What bothers me, is that through your process philosophy, you have assigned to the limits (discrete and continuous) the status of not real, non-existent. But then you go ahead and talk about these limits as if they are somehow part of reality. You describe reality as being somehow forced to exist within these limits, yet the limits are said to be non-existent, not real. — Metaphysician Undercover
You readily avoid the paradoxes by simply ignoring them. — Metaphysician Undercover
But in the process view, how would the contents be more real than their container? — apokrisis
So you are trying to impose your own non-process view on an understanding of process philosophy. And yes I agree, it doesn’t work. But that is now your problem. — apokrisis
The problem is that you talk about the contents and the container as if they are separate things, — Metaphysician Undercover
Moving along, you assume "contents" as well as the container, something which is contained by the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover
Now, the real existence of contents and container are spoken of in terms of "degree". — Metaphysician Undercover
Could you say that this thing is 50% contents, and 50% container (discrete and continuous), making it 100% real or existent? Could a thing have 80% real existence, being 40% contents and 40% container? — Metaphysician Undercover
I chose to talk about the same general distinction in another way so as to broaden the view you were taking. So try to understand it that way rather than setting things up for further confusion. — apokrisis
The discrete and the continuous do map to this view. Continuity becomes the global container - the constraints. And discreteness describes the now locally countable, because crisply individuated, degrees of freedom that are being "held" within the container. — apokrisis
When we speak of them, we are only pointing to the fact that reality must exist between these two reciprocally-defined extremes. Both represent the measurable limits to existence. And so existence itself has to be the bit that stands in-between. — apokrisis
OK, but our subject is the question of the existence, or non existence of the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover
Clearly you are saying here, that "discrete" and "continuous" refer to two "reciprocally define extremes", and that they are "limits to existence". But now, when you apply the container/contents analogy, continuity is represented by "the container" and is called "the constraints", which represents the limits, and "contents" represents the discrete. — Metaphysician Undercover
How can the infinite actually constrain anything" "Infinite" means the exact opposite, unconstrained. — Metaphysician Undercover
The second question is what type of existence does the discrete have now? — Metaphysician Undercover
That might be your subject. And the only way you understand any subject. — apokrisis
So the mathematical debate seems to hinge on whether "the real" is discrete or continuous. — apokrisis
What's so difficult? Being reciprocal is why the discrete and the continuous would map naturally to a hierarchical story of the smallest vs the largest. That is the nature of the relation being describe. The bigger one gets, the smaller the other gets. — apokrisis
I thought it meant the space within which every possible number exists in bounded fashion. — apokrisis
It is a limit on any continuity - the least amount of continuity imaginable. Just as continuity is whatever is the least unbroken state of affairs that you can imagine. — apokrisis
As I say, your non-process view of metaphysics keeps crashing into paradoxes because it believes in ontological absolutes rather than a logic of relations. You keep demanding to be shown something fixed and concrete that answers to your mechanistic conviction that reality has to begin in counterfactual definiteness, rather than definiteness being a relative outcome. — apokrisis
Hey, you brought it up, not I. It is your subject, look: — Metaphysician Undercover
It's not my fault that when I try to engage you on this subject, you simply tried to change the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover
But when things are related, and one is designated as the largest, and another is designated as the smallest, it is not the case that the largest contains the smallest. They are considered, and compared as separate entities, or else this relation could not be established. — Metaphysician Undercover
The nearest thing would be to draw a number line, but that would be a representation... — Metaphysician Undercover
They both coexist and there is no way of saying that one is the contents and the other the container because each, the continuous and the discrete, seem to have features of container as well as features of contents. — Metaphysician Undercover
You are getting it ... by trying so hard to get it wrong! Spectacular. My job is done. — apokrisis
You talk about the discrete and the continuous as if there is some real difference between them. — Metaphysician Undercover
But when you describe the way that existence really is, you claim that there is no way of distinguishing between them within real existing things. — Metaphysician Undercover
because the two are fundamentally inseparable, and therefore cannot be identified individually. — Metaphysician Undercover
What are you talking about. This is modelling. So to the extent that we know the thing-in-itself, the dichotomy of the discrete and the continuous is the conceptual division that would describe a separation of the real - whatever that is noumenally speaking - towards its "real" phenomenological limits. — apokrisis
Thus if we are talking about our ontic commitments, then containers and contents are both equally "real" in that modelling sense. Likewise our notions of the continuous and discrete as the limits on possible existence. — apokrisis
OK, let's start from the beginning again — Metaphysician Undercover
They are defined in such a way that the one excludes the other in opposition. — Metaphysician Undercover
So here is the problem I have, which I've been trying to relate to you. If we model reality in this way that you are proposing, how would we distinguish between, and identify, the two defining elements, the container and the contents, within the thing which is being modelled? — Metaphysician Undercover
Yes. Let's see if you can just remember the definition of a dichotomy as that which is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". So there is a process of separation towards reciprocally-matched limits. Two contrasting limits on "the real" emerge into view according to the distance each can each put between itself and its "other". — apokrisis
You make the right noises about dichotomies only then to collapse everything back to your happy simplicities of pairs of terms that are then neither mutual nor exhaustive anymore so far as you are concerned. — apokrisis
Then maybe you will have the logical wherewithal to take a next step. — apokrisis
Anything within the limits, being not the limits themselves, which is the entirety of "the real" would be excluded from the dichotomy under the designation of "jointly exhaustive" — Metaphysician Undercover
That's because I normally use "dichotomy" in the more general and common way. — Metaphysician Undercover
This leads to the idea that things which are opposed to each other, like hot and cold, form a dichotomy. But notice how all things which are warm are excluded from that dichotomy. — Metaphysician Undercover
Dichotomies are incompatible with your process philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover
And don't forget that what follows after a dichotomous separation or symmetry breaking is the arrival at the stable equilibrium of a triadic hierarchical state of order. You get an ending to the breaking when the two limits are in equilibrium with the contents they thus now contain.
Again, because you can't be bothered to study how all this works, you keep falling woefully short of any understanding. I have to keep explaining basic stuff again and again. — apokrisis
Exactly. You think it is a simple division. And the process view says it is irreducibly complex. Things only reach stability once the separating into polar opposites has arrived at a hierarchical balance where there is also now a connecting spectrum of concrete possibility. — apokrisis
Hardly. All things warm are now specified in concrete fashion because they are related to the extremes of a dichotomy. There is the hot in one direction, the cold in the other. So now the warm has its own definite and measurable location somewhere on the spectrum of possibility just established. — apokrisis
What do you understand about process philosophy? A big fat zero so far. — apokrisis
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