Secondly, even if it were true, what would be its relevance to the claim that humans are especially special. I could as easily say
'Who could hear that statement if it were transmitted at a frequency of 40,000 Hz? Only a bat' — andrewk

Surely humans are special because that is something we can easily think, say, or indeed transmit over any chosen frequency given a radio.

But bats? Not so much.

Hearing noises and comprehending messages are unarguable differences in kind.

But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think. — mcdoodle

And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?

If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.

My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated. — mcdoodle

Why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

And yes, human thinking in "any given place and era" is indeed historically situated - that is, you just gave a definition of being historically situated, not an argument.

So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy.

And not caring either. You are playing the same old tunes I see.

Sorry, did I miss the bit where you explained why it wouldn't be more parsimonious if wishes were indeed horses for idealists?

What are you talking about? The grounding premise was that consistency would be a good thing. If your counter argument relies on a malicious deceiver - the faking of ancient dinosaur bones - then already it is weaker because of a lack of explanatory parsimony.

I agree that such arguments are avoided like hell by ontic idealists of course. :-}

Why not spell it out?

As far as I can see this doesn't follow or support realism. Idealism has never claimed, to my knowledge, that whatever you want to happen happens, nor do I see what would ever commit it to that. — The Great Whatever

And yet it follows that if the world is truly generated from a personal viewpoint, then there has to be some reasonable account of why that isn't the case.

Realism justifies itself on the grounds of recalcitrant nature. It is because the world shows no sign of coming from our point of view that we should believe it to be most likely real.

Yeah, I definitely think some of the classical transcendental idealists could be read as claiming that the universe is procedurally generated based on a starting facticity (roughly, the 'program,' the 'thing in itself') combined with a generation of the empirical world 'on the fly' as the knower's faculties come into contact with it. — The Great Whatever

And so as I suggest, the kind of world that does unfold before our questing gaze ought to be generated in some kind of accordance with our wishes. This becomes an empirical test (even if a reasonably modest one) of idealism as a metaphysical hypothesis.

But I guess that is simply standard. Realism is supported by the world's recalcitrant being. If we kick a stone, our toe still hurts, even if it seems more logical that it shouldn't if our preferences actually ruled.

So I wonder what kind of naturalism could explain the world that the idealist encounters? Why - at some deep level of metaphysical reasonableness - is this the world we generate?

And the failure of idealism to deliver a reasonable account on this point would be further reasonable evidence against idealism.

The answer from science is that language made the distinct difference.

So the neural architecture is basically a standard ape brain enlarged. There is a continuum difference because our brains are bigger. But the development of an ability to structure trains of thought using gramatical rules and combinatorial word units was why homo sap started to think symbolically and rationally.

And it is not about the difference that made just at the individual level. Speech is a social thing and so speech comes to encode social learning, social structures of thought. Ideas have a place to evolve because humans have symbolic culture. Animals are stuck at a biological level where concepts evolve only at that level of existence.

So humans exist at a different level because they have symbolic speech/symbolic culture - the essence of an intellectual life that exists apart from the hurly-burly of the natural animal world.

That doesn't mean animals can't problem-solve or be smart in many ways. They just lack access to our fast-evolving culture of smartness, which completely changes what it means to be smart.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.

As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being. — darthbarracuda

Now here you sound like you agree with my approach, so this becomes very confusing.

To summarise, the argument goes that we patently exist in a world of definite objects. So we start with where we are at. And then we look to what could be different in an attempt to figure out how we could come to be in such a place.

Greek metaphysics started with the idea that form was plastic and so there must be some material principle that is the underlying eternal - an ur-stuff. And as you say, something so unchanging must be ungraspable, unintelligible, as it stands beyond the descriptiveness of formed somethingness. It is like a taste so bland it can't be tasted, or a hue so pastel it can't be seen.

Anaximander gave it a name - the apeiron, or the without-limitation. But Anaximander also realised that while form (or limitation, ie constraints) was plastic, it was also based on a dialectical logic. It had to arise dichotomously as a succession of symmetry breakings.

For limits to arise in the limitless, it could only do this by the apeiron "moving apart from itself in complementary directions". And Anaximander - looking around, being empirical - not so unnaturally struck on the prime thermodynamic idea that the first parting of the apeiron would have to be into the warmer and the cooler. And then as this division proceeded to develop, it paved the way in turn for a division into the dryer and the wetter. Again, empirically, heat dries and cold dampens.

And so we have the start of a natural hierarchy of formed substances. We have the Greek elements of fire, air, water and earth as the four resulting mixtures (the hot dry and the cool dry, the hot wet and the cool wet).

Now later Greek philosophy rather messed up the simple natural purity of Anaximander's vision even as it sought to expand upon it. Obviously, the Athenians tried to work a strong notion of the divine back into it - or at least, some account of the mind seemed necessary. There was also the atomistic alternative - which did have some explanatory advantages, like stressing the notions of composition and the void. And atomism did try to argue for a rational naturalness in giving atoms the perfect shapes of the Platonic solids, or else providing them with hooks and other property-creating features.

So the notion of an ur-stuff did get confused. It became a divine spirit stuff - different from material stuff in a dualistic fashion. And it became a fundamentally particulate stuff - concrete particles rocking through an immaterial(!) void. So again a dualistic conception in that now existence was separated into the concretely material and causal contents, and an a-causal, non-material, non-involved nothingness as its cosmic container.

Thus you can see a parting of the ways from the orginally organic and holistic vision of Anaximander. Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism.

But modern science has returned to a holism where existence is the transformation of simple potential via a succession of symmetry breakings, and the duality of atomism has been repaired because particles are excitations in fields and spacetime has material properties.

So we return to the question of what is the ur-stuff, the hypostatic ground, the apeiron, from which our structured existence could arise.

And as you seem to be saying, we can only characterise it in terms of it being everything our well-formed world of substantial objects is not.

So that is indeed how I would define vagueness, or the quantum roil, or the One, or whatever technical metaphysical term we might wish to give to this critical and logically necessary idea.

The things we can say about it are that it must at least be the kind of thing out of which our existence could arise. And so if our existence is about a succession of symmetry breakings, then it is some kind of perfect symmetry. And that's great, because we have some maths to get a handle on it right there.

So what is the ultimate symmetry state? I've argued the standard understanding that symmetry is about changes that can't make a change (just as symmetry breakings are semiotically the differences that do make a difference).

Absolute nothingness seems one candidate for such an ideal initial state of symmetry. But that's logically out as nothing can come from nothing.

The alternative is instead an initial state of everythingness - a complete lack of limitation on action. So some kind of dimensionless, or infinitely dimensional, chaos. Unbound fluctuation. In a state of wildness, nothing is really happening because everything is happening. And logically it is quite easy to understand how the taming of such a roil by the emergence of symmetry-breaking constraints could produce our kind of hierarchically organised world.

The classic example of such a dissipative structure is a Benard cell where global hexagonally shaped convection currents form to organise the previously chaotic thermal motions of oil molecules being heated in a pan. The many directions that the molecules are going in are reduced to the particular directions of the convection flows. The universality of a global form is imposed on the material chaos and the convection cells become a real feature of the oily world.

So we can revisit the notion of the apeiron armed with all the maths and empiricism we have gathered over the past 2300 years. If we have a clear metaphysical model of what has come out of the apeiron, we can in negative descriptive fashion now also say something scientific about the "indescribable" nature of the apeiron.

So that is why I talk about it in terms of things like unbounded fluctuation. We now understand the concrete world of substantial objects in terms of bounded fluctuations. So it is simply logical that the apeiron would be the "other" of that.

Whatever is our current best theory of fundamental being, we can reverse that out dialectically to speak about what must then be the best possible theory of the cosmic fundamental potential - the possibility that must have grounded the actuality of our Universe.

The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas...

I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate. — mcdoodle

You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right.

If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that.

And to remind how hierarchies relate to universals, the problem with universals is they refer to constraints - the forms that inform matter - but they lack hierarchical organisation in most people's minds so it sounds like we are talking about a random Platonic collection of ideas. Anything that has a name - like a sparrow, love, the cosmos, my left toe - has an ideal form.

But of course even Plato tried to create some kind of hierarchical order in his realm of perfect ideas. The good stood at the most global level, mathematical truths somewhere further along the spectrum of specificity.

Bullshit. My question was not about some arbitrary programmer's choice but about what would be most self consistent.

And when equations produce positive and negative roots, we know to throw the negative away when it can't make physical sense. So yeah, a naturalness test does get applied.

So you just won't answer my question about naturalness and the expectations we can rightfully derive from such an assumption. Bad faith.

Just address my actual argument. Would a generated world more naturally generate what is contemporary or what is historic?

Some would say that no longer requiring such absolutism of knowledge has been one of the major achievements since Parmenides.

What I'm asking is whether such a world is metaphysically possible and whether it would be empirically indistinguishable from our world.

Well my point - again - is that the existence of a historical aspect to this reality would be one kind of empirical evidence against it being the case.

So I am granting your indistinguishability claim - we can't tell if things were always there or generated as we go along.

But then given that, if this world has a look of history, then that still counts as empirical evidence against it being generated.

Given two options - a metaphysics that is consistent with what we experience, and one that would be in contradiction - then we have a reason to prefer the consistent story. And that is the one where the appearance of history is evidence of actual history (just as a lack of apparent history would be evidence in favour of a "generate as you go" ontology).

I didn't mean to suggest that a real world would have a fake history. I meant to suggest that (in this hypothetical world) the bones we see when we dig don't exist before we see them; instead what "exists" is the "function" that determines that when we dig in a certain spot we will see bones.

How is making weathered dinosaur bones not faking an entropic history?

Sure I accept that your argument is that the bones are only made at the very instant they need to be struck by our spade. But it is the same issue as for creationists. Why go to the extra trouble of building in the look of a history if this is an essentially a-historic world creating process?

It seems illogical for such a world to have a reason to create a look of history in contradiction of what it actually is as a "create it as you go" kind of world.

You're calling Plato a mystic.

Well you seemed to be taking a materialist position and that's hardly Platonic form is it? So you make less and less sense here. If you are arguing Plato, say so.

(And it might make more sense if you did that in relation to Plato's own concept of the chora - the material receptacle of his forms.)

I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance.

Again your use of jargon is confusing. Do you mean prime matter? It seems that you mistake Aristotle's hylomorphic doctrine of substance for material cause.

And I don't think Aristotle's prime matter is a concept that works except as another name for vagueness or apeiron.

So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.

But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle.

My notion instead treats it as the limitless, the unformed, the unmaterial. It is not fixed by conservation or locale. It is just pure open-ended possibility. So it is pre-material in any usual sense of matter, just as much as it is pre-form in not yet having undergone the phase transition which is its structuring organisation to become a something definite.

At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?

The change is the beginning of time and space. Those are both aspects of the emergence of a global dimensional organisation. So it is what "happens" in the earlier time, and the higher energy, which would be the "before" of the Planck scale. Except before the Planck scale, there just isn't anything determinate in existence, so talking about the before does't really make sense.

Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?

I'm not interested in poetic visions. So I agree. If vagueness and this general way of thinking can't be cashed out in real physics, its nothing in the end. It has to be a mathematical strength model or chuck it in the bin of metaphysical speculation.

Luckily, it is a way of thinking that is increasingly common in science. There is a lot of maths to support it.

What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today.

Mechanics is not wrong. It has worked splendidly to serve the interest of humans the last 500 years. If you think of existence in terms of the causality of machines, you start to get good at making machines. So mechanics has repaid its makers many times over. And it is not wrong as - in its carefully limited sphere - it works.

But if you are talking about the bounding extremes of our existence - the quantumly small, the cosmically large, the neurally complex - then yes it breaks down and a bigger modelling paradigm is needed.

What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself.

I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron.

This is what I'm questioning. Is it necessary that a real world incorporates a global history? Or is it metaphysically possible for a real world to behave in the same sort of way where "more world" is generated from a single point of view?

So it seems possible if your existence is just a computer simulation. But if this about a material reality, what could generate the level of accumulated material history that we observe. Why would a real world have to fake a history - like you dig in the ground and find the mineralised bones of dinosaurs?

Sure you might say some magical process just generates stuff as far as your eye can see. But why would it fake layers of entropic history rather than just generate shiny new untouched stuff?

We account for our world in the way it actually seems to be - which is historically conditioned. If this alternative way of making worlds is always making new stuff, it adds considerable implausibility that it would go to the trouble of make the new stuff look "suitably old".

A shadow cannot exist without a body blocking out the light. The properties of the world are like shadows and depend upon a body that has no properties. — darthbarracuda

Ye gods. Outright mysticism.

It's why asking "what caused God?!" misses the entire point of the argument - under the metaphysical scheme from which they are operating, God is a necessary component.

So it is necessary there is a first cause. And it must be a first substance indeed. Otherwise your hypostatic reductionist framework is in deep shit. Isn't that a rather personalised invocation of final cause?

I'd say, because there's no explanation as to how this vagueness exists, as if its vagueness isn't dependent upon anything else and is just floating around somewhere in non-spacetime.

Well the obvious retort is that vagueness exists vaguely. And we can speak about that intelligibly as being the antithesis of the crisply formed world from where we ask such questions.

So sure, one has to use a little poetic licence to introduce the idea. But it is of no real interest unless it can be mathematically modelled. Just like quantum foam, virtual particles, zero point energy, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the many other useful physical concepts that depend on a notion of "pure fluctuation".

I mean do you think our 4D Universe "floats" in anything? Do you think the modern maths of curvature only makes sense if you re-introduce a pre-Goethean embedding space? Do you think infinity only exists if someone has counted all the way to its limit?

You are raising quibbles that have long been left behind in science and math informed metaphysics.

For each time we postulate a process, we need to postulate a stage in which this process is occurring. — darthbarracuda

And you find this a self-evident and undeniable truth because? .... [please fill in blank].

I mean has science found some such ultimate basis? Surely what science is finding that wind the clock back to beginnings and it all goes quantum vague (indeterminate).

And is it even an intelligible clam? Just because most of what we know from our own scale of being seems to have a substantial underpinning, how can it be turtles all the way down? How can there be a first definite stuff with no cause? Doesn't that do the ultimate violence to the very notion of causality you hope to employ.

So a more radical alternative is already demanded as reductionism can't ground itself. We should accept the fact and move on, opening our minds to the other alternatives out there.

Peirce's semiotic approach - which grants that beginnings can be vague, an unstructured sea of fluctuation - is the one that fits a generally informational and developmental metaphysics (of the kind to be found in physics and cosmology today).

Aha! So there's the 'implicit mind' in semiotics. Knew it was there somewhere. ;) — Wayfarer

Yep. Except to access that, you would have to redefine your notion of "mind" in radical fashion. And you would still want to argue that mind is something transcendent and substantial, no?

With a complex algorithm and a single seed an entire universe (264 planets) and everything in it is accounted for (although obviously not generated). It is predetermined what you will find if you fly off into the distance – even though that distant thing doesn't actually "exist" yet. — Michael

Interesting article. But it does say that further random seeds are being generated all the time. Now it then tries to backtrack and argue that this is still deterministic because the original seed is the source of the pseudo-random generation of new seeds. And yet - if the principle of indifference does apply in the program - then there is a constant generation of randomness, for all practical purposes.

Plus of course there is the human making decisions when playing the game. So the gamer is outside the "procedure" as the critical source of unpredictability.

So the model kind of captures reality in imagining a few basic laws that get kicked along by randomised variables being plug in to generate the actual dynamics.

But there are big chunks of reality missing - like entropy. There is no energy cost, speed of light restrictions, decay, and much else in the model. So the model represents a very thin view of physical structure.

The clunky level of randomness and interaction being modeled is illustrated by...

Minor adjustments to the source code can cause mountains to unexpectedly turn into lakes, species to mutate, or objects to lose the property of collision and plummet to the center of a planet. “Something as simple as altering the color of a creature,” Murray noted, “can cause the water level to rise.”

So the major thing is that this world is driven from a single point of view and does not reflect a god's eye coherent point of view. It generates "more world" from wherever you have got to in the game's structure - so incorporates a local personal history. But the real world incorporates a global history in generating its every next step.

That is what makes it possible for there to be chameleons that change their colour without it destablising plate tectonics. The constraints that form the real world have a hierarchical organisation which makes it meaningfull whether we are talking about universal conditions baked in generally from the first moment of the Big Bang or instead the very arbitrary choices a human is free to make when deciding whether to shoot or sit back and watch computer generated aliens on imaginary planets.

Well I think processes are dependent upon a hypostasis. It doesn't make any sense to talk of structure, vagueness, proto-objecthood, process, or what have you without an underlying hypostasis. — darthbarracuda

Thanks for restating your conventional reductionist understanding of reality. But assertions aren't arguments.

The interpretant is essentially the already-baked-in observer here. Whence interpretation? My prediction is you will say that we cannot go any further than this semiotic ground and thus just a brute fact. — schopenhauer1

That's a good point. And it is the point of the semiotic view to generalise or universalise the notion of the observer.

So in the panpsychic view, this is done by spreadiing mind about everywhere, over every scale of being. But who knows what this "mind" is? It is a concept without causal structure or useful meaning.

In the pansemiotic view, it is interpretance or the sign relation that is spread around every scale of being. And so observation is modelled in terms of an ontic process.

Of course that is just a broad brush sketch. Then you have to cash it out in more useful ways. Which is what modern thermodynamic/information theoretic descriptions of the Universe have been doing.

This infodynamic perspective for instance adds formal and final cause - the story of the top-down constraints - to the bare science. The development of structured being is granted an entropic shape, direction and purpose. The universe becomes "mindful" in this self-organising regard. The universe can be considered a dissipative structure that is dissipating hot quantum uncertainty so as to produce a cool realm of robust classicality.

So the panpsychist starts with a reified notion of "mind" and simply imagines diluting it - thinning out its substance until it is there in fundamental particles in some deaf, dumb and blind fashion. The basic question of "what is observation" is simply brushed under the carpet by fading it away to nothing except the regular physics of mechanical masses and forces.

Pansemiotics is part of the new information revolution where observerhood is defined at the Planck grain in terms of "the questions that could even be asked" of a physical locale. Quantum uncertainty is due to the fact of hitting a physical limit where you can no longer ask all the questions you need to to precisify the state of a locale. So the breakdown of observation is exactly determined. Hence the beginnings of (classically certain) observation is also made physically measurable and theoretically tractable.

Once you can say where things stop and start in terms of concrete existence, you are away. And that is what physics can now do.

Every physical constraint is a sign. It is information to be read as a constraint on free dynamics. And information theory can account for both the negentropy of constraints and the entropy of degrees of freedom.

That view of things is now being take back into mind science to account for the kinds of things that brains do in terms of forward modelling or Bayseian information uncertainty reduction.

Consciousness becomes not the generalised substance of panpsychism but instead a massive ensemble of accessible modelling states - a massive ensemble of particulars. In any moment, the brain could be in any number of states that represent a meaningful observer~observables modelling relation. The fact that just one state is selected, the rest suppressed, is what gives brain consciousness its exceptional adaptive variety.

So in pansemiotics, the observer is the interpretance, which is the habits, which is the constraints, which is the negentropy. That is how you go from the highly complex specificity of observing brains to the most simple, universal and fundamental level of observation that is the basic entropic condition of the Universe described through dissipative structure theory.

The metaphysician isn't concerned with how universals evolved. He's concerned with whether or not universals exist. The evolving structure narrative can be explained without universals. — darthbarracuda

So metaphysics doesn't include process philosophy in your book. Great. You win.

Where does this sparrow emerge from? How is this "ancestral" generality not a particular? The fact that we can identify it and communicate about it shows that it's something. Maybe not like a sparrow, a chair, or a hydrogen-fusing hypergiant star, but something regardless. — darthbarracuda

The sparrow emerges from the capacity of information to organise a dissipative flow of matter into an anticipated, purpose-serving, structure. It's negentropy and entropy, constraints and freedom - the usual systems story.

And sure we can say something about a sparrow. But again, don't mix synchronic epistemology and the diachronic ontological issue of universals.

Yes, you said that many today are disregarding universalism because of social issues - universalism is closely tied to essentialism, and essentialism has a rather blotchy history of labeling non-conformers as dysfunctional. — darthbarracuda

What? Are you saying a liking for systems thinking is like homophobia?

Could such 'fundamental constants of nature' be considered as analogous to universals? — Wayfarer

It could go either way. The big problem for fundamental physics is that the constants seem instead to be the most contingent of all particulars. So they just are brute numbers that are true of our universe by some kind of random accident. That view of the constants is why there are multiverse theories. If the constants are particulars, then there is no reason to limit the values they take and no reason for there not to be an infinity of universes.

The other view is that the constants instead represent some kind of deeply rooted equilibrium balance or geometric ratio. So - if we had a theory of everything - they would pop out of that as the only possible ratios, in just the same way that pi, phi, e and Feigenbaum's constant are all explained as straightforward ratios that result in these really arbitrary seeming numbers.

So most physicists would lean to the idea they are contingent particulars. The more interesting alternative would turn out to be that they express a pure geometric relation that we might one day discover.

Explaining how generalised simplicity becomes particularized complexity doesn't really tell us whether or not universals exist, because at any moment of time, a property is instantiated in virtue of the fact that something exists. — darthbarracuda

Generally I'm not following your post (sexual ethics essentialism???).

But I draw attention to the synchronic supposition upon which you try to argue your case. For you it is natural to talk about what exists at some moment in time. But it is fundamental to my position that spatiotemporal scale is itself what is hierarchically organised. And this is now standard physics - as in lightcones, event horizons and quantum events.

So generality is defined by it being the very largest possible spatiotemporal scale over which action is being integrated - that is, the visible universe in the case of physical law.

A sparrow is made up of protons and electrons. Those parts are standard across a universe over a scale defined by the particle horizon and the electro-weak symmetry breaking temperature.

But the organic chemistry that is the sparrow is a far more local and specified state of affairs - generic only over about a billion or so years.

Then the genomic sparrowness of the sparrow is information that impinges on a location in a substantial way (such as we would say - there's a sparrow) over perhaps a few million years of evolutionary memory forming.

And so we could continue on to what makes this particular sparrow about to spread its wings and have the property of being scared (the sight of the lurking cat).

So you make pointing at particulars seem like something we can freely do at any chosen moment. But that is to confuse epistemology and ontolology if you are hoping to talk about the complicated and hierarchical structuring of nature that sees a sparrow emerge as a natural kind - a genus - let alone produces some particular bird before us.

Of course, it I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary. — John

Another ontological point that distinguishes Pragmatic naturalism here is that it indeed embraces the arbitrary along with the necessary.

So the traditional Platonic conception of universals (and natural laws) is they are necessitating or determining principles. Universal causation applies because every effect must have its prior cause.

However Peircean pragmatism was explicit in saying universal causation may be the generalised habit, yet there is also actual spontaneity or arbitrariness in life. And this claim was made on the basis of the emergence of probalistic thinking in science, particularly in thermodynamics and evolutionary theory. Of course, this doctrine of tychism also foreshadowed quantum theories demonstration that existence is fundamentally spontaneous in this fashion.

So Aristotle got it right at the beginning in accepting brute accident in nature, as well as the fact of nature being organised by a hierarchy of increasingly generalised constraints or lawful habit. And that more subtle metaphysics is what Pragmatism picked up on, and post-quantum science is now really driving home.

The scholastic argument about realism vs nominalism seems hugely quaint in that light. It is of historical interest having become such a familiar part of the general culture of the humanities. But metaphysics/science has long ago moved on to much more sophisticated conceptions.

(Even if, as I say, most scientists have their own rather culturally wonky take on these philosophy of science issues because - in usual dialectical fashion - science seeks to define itself as other to the humanities, returning the favour.)

Nothing changes if I adopt a trope theoretic position or a nominalist position, because metaphysics is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is. — darthbarracuda

You miss the point of science talking a hierarchical naturalistic view on the question. It does mean you can go out and measure universality in terms of generalised simplicity vs particularised complexity - gravity vs sparrows.

So the debate about universals carried on "metaphysically" in the hands of scholastic realists vs nominalists. Meanwhile science continued on with Aristotle's natural kinds metaphysics where universals were really various grades of a genus~species dichotomy.

Peirce in particular took this forward by identifying the universalising tendency in nature with constraints or habits. So the naturalness of hierarchical organisation is explained by the naturalness of developmental/evolutionary processes. Which in turn, is explained by symmetry breaking structural principles.

So the conventional metaphysical debate is non-naturalistic in being between the platonic idealists and the hardline social constructionists. The Aristotelean tradition is the metaphysics that science has cashed out with great success via Pragmatism - even if Reductionism/Scientism/Positivism is a further modern anti-universals tendency (being that part of science's success that quixotically wants to reject its own philosophical grounds for social reasons.)

I don't see why we should expect that a physicist in say 400 years' time will see universals as the same as we do now. It certainly hasn't worked out that way so far. — mcdoodle

Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.

To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here.

Other than Aristotle what are some good resources on four cause causation, in particular its relationship to science? — darthbarracuda

That's a broad question. It's just basic in systems science and theoretical biology. But for example there would be Robert Rosen's relational biology and anticipatory systems books.

I would be interested in any comment you might have on convergence, posted above. — Wayfarer

Convergent evolution is a good example of how contexts shape up their contents in teleological fashion. So ecosystems have niches for vultures. In the old world they evolved from hawks. In the new world, they evolved from storks.

So yes. Reductionist science is in line with nominalism in always wanting to discount the reality of formal and final cause. Convergent evolution should make reductionist stop and think. But prejudice normally wins out.

The particular present-day hierarchy of sciences is however a historically-situated way of organising, that happened for contingent reasons. In other eras or in other possible worlds understanding might be organised quite differently. — mcdoodle

Regardless of your alternative world scheme, gravity is going to be a more universal fact than sparrows.

So Hegel's statement that "pure Being is one and the same as pure Nothing" amounts to just that...nothing. It's gibberish. When we imagine "Being as Nothing" we end up thinking about some kind of vast black void, or a feeling of emptiness. But that is simply poetry. For most metaphysics, then, these statements are pseudo-statements: they bastardize the meaning of a word and use it in a fictional way. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, Hegel was making a deeply logical point that Carnap's brand of logic fails to describe.

Carnap's metaphysics presumes all logical possibilities to be crisp or counterfactual. Things are either one or the other. And from that reductionist axiom, all his deductions may proceed.

But Hegel, like Peirce, was introducing the further grounding category of the vague or indeterminate. So pure being and pure nothing were the same in their - logical - absolute lack of determination. A state of everythingness and a state of nothingness are in effect the same in their lack of of any somethingness.

So Hegel was simply pointing out the further category of the indeterminate that grounds all the happy logical apparatus of reductionist logic - the kind of logic that simply then presumes everything that is, does fit its Procrustean binary A/not-A format.

. What you are arguing here here is not something you can demonstrate with scientific references, although, granted, you can make a powerful argument from scientific knowledge to the realm beyond science. — mcdoodle

So why is science hierarchically organised in to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology? Did humans just invent a crazy set of divisions for no reason or does that reflect the ontic fact that existence is found to have levels of constraint that range from the very general to the highly specific?

I believe nominalism claims that those things which particulars have in common are not independent of those particulars. There is no such thing as roundness in the absence of a round object. — Michael

Again, the real point is that the realist-nominalist debate is founded on a metaphysical dichotomy. And so the resolution lies not in an eternal battle to decide which is the real, which is the epiphenomenal. Being a dichotomy, each requires the reality of the other to be real itself.

So there can be no particularity without generality. And vice versa. You need a symmetry to have a breaking. And the breaking is what reveals there was a symmetry.

The problem with universals and Platonic ideas is that they are not generally understood in a hierarchical fashion. So roundness and sparrows and teacups are all names for individuated ideals. Platonia quickly fills up with a bestiary of perfect representatives of classes.

Nominalism is right on that score. We humans freely name abstractions without really being systematic about the formal and final causality that the names mean to refer to.

But reality is organised hierarchically. So teacups are ideals that have their formal and final cause very locally within the sphere of human culture. And sparrows likewise are the product of very local biological and ecological constraints - the symmetry breaking information to be found in a genetic and ecological developmental history.

So if we are talking about the truly universal, we are talking about the cosmologically fundamental. And roundness becomes a good example of that.

The reason for roundness is rotational symmetry. Along with translational symmetry, it is simply one of the basic facts of their being spacetime. And it is a universal in the fashion I specify - a difference that doesn't make a difference. To spin on the spot is inertial. Rotation freely happens because it makes no difference.

So roundness becomes the name we give in recognition our (geometric) reality has this fundamental boundary property. A circle is a representation of the symmetry which is an unbreachable limit - you can't get more round than this roundest thing. The circle embodies the difference that doesn't make a difference because it could be spinning madly, it could be standing still, and you couldn't see any change.

And then from that state of cosmic Platonic perfection, even the slightest deviation becomes the symmetry breaking, the difference that makes a difference. Mark the circle with the tiniest dot and now it's state of motion is made a counterfactually definite thing.

So the whole realist-nominalist debate is a result of the usual wrong turn when faced with a metaphysical strength dichotomy or symmetry breaking.

The way to make sense of an apparently fundamental opposition is to step back to the triadic or hierarchically organised point of view where you instead see how it is a case of two complementary principles in mutually formative interaction. Each extreme is making its other in a mutualised symmetry breaking.

Wayfarer should recognise this as Budhist dependent co-arising even if he doesn't get the more advanced formulations of systems science and Peircean semiotics.

I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows. — mcdoodle

But sparrows and redness are names of qualities. So how did you get from quantification to that?

It would make more sense to say that we are differentiating creatures and then generality or quality arises in the limit where differences no longer make a difference to what we are talking about. A sparrow is still a sparrow if it red or blue, plastic or flesh, fat or thin.

So universals - as ideas, conceptions, qualities or the many other terms we have to denote bounding constraints - are not merely merological composites of all their possible instances. They stand just as firmly as the ground to acts of differentiation. For differences to make a difference pre-supposes the simpler state of differences that don't change a state of affairs.

This isn't about predicate logic as that is itself a highly reductive version of what I would mean by logic.

So it is about sign relations as a whole - propositions merely being the signs themselves, the targets of some habit of interpretance.