Hegel says we create patterns.

"Space is abstract generality"

"To speak of points of space, as if they constituted the positive element of space, is inadmissible"

(Only the mind can be continuous)

"Points are the negation of space because it is immediate undifferentiation" (Heidegger thought this refers to potentiality, the ground)

It seems to me that a point, a segment, and a plane are only connected logically, and it is the error of higher mathematics to connect them physically or mathematically

Would you accept a correction: No. That which underlies patterns of information are the same for everyone. — tim wood

OK. But what is "that which underlies patterns"?

I hope he is a bit clearer that that in his explanations. — Banno

Have you read any of his argument against reality? If you don't want to read the book, there are several videos on related topics. But you may not like what he's implying. His theory is a form of Idealism, in which what you see as real is a mental model, not the underlying essence of reality. His argument makes sense to me, but then I am not a committed Materialist. :smile:

Hoffman TED talk : https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_hoffman_do_we_see_reality_as_it_is/transcript?language=en

Any information can be encoded as a string of bits. We can then calculate the entropy of that string. No 'icons' would be involved - unless bits are considered icons. — Banno

Are you familiar with "black hole" physicist John Archibald Wheeler's "It From Bit" hypothesis? In Hoffman's theory, Icons are what we believe to be real. Is a "bit" of information real? In what sense? :smile:

It From Bit : “All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information.”
"“Reality is what we take to be true,” pioneering physicist David Bohm asserted in 1977. “What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/02/it-from-bit-wheeler/

Who considers silence to begin with then entropying as time passes having knock on affects forming things? Is there any evidence for this in regards to formation of sound frequencies?

The presence of a pattern implies a pattern generator. A finality. There is some larger process that is placing constraints on irregularity or uncertainty. — apokrisis

Yes. Patterns are not random, they are caused. And the "finality" is the First or Final or Ultimate Cause. The "larger process" is a Teleological System with Laws (constraints) and just enough freedom from determinism to allow for the creativity of "uncertainty". Do you have a more specific name for your "Pattern Generator"? :smile:

The presence of a pattern implies a pattern generator. A finality. There is some larger process that is placing constraints on irregularity or uncertainty.
— apokrisis
Yes. Patterns are not random, they are caused. And the "finality" is the First or Final or Ultimate Cause. The "larger process" is a Teleological System with Laws (constraints) and just enough freedom from determinism to allow for the creativity of "uncertainty". Do you have a more specific name for your "Pattern Generator"? :smile: — Gnomon

Deus es machina

Practical knowledge tells us it is what you think it is.

Do you have a more specific name for your "Pattern Generator"? — Gnomon

Well, nature is the generator. So really I am talking about the long tradition within metaphysics and science that seeks an immanent and self organising, thus triadic, approach to the development of the structured reality we observe. This knits together systems science, cybernetics, Peircean semiotics, hierarchy theory, thermodynamics, etc.

The key insight is that reality is the evolving product of top-down constraints interacting with bottom-up constructive degrees of freedom. Global constraints shape the local degrees of freedom to be what they are (the atomistic stuff that can construct). And local degrees of freedom then act to reconstruct the world that is the collective state of constraint forming them. Reality is a habit that works.

So a detailed summary of how the many strands of thought now weave into a tight thermodynamic story can be found here for example - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1006.5505.pdf

The key is the shift from a mechanical or Cartesian framing of Nature to a triadic framing that is thus large enough to include the idea that reality must evolve, develop or self-organise into being.

So Nature is self-generative. It is always forming patterns for reasons. Even its randomness or indeterminism is a pattern - the one produced by the least amount of possible constraint on what is going on locally.

Deus es machina — tim wood

A lazy insult.

Anything we can say about “nature” is going to be a model - a pragmatic business of constructing a general causal theory to be constrained by “the facts” as we then discover them (the facts being of course measurements predicted by our models, so leaving us in Kantian fashion, still on our side of the epistemic bargain).

All this is completely accepted about the relation we would have with “nature” - our Umwelt. — apokrisis

Well, nature is the generator. — apokrisis

And the generator a model, or not? I know how I get to nature, but how do you?

And the generator a model, or not? I know how I get to nature, but how do you? — tim wood

More pointless snark.

The generator would be the "physical" process. So whatever nature is and how it counts as a generative process. (The Big Bang tells us it definitely counts as such.)

We would then model that generative process. The model is a model, not the thing-in-itself.

Where you may be getting constantly tripped up is that the Peircean systems perspective closes the loop. The model of the process, the thing-in-itself, is that it is a modelling process. That is how it generates something so rationally structured and lawful.

As Peirce said, the Cosmos self-organised into existence as the inevitable expression of universalised concrete reasonableness. Rationality was the finality. (Hegel said much the same thing.)

But anyway, you have to take all three steps to arrive back at the whole picture.

First nature is nature - it looks like some kind of evolving and structure-producing process. Then we jam on our science hat and model that in good pragmatic/empirical fashion. Finally, the best possible theory of nature as a process turns out to be itself the very image of this pragmatic method. Nature is a triadic modelling relation.

Semiosis is all about a "system of interpretance". And as such, it anticipated all the mysteries of quantum theory. It is exactly the metaphysics we have discovered as physics.

But physics itself struggles to see that as it is still caught up too much in a conventional Cartesian framing of nature - the irresolvable duality of the observer and the observables. It is only when you start to get to a modern thermal decoherence story of quantum theory, or a quantum information one, that you start to move sideways into a systems metaphysics that works.

And the generator a model, or not? I know how I get to nature, but how do you?
— tim wood

More pointless snark. — apokrisis

I gather you don't. You've got a nice model. But it seems you turn it upside down and say that the model is nature. I get that, it works. But the price is reductionism to the model. I see a tree. You see a tree. There's no disagreement between us as to it being a tree. It passes every tree-test, because it is a tree. And apparently you're done. Your model works. I know it's tree as a practical matter. I also know it's just not that simple. There's more to the tree than any model - models being for some purpose to some end. At best we see a thin "slice" of the tree - that part visible to us when and how we're looking. And how do we know, anyway? Because we are in possession of a pattern, a template, and the tree fits - resembles - to some degree the pattern.

It starts in the mind; it ends in the mind. If our minds have done a decent job - and they usually seem to - then we pronounce the product knowledge.

Now show me where I'm off the rails. Keep it simple. No "self-organized cosmos." No "Peircean systems perspective." No ""system of interpretance." What have you got that I don't? And I seem to have a least the idea of the tree itself, and you don't.

The substratum of what we see is beauty. We look with our right subjective mind and our left objective mind and conclude, with will, that it's objective. But that's choosing what's true. That is, there is faith. Hegel wanted to get rid of faith by knowing nothing and everything, balancing the objective and subjectice. The basic fact is beauty is subjectice, so tim wood has been correct. Hegel kept a homey natural faith to keep from scepticism

Now show me where I'm off the rails. — tim wood

No need.

↪Gnomon
Practical knowledge tells us it is what you think it is. — tim wood

Yes. In practical Reality, what you see is what exists. But in theoretical Reality, what you see is a mentally constructed image (icon) of abstract energy patterns. Hoffman is not an experimental (biological or neurological) scientist looking through microscopes. He is a theoretical (cognitive) scientist, using metaphors to describe things we can't see, such as Ideas. :smile:

The key insight is that reality is the evolving product of top-down constraints interacting with bottom-up constructive degrees of freedom — apokrisis

That is also a "key insight" of my Enformationism thesis. :up:

Creativity -- Freedom with Constraints : The process of evolution can be construed as an ongoing reckoning of Cause & Effect events. Another way to put it is to say that Natural Selection is the product of freedom-of-action (randomness) and constraints-on-action (selection).
http://www.bothandblog.enformationism.info/page51.html

Yes. In practical Reality, what you see is what exists. But in theoretical Reality, what you see is a mentally constructed image (icon) of abstract energy patterns. — Gnomon

I buy this. Slight edit: Yes. In practical Reality, what you see is what exists. But in Reality, what you see is a mentally constructed image. Yes? No?

I enjoyed browsing your site. And of course there are both similarities and differences in our views. But generally, this is about the contrast between a mechanical or reductionist view of causality and an organic or holistic view of causality.

One starts off the general conception of the Cosmos as case of "there is nothing, so build me something". The other says "anything and everything is possible, but that in itself is going to result in a self-selecting competition". As in a quantum sum-over-histories, reality is what is left over once all the possible alternatives have cancelled each other out to leave a single sharp outcome remaining.

If you have ever played poker, generally, the game is about patterns; more complex patterns exist simultaneous to the game, helping you to spot false randomization, or to win bets.

10 J Q K A(suited) is a high scoring hand in poker; I think about the pattern of my poker hand subjectively, or objectively and seek to construct good patterns.

Pattern recognition is a skill, and therefore I can become fluent in this skill-set.

To think of patterns as subjective only is an amateur understanding (in that progression to become fluent); as objectively, more is to be gained from successfully recognizing good patterns.

I buy this. Slight edit: Yes. In practical Reality, what you see is what exists. But in Reality, what you see is a mentally constructed image. Yes? No? — tim wood

Yes. That mental image is what Hoffman calls an "icon", by analogy with the symbols on your computer or phone screen that represent the low-level functions of abstract mathematical processes in the processor. We don't need to know the nitty-gritty details, just what to expect from what we "see". :smile:

One starts off the general conception of the Cosmos as case of "there is nothing, so build me something". The other says "anything and everything is possible, but that in itself is going to result in aself-selecting competition". As in a quantum sum-over-histories, reality is what is left over once all the possible alternatives have cancelled each other out to leave a single sharp outcome remaining. — apokrisis

Actually, I have discussed both sides of the something vs nothing dichotomy. In unlimited Eternity-Infinity all things are possible, but in our constrained space-time Reality, only some things are actual. That's how I conceive of Natural Selection : random evolutionary change (including mutations) produces a variety of possible options, but the Selection process "chooses" which will go on to the next stage of evolution. Presumably, "unfit" options are the ones that "cancel each other out", via direct competition for niches. In that sense, evolution is a win-lose game. But ultimately the world as a whole is a winner, it progresses in quality. :smile:

Poker is one hundred percent luck. I make the same move every time because there no reason not too lol

No, no no no no. Rules as such apply:

1. AA is 75% of the time, a severed hand, metaphorically, if still a pair on the flop; it is best to play AA by betting minimal until the end phase - don't just go all-in.
2. Play low-cards as a hidden-blade, sometimes.
3. Raise often, if 3 diamonds are on the table, then you may raise as a bluff signalling to others that you have a flush.
4. Betting rhythm is important to register, even better a face, but without faces, betting rhythm (which can work against you or with you; clockwise/anticlockwise logic) is the way the betting and cards rhythmically intertwine; for example, K4 of hearts is your hand, 3 5 6(h) is the flop, rarely you'll see a larger bet, in this case, so if someone does bet large, what do you think? Bluff, pair in hand, straight draw, etc. It's hardest to explain betting rhythm, but, again, no no no no, it is skill-based too.
5. Have a comfort zone, don't lose your ability to raise.
6. Don't fold if only the blinds are bet, because you may as well see the flop; if the blinds are humungous, maybe not.
7. Luck is that all these rules may not apply! :)

EDIT:

Unless you mean: "To win big at a low-level, you'd literally have to get lucky, and the chances are much slimmer on poker than they are on betting on sports.", then I agree.

You've got a nice model. But it seems you turn it upside down and say that the model is nature. — tim wood

This is what annoys me. You misrepresent.

Again, your Kantian epistemology is our shared departure point. We can only speak of reality as pragmatic truth. We are in a modelling relation with the thing-in-itself.

The Peircean twist on Kant is to argue that this psychological fact is not a bug but a feature. It is how a "mind" can separate itself off from a "world". The self (as a point of view, a state of conscious being) arises as from the Umwelt that pragmatic modelling will produce.

So the reason why science has the form that it does - a pragmatic story of theory and measurement that "represents" the world - is because it is just a natural extension of how psychological being in general works. The brain evolved to be able to interpret reality as a "system of sign", or the semiotic thing of an Umwelt.

So step one is the model of epistemology. And the Kantian cognitive model was the first major correction on Cartesian representationalism. It began the shift to a triadic and semiotic model - the generic modelling relations model.

That in turn had ontological implications. If we now ask why science is "right", it is because it has that particular epistemic structure - the one that evolution arrived at with conscious brains. And theoretical biology now says it is the epistemic structure that even explains life itself. Life and mind are both expressions of generalised biosemiosis – the ability to construct a "private" world to control the "real" world via a modelling relation (see Robert Rosen for the mathematically rigorous argument).

So step one is semiosis as our best model of epistemology. Then step two is semiosis as the best ontological model of mind, and even life - living epistemic systems.

Step three is where it gets pansemiotic. The Comos itself is - in some formal or model-theoretic sense - is ontologically-speaking, an epistemic system. The huge difference is that the Cosmos has no mind, no sense of self, no experiential Umwelt as such. It is not a private model within a reality, but reality itself.

However what does carry over is the triadic model of causality. A hierarchical or Aristotelean view of causality which is about global informational constraints on local entropic uncertainty or statistical degrees of freedom.

In some useful sense, the Cosmos is its own model. It has physical boundaries that encode information (hence holography, hence wavefunctions). That is globalised or contextual information that acts to constrain everything that can be observed at spatiotemporal locales. Or as Newtonian science would put it, the Universe has laws that regulate local actions.

Pansemiosis is a powerful advance in ontology because it can include all four causes put forward by Aristotle in a logically closed structure. The systems view demystifies "the laws of nature" as much as it does "the problem of mind".

And this is where we get to the patterns of nature as being something physically real - even if emergent from the interaction of globalised cosmic constraints and localised freedoms of action.

Another way of saying this is that Nature is essentially a statistical pattern. It has to develop structure stochastically - as an equilibrium outcome.

Any pattern that can't self-organise in a statistical fashion simply won't be found in nature - or at least on that side of the boundary which is "nature in the raw" and not nature as it becomes to a pattern imposing epistemic system.

So pansemiosis is granting special privileges to life and mind as being able to impose their will on the world. Humans have no problem constructing patterns that are rigidly mechanical and thus artificial. It is how we set ourselves apart from the world - re-imagining nature as a machine and thus gaining useful control over it.

But ontologically - if you have followed the whole trail of thought through to its scientifically-validated conclusion - the world is not actually a machine. It is a statistical pattern generator. It is a realm of structured entropic flows that everywhere do the job of dissipating entropy. And that kind of triadic or hierarchically-organised story - constraints in interaction with degrees of freedom - is Peirce's definition of semiosis.

Every definite material event is also - from the point of view of the cosmic context - an informational sign. Something happened, rather than didn't, and so is concrete step added to the great construction that is a cosmic history. The radioactive atom decayed. It becomes now a contextual fact which changes things for everything else that might follow with "wavefunction collapse" definiteness.

There's more to the tree than any model - models being for some purpose to some end. At best we see a thin "slice" of the tree - that part visible to us when and how we're looking. And how do we know, anyway? Because we are in possession of a pattern, a template, and the tree fits - resembles - to some degree the pattern. — tim wood

I keep saying this is standard cognitivism. This is the Kantian model of epistemology that became validated as the ontology of mind by psychological and neurological science.

Well, to be accurate, that is the 1970s form of cognitivism that suffered from a residual Cartesian representationalism and which has been fixed by the more recent Peircean and triadic brand of cognitivism known as enactivism (and various other things).

But anyway, you yourself are making the move from a model of epistemology to a model of ontology - in regards to our scientific models of an epistemic system like a "pattern-fitting" brain.

What you don't appear to get is that after a dualist causal paradigm must come the larger explanatory framework of a triadic causal paradigm. And that we need this kind of enlarged ontological holism to fully get at the workings of reality in general.

The substratum of what we see is beauty. We look with our right subjective mind and our left objective mind and conclude, with will, that it's objective. But that's choosing what's true. That is, there is faith. Hegel wanted to get rid of faith by knowing nothing and everything, balancing the objective and subjectice. The basic fact is beauty is subjectice, so tim wood has been correct. Hegel kept a homey natural faith to keep from scepticism — Gregory

Which of his books talk about points and quantity? Wikipedia says Whitehead wrote stuff that was wrong about wholes and parts, while Husserl wrote good things. This is stuff that I'm interested in — Gregory

I think that what underlies everything is the pure potentiality of Infinity and Finitude. If you have a segment pi in length, then a piece of the segment corresponds to each number. It goes on forever (Infinite) but has a limit (Finite). Where the infinite meets the finite (at the limit) is an infinity mystery. So nature can never even be understood — Gregory

Chaos vs symmetry... That's a lot to think about. It's deep. Maybe because I suck at math in trying to make up for it by over thinking this stuff. Maybe there are truths that simply can't be said. The college I went to after high school was Catholic and they hated basing math on logic. I feel like I'm trying to do something similar, but I like it. — Gregory

Being new to the Forum, I didn't intend my previous post - but cannot see how to remove it.


As regards whether patterns are objective or subjective, it is probably the same problem as to whether patterns are discovered or invented.

As noted by Pfhorrest, the concepts quality and quantity are important in explaining a word. The word "pattern" has two meanings.

As a quality, pattern is a mental concept, a universal definition, and therefore subjective.

As a quantity, a pattern is a particular thing that exists in the world. A pattern is understood by the spatial or temporal regularities in the elements that make it up. But is such a pattern objective or subjective ?

Start by considering a pattern dependent on time, such as a musical pattern, where the regularities in the elements that make up the pattern are through time. For a pattern to be objective, the pattern must exist in a world having a space-time of three spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension.
But within our world only one moment of time exists. Therefore, in our world, the relationships between the elements that make up a musical pattern cannot be objective. If a musical pattern can only exist through time, then it can only exist in the mind, meaning that such a pattern is subjective.

Patterns (considered as a quantity) exist in space and time. When we think about patterns - a wave on water, a Derain, a Santana, a fractal leaf, a William Morris design, a Sondheim - we generally don't treat patterns in space as being ontologically different to patterns in time. Therefore, if a pattern in time is subjective, we can deduce that patterns in space are also subjective, ie, all patterns are subjective.