That is the usual commonsense position but it runs into the problem that causation is what in the end folk want to get at. Cartesian dualism seems a fact because we are minds that seem to be able to make things happen. That may also be causally insoluble under dualism, but it would be incoherent to deny that it is the very thing that most needs explaining.

So I would say - like Peirce - you are arguing the wrong way round in saying universals are just a logical way of talking. The Peircean position is that causation is a logic-like process - a universal growth in reasonableness or intelligibility.

Logic works for us not by accident but because the Universe itself operates "logically".

As to ideas and change, it is Platonism that treats forms as eternal abstract objects. A systems view treats them as informational constraints. So forms capture limits on free material variety. They are thus the directors and channellers or actual change. Also forms can develop or evolve in time. Or more accurately, as limits, they only get fully expressed at "the end of time" - that is, whenever things come to an equilbrated state of rest.

Peirce said reality was organised by sign relations. That is a little different. Or even completely different.

Yet still you have two ontic choices here - either you are going to go for an immanent or a transcendent metaphysics. I choose immanent.

Where I would agree with you about your usual target here - Scientism or Materialism - is that these too are transcendent in effect. They want to put formal and final cause in the realm of ideas. The only difference is that they add the word "merely" ideas. Scientism pretends that questions about observers and minds and purposes are not real (causal) questions.

But if you are an adherent of immanence, then the job is to account for everything - causes and effects - from within.

And that was what the irreducible triadism of Peircean metaphysics was aimed at.

That's fine. Except my point is that it is the very thing of trying to make one "the real", the other "mere appearance", that is the wrong move that engenders this eternal debate.

So we have the traditional problem of universals because of a dualistic thinking - the usual divine vs material dichotomy - which then wants to make one side of the argument the ultimate winner.

My view is the systems' one where the ontology is irreducibly triadic. So when we are talking about the formal vs the material causes, those are both real - as causes. And so too is the world of formed matter that is the result of that causal action. So the effect is also real.

At which stage talking about what is real or unreal doesn't really make much sense as what we have is talk about a system for holistic emergence. We wind up with the three aspects of coming into existence which are the two types of causality - formal and material - plus the third thing which is where causes ceases to make a difference and instead we have what we call a stable effect, an individuated state of being.

Another a way of resolving matters is to see both the general and the particular as equally "unreal".

So where all the issues stem from is our need to identify the causes of states of affairs. And following Aristotle, we can make a broad division into the essential abstract causes - form and purpose - and then the accidental or particular causes - the material and efficient.

So particular things are not really individuals but the individuated. They arise because of a hylomorphic interaction between top-down constraints (universal forms) and bottom-up constructions (material contingencies).

Thus talk about "reality" gets confused as instead everything is part of an irreducibly triadic emergent process. An individuated object is really a process, an act of individuation in which the universal stands for the shaping causes and the particularity is about the material contingencies. The object in question is made of this lump of stuff, in this place, at this moment.

So from a systems perspective, universals are real as a critical part of the causes of reality - reality being what we usually mean as the persisting result of causal actions, the individuation that results in concrete appearing states of affairs.

Another entropy based way of visualising it is like gas condensing to water. Gas moves about in constant disorderly fashion. Then it cools and gets organised. It develops a dimensionality of flow. Talking about directions makes sense because there are now counterfactual directions not being taken.

So is the gas timeless or too busy flying in any old direction? What we know as a dimension of time is a global entropic flow, against which any negentropic counter-action becomes a difference that makes a difference. Something "really happens" only to the degree that it can't very easily unhappen anymore.

Its only a problem if you believe scientific models have to be "the thing as it really is", rather than a pragmatic model.

So the source of the time symmetry in mechanical descriptions is hardly a metaphysical-level problem - science built its models that way. But the next step would have to be a quantum gravity model of existence. And at that stage, spacetime is going to have to be statistically emergent from a more fundamental symmetry (and symmetry breaking).

Sure, Smolin talks about the need for real time. But on closer inspection, does that mean more than thinking that flux or change is fundamental? It is the (quantum foam) ground out of which spatial coordinates and persistent lawful organisation develops.

Entropy is the only thing that could explain time (as global change) having a direction.

So the problem for all of physics is that it is "mechanical" - an assumption of local time reversibility is built into the very form of its equations. Any equation is a statement of a symmetry which is then broken by you the observer plugging in some actual physical number of a variable.

To then talk about the whole of the Universe, including the emergence of time, you have to have equations that already encode some sort of temporal direction - a symmetry breaking.

Thermodynamics or statistical mechanics give you such a framework. It says if you let a system freely randomise, it will freely keep randomising until that randomness reaches its equilibrium maximum.

But a theory of the universe has to include not only the story of its initial conditions (the local material contents that get shifted around randomly) but also the reason for their being "the system", quantum or otherwise, that is the boundary conditions.

So ordinary thermodynamics - which likes to take a bounded spacetime for granted - is only half an answer, which is why ordinary entropy accounting doesn't get you too far here.

On the specific thing of quantum information loss (or decoherence, as I believe you likely mean) then yes, that is a useful model.

The general idea is that as things tend towards a cold residual fizzle of radiation, all particular local information has been erased and you only need two global measurements - the general temperature (or energy density) of the universe and its scale factor (how big it is in terms of the visible event horizon).

At the Heat Death, with both these at their maximum, time has pretty much halted in terms of meaningful change. Like gas particles in a flask, everything might still be in motion, but nothing new is happening in any physical sense.

Heh. Well as PF is buggered...

Applying entropy concepts to the whole universe is tricky. But two simple points we can make are:

1) The Heat Death state is as cold as it gets and so that limits rather severely the possibility of hot thermal fluctuations that might spawn something new.

2) Having said that, it is only the Planck scale that puts a floor under the ultimate temperature drop and so if the Planck scale is not a true physical limit for some reason (that is, our vacuum state is only a false vacuum) then theoretically some further symmetry breaking could arise and the universe would plunge on through, getting larger and colder than 0 degrees K.

Then starting to get into the complications, the old cosmological problem was that the universe really ought to gravitationally roll itself back up into an a negentropic super hot ball given enough time - setting up a simple eternal recycling.

The new dark energy universe tells us there will indeed be eternal expansion and so an actual heat death. But the new get out clause could be that dark energy is a residual inflation (a scalar field that expands exponentially without "cooling" - believe that if you like) and so at some point in an eternal Heat Death there could be a fluctuation that again breaks the symmetry and inflation takes off all over again in its "cost less" fashion - the so-called Big Rip.

The point is that any scenario can be concocted. But the observable state of the universe should suggest some scenarios are highly unlikely (because the Heat Death just now has the look of a one way trip).

However in popular science, no one likes a dull answer. So eternal recycling and other wild rebirth scenarios get plenty of airtime.