If we can't generally agree on a basic definition there is no way to continue the discussion, is there? — Sam26

But are you looking for some everyday meaning - when everyday meanings are never sharply demarcated anyway? Or are you seeking a well-founded philosophical distinction? In which case clearly it is the metaphysical-strength claims the words might invoke that are in contention. You can't avoid that by some kind of ordinary speech manoeuvre.

By entymology, they are a technical contrast, not everyday terms. Didn't they gain their modern understanding by Kant problematising the issue?

He says that "I" changed and "I" was stupid. Which shows that he had an "I" before language that was different. — Harry Hindu

He can say that now .... retrospectively. Equipped with a language that is suitably tensed.

And the surprising thing about his reply was how indescribable that language-less and unnarrated past state was to him.

But then that is not so surprising. Our own autobiographical memories only start to form about the time we really begin to master the habit of self-narrative talk and self-regulatory thought. So before the age of about three, we don't have a narrative style of memory. We weren't able to organise our experience so it was telling a running story about our "self".

It's not necessarily dualistic. — Sam26

If you are talking as if there really is a fundamental division between the mental and the real, the self and the world, the subjective and the objective, then it is dualistic until you can explain how it is not.

If you instead employ it as a common manner of speaking, and don't in fact accept the standard ontic committment that motivates it, then - like me - you could present the alternative ontology you would defend, and hence the alternative language you would prefer to employ in serious discussion.

I don't think you can escape the metaphysical by choosing those words though. — Sam26

Escape? I am being explicit about the metaphysics which I am making an ontic commitment to in expressing a linguistic preference here.

I see a conflict if you want to both use dualistic terminology and yet claim that you might as well just be talking physicalism. This is what leads to all the problems with theories of truth.

A triadic modelling relations approach - semiotics - is the consistent way to make sense of what is going on. Rather than the mind receiving the truths of the outer world into its inner world, minding is about forming embodied and adaptive points of view. Mindfulness is the larger thing of that relation in action.

Yeah. To speak of “mind” is to slip into a substance ontology. It treats the mental as some kind of dualistic realm or stuff. I would take a process ontology view where “minding” is an embodied action. The brain is conscious in that it is continually forming a series of distinctive attentional viewpoints.

So my choice of words here would reflect my neuroscience. The mind is not a thing but a succession of views.

So is the issue that there are claims we might make about the state of the world and claims we might make about the state of our mind, and it is always some mind making these different categories of claim?

My general definition of “subjective” would be claims that are viewpoint dependent, and “objective” would be claims that are viewpoint independent. So the problem arises when there is some collective of minds, and thus potential viewpoints, involved in judging claims about a shared world.

To the degree the minds are alike, as when speaking the same language in a historically constrained fashion, then they are essentially speaking for the one viewpoint. That seems pretty subjective, even if many minds might also appear capable of many views.

Yet also we can conclude that for language use to arrive at a historically constrained stability, there must be something invariant or mind independent to force a collection of viewpoints to a position where meanings are shared. Or at least shared to a point where the remaining uncertainties make no practical difference.

Ergo, a pragmatic account of truth claims.

Still no reaction to this, eh? — Harry Hindu

The thesis I'm defending is that we can grant consciousness to neurology. And that involves a fundamental self~world distinction. However humans have the further thing of a metacognitive awareness of that lived self~world distinction. Language allows us to see that is the case - that we are individuals, or actors in a larger social context. We fit our own existence into a running narrative. And that is a metacognitive habit of self-consciousness that makes all the difference in the world.

So if you take the case of Idefonso, what does it really tell.

First off, he was raised in a linguistic context. Even lacking speech himself, that context would have shaped a set of expectations that couldn't otherwise have been the case. Even our pet cats and dogs, with their much tinier brains, learn they need to scratch at doors and find other ways to communicate with us in our highly structured human environments.

So as this blog notes, Idefonso was...

...a profoundly deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language

Schaller found herself in a class for ‘Reading skills’ that was little more than a warehouse for all the deaf students...

"I went to the door to walk out and was actually turning the handle to leave, when I see this man who looked so frightened. He was holding himself as if he were wearing a straightjacket. He was backed up in a corner, protecting himself. I saw that he was studying mouths, he was studying people. Even though he was frightened, he was still watching: what is happening, what is happening?"

...One problem for Schaller’s efforts was that Ildefonso’s survival strategy, imitation, actually got in the way of him learning how to sign because it short-circuited the possibility of conversation. As she puts it, Ildefonso acted as if he had a kind of visual echolalia (we sometimes call it ‘echopraxia’), simply copying the actions he saw:

"He’d just try to form signs and copy what I was doing. But his facial expression was always, is this what I’m supposed to do?"

Then eventually the teaching clicks and we have that sudden biosemiotic realisation that changes everything...

All of a sudden, this twenty-seven-year-old man-who, of course, had seen a wall and a door and a window before-started pointing to everything. He pointed to the table. He wanted me to sign table. He wanted the symbol. He wanted the name for table. And he wanted the symbol, the sign, for window.

The amazing thing is that the look on his face was as if he had never seen a window before. The window became a different thing with a symbol attached to it. [emphasis added, GD] But it’s not just a symbol. It’s a shared symbol. He can say “window” to someone else tomorrow who he hasn’t even met yet! And they will know what a window is. There’s something magical that happens between humans and symbols and the sharing of symbols.

That was his first “Aha!” He just went crazy for a few seconds, pointing to everything in the room and signing whatever I signed. Then he collapsed and started crying, and I don’t mean just a few tears. He cradled his head in his arms on the table and the table was shaking loudly from his sobbing.

And then the really interesting question. Looking back, what was his consciousness like before he had the means to fit it into a running, linguistically structured, narrative?....

"It’s another frustration that Ildefonso doesn’t want to talk about it. For him, that was the dark time. Whenever I ask him, and I’ve asked him many, many times over the years, he always starts out with the visual representation of an imbecile: his mouth drops, his lower lip drops, and he looks stupid. He does something nonsensical with his hands like, “I don’t know what’s going on.” He always goes back to “I was stupid.”

It doesn’t matter how many times I tell him, no, you weren’t exposed to language and… The closest I’ve ever gotten is he’ll say, “Why does anyone want to know about this? This is the bad time.” What he wants to talk about is learning language."

Hmm. Telling, hey?

It looks like you try to represent one particular moment in human history as the universal one. In the vast majority of known cultures “awareness of self as an individual actor” never existed. It is a relatively new Western invention. — Number2018

Sure. Socratic philosophy secured the modern Western cultural image of what it is to be a self-actualising individual. The culture of human selfhood has continually evolved.

But you are missing the point if you don't look for the change that made the difference. At some moment, we became a species with a symbolic culture. And the paleoanthropological record says that was a fairly abrupt transition. Suddenly folk were wearing beads, painting caves and setting out their camps with ritualistic order.

The lens through which I look at this transition is biosemiotic. The major transitions underpinning life and mind are down to the evolution of serial coding mechanisms that can be used, in abstract fashion, to regulate material dynamics. In the words of Howard Pattee, this is the epistemic cut. Life depends on being able to step back from itself - using a syntactical/informational machinery like genes, neurons or words, in particular - so as to be able to regulate the entropic flows that constitute that self.

So this is why language is the key. It opened up a new level of semiosis that simply did not exist before. There is no point fluffing around with other things. Language is core, just as the discovery of DNA, and the discovery of neural signalling, have been core to making sense of biological life and animal-level mind.

Before there were neurons, sure there were hormones. Chemical messaging was taking place. But what was transformational was the development of a spiking neuron as a generalised, universal, form of information representation. A message wasn't coded by some particular chemical lock-and-key signalling. A neuron's spiking rate could become a means of representing any kind of abstract event - the sight of something, the smell of something, the sound of something.

Brains developed because there was an epistemic cut in which the world was modelled in terms of a standard symbolic code. You could point to the fact there were always precursors to that, and also always continuing elaboration once the first most primitive nervous systems emerged, but the rubicon was crossed when the neuron evolved as a universal means of encoding regulatory information. Just as life began when there were genes that allowed for the displaced regulation of cellular metabolisms.

So the evolutionary continuity we seek is a biosemiotic one. It is obvious that something happened to turn a smart social ape into a modern encultured human being. You could speculate that it was just a general biggering of the brain - but the paleo evidence is against that. And once you have framed the question as a semiotic one - once you see how a new level of coding machinery would have to make a difference - then it just becomes obvious that is the core story. Language underpins the crucial mental shift. The rest is culture studies.

I would just add that world is largely 'made of' or often experienced in terms of tools used almost transparently. — macrosoft

Yep. That is what I would mean by calling it a habit that is formed. It becomes routine or automatic. The relationship is maximally meaningful in becoming maximally certain. And thus quite unthinking and effortless in its execution.

Does meaning involve anything like a correlation or an attribution. Me don't think so. Meaning is not attributed, rather we are there and in the thick of it, so to speak — bloodninja

But meaning is attributed because there is a sign relation involved. The gardener sees "dirt" as a sign that there is a place where some plants can be dug in. A good gardener will be reading the dirt for its particular qualities. Does is display the signs of being fertile, loamy, acid, bony, whatever? But the worried parent of a child scrabbling in the soil might just see "bad dirt" and nothing more.

So meaningfulness is neither in the mind, nor in the world. It is about a triadic semiotic relation in which a world is understood as an Umwelt, or intelligible system of sign. Everything is suitably categorised according to useful habit. It is meaningful in being a bridge between a self, with its desires, and a world, with its possibilities. The sign encodes a relation in which self and world are semantically connected.

In other words, it's not that the dirt lacks meaning and then we attribute it meaning through our gardening activity or some correlation, rather we can only ever garden on the basis of this 'meaning' thing. Thus prior to any attempt to attribute or correlate, meaning already is. — bloodninja

The mistake is to get hung up on trying to assign meaning to either side of this relation rather than to the relation itself. Meaningfulness arises where there is this semiotic connection that itself marks off a clear distinction - an epistemic cut - between "a self" and "the world".

There would be any number of points of view of what "dirt" is. How could it be defined in any truly mind-independent sense? We could talk about agglomerations of clay particles, ecologies of bacteria. But those are all words with meanings. They are the signs of "things that constitute that kind of world we are talking about". They are ways we have organised our experience so as to make the best kind of sense of the world ... when construed as a host of constructive possibilities we might exploit.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, people that speak the same language would have the same sense of self, but that isn't the case. — Harry Hindu

Not so. The claim would be that it is sharing the same culture which results in sharing the same style of selfhood. Language in a general fashion allows culture to even exist. But simply speaking English doesn't mean there aren't then many national and regional styles of selfhood and self-regulation.

So the point is that language enables that leap - the one to a cultural level of semiotic organisation. Individuals can now learn to take the collective social view of the psychological fact of their own existence as "conscious beings". Awareness of self is awareness of self as an individual actor within a collective social setting.

But every language serves that purpose. And every culture can then write its own version of the script. A Japanese sense of self can be quite different from an American one - or at least to the degree that American culture hasn't overtaken the traditional Japanese mindset.

If self-awareness is a linguistic habit, then at what point in our learning a language do we become self-aware? What words or grammar rules trigger this self-awareness? — Harry Hindu

There is plenty of research on the development of self-regulation in children if you are interested in the characteristic stages. But you are pushing for a simplistic reading of the argument. If a self-aware style of cognition is something learnt, then there is no fixed moment when it clicks into place. It is always something that is developing.

Words and grammar just give access to this new world of possibility.

And long before infants have any mastery of speech, they are already embedded in a world where they are being treated as psychological individuals - especially if they are middle-class and Western. A social demand is being placed on them. So the learning of the way to think is already begun.

It seems to me that we use language to point to what is already there. "Consciousness" and "awareness" are just scribbles that refer to these things that exist prior to our labeling them for communicating. — Harry Hindu

Sure, our sensations are already there. And even our intentions and reactions. But then self-awareness - the metacognitive level where we see our selves as selves - is the unbiological thing of learning to see all that through the eyes of a detached spectator. We say, there "I" go, experiencing certain qualia, having certain thoughts, feeling certain things.

Our mentality shifts up to a sociocultural level where everything is happening to a spectating self - a self that is understood as a contrast to the collective. We now see ourselves living in a world of the like-minded, and so see ourselves as "one of that kind of thing".

Clearly there was a huge evolutionary advantage in developing that language-enabled detached understanding of the self as a "self", and hence a free actor within a socially-constrained setting. It set up a whole private vs public dynamic. We could become self-regulating in the service of larger cultural goals once we learnt the trick.

Babies are discovering their bodies and how to control them after just a couple of months - well before any linguistic abilities arise. — Harry Hindu

Yes of course. It is basic to cognition that organisms must reach that first semiotic level of being able to distinguish self from world. We must have a habitual sense of where "we" start and where "the world" ends. Language is not required to learn how not to chew your tongue instead of your food.

So there is a sense of self that is part of biological level consciousness. And social creatures - dogs, chimps, dolphins - will also have a social sense of self. That understanding of being part of a collective will shape "their world" and so their notion of being the kind of "self" that makes sense in that world.

However, the question is what makes humans so different, such a sudden and rapid departure. And the evolution of symbolic/grammatical speech explains that. Why it was important is because it opened the door to the new thing of abstract and transmissible culture. Rather than merely being just selves in a world, we became "selves" seeing that we are selves in a world. Selfhood became a central fact of our psychological being - and hence, all our actions and experiences became filtered through that new culturally evolving lens.

We became self-anthropologists.

Dogs don't run from their own bark, or jump at feeling themselves bite their itch. They can distinguish between their own bodies and actions and others. — Harry Hindu

Well when it comes to dogs and cats, their tails often seem to have a mind of their own. And also get chased and attacked like a foreign object. :)

But again, this is about grades of biosemiosis. The self~world distinction is basic to life itself. An organism is defined by know what is self, what is not self. So the argument here is that humans achieved a huge jump via the evolution of linguistic structure. Selfhood could now become a cultural level thing. We could now look at ourselves abstractly as social players always having to make individual choices. Our "world" expanded to include a rich overlay of taboo, memory and custom that only abstracting language could grant access to.

There are just different levels, or degrees, of self-awareness that result from differences in brain structure, not from differences in language. — Harry Hindu

If that were so, you would be able to point to the vast differences between chimp and human brains.

There are vast differences between chimp and human vocal tracts. So yes, something had to evolve biologically. And there are some subtle neuroanatomical differences too. The hominid brain was being reorganised for a good million years for a culture of skillful tool use - a pre-adaptation for the trick of grammatically-organised symbolic speech when that kicked in with reasonable suddenness, judging by the abrupt appearance of symbolic culture about 40,000 years ago.

So the story would be the usual case of both slow gradual change and then also sudden rapid advance. There is no need to be either a lumper or a splitter in some absolute sense. However, it is crucial - when it comes to an understanding of "consciousness" - to accept that the evolution of language was transformative of what we would understand as mentality. We can't just think of humans as being bigger-brained animals. We were also the first of the creatures to be organised by the symbolic structure of language and the world of abstracted cultural development that allowed.

I emphasize the unknown and say this implies we should be agnostic about those points. — Relativist

Fine. Be as agnostic as you like. Meanwhile the field of quantum interpretation moves on. The current trend towards quantum information approaches make admirable sense to me.

The thing identified by the law of identity is not necessarily particular, but when we apply that law to the sense world, — Metaphysician Undercover

OK. But I am talking physicalism. There is no room for a Platonic world where forms exist as universals. Universality would be what emerges from the inevitability of certain overarching structures ... the structures that can bring stable formal constraint to material uncertainty, per the OP.

But if it were the case that all things were united as one, "the universe" this would falsify relativity theories because it would mean that there is an absolute frame of reference. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It just says spacetime ain't absolute. And we already know that. The container is shaped by its contents. So the next step for physical theory has to be one that includes energy and gravity into the fundamental level description.

Structural realism says that the absoluteness, the unity, is to be found in that relation, somehow.
Spacetime doesn't have some inherent fixed order. That organisation emerges in reciprocal fashion from a relation that exists between energy density and spacetime curvature. So it is about the absoluteness of the three fundamental Planck constants, and the essentially dimensionless web of relations they then weave.

But identity is necessary for any logic to proceed — Metaphysician Undercover

Even if this were the case, the issue would be how do you produce that identity - the particularity that is what it is to be individuated in a physicalist realm of spacetime and energy? If you are concerned with ontology, you can't simply just claim identity as a brute fact of existence. And so OSR - piggybacking on condensed matter physics - can offer a theory of how identity can arise as localised acts of individuation.

Essentially it’s just stay neutral. — schopenhauer1

Don't be obtuse. I said it was a balance. The ideal balance is a win/win. And to justify your Pessimism, you are always trying to construct a world that is lose/lose.

The world of work is soul-less and meaningless. And the world of play is then an essentially meaningless distraction from the meaningless world of work. Oh misery me. Alas, alack. What a moral "dilemma" we seem to have.

How is that even answering — schopenhauer1

I told you how it was answering. I pointed out that the morality would concern the balance of two contrasting impulses, both entirely natural. I gave you a second scenario to make that point.

But whatever.

I pointed out that the morality would concern the balance of two contrasting impulses, both entirely natural. I gave you a second scenario to make that point.

Diddums that you then start whining rather than answering.

If the identity of an object is lost, through the use of relative reference frames, then this is illogical and unacceptable as an ontological principle. — Metaphysician Undercover

It might be a problem for predicate logic. But that already presumes the existence of definite particulars as part of its axiomatisation. That is what the principle of identity is about. Starting off with that as the assumption already granted.

Should ontology limit itself to that kind of atomistic or nominalistic reasoning? Why would you think so?

Diddums.

It seems obvious to me that they'd have to obtain in conjunction with each other. — Terrapin Station

In the end, that is what I would be saying too. In the "beginning" - before some kind of ordered notion of time or action exists - there would just be the complete nullity of a vagueness. Relata~relations - as the holistic enterprise - would have to emerge together, each being the ground to the "other".

However, having said that, it also becomes useful to envisage starts and ends in terms of that which most dominates the scene. And cosmology tells us that in the beginning, we have the maximal state of uncertainty that is the "quantum fireball" of the Big Bang. Then at the end, we have the maximal state of classical certainty that is the Heat Death.

So material fluctuation rules at the start, and formal constraint rules by the end. The two causes of being would always have to be co-present in reality. But the balance shifts from the dominance of the one to the other.

The structuralist story is thus that structure has to develop. The cosmos exists because it was possible for disorder to grow the regularity of lawful habit. Essentially the Universe represents a phase transition which will be complete once it expands and cools to the point where it arrives at the generalised temperature of 0 degrees.

So in this picture, we begin over at the extreme represented by material uncertainty - the Universe as a super-dense plasma without any particular structure to its fluctuations. Then we end at the other pole where all material fluctuations have been reduced to their simplest possible form - a lingering quantum sizzle of blackbody radiation "emitted" by the cosmological event horizon.

And then in-between - like right about now - we have the middle ground story of little atomistic bits of crud still floating around at sub-relativistic speed. We have all the fermionic matter, like protons and electrons, that are locked up knots of substance - structural defects in a spreading~cooling spacetime fabric that is wanting to flatten itself right out.

Morally, what would you say is superior- the employees frivolous pursuits that are more satisfying to the employee or the 8 hours of tedious soul-crushing work that produced a life-prolonging process? — schopenhauer1

I would say morality is aimed precisely at the issue of how we make those kinds of social trade-offs as social creatures. The social system is founded on the natural dynamic of a balance of the competitive and the co-operative, the individual and the collective. It is all about negotiating that give and take.

So you have worked up an example that presents an obviously unhappy balance. And it is just as easy to present one that is a more constructive picture of life.

Now imagine you work as a much appreciated medical researcher in hot start-up with the possibility of doing great good for public health in the worst parts of the world. Work in that light is so rewarding, so sociable, that you don't even want to sit around on your own binge watching another lame Netflix series.

Morally, which would you say is superior in that light. Eight hours in front of the TV or eight hours doing the job?

Fundamental to an object's identity is it's spatial temporal location — Metaphysician Undercover

And what do you think happens to that in the case of a system of entangled particles?

So they deny the very thing which provides the identity of an object, its spatial temporal location, as not necessary to its identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you want to wind physics all the way back to absolute Newtonian reference frames? Sounds legit.

The inability to determine the spatial temporal location of a particle, and therefore identify that particle, is a direct result of the mindset of modern physicists which makes spatial temporal location relative rather than absolute. . — Metaphysician Undercover

MU has spoken. Physics is rocked to its core.

Materialists think that all of Reality consists of the physical world. — Michael Ossipoff

Structuralists would take an expanded view of physicalism - one in which information becomes part of the picture. A context or history is the information that bears down to constrain the possibilities of what might happen at some locale.

So it is Wheeler's "it from bit". Materialism believes that substantial, already in-formed, matter sits at the bottom of physical existence. An informational or constraints-based ontology flips it around so that the material is whatever is left as a concrete possibility after a context has restricted its variety.

It recognizes that there’s no reason to believe that experience isn’t the fundamental reality of the describable world. — Michael Ossipoff

If your idealism rejects physicalism, then you won't have any interest in OSR as a species of physicalism.

As I say, I don't take idealism seriously. It's a joke. And It has nothing to do with the OP. So it is off topic.

That seems an unjustifiable belief, that observers create. Reminds me of devotees of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM who consider observation to cause wave function collapse. — Relativist

When I say observers, I'm not talking about human consciousness causing a wavefunction collapse. I'm talking about how thermal contexts would decohere. So I would be taking a quantum information approach - accepting that quantum "weirdness" is bound up in the structural fact that you can't ask a particle about two contrary properties, like position and momentum, in the same act of measurement. You get quantum behaviour at the limit be cause you can't constrain the uncertainties of an event in both its complementary directions in the one go.

So it is a structural feature - an ultimate failure of a physical context to be able to constrain uncertainty - that produces quantum behaviour at the limits of material being. And that is of course a notion of observerhood or wavefunction collapse that is in keeping with OSR.

We could suspend belief about whatever it is that might move the needle on the dial. But why even bother doing metaphysics then? That sounds like no fun at all.

Besides, you are taking the position that there are in fact objects that are unobserved. Which is hardly a stance eschewing an ontic commitment. You are just being the usual kind of material realists who fully expects QM to reveal its hidden variables some day. There is nothing philosophically neutral in this take on OSR.

So I am happy to instead to change the game and replace the unobserved object with the observer-created relata. Objects are what emerge as a vague everythingness becomes constrained. And structuralism is all about those kinds of systems of constraint. Permutation symmetry now formalises the notion of differences that don’t make a difference and so a nautural limit to constraint or symmetry breaking itself.

So no need for metaphysics to suspend judgement. Physics has already told us that hidden variables and other conventional materialistic notions have failed. That judgement is in. Now make of it what you will.

The peacock's tail. Is it frivolous or is it promoting the survival of the species?

Could a medical process on an individual past reproductive age be considered moral in the sense you want to apply it?

Are humans now more defined by their cultural evolution than their biological, so would that put cartoons in a different light?

Frivolity would need some kind of theory to pin it down here. If the issue is the moral value of our collective survival - an imperative that quite naturally informs our being - then what is the frivolous in that context?

Most folk would say it is stuff that we might do that makes no essential difference to the fulfilling of that major goal. And our moral stance in regard to that would be a collective shrug of the shoulders. That becomes the morally meaningful thing to do.

If cartoons and jokes instead seem to matter, then they probably do. They aren't actually frivolous on closer examination. They have meaningful survival value.

This directly opposes what you stated above — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. So particles and spacetime points would be objects in a minimal sense. That minimal sense would include a "violation" of the law of identity - in the sense that the principle of non-contradiction would fail to apply. It would not be the case that x is x', but nor would it be the case that x isn't x'. Thus what is being asserted is that the identity of x is fundamentally vague - under the Peircean view that vagueness is defined by the failure of the PNC to apply.

Sounds good to me. The game thus moves on from ontologising objects to ontologising vagueness.

It does not eliminate the material principle. My point, as stated in the OP, is that we shouldn't expect structuralism to be able to do that when it comes to relata. But it is a radical change to ontologise uncertainty, indeterminism, instability and fluctuation as what is "materially fundamental".

The vague is definitionally that which lacks individuation ... and hence is also the prime material for any consequence process of individuation.

This object which is not an individual, what is it, a multitude of objects? — Metaphysician Undercover

In OSR, objects are the individuated. So they are the result of a multiplicity of possibilities being limited.

Why do you find metaphysics such a struggle?

Our knowledge of the world, in terms of fundamental physics, is not settled. — Relativist

On the other hand, a heck of a lot of alternatives have been eliminated. And we have arrived at the inevitable truths of permutation symmetry. The progress of physics is undeniable. The old theories haven't been disproved. They have been absorbed into ever more mathematically general frameworks.

Should we treat quantum fields as fundamental? Quantum field theory is not even complete, since it doesn't include gravity. Are points in spacetime "individuals"? Do we depend on haeccity for individuation? What about string theory? — Relativist

You are complaining about the fact that science has both moved so far and seems to have clear ideas about the issues that still need to be resolved.

Sounds like success to me.

If physics doesn't have a firm answer, how can ontology? — Relativist

Metaphysics should be more like science then. The goal is not to claim absolute certainty but to support a position of minimal uncertainty.

And that is precisely what OSR would do in going off mathematical-strength constraints on material uncertainty.

You are setting an impossible standard for knowledge. And that makes it easy to say, well guys, let's not even try then. But as a pragmatist, I accept already that the task is to minimise our uncertainty about what might be the case. And progress in that sense is always possible. But you now have to be willing to make some intellectual effort.

But, you're mistaking the forest for the trees here. Dimensionality is not captured in a single image. — Posty McPostface

Well take the next step and realise that the duality of dichotomies speaks to the triadicity of hierarchies. The ur-dichotomy - in a world with complex development - is one divided by the distinction between the local and the global, the particular and the general.

So you mention the forest and the trees. The phenomenon in question is united in the sense that it has both the particular and the general. It is composed by its individual trees. And constrained by the general fact of being "tree-ed".

Thus the hierarchical view that can see both these things at once is capturing the phenomenon in a single image. It captures both its essential ontological dimensions. It sees that the forest is both composed of its trees and that being part of the forest is a constraint on the identity of the trees.

Eventually, dimensionality is captured when going to a higher dimension. — Posty McPostface

Correct. But we only need to count up to three - as CS Peirce showed.

We start with one - but logically a oneness is a vagueness, a chaos, a symmetry lacking any distinctions. It is a world without intelligibility.

Then we have two - the breaking of a symmetry, the separation of a dichotomy, that now introduces a primal distinction into the picture. We can have hot because we have cold, left because we have right, good because we have evil, stability because we have flux. A counterfactual comparison has arisen.

Then we have three - the arrival at the limit of a symmetry breaking in terms of a maximal asymmetry. We have the ultimate kind of division that is the local separate from the global, the particular separate from the general. There is a stratification in scale and causality. There is the parts that compose and the whole that constrains.

Now we have an image of an actual system, an actual world. A complete description. Ontically, we don't need to count any further. Adding a fourth or fifth ontic dimension is redundant.

You need multiple overlaying images at different angles and degrees to do that. — Posty McPostface

But you are just expressing a standard prejudice. The history of thinking provides us with a foundational dichotomy - that of the one and the many. Either we must argue for monadic unity or unlimited plurality - so it seems.

But reducing your philosophical options to a binary either/or is what is the big mistake. Instead you should recognise the unity of opposites - and how their unification results in the irreducible triad that is a hierarchy - is what is really being said.

If the one and the many are a convincing dichotomy then that must be the output of some wiser metaphysical understanding.

Sure, your over-arching unity would be of the kind that would contain multiple angles and degrees. That is the point. It is a single general co-ordinate space that then definitely contains all these particular different slices across it.

So plurality is possible because there is a unity large enough to contain its individuated variety. Before that dichotomy arises, there would only be the featureless monadicity of a vaguess. Dichotomies begin the making of the distinctions that are the basis of any intelligibility. And then hierarchies are the terminus. They are intelligible order fully expressed.

My belief is that consciousness develops alongside improving language. — Tim3003

This is correct. Self-awareness is a linguistic habit that evolves culturally. We are socially constructed as individual beings. Check out Vygotskian psychology or symbolic interactionism for the arguments.

So this is something that is not widely believed or appreciated. Yet within social psychology, it just pretty obvious.

Because it oversimplifies things to simple binary states, which you of all people know that's not how nature operates in practice. (Human nature). — Posty McPostface

Modelling is about maximising simplicity. You've been going on about bipolarity. Why do you think logic relies on reducing possibilities to crisply counterfactual choices?

It's basic information theory. If you want to separate signal from noise, you arrive at the ultimate simplicity of a binary code. To model an analog world, you find that a digital representation is the most universal machinery.

And speaking of human nature, the nervous system itself is a hierarchy of dichotomies. That is how we process reality. It is the optimal solution that evolution uncovered.

Our brain is divided according to the unity of opposites. Physically - in the design of its pathways - it separates the what from the where, the focus from the fringe, the active from the passive, the event from the context, the novel from the familiar.

So it is nuts to complain about over-simplifying. The world is complex. The job of a model is to simplify it in the most effective possible manner. Nothing can be simpler than breaking things down into a choice of two options - two options that meet the logical requirement of being mutually exclusive AND jointly exhaustive.

So your choices are either a) no analysis at all, or b) founding analysis on its optimal case. Philosophy and logic arose when folk realised that was the game. The principle of bivalence or bipolarity is the method that yields the most information about reality. That's a mathematically proven theorem. Ask Shannon.

I recommend reading the article at the SEP. It is a good survey of the various flavors of SR, and identifies objections to each. — Relativist

But it is also pretty dismissive of all those objections. It shows that they are ill-founded. Or that atomism makes its own even wilder leaps of faith in claiming the brute existence of relata while trying also to deny the causal reality of constraining structure.

So my OP points out that OSR can't simply ignore the problem of relata. However it can work towards a completely minimalist version of relata as "mere accidents" - meaningless fluctuation.

And as SEP says, that is how some in OSR see it too:

In any case, eliminativism does not require that there be relations without relata, just that the relata not be individuals. French and Krause (2006) argue that quantum particles and spacetime points are not individuals but that they are objects in a minimal sense, and they develop a non-classical logic according to which such non-individual objects can be the values of first-order variables, but ones for which the law of identity, ‘for all x, x is identical to x’, does not hold (but neither does ‘x is not identical to x’).

So you don't require the brute existence of primitive individuals to stand as the relata. All you require is some principle of individuation - a constraint on random accidents or chaotic variety such as for there to be something "there" to get the game of stable existence going.

My takeaway is that there's more reason than ever to be agnostic to ontologies. — Relativist

But why take that view when mathematical physics has added so much to what we know about fundamental reality? Why would you suddenly lose faith in metaphysics right at the point science is delivering so many answers?

You seem to agree with Ontic Structuralism, but why Realism? it's an obvious truism that all we experience is our experience. Then why make up a Realist metaphysics? I suggest that what makes sense is Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism. — Michael Ossipoff

Well, I do take reality seriously. And so that motivates a concern to arrive at its best model. Idealism doesn't make any sense. It doesn't address the central fact of experience ... which is that it seems divided into a part that is recalcitrant world for some reason.

So as I say, I already accept it is about our pragmatic models of something that actually needs explaining. Just saying "everything is experience" explains neither the "we" that is doing the experiencing, nor the "world" that resists our wishes.

Dichotomistic thinking is the bane of philosophy. — Posty McPostface

What makes you say that? Is this a prejudice you can support? Why would you disparage the ability to discover unity in opposites?

But, what if an agreement is of higher value than truth itself? Is that a problematic position to hold? — Posty McPostface

So what are your grounds for agreement being of higher value - in the context of worthwhile philosophical debate?

As I said, I would have no problem with Rogerian reasoning in a context where conflict resolution might be the goal.

And really, if you think about it, it would be odd if you objected to my point that dichotomies reduce philosophical conflicts to their fewest number of possibilities. If you boil the choices down to two mutually opposing/jointly exhaustive alternatives, you have already agreed on the most important thing.

Well, I do philosophy, not physics. — Metaphysician Undercover

So given this thread is about ontic structural realism, it may not be the discussion for you.

Does that sound overly simplistic? — Posty McPostface

If there is nothing much in particular at stake, then we can all gather around the campfire and sing Kumbaya. Differences of opinion can be shown to be ignorable accidents - a reflection of other essentially random points of view - and nothing more.

But there is a reason why philosophy of any depth finds itself polorised. The way to get to the bottom of things is to find the two reciprocal extremes that form the equally "true" limits on possibility.

It is the dichotomy itself which is the fundamental truth of any sufficiently deep inquiry, in other words.

If you say reality is discrete, then the best matching truth to oppose that is its precise inverse - the claim that reality is continuous. Then having identified the possible limits that must bound the issue in question, you have actually arrived at the issue that matters. And you can see that happy agreement then has to exist with the dynamic spectrum of possibilities now properly outlined. You can share the same metaphysical frame while also adopting for some reason some particular, purpose-suited, point of view.

The success of philosophy has been all about outlining the intelligible limits of Being. Through dichotomies, we agree to the reference frame for a productive discussion. Both horns of the dilemma are the truth in that sense.

But just to seek agreement - promoting a simplistic tolerance of "other viewpoints" - shouldn't be the main way of progressing philosophy.

Sure, that is the right attitude to take when you realise that nothing fundamental is actually at stake. If it doesn't make a difference that you believe X and they believe Y, then why not just spend time in another person's shoes. That is its own useful exercise.

However philosophy is dialectical for a good reason. What you have to see past is the division to the unity of opposites that is actually being uncovered when fundamental inquiry is doing its job.

...in between are flavors of the ontic that still believe relations must have relata. — Relativist

Yep. The Ted Sider paper references some of these. So my point is that structural realism is either guilty as charged - it fudges the issue on relata. Or as Sider wants to argue, it is left with some pretty unappealing answers - unappealing as they boil down to some kind of standard, if mumbled, materialism.

So my approach is to take relata seriously, but take them to what would be the other extreme for the materialist. Instead of relata being the fundamentally definite and individuated, I would make them the fundamentally indefinite and vague. I would reduce the material aspect of the story to mere fluctuation or accident. That then lets structuralism come in and claim responsibility for all the resulting organisation of the meaningless mess it got presented with.

So you can claim the relata precede the relations. But the relata then have no kind of stable identity that could dignify the claim that they "exist" in a way that "precedes". There are in fact no relata before the formative hand of the relations arrive to constrain things to the degree there now seem to be relata to pick out.

Even if you're right that "structural realism has to be the fundamentally correct ontology" rather than just the right epistemic attitude, it remains to be seen if the eliminativist version will blow away the others. — Relativist

Yes. As I say, a monistic approach based on relations is no better than a monistic approach based on relata. When faced with a chicken and egg dichotomy like this, the proper resolution is not to try to win by eliminating one or other half of the dyad but instead, accept that the bigger story is the one of a triadic relation. Each half of the equation becomes now the other's cause.

The question is what does that then actually mean in terms of the metaphysics. My argument is that we have to reconceive the material half of the equation in a way such that it is the precise opposite of how materiality is normally conceived.

(And that way, structural realism does win! :) )

but it's blatantly contradictory to say that there is a change which isn't a change — Metaphysician Undercover

If you bothered to read with care, you would see the claim is that some changes make a difference and others don't. And if you understood physics, you would know that Newtonian mechanics was founded on the fact. Inertial freedoms exist because nature believes in the symmetries of translation and rotation. Spinning on the spot is the kind of change that doesn't make a difference to the structure of an inertial frame.

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