Being is definite existence. — apokrisis

But what is existence?

Existence is a sum over histories. — apokrisis

Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is.

What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long."

But what is existence? — darthbarracuda

It's half of a single concept: existence/non-existence.

But what is existence? — darthbarracuda

Persistence. Stability. Equilibrium. The limitation of flux or change.

Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is. — darthbarracuda

So it would be better to say actuality is a sum over potential histories.

Entities are a fiction in this hylomorphic view I am taking. There is nothing individual, just the many things that are individuated.

So yes, if you believe in "existence" and "entities", then you are stuck with a metaphysics too impoverished to deal with the questions you want to ask.

It is not until you get beyond that thinking - based in actualism and substantialism - that you would understand what even Aristotle or Anaximander had to say on the issue.

What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. — darthbarracuda

But does science still do that? Or does it now understand entities and existence in terms of ontic structuralism?

As to the difference between being and Being, you yourself make it sound pretty semiotic - the difference between a sign and the thing-in-itself.

So reality can be quite "psychological" in that the problem physics has to overcome is telling a tale of the Cosmos that has observers along with the observables. Physical theory has to achieve this goal of internalising the semiosis that indeed actualises the potential.

That is the big question. My routine point is that we can't just toss "mind" into the theory - some spiritual, substantial, notion of consciousness. But we do have to weave in something like a "point of view" - a semiotic relation.

And Being is all about the having of a point of view, isn't it? Well, maybe you understand it differently.

Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long." — darthbarracuda

Hmm. Are you sure you haven't got this back to front? To be measurable demands something more primal - a separation of an observer from an observable. It is that semiotic distinction that has to arise for either "to be". And right at the beginning, the relation would be symmetric. It would be merely a brute reaction (Peircean secondness) where neither side was clearly yet the one or the other.

So being four foot long follows the measuring of four feet. It is the broken symmetry where some observable is "four foot long" in terms of some observer - some now encompassing reference frame that serves to individuate that length as an actual concrete event.

Being is actualised stable existence to the degree that it has been "observed into fixed quiescence".

So again, you are starting your metaphysics from a presumption of already individuated material being. Yet that kind of classical state - an object oriented metaphysics of a world of medium sized dry goods - is only a late-in-the-day emergent outcome of cosmic development. It is what has condensed out due to expansion and cooling, a result of there being a well-establish reference frame of cold vacuum against which a few bright flashes of concrete activity will stand out in apparent isolation.

You are insisting on a metaphysical starting point that science has already shown to be not primal. So you haven't even begun to explore the options that science offers in terms of what primal actually looks like to the best of our investigative knowledge.

What are your thoughts on the claim that Being and Nothingness are identical? Being is not a being. But if Being is not itself a being - if it is not a something - then it is Nothing. There's an unresolvable paradox lying at the heart of metaphysics. The mind, in its attempt to conceptualize Being, necessarily reifies it. Thus reified, Being becomes an object of thought among other objects. But this is precisely what Being is not. So what follows? Metaphysics, as a science of Being, is impossible. There are no metaphysical depths lying beneath the surface of everyday experience. Beneath the roil of experience, there is Nothing.

As to the difference between being and Being, you yourself make it sound pretty semiotic - the difference between a sign and the thing-in-itself. — apokrisis

What is this "thing-in-itself" without simply referencing the mapped signs that describe it (i.e. not having circularity)? In other words, what is the thing-in-itself as it is in-itself?

The signs sums up what matters to us about our relation with it. So beyond that begins all we don’t need to care about. It becomes the possible differences not making a difference.

Of course this might then become some kind of ultimate reality that obsesses folk who want an exhaustive account of all those indifferent differences as well. They want to take every possible point of view .... even when the very point of the semiotic relation is to create that selective thing of there being just some actual concrete point of view that represents the indifference the observer can afford to have towards the thing-in-itself. The mediating sign by itself becomes enough. Until some difference that makes a difference arises and an observer is forced to modify a habit.

The signs sums up what matters to us about our relation with it. So beyond that begins all we don’t need to care about. It becomes the possible differences not making a difference. — apokrisis

What is this "our" and "it"?

What is this "our" and "it"? — schopenhauer1

The separation of the observer from the whatever by the semiotic formation of an umwelt.

So “we” are the point of view shrugging our shoulders about the thing-in-itself because that world of possibility has been reduced to our own world of experience - some configuration of habitual signs.

Try thinking about all this triadically rather than dyadically. It may then click into place.

The separation of the observer from the whatever by the semiotic formation of an umwelt. — apokrisis

It is precisely this that we are trying to explain, thus saying an event is composed of these other events doing stuff, isn't the full story.

someconfiguration of habitual signs. — apokrisis

Why is there somethingness related with habitual signs? Why not just habitual signs PERIOD.

Try thinking about all this triadically rather than dyadically. It may then click into place. — apokrisis

There's always a Dues Ex Machina, it seems. That is why it is not clicking with me, as you are explaining it. There is "secondness". What is this aspect of the triad, for example?

What if 'being' is thought not as a static noun, but as a dynamic verb? Then be-ing and be-coming are synonymous (since change is ubiquitous). Being is not a being in the sense that it is not a thing, but a process. It is then no-thing but it is not nothing.

Your question isn’t clear. But perhaps you mean that what we signify by “consciousness” is a really complex lived relation with the world.

I’ve given the sparsest possible description of the semiotic relation - the point of view that is the taking of a sign and then a shrugging of “whatever” about anything that might be thus ignored. There is then that basic trick being a lived and mindful process. And it gets really complex. The point of view becomes not some single static instance but itself a constantly adapting and predictive state of affairs - the self that is assimilating a world as a flow of perceptual experience.

In a curious way, I think your dualism is convincing you that any such talk of the self - as just the emergent fact of a continually adapting neurocognitive point of view - must be talk of some “thing-in-itself self”. Beyond the play of habitual signification - the realm of the phenomenal - there must be the noumenal self. The soul, the spirit, the will. The force behind the scenes that gives selfhood a sturdy dualistic reality.

So as I say, you are trying to make sense of what I say from a dualistic position. But that is then why it seems a necessity that there is both a real self and a real world beyond the realm of the phenomenal. You can’t be content with a theory of mind that is merely one of semiotic emergence, no matter how hierarchically complex the tale.

A triadic paradigm has the extra dimension to see that hierarchical complexity in a holistic fashion. It can see emergence because it can see development - the change from the vague to the crisp.

So think about that. You must keep thinking that my triadic account leaves out the noumenal self that “has to be there” ... according to the paradigmatic conditions of dualistic representationalism. No noumenal observables without also that noumenal strength self ... experiencing a phenomenology of sign perhaps. :)

"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest". Firstly, Krauss's use of the word "nothing" was intended to bait theists claiming that God was needed to bring something from nothing. His exact point was that nothing is not actually nothing. It's true he doesn't try to explain how the quantum foam came to be and so forth, but that's just because no one yet knows.

It's true he doesn't try to explain how the quantum foam came to be and so forth, — Greta

If you're going to write a book called 'A Universe from Nothing', then it behoves you to know. Otherwise, you might look suspiciously like you don't know what you're talking about.

There is another good analysis of Krauss' 'metaphysical muddle', in an article of that name, by (gasp) a theologian.

Wayfarer, it was just a game. Analyses of games treated as though serious are not going to yield much other than simple strawperson criticism. Krauss was being rational enough, just that he can't help having a dig.

All he is saying is that there is always "something", but that "something" is relative. That relativity means that something very much less dense material can be perceived as "nothing" by more dense material.

it was just a game... — Greta

It was a book called ‘A Universe from Nothing’ that purports to explain exactly that point. From the David Albert review:

Look at how Richard Dawkins sums it up in his afterword: “Even the last remaining trump card of the theologian, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?,’ shrivels up before your eyes as you read these pages. If ‘On the Origin of Species’ was biology’s deadliest blow to super­naturalism, we may come to see ‘A Universe From Nothing’ as the equivalent from cosmology. The title means exactly what it says. And what it says is ­devastating.”

But - hang on - actually it’s not. No, it’s just ‘a game’. Not so devastating after all then.

In a curious way, I think your dualism is convincing you that any such talk of the self - as just the emergent fact of a continually adapting neurocognitive point of view - must be talk of some “thing-in-itself self”. Beyond the play of habitual signification - the realm of the phenomenal - there must be the noumenal self. The soul, the spirit, the will. The force behind the scenes that gives selfhood a sturdy dualistic reality. — apokrisis

It doesn't have to be selfhood. This is comprised indeed of complex interactionism- perhaps of the triadic variety you extol. It is the brute actuality, the "secondness" in Peircean terms, that seems glossed over here. That is perhaps the nexus here with the experience that you seem to have a blindspot of. What is the isness of being? If you say it is X description (i.e. Peircean triadic semiotics), that is the same as saying what is green and then going into optics, wavelengths, etc. It is a description, but it is not metaphysics. Its all description of the empirical parts, and not getting at the phenomena itself as it is in-itself.

You can’t be content with a theory of mind that is merely one of semiotic emergence, no matter how hierarchically complex the tale. — apokrisis

Well, yeah, its not getting at the phenomena of what the internalness other than a description of its parts.

A triadic paradigm has the extra dimension to see that hierarchical complexity in a holistic fashion. It can see emergence because it can see development - the change from the vague to the crisp. — apokrisis

I think you cannot see the problem outside of its parts. There is still a leftover- what the phenomena is in itself. There is something that is internal going on. I'm looking for green and you are giving the components without the feeling. What is even more of a blindspot of your philosophy is that your own philosophy leads to panpsychism.

You don’t understand Peircean triadicism.

Secondness is the particular. So it arises from firstness as brute reaction and then becomes a repeatable act of individuation after the thirdness of a global habit is formed.

So it starts out as accident. Then it becomes a habitual regularity - the reliable repetition of a difference.

And as to your dualistic moaning about the phenomenal being absent, I’ve just explained how it is you who ache for both a noumenal self and a noumenal world. Peircean semiotics is an internalist metaphysics. It is the view from the phenomenal. But with enough dimensions to capture the structure of phenomenal being.

Self and world are not dualistic realms. They are the complementary limits on a phenomenology rendered finally intelligible by that structure-recognising move.

Okay, let's say: Possibility, brute reaction and habitual regularity. There IS something going on betwxit the three and that IS is consciousness. This is a slippery slope to panpsychism. If you take the IS out, there is nothing except mere description. I'm sorry.. it's not moaning, its just what it IS. My umwelt IS the dynamic complexity of this semiotics playing out.

Not seeing your slippery slope to panpsychism. Only seeing that you don’t get pansemiosis.

Not seeing your slippery slope to panpsychism. Only seeing that you don’t get pansemiosis. — apokrisis

No, I don't see how you get blood from a stone. Causation is not the whole of metaphysics. Ontology of being. The umwelt has a point of view, I presume. There is something of what it's like to be an umwelt. The dynamic process ITSELF AS IT HAPPENS.

In other words, any semiotic process can be said to have internal states. Otherwise, what is it about animal experiences, that make that process ONLY have internal states (i.e. a point of view).

I imagine you will give an answer.. Then we have to ask what IS this internal state that is only animal internal states? Causation again is not the ontology of the internal states. It is merely a description. That isn't what we are asking though.

You are then going to characterize it an illegitimate question to ask, in which case you are missing the whole point of the metaphysics of the problem. Just because it is a (practically) unanswerable question, doesn't mean its illegitimate.

There’s no place for speculation in metaphysics. …though, at this forum, such speculation is popular.
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I’ve covered metaphysics here.
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By “metaphysics”, I mean the topic of what-there-is that is discussable, describable, arguable, assertable.
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Other than that, the matter of what-is, I refer to as “meta-metaphysics”. So, as I mean “meta-metaphysics”, of course little can be said about it, and what little can be said can’t be asserted or proved and can’t be called description.
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Those are two different "what-is" topics.
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The question of Being - that there is something rather than nothing - is a special question that cannot be approached conventionally through the use of profane instruments or observation tout court.

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Whether there’s metaphysically something instead of nothing depends on what you mean by “something”.
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As Materialists mean “something”, there’s no reason to believe that there’s discussably, describably and assertably anything.
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Our physical world and your life are real in their own context…only. There’s no metaphysical objectively real and existent solid rock at the basis of it, holding it up. There’s no reason to believe that it’s other than only a hypothetical story.
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People here seem to have a hard time with that. …hence all the pointless metaphysical speculation here, mostly to try to somehow save Materialism.
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That the universe came from nothing, or creation ex nihilo, is prima facie, absurd.

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…unless the physical universe still is nothing , by the materialist’s meaning of “something”. ...nothing but a system of inter-referring abstract facts. There’s no reason, no evidence, to believe otherwise.
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There’s no need to ask why, metaphysically, there’s something instead of nothing. As most people mean “something”, there metaphysically isn’t anything.
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That the universe "came" into being seems to imply, from the semantics, that it came from or entered into somewhere or something that existed before. Before there was light, there was darkness - but this darkness is not "nothing". There must have already been something, a "firstness", "primary being", or some such eternal substance that holds up the rest of the architecture of existence as the foundations hold up a building, or the canvas displays the paint.

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If you’re talking about what’s discussable, describable and assertable,--in other words if you’re talking about metaphysics--then no, there’s no reason to believe in some objectively-existent metaphysical basis for our “physical” world.
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First there is the "there is". It is not a being but Being itself, an infinite, eternal, all-encompassing and penetrating reality. We know this because we ourselves are fundamentally an emanation from this mysterious primordiality.

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In metaphysics? No.
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Otherwise? Yes, many feel that there is—but it isn’t a topic for assertion or proof.
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Words don’t describe or discuss all of Reality.
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When we ask, did the universe come from nothing?, I have to wonder if we aren't confusing words.

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Yes.
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Precisely, nothing cannot be positively defined, for otherwise it would be something. The "nothing" is the primal Being, the darkness surrounding the light. Creation and annihilation are akin to dawn and dusk. Take away all the light, all the beings, and there is still the ominous Being, hiding and lurking in the background; that eternal ennui of awareness without content, endless striving.

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Not everyone would agree that Reality is eternal ennui and endless striving. :D
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In my mystical and esoteric moments I am drawn to the idea that what we call the world is a temporary dream in an endless sleep; that consciousness is an insomnia in a population of dreamers, or a momentary divorce from the unconscious deep.

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Of course there’s something to that. Sleep is more natural, the natural and usual “state-of-affairs”. What we have, experience and are in sleep is more fundamental.
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A life, or (probably more accurately) a sequence of lives, an appearance with such things as identity, events, time, and striving, is a blip in timeless sleep.
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Why is there that blip? First, of course, it isn’t, really.

It needn’t be called “real”. But, because there are abstract facts, there are hypothetical experience-stories. And you and your experience are one such hypothetical experience-story. Real? Not really, but seemingly real enough to you its protagonist. Real in its own context.
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The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear.

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Idealism, yes.
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Yes, Materialism doesn’t hold up. It’s proponents always angrily, sputteringly, leave discussions when asked to define some of their terms or justify some of their claims.
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Panpsychism could qualify as one way of expressing a meta-metaphysical feeling, one shared by many people, that Reality is alive and has intent.
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But Panpsychism doesn’t hold up as metaphysics, at the metaphysical level.
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The entire world could end and there would still be this original Being. Strip the world of everything, including the world itself and there still is the "there is". There is, and there always will be. If existence is a story…

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That’s exactly what physical and metaphysical existence are: …a hypothetical story.
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…, then it ends where it begins in the eternal return to this original and fundamental reality.

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…an end that is experienced at the person’s eventual end-of-lives.
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(But don’t count on that arriving at the end of this life.)
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I take that last part of the post to refer to an impression about what-is, beyond metaphysics, discussion, description , assertion, argument and proof.
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It’s an impression that many agree with.
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Michael Ossipoff

But no need to exaggerate the mysteries.

How could a living, running, intentional model of the world - a model which includes a model of “ourself” - fail to feel like something?

Doesn't change presuppose something that changes? Isn't this something more fundamental than the changes that it undergoes?

Doesn't change presuppose something that changes? Isn't this something more fundamental than the changes that it undergoes? — Aaron R

Alternatively, change could be fundamental and somethingness is what we get when unbounded fluctuation is stably bounded.

How does a star exist when it is both a violent fusion explosion and a gravitationally collapsing ball of gas? You have two extreme and uncontrollable types of change in the one place. But a star can exist for billions of years because these two opposed kinds of change must find a stable equilibrium balance.

So all somethingness could be the stable equilibrium balance emerging from violent underlying change.

Any precisely opposed directions of change will have this result. And if it seems unlikely that such dichotomous pairings would arise in nature, consider the fact that if this is how existence works, then for anything to exist, only neatly complementary actions capable of striking a stable balance would be around to be observed. Everything out of balance would not be the case.

So a reasonable position is that anything might have been the case. And that is a maximally unstable or dynamical starting point. But if stable balances were possible, then stability would have to emerge. The fact that the forms of such stability - such as realised in stars - might seem rare is beside the point. They would be the ones that actually prevail as only they could prevail. And we know they could prevail, as here we are here to note the fact.

Can we find something changeless in everything that changes? What is it to be something other than to be a unique process of change? Under a process view the ontic "divisions" between entities would then be according to differentiated modes and rates of change. The identity of entities is that which is understood to endure, but the notion of changeless endurance is an abstraction.

Here is part of an essay I am writing on this subject-

One of the most intractable questions in philosophy is Why is there something rather than nothing? Very little progress has been made in answering this question. But we know there is something; 'I think therefore I am'. So, at least Descartes exists, or at the very least, 'there is thought' (Bertrand Russell). At any rate, we can begin with the assumption that there is something rather than nothing.
The something that is, is existence. Existence is not a verb, it is a noun. It is the substance that is and always has been. Existence is God and is not contingent upon any previous state. Existence is not a property of anything, rather, existence has properties. To show that existence is not a property assume X has the property 'existence'. In this respect we consider X and existence to be distinct entities (otherwise X is equivalent to existence and there is nothing to prove). We now ask the question; Does X exist (as a distinct entity)? There are two answers;

1. X exists.
If this is the case existence, as a property of X, is superfluous since X exists anyhow. Therefore X is equivalent to existence.

2. X does not exist.

It is incoherent to say a non existent X has properties, let alone the property existence.

This means that if existence is not a property, it is not contingent. That is, not dependent on any previous state. All other realities are properties of existence. The universe is a set of properties of existence. Properties of existence 'inherit' their existence. We can say 'This milk bottle exists'. By this we mean that the milk bottle is a property of existence and the substance of it is existence, because existence is the only substance that is.

In principle we can deconstruct the bottle into glass crystals and we can deconstruct the crystals into molecules, atoms and so on until even the atoms are deconstructed into energy because energy is the substance of matter. It may even be possible to deconstruct energy into a deeper form of energy but this deconstruction cannot go on indefinitely; it cannot be 'turtles all the way down'. We must come to some ultimate substance that supports the properties 'atom', 'molecule', 'crystal' 'bottle'. This substance is that which is from the beginning, existence.
Even though philosophy cannot say why existence is or what it is, there are a number of things we can say about it;

1. Existence is.
2. Existence has vast creative potential because it has emerged into a universe and everything in that universe.
3. It has the potential to become life, because life is found in the universe.

I think you cannot see the problem outside of its parts. There is still a leftover- what the phenomena is in itself. There is something that is internal going on. I'm looking for green and you are giving the components without the feeling. What is even more of a blindspot of your philosophy is that your own philosophy leads to panpsychism. — schopenhauer1

As I understand it @apo's pan-semioticism is a claim that reality, at all levels, exists in the triadic sign relation, which consists of an object, a sign and an interpretant. You seem to be saying that because the interpretant is the central player in this drama, and because there is something it must be like to interpret, that this leads to panpsychism. But could it be panpsychism if there is something it is like to be an interpretant, whereas there is nothing it like to be an object or a sign?

Also panpsychism would seem to consist in the claim that everything has a mind, which seems to make little sense. Whitehead's panexperientialism, on the other hand, seems to make much more sense. For Whitehead nature just is what is experienced, not just by humans, but experienced by any and all entities. The electron experiences the binding force of the nucleus, the hillside experiences the erosive power of the wind and rain, that kind of sense of experience. So, I think Whitehead would say that the interpretant is also the experient, at all levels in nature. but this has nothing necessarily to do with "having a mind'.

Also panpsychism would seem to consist in the claim that everything has a mind, which seems to make little sense.Whitehead's panexperientialism, on the other hand, seems to make much more sense. For Whitehead nature just is what is experienced, not just by humans, but experienced by any and all entities. The electron experiences the binding force of the nucleus, the hillside experiences the erosive power of the wind and rain, that kind of sense of experience. So, I think Whitehead would say that the interpretant is also the experient, at all levels in nature. but this has nothing necessarily to do with "having a mind'. — Janus

I am thinking more in terms of the Whitehead variety of panpsychism (i.e. panexperientialism). I am claiming to apo that the thing in-itself version of pansemiotics is panexperientialism (a variety of panpsychism). Thus, he is stuck on the components and not the event at question itself (i.e. the point of view or the IS of the event itself).

How could a living, running, intentional model of the world - a model which includes a model of “ourself” - fail to feel like something? — apokrisis

At what point does modeling not feel like something?