What about the 'limit' of there seemingly being a zero-sum balance of opposites, or no absolutes, or as no intrinsic properties such as with relationism? — PoeticUniverse

I am talking about a system of pure self-defining relation in talking about dialectics and semiotics. But that is a positive rather than a negative story. Two complementary limits add up to produce the wholeness of a spectrum of mediating possibiities. It is a division that creates something.

The other way of looking at it is negative in that two opposites must cancel to nothing. That is a division that destroys possibility.

Which one were you thinking of?

Or maybe freewill is just a cultural meme - a faulty characterisation of a human social construct as something metaphysically fundamental?

(Spoiler: That is indeed all it is.) — apokrisis

I see that you continue in your contradictory ways. Free will is a necessary requirement for the existence of any "human social construct".

This denial, that ideas, goals, and intentions, are the real causes of artificial structures, is the reason why you'll never be able to understand that part of reality. Until you face the reality that immaterial ideas are real active causes in the world, causing the existence of artificial material things, you'll be forever lost in your bungled metaphysics which attempts to explain final cause using the contradictory notion of retrocausation.

I see how you slid from freewill to other things without even noticing. Sloppy.

You don't seem to have any idea what the concept of free will encompasses. Ever look it up? Or do you just dismiss it as "a cultural meme" every time you see or hear the words, and your eyes glaze over?

You don't seem to have any idea what the concept of free will encompasses. Ever look it up? — Metaphysician Undercover

:yawn:

For all I know, the alleged "important stuff" may be "unimportant stuff." And it is perhaps for the latter reason, rather than for the former reason, that it is unsaid, or unsayable. By the way, what makes "stuff" important or unimportant anyway? Just being able to be said, rather than not being able to be said?

seconds ago — charles ferraro

Which one were you thinking of? — apokrisis

Either, as the nature of Ultimate Reality.

I'd guess I'd also add that whatever it may be, will be discovered by reason alone. Our sense perceptions have finite capacity. Granted our reason must have some limit too, but it is clearly more powerful in these kinds of questions.

But as others have said, it may well be the case that these kinds of grounds are unsayable.

But language systems can be mathematical. Ordinary language is speech from some social point of view - developed to (re)construct the society that is speaking it. And now - through the practice of metaphysical-strength reasoning - modern humans have constructed a culture of technical speech that is rooted in the habits of logic and arithmetic. We have language that is designed to transcend our social being and so move towards some conception of "ultimate reality" - as the limit of this new displaced and third person point of view. We "see" the world through the "objective" eye of axiom and measurement. — apokrisis

A provocative set of ideas. First, I should say that the reason I want to give rationalism some presumption of favor is that individual identity insists. The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. To sit, and make a dramatic move into the "eternal present" (Kierkegaard, Buddha?) free of what Husserl calls predelineated determination (memory) still requires an implicit language world that is always, already there, making, stabilizing, normalizing all things. This language structure is not something that can be put down, for one would have to put down "the world". Of course, languages are each one arbitrary, but the logic that makes it even possible, this is my interest here.

Metaphysical strength reasoning? What would this be if not the dialectics, about which one has to be very careful, as Kant was pretty good at explaining.

So Hegel got that to the degree he developed a logic of dialectics. This was the intellectual project that got modern rationality and science going back in Ancient Greece. Hegel tried hard to update it in the age of Newtonian mechanics. But he bent his arguments away from the third person and back towards the first person to the degree he placed God, spirit or goodness at the centre of his metaphysical scheme. Too anthropomorphic. Although that was an understandable cultural response in an age where the pendulum had swung too far from the very idea of points of view - Newtonianism being understood as the view from nowhere ... rooted in the nothingness of a void, rather than in a plenum of possibilities. — apokrisis

This rootedness in the plenum of possibilities sounds Heideggerian. I hold that such words as God, spirit or goodness are dialectically unfinished, or better, reach their end in the confrontation with actuality. Clarity is challenging here because philosophy, if allowed to follow its internal course, leads only to one place, and that is the eternal present. Wittgenstein followed Kierkegaard on this strange bit of metaphysics, but it is, by my lights, the coveted brass ring of philosophical endeavor. Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic.

It is important to remember that all of our vocabulary is hermeneutic, and when we use a term, any term, like 'logic', we are taking up some part of the world AS, as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this).

This expression "nothingness of a void", I would add, is simply a hermeneutical place holder, a way of abstracting something that is manifestly there, in the world. As to goodness, well, what is this? Ethical/aestheitic goodness or contingent goodness? God? Spirit? These are not terms with no existential underpinning. I claim argument bears this out.

And then mathematical reasoning and scientific method arose out of the development of a new metaphysical language - one that ends up speaking in numbers rather than words, and dialectical logical structure rather than an everyday causal grammar based on a narrative tales of who did what to whom. — apokrisis

Perhaps. But there is the inevitable "goodness" question begged here" What if there were discovered some Pythagorean harmony of the spheres (reminds me of an interesting, if creepy, movie named "Pi" in which a mathematical genius was chased down by religious zealots who thought he possessed mystical insight). Any way, if such a thing were determined, then so what? This revelation would have value only if it were attended by a valorizing agency. Hume once wrote that if reason had its way, it could annihilate the world with no regrets (so to speak); facts have no value and logic has no value conceived as such. Reason has to be conceived, not in terms of "pure" reason, logical or arithmetic, which is an abstraction, but in some kind of reason/value matrix of experience.
Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language.

There is a proper way to talk about ultimate reality. Or at least the relevant community of inquirers have agreed much about the current state of the art in this regard. Nature is symmetry breaking and thermodynamics. A dialectic of constraints and uncertainty. Or as Peirce said, synechism and tychism. — apokrisis

I really don't have a complaint abut this in a qualified way, though I do recall that positivist ideal in which all meanings were reduced to their essences, and language simple, what, mirrors to reality. This kind of thinking has grave flaws.

The problem here is that there is no point just swinging the pendulum between the dialectical extremes of the third and first person point of view. — apokrisis

Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, if as recall Hegel. I didn't used to think this either, and I don't now, really. But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. I simply understand that reason is an essential part of the construction of the meaning, and it is possible that its depth is beyond contingency.

But since Anaximander first argued for the spontaneous self-organisation of an Apeiron, a metaphysics of sense-making rationalisation - a dissipative structure - has been kicking about in the back room of organicism. We can certainly see it in Hegel and Peirce, as well as others, — apokrisis

And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back from ground in the mind to ground in the beginning of the universe and time.

The "fun" part of post-Kantian idealism is its antimonies... The first eye that opened was when time began, but empirically time goes further back than that, etc. The ground is the cognition. The infinite monads or the unified Thing-in-Itself(s) are the "behind the scenes" and "actual" reality.

With this sort of realism you propose, triadic form self-organizing is kicked off somehow from a distant past Apeiron. What is "this"? You describe the theoretical and postulated "form" but not whence or what, which is the leap of faith metaphysics part.

The self, even the most basic, reduced self in, say, some deep meditative state in which thought has been suspended altogether, is still constitutively a rational entity, not a blooming and buzzing infant. — Constance

We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world.

Our world is structured in time, so called. Of course, one could fill a library just on the way this single idea has been worked out in the past two centuries, but I say, deep meditation does much to undo the world's most familiarizing features, and when familiarity falls away, philosophy becomes revelatory. BUT: revelation is structured revelation, or, requires a structured self to receive it, assimilate it with the rest of the implicit composite self, and this is where Hegel has his place. Experience at all requires native logic. — Constance

I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,

So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense?

as Heidegger put it the intended object; our language's vocabulary does not stand for things in the world, it "stands in for" things (and then, this "standing in" gets diffused in "difference" but never mind this). — Constance

Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers.

Speaking in numbers? If so, these numbers would have to be valorized, have meaning beyond the number, just as with plain language. — Constance

Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does a fair job of valorising this.

Right, you don't think there is ever some asymptotic approach to God's self realization, — Constance

Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling.

But any intimation of a deeper sense of the world is bound to the logical construction of experience, and, as Wittgenstein told us, it is nonsense to think otherwise. — Constance

Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions.

The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable.

The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc.

And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back itself. — schopenhauer1

Haven’t we been through that loop many times already? But I note you correctly put “ground” in quotes.

Any notion of the Apeiron is one of a limit. A limit on distinctions themselves. Vagueness is defined by the principle of contradiction finally giving out and failing to apply.

So if you are a materialist, you must think in terms of grounds. And then moan forever about the paradox of a world standing on an infinite number of turtles.

But process thinking already makes natural the idea of limits. An equilbrium is a mess that can keep messing about yet not get any messier.

It ain’t my problem if you feel you must employ an inferior brand of metaphysics when better ones are available.

It ain’t my problem if you feel you must employ an inferior brand of metaphysics when better ones are available. — apokrisis

You missed my edit and additions, which I think is what I'm really interested in:

And then, what is the nature of the Apeiron? Is this not a "ground"? It just pushes the can back from ground in the mind to ground in the beginning of the universe and time.

The "fun" part of post-Kantian idealism is its antimonies... The first eye that opened was when time began, but empirically time goes further back than that, etc. The ground is the cognition. The infinite monads or the unified Thing-in-Itself(s) are the "behind the scenes" and "actual" reality.

With this sort of realism you propose, triadic form self-organizing is kicked off somehow from a distant past Apeiron. What is "this"? You describe the theoretical and postulated "form" but not whence or what, which is the leap of faith metaphysics part. — schopenhauer1

I csn’t make sense of your additions.

I csn’t make sense of your additions. — apokrisis

Whence/What the Apeiron? You answered

Vagueness is defined by the principle of contradiction finally giving out and failing to apply. — apokrisis

Vagueness vagueing is pretty vague if that's your answer, but it's just as oddly metaphysical as any other metaphysics.

Vagueness vagueing is pretty vague if that's your answer, but it's just as oddly metaphysical as any other metaphysics. — schopenhauer1

It is a logical claim about counterfactuality. When no difference can be found, you have reached the limit in terms of differences. Some statement is neither true nor false, just completely vague.

And then most normal stories about the world - regular reality - focus on the vast amount of counterfactuality. The world is a state of affairs, the realist exclaims. It is a world populated by an apparently infinite supply of middle-sized dry goods bumping about in some cosmic scale void.

But if we want to imagine ultimate reality - the ground to this counterfactual mixture of atomic substances acting mechanically within an a-causal spatiotemporal expanse - then we can start inquiring into the point at which this sharp counterfactuality first arose. That is, we can head back to where we encounter the Planckian limit on any form of definite material being.

That there was this limit was the quantum surprise. We found scientifically that the past ain't infinite - turtles as far as any eye could see. It was instead bounded by a horizon - a limit on substantial "thingness", or even physical law, or spatiotemporal voids - itself.

So it ain't oddly metaphysical. It is the cashing out of a dialectical and process based metaphysics in robust science.

You keep wanting to argue the view from Newtonian materialism - the metaphysics of middle-sized dry goods. And that still feels supported by a matching version of logic - the one in which the three laws of thought, the principles of identity, non-contradiction and the excluded middle, are taken for granted as eternalised verities rather than as their own emergent limit states on Being.

In the imagined limit - the limit on uncertainty as the inverse to Vagueness's limit on certainty - these laws of thought might apply. But in practice, we exist in the world that is suspended between these dialectical limitations on Being.

Circling back to Aristotle, substance is informed potential - self-consistent constraint on generalised uncertainty. And the "ground" of Being is thus this dialectics of establishing a world that is strongly dichotomised ... in dialectical opposition with the "world" that was once, by contrast, merely a vagueness or Apeiron. A pre-Planckian condition unmarked by distinctions, as our measuring instruments now tell us.

We are biological beings before we are we linguistic and socially constructed beings. So we start from that neurological level of world modeling like any animal. Although human babies are engaged in linguistic culture and even mathematical culture from the earliest age. Rationality is being shaped just by being raised in a carpentered environment where chairs, doors, light switches and now iPads are the natural form of the world. — apokrisis

This is where the post modern turn to language steps in: no, biology is not antecedent to language. Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. If this idea is new to you, it is very unlikely you will find favor with it here, for it is a very difficult business to get familiar with. This is because it turns conventional science orientation on its head. I am confronting the world, and wish to know it intimately, I have to get into original proximity to what is there, that is, as "originary" as is possible. When I behold objects, wherein lies this generative source? It is within the perceptual presentation: a thing is a perceptual object first, a logical construction first. If I wish to move into regions of apprehending the world, like biology or knitting, then this is fine, but here I am removed from phenomena simpliciter, the "given" of the world prior to be taken up for some other than philosophical purpose. Philosophy is the attempt to maximize proximity by reducing the world to its foundational terms, and biology, for one, is derivative.

I’m not seeing anything to do here with the question of ultimate reality as a claim about the world or the thing itself. Just some hazy, culturally specific notions of selfhood and subjectivity,

So are you simply saying that ultimate reality is phenomenological and you are uninterested in the scientific method and pragmatic reasoning - the hunt for ultimate reality in that sense? — apokrisis

Ultimate reality is first given to us in language. It is not as if the world just reaches into your consciousness and declares its nature. Rather, we receive the world within a body of always already there language and interpretation. Ultimate reality is an idea first received by an active interpretative agency, and it is here meanings step forth and try to made sense of the given intuitions. These intuitions by themselves come to as language possibilities, out of which ideational constructs are made. According to this thinking, there is no pure intuition of anything, for intuitions are composites of thought. Derrida takes this to its logical conclusion, denying even the possibility of a singular affirmation, but then, consider that what this amounts to a a denial that language can speak the world, and this is what Wittgenstein talked about in the Tractatus, and in this work there is the famous, or infamous, reference to the mystical, the transcendental.
The real issue lies with Time, for our understanding is and eventful awareness, not a static "presence" but then, presence is the key to ultimate reality. See the Abhidhamma.

Well, language is the semiotic tool that constructs a self-world relation in the first place. It doesn’t get in the way. It is the way. As modern educated folk, we are generic selves, neurological selves, social selves and mechanical selves - the four levels of semiosis, using the codes of genes, neurons, words and numbers. — apokrisis

But note: to conceive of language as a semiotic tool, we need language to do this. The point is, we have the vocabularies first, and these vocabularies construct meaning. It is not that calling it a semiotic tool is wrong at all; rather,, putting language first, we move into a theoretical field called hermeneutics which denies "ultimacy" to anything that can be said because language itself is a constructive feature of the very reality that is the object of questioning. There is no terminal juncture where language ends its inquiry.
I don't really with this to its conclusion. I think there is an end, and ultimate reality makes sense, though the sense that is delivered up, is not discursive, not contingent, not bound to some novel ways to take up the world via an existing vocabulary. I think Michel Henry in taking up Husserl's epoche has it right, though I can't exactly tell you what this is and how I use it here. A rather lengthy affair.

Well at all levels, semiosis is about information being used to regulate the material physics of the world. So it is about harnessing the world in a way that works for the self - the organismic view of things. — apokrisis

What I mean is that, if numbers are to somehow hold the key to foundational meaning to, well, life the universe and everything, then numbers would have to be conceived more fully in their conception. A number simpliciter is just an abstraction. Where is the meaning, the affect? What we are trying to explain is not a body of lifeless facts, but a world of meanings, and the meta-question of which is that of metavalue: not quantitative, but qualitative. The first question we encounter when asking about ultimate reality is, what is there in reality that is being called ultimate? Here, in our midst, we find the most salient presence to be qualitative experiences, like falling in love, being tortured, haagen dazs and tonsillitis; you know, joy and suffering. The basis for what is ultimate has to be conceived on these terms, not in abstract structures.

Well not if my science-informed view is claiming the asymptotic approach is instead towards the Cosmos’s Heat Death. And that mid-era complexity in the form of life and mind arises as a clean-up squad for lumps of free energy that the universe wants degraded back to background heat as soon as possible - as part of its grand project of eternalised expansion-cooling. — apokrisis

But again, this talk about science is derivative, resting on something else, which is the phenomenological description of matters prior to being taken up in science.

Sure. Peircean semiosis warns us that the self is as much part of any modelling as the world that stands as its “other”. So we can’t develop views of either poles of being without understanding them as pragmatic co-constructions. — apokrisis

Of course. And Peirce had read Kant thoroughly, and understood the Copernican revolution that underlies this. After all, concepts without intuitions are empty, and intuitions without concepts are blind; and if the entire affair is pragmatic in nature, then this is a pragmatic phenomenology. I think pragmatism is right up to a point.

The difference was Peirce could say this clearly rather than mumble indistinctly. He showed how the mechanics of logic are rooted in organismic being and so how the rational structure of the Cosmos was natural and inevitable. — apokrisis

I don't quite understand this "rational structure of the cosmos" at all. It must be the way it is put here, but Peirce was a long run thinker, and he is criticized by some for his view that truth is what emerges in the long run. Don't recall well about this though. But I take issue with this phrase as you state it. After all, the structures revealed to us are inherently pragmatic, and any conception of the cosmos is, as you say, a co construction. Nature does not reveal itself apart from this doubt moving to belief equation.
I read Making Out Ideas Clear and his Fixation of Belief. I'll read them again.

The ultimate level of reality description for him is pansemiotic. Which is why I highlight the degree to which science has arrived at a pansemiotic model of the physical universe - one involving things like dialectical symmetry breaking, law as universalised habit, quantum potential as a logical vagueness, etc. — apokrisis

Oh. I see. Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered.

Language comes first, for it is in language that biology is conceived. — Constance

Well my camp is natural philosophy. So we explain where language comes from as well as how it organises human thought in socially constructed fashion. :lol:

Well, a pansemiotic model is not going to be some "ultimate" or absolute description. That would be impossible staying within the bounds of pragmatic truth and epistemology. Truth is made, not discovered. — Constance

Peirce formulated both pragmatism as epistemic method - a theory of truth as the limit of inquiry in a community of rational thinkers using abductive reasoning - and also semiotics as an ontology that, among other things, grounds such an epistemology.

So semiotics operates within epistemic limits while also being an ontology large enough to encompass anything sensible and evidence-backed that PoMo might have to say or raise as a concern.