Suppose you introduce a boundary by separating one piece of a continuum from another. By hypothesis, we are now at least treating the continuum as digital, which means the border must be somewhere. — The Great Whatever

I don't see how this follows. To separate "one piece of a continuum from another" is not necessarily to treat it as digital; but simply to treat it as diverse. The continuum, to be susceptible of being thought even analogically must obviously be diverse, right? In the continuum of spacetime there are different galaxies, but there do not seem to be any precise digitally conceivable boundaries between those galaxies.

Yes, I guess that is the big question. But even if the real turned out to be (that is if we could know without question that it definitely was) discrete, is it reasonable to think that discreteness could consist in absolutely precise boundaries between the fundamental units? That would seem to evoke Leibniz' Monadology. — John

Well quantum theory says reality is fundamentally uncertain - so fundamentally vague. The discrete and the continuous would then be emergent in being the crisply complementary limits on that basic indeterminism. So it is not a question of whether reality is particle-like or wave-like. Instead those are the bounding alternatives. And which you see becomes a point of view. The observer conjures up the wave or the particle, depending on the type of measurement he chooses.

So if this is the actual ontology of the world, then it is only reasonable that it is reflected in our ideas about logic too. A deep logic is going to go beyond emergent features like continuous and discrete to connect with the indeterministic or vague.

Perhaps all three have their different places and functions if the 'grand scheme'? I''m guessing though, that you see the other two as being subsumed and augmented by pragmatic metaphysics? — John

The grand scheme of pragmatism is triadic. So logic has three levels - firstness, secondness and thirdness. Or to talk about it more psychologically, the three things of pure monistic quality, the dyadic thing of a reaction or relation, and the third thing of mediation or habit - a hierarchically structured relation in which a memory becomes the context generally shaping events.

Now the familiar model of logic - as encoded in the laws of thought - is all about secondness or dyadic relations between particular things and events. It is a logic of the particular, in short. It presumes the world already exists as a crisp state of affairs, a set of individuated facts. And it takes a nominalist view on abstracta or laws or any other kinds of transcendent regularity.

It is this logic of the particular that AP-types instinctively seize on to do any metaphysics. You see that in TGW and his furrowed brow when modal logic gets challenged. The only logic that computes is the stuff which ordinary logic courses spend all their time teaching - the logic that is splendidly mechanical and a valued tool in a society that values the making of machines.

Then we have the larger logic of Pragmatism which comes out of the long tradition of organicism and holism. This now adds in a logic of vagueness and a logic of dialectics or symmetry breaking - the firstness and thirdness in Peirce's scheme. (He also distinguished these two categories as the complementary principles of "tychism" - or absolute chance - and "synechism", or generalised continuity.)

So now we have a logic founded in vagueness or indeterminism. Nature creatively sports possibilities. Already the principle of sufficient reason - an axiom of ordinary logic - is denied. Fluctuations can happen without limit.

But then that unbounded and chaotic firstness contains within it the seeds of its own self-regulation. Because while indeed "everything can happen", everything that is then contradictory is going to cancel itself out. So just in trying to be completely chaotic, already firstness is on the way to being self-limiting. And anyone who knows quantum field theory will recognise Feynman's path integral or sum-over-histories logic at work here. This isn't some bit of wild-eyed metaphysics. It is exactly how physics has come to make sense of the world in the past 50 years.

Then we go to the other thing of the dialectic or the dichotomy. This is now a logic of generality. This is how we reason to extract the plausible limits on existence itself. So as with this thread, as we abstract away the particulars, that leaves always the duality of thesis and antithesis - two possible extremum principles, both of which seem equally "true".

So the LEM is for reasoning about particulars. An individuated thing or event has to be logically one thing or another. If it is A, then it is not not-A, and vice versa. Negation seems fundamental in this context. You have to reduce reality to descriptive binaries - and then hold one of the two options true, the other false. And as I say, as a model of secondness, a logic of particulars, it works really well. It makes for splendid machines. And even societies that think and act like machines.

But then the dichotomy is the basis for a logic of generality. Now - following its rules requiring a separation of vague possibility into crisp actuality via a dichotomising process of mutual exclusion/collective exhaustion - we always will arrive at complementary poles on being. We have two alternatives - and both must be "true" in the sense of being ultimate bounds on possibility.

You can head towards the two poles of "the discrete" and the "continuous", but you could never go past them - as how can the discrete be more discrete than the discrete? And you never really leave either behind either as the only way to know you are headed towards discreteness is because it is measurable - plainly visible - that you are headed away still from continuity. And vice versa. So formally, mathematically, the dichotomy encodes the asymmetry of a complete symmetry-breaking. It describes a reciprocal or inverse relation where the way to make one end bigger (or truer, more dominant, more real, more fundamental) is to make the other end smaller.

We see this in familiar things like infinities and their reciprocal, the infinitesimal. What is the number line except an infinity of infinitesimals? That is why a number line can be both continuous and discrete at the same time - unlimitedly countable. It encodes an uncertainty relation at its base. Neither the continuous or the discrete are fundamental, merely emergent. It is the idea of the infinitesimal difference that reciprocally allows the construction of the unboundedly continuous (when it comes to counting). The infinitesimal = 1/infinity, and vice versa.

So metaphysics got going when it discovered this logic of generality or dialectical reasoning. Ancient Greece spilled out a whole set of logical dichotomies that underpin pretty much all of the science and thought that has happened ever since.

Now PoMo - showing the Hegelian roots of its Marxist leanings - has flirted a lot with this dialectical reasoning. So at least it knows about it. But mostly it uses dialectics to generate a play of paradox. It points out that two opposite things always seem true about nature. However instead of saying, well yes of course, and that is what leads on the Peircean thirdness of habit or hierarchical organisation, it treats that fact as some source of deep ambivalence. PoMo is - politically - anti-hierarchical. And so it prefers to conclude that the inevitability of dichotomies is instead a sign that we should somehow return to the vague source of things - the radical uncertainty in which things would be again freest.

It might sound like it is a good thing to return to vagueness like this. But it isn't true vagueness - PoMo just doesn't have a tradition in that regard. Instead it is just another version of AP's notion of existence as an essentially random collection of events, a state of affairs composed of already individuated being.

OK, PoMo does have some concerns about how individuation comes about in fact. But it has no logic of vagueness to work with. It's grasp of logic on the whole is sketchy and not central to its concerns. It actually quite likes the idea of Romantic irrationality as its alternative to the patently mechanical mindset of AP.

So that is why I say Pragmatism is the only brand of metaphysics that both does pursue logic with rigour and has a large enough model of logic to talk about the whole of existence.

AP has tunnel vision. It only wants to apply the logic of the particular with sterile relentlessness. PoMo has ADHD. It is all over the shop as to what logic really is. Only Pragmatism (as defined by Peirce) uses a formally holistic logic that comprises of three elements in interaction - a logic of vagueness, a logic of particularity, and a logic of generality.

Though of course Peirce wasn't the end of the story. He was only a solid beginning. Our ideas about symmetry-breaking and hierarchy theory are much more mathematically developed these days. And quantum theory is rubbing our noses in the reality of indeterminism. So we can be a lot sharper about defining both vagueness and generality now.

We cannot assume a proper A and not-A relation between the analog and the digital — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that analog~digital is probably not a proper dichotomy. They are terms that arose early on in the development of signalling technology. And so it is a little blurry whether analog - in being iconic, a direct representation of its material source - is the opposite of symbolic, or merely proto-symbolic.

Retrospectively, we could tidy this up and find a way to define digital as 1/analog, and analog as 1/digital. But really, that is a reason I would rarely talk about analog and digital as a crucial metaphysical distinction. Discrete and continuous is simpler to understand as a rigorous dichotomy. Likewise matter and symbol. But analog~digital is a little ambiguous in comparison.

I do not claim that we need to start in certainty, this is more like what you imply. You imply that if a thing is different from A you can establish the logical certainty of not-A of that thing... — Metaphysician Undercover

Correct. I say it is essential to by-pass uncertainty and begin with a confident positive assertion - just state an axiom or premise which has the logical form of the LEM. But that positive start is what you then seek to test. Does the guess work out in fact?

So this is the mistake, these two, discrete and continuous, are not properly opposed and therefore are not mutually exclusive, as you imply. We have discrete colours, red, yellow, green, blue, within a continuous spectrum — Metaphysician Undercover

Given colour experience is the most unreal of mental constructions, this example is already off to the worst possible start.

The world is not coloured red, yellow, green or blue, nor any mix of these primary hues. That much we know from basic psychophysics.

There is a relation of exclusion involved here, but (as others have alluded to) it's the exclusion of contrariety rather than contradiction. So for example, red and green are contraries whereas red and not-red are contradictories. The former is associated with "material" negation, the latter with "formal" negation. Interestingly, formal negation can be defined in terms of material negation: not-red is the just the set of all of red's contraries, etc.

Similarly, the sense in which the magnitude at point A is not the magnitude at point B (within the context of a gradient) also appears to be that of material negation. Having a psi of 40 at point A is materially incompatible with simultaneously having a psi of 50 at point A, and in that sense the former excludes the latter (and vice versa). Crucially, the magnitude at A is not the magnitude at B quite regardless of the activities or even the existence of ens vitae. — Aaron R

But the measure of psi is still not 'intrinsic' to the notion of pressure gradient; it still a digital model of the analog; this has nothing to do with the measure of psi per se, but simply because it is a numerical measure to begin with. Recall that the whole number line is generated by utilizing 'zero' as a rule (that is, a boundary) to distinguish between integers; as per Frege, one begins by defining zero as the 'object under which the concept 'not equal to itself' falls', and then from there, generates the whole of the number line:

"Zero is implicitly defined as a meta-integer, and indeed its definition is what provides the rule for the series of integers which follow it ... [Number] depends upon the distinction between 0 as an object falling under a concept, and 0 as the number belonging to a concept. All that needs to be established is that zero is not simply a number as such, but a rule for a relation between integers. The number which belongs to the concept 'identical with 0' is also the interval or gap between the integers (the number one). Thus a⁰ (but not 0°, which equals 0) is arbitrarily defined as 1, because it is the boundary between a¹ and a⁻¹." (System and Structure)

So the measure of psi - as a measure - is not intrinsic to the analog gradient that is a pressure gradient. While I appreciate that the two measures of psi at different points of a pressure gradient may stand in a relation of contrariety rather than contradiction, not even contrariety is, strictly speaking, an analog value. Hence Deleuze: "It is difference in intensity, not contrariety in quality, which constitutes the being 'of' the sensible. Qualitative contrariety is only the reflection of the intense, a reflection which betrays it by explicating it in extensive. It is intensity or difference in intensity which constitutes the peculiar limit of sensibility" (Difference and Repeition).

Certainly there can be analog and digital measurements, but ultimately what exists at the present is what I believe apokrisis calls "crispness" - the vague becomes the discrete, or the digital. Digital corresponds to certainty, analog to uncertainty or vagueness. — darthbarracuda

See my reply above to Apo - the analog is not just uncertainty and vagueness. It has specific properties of it's own defined primarily by relationality.

Furthermore, analog systems inherently have digital parts anyway, they just aren't computational. Additionally, the way I understand it, analog systems are not so much a separate kind of thing than they are a less discrete digitalization.

As I emphasized previously, the difference between continuity and discontinuity is indexed by negation, and by implication, self-reflexivity. No amount of fine-graining of the digital will allow it to lapse over into the analog. The difference is a difference in kind, and in principle, not just one of degree.

I think it's worth noting that the continuum, just as much as digital logic, exists only by virtue of thought. Thought enables the coming-to-be of parts, and that coming-to-be consists in the self-distinguishing of the part from the whole, as much as it does the self-distinguishing of the whole from the part. — John

I don't think this is quite right. As a matter of principle, it trades too heavily on some kind of thought/world duality which I think is unsustainable, if not mystical. As far as the facts go, however, digitality is present at the level of things like gene expression and axon function in nerve cells, and require no 'thought' in order to function. What matters in both cases is not thought but behaviour, or better, semiotic function. At this level - the level of life - behaviour is regulated by feedback which means that casual processes operate as sign-relations: whether or not an axon will propagate a signal, for example, depends on the (chemical) feedback it receives from it's environment; as such, signals operate not as efficient causes but as signs.

To use another example, consider a tree-line that doubles as a national border. The tree-line does not 'cause' you to avoiding crossing it without the proper documentation, but it stands as a sign which regulates your behaviour nonetheless. If everyone were to ignore national borders, the tree-line would no longer stand as a sign. But again, what is crucial here is not thought but behaviour: you can't 'think away' the fact that the tree-line is a border, and even if you do, you will (possibly) suffer the real-life consequences of being caught if you cross it illegally. The institution of the digital is a result of a decision, but the status of this decision is not 'in thought' so much as it is 'in practice' (which is why you can't 'find it' anywhere in particular). One must remain a materialist about these things.

As I commented on elsewhere in reply to Pierre, the analog is not some kind of unknowable 'thing-in-itself' which is simply 'vague'; the analog has qualities which are knowable, but simply in a different mode than that of the digital. — StreetlightX

I didn't say the analog equates to the vague, so your reply is mostly off the point.

I said to call the thing-in-itself anything is to take a theoretical stance. And so it is the epistemic (not ontic) vagueness that we aim to pierce here. And the way we pierce it is by forming up some robust dichotomy as our best guess as to what could be the case. Doing this employing a dichotomy ensures that whatever is the case in regard to the thing-in-itself, it must logically lay somewhere within the limits we have thus rigourously defined.

And so one such dichotomous inquiry might be to ask is the thing-in-itself continuous or discrete (or in your less crisp lingo, analog or digital)?

So again, in explaining the epistemic cut to MU, I was talking epistemology rather than ontology (the clue was in the "epistemic cut").

Bateson himself speaks of how analog communication works.... — StreetlightX

Yes. So iconic or indexical rather than symbolic. But as I said, I don't think you are working with a well defined dichotomy in talking about analog vs digital. They are not a reciprocal pairing in the way a proper dichotomy like discrete and continuous are. That is why you want to call them contrasting modes or levels of communication or representation. There is some fudging going on there that makes for weak metaphysics.

Of course you could always pause to examine this point, tidy it up.

At it's base, this is what 'aesthetic' means: relating to space and time, as with Kant's 'transcendental aesthetic'. — StreetlightX

Whoa! Is that really what you have been meaning by "aesthetic". Forgive me for thinking you were using it in the more usual sense....viz:

Aesthetics (/ɛsˈθɛtɪks/; also spelled æsthetics and esthetics also known in Greek as Αισθητική, or "Aisthētiké") is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of art, beauty, and taste, with the creation and appreciation of beauty.[1][2] It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgements of sentiment and taste.[3] More broadly, scholars in the field define aesthetics as "critical reflection on art, culture and nature."

Gilles Deleuze is the philosopher who has perhaps attended to the specificity of analog differences with the most care, referring to them as differences of 'intensity' as opposed to digital differences of 'extensity', noting how the former necessarily underlie the latter: — StreetlightX

Yeah. That passage reads like gibberish to me so you might have to put it into your own words.

I understand what intensive and extensive properties mean in the standard physics context. I completely don't get your attempts to argue that they somehow reflect an analog~digital distinction.

How are energy or volume "digital" and not physically continuous in their extensibility?

How are bulk properties like melting point and density "analog" when they have a value that doesn't change in continuous fashion?

And how do intensive properties underlie extensive properties when instead an intensive property is formed by the ratio of two extensive properties (as in density being a ratio of mass and volume)? Is a ratio more basic than that which composes it?

This is some baffling shit here.

I can see how you/Deleuze might be driving at a substantialist ontology - one that takes existence to be rooted in the definiteness of material being. And so the inherent properties of substance would seem more fundamental than the relational ones.

But that is quite a different kind of ontology to a triadic process one where - as in hylomorphism - formal constraints shape up or individuate material potential so as to produce the middle-ground actuality we know as substantial being.

This field is intensive, which is to say it implies a distribution in depth of differences in intensity ... — StreetlightX

Again, this is unscientific horseshit. By its very definition, an intensive property is constant through-out the substance in which it is said to inhere. It can't vary in intensity without some further reason to make it so - what I would call a further informational constraint, and which you would thus have to call "discrete/digital knowledge" in the position you are advancing.

So again, to turn back to our eternal debate, any metaphysics based on modeling relations - itself premised on discrete, digital knowledge - is derivative of a more primal aesthetic ground out of which it is born. — StreetlightX

Again this seems a weird definition of aesthetic. Even if we go now with this being a reference to necessary Kantian intuitions about Euclidean space, I think most agree that Kant screwed this bit up. And it is hardly primal, or non-conceptual/non-digital, to project the idea on to space that it is flat and infinite in a dimensioned, countable, Euclidean maths, way.

Psychology shows that we do dichotomise spatial relations in a fairly primal and inductively-learnt fashion - a posteriori knowledge. We learn that everything we see is generally large when it is close at hand and small when it is far away .... if it is the kind of thing with a normally constant size. And spatial distance in turn relates to time and energy. If it looks close, we can probably get to it quite soon with not too much effort.

So an embodied sense of being in the world is built up from these kinds of exploratory learnings. They are the dichotomies of experience rather than the antinomies of pure reason. :)

So I agree with your general urge to take an enactive or embodied approach to epistemology here. Biosemiosis is indeed foundational to linguistic or mathematical semiosis. And a lot of philosophy does go in the other direction in presuming a physics-free disembodied rationality. That is why computers seem so ... deep ... to so many. They are disembodied rationality, pure syntax, brain in a vat digitalism, personified.

And I get the general thrust of what you mean about the digital distinction. Biologists are embracing Peircean semiotics because it gets at the basis of how - in Pattee's words - rate independent information (a digital code/memory) can constrain rate dependent dynamics (the Newtonian realm of "analog" or continuously state-determined material processes).

So these are the important points. Dissipative structure can be regulated by a machinery of memory. And this is how bodies are formed, individuals are individuated, autonomy arises.

But Deleuze seems mostly mangled Prigogine. And Prigogine, while a genius, also was working at the level of rate dependent dynamics. He wasn't about the larger semiotic story of the epistemic cut and rate independent information. So to make Prigogine your departure point is - as with autopoiesis or dynamical systems theory - to strike out with only half the whole story.

Having a psi of 40 at point A is materially incompatible with simultaneously having a psi of 50 at point A, and in that sense the former excludes the latter (and vice versa). Crucially, the magnitude at A is not the magnitude at B quite regardless of the activities or even the existence of ens vitae. — Aaron R

In this example, the psi provides the material content, while the value assigned to it, is what has changed. "Psi" is unchanged, therefore providing us with a continuity between point A and point B. We are talking about the same thing at point A as at point B, but something has changed about that thing, such that we have to give it a different value.

Now, we could deny the continuity, and say that point A and point B are completely different instances which are being compared. If someone is to say that "the same thing" is being measured at point A as is being measured at point B, this claim needs to be justified. So the concept of psi has to be exposed, and analyzed, to determine whether we are actually measuring "the same thing" at A and at B. If there is not something real, which "psi" refers to, there is no continuity, and the claim that we are talking about the same thing having a different value at point A from point B, is false. It is an unjustified assumption.

We can see this issue in modern physics with the concept of "energy". As an attribute of an object, energy can pass from one object to another. This object has energy, and the energy it has may be transferred to another object. Someone might claim, that after transferral, it is the same energy now in the second object, as was in the first object. But this gives identity to the energy itself, and the energy must have identity in order that we can claim "the same energy", a continuity between the energy being in the first object and then in the second object. Under this assumption now, the energy is not a property of a thing, but is an identified thing itself.

We are faced with a metaphysical dilemma. We may hold fast to fundamental ontological principles, and say that energy is a property of things, and can only exist as attributed to a thing. In this case, we must face the problem of how the energy appears to transmit, or radiate from one object to another. The continuity between the first and second object has been denied as an unjustified assumption, by restricting the existence of energy to being a property of an object. Now we must look for another mechanism by which the energy transmits. The other possibility, is the route taken in physics, we allow that energy itself is an identifiable thing. Now the continuity is justified by this assumption, that energy is a thing itself. But the concept of energy now needs to be exposed, and analyzed, just like the concept of psi above, in order to determine whether "energy" actually refers to a real thing, and not just a property of things, and then the continuity would be justified.

Difference or intensity (difference of intensity) is the sufficient reason of all phenomena, the condition of that which appears." (Difference and Repetition). — StreetlightX

Such a difference implies a necessary underlying continuity, sameness, and this is the underlying analog principle. My argument is that this underlying continuity is simply assumed, deemed necessary in order to make difference intelligible, and therefore assumed. Any such assumption needs to be justified.

"Every diversity [read: identity - SX] and every change refers to a[n analog] difference which is its sufficient reason. — StreetlightX

So the assumption that there is an underlying analog difference, as "sufficient reason", must be justified. We cannot just say "it must be so or else the world is an illusion", the reason why the world is not an illusion, must be itself be made intelligible.

You can head towards the two poles of "the discrete" and the "continuous", but you could never go past them - as how can the discrete be more discrete than the discrete? And you never really leave either behind either as the only way to know you are headed towards discreteness is because it is measurable - plainly visible - that you are headed away still from continuity. And vice versa. — apokrisis

The problem is, that the pole of "continuous" is an arbitrarily posted pole. It is simply assumed. Therefore the thing which has been designated as continuous may prove to actually be discrete. Then, if it still appears necessary to assume a "continuous", a new post is set, so we are in fact, always going past the pole of "continuous".

But as I said, I don't think you are working with a well defined dichotomy in talking about analog vs digital. They are not a reciprocal pairing in the way a proper dichotomy like discrete and continuous are. — apokrisis

Au contraire mon ami, the reference to the discrete and the continuous mean nothing without the index of negation and reflexivity which quite precisely define the distinction between the analog and the digital.

Forgive me for thinking you were using it in the more usual sense.... — apokrisis

Consider yourself forgiven; we all begin somewhere, even if that somewhere is Wikipedia. But of course aesthetics in the broader sense has to do with the shaping of space and time; rhythm, form, and everything that belongs to the realm of the sensibility in general. From the Greek Aisthēsis, that which relates to the sensible; the vulgar sense of the aesthetic as relating to the art and the beautiful being a particularly modern, restricted and derivative sense of the term.

I can see how you/Deleuze might be driving at a substantialist ontology - one that takes existence to be rooted in the definiteness of material being. And so the inherent properties of substance would seem more fundamental than the relational ones. — apokrisis

Except you're wrong; the whole point is that 'substances' are differentially engendered. It's process all the way down; though perhaps not all the way up. But your misreading is not worth entertaining too far.

I understand what intensive and extensive properties mean in the standard physics context. I completely don't get your attempts to argue that they somehow reflect an analog~digital distinction. — apokrisis

By intensive I simply mean sub-representative/digital (i.e. analog) differences. A bit of history of philosophy helps here too: Aristotle's understanding of difference is premised on his metaphysics of the categories. A thing can only be said to differ from something else if they belong to the same genera: "Difference is said of things which, while being other, have some identity, not according to number, but according to the species, or the genus, or the proportion" (Aristotle, Metaphysics, book Gamma). In every case for Aristotle difference is derivative or parasitic upon a more primal identity; that is, difference can only ever be digital. But if it agreed that the digital is itself a product of boundary setting, then, in Deleuze's terms, there ought to be a concept of difference not subordinated to differences in the concept (read: genera). That is, there are differences which are not digital differences; in the context of the thread, these are referred to as intensive differences.

Miguel de Beistegui sums things up nicely: "[in Aristotle's schema], differences... make sense only in relation to the species and genus under which they are subsumed. And so, were we to rehabilitate differences in philosophical discourse, we would need to overcome the primacy of ontology as ousiology or, more specically, overcome the punctual character of substance, and the conception of discourse as propositional. We would need to begin with differences, and with matter, and to show how they themselves are generative of identities and substances. We would need to consider them no longer as accidents ... since accidents always presuppose a substance to which they occur, but as events, and as events constitutive of our world. In so doing we would begin to move from an ontology of substance and essence to an ontology of events" (de Beistegui, Truth and Genesis). This is not to mention also Kant's original use of the distinction between intensive and extensive magnitudes from whom Deleuze draws the terms from in modified form.

Wilden too puts the whole issue in terms of difference, although he doesn't employ the vocabulary of intensive/extensive: "There are thus two kinds of difference involved, and the distinction between them is essential. Analog differences are differences of magnitude, frequency, distribution, pattern, organization, and the like. Digital differ­ences are those such as can be coded into distinctions and oppositions, and for this, there must be discrete elements with well-defined boundaries. In this sense, the sounds of speech are analog; phonology and the alphabet are digital. In the same way, the continuous spectrum of qualitative, analog differences ranging from black to white in the visible color spectrum may be digitalized by the boundaries of a color wheel or coded around the opposi­tion of black and white (which, for another system of explanation, as the absence of color, are identical)". (System and Structure).

No, the the digital is a subset of the analog, they are not in opposition or in a relation of exclusion. The relation is not a∨d (XOR), rather, d⊆a. Wilden: "The analog (continuum) is a set which includes the digital (discontinuum) as a subset." — StreetlightX

Is this really so clear? We can think of Q as a subset of R, but R is itself is usually constructed from Q and some quantifiers, and finally from the empty set, which is like pure digitality itself. We try to breath the "spirit" of the intuitive continuum into the "letter" of our relentlessly discrete symbols, because we want to have objective or inter-subjective discussions about this intuitive continuum. But we have to build it from digital sets, so it's arguably not the "real" continuum of intuition. As I'm sure you know, the power set of N is sometimes called the continuum, and this seems very digital. Plato's notion of the "One and the Indefinite Dyad" may be useful here. Perhaps we just come equipped both ultimately incompatible world-structuring faculties. The rational numbers were a brilliant fusion of digital counting (the One) and the Indefinite Dyadic intuition of continuous length, but troubled of course by the discovery of irrational magnitudes. So we build the "scientific" reals out of sets. And then there's also the argument that we can do science with a finite subset of the rational numbers (numerical analysis). The intuitive continuum is something like the wind that is only made visible by the discrete leaves it shakes as it informs our construction of discrete, symbolic systems.

I don't think this is quite right. As a matter of principle, it trades too heavily on some kind of thought/world duality which I think is unsustainable, if not mystical. As far as the facts go, however, digitality is present at the level of things like gene expression and axon function in nerve cells, and require no 'thought' in order to function. — StreetlightX

I'm not proposing any "thought/ world duality, in fact I am proposing just the opposite, Is there any continuum-in-itself apart from the one we know? How is it known, if not through thought? But take 'thought' here in its widest possible sense as consisting most primordially as re-cognition; which is the basis of semiosis.

When you say that "digitality is present at the level of things like gene expression and axon function in nerve cells, and require no 'thought' in order to function" I have no argument because that is just the way we conceive it. Does it make any sense to say that it could be in any other way than how we conceive it to be, other than it being in some other way, perhaps more comprehensive or even radically different, that we might come to conceive it?

So, the continuum doesn't exist as continuum until it is conceived as such. The continuum itself is an identity for us. But then does it make any sense to say that there are no identities in nature, if nature cannot be conceived and talked about by us except in terms of identities? By this I mean that nature nowadays is generally conceived as a vast causal nexus of relations between entities that are in one sense unique and on the other hand are of specific kinds. It is uniqueness that confers identity, and uniqueness consists just in difference from everything else. It is similarity that underpins identification, and similarity consists in being understood to belong most specifically to species, and most generally to genera.

The institution of the digital is a result of a decision, but the status of this decision is not 'in thought' so much as it is 'in practice' (which is why you can't 'find it' anywhere in particular). One must remain a materialist about these things. — StreetlightX

Thought and practice are inseparable, so I don't see it being necessary to privilege one over the other. I think it's really more a matter of looking at it broadly from the different perspectives at our disposal.

So, thinking about your 'treeline as border" example, it's true that I can't "think away" its borderhood, because the latter consists in a collectively institutionalized thinking over which I have no control.and if I cross the border illegally I will be subject to the actions motivated by that collective thinking. I also see that that collective thinking may have itself come about by virtue of past actions that were not specifically motivated by the notion of the treeline as a border, but then have become entrenched by a long history of territorial kinds of practices around the treeline. I think one does better to remain neither materialist or idealist, but to take account of the necessity of both thought and matter, and their ultimate inseparability, and to privilege neither one at the expense of the other..

Wilden too puts the whole issue in terms of difference, although he doesn't employ the vocabulary of intensive/extensive: "There are thus two kinds of difference involved, and the distinction between them is essential. Analog differences are differences of magnitude, frequency, distribution, pattern, organization, and the like. Digital differ­ences are those such as can be coded into distinctions and oppositions, and for this, there must be discrete elements with well-defined boundaries.. — StreetlightX

I can agree with Wilden. It is when you start pulling in Deleuze and "aesthetics" and other such baggage that it loses analytic clarity and becomes a romantic melange of allusions.

So accepting Wilden as a valid starting point, I will focus on the further things that could be said from a (pan)semiotic point of view.

The key thing is that reality itself is digital in being marked. To talk about analog difference is already to talk about a reality that is constrained in particular material ways. If the weather is a pattern of magnitudes - the pressure high here, low there - then already the world is divided against itself, expressing a proto-negation.

So a pure analog state would have to be a completely bland state, one characterised by its intensive or bulk properties. It would be like the early state of the Universe when all that existed was a thermalising bath of radiation - a featureless state with the same pressure and energy density and rate of action everywhere. The Big Bang was the least possible marked state of being - a spreading ocean with no discernible texture. The only change was the change of becoming steadily larger and cooler - a change that could only be appreciated if one was standing god-like outside everything that was happening.

Yet even the radiation-dominated era of the early Big Bang had some digital structure. Action was confined to three spatial dimensions. It was also confined to a single temporal one in the sense that all action had to flow entropically downhill - to flow uphill would be neg-entropic!

So contra your position, existence has to start with the digitisation of the analog - a primal symmetry-breaking. Or as I say, to make proper sense of this, we have to introduce the further foundational distinction of the vague~crisp. We have to reframe your LEM-based description in fully generic dichotomy-based logic.

So now we get to a Peircean, Gestalt or Laws of Form level of thinking where both event and context, figure and ground, particular and general, atom and void, are produced together, mutually, when a symmetry is foundationally broken. In the beginning was a vagueness, an apeiron, a quantum roil, a firstness of pure qualitative fluctuation. Then this state of unformed potential was broken, marked by its most primal distinction. In Big Bang theory, we have a reciprocal relationship between an extensive container and its intensive contents - an expanding spacetime and a cooling ocean of radiation.

This is the really difficult to get bit. But it means that the reductionist instinct to make one aspect of being prior or more foundational than its "other" is always going to mislead metaphysical thought. Does the digital precede the analog, or the analog precede the digital? The whole point of an organic and pansemiotic conception of this kind of question is to focus on how each brings its other into concrete being. To be able to make a mark is to reveal the possibility that there is a ground to accept that mark. So before anything happens - before there is any kind of difference, analog or digital - there is only the vagueness of a potential. And then when something happens, the digital and the analog would be what co-arise as the two aspects of being which such a symmetry breaking reveals.

Now we start to get into the difficulties with your view. As I say, the purely analog - if it is to make dialectical sense - would have to be the least digitallly marked kind of state that still have definite material being.

So it would be like the earliest state of the Universe - a featureless and homogenous realm of the cooling~expanding. All distinctions - all negations or differences that make a difference (to someone) - would be pushed to the margins of this generic state. It would only be a god-like observer, free to take a position outside the totality of this material existence, who could make remarks like "This Universe is a colder/larger than it just was, and it is cooling/expanding at rate x rather than rate y or z." Or heading the other way in scale, remark "This Universe is featureless, except when we get down to the quantum grain, we can see it still has a residual fluctuating freedom that again is an active negation of its generalised state of constraint."

But then of course the actual Big Bang went through its further symmetry-breaking phase transitions and matter condensed out of radiation bath. This - in dichotomistic fashion - cleared the vacuum of energy in a way that made it the other of "the void". So now we still seem to be in an analog realm, but now one with a lot more possibilities for local magnitude differences. Mass is gravitationally clumping. A new level of action is starting to play out.

The radiation era was already digitally-broken - it had generic counterfactuality in that it only had three spatial dimensions and a single entropic gradient, etc. But now the matter-dominated era was starting to get really broken. There existed mass that could have any contingent rate of motion between the limits of rest and lightspeed. Greater digital constraint - the marking of the extremes of speed as two crisply opposed limits - had just bred new analog variety in the fact mass could travel at any rate on the spectrum of rates thus revealed.

So you should be getting the picture. If we actually check in with the physics, we can see how analog~digital is a drama being played out in which both emerge together out of a primal symmetry-breaking. And then both evolve together as symmetry-breakings become the ground - the vaguer preconditons - for further symmetry-breakings which render the presence of the analog and the digital ever-crisper. Both aspects of nature are being strengthened because that is how the mutuality of dichotomous development works. The blacker the pencil, the whiter the paper it marks.

Of course analog and digital were terms created for the late machine age and so are being dropped into a world with a very long history of become crisply developed in its dualistic fashion. If we look around the world of sensible objects, we see it sharply divided in terms of the continuous and the discrete, the part and the whole, the form and the matter, the flux and the stasis, the chance and the necessity, etc. That is physically how it is for us, being creatures that necessarily depend on the Universe having reached its high point of material complexity - sorted into stuff like heavy element planets bathed in the steady energy flux from a star fixed at an optimal distance.

So what Wilden describes is the epistemic cut that underlies the further adventure that is life and mind in the cosmos. He is no longer talking about the material world in and of itself - the topic of pansemiosis. He is not talking about analog and digital in that general physicalist sense. He is now talking about symbolic representations of that materiality. And also perhaps, the evoution of that symbolism - which begins in the analogic simplicity of the iconic and indexical, and terminates in the digital crispness of the properly symbolic.

If we are to talk about analog or iconic representation as opposed to being, then we are talking about machines like old-fashioned wax cylinders where a needle - driven by making noises into a tube - produces a wriggling groove. And then when the energy relation is reversed - the cylinder is cranked to wiggle the needle and cause the tube to utter noise - we get a playback of a trace.

Crank the cylinder too fast or two slow, and we can have proto-negation - a funny playback that is a difference in kind in being a fictional representation rather than a realistic one. But generally, the analog representation is un-digital in being still so closely connected - as close as it can possibly be - to reversible physics.

There is a symmetry-breaking - a one way expenditure of energy to make the recording and reduce dynamical reality (a sound of a band of minstrels singing down the tube) to an enduring negentropic memory trace. But it is a symmetrical symmetry-breaking, a shallow one, not a deep and asymmetry-producing symmetry-breaking (like a dichotomous symmetry-breaking). As I say, just turn things around so the groove drives the needle rather than the needle carving the groove, and you get back the memory you created as a dynamical performance of sound. The minstrels sing once more.

So analog representation, or analog signal processing and analog computation, arises as the most primitive, least broken, form of memory-making. The triadic semiotic trick is all about a living/mindful system being able to internalise a view of the world - code for a set of world-regulating constraints using the machinery of a symbolic memory. And analog representation is the simplest version of that new trick. It sticks a machine - like a wax cylinder recorder - out into the world. And then exploits the physical asymmetry of a rotating cylinder and a dragging sharp point to construct a trace - a linear mark encoding a sequence of energy values.

Just by being able to switch the direction of the energy flow - from the needle to the cylinder versus from the cylinder to the needle - is all the digitality needed. On/off, forward/backward, record/playback. Semiosis at the lowest level boils down to the physical logic of the binary switch.

So the point is that even analog devices are digital from the get-go. What we mean by analog in this context is that they cross the semiotic Rubicon by the least possible distance. They are devices that can do "representation", but of a kind so thin or materially direct that we wouldn't call it properly symbolic, just basically iconic, or at most, indexical.

I hope you can see how - in ignoring the fine print of a definition of analog - you have produced a great confusion in so loosely applying the analog~digital distinction to the world in general, the ontic thing-in-itself, rather than honouring its technical epistemic meaning as a way to clarify our thinking about rate independent information - the semiotic mechanism by which life and mind forms memories or representations of the world.

It is when you start pulling in Deleuze and "aesthetics" and other such baggage that it loses analytic clarity and becomes a romantic melange of allusions. — apokrisis

What's wrong with Deleuze? I find him to be one of the very few modern philosophers who actually seemed to know what he's talking about.

But if it agreed that the digital is itself a product of boundary setting, then, in Deleuze's terms, there ought to be a concept of difference not subordinated to differences in the concept (read: genera). That is, there are differences which are not digital differences; in the context of the thread, these are referred to as intensive differences. — StreetlightX

See, he is simply saying that there ought to be a concept of difference, which refers to difference itself, rather than referring to our judgements of difference. That seems like a good honest principle to me. How are we going to come to understand "difference" by looking at the way we measure difference rather than looking directly at difference itself?

But this already assumes that there is such a thing identified as "difference". And so, within this identity is implied a certain sameness. If we can refer to everything that we see as a "difference", then by using this same word, "difference", aren't we really saying that everything which we see is the same? Therefore, it doesn't really matter what we call it, "difference" or "same", as long as we are referring to the same thing, what difference does our choice of words make? It's when we refer to different things with the same word, that confusion rolls in.

This is the really difficult to get bit. But it means that the reductionist instinct to make one aspect of being prior or more foundational than its "other" is always going to mislead metaphysical thought. Does the digital precede the analog, or the analog precede the digital? The whole point of an organic and pansemiotic conception of this kind of question is to focus on how each brings its other into concrete being. — apokrisis

This, I will steadfastly argue, is a mistake, the fallacy of synthesis or some such thing. We take two things, future and past for example, and rely one upon the other to understand the two. Then, because our understanding has developed in this way, that we use one to understand the other, and vise versa, we assume that the two are naturally co-dependent. But this is only a reflection of our understanding of the two, we bounce one off the other to get an understanding of both. It doesn't say anything about the real things which are referred to by "future" and "past", in their natural existence, it only says something about the way that we understand these two. Then we might be inclined to say something ridiculous like neither one of these is prior to the other, they are co-dependent. Because we see that future and past are co-dependent in our concept of "present", we might forget the obvious, and make such a silly claim.

Then we might be inclined to say something ridiculous like neither one of these is prior to the other, they are co-dependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would it be ridiculous? Is it because the present seems necessarily prior to either the past or the future in your definition of time here?

"It is impossible to represent the truth functions of symbolic logic in an analog computer, because the analog computer cannot say 'not-A'. — StreetlightX

Before I even get to the identity part, I had a question about this part: following this, would you say that persons are "digital?" Because we have no problem with true/false, A/not-A etc. So unless we're "digital" for some reason, then it seems as if "analog" systems have no problem with symbolic logic truth function representation after all.

(Probably the "analog"/"digital" picture as a general ontological idea is taking computer fetishism a bit too far, but let's go along with it for a minute just to answer the question above.)

It would be ridiculous to think that neither the future is prior to the past, nor the past is prior to the future, when the concept of "future and past" is dependent on one being prior to the other. The terms describe a temporal priority, so to deny that one is prior to the other is to negate the concept of future and past, rendering any talk of future or past, nonsensical.

If you would maintain that what the words "future" and "past" refer to, is purely conceptual, then what they refer to is a purely conceptual opposition. There is no need to assume a priority, because each is dependent on the other in conception. But if you look at what these words refer to, in the real world of experience, rather than something conceived, then they express a priority.

So this expresses the difference between understanding the word simply by relating the word to a concept, and understanding the word by finding the thing in the world which the word refers to. If we don't go to the world, to understand the word, then all these dichotomies, big and small, hot and cold, etc., are filled with words which express a co-dependency. You rely on the one word to express the meaning of the other, as a negation, an opposition, thus it appears as if the two things referred to are ontologically co-dependent. It is only by turning to the world of sensation and experience, that you can see what the words actually refer to, and the real difference between these two supposedly opposed things.

That is the lesson of Plato's "Theatetus" . They went looking in the world, for this thing called "knowledge". They had a preconceived notion that what the word referred to was something which included truth, and excluded falsity. It was a determined relationship between these two opposing terms, true and false. In the real world of things which were called "knowledge", they couldn't find any reliable way that falsity was actually being excluded from the thing which was being called "knowledge".. Therefore they were forced to conclude that their preconceived notion, "including truth, and excluding falsity", was not a proper definition of knowledge to begin with, because this did not fit with what was actually being called "knowledge" in the world, they were looking for the wrong thing. Their preconceived notion of what "knowledge" is, made it impossible that the things which people were calling "knowledge" was knowledge according to the conception. What could they do? They could not tell everyone that what they were calling "knowledge" is not really knowledge because it fails the standards of their preconceived notion, leaving the world with a concept of "knowledge", with nothing in that world to apply the name to. The only viable option is to admit that the conception is wrong.

This is a very real issue, especially with terms of ontological or metaphysical significance. We have a conception of future and past for example. This conception models these two as pure opposition. Take a point, on one side of that point is past, the other side is future. We could build a massive epistemic structure on a conception like this. The problem is, that in the real world, and common understanding of future and past, there is an implied necessary temporal priority, past has gone by, and future is yet to come. The conception, of pure opposition, two sides of a point, fails to take this into account. Therefore any conceptual structure built on this concept is completely illusory, it fails to take into account what we are really referring to when we use the words "future" and "past".

By the way, I think this thread has developed into a very interesting discussion. Thank you StreetlightX, and others who have participated, for some very informative, and thoughtful posting.

We try to breath the "spirit" of the intuitive continuum into the "letter" of our relentlessly discrete symbols, because we want to have objective or inter-subjective discussions about this intuitive continuum. But we have to build it from digital sets, so it's arguably not the "real" continuum of intuition. — Hoo

Hoo, do you think that "intuitive continuum" refers to anything real? Isn't it more than just intuition? Would you think that continued existence, what is expressed by terms like momentum and inertia, is simply an intuition, and not supported by anything factual. If you give the status of "factual" to such terms, how can you say that the continuum is simply intuitive.

Is there any continuum-in-itself apart from the one we know? — John

How can there be a continuum which we know? If what we know is the digital, how could a continuum be known? This seems to be the problem. There are indications of a continuum, so we claim to know that there is a continuum, but the continuum cannot actually be known. So how do we validate our claim to know that there is a continuum? What if we are mistaken on this point, and the thing which we are calling 'the continuum" is actually discrete? Would we then have to designate something else as "the continuum", to support our claim to know that there is a continuum? That is the importance of identifying the thing which we claim as "the continuum", to see if it really is the continuum. If it is not, then either our claim to know that there is a continuum, or our claim to have identified the continuum, is wrong.

It appears like StreetlightX is arguing that we cannot even go so far as to identify the continuum, because to identify it is to imply a sameness, when the continuum is necessarily difference, as per Deleuze. My argument is that to identify it as difference is still to identify sameness, and this defeats the claim. I think that this pushes us back toward some type of mystical position, claiming that this assumed continuum is something that we cannot even talk about, like the ancient mystics used to claim about "matter".

Been through this multiple times now, Meta, to know is not to identify. Won't go through it again.

True, but to identify is a necessary requirement of to know, a step in the process of knowing. You cannot know what you have not identified.

No it isn't, and yes you can. If you want elaboration, see what I've previously written about the analog as the knowing of relations.

I can agree with Wilden. It is when you start pulling in Deleuze and "aesthetics" and other such baggage that it loses analytic clarity and becomes a romantic melange of allusions. — apokrisis

Yes, yes, if it doesn't come from the one of five of six philosophers you've bothered schooling yourself in it's all allusion and romantic melange.

So contra your position, existence has to start with the digitisation of the analog - a primal symmetry-breaking. Or as I say, to make proper sense of this, we have to introduce the further foundational distinction of the vague~crisp. We have to reframe your LEM-based description in fully generic dichotomy-based logic. — apokrisis

But your 're-framing' does nothing but dilute a perfectly rigorous distinction with a fuzzy, unprincipled one. As I've said quite a few times now, the distinction between the digital and the analog is quite precisely defined by the presence of negation and self-reflexivity. At stake is a difference in kind, not a difference of degree. Wilden himself is unequivocal about this: "'Not' itself is a metacommunicative boundary essential to the 'rule about identity' which is the sole sufficient and necessary condition of any digital logic"; elsewhere: "A digital system is of a higher level of organization and therefore of a lower logical type than an analog system. The digital system has greater 'semiotic freedom', but it is ultimately governed by the rules of the analog relationship between systems, subsystems, and supersystems in nature. The analog (continuum) is a set which includes the digital (discontinuum) as a subset". Insofar as your whole line of reasoning does not respect this fact, it is less a refinement than it is a watering down.

In that case, what is known is the formal relations, the logic of the conceptual structure, and these relations are identified. It is simply a difference between identifying natural things, and identifying formal relations. In each case, the thing known has been identified. It is simply nonsense to say that you can know something which you have not identified, because once you claim to know it you have identified the thing you claim to know. But it is not nonsense to say that you have identified something, and you know not what it is..

Thank you for your series of assertions.

Hoo, do you think that "intuitive continuum" refers to anything real? Isn't it more than just intuition? Would you think that continued existence, what is expressed by terms like momentum and inertia, is simply an intuition, and not supported by anything factual. If you give the status of "factual" to such terms, how can you say that the continuum is simply intuitive. — Metaphysician Undercover

I guess that depends on what one means by "real." Is the real equated here with the scientific image (Sellars) ? For me that image is only a fraction of the foggy, inter-subjective real. I say "foggy" because I'm thinking of a continuum that runs from the unreal to the perfectly real. Maybe the real is well described as axioms in common. This would include the physical world but also the "common sense" that makes more abstract conversation possible. We can double back and edit chunks of common sense, so the real is unstable or "on fire."

How can there be a continuum which we know? If what we know is the digital, how could a continuum be known? — Metaphysician Undercover

You might want to look into (if you haven't already) the "arithmetization of analysis." I've really obsessed over this issue. I love analysis, but the real numbers are strange birds indeed.

Thank you for your series of assertions. — StreetlightX

That's what a difference of opinion amounts to, your series of assertions versus my series of assertions. The question is, who's series of assertions makes the most sense, and here we have only intuition to refer to. How does it make sense to choose a series of assertions, to believe in, which are counter-intuitive, but are chosen simply because they support an ontological position which is chosen for some reason other than that it makes sense intuitively? Isn't that choice of ontological position supported only by an unreasonable prejudice?

We can double back and edit chunks of common sense, so the real is unstable or "on fire." — Hoo

Is that really possible though, or more precisely, is it a correct procedure? It may be possible, but also incorrect. To "double back and edit chunks of common sense" implies that there are principles, based in something other than common sense, which exist, and which we can refer to, for use in a judging of common sense, to edit common sense. Isn't any such principle demonstrably supported by nothing but prejudice, as described in my reply to StreetlightX? It is the very description of prejudice. What would provide you a principle whereby you could judge intuition or common-sense, a principle which could be excluded from the charge of "prejudice"? Refer back to Deleuze's "there ought to be a concept of difference not subordinated to differences in the concept". Such editing of common sense is precisely that, subordinating your concept of difference to difference within the concept. But in judgement, these pre-conceived principles are called prejudice.

I'll go ahead and reply to both your replies, since they are related.

That's what a difference of opinion amounts to, your series of assertions versus my series of assertions. The question is, who's series of assertions makes the most sense, and here we have only intuition to refer to. How does it make sense to choose a series of assertions, to believe in, which are counter-intuitive, but are chosen simply because they support an ontological position which is chosen for some reason other than that it makes sense intuitively? Isn't that choice of ontological position supported only by an unreasonable prejudice? — Metaphysician Undercover

I'd say that we have unstable systems of beliefs that we are constantly testing against experience, itself shaped and organized by these beliefs. "Intuition" has to pick up the slack when differing beliefs fail to lead to different actions, but distance from "what should we do now?" is associated (though not identical with) the irrelevance of an issue. This is why pragmatism is so annoying. It "dissolves" differences by taking them "modulo praxis." He believes A. She believes B. They both do C. So it doesn't matter which (if either) is right. If an ontology is a tool, then we just need it to work --to make us happy. If we continually tinker around with it, it's maybe "the princess and the pea under the mattress" situation. Musicians have an ear for tiny differences in sound, and philosophers in thought. Intuition ==taste, etc. As to "unreasonable," I think we need a notion of pure reason to ground any notion of pure unreasonableness (I think you'll agree). So I like to think of normalized discourse (Rorty/Kuhn), where philosophy, the normalizing discourse, is necessarily abnormal as it addresses itself. Reason itself is on fire.

To "double back and edit chunks of common sense" implies that there are principles, based in something other than common sense, which exist, and which we can refer to, for use in a judging of common sense, to edit common sense. Isn't any such principle demonstrably supported by nothing but prejudice, as described in my reply to StreetlightX? It is the very description of prejudice. What would provide you a principle whereby you could judge intuition or common-sense, a principle which could be excluded from the charge of "prejudice"? — Metaphysician Undercover

For me it's all prejudice. We can build principles on top of parts of common sense that make other parts look less "common-sensible." This is one of my favorite quotes:

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction. — Neurath

Most of "common sense" or our prejudices have to remain intact while we judge and edit a particular prejudice. Pleasure and pain are the hammers that re-shape this edifice. But the pain can be cognitive dissonance, and the pleasure can be a sense of status. It's not at all just bodily.

The observable process which Schiller and Dewey particularly singled out for generalisation is the familiar one by which any individual settles into new opinions. The process here is always the same. The individual has a stock of old opinions already, but he meets a new experience that puts them to a strain. Somebody contradicts them; or in a reflective moment he discovers that they contradict each other; or he hears of facts with which they are incompatible; or desires arise in him which they cease to satisfy. The result is an inward trouble to which his mind till then had been a stranger, and from which he seeks to escape by modifying his previous mass of opinions. He saves as much of it as he can, for in this matter of belief we are all extreme conservatives. So he tries to change first this opinion, and then that (for they resist change very variously), until at last some new idea comes up which he can graft upon the ancient stock with a minimum of disturbance of the latter, some idea that mediates between the stock and the new experience and runs them into one another most felicitously and expediently. — James

The idea that there is something beyond prejudice can itself be described (though not finally, since description is apparently never final) as one more prejudice. This threatens the distinction itself of course which we need in order to get to this threatening...

How can there be a continuum which we know? If what we know is the digital, how could a continuum be known?


That is the importance of identifying the thing which we claim as "the continuum", to see if it really is the continuum. If it is not, then either our claim to know that there is a continuum, or our claim to have identified the continuum, is wrong.

It appears like StreetlightX is arguing that we cannot even go so far as to identify the continuum, because to identify it is to imply a sameness, when the continuum is necessarily difference, as per Deleuze. My argument is that to identify it as difference is still to identify sameness, and this defeats the claim. I think that this pushes us back toward some type of mystical position, claiming that this assumed continuum is something that we cannot even talk about, like the ancient mystics used to claim about "matter". — Metaphysician Undercover

For me there are different senses of 'know'. First there is the knowing of participation, familiarity. I believe animals do this; it seems obvious. With symbolic language come recursive and discursive forms of knowing which may be more or less 'digital'. But remember, within linguistically mediated forms of knowing there are metaphorical, which is to say analogical, modes as well as more precisely propositional ( digital) modes. And the differences between these modes of knowing do not themselves constitute a sharp dichotomy (although it may be conceived as such) but a series of imprecise locales along a continuum.

So, primarily we know what we come to conceive as the 'continuum' directly by our participation in it as embodied continua.

In regard to what you say about sameness and difference, I would say that no two parts of the continuum of our experience are the same; every part is unique so it is more a matter of a play between similarity and difference that allows it to be said of two things that they are, not the same, but of the same kind. That something is of a kind is a matter of identifying it, I have argued, involving the balance of similarity and difference.That anything is absolutely unique across time and at each moment is a matter of identity, simply involving difference; to be unique is simply to be different to everything else.

Instead of repeating myself I'll quote my earlier response to StreetlightX because I think it is relevant here:

So, the continuum doesn't exist as continuum until it is conceived as such. The continuum itself is an identity for us. But then does it make any sense to say that there are no identities in nature, if nature cannot be conceived and talked about by us except in terms of identities? By this I mean that nature nowadays is generally conceived as a vast causal nexus of relations between entities that are in one sense unique and on the other hand are of specific kinds. It is uniqueness that confers identity, and uniqueness consists just in difference from everything else. It is similarity that underpins identification, and similarity consists in being understood to belong most specifically to species, and most generally to genera. — John

This is a very real issue, especially with terms of ontological or metaphysical significance. We have a conception of future and past for example. This conception models these two as pure opposition. Take a point, on one side of that point is past, the other side is future. We could build a massive epistemic structure on a conception like this. The problem is, that in the real world, and common understanding of future and past, there is an implied necessary temporal priority, past has gone by, and future is yet to come. The conception, of pure opposition, two sides of a point, fails to take this into account. Therefore any conceptual structure built on this concept is completely illusory, it fails to take into account what we are really referring to when we use the words "future" and "past". — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure what you think I'm arguing here. It has been my point that we impose our frameworks of intelligibility on the world.

But then a dialectic or dichotomous logic ensures that this process is rigorous. In being able to name the complementary limits on possibility, we have our best shot at talking about the actuality of the world, as it must lie within those (now measurable) bounds.

So if you want to talk about "time", then it is only going to be an intelligible notion that we can project onto reality in a measurable fashion to the degree we have formed a crisply dichotomous model of it.

For example, the classical conception of time and change developed by the dividing off of stasis and flux, being and becoming. Then space and time became a division of dimensions - if you imagine existence in terms of straight lines, then you can imagine points travelling along the lines so that first they were here, later they were there.

Both relativity and quantum theory have since shown space and time are not so distinct and we are back to having to include energy - as the thermal source of any change - in the spatiotemporal picture. The rate of time can be relativistically bent by energy density. Time and energy form a dichotomistic uncertainty relation in quantum theory. Both even challenge the notion of before and after. Relativity permits wormholes in time. Quantum theory appears to demand some form of retrocausaliity to explain quantum eraser experiments.

So we have a variety of ways of thinking about time - all of them models that try to impose some kind of fundamental dichotomy that would make time an intelligible, and thus measurable, concept of the thing-in-itself.

A logic of vagueness is a further such modelling exercise. And while I might employ familiar (causal) notions like before and after, or earlier and later, to talk about semiotic development, clearly I do so in a new context - one in which any more traditional notion of temporal co-ordinates is itself going to be emergent.

And as I say, this is not wild metaphysical hand-waving. It is where Big Bang cosmology has led. The Planck scale encodes a dichotomous or reciprocal relation between spacetime and energy density now. Planck spacetime is h x G/c, while Planck energy density is h x c/G.

So a quanta of existence - the fundamental unity that the triadic Planck relation expresses - encodes a dichotomously matched pair of limits.

If we think of it geometrically, spacetime is extremitised by being flat. It becomes changeless, featureless and energyless by becoming maximally stretched out in Euclidean fashion. And then energy density or change is extremitised by being hyperbolically curved or maximally fluctuating. Instead of spacetime lying flat and even with itself, now every point is pointing away from such a dimensionally regular state. It all wants to break apart in every possible "direction" as quick as it can.

So now that view of things is thermal and allows us to understand "time" as a (dichotomous) contrast between a backdrop flatness (a Universe that has developed to become generally large and cold) and a localised curvature (the patchy clumps of energy density represented by spacetime-bending "stuff" like nebulae gas clouds, stars, planets, atoms, blackholes).

And matter is now the source of a further temporal dichotomy (one born of the symmetry breakings of particle physics) because it introduces the new possibility of an energy density that moves about at less than lightspeed. It now "takes time" to move about because action no longer has the vanilla rate of c, the vanilla rate of radiation. Mass is instead operating within the new symmetry-breaking, the new dialectical limits, of absolute rest and lightspeed.

So the whole notion of time - in its familiar Newtonian sense - is something that has to develop via a succession of symmetry-breakings. The kind of time you are talking about did have a prior history in which it was a different (less differentiated, and thus more vague) kind of time for quite a long time. :)

As I've said quite a few times now, the distinction between the digital and the analog is quite precisely defined by the presence of negation and self-reflexivity. — StreetlightX

You are merely choosing to highlight the bit I already agree with in general fashion. From a biosemiotic viewpoint, that states the obvious.

But what I have been pointing out is that your framing of the issues lacks the further dimensionality that would allow it to be actually developmental in the way a process view needs to be. Your way of talking about the continuum or the analog is fuzzy over the issue of fuzziness. You talk about the analog/continuum as being itself crisply existent (a realm of actualised material being), and then at other times you talk about it as a ground for further development - the less specified basis for the discrete/digital machinery that transcends it so as to have a view of it.

Of course in your confusion, that becomes the confusion you accuse me of. I'm just patiently taking you back to the source of symmetry-breaking to show how both continuity and discreteness co-arise from pure vagueness. And analog~discrete would have arisen as modes of communication or representation in the same fashion.

As I have said, it is important that the analog or iconic representation already exists on the other side of the epistemic cut - on the side of the symbolic or "rate independent informatiion". It is a distinction made at the level of the mapping, even if it means to be talking about a distinction in the (computational!!) world.

And because you set off in the OP to say something logically concrete about metaphysics, you can't just gaily presume that what is true of the map is true of the territory. That further part of the argument must be properly supported.

Either you don't understand that or you simply want to avoid the issue.

So it is fruitless to keep trying to return me back to Wilden's perfectly acceptable 1970s analysis of the distinction between analog and digital computation. You know I agree with that.

The interesting question is then the ontological or metaphysically-general one of how does that fact about representative modes change our conception of nature itself? What new vantage point does it give us for dealing with the central questions of process philosophy, like the mechanics of development and individuation.

A difference that makes a difference can be described analogically or digitally, represented in terms of what it is, or what it is not. But that does not yet get at the deeper question of how representation itself arises (via an epistemic cut), nor how bare difference arises (as an ontic symmetry breaking).