Not necessarily prior, since identity is a relation. — aletheist

According to Aristotle's principle of identity, identity is not a relation. A thing is itself. That is its identity, its very self.

I don't really understand the rhetorical strategy. If the point is that you want to think about becoming without recourse to substances, moving to relations doesn't seem to do that, since relations still have relata which are thought of as 'terms' – there's just more than one of them. So there's nothing intrinsically 'taller than' about Peter, but there is something intrinsically 'taller than' about the dyad <Peter, Paul>. Increasing the number of substances by one doesn't seem to change anything.

If anything you'd think you'd want to look at a zero-place predicate like 'rain' as a model, but even here, I 'm not sure what this accomplishes.

Something can be in a relation towards itself. For example, you can be your own harshest critic. Identity is then just the minimal reflexive relation.

when you try to produce absolutes, fundamental principles, from relations (becoming) you render the world unintelligible, as you have demonstrated in your example. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not sure what example you're talking about, but remember that on my view, becoming isn't primary. Becoming isn't different than being. They're the same thing.

.... the dialectic [is] a false movement, that is, a move­ment of the abstract concept, which goes from one opposite to the other only by means of imprecision. — StreetlightX

This just again confirms Deleuze to be a donkey. There couldn't be a more precise movement than a reciprocal or inverse relation.

Again, if you could present a valid example of a singular conception - one that somehow exists alone without being reciprocal to a context - then you might have something to get started with here. But you don't.

Becoming can best be defined in terms of symmetry breaking - pure dichotomisation. So what gets left behind is the initial absolute lack of distinction - the symmetry of a pure and unbroken potential.

But what justifies [becoming as self-sufficient] when any one term can only have cogent definiteness or counterfactuality in terms of its "other"? You have to be able to say with certainty what your term is not otherwise your term is merely vague in not admitting to the principle of non-contradiction.

In arguing that absolute distinctionless potentiality is "left behind" musn't there be a time when there was no distinction? (bc otherwise what would 'left behind' mean?) But wouldn't that be then its own self-sufficient other-lacking term? So wouldn't it be more correct to say that pure poeteniality can only be a term 'after' the symmetry is broken (or that there is no pure symmetry that was broken, only one that has always already been broken?)

It seems, by your own lights, like you're stuck with two options - either we can speak cogently of something self-sufficient, even if, in speaking of it, we have to oppose it to something else. Or there is ever only the dichotomous, and its quite right to say there's no origin, only an in-between.

In arguing that absolute distinctionless poetentiality is "left behind" musn't there be a time when there was no distinction? (bc otherwise what would 'left behind' mean?) But wouldn't that be then its own self-sufficient other-lacking term? So wouldn't it be more correct to say that pure poeteniality can only be a term 'after' the symmetry is broken (or that there is no pure symmetry that was broken, only one that has always already been broken?) — csalisbury

You are quite right. Except of course time then becomes another distinction. As does the notion of space that is invoked in talking of something being left behind. So the argument is a little more complex.

In my lingo, this absolute becoming is the perfect symmetry of the Apeiron or vagueness. I prefer vagueness as a term because it is self evidently opposed to the crispness of being. Although if you know your Greek, then - a peras - being without limit naturally points to its other of coming to be limited.

So yes, the Apeiron would have to "exist" in a way that is the least like any form of existence to stand as the metaphysical other of existence. And the only way we could know of it is by retroduction - looking at its broken parts and seeing there must have been the perfect whole.

If we take our existence to be completely and fully realised - at its limit in being real, as we do without even really thinking about it - then Apeiron, vagueness, potential, becoming, or whatever we want to call it, is the exact opposite. Whatever we take hard, cold, crisp, determinate Being to be, then already in that lies our best possible understanding of what could be the other of Becoming.

So it just is always the case that our Metaphysical strength conceptions seem strong because they are not self-defining, but defined in terms of everything they are not. Dichotomies form categories that are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive. So they are the only completely rigorous way to form conceptions themselves.

The difficult thought - the one that eludes pretty much everyone - is that the dichotomous relation is not in fact oppositional but reciprocal. If expressed mathematically, x become its other of y by y being 1/x.

Normally of course, the relation is understood in terms of subtractions - A vs not-A. One turns into its other via negation. And this can be constructed by taking away every essential property in a way that might satisfy the atomistic logic of a reductionist.

But I am taking the holist view where existence is the product of constraints on freedoms. And so a different maths expresses that.

For example, the opposite of infinity is the infinitesimal - that is to say, the infinitesimal equals 1/infinity. And vice versa of course.

And critically, each then becomes the others limit. So neither the infinite nor the infinitesimal actually exists. Instead we have made it clear we are talking about the complementary boundaries of existence (or in this case, counting all the way up vs counting all the way down).

So apply this to the dichotomy of being and becoming. Each is now the others limit. And each achieves its own status as a limit by being as far away from its other as it can get. But by the same token, neither can ever break the bond that (semiotically, meaningfullly) connects them. In yin yang fashion, each must retain an irreducible element of the other within itself to have that essential property of being always measurably other to its "other".

What that in turn means is that even Being - that which we take to be fully and unambiguously actual - is itself (by logic) always still to some inifinitesimal degree in the act of becoming.

And hey, what does quantum theory now tell us? This is exactly the world we observe. Zoom in on crisp classicality and it turns out to have in the limit vagueness or indeterminism. Science has cashed out metaphysics yet again. Peirce in particular was right about tychism in relation to synechism, to use his jargon.

So when it comes to talking definitionally about a state of pure potential, we are having to define it terms of what it is not, while also, we have to remember that - like being - it must still be infinitesimally a bit like its other. The unbroken symmetry must already be broken ... to the least possible degree.

So dichotomy thinking - done correctly as a reciprocal forming of limits and not the usual dialectical opposition of absolute "things", concrete abstracta - says neither being nor becoming are ever truly disjunct states. They are only maximally separated in terms of being as minimally like each other as possible.

Think again about the reciprocal argument. Note the 1 that gets employed. We are saying in effect, whatever is the thing we have in mind, let's start by calling it a singular one, a pure standalone whole.

Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.

So that is the way that in Metaphysical conception, one deals with singularity. It is an abduction awaiting its proper deductive framing.

Thus Becoming is 1/Being. It is whatever it is that would be the least possible when it comes to the complementary "thing" of being. Beyond that, talk about becoming becomes meaningless because it has snapped the connecting thread and left us talking merely about a singular and contextless one again. Which is - technically speaking - unintelligible.

It seems, by your own lights, like you're stuck with two options - either we can speak cogently of something self-sufficient, even if, in speaking of it, we have to oppose it to something else. Or there is ever only the dichotomous, and its quite right to say there's no origin, only an in-between. — csalisbury

I should add that the whole story is triadic. So you have to add in the hierarchy that stabilises the dichotomy which is breaking the vagueness.

The simplest symmetry breaking results in easy reversibility. It has no stability because - just as you can erase a turn to the left by now swivelling right - if there is passing time, the next fluctuation is just as likely to cancel the last one out.

And that is the whole reason for the need of the further thing of pansemiosis or the habits of constraint that hierarchical development allows.

For symmetry to stay broken, you need it to be self sustaining. Like Apeiron presumed as a property it had, any breaking must continue due to its own contextual feedback. The breaking has to become "inexhaustible".

Again this is a mathematical subtlety that goes over heads. But who studies the actual maths of hierarchies?

What that in turn means is that even Being - that which we take to be fully and unambiguously actual - is itself (by logic) always still to some inifinitesimal degree in the act of becoming.

&

So when it comes to talking definitionally about a state of pure potential, we are having to define it terms of what it is not, while also, we have to remember that - like being - it must still be infinitesimally a bit like its other. The unbroken symmetry must already be broken ... to the least possible degree.

Alright, I believe I understand your broad portrait -

but then I don't understand what you're objecting to here:

[in Becoming] There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive at or which you ought to arrive at. Nor are there two terms which are exchanged. The question ‘What are you becoming?’ is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself. — Deleuze

The origin and the destination, in your account, both stretch asymptotically away, so are we not ever in-between? What's wrong with the quote?

Now this singularity is ill-defined. And yet we can give it complete definition by saying whatever it is, it is the y that is the 1/x.

So that is the way that in Metaphysical conception, one deals with singularity. It is an abduction awaiting its proper deductive framing.

You lose me here though. A singularity is the limit for that which would limit it? Would you be willing to illustrate this by means of an example?

(also: If it's meaningless to provide a term unless you also provide that which reciprocally limits it, wouldn't reciprocity itself have to be reciprocally limited by non-reciprocity? But, if everything in your system deals in reciprocally limiting dichotomies, where is there room for non-reciprocity? )

The only thinking is thinking again, thinking otherwise : ) Everything else is doxa.

Or at least that's the long-held consensus of everyone in the Deleuze Studies department ;)
Just kidding, sort of, I really do like Deleuze, but do you know what I mean?

he origin and the destination, in your account, both stretch asymptotically away, so are we not ever in-between? What's wrong with the quote? — csalisbury

I don't follow. The only place we are is inbetween. My position is internalist.

And also - a further aspect of symmetry breaking - there is indeed a global directionality for becoming. That is what the vague~crisp distinction describes. Vagueness is the point of departure, crispness (the crispness of dichotomistic separation and hierarchically formed habit - are the terminus. At the end of time is when individuation has most fully happened.

I don't really understand this. A singularity is the limit for that which would limit it? Would you be willing to illustrate this by means of an example? — csalisbury

Once again, the singular here is the bare abductive guess. So I am agreeing - as is explicit in Peirce's epistemology - that Metaphysical conception would have to begin with some dimly grasped "something". We can call that - vaguely - some inkling of "whatever the hell it is". The principle of non contradiction does not yet apply because so far we might have a name for this guess - let's call it concept X - but we don't really understand it in any properly intelligible or counterfactual sense.

So the next step is to sharpen our definition so as to make it pragmatically measurable. And we can do that by seeking to define it in terms of its own inverse.

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

If this combinations of intuitions works out, we will find that the formula works. They will form the complementary limits on possibility. And we will wind up inside those limits in a way we can now directly measure.

This is how all the complementary Metaphysical pairs work. Chance is the lack of determination, and vice versa. And soon through all the other standard dichotomies that work (even if PoMo has got into the habit of thinking them dazzling paradoxes).

(also: If it's meaningless to provide a term unless you also provide that which reciprocally limits it, wouldn't reciprocity itself have to be reciprocally limited by non-reciprocity? But how could non-reciprocity reciprocally limit anything?) — csalisbury

But triadicism or hierarchy theory is an internalist approach. It puts us inside a pair of complementary limits. So those limits can be pushed away "infinitely" - or more accurately, asymptotically - but there is by definition any possibility of stepping outside the world they make.

So the term - if it describes a limit - describes itself fully in saying that it has within it the least of the other. And the other term for the other limit does the same thing. So the reciprocality is mutual or reciprocal in itself. Non reciprocality is then the third thing of vagueness - vagueness being reciprocal with crispness in being the undifferentiated vs the fully dichotomised.

I think the primacy of relation is exactly what becoming gets at. Awareness pre-dates sorting into strict discursive catergoies. One senses so much before using the catergoies and classifications used around them. I think we notice a lot before we "establish existence."

The act of establishnent is sort of a second order act. We do it force or create the world in a particular direction. Awareness pre-dates this action. People realise something before the start directing themsleves to change the world.

Rather being unintelligible, the world before (or without) the act of establishnent is perfectly intelligible. People genuinely realise something without setting a stuffy and exact discourse. Becoming doesn't need the loss of intelligibly, but rather that comprehension goes beyond merely setting out defintions of forms. Intelligibly has more depth than many philosophers give it credit for.

I don't follow. The only place we are is inbetween. My position is internalist.

And also - a further aspect of symmetry breaking - there is indeed a global directionality for becoming. That is what the vague~crisp distinction describes. Vagueness is the point of departure, crispness (the crispness of dichotomistic separation and hierarchically formed habit - are the terminus. At the end of time is when individuation has most fully happened.

Ok, the directionality bit is certainly different than Deleuze (tho I suppose there's a case to be made for focusing on local zig-zagging at the expense of global crisping, b/c in the long run we're all heat dead. On that note - & I'll admit thermodynamics isn't my wheelhouse -but how is the steady march of entropy an increase in crispness? My gut reaction has me seeing crispness as requiring a figure/ground thing, where something stands over and against some background. B/c my gut can't imagine something crisp that isn't foregrounded against something less crisp. Doesn't the possibility of that fade as the world grows cold and dispersed?)

It's still a strange thing, tho, if neither extreme (pure vagueness/pure crispness) can be fully realized, than we're always stretched out between two infinities (infinitely free, infinitely constrained), always have been, always will be.

Once again, the singular here is the bare abductive guess. So I am agreeing - as is explicit in Peirce's epistemology - that Metaphysical conception would have to begin with some dimly grasped "something". We can call that - vaguely - some inkling of "whatever the hell it is". The principle of non contradiction does not yet apply because so far we might have a name for this guess - let's call it concept X - but we don't really understand it in any properly intelligible or counterfactual sense.

So the next step is to sharpen our definition so as to make it pragmatically measurable. And we can do that by seeking to define it in terms of its own inverse.

We call whatever the hell this is, this thing we call the singular X, now a mathematical 1. A unity or whole ... despite the fact that it is only the vaguest 1. It is the oneness of whatever the hell might be the case.

So that is where singularity enters the picture. And we can define X now as 1/Y ... Y being a second singular that feels most like the pure antithesis of X.

If this combinations of intuitions works out, we will find that the formula works. They will form the complementary limits on possibility. And we will wind up inside those limits in a way we can now directly measure.

My stumbling block right now is that I'm not sure what sort of analysis this is. Is it phenomenological and/or anthropological (i.e. is this how we observe ourselves or others coming to grips with a strange new 'something'?) Is it a methodological prescription? Is a description of an already practically exercised methodology?

It just doesn't look anything like any process I know. When we come up against a new something, we usually try to see what it can do, how it reacts, how it's similar to other things we already know etc. When do we ever try to determine the thing most antithetical to it? Or is it just that you think we can, in principle, define it by reference to that antithesis? Like what's the pure antithesis of my mother/Beethoven's 5th/this bottle in my room/'Swann's Way'/ ? I still don't really know what you mean. I understand the 1/x thing for big ol headliners like Being/Becoming Determinism/Chance etc. but I'd really need some concrete analysis of some singular thing to understand how it works at the level of singularity.

So the term - if it describes a limit - describes itself fully in saying that it has within it the least of the other. And the other term for the other limit does the same thing. So the reciprocality is mutual or reciprocal in itself. Non reciprocality is then the third thing of vagueness - vagueness being reciprocal with crispness in being the undifferentiated vs the fully dichotomised.

But isn't this just stipulating non-reciprocality (non-dialecticity?) as a fixed absolute in order to hold stable an equally absolute system of reciprocal/dialectal dichotomizing? "Everything has to be defined reciprocally EXCEPT reciprocity which exists in a non-reciprocal asymmetric relationship with non-reciprocity." Can't we use this same template and generate any number of metaphysical systems, depending on our tastes? Essentially what you've done is exempted your own model from the metaphysics of everything else, by carving a special metaphysical niche for it.

There's another point to be made: No reason a singularity has to be a 1. It can be a historical situation. Something crazy goes down, rewrites the coordinates, you walk outside, not knowing what's what anymore, then you try to act, in that.

On that note - & I'll admit thermodynamics isn't my wheelhouse -but how is the steady march of entropy an increase in crispness? .... Doesn't the possibility of that fade as the world grows cold and dispersed?) — csalisbury

The baseline condition of the Universe is that it was born as a spreading/cooling bath of radiation. So at the heat and smallness of scale near the big bang, by quantum uncertainty, everything is maximally indeterminate. And then roll forward to the heat death, everything is instead so cold and large that it is as classically definite at it can get.

Thus crispness is defined in the sense that the dimensionality of the Universe - its degrees of freedom - are as generally limited at they can get. And this is due to the duality of expansion and cooling. The dichotomy consists of the reciprocal actions of heading towards asymptotic spatial flatness and asymptotic thermal coldness (each being the means by which the other can happen).

Of course the actual universe is a cascade of other symmetry breakings. So it gets complex. At the electroweak symmetry breaking scale, massive particles condense out of the generalised entropic flow. They make the whole universe suddenly somewhat colder than it should be "ahead of time". And those massive particles then have to give back that negentropy at a new rate - one which more complex structure still, like stars and bacteria, can in turn pay for their existence by accelerating the return of the stolen negentropy.

So the early smooth flow breaks up into a hierarchical mess of complexity - but all still entrained to the same final purpose.

It is all essentially or logically exactly the same thing - dissipative structure - but existing parasitically on multiple scales of being (due to there being these further symmetries able to be broken as things cool/expand enough for them to also be revealed).

Deleuze was of course supposedly influenced by Prigogine's ground breaking work on this kind of far from equilbrium dynamics. But I only see a garbled version in any of his writing so far. Not that I've felt the need to dig that deep myself given the science of dissipative structure, and also basic physics, have moved on so much in the past 30 years.

It's still a strange thing, tho, if neither extreme (pure vagueness/pure crispness) can be fully realized, than we're always stretched out between two infinities (infinitely free, infinitely constrained), always have been, always will be. — csalisbury

In what way are we actually ":stretched out" if we are always falling in the one direction (or more accurately, accelerating the world in that direction so as to pay for the right to exist ourselves as passing negentropic organisation)?

And also, remember the subtle difference between how we can think about these things and the thing in itself.

In the end - in Kantian fashion - we can only "know" the world we model. So the dichotomy - with its story of both things having an irreducible degree of its "other" in it - is only our best metaphysical conception. It is the theory we can produce following a dialectical logic. But no theoretical map is ever going to just be the territory it navigates.

Although, again, the evidence is certainly supporting the theory. The "surprise" of quantum physics is the kind of radical confirmation that says classical mechanics - the "physics of predicate logic" - just doesn't predict the world we've actually found. Quantum physics is incomplete, but already it bears out a metaphysics based on vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.

It just doesn't look anything like any process I know. — csalisbury

And yet - from my natural science background - it looks exactly like every process I know.

Like what's the pure antithesis of my mother/Beethoven's 5th/this bottle in my room/'Swann's Way'/ ? — csalisbury

Here you are talking of complex negentropic objects and not the metaphysical generality of existence itself.

All particular things are full of accidents - differences that don't make a difference to nature in general. just possibly a difference to some also rather particular observer.

Look. My favourite cup is cracked. The second law doesn't give a stuff (it's entropy in progress my son). And yet for me it feels the end of the world.

So thesis and antithesis don't operate down at the level of the particular or accidental. They speak to what is generally necessary - the only kind of conflicts or symmetry breakings which don't simply cancel themselves away and so can survive to be "things" that exert constraints.

I understand the 1/x thing for big ol headliners like Being/Becoming Determinism/Chance etc. but I'd really need some concrete analysis of some singular thing to understand how it works at the level of singularity. — csalisbury

OK. But it is confusing to now talk to individuation (or particularisation, or contingent being) as "singularity" when singularity was instead some kind of claim about monism over dualism or triadicism (who knows what SX really thought he meant). And I've just defined my acceptable understanding of singularity as the bare abductive "well what ever the hell it is" which of course is the spur needed to get any metaphysics started. And that sense of singularity then explains the third thing of the 1 that has to be introduced to talk about dichotomistics X and Y - becoming the vague possibility that gets divided by the familiar maths of reciprocal or inverse relations.

So if we are talking about individuation, it is absolutely key that not everything in existence is determined. The point about constraints is they encode finality or purposes and so they only limit chance to the degree there is a reason to care. That then leaves abundant scope for accident to play its part in actuality.

Of course we care that the world's highest mountain happens to be in Nepal. But does plate tectonics - as a vicar of the second law - give a fuck? It is a complete accident that that is the particular case. On the other hand, it is completely necessary that hills and valleys form in a way that conforms with fractal statistics. Growth and erosion are the reciprocal actions that must be balanced.

But isn't this just stipulating non-reciprocality (non-dialecticity?) as a fixed absolute in order to hold stable an equally absolute system of reciprocal/dialectal dichotomizing? "Everything has to be defined reciprocally EXCEPT reciprocity which exists in a non-reciprocal asymmetric relationship with non-reciprocity." Can't we use this same template and generate any number of metaphysical systems, depending on our tastes? Essentially what you've done is exempted your own model from the metaphysics of everything else, by carving a special metaphysical niche for it. — csalisbury

But vagueness doesn't need to lack reciprocality. It just has to say there is no order or organisation to it. Any beginnings are just as fast ended as vagueness is a state of perfect symmetry, and thus a perfect condition of constant self erasure.

Again, this just describes the quantum physics of the vacuum. It is exactly how nature is. The vacuum, due to uncertainty, could spit out any kind of possible particle at all. Yet by the same token, there is the same likelihood it will spit out its exact anti-particle - and the two virtual particles will annihilate immediately to leave the vacuum looking still a blank, non-fluctuation, symmetry.

So vagueness can have every possible reciprocal action going on, but none of them have any bite.

Of course, it is also the case that this symmetry breaks - lucky for us. And we thus have to identify - via symmetry maths - how this could be the case.

A big clue for example is that the Universe has just three dimensions. And theorems from network theory tell us that every more complex network can be reduced (constrained) to interactions of three edges. But you can't have a network of lower dimensionality than that.

So it is easy to see that once a self-simplification gets going (of the dichotomous kind, which for networks is the crisp thing of "connections and nodes"), then it will go to its limit. And the limit may have irreducible structure. Hence something is left existing despite all attempts to self-erase. Not everything actually can cancel. (And if you want to be technical about it, now we are talking about the mathematical definition of a singularity!)

So yes, my approach as I've outlined it is metaphysically bootstrapping. And that's its feature, not a bug.

You are basically saying that my metaphysical model doesn't accord with your belief about the thing in itself - the thing in itself not being allowed to bootstrap ... because that then is in conflict with your own metaphysical logic.

But you can see how that is not an acceptable complaint. The "thing in itself" is that for both of us. So all we can do is propose our various models and see which turns out to work best as the map that allows us to navigate reality.

I mean I have no trouble using good old fashioned predicate logic. Classical physics works for everyday engineering. Reductionism makes normal life very simple. So in its domain - roundabout the human scale of physical existence - it works fine, nothing better.

But it should be no surprise that if we are dealing with the extreme scales of existence - the vanishingly small and the incredibly complex - then actually we need a metaphysical logic that deals directly with the very issue of scale extremes. Hence hierarchy theory ... which in turn needs dichotomies that produce separations ... which in turn need vagueness as the foundation on which the rest can get started.

There's another point to be made: No reason a singularity has to be a 1. It can be a historical situation. Something crazy goes down, rewrites the coordinates, you walk outside, not knowing what's what anymore, then you try to act, in that. — csalisbury

Calling it 1 is again just to say that there is something, abductively, which is just whatever the hell it is. By then going through the further steps to discover the reciprocal relation that can work to clarify what we might have actually been talking about, the 1 is transformed into the scale factor that then specifies the measurement basis.

Does it help to give the equation in more complete form?

1/infinitesimal = infinity/1.

You see that the 1 in fact appears on both sides. But on one side it scales the parts and the other it scales the whole.

Or at least that's the long-held consensus of everyone in the Deleuze Studies department ;)

Just kidding, sort of, I really do like Deleuze, but do you know what I mean? — csalisbury

Yeah but who cares unless you're invested in that little cottage industry to begin with? Honestly, it's these self-referential loops that get us stuck in these situations in the first place. Really, if your thinking isn't being forced by the exigency of the situation, if it's not imposing itself upon you in order to reorient your sedimented categories of thought, then what's the point? I mean honestly, Apo literally does not think as far as I'm concerned. He's like one of those conversation-bots you used to come across a few years ago that kind of just spat out pre-fab lines depending on the keywords it came across. I mean he is literally incapable of understanding what it means for something to be singular and not - because this is the only word his fifteen word vocabulary allows him - particular.

This just again confirms Deleuze to be a donkey. There couldn't be a more precise movement than a reciprocal or inverse relation. — Apo

Yes, precise because analytically so, and thus completely incapable of engaging at a singular level, and thus philosophically impotent. And who says donkey, lol.

Again, if you could present a valid example of a singular conception - one that somehow exists alone without being reciprocal to a context - then you might have something to get started with here. But you don't.

And who says singularity is something that 'exists alone without being reciprocal to a context'? Again, It's cute how you like to jam things into the three of four categories of thought you are capable of, but it makes for very boring conversation.

The usual epic whinge....

Did they program that one for you too?

Thus Becoming is 1/Being. It is whatever it is that would be the least possible when it comes to the complementary "thing" of being. Beyond that, talk about becoming becomes meaningless because it has snapped the connecting thread and left us talking merely about a singular and contextless one again. Which is - technically speaking - unintelligible. — apokrisis

This is exactly the problem which StreetlightX is trying to bring to your attention. You have transformed "becoming" into a form of "being", and in doing such you leave real "becoming" aside, claiming it's unintelligible so there is no point in guiding the mind toward that direction.

I think the primacy of relation is exactly what becoming gets at. — TheWillowOfDarkness

The point though, is that if "becoming" is to be conceived of as primary, it is necessary to lose this idea of becoming as relation. It is logically impossible that relations are primary. I think this is probably what Deleuze is getting at when he says that we must get rid of the idea of becoming as proceeding from here to there, because this necessitates a start which is prior to becoming. As The Great Whatever says "...relations still have relata..", so if becoming is necessarily relation, then the primacy of becoming is an impossibility.

I don't really understand the rhetorical strategy. If the point is that you want to think about becoming without recourse to substances, moving to relations doesn't seem to do that, since relations still have relata which are thought of as 'terms' – there's just more than one of them. So there's nothing intrinsically 'taller than' about Peter, but there is something intrinsically 'taller than' about the dyad <Peter, Paul>. Increasing the number of substances by one doesn't seem to change anything.

If anything you'd think you'd want to look at a zero-place predicate like 'rain' as a model, but even here, I 'm not sure what this accomplishes. — The Great Whatever

Notice, the op, how StreetlightX says relations "belong" to becoming, "if relation is the domain of becoming", relation "implies" becoming. This, I believe, is what Deleuze is trying to lead us away from, the idea that a "becoming" is necessarily a relation, toward the idea that a relation is necessarily a becoming. What we need to do is to see relations as examples of becoming, but make becoming the broader term, such that all relations are necessarily becomings (necessitated by the nature of time), but not all becomings are necessarily relations. This allows that there is (logically) a first becoming, with nothing prior to it. Then we are left to look at the nature of the relation without the relata. What type of thing, exactly is a relation, and how could it exist prior to the things being related, such that the relation only gains real physical existence when there are things which are being related?

Becoming is usually a present participle verb. As a noun it has a weird religious vibe. We await the Great Becoming.

Thus crispness is defined in the sense that the dimensionality of the Universe - its degrees of freedom - are as generally limited at they can get. — apokrisis

Just curious - is there a reason why you prefer "crispness" as the term for the opposite of "vagueness," rather than something like "determinacy" or "definiteness"? Is it just to emphasize that you are talking about a continuum, a matter of degree, rather than an absolute dichotomy?

Its just the term that a group of us were using as we were discussing bio- and pan-semiosis a decade or so ago. I think Stan Salthe coined it.

And I think it does admit to degrees of development more easily. But also it just has a pleasing ordinary language match to vagueness.

So we could talk about definiteness and indefiniteness, or determinacy and indeterminacy. But those are explicitly just negative formations - the thing and it's lack.

A dichotomy - as a reciprocal deal - is instead a symmetry breaking so complete that you appear to have two different fully realised things in opposition, So it feels more appropriate to give each its own full name, like vagueness and crispness.

That more than just the continuum issue would be why the pairing sounds right to my ear. So like discrete and continuous, or one and many, it is about making a clear statement that both limits are real and different enough to have their own distinct character. The continuous is not merely the in-discrete. It is the positively completely continuous (as a maximal exclusion of the discrete).

This is exactly the problem which StreetlightX is trying to bring to your attention. You have transformed "becoming" into a form of "being", and in doing such you leave real "becoming" aside, claiming it's unintelligible so there is no point in guiding the mind toward that direction. — Metaphysician Undercover

And this coming from you who can never deal with the notion of vagueness, or emergent temporality, or finality that is not prior to what it calls to, or prime matter that is not already substantial.

It is you that can't shake the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, not I.

Then we are left to look at the nature of the relation without the relata. What type of thing, exactly is a relation, and how could it exist prior to the things being related, such that the relation only gains real physical existence when there are things which are being related? — Metaphysician Undercover

This doesn't make any sense to me, but OK. I'll let SX speak for himself on the matter.

And this coming from you who can never deal with the notion of vagueness, or emergent temporality, or finality that is not prior to what it calls to, or prime matter that is not already substantial. — apokrisis

It only demonstrates that unlike you, I am capable of adopting a different perspective. But also unlike you, I will not even consider a logically impossible perspective. You claim the primacy of a relativity induced vagueness, denying the logical priority of the relata. But a relation can only follow from the existence of the relata, so relativity cannot bring us to the primal condition. Therefore you proceed from a logically impossible position, and your emergent temporality is purely fiction.

This doesn't make any sense to me, but OK. I'll let SX speak for himself on the matter. — The Great Whatever

That was just my way of phrasing it, and that was probably not good. But the point is, that if we make "becoming" the broader category than "relation", which is what is necessary to understand becoming in the way that SX describes Deleuze, then we need some other way to understand "becoming". If relations are all the examples of becoming which we have, yet we want to understand becoming outside of relations, what can we turn to?

I don't see how a relation is 'an example of becoming.' As I said before, it's no different from a property, it just involves more than one individual. So I am unclear where SX is going with this.

... I will not even consider a logically impossible perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your logic is evidently too narrow.

But a relation can only follow from the existence of the relata ... — Metaphysician Undercover

"____ is red" is a monadic relation; its reality does not require an existing subject to fill the blank. "____ is larger than ____" is a dyadic relation; its reality does not require two existing subjects to fill the blanks. "____ gives ____ to ____" is a triadic relation; its reality does not require three existing subjects to fill the blanks. And so on.

Another way to think about it is that nothing exists without being in relations. In fact, existence is reaction, the state of being in dyadic relations with other things.