Someone like Aristotle and Aquinas could easily turn around and say you're committing the Parmenidean fallacy of thinking there is only actual being or nothingness.

For Aristotle, being also exists in potentia. Potentiality is also a mode of being and it is directed towards actuality, and change and time are what happen when potentiality becomes actuality.

Thing is, potentiality is still being, just a lesser form of being. It's not solving the primordial existential question of why there is something rather than nothing, since potentiality is something, no matter how far it is from actuality.

What you need is something that can cross the infinite divide between literal non-being and actuality (and all the potentia in between).

For theists, that is God, since the divide between potential and actual needs a causal power proportional to the size of that divide.

In classical theism, God is not an entity, a thing, an object, or something which may or may not exist. Classical Christian metaphysics understands that for any created thing, there is a difference between what a thing is and that it is.

I.E There is a thing's essence, and its act of existence. Nothing about the essence of a blueberry bush tells you if it exists or not, so it requires an act of existence over and above its essence, its form, its source of individuality and intelligibility.

God is Being Itself, that for whom essence and existence are identical. God cannot not be. God is that-ness. God donates that-ness in limited forms and you get a creature, some constrained form of existence.

I agree, and I think this is where we're headed into Christian metaphysics, the realisation that Being in some sense is necessary, there cannot be existential null. This is just the basic thrust of Christian metaphysics - no particular thing is necessary, but "Is" Is necessary, as if Being has no negation.

So, Being isn't a rug which we need to throw over a "nothing" like what Bergson said.

Yes, this is the way I see it. That comes at a fairly significant demand, however. I don't believe Newtonian/Cartesian/Comtean/Hobbesian matter or philosophy of nature has the adequate conception of the universe to explain how the non-living even has the potential to give rise to the living.

One of the only places I find myself agreeing with Descartes is that the idea of dead, dumb, inanimate matter somehow generating subjectivity, agency, meaning, poetry, art, philosophy and science is utterly absurd. On that score, Descartes is absolutely right.

I like the method Schelling developed which would eventually become what we know as neutral monism now; you take your concepts of matter, and intelligence/mentality and strip away their respective properties until you get to some sort of basal, common denominator, and build both back up again from there. I think what we get when we do that is neither matter or mind, but just a system with various biases and habits.

Or some basic habitual end-directedness. Material things and mentality are both kinds of system with various habitual ways of behaving, and the key is to figure out what it is about intelligent systems that makes them behave differently. This is the way to a naturalistic but not-reductive philosophy of nature that has intrinsic room for intelligence, subjectivity and agency etc.


I think what Schelling said is that nature is not brutely objective, external "stuff", but the expression of unconscious intelligence, albiet self-organizing. That expression of unconscious intelligence finds its expression as per se intelligence in us. Or, that matter is product and mentality productivity, but it's all the same sort of warp and woof.

When you say the universe is inevitable, how do you mean? Do you mean it is non-contingent or metaphysically necessary?

Because that's definitely contentious. I would be hard pressed to find any philosopher who argues the universe is necessary. I would believe atheist philosophers would simply accept its brute contingency. If you want to argue its necessity in some sense, you would be pitched right back into the nature of metaphysical necessity and the contingency argument for God.

IMO, necessity demands ontological non-composition and non-changeability. I don't think we can ascribe those to the universe, since the universe is a set of space-time events with no substantial existence beyond its components.

I still like the term naive realism. I think it is apt since it's not doing justice to any adequate theory of realism. An adequate theory of realism would have to treat the perceiver as a genuine agent, not an entirely passive recipient of a purely objective world in all its glory.

Hence, why I think critical realism and new realism are better positions since they're seeking a better understanding of what it even means for something to be real. A realist account of perception will have to consider what the agent themselves brings to the encounter in terms of subjectivity, context, history, affordance, cultural sediment etc.

I wonder if there is some way of avoiding the dichotomy of traditional religious God vs the universe as pointless accident theory.

TBH, I think the universe simply coming into being pointlessly is the height of absurdity and would render reality fundamentally unintelligible. The only way a scientific cosmology could avoid that would be to accept a tenseless theory of time along with some sort of eternal universe.

I like Paul Davies idea that the only things that can possibly exist are things that explain themselves, some sort of self-contained intelligibility, so that the universe and the reason for its existence must be co-emerging or co-creating somehow. A constructivist metaphysics I lean towards would consider this viable.

I thought Bohm's idea was just an inelegant and superfluous attempt to retain discrete particles and a purely objective pre or no-collapse reality. But what is the motivation for retaining this idea given what we know now?


Isn't it the case we now have significant experimental refutation of hidden variables, such as Bell's Theory, Legget-Garg inequalities, and Kochen-Specker theorem?


IMO, this takes us some way beyond the traditional positions of monism, dualism, reductionism etc. to some sort of metaphysics which needs a new vocabulary, like the kind of constructivist pluralism I've been talking about here.

Holst's The Planets:Neptune is marvellous:

Animism is actually very misunderstood by modern academia since animism is read through a very Cartesian lens, which is really mistaken. Of course it's going to sound silly if you make animism into panpsychism, as if everything had some sort of little cartesian soul and consciousness was wholly subjective.

Animism bears much more in common with American pragmatism and their ideas of metaphysics rather than panpsychism/Cartesianism. There are worlds in the plural, and personhood of whatever- rocks, trees, people etc. arises in pragmatic contexts of action.

The proper term to describe animism is really ontological pluralism, reality is many, not One. But not solipsism, since worlds are partially overlapping but partially autonomous yet other worlds can be entered into/assumed.

It's context sensitive metaphysics and I've argued earlier on Hoffman's views imply this too, once we understand the physics underlying it.

Logical possibility just means it can be stated in a way that doesn't violate an axiom of logic, but metaphysical possibility requires there is a possible world where such a thing can really exist.

A mile high unicycle is not incoherent, but it's not metaphysically possible because of the impossibility of an actually existing infinite set of things. So it is definitely possible for something to be logically coherent but not existentially possible.

And on the only one existing thing idea, what you might be suggesting is that the existence of a thing implies the set of existing things albeit with only one member, so a thing existing presumes the set existing.

But do sets exist? That's an unresolved metaphysical debate. So I don't think it's incoherent to claim only one thing exists, despite its metaphysical impossibility.

Perhaps one object is only logically coherent, but not metaphysically possible in any possible world?

Such as infinitely tall unicycle. Not logically contradictory, but not metaphysically possible. Or the existence of literally only one thing. That's not a logically incoherent notion, but I don't think there can exist literally only one thing because I believe for something to exist it must causally interact with something else as either an agent or a patient.

I'd recommend Sebeok's book Signs or Deely's introductory text Introducing Semiotic.


I'd also recommend once you have the basics down, getting Deely's magisterial Four Ages of Understanding. I think it's necessary to understand how semiotics is an entire thoughtform and how it relates to the history of philosophy, and Deely's book does this.

This is why I have recommended the paper Hoffman has jointly co-authored on Eigenforms and Holography.

The answer, simply put, is that yes, objects do have the properties we perceive them to have because they are observer-dependent. Hoffman's layman level work leaves the causal, knowable nature of the world ambiguous and that to me sounds like Kantianism.

But this newer work makes some good headway on the metaphysical implications of ITP. I believe they say quite adamantly that there is no world sans observation, without observation/decoherence, we have the quantum state of indeterminate possibilities/properties. Upon observation, a classical state is registered:

" If interfaces encode information about fitness, then they do not encode information
about the observer-independent ontology or causal structure of the world. In the present
conceptual framework, of course, this is tautologous: there is no observer-independent
ontology or causal structure in any world that is defined only relative to an observer. "

As they continue, space just is icons/eigenforms encoded into a 2D surface - where an icon's 3D appearance is encoded informational redundancy not only about an object's appearance,but possible actions one can take WRT to it. Apple can be eaten, thrown, smashed, juiced etd. "Space" is just how many bit-flips you need to get from one icon to another.

Objects in space are there to communicate information about your fitness. They are not apart from you - Yourself and the environment are co-dependent and co-arising. You're entangled. A system dividing itself into two -- but not separate things-- to communicate information to itself about how to perpetuate its own existence. If you don't interpret the icons properly, the Conscious Agent-Decision-Action loop breaks and both you and the environment "die".

So there is nothing "behind" or "underneath" appearances. Without observation, there is just superposition of quantum possibilities, but no "unknowable" world out there. I do believe, though, that there are many observers and many concomitant worlds, but these are their worlds, so this might actually be a kind of ontological pluralism.

I would like to know if anyone has read the Hoffman paper from Constructivist Foundations, since I think it really does make some good improvement over the kind of metaphysical quietism WRT reality and/or Kantianism we tend to see in his popular level clips and writings.

As I interpret it, Hoffman et al don't seem to be claiming that space is just a mode of apperception ala Kant, but it really exist but not in a Newtonian, objective sense, either. I think Hoffman has become Peircean in all but name.

As you will see, he describes environment and organism co-emerging and co-creating. Icons and eigenforms really exist since they're holographically encoded as space. I think this is what he is saying: This is what space is. It's icons and eigenforms encoded holographically and we interpret and act on them.

Space isn't wholly "out there" nor is it just our mode of apperception. It's a semiotic phenomena which we interpret to perpetuate our existence, and it exists in the relational in-between.

If you're interested, Hoffman has released a paper which assumes more ontological commitments WRT to his ITP: https://constructivist.info/12/3/265.fields

He has a physicist for a co-author here, and I really recommend following up Chris Field's own publications.

The paper takes a decoherence interpretation of quantum physics to explain how the world and agent co-construct or co-emerge in a new metaphysics which doesn't assume the ready made world. There is still work to be done on the notion of observation of course, but I think the implications take the theory a satisfying distance away from Kantianism.

I myself adopt a cybernetic metaphysic in the Von Foerster vein in my own stuff.

Yes, I actually have had correspondence with Hoffman over this. I actually was interested in his work as a possible way to bridge the ecological psychology paradigms with underlying work in philosophy of phsyics.

On that front, I think his work is very good. I especially like the idea of decoherence as underpinning the co-emergence of the world and agent (ultimately, one system informing itself about itself).

Thr Kantian divide between noumena and phenomena is less appealing, though. Hoffman is not too far from a vast improvement though when he describes the environment as iconic and space as fundamentally semiotic - like a users manual for perpetuating your fitness and existence. Cogntition as an interface is a solid idea, but we need a relational theory of cognition in this vein and not a Kantian one. Thankfully, the philosophy of signs naturally complements Hoffman's idea and it's a non-dual since it involves triadic relations between the sign, object and interpretant. The interface isn't hiding reality, it is reality as co-constructed by agent and world, between realism and idealism.

I believe consciousness has to be of something, I believe it has to be intentional in its most basal form, but "content" is controversial issue of course and it's a key controversy in philosophy of mind ATM as well - how do we get from simple minds or non-minds to contentful mental states of which we can predicate True or False?


Might it be the case that content does not necessarily need to be semantic content?

Thanks for the reminder to read Signs in the Dust! I found out about that book some time ago, meant to read it, fell by the wayside.



Personally, I prefer semiotics or a semtioic phenomenology over classical phenomenology. I think why people took to phenomenology as being a research programme without merit was because phenomenologists themselves have had a tendency to devalue any phenomenological perspective that wasn't derivative from Husserl.

Classical phenomenology I believe is too anthropocentric and arguably, at least in the Husserlian vein might steer too close to a transcendental idealism. Husserl's bracketing means speculation about external world is left out but this may leave it vulnerable to accusations of idealism - but I don't think that's a fair thing to accuse phenomenology as an enterprise of.

I'd want phenomenology to yield metaphysical insight too and I think Deely is correct that we want semiosis to be foregrounded over classical phenomenology. Idealism is not only a worry phenomenology is accused of, but also I don't see the classical perspective working out a mechanism for how creatures actually make sense of their world. The semiotic perspective Deely outlines illuminates the "how" of sense-making and also the "how" of the phenomenon qua appearance. Conscious phenomena are a scaled up and special case of semiosis.

Some clear benefits there - we don't need to put the metaphysical reality of the appearance into abeyance, nor do we have a consciosuness centric method that limits an inquiry into the forms of meaning-making.

To OP,


Deely is an absolute gift and his philosophy is incredibly rich. I've met and talked with some of his former colleagues and friends at length.

What Deely hoped for IMO is for a recognition that there were two major paths philosophy could have gone down, and Newtonianism and Cartesianism were only one. There was also the budding path John Poinsot was developing which was the sign-based semiotic philosophy, the one which easily naturalizes mind and doesn't plague philosophy with dualisms everywhere.

Unfortunatley, Poinsot was too late for his thought to take off so it was lost to history if not for this reconstructive work.

The information revolution is a promising start, although there is now this kind of schism between matter-information that is still too Cartesian/modernist. Shannon's information theory is a far cry from a full-orbed semiotic theory since it operationalizes information and meaning. There is still a way to go.

I think eventually, the problems of relevance realization and framing will become so pressing that contemporary philoophy/science will need to take on board semiotic philosophy.

I'll read the entire thread when I get the time, but for me personally, I think the flaw of the simulation argument is the presupposition of the information-processing theory of the mind.

I could write at length about why I think that view is false, but basically I think it's because the existence of mind is not and cannot be an algorithmic phenomenon since you can't prespecify all of it's possibility space.

I think embodiment is crucial to that end concerning relevance realization. I open a door because I've got somewhere to go, I drink from a cup because I get thirsty. But I can also throw the cup, bash someone on the head with the cup, turn the cup into an artwork by painting on it, sell the cup to someone, make someone a cup of coffee, grind the cup down into powder and fashion it into something new. I could go on forever with just a cup. Hence I don't believe the nature of mind is formalizible into a set of algorithmic instructions.

Although I am in complete agreement that dead, dumb inanimate matter coming to possess a rich, subjective inner life is absurd, I don't agree that panpsychism is the answer.

What explanatory gain do we gain with panpsychism? If atoms somehow have some sort of subjective life, how does it illuminate the phenomenon of consciousness simply by supposing everything has it? Do quasi-conscious atoms do anything to explain the phenomenon?

OP, so why think that the LLMs like Chat GPT etc. exhibit actual legitimate intelligence?

Consider the following, if you will. People claiming that GPT is exhibiting intelligence tend to assume that passing the Turing Test is the mark of the mental. But hasn't Searle already dealt with this? What do LLMs do that Searle has not already argued against?

GPT at least, seems bound to established patterns formed in pre-existing conversations. Because it uses language in a statistical way which is unlike us. We use language in a grammatical/semantic way.

I think an element of intelligence is differentiation between the communicative act and the actual intention - langue/parole. An AI cannot differentiate itself from the environment so it cannot have non-linguistic intentions.

They might manipulate words efficiently based on statistical prediction, but the classical question is...do they know what they refer to?

I read it years ago, it was so dense and rich I said I would need another re-read at a later time. Going to follow this thread. I'm particularly interested in how it intersects with phenomenology and defeating the reality/appearance dichotomy, and in turn the dichotomy between ontology and epistemology.

FYI, I think Frederick Wilhelmsen's work would be a good primer to get up to speed with the kind of Existentialist metaphysics here. Getting the Essence-Existence distinction down would be necessary before even attempting this.

But if qualia constitute the self, I see two issues immediately for the view:

1. I can differentiate between the sensation of blue I am seeing, and my awareness of that sensation of blue I am currently seeing. I can differentiate myself as the seer from the sensation of blue itself.

2. I don't think it can differentiate between the faculties of sensation and intellection. There's more to consciousness and cognition than just qualia. I can entertain universals, abstractions, conceptualizations, mathematics, symbols, possibilities etc. If the self is qualia, how come the higher order faculties of intellection? Does this not raise issues about how to differentiate between humans and animals, if selfhood is identical to qualia?


I'm sympathetic to the line of thinking that does attempt to unravel the hard problem, however, rather than simply solve it. I think something has gone wrong in the way the question has been posed, and I think a view of consciousness not based on qualia would be better.