Both QM and semiosis see information as part of reality. So Whiteheadian talk about particle "experience" - conscious or non-conscious - is dualistically incoherent. But the information theoretic turn in fundamental physics is founded on a measurable dualism between information storage and entropy production. It is proper theory.

http://www.informationphilosopher.com/introduction/physics/interpretation/

So are you saying there is a fact of the matter that an electron or photon is alive or dead?

With a cat, the behaviour tends to be reasonably different. We can tell. And we even have adequate physicalist explanations for why some cats are alive, other cats can be regarded as dead.

But can any Whitehead supporter explain how the posit of "non-conscious experience" makes a damn bit of different to existing physicalist understanding of the behaviour of fundamental particles. What does it change about the predictions we might make concerning what we may observe?

As a posit, the "experience" of a particle would be purely epiphenomenal on the account being given. Which is kind of ironic given the kind of anti-bifurcation rhetoric being flung about.

But Schroedinger’s cat’s electrons and photons? Not so much?

When two particles interact they "experience" each other, and the physical description of that interaction is only a partial description of what actually goes on. — prothero

Again, still no explanation of what non conscious experience is in this physicalist description of nature such that it makes a damn difference to anything consciously experienced as an observable.

information theory?

You seem to be descending into dualistic thinking here. — Janus

Or I am ascending towards the triadic sign relation view. As usual.

For Whitehead the sum of the experiences (the interpretations) just is the world — Janus

Great. So if you can sum experience, it must be measurable. Now getting back to electrons and photons, how does that cash out then? When one electron experiences another one, what is the maths involved? How does your gay talk about experiencing change a damn thing about how physics already talks about how electrons act?

So collapse is basically measurement or interaction to a specific value or location. Precisely how that happens is not something explained by either physics or metaphysics. — prothero

So are you suggesting experience completes the physics here - supplying the collapse? Or does experience resemble the incompleteness of a quantum "event" in lack that bit of the physics?

...the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon. — Segall

So here we have a clear statement of qualia realism. And yet what colour is a colourblind person truly seeing when s/he confuses red and green? Is it red? Is it green? In what sense is it real?

This kind of nonsense falls at the first hurdle.

The only valid method of explanation from Whitehead’s point of view is the reverse of the materialist’s, an explanation which traces the genesis of abstractions back to the concrete consciousness and perceptual presences from which they emerged. — Segall

So the bifurcation of nature is precisely the effort to separate the subjective from the objective or the observer from the observed or the object from its place in nature (relationships and interactions). — prothero

So Segall says Whitehead's intent is to collapse the abstract scientific account back to a subjective experiential account. And you say his intent is to separate those two accounts.

I still think Whitehead makes the mistake of trying to collapse the scientific (or semiotic) account and so talk right past the observer issue. What QM needs to complete it is an abstract model that includes the observer along with the observables - which is what it has got, in practice, with thermal decoherence being welded on to the quantum mechanics now.

Experience in various forms and degrees is as much a part of nature as are the physical or material aspects of nature and in trying to declare one “real” and the other an epiphenomena, one denies the unified character of the process of reality (nature). — prothero

And so back to a measurable definition of experience here - which is still MIA.

When two particles interact they "experience" — prothero

So are you only willing to speak analogously here or are you willing to make some actual ontic claim?

Why would we call it inter-experiencing and not inter-acting?

Action, as a materialist notion, is well-defined. It can be cashed out in observables. We can measure a difference in terms of a state of motion.

But how is experience to be defined in terms of measurements? As a theoretical construct, how does it make a predictable difference to what can be observed?

Experience is just a vague and meaningless term in this discussion so far.

Experience is defined by Whitehead as any event or process. — Janus

Yep. Completely meaningless then as it makes no specific ontic commitment. It is so undefined it can seem to cover any eventuality. As a theoretical construct, something that is always present and not changing anything, it is "not even wrong". It fails the test for even being an ontic commitment - an assertion capable of being false.

Whitehead, I believe, would say the sign is experienced by the interpretant; it prehends the sign. — Janus

But where does Whitehead leave room for the mediating thing of a sign in his scheme? He starts by rejecting that basic division into a world and its interpretation - a modelling relation. So the third thing of a mediating sign is hardly going to come into the story.

As the Whitehead expert, you can explain how it does, and why then prehension could be understood in terms of sign interpretation.

Prehend for Peirce would be the conceptual seizing or grasping of the perceptual sign as standing in a habitual pragmatic relation with the noumenal. But where is Whitehead making the same kind of claim? Can you cite anything that would clear this up and support your view?

For Whitehead only the tiniest fraction of what is experienced is consciously experienced. — Janus

Feel free to define experience then.

f you have evidence that Whitehead believed consciousness caused quantum collapse you can present it but I believe that is a misstatement or misunderstanding. — prothero

I am responding to your characterisation here. You said they resembled quantum events. But there are no events without collapse. So there remains something missing in the metaphysical tale.

The fundamental units in science are roughly quantum particles which are perhaps better termed quantum events and the nature of quantum events is open to both scientific and philosophical debate but it seems that perhaps particles only exist when they interact and that the properties of such "events or particles" are really relationships to other particles and events which is not to dissimilar to whiteheads presentation of "actual occasions". — prothero

That's fine. But that also hinges on collapse realism. Which is also fine. But now - like Whitehead - you owe an account of how collapse happens.

In my view, Whitehead goes astray from the off because he rejects the kind of bifurcation of nature that would distinguish between observers and observables.

Physicalism has the problem of solving the collapse issue. And a semiotic approach - one that agrees to a semiotic bifurcation in terms of information and entropy - would be the one I would take. But you can't talk about a process approach "resembling quantum ontology" without addressing the fact that quantum mechanics really challenges Whitehead's basic assumption of "no bifurcation" - the basic theme of pan-psychic thinking.

Observers and observables have to be separated somehow. They can't be co-located as if there were no basic separation. The issue is then how to achieve that without lapsing into Cartesian dualism.

In many respects Whiteheads actual occasions resemble quantum events. — prothero

Except that QM doesn't model the collapse to anything as concrete as an occasion. It only models the time evolution of a set of wavefunction probabilities. And this depends on an a-temporal or non-local view of reality.

So the effort here is to imagine the kind of collapse or condensation which could magic atomistic durations into existence, like droplets forming in a vague misty backdrop.

In the end both space-time consists of quanta and the argument is whether such space time quanta are purely material or do they also have experiential qualities in prehending the past and possibilities from the future? — prothero

Again, Whitehead's metaphysics grew out of that collapse issue. If you believe that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the quantum potential into a classical atomistic actuality, then you might want to go his pan-psychic route.

But who still believes that consciousness is responsible for collapsing the wavefunction?

What is the 'atom' of a process, its smallest existent? (I don't wanna say smallest particle, because this implies substance.) Does this question even make sense in pp'ical terms? — rachMiel

It makes sense to me to think of it in terms of smallest form or structure. So you could follow the condensed matter view that a particle is a quasiparticle or soliton. That is, it is like a knot or frustration in the fabric of existence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasiparticle
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soliton

1. If time is a process, any slice of it (duration) would have a beginning, middle, and end. Likewise, each of these would have a beginning, middle, and end. And so on, fractal-like, ad infinitum. Yes? — rachMiel

Space and time are ways in our modelling to give change a static backdrop against which it can be measured ... as change. So we have to have something that stands still as the way we make it clear that something else is moving or evolving.

Thus in process thinking, we have to realise the nature of the trick we are playing. We invent a notion of a fixed spacetime backdrop so as to dramatise the fact that there are then energetic changes taking place within that steady reference frame.

That non-process approach works really well. But ultimately, it is a physical fiction. As general relativity and quantum physics eventually show. What is fixed and unchanging is simply a point of view.

The next step after that - which gets you into a proper process story - then generalise the (semiotic) notion of a point of view so that change is basic, but a recognisable structure of reality still emerges.

At root, this is just relativity - the light-cone holographic structure of the universe. All action is scaled by c. And so two points in space share the same moment in time only if they are in communication and are integrated or coherent in the sense of being in a cause and effect relation to each other.

If the Sun went supernova now, you wouldn't know about it for another 8.5 minutes. There would be no disturbance in the light or gravity you think it is pumping out until news of that arrived at lightspeed.

So c sets a basic scale of integration when it comes to the physical definition of a temporal duration or moment. Nothing has really changed until two points in space have had enough time to be energetically connected ... in a way that could cause a difference.

Lightspeed is the very fastest rate of temporal integration. But the relaxation times of more complex physical processes could be much slower. How long does it take for a mountain range to be thrust up by the collision of tectonic plates? Geology would have its own really slow scale at which the network of forces and masses involved reached system-wide state of equilibration after any perturbation. A moment of geological time would take forever to unfold compared to the simplest level of universal equilibration - the establishing of regions of space coherently connected in terms of photons and gravity.

So a process view would see temporal duration as being about the time it takes for a spatially distributed action to unfold and arrive at some coherent balance. And with relativity, a fundamental rate for this integrative action was established by saying nothing can happen faster than c. And then we know that any process involving mass happens at sub-light integration rates. So the "cogent moment" for material systems can be way slower in terms of the rates at which a process of equilibration unfolds, and much smaller in the distances that are being integrated over.

So it is all kind of fractal. It has scale symmetry. But there is a fundamental relativistic baseline set by c.

In terms of your question, there would be a thinnest kind of slice - the c-scaled slice, or the lightcone story. Then in terms of other material processes, they would all have much fatter "moments". They take longer, and span less distance, to achieve the cogency that defines a duration - the time it takes to achieve a stable change, a change stable enough to be fixed as a fact of history, a constraint on future freedoms.

2. If time is a process, does it imply that space is also a process? — rachMiel

Space, time and energy together make up the process. So space is an aspect of the process. We want to get away from the simple Newtonian separation of the three, even if the three are quite separated seeming in our current state of the Universe - where it is so cold and expanded that it is pretty close to its static Heat Death condition.

One way to think about space then would be as the opposite of time. And if time is how we think of integration, then space is how we think of differentiation. If two points are distinct and at a distance from each other, then that is why it is going to take time for them to become connected and in touch with each other in an energetic or communicative sense.

For there to be an issue with integration, then there has to be differentiation. And vice versa. So really the two are the two sides of the same coin. That is why relativity can speak of spacetime.

Time then gains a direction once we stir thermodynamics into the pot. Entropy breaks the symmetry of relativistic spacetime and so gives us a direction that points to the past and a direction that points to the future. The past is all the spatial extent that is now temporally integrated. The future is all that extent yet to be integrated.

So a process view would understand reality as a web of relations not a collection of bits. And then we would see structure arise as the result of fundamental contrasts in those relations. You would have action going in two directions at the same time - integration and differentiation. And that in turn would map to what the "collection of bits" ontology has been calling temporal duration and spatial separation.

A process view would have to change its very jargon to escape the familiar clutches of the mechanical view of nature. So asking what "space" or "time" are, is still to be thinking that the holism of the process view ought to reduce to the mechanicalism of classical physics.

Now mechanics is great. It is a really efficient for calculating the state of the world - in the near Heat Death state that defines our particular moment in Cosmic history.

But a process view is about a metaphysics of relations. It is about seeing nature in terms of its coherent structuring forms rather than as an atomistic collection of parts ... floating in a supposedly a-causal void.

how can something that emerges also 'impose itself'? — Wayfarer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh–Bénard_convection

And neo-Aristotelianism? The supposed subject of your OP. What does that conclude?

What? You need to be scandalised all over again by the notion of a cosmic Heat Death?

You've been reminded as you asked. Now squeal in horror.

Thanks, really what I was asking after was what is the core difference (if any) between "material" and "efficient" cause. The classical difference would be the material is bronze and the efficient is how the artisan uses his tools to fashions it into a statue. — JupiterJess

The difference in my view boils down to the distinction between the general and the particular. So talk of material is talk of a general stuff with some suitable generic property. And then efficient cause focuses on a particular local triggering action. The properties of that stuff are being employed at a particular place and moment in time to achieve some substantial change.

So for construction to happen, you need some stable stuff with stable properties. And then you need whatever it is that starts the atomistic building up in a particulate, localised, step-by-step fashion.

You can see the presumption is the parts have inherent stability in terms of possessing some set of properties. And so that is what makes construction even a coherent possibility. You can add bricks and eventually you have a wall.

Downward constraint, by contrast, presumes a chaos or foment that needs to be contained to create any localised stability. There are no parts to build a wall unless there is a context to ensure the parts retain their shape. It would be like trying to construct with rectangles of sloppy mud. The construction would flow and loose its shape unless something is constantly holding the mud solid.

Also, and this fits more with the discussion with this thread and is not really addressed to you, but if the top-down constraints , formal causes do not exist when they are not in use how is it they can be repeated at future points? I've read some Aristotleian realism and it doesn't seem to come up with an adequate solution. For example if "redness" can be manifested multiple times, then when there are no red things can it occur again at a future point? — JupiterJess

Yeah, this is a real problem. But it is solved by understanding constraint to take hierarchical form. And this is what we see with biology - where there is the information contained in the genes to specify the symmetry-breakings which channel growth down regulated pathways, so that the form of a particular species is repeatedly produced.

So this is the genus~species approach - a subsumptive hierarchy. You start with the most general constraints, then add further constraints as needed to increase the specificity of the final outcome. You keep narrowing the definition of what is acceptable. And eventually you are producing the near identical.

Redness makes for a bad example as redness is just an interpretation the primate brain makes of the world to help it distinguish the boundaries of objects. It is a processing shortcut for brains which need to do rapid object identification. A red apple is going to pop-out against a backdrop of green foliage.

But consider convergent evolution - the way wolf-life, cat-like, tree-like, etc, animals appear to fill the niches in ecosystem. The same kind of body shapes appear despite disconnected evolutionary stories. This is an example of how environmental constraints are imposing a structural demand on material plasticity. The world just grows to fill the slots that are defined for it.

So reality as a whole has this weight of hierarchically organised constraints. And then material possibility flows so as to fill the structure created.

Even at a quantum physics level, if you set up a particular kind of experimental apparatus, then events will fill that context you have created. You have made it possible for them to happen due to the imposition of an intelligible structure . But quantum physics exposes the fact that the material principle also has to do its part of flowing to fill that framework. If an experimenter does not completely determine the path of an event, then the event will fill that larger, more relaxed, space of what is possible. It will live in that looser, less specified, world.

QM is really very hylomorphic. One of the themes of the book mentioned in the OP.

But not all causation is physical, that's the point with free will, intention, it's non-physical causation. And, the need for a cause of physical existence is what drives the assumption of God. The cause of physical existence cannot be something physical, therefore it is necessary to assume a non-physical cause. It is different to say that all effects are physical than to say that all causes are physical. And this is one of the important aspects of Aristotle's philosophy, that he provides real grounding for non-physical causes. — Metaphysician Undercover

But your Aristotelian holism falters as you are deliberately arguing towards some version consistent with a transcendent theism.

It is true that material/efficient cause can't be itself the cause of what it is. But it doesn't help for you to assert that the cause of material/efficient cause is now something unphysical ... like a divine first cause ... which is really just another version of material/efficient cause, just removed to some place off stage and given a mind that just wants things, and whatever it wants, it gets.

So your transcendent theism claims the existence of a non-physical material/efficient cause, and heads off into complete incoherence as a result.

A properly physicalist understanding of Aristotle's four causes naturalism would see formal/final cause itself as the cause of material/efficient cause. So the cause of the material principle would be immanent - a self-determination that suppresses any uncertainty or indeterminacy when it comes to material action happening with definite constructive direction.

Formal/final cause explains the nature of material/efficient cause in direct fashion. If you give action a definite shape, then it acts with definite direction.

And then, in reciprocal or complementary fashion, formal/final cause gets explained by the fact that there is material/efficient cause constructing "its" kind of world.

So each aspect of causality is broadly responsible for the origination of its "other". And that is how actuality can arise from potentiality in a self-determining fashion. A strongly causal world is what emerges as a process of development, a process of establishing regular habits.

if you have to be more analytic about it how would you frame the four causes? — JupiterJess

I'm not sure what particular clarification you seek here. But I suppose one concern is to reduce the four to the two in some proper fashion. So my systems view of causality would see things in terms of the dichotomy of downward acting constraints in interaction with bottom-up acting construction. You have two contrasting species of action - holistic constraint and atomistic construction. The downward constraints then embody Aristotle's formal and final causes. And the upward construction embodies his material and efficient causes.

So top-down, an intelligible structure is being imposed on nature in emergent fashion. There is a necessity for global regularity to appear during development simply because for everything to be part of the same world, it has to cohere in some fashion. It has to harmonise and rub away all the rough edges.

Then bottom-up, there has to be the something "material" which is getting structured - shaped to fit or regularised. So that material principle also has an emergent/developmental story. It begins as merely undirected or chaotic action. Not actually constructive or stable at all. But constraint limits it, gives it the regularity of a shape that fits, one that has had all the rough edges rubbed away. And by the end, it becomes something atomistically regular.

This is like the grains of sand making a beach. A lot of rough rock gets ground to a smooth paste - spherical particles of a standard size. And then that emergent atomistic regularity can act as a source of constructive action. A beach becomes something that is simply a collection of parts. We arrive at the "atoms in a void" view of reality where everything seems just some accidental arrangement of indistinguishable particles.

So I see Aristotle's four causes as dividing causality up. The principle division is the one between causality as constraint or limit, and causality as construction or atomistic building. My systems view put them together in a developmental scheme. The whole shapes its parts and the parts (re)construct the whole that makes them. You get a neat self-sustaining story of a world rebuilding itself in a way that works for it.

Reductionist physicalism then tends to drop the constraints aspect of the deal. It just starts with the shaped parts and tries to model everything in terms of bottom-up construction.

But anyway, the basic division is into two types of causality - formal constraint and material construction. And Aristotle's four causes then breaks this down with another set of dichotomies. It splits constraint into formal and final cause, construction into material and efficient cause.

Is this helpful or needed? Well they do seem to map to a useful temporal distinction - the synchronic vs the diachronic.

Efficient cause speaks to a triggering material push in the past. Finality speaks to an ultimate constraining goal to be arrived at in the future. Formal and material cause are then creatures of the present - the structure and the matter that are actualising some state of substantial being right now.

My question to you is how this attempt to derive a scientific TOE differs from your conception of metaphysics. — Janus

As epistemology, it doesn't much. But then I am a naturalist in my ontic expectations. So science is simply carrying forward that general project.

And I am happy to be explicit that I have ruled out the supernatural or the dualistic in taking that view. They are no longer avenues of inquiry worth exploring if metaphysics is understood as an inquiry into Being.

Now you may take a different view. Fine. I simply ask, on what grounds? Convince me with an argument.

My conception of metaphysics is that it consists in producing a picture of what entities there are, what the most fundamental or necessary entities are, and how those entities are related to one another. — Janus

Again, all well and good. But my specific argument here is that a mathematical language producing a mathematical picture is the gold standard. Ordinary language lacks precision.

(And rather than entities, I would be thinking more in process terms. So it would be about reality's fundamental or necessary structures.)

So, you have broadly, theistic and atheistic metaphysics. In theistic metaphysical systems God is posited as being necessary to ground the possibility of the intelligibility of nature (as well as freedom, rationality and so on, but I think intelligibility is really the most salient point in such positions). — Janus

Yep. And so I would have no problem in ruling out theistic systems on the grounds they are "not even wrong". If they purport to be theories of nature, yet don't cash out in empirical consequences for nature, then they aren't actually theories of nature. We can't find evidence for them in the actual world.

But I would also note that I find a lot of theistic scholarship very useful because it does tend towards the holistic systems view. It rejects the mechanicalism of reductionist science - the Scientism that leads to plenty of quite terrible metaphysics.

And theistic metaphysicians often arrive at rather immanent and pantheistic notions of the divine. Like Peirce, they have to say to the degree they are believers, their God is very different from the conventional concept.

So I think that this is just a case that regardless of your starting point - religious or scientific - all paths have to converge on the kind of holistic metaphysical naturalism expressed by Aristotle, for instance.

You mentioned Deleuze. Even he is converging on the same essential metaphysical story from his PoMo beginnings. You can discern the same triadic structure of being, despite plenty of missteps along the way.

As I remarked to @Dfpolis, now that I look again at Plato through the lens of neo-Platonism, he too looks to be converging more than diverging on the same essential understanding of the structure of being.

So - for me - the degree of convergence from all directions is a sign that all parties wind up feeling the same elephant. A lot of peripheral nonsense falls to the side as the central structure of existence begins to emerge.

And then fundamental physics is arriving at the same party now, with its strong and testable mathematical models. So I don't know why anyone would waste too much energy on fighting for the right to free poetical metaphysical speculation. No one is stopping you. But I'd rather be where the action is myself.

In Husserlian terms, it means that a lived, as opposed to an idealized, moment is both retentive and protentive. It carries the past that in-forms it, into the future that is expected in it, and which it will, in turn, in-form. — Janus

Nice.

Can an individual 'occasion' of process philosophy be said to actually exist?
Or is an individual occasion like the present moment, of zero duration, therefore not actually existent? — rachMiel

Not speaking for Whitehead, but for process thinking in general, the problem for the process view is how does "atomistic" individuation arise when everything is united by a common flow? So an "occasion" would be like a whorl in a stream - a feature that arises as its own momentary thing while also being part of a greater temporalised flow.

The whorl thus exists both as an expression of its context, and also marked by its momentary departure from the over-riding character of that context. A whorl is a rotation that fleetingly betrays the possibility of other directions of flow and so marks itself out even as it is borne off downstream.

So as @Janus says, an occasion is its own temporal duration - a localised past, present and future. From the point of view of the river, the whorl is a general kind of regularity that is expected to break out in unpredictable fashion. So the general history of the river is a constraint that makes whorls likely to erupt at "any time" in its future. And at any present moment, there will be whorls that have appeared and shortly to depart.

But within the whorl itself, it is characterised by itself being a departure from that prevailing general flow. The whorl opens up the possibility of a brief spin heading upstream. It itself constrains the water flow locally, and any objects bobbing about on the surface, to its quick little rotation. Locally, the past/present/future is set up with its own fleetingly distinctive sense of direction.

Thus, in the physicalist reading of process philosophy, you have a general character to time as @Janus outlines. And it can sound pretty psychological. History locks in a set of expectations as far as the present is concerned. Time itself is thus a process. It has an internal story arc rather than just being a collection of structureless instances.

So time has a general global flow like a river. And that in turn can become particularised by local events that are marked out by being fleeting twists in a different direction. Local moments of temporal structure can arise that go in a different, more personal-seeming and individualistic, direction.

The general flow had mostly suppressed those other directions. But locally, they can erupt as constraint can never completely eliminate freedom. And what cannot be stopped is something bound to be expressed. Like the whorls that spot a stream.

you might want o read my article, "A New Reading of Aristotle's Hyle," — Dfpolis

Thanks for that. An excellent paper. It shows that Aristotle's view evolved a lot. But also I would say that Plato's view evolved too, and is far from the usual caricature version, especially if you give credence to the unwritten doctrines and Pythagorean system of the one and the indefinite dyad - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_unwritten_doctrines

So it is tempting to do the usual simplifying thing of setting up the master and the pupil as saying the opposite things, and only one of them able to be right. The historical reality looks more like that they both got the essential duality of a formal principle and a material principle as the causal arche. And they both played around in various fashions to get this schema to fit the metaphysics.

But the modern mind - so accustomed to ontological atomism - is no longer alert to the subtlety of the metaphysical answer both look to be evolving towards. As described for instance in Kolb's - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236756740_Pythagoras_Bound_Limit_and_Unlimited_in_Plato%27s_Philebus

In brief, I take a constraints~freedom approach to the issue.

The material principle is that of an Apeiron or the Indefinite - chaotic action. Everything wants to happen in an unstable and directionless fashion. So "prime matter" would be action without shape or memory. It is an active principle, but not one that results in anything with the definiteness of individuation and actuality.

The formal principle is then the order that regulates this chaos of fluctuation. Tames it, channels it, gives it structure and intent. It limits and imposes a unity. It is also an active principle in a sense. But active in imposing a form, a limitation, that keeps all the action organised and heading in a shared direction that is intelligible and so persists.

So the material principle is a formless energy wanting to go off in every possible direction and amounting to nothing in particular. The formal principle is an intelligible order that limits all this wildness so that it is channeled into some generalised unified direction or purpose. And then out of that arises the actuality of substantial being, the multiplicity of the accidental individuals.

So in a developmental sense, it all begins with a raw energetic potential, that becomes constrained by some intelligible organisation, and then the result is a fracturing of that into an abundance of actualised substantial beings. The vague is regulated by the general to produce the particular.

It is this step from the simplistically dual to the complexly triadic which eludes most tellings of hylomorphism. But Aristotle and Plato both look to be groping towards that actually holistic or systematic view of metaphysics.

The doctrine of the One and the Indefinite Dyad in the Philebus does that in helping to focus on the developmental nature of the Forms. It allows for a hierarchy of form which begin vague and loose, then become more definite and specified. It also allows substantial being to incorporate accidents during the history of its development or individuation.

So the simple "stamp and sealing wax" Platonism is easy to criticise. It makes the material principle simply an already existent passive stuff. For a laugh, you could even call it fascist in its implication that the world always takes a faulty impression of the Ideal stamp.

But Platonism was never that simple. It evolved - even if we can only reconstruct that evolution in guesswork fashion. And a sympathetic reading would arrive at a constraints-based logic where form is a developmental outcome - the imposition of habits of regularity on a chaos of possibility, which thus always emerges as substantial actuality that is a blend of the necessary and the accidental.

Constraint only has to limit the accidents of individuation to the degree they actually matter. That itself is the other face of finality. So the variety to be found in the substantial particulars is not evidence of imperfection. It is literally that which doesn't matter in terms of some generalised purpose.

Rather than fascism, it is more like democracy. Some general rule of law or bill of rights is in play to constrain a citizenship to fundamental level of unity. And then within that scope, there is a matching absolute freedom of action. All the particular ways of being that are possible are not only allowed, they will almost certainly get expressed. Multiplicity is guaranteed by the fact that constraint ain't control.

Anyway, the point is that your paper argues for a more complex Aristotle. The same case can be made for Plato. And both of them seem to have a lot more in common than modern ontological atomism could imagine. They were grasping in the direction of this basically triadic metaphysical scheme I would suggest.

Picking up on these comments from your paper...

What of prime matter? We must remember that there is no indeterminate potency in Aristotle. Hyle is always the dynamics to become some particular thing. But Aristotle does recognize a hierarchy of hyle: the chest is wooden, the wood is earthen, and perhaps the earth is fiery. If no further analysis is possible (and that point must come because an infinite regress is impossible) then that unanalyzable hyle is a kind of primary matter.

From the logical point of view, the traditional doctrine of prima materia makes no sense. How can one have a concept of a principle which, by hypothesis, has no intelligibility? If all intelligibility is contained in form, matter must be unintelligible.

...I would say that you have a problem in that your reading of hyle leads you to suggest it contains form within it in some sense. You appear to be angling at a (theistic) vitalism where you say "Hyle, on the other hand, bears within itself the life-force ready burst into leaf."

Now definitely I agree that hyle is an active principle. But now I would triadically break it down so that we have the three things of a Vagueness, Apeiron or Firstness that is the ur-potential that gets the game started. And the Material and the Formal are the two complementary limits of being that emerge into definiteness in the co-evolutionary fashion described in the Philebus.

So - as you do seem to say - hyle evolves. It becomes a bunch of particular substrates, like gold or wood. And before that, it is four more generalised substrates - fire, air, water and earth. And even physics recognises that categorisation as the four states of material order - plasma, gas, liquid and solid. But we want to go back another step towards whatever is prime. And that is when it all turns tricky as it is so hard to leave behind some notion of the material principle as already some kind of definite stuff - like a space-filling, but formless and passive, chora.

What resolves the issue is that primal hyle is just action without unity. And so, more subtly, it is the possibility of intelligibility itself. It is the bare possibility of instantiating a dichotomy, a difference that makes a difference. So it is some kind of ability to remember, to encode, to record, to establish a history that speaks to a common direction.

A material fluctuation in itself has no meaning or identity. It lacks a context that makes it anything at all. So more primal is that it could be an action with a direction. It is the formal possibility of that dichotomy that marks the beginning of "stuff".

It is a hard point of view to articulate. But the Philebus looks to be saying something like that. The material and formal principle are always co-dependent from the point of their ultimate origination. They have to arise together for there to be the start of anything definitely and historically actual. And so all that "exists" at the start is the potential for that dichotomy.

It puzzles me as to why you seem to have such a passion for mischaracterizing what I have said. — Janus

I am simply prodding you to make explicit your position. It ain't crystal clear.

I distinguish science from metaphysics and each of them from poetry on the grounds that they are three different disciplines — Janus

And I dispute that being a hard difference. My position is that they are all united as forms of semiotic discourse about nature. They are united by the same method of reasoned inquiry - which includes measurement, or however else we term the empirical aspect of the deal.

I can't see any way in which metaphysical speculation is constrained by empirical measurement, much less necessarily so constrained. — Janus

All reasoned inquiry is constrained by that if it aims at "truth" or "knowledge".

As I explained, speculation can be free. Indeed, it is a necessity that all reasoned inquiry makes a creative leap to get started. So metaphysics has that special quality of being the speculative breeding ground for useful new ideas. But then those are ideas to be tested. Otherwise, they are not really very useful - even if they might provide light entertainment or cod support for social constructs.

As to whether metaphysical speculation should be, or necessarily is, constrained by "aesthetic experience", I'm not sure what you would mean by that. — Janus

Nor did I say it. I did say that there is an "aesthetic" dimension to mathematical-level thought in terms of being able to contemplate abstract dynamical structure in a sensory-feeling kind of way. Patterns composed of numbers can come alive and reveal their necessary form.

...and by good sense; meaning being in accordance with the generally evident logic of our thinking about the broadest categories of meaning; the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, freedom and determinism, similarity and difference, change and identity, being and becoming and so on. One term of each of those dichotomies seems to be involved in the ordinary empirical world of sense experience, and the other not. — Janus

I would say that each dichotomy - to the extent it is metaphysically right - manages to define the polar limits of possible sense experience.

Jointly, they set up the opposing bounds of what exists. And then that ensures every possible particular is to be found within those bounds.

So they are the limits that define the spectrum. And that is where the measurability begins. With black and white defined in some absolute fashion, the spectrum in-between can be divided into its shades of gray,

A point to note about Peirce is that he was heavily influenced by Schiller. So the poetic or aesthetic is important as the "other" to any rationalism or logicism.

That is why his triadic semiotics is a metaphysics which is large enough to be totalising. Look closely and your own concerns are found to be bound up within his system of reasoning.

So when it comes to any exercise in human rationality - such as scientific inquiry - it has to start somewhere. It has to begin in what Peirce called musement or some kind of free imaginative play of thought and interest. What he called abduction - the creative leap towards fruitful hypothesis.

So the mechanical nature of rational or logical thought itself demands the "other" that can animate it. To the degree that we refine the one - some rigid method - we have to also develop the other that complements it. We have to have that aesthetic or poetic element to our thinking which gives us something meaningful as an idea to explore by way of that method.

Now I don't think that Peirce properly clarified this aspect of his system. But it is key. To the degree that you have the one - a mechanistically constraining logic - you need just as developed a version of its other, some kind of basic freely associative imagination which plays about in ways to breed fruitful speculative lines of thought.

Like Schiller (and even Kant) then, Peirce saw creativity and spontaneity as being as basic as constraint or logical habits of thought. You couldn't get anywhere in thought without both.

So what I criticise is where the two aspects of a developed mind are treated as representing a disconnected duality - as in rationality and irrationality, or science and poetry. The Peircean view is that the two are the complementary aspects of any general process of reasoned inquiry.

Likewise, another dualism regularly forced on the discussion is the one of rationality vs empiricism. You try to split off science from metaphysics on the grounds that metaphysics is so free, it doesn't need to be constrained by empirical measurement, possibly not even by aesthetic experience - as somehow mind or spirit is all about some absolute freedom ... getting us back to that Cartesian dualism that semiosis is all about getting past.

This is a wrong move. Again, dialectics requires that to go in one direction, the other direction must be real also. So all thought - that has any shape at all - is a fruitful mix of idea and impression, concept and percept, theory and measurement. Whether you are a poet or a scientist, there is this same dialectic of generals and particulars in play. All thought is rational~empirical in structure. If you were born lacking senses, there just wouldn't be any thinking.

That is why I highlight the special nature of scientific experience. It asks us to feel and sense the world in terms of numbers or logical quantities - information. So it is a completion of the development of a logical form of discourse. A mathematical-strength conception of nature quite naturally depends on a mathematical-strength perception of nature.

Now the objection is that this is too mechanical. It winds up seeing nature as a machine. And that can be true if you have a reduced model of causality - the model that disposes of formal/final cause.

But philosophical naturalism embraces all four Aristotelian causes in a holistic systems logic. And Peircean metaphysics takes that forward by seeing holism in a process/developmental light. Then finishing the job, making explicit a dualism of information and matter which allows a physicalism which is divided by a fundamental difference without being dualistically disconnected. Information and matter become formally reciprocal, the inverse of each other.

Anyway, it is perfectly possible to take a fully holistic position as a scientist. And pragmatically - as Peirce emphasises with abduction - the aesthetic and the poetic are fully included in that as musement or creative spontaneity, a fundamental animating ingredient of rationally-constrained inquiry.

Then science does cash out a mathematical conception of reality in a mathematical perception of reality - experience constrained to the act of reading numbers off dials. But there is then the other side that results from this. Scientific level musement. The ability to enjoy a poetic or aesthetic level play in the new realm that is the mathematico-logical reality. The land of abstract dynamical structure.

Platonism does give an image of this realm as being frozen and rigid. But the Peircean view would be of a realm that is dynamical and developmental. A realm of processes of growth and purpose.

So all the way down, the Peircean view is trying to make sense of the whole of things in a naturalistic fashion. In laying the foundations for modern rationalism, it was trying to do justice to the creativity and spontaneity that makes nature a self-organising process and not some Cartesian machine, dualistically divided within its own house.

As a result Plato's "matter" (chora) is an entirely different concept from Aristotle's "matter" (hyle). The fact that both Greek terms are translated by the English "matter" only adds to the confusion. — Dfpolis

That question has always interested me. What is your understanding of the difference?

Metaphysics: needs to be logically consistent but does not need to be based on empirical evidence (not sure if it even can be). — Janus

If it is about the big old world out there, then sure it needs to be empirically based. What we believe would be constrained by the evidence of experience.

Science just ups the game by shifting from feelings and sensations to acts of measurement - reading numbers off dials.

And that makes all the difference. It lifts us out of our embodied biology and into a new realm of pure abstracted reasoning.

But if you want to say that metaphysics can be based on feelings and sensations rather than acts of measurements that are themselves part of the conceptual apparatus, then go for it. Rhyme away.

As I tire of saying metaphysics is neither poetry nor science; it is in between. — Janus

Whatever that means.

Bugger modesty. If that were truly in effect, you wouldn't be championing your laissez faire pluralism against my totalising unity of thought. You have an axe to grind like anyone else.

So I can see your game plan is to reduce rational method to just another form of semiosis - like poetry or art. In the end, all epistemologies are equal, none intrinsically better than any other, etc. We've been around the house on that enough.

And I've already laid out the reason why one stands at a higher level than the other. One is merely the view from social linguistics, the other is what has developed as a result of stumbling into a mathematico-logical modelling of objective reality. You failed to dent that argument.

a poetic 'truth as revelation' to evoke insight into the human existential situation, then to contest it "at a meta level' would be to commit a category error. — Janus

Agreed. Objective umwelts and cultural unwelts are different levels of semiosis. It would be a category error to use social ideas as the basis of completely open and rational metaphysical inquiry. The human sphere exists within the realm of nature and not the other way around.

But to say that these perspectives 'explain' religion, again, can't be anything other than reductionist, as it is saying that the rationale is other than, and less than, what its devotees understand it to be. — Wayfarer

There has to be a difference between doing religion and explaining religion. Explaining is the meta story, the third person objective story.

So sure. If the devotees pretend to have some meta story of why they do what they do, then that is contestable at a meta level.

It is the rules of that contest which you now need to justify.

I say the meta method has to be a process of rational inquiry. And that simply is what metaphysics is historically. It cashes out as Peirce's method of abduction/deduction/inductive confirmation. And science confirms the universal value of this kind of system of reason wedded to a process of measurement. We believe x because it is probably true in terms of the signs that we take as providing adequate confirmation of what we deduced from some set of axioms.

Now you may have some other method for doing metaphysics. But can you spell out how that works exactly. Then we can do some meta-metaphysics to see why your method might have any actual merit.

So we can be certain of our intentions? — Banno

If we can doubt them, then we can certainly be relatively certain. Epistemology as usual boils down to pragmatics. Doubt and belief ground each other in logically dichotomous fashion.

Them Ruskies are cunning. First it was always the left-wing - trade unions and students - as the way to undermine the UK establishment in the Cold War years. Now the right-wing seems the best way to affect domestic politics.

The wind of reform used to blow from the globalising international direction. Now it blows from the populist nationalist direction. Russia is set up to exploit the wind whichever way it blows.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_2016_Brexit_referendum
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/nato-uncovers-russian-plot-spark-12044455
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-plot-against-the-west-vladimir-putin-donald-trump-europe/
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/07/12/how-the-bbc-lost-the-plot-on-brexit/

Two other stories deepen the impression of Putin exploiting useful right-wing idiots as part of his long-term geopolitical cold war.

First, just as Trump's attempts to break up Nato are a puzzle, so was Trump's attack on the Iran nuclear deal. So who wins if Iran is constrained on its oil exports? Well Russia of course.

When President Donald Trump declared in May that he was withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, he vowed to reimpose some of “the strongest sanctions that we’ve ever put on a country.” Among the biggest targets: Iran’s booming oil fields, an economic engine that fuels Europe and Asia with 4 million barrels of crude a day. But as Tehran and other world leaders recoiled, one country celebrated: Russia.

https://www.newsweek.com/2018/06/08/irans-loss-will-be-putins-unexpected-present-us-sanctions-drive-oil-prices-948173.html

And then there is Putin's engineering of Brexit, another intelligence coup exploiting the gullible right.

In Britain, billionaire businessman Arron Banks financed the Brexit referendum with the largest donation in British history. Initially, he copped to having one meeting with Russian officials. After the Guardian obtained secret documents blowing up this claim, he admitted there were actually three meetings. Now the Times has even more information, and Banks concedes the number of covert meetings has grown to four.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/the-british-russia-collusion-scandal-is-breaking-wide-open.html

As background on Putin, this is interesting. He was always much more the outsider than I realised. It may have taken Western intelligence some time to wake up to the extent of Putin as a threat.

Putin was an outsider even to Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika (restructuring or transformation). He was posted in Dresden during the critical period when Gorbachev took the helm of the USSR.

Shevtsova and many others cautioned in 1999 against seeing Putin "as some kind of superman" based on his previous, and brief, position as head of the FSB, the successor to the KGB. They concluded that "he [Putin] will be greatly limited in what he is able to do."

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/02/how-the-1980s-explains-vladimir-putin/273135/

And the American people are happy to have as an inept a deal-maker as Trump locked up in cosy one-on-ones with this guy?

because the idea that mind has a task is bunk. — Banno

Brains are optional? They don't evolve for a reason?

Sounds legit.

No, it's a pattern of events, occurrences, observed appearances. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, there might be a bunch of events. But you are talking about a pattern. And to even think there is a pattern is to hypothesise the existence of some set of relations, some explanatory form of connection sufficient to produce an observed regularity. A generic cause, in short.

...don't think Russia entrapped Trump, he's a willing participant. — Metaphysician Undercover

That is the point. The trap had to be so clever that Trump sees himself as its central willing player.

So it could be that Trump just consistently has adopted the Russian geopolitical agenda as his own. He had a nice time being wined and dined in Moscow. They seemed keen for him to build a Trump tower there. Gorbachev and Perestroika were still in play. It wouldn't have been so treasonous to see Russia as being a future democratic ally and lucrative business partner.

It could just be that Trump was a very impressionable person. He received warm hospitality. He was encouraged that he could be a larger political voice. Being Trump, that was all he needed to imagine a tilt at being president.

It was a co-incidence that his first policy statements reflected Russian wishes - quite reasonable wishes - for a breaking down of Nato and a united Europe as a precursor to a geopolitics which would give the new Russia some growing room. Also, if the US could wind back its international defence presence generally, that would be comradely too.

Trump was grasping for something interesting to say. So he parroted what he had heard conversationally over a few vodkas and strippers a few months earlier.

1986 — Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev announces perestroika, economic restructuring

1986 — Soviet Ambassador invites Trump on all-expenses-paid trip to Soviet Union.  Trump had lunch with Soviet Ambassador Yuri Dubinin. At the lunch, Dubinin told Trump that the ambassador’s daughter “adored” Trump Tower. Dubinin proposed that Trump build a similar tower in the Soviet Union. Soviet officials then visited Trump in New York, inviting Trump on an all-expenses-paid trip.

July 1987 — Trump’s first trip to Soviet Union. He told reporters that he’d read Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika to prepare for the trip. Trump told reporters that he was invited to go to Moscow for a possible plan to build a hotel across from the Kremlin.

Sept 1987 — Trump drops first hints that he’s considering a run for U.S. presidency.   He spends $94,801 to buy full-page ads in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. The ads read, “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.” And that America “should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves.” The advertisement also criticized American foreign policy “as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

Dec 1987 — Trump talks with Gorbachev at State Department lunch . Gorbachev asked Trump to build a hotel in Moscow, Trump told reporters.

https://medium.com/@abbievansickle/timeline-of-trumps-relationship-to-russia-5e78c7e7f480

All very innocent really. But why now, when he is actually president and horrifying his own hawkish generals and intelligence chiefs, is he persisting with this anti-Nato line?

In July 2013, Trump visited Moscow again. If the Russians did not have a back-channel relationship or compromising file on Trump 30 years ago, they very likely obtained one then.

The leaked conversation also revealed something else about the Republican Party: Putin had, by then, made very few American allies. Among elected officials, Trump and Rohrabacher stood alone in their sympathy for Russian positions. Trump had drawn a few anomalously pro-Russian advisers into his inner circle, but by early 2017, Manafort had been disgraced and Flynn forced to resign, and Page had no chance of being confirmed for any Cabinet position. Trump’s foreign-policy advisers mostly had traditionally hawkish views on Russia, with the partial exception of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, the former Exxon CEO who had won a Russian Order of Friendship award for his cooperation in the oil business. (Romney had been Trump’s initial choice for that position, The New Yorker reported, but Steele, in a separate dossier with a “senior Russian official” as its source, said that Russia used “unspecified channels” to influence the decision.)

Now that he’s in office, Trump’s ties to Russia have attracted close scrutiny, and he has found his room to maneuver with Putin sharply constrained by his party. In early 2017, Congress passed sanctions to retaliate against Russia’s election attack. Trump lobbied to weaken them, and when they passed by vetoproof supermajorities, he was reportedly “apoplectic” and took four days to agree to sign the bill even knowing he couldn’t block it. After their passage, Trump has failed to enforce the sanctions as directed.

Trump also moved to return to Russia a diplomatic compound that had been taken by the Obama administration; announced that he and Putin had “discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to jointly guard against “election hacking”; and congratulated the Russian strongman for winning reelection, despite being handed a card before the call warning: “Do not congratulate.”

More recently, as Trump has slipped the fetters that shackled him in his first year in office, his growing confidence and independence have been expressed in a series of notably Russophilic moves. He has defied efforts by the leaders of Germany, France, Britain, and Canada to placate him, opening a deep rift with American allies. He announced that Russia should be allowed back into the G7, from which it had been expelled after invading Ukraine and seizing Crimea. Trump later explained that Russia had been expelled because “President Obama didn’t like [Putin]” and also because “President Obama lost Crimea, just so you understand. It’s his fault — yeah, it’s his fault.”

During the conference, Trump told Western leaders that Crimea rightfully belongs to Russia because most of its people speak Russian. In private remarks, he implored French president Emmanuel Macron to leave the European Union, promising a better deal. Trump also told fellow leaders “NATO is as bad as NAFTA” — reserving what for Trump counts as the most severe kind of insult to describe America’s closest military alliance. At a rally in North Dakota last month, he echoed this language: “Sometimes our worst enemies are our so-called friends or allies, right?”

Last summer, Putin suggested to Trump that the U.S. stop having joint military exercises with South Korea. Trump’s advisers, worried the concession would upset American allies, talked him out of the idea temporarily, but, without warning his aides, he offered it up in negotiations with Kim Jong-un. Again confounding his advisers, he has decided to arrange a one-on-one summit with Putin later this month, beginning with a meeting between the two heads of state during which no advisers will be present.

“There’s no stopping him,” a senior administration official complained to Susan Glasser at The New Yorker. “He’s going to do it. He wants to have a meeting with Putin, so he’s going to have a meeting with Putin.”

Even though the 2018 version of Trump is more independent and authentic, he still has advisers pushing for and designing the thrusts of Trumpian populism. Peter Navarro and Wilbur Ross are steering him toward a trade war; Stephen Miller, John Kelly, and Jeff Sessions have encouraged his immigration restrictionism. But who is bending the president’s ear to split the Western alliance and placate Russia?

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html

So yes. It all could have started in the most untreasonable fashion. Russia was on the way to becoming a friend in 1987. It was a valid question why US tax dollars would be needed to create a ring of Nato and US military bases around the now broken up and broken down USSR. Regan had won the Cold War. Time for the conciliation. One can see that the only thing truly of interest to Trump was a golden phallus powering into the Moscow skyline with his name written in giant capitals.

But now, there is a question of why he would continue to push the same line in a way that today has real geopolitical consequences in a time when it is clear that Russia under Putin is a very different animal?

What's in it for Trump? Does he still just want a Moscow Trump tower? Is he just loyal to old friends? Who can explain the psychology of taking a line that must offend his own US fan-base - assuming of course they see that collapsing Nato and fracturing Europe is not in the US self-interest on any count.

Why would you need to know anything about the causes of the patterns? — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean, the pattern of the causes?

Let's get real. What do you even mean by "cause" here? What is your model of "a cause" - the "true" one?

The OP started as a discussion of the Aristotelian model of how to break down the holism of substantial actuality in some generically useful fashion. That is what leads towards the necessity of four "becauses". And as I've often mentioned, that reduces to a general model of holism based on an systems-style interaction between top-down acting constraints, or boundary conditions, and bottom-up constructing degrees of freedom, or initial conditions. A causal story composed of generals and particulars.

So we can contrast, in a broad sense, between an atomistic model of causality and a more properly holistic representation of reality. One model is larger and more comprehensive than the other. The other is matchingly more compact and less work.

Where do you think your "true story on causality" fits into this metaphysical analysis of nature's underlying causal structure?

The "underlying causal machinery" if that's what you want to call it, is irrelevant to the predictive capacity, which is what is valued. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you can't model the world predictively unless you are modelling the causes of its material patterns. That is what the mathematico-logical framework of a theory does. It describes a formal structure of entailment.

The pattern - as a prediction of a future state - is generated from some algorithm. You plug in one set of values representing a state of the world and crank out another set of values representing it at some other moment in time.

Or more holistically - as with Lagrangian mechanics and other models that apply global constraints - you can plug in the start and the finish so as to predict the most optimal path that then will connect them.

Of course it is always "just a model" even when modelling the causality. And I've already discussed why mechanical notions of causality finally break down with QM. We don't have some fully generic model of holistic causality as yet. The maths is still a scientific work in progress.

If it is true that Russia managed to entrap Trump as described, then this raises new psychological questions.

How could such a reckless narcissist become so accepting of his captivity? What trick of his psychology are the intelligence agencies managing to exploit?

It is of course important that the suborning started back in 1987 when Trump was cultivated as a useful foreign idiot. Flattery and financial advantage, coupled to Trump's lack of any moral centre, would have made peddling the Russian worldview a costless psychological exercise. It wouldn't conflict with the narcissism as it would be just Trump agreeing with his new friendly pals.

But come the run for President, the entanglements had grown wide and deep. Presumably his case officers did play Trump skillfully - never threatening him with what they could expose, but keeping him focused on what he could gain. In particular, the attention and adulation he craved. Trump would accept anything - breaking up Nato, letting Russia reclaim its territories - for one more Trumpian rally before an adoring, affirming crowd. It is not as if he was emotionally connected to the geopolitical realities of the world in anyway. He lacks the capacity to feel anything about the importance of that.

And now the Russian project is to get Trump re-elected. That raises the stakes in so many ways. How far are they willing to push given the level of scrutiny that exists. Is the US body politic so decapitated that it can't react even as it is being gnawed away?

And if all this is actually true - the most spectacular of conspiracy theories - then what does that say about the usual conspiracy theories that would see Trump being taken out by an "unfortunate accident" - an in-house coup? Are the US intelligence chiefs trusting to due process - Mueller doing his job before real damage gets done?

This is going to be such a terrific story when the truth of it is finally told!

Yes, science is "in part, descriptive", but the trend in modern science, due to the way that scientific projects are funded, is toward usefulness, and that is mostly found in predictive capacity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your emphasis is back to front. Science begins in observational description so as to proceed to the modelling that cashes out in predictions. The end goal is not to fit all observations to some descriptive system or other. It is to find the pattern, the formal organisation, that gives the clue as to the causal machinery. Once you can model that underlying causal machinery, you are in business. You can generate predictions.

So science does start at the surface - the observational phase which is simply trying to discern some pattern to events. Then the modelling tries to find the deeper mechanism that could generate such a pattern of events.

You are confusing yourself with your attempts to oppose truth and utility - the usual idealist vs realist trope. Pragmatism has moved beyond that.

Great. You do things your way and I'll do them mine. We don't even have to compare outcomes.

Correct. I don't construe him as having acted as a Russian agent. — raza

Have you read this? It’s going to be bigger than Nixon or Clinton when the tale is finally told.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html