about exactly the self-delusion which you - in all your superiority - have the better sense to see through.

But bullshit my friend. Pessimism is a rationalisation for a failure to engage with existence in constructive fashion.

Unlike what you claim here, I actually have scientific data to support my views. I'm not just going to ignore an entire sector of inquiry because you personally don't like it. — darthbarracuda

You have a flawed thesis. You think the point of life is not to feel the slightest discomfort, rather than to actually live it and make something of it.

All the science stands against you there - from biology through neuroscience, sociology and psychology.

Your case hinges on a mentality you have chosen to construct - one where you have got into the negative habit of focusing on the very worst possible outcomes and treating them as the sole determinants of your existence.

It's learned helplessness dressed up as "philosophy".

Now I suspect you will argue around this via Popper. But I wonder if the assumption UN isn't going to be hiding somewhere. I like the notion that the mind is an expectation machine and that violations of expectation in particular come to our attention. We expect the future to resemble the past — Hoo

I would say rather that we expect the past to be a constraint on future freedoms. The past can lock the free flow of events into restricted possibility.

Both Popper and Peirce took a propensity view of probability in this fashion. It has the advantage of recognising chance and spontaneity (or vagueness) as ontically real. And hence the determinism of existence is balanced by indertiminsm.

So far as logic goes, that makes induction more realistic and fundamental than deduction. Deduction depends on ontic determinism. But induction is happy to talk about the development of propensities which only constrain the space of the future possible and don't absolutely determine if t.