What analysis of an organism doesn't start with concept of homeostasis? — frank

Exactly. And homeostasis is about having the goal of regulating dynamical instabilities. So that is a very organic conception of nature - to be able to impose stability on instability in pursuit of a purpose.

You can have the defining desire of maintaining a "constant state" only because that state is in fact absent without the appropriate constraints being applied.

So now we are clearly starting to talk the language of organisms rather than machines. Some form of long-run intentionality has already come into play. And at the same time, some presumption about simple atomistic states of affairs - a state as a snapshot of all that exists during some "instant" - is making its exit.

Talk about "states" is Newtonian physics-speak. It presumes localised linearity and determinism. But good, you agree that talk about the mind is already talk about holism. We are really talking about states of intentionality. We are talking about sticking determinedly, in a fairly straight line, to goals that have a long-run stability. Or better yet, that produce that long-run stability.

That is why we can see the OP has already made the wrong move in accepting the Newtonian physics-speak notion of a state when it asks such questions as: "Is it just experiencing Mental phenomena such as beliefs, desires, intentions , and sensations?"

Now we have goal-directedness being spoken of as some kind of object floating in some kind of space. It is a mental thing, a lump with properties, that is to be found wandering about in some stray corner of this great place called "experience".

That is why I suggest that the OP ought first define what is meant here by state. If meaning is use, it is clear that the only definition the OP has in mind is some drab and lifeless notion derived from Newtonian mechanics and computer science.

The discussion shows that to talk about "states" introduces the false step right at the start. It is an information processing term. One derived from a mechanical approach to dynamics. And so it imports all the metaphysical deficiencies of that particular language game (even if it might also have some advantages, such as a familiarity and simplicity).

Is the brain a machine, a computer - a finite state automaton?

If you are happy to think so, then sure, the OP probably seems to make sense to you. You can spend forever trying to make the organismic facts fit that weird thing of "a state".

OK, but our subject is the question of the existence, or non existence of the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover

That might be your subject. And the only way you understand any subject.

Clearly you are saying here, that "discrete" and "continuous" refer to two "reciprocally define extremes", and that they are "limits to existence". But now, when you apply the container/contents analogy, continuity is represented by "the container" and is called "the constraints", which represents the limits, and "contents" represents the discrete. — Metaphysician Undercover

What's so difficult? Being reciprocal is why the discrete and the continuous would map naturally to a hierarchical story of the smallest vs the largest. That is the nature of the relation being describe. The bigger one gets, the smaller the other gets.

A point can't contain the line, but it can compose the line in being its contents. And likewise, a line can't be the contents of a point, but it can certainly contain points.

How can the infinite actually constrain anything" "Infinite" means the exact opposite, unconstrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

I thought it meant the space within which every possible number exists in bounded fashion.

The second question is what type of existence does the discrete have now? — Metaphysician Undercover

It is a limit on any continuity - the least amount of continuity imaginable. Just as continuity is whatever is the least unbroken state of affairs that you can imagine.

So to the degree you can define the one, you can define the other.

You are simply showing that the two can't in fact be disentangled with arbitrary completeness. Just as my developmental approach concludes.

As I say, your non-process view of metaphysics keeps crashing into paradoxes because it believes in ontological absolutes rather than a logic of relations. You keep demanding to be shown something fixed and concrete that answers to your mechanistic conviction that reality has to begin in counterfactual definiteness, rather than definiteness being a relative outcome.

'm sure that there are many nuances in the maths that I am glossing here, but does that capture the basic idea? — Esse Quam Videri

That’s it.

In case you are interested, there is this nice paper on the Metaphysics of the Principle of Least Action, Vladislav Terekhovich - https://arxiv.org/pdf/1511.03429.pdf

And I highlighted the "mysteriousness" of the PLA in this discussion - https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/178536

Also I follow Stan Salthe on how to keep telos unmystical within philosophical naturalism - http://www.nbi.dk/natphil/salthe/Purpose_In_Nature.pdf

This naturalistic approach recognises nested grades of purpose. So you have {tendencies {functions {purposes}}} as the physical, biological and then psychological levels of telos. The prime mover at a generalised physical level is simply a global tendency, nothing grander. More organised states of purpose then evolve locally within organisms as higher levels of systemhood.

Do you understand the neurological difference between attentional processes and habitual or automatic ones? Is there something further to be explained after those?

Moving along, you assume "contents" as well as the container, something which is contained by the discrete and the continuous. — Metaphysician Undercover

I chose to talk about the same general distinction in another way so as to broaden the view you were taking. So try to understand it that way rather than setting things up for further confusion.

To talk of contents and container is to talk about the systems view of physicalism. Everything that exists is the product of the process that is the formation of a global structure of constraints, a state of systemhood, which results - matchingly - in some locally emergent degrees of freedom.

So the container is emergent - some set of global boundary conditions or "habits" which stand for the system's defining final/formal cause. And the contents are emergent too - as the now definite degrees of freedom that stand for the system's material/effective cause.

Unpredictability regarding the contents has been stripped away by the nature of the container, resulting in a set of contents that is now definite to the degree that its material possibilities have been sharply restricted.

The discrete and the continuous do map to this view. Continuity becomes the global container - the constraints. And discreteness describes the now locally countable, because crisply individuated, degrees of freedom that are being "held" within the container.

Now, the real existence of contents and container are spoken of in terms of "degree". — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Degree of development. In the beginning, when everything is just vague, containers and contents would be hard to distinguish apart. A clear difference is what then emerges.

Could you say that this thing is 50% contents, and 50% container (discrete and continuous), making it 100% real or existent? Could a thing have 80% real existence, being 40% contents and 40% container? — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, I probably made a mistake given you such a concrete image to latch onto. I aimed to give you a stepping stone out of your worldview. You are not using it to avoid actually have to step out of that worldview.

Think of a cloud. As an object, it only has a vague boundary and so only vague contents. It is kind of contained, and kind of substantial. Fly into one and it goes all misty, damp, cold. But neither its form nor its material is particularly definite - certainly relative to our usual notion of a substantial object.

Or to give another example where the active nature of containment might be clearer, think of a tornado. It is a vortex that entrains all its contents with a direction. Stuff gets sucked into its shape. It become composed of a spinning air mass, plus anything else light enough to be swept along.

But it is hard to put a finger on a sharp boundary to that vortex. It is a container, a constrainer, with a vague outline. And its contents are also in a vague state. There is a general sort of directionality to all the parts, but also a lot of individual chaos still.

I'm afraid your philosophy is nihilistic — Wayfarer

And I’m afraid that is bollocks. My entropic approach takes meaning so seriously that it can measure it. Yours is theistic wishful handwaving.

Yes, this makes sense, except that I think the final cause Wayfarer is looking for must, according to him, lie outside (be transcendent to) the system, which really makes no sense. So, I tend to think that Buddhist philosophy and Hegelian dialectics are not in any sense philosophies of transcendence in the way Wayfarer seem to conceive it, quite the opposite in fact. — Janus

Correct.

This is a really interesting point. At the heat death, thermally speaking, there would be the ultimate degree of order, which is changelessness. But in terms of the spatial distribution of (dead, cold) matter it would be the ultimate disorder or lack of order. I've long thought that is a kind of weird paradox about entropy. Wayfarer also refers to it with his "I'm not sure which". — Janus

This is a very subtle technical point in cosmology. The total entropy content of a “co-moving” region of space never changes. If the expansion and cooling of the universe is a smooth unfolding that maintains its original equilibrium, then the entropy count never changes despite all that cooling and expanding. The change is adibiatic.

So while the Heat Death is often characterised as a maximum entropy state, on a larger view, nothing entropically changes. All that happens is that those degrees of freedom - the initial burst of radiation considered as a bunch of rays - are more stretched out and so as cold as possible. But unless there is something to compare their temperature to, there is no real difference to speak of. The total number is the same.

That again is why we need yet a further dimension of reality - the vague~crisp - to measure the transition from the Big Bang to the Heat Death. The beginning would be seen as a state of maximum indeterminism of those degrees of freedom, those radiation particles, and the end would see them have a maximally determinate existence. They would be in their simplest energy state in the flattest possible world.

Note that at the Heat Death, I am presuming all the cold matter has been fizzled back to radiation again by being first swept up by blackholes which then decay to release all remaining matter back to this simplest possible state.

Although it also works that at the end of time, space gets so expanded that every individual particle disappear over an event horizon. So even if things get down to a dust of protons, there would eventually be just a single proton inside any light cone region of the universe.

Also note that this particular scenario - where there is an actual Heat Death at some point in an eternal future - depends on the dark energy or cosmological constant that provides a faint continuing accelerative push. And making sense of that negentropic force, when talking about the cosmological entropy balance, is yet another headache in getting the sums to come out right.

But anyway, the Heat Death is usually described in very simple terms as a maximum entropy state. That is only a very simple introductory idea. The discussion quickly gets metaphysical and dialectical after that.

not because it is not the case that some physicalists (such as apo) might understand entropy to be a kind of ultimate telos — Janus

On the contrary, i agree with Nietzsche that the demand for such an ultimate purpose is what leads to nihilism — Janus

I should mention that my physicalism is of the systems vairiety. So an imperative towards entropy is also matched by one towards negentropy. Thus nihilism is avoided by all things being dichotomies rather than monisms.

And so this is like the Buddhist notion of co-dependent arising. Or Hegelian dialectics.

Even finality is dualised in the sense that entropification take organisation. The Heat Death is a state of extreme order as much as extreme disorder. Everything becomes as much alike as possible.

So a proper Peircean view here is that the Cosmos describes a phase transition from absolute vagueness to absolute generality.

Entropy is a convenient local measure of something that seems to increase with time. But we could just as well measure this transition into a state of maximum generality by 1/entropy, or negentropy. The Heat Death is where change effectively ceases and spacetime finally achieves its flattest, most eternal, universal condition.

The problem is that you talk about the contents and the container as if they are separate things, — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. That is how you are talking about them. The way I would talk about them is relative to each other. So there would be a contents to the degree there is a container, and vice versa.

What is a state? First things first.

so my etiquette may not be up to snuff. — Esse Quam Videri

I wouldn’t worry about that.

Setting aside the question of anthropomorphism, does your system posit a "necessary" component that causally grounds the entire system? — Esse Quam Videri

The part played by a prime mover would be the thermodynamic imperative or least action principle.

Modern physics tells us that the finality guiding the Cosmos is a general imperative towards a flat and even balance - a Heat Death. So we can discern in that end the goal that grounds the existence of the Universe.

So the hylomorphic story speaks to some generalised motion that turns the heavens. But now it is about the slithering down an entropy gradient in the most direct way feasible.

This won’t make sense unless you are familiar with the physics of course. But yes, I am saying that there has to be some form of telos in play for existence to be called into being in an immanent fashion.

What bothers me, is that through your process philosophy, you have assigned to the limits (discrete and continuous) the status of not real, non-existent. But then you go ahead and talk about these limits as if they are somehow part of reality. You describe reality as being somehow forced to exist within these limits, yet the limits are said to be non-existent, not real. — Metaphysician Undercover

But in the process view, how would the contents be more real than their container?

So you are trying to impose your own non-process view on an understanding of process philosophy. And yes I agree, it doesn’t work. But that is now your problem.

You readily avoid the paradoxes by simply ignoring them. — Metaphysician Undercover

The paradoxes are a product of your metaphyics. So I can simply ignore them.

I’ve given the godless view quite a few time just in this thread. See the post just a few back on this page, for instance. Or on p2.

Basically I draw on CS Peirce for the broad metaphysics and a modern physical understanding of self organising systems (ie: systems science).

But anyway, to the degree that physical systems can self organise, and that this in turn is accounted for by an unavoidable mathematical logic, we have no need for any kind of god or supernatural/transcendent extras.

So if god exists, he is left with bugger all to do so far as existence is concerned. You could claim he could have made maths and logic come out differently. But there doesn’t seem any particular reason to believe that. And of course there is no evidence to suggest it. So why invoke something that makes no real causal difference?

That is, that there is an immanent 'logic' that math exhibits that is exactly parallel with the logic of, well, anything else. — StreetlightX

Heh, heh. After the post-structuralist revolt comes ontic structuralism again.

So you are arguing that neither, the continuous nor the discrete are real? They are ideals and reality stands in between. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well remember that here I’m using the conventional categories of Being rather than Becoming. So the discrete vs the continuous is talk about that which exists in static eternal fashion. This then creates the tension that bothers you - how can limits be part of what they bound if they are in fact the precise place where that internal bit ends and the external begins.

In my own preferred process metaphysics, the discrete and the continuous become a dialectics of developmental actions. So now you have the rather Hegelian opposition of differentiation and integration. Or individuation and generalisation.

And that active view, one that sees reality as fundamentally a flux with emergent regulation, would avoid the kind of hard edge paradox that your own non-process metaphysics tends to encounter at every turn.

The difficulty is in determining which aspects of reality are continuous and which are discrete, because to treat one as if it were the other is to err. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. But I am arguing that both are practical conceptions. When we speak of them, we are only pointing to the fact that reality must exist between these two reciprocally-defined extremes. Both represent the measurable limits to existence. And so existence itself has to be the bit that stands in-between.

That is why every actual thing we encounter in the real world is never quite perfect like the model would suggest. The continuous things are still always a little bit discrete. And the discrete things are always a little bit continuous. And indeed most things will be far more obviously a mixture of the two possibilities. They will not be clearly divided in either direction.

This is easy to see if we look at any actual natural feature - the outcome of a dissipative process - like rivers, mountain ranges, coastlines, clouds. They express a fractal balance that puts them somewhere exactly between the discrete and continuous - in a way we can now also measure in terms of fractal dimension, or the notion of scale symmetry.

So you are taking the view that the world actually exists as either continuous or discrete in some black and white, LEM-obeying, PNC-supporting, fashion.

I am saying, sure, that is a useful basic epistemic model to apply when measuring the world. Acts of measurement depend on having that commensurate yardstick. And the way we achieve formal closure to construct a "world of measurement" is by applying that dichotomising logic. We speak of the two extremes which mutually, reciprocally, ground each other as conceptions.

But then the idea of the discrete~continuous remains just a pragmatic conception - an idea robust enough to launch useful acts of measurement. And as our modelling of reality has progressed, we have arrived at "surprises" like fractal dimensionality and other non-linear maths. The discrete and the continuous can have some exact balance which itself becomes a useful metric. We can apply them to systems that energetically grow in that kind of endless budding fashion of natural dissipative systems.

Clouds look pretty vague. Where do they really stop or start? But fractal descriptions can employ the discrete and the continuous as themselves a ratio - a log/log formula of endless, but also recursive, growth. The open and the closed in the one trajectory.

So modelling can play any game it can invent. And some of those games are surprisingly effective - as if we are actually encountering reality in a totalising fashion at last.

Continuing that line of thought, I forgot to mention the importance of your employment of the notion of a convergence on a limit as the way to achieve effective closure - turn infinite openness into something with a now internally closed definition.

The pragmatic modelling relation approach says this is so because we accept eventually that difference cease to make a difference. The way we have everything set up means that we will reach a point where there is just no conceivable reason to care. The differences that speak to an incommensurability will cease to be measurable. They will be infinitesimal - the formal reciprocal of our notion of the infinite. And so they will themselves have become a symmetry, a blur of continuity, and no longer discrete countable entities. Modelling arrives at conceptions that are self-truncating - truncated by the a formalised principle of indifference that can achieve epistemic closure for a modeller.

That sounds pretty pragmatic then.

So when it comes to the issue of an incommensurate world - as the thing-in-itself never fully grasped - we do have to approach it via commensurable acts of measurement. The world might be analog or continuous (as our best characterisation, as the noumenal escapes complete description), but our embodied modelling relation with it demands that we measure it in a method that is digital or discrete.

That is, semiotically, we must form a mediating sign that allows us to most effectively relate to the thing - the world - we have every good reason to believe to be out there, existing in recalcitrant fashion as that which waits to be encountered.

So the world is an unbroken wholeness. And modelling relies on fragmenting that in a useful way so that its wholeness becomes a tractable construction of parts. Paradigms are where we have achieved an acceptable level of correspondence for the purpose in mind. A lot of important problems are being handled adequately. A lot of unimportant ones make no important difference, so can be swept under the carpet in respectable fashion.

There is no particular "disaster" about this. It is business as usual. That is how a modelling relation has to work for good reason.

So infinity, as a concept, stands for the principle of the open or the unlimited, the unbounded, the endless. And that contrasts with what the modelling mind seeks - closure. A digitised tale composed of signs, or acts of measurement, which has the formal property of being closed for efficient cause.

The thing-in-itself is still beyond any such actual disclosure to the modeller. But the modelling itself sets up this closed vs open ontology. It produces the concept of the infinite, the perfectly open, that must logically be a corollary of its own hunt for this perfect closure.

Thus I would agree the infinite doesn't exist in some Platonia of abstract objects. It very much arises as an opposition within modelling itself. We encounter it as we probe the nature of what we like to call the finite. The usual dialectical deal.

And here is where I would point out the advantage of going a step further - like Peirce.

The infinite and the finite, the open and the closed, are very crisp or determinate conceptions. And recognising that characteristic should draw attention to their own corollary - the vagueness that would need to stand opposed to this canonised crispness.

Vagueness becomes another useful mathematical/logical resource that can be brought into play with our encounters with number lines and other habitual signs of the infinite.

do you also admit the Aristotelean concept of substance? — Esse Quam Videri

Yes. Hylomorphism was a good early stab at understanding Being. The problem would be that there was a lot of scholastic rewriting of what it might mean. But the systems view would take it as being essentially right, once shorn of any transcendental or supernatural aspects.

So the significant feature would be the irreducibly triadic or hierarchical complexity of substantial being.

There is monism - everything is one kind of substance or principle, whether it be ultimately mind, matter, whatever.

Then there is dualism - we always seem to wind up needing two realms or two aspects to describe substantial existence.

And then there is the systems view of causality which says there must be a three way relation that together produces substantial existence.

So the Aristotelian story would say that triad is the one of prime matter, form, and the substantial being that emergently results in the middle of that. Substance is the meat in the sandwich.

Or another way of putting it is that we have a reality that is composed of the three things of contingency, actuality and necessity.

Prime matter is pure material contingency - not yet any particular matter with a shape and hence a character, just a generalised potency for action waiting to be formed. A kind of chaotic freedom.

Then necessity is the downward acting constraints, the order or mathematical regularity that chaos cannot escape in finding some route into actual substantial being.

We have physical models of this idea from modern self-organising dissipative structure theory -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh%E2%80%93B%C3%A9nard_convection

And so between the two - pure contingency and unavoidable regularity - we have something actual, something we call substantial because it has a stability and necessity imposed on its contingency and volatility, emerging into persistent existence.

Encounter in the POMO sense — fdrake

How is that defined then? Genuinely curious.

but the problems it addresses are those which were engendered by an encounter with infinite mathematical objects. — fdrake

So, Platonism? There is a realm of commensurate entities to be encountered?

Naturalism would be a distinctive position, especially in the systems science, hierarchy theory and theoretical biology tradition, where nature is understood in terms of all four Aristotelian causes being regarded as both real and immanent.

So the stress would be on the developmental and self organising nature of Nature. No outside hand delivering the formal and final causes. Yet also, formal and final cause are just as real as material and efficient cause. A system has real global constraints or habits that have evolved. Local chance or creative spontaneity is real too.

This contrasts with scientific reductionism that would treat any global order as mere appearance. Complication rather than the actual cohesive thing of structure and complexity.

And it contrasts with theism or Platonism where something supernaturally dualistic is needed to provide the world with its order and purpose.

So a general loose definition would say naturalism simply asserts everything that is real results immanently from materiality. And a stricter Aristotelian definition specifies this includes the downward constraints that give nature its form and purpose.

The delights and possibilities that have resulted have never been giddier. Hence FOMO and anxiety about losing it all becomes the pervasive mood. :razz:

Unreal. The posture I am calling you out on is the one where you want to act like you are doing me favours here. It is the posture you would call arrogance.

Stop being a time suck. If you want to engage in the ideas, get on with it. Drop the attitude that I need to be grateful for your favours in this regard.

I'll be very charitable and try to digest this behemoth and get back to you. — schopenhauer1

I'm pretty sure we had this whole semiotic conversation before. I would have posted the same links.

And why not drop all the posturing if you want to continue the conversation. Park your ego at the door.

...learning more about the ideas does not mean consenting with it or at least everything about it, obviously. — schopenhauer1

Why would you even feel the need to say that?

I agree that the individuated would seem to need to come from the unindividuated. — darthbarracuda

Right. So now there is a clear direction to concentrate on. Now next steps, avoiding false moves.

The basic, fundamental "theater" is a single unity. Lately, I prefer to simply call this the posteriority. There is the puppet theater, and while the illusion is that the puppets are operating on their own, we understand that there is something "behind", pulling the strings. — darthbarracuda

OK. I see a problem here in claiming posteriority pulls the strings. I would agree that all individuation might be contextual - shaped by constraints that are outside it, behind it, more fundamental than it.

But note how much ontic furniture creeps in with all those terms. They all conjure up some kind of concrete image of a relation which is dimensional or has an already present causal direction. And there is a confusion if all of them seem equally applicable, and none is being preferred.

So we have to start distinguishing the grades of contextuality that produce individuation. That itself must become a developmental story which begins with a general lack of individuated context.

To be outside is spatial context. To be before is temporal context. To be pulling the strings is energetic context. All these must be dissolved together to get closer to posteriority as a lack of either definite individuation OR definite context.

So posteriority has to be somehow a fundamental resource or potential - where individuation~context springs from - but not itself some kind of actuality with definite dimensions of structure or material.

There is the anterior appearance, and the posterior ... "whatever". — darthbarracuda

Yep. But is the anterior the "appearance" or the actuality? Again, the words really matter as they are how ontic commitments creep into the game.

Calling the posterior the "whatever" seems pretty good. It is going to be the unspeakable or ineffable to a large degree. We can point towards it as "something" that must have been "there" - after we have dissolved away both thingness and thereness in our metaphysical acid bath.

But "appearance" is again speaking to a type of relation that ought to be in question. Yes, our actuality must have emerged via development. But it might have been its own cause of that emergence too. The appearance might be the necessary state and not an accidental result of something else.

In space-time, we can always move beyond. There is always more. But the posteriority, by its nature, cannot be finite, there cannot be anything further behind it. It is where we move to once we move beyond all else, including space-time itself. It is infinite, but dimensionless. When we talk of nothing existing, we may say that there are zero entities. Yet zero is still a description, an entity. So paradoxically, one comes before zero. There is before there is not. — darthbarracuda

Good. @wellwisher's quantum symmetry breaking is on the right track. But all quantum mechanics then has to explain why its rules would apply. As regulatory facts or laws, they would need a developmental explanation for their existence as a structuring necessity of worlds in general.

So spacetime extent and energetic content - form and matter - must be folded back into each other to arrive back at posteriority. Jumping ahead, they must have the right kind of complementary or reciprocal nature to cancel each others individuated existence away.

The problem with the quantum fluctuation which naturally splits into matter and anti-matter is that this is both true, and yet does not account for the quantum laws themselves. Time, especially, is the dimension that stands completely outside the quantum laws as a presumed fixed backdrop. That is why quantum gravity theories - which would unite spacetime and energy density - are taking the view that time needs to be incorporated into a final theory as a further emergent feature of the deal.

So, as you say, we must arrive at some kind of big fat zero as the cosmic starting point. And then as quantum cosmology suggest, there is every indication that this does happen because everything that has emerged does all seem to cancel away in the required reciprocal fashion. Spacetime extent and energy content are opposites that cancel in some absolute fashion as we run the clock back to the Planck scale.

Our Universe is composed of the two orthogonal actions of expanding and cooling. Each is the cause of the other. And wind the clock back, they do mutually annihilate to create a "quantum foam". Curvature without connection. Action without direction. Fluctuation without bounds.

Or in relativistic terms - that see this from the point of view of classical mechanisms - you have a cosmic fabric composed of matched anomalies. You have a realm of blackholes and wormholes. Again curvature without connection, or curvature which makes connecting relations impossible. Space is curved like a blackhole everywhere - due to Plank-heat energy density. And time is likewise curved into thermally-closed loops. The Planck density bends time so it cannot even have a causal direction. Every event is its own beginning in being a wormhole.

So physics - by winding known physics backwards - actually tells us some pretty concrete things about the initial conditions. We can see what posteriority looks like from established science. Although we still need a theory of quantum gravity perhaps ... if the asymptotically safe version of quantum field theory ain't already enough. Well there is dark energy also to fold into the quantum story now. We know there are more ingredients to be explained. But we are closer perhaps than many believe to a reasonable view of how everything that actually observably exists is a spacetime extent and an energetic content that cancels exactly to nothing at the beginning.

But that is not then a "nothing" in the conventional sense of an absolute absence. A zero that exists. It has to be a nothingness that is the everythingness of the absolutely unindividuated - the kind of unactualised resource that is a grand symmetry just waiting to be broken in its possible complementary directions.

Is this fundamental reality what we mean when we refer to Being? Do entities Spinozistically participate in Being as clumps of transient solids participate in a non-Newtonian liquid? — darthbarracuda

Now you are offering an image of a quantum foam or geometrodynamical fluctuations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics

This is good. But the danger is again seeing it as a solidity, a state of materiality. There is some stuff that fluctuates, rather than fluctuation being the form that "stuffs" - that causes material being to be individuated as a substantial fact of a world.

Does the fluid take on the appearance of those little fluctuating shapes? Or do those shaped fluctuations create the appearance of there being some underlying fluid?

Which of these two intuitions are you reading into the same picture?

I'm addressing the confusions in your own questions.

So your phrasing focuses on individuation. And I agree that is key. So is individuation something that happens - is caused by - a process? And if so, doesn't that mean it emerges from - in some sense or other - the unindividuated?

Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed.

And now that constraints-based developmental view can be contrasted with its "other" that might seek to make existence something eternal and unchanging. We now switch to the materialistic view that asks what is the unchanging stuff or substance which underlies all the more superficial changing and transforming?

Again, the conversation is fleshing out. We are getting somewhere. We can contrast two approaches. We can see that the eternal material story has a problem if cosmology and science generally is telling us that everything develops into being out of some deeper undetermined or unindividuated condition. If there is actually a creation issue, then we encounter the problem that something can't come out of nothing. We are being pushed towards the other alternative. We need to explore that more seriously.

Of course if reality is uncreated and founded on material being - individuation is some kind of emergent and superficial illusion - then no problem for Existence. It just is as you are claiming it has no cause for its Being.

It is only because creation seems a hard fact - we have the Big Bang, as well as all the science saying we have developed and evolved too - that an uncreated story of Existence is not good enough.

So again, focus. Follow the logic of agreeing individuation is what it means to exist in a strong sense as far as you are concerned. Then begin to follow that trail backwards to where it rationally has to lead.

My complaint is that you aren't following either option with any rigour. You are mixing them up to perpetuate a state of confusion.

I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself. — darthbarracuda

Existence in the sense you are using it here means to be individuated. So you are asking what causes individuatation. What are the options you are then willing to entertain on that?

http://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

Modelling. Information. What I always tell you. Do you keep forgetting?

Look I know this applies to science; I already agreed with that. I just don't accept that it applies to philosophy — Janus

What about metaphysics? What about philosophical naturalism.

It doesn't matter to me if people want to go off in all sorts of esoteric directions. Whatever floats their boat. I'm happy to hear of their travels.

And yet also I assert my own right to follow a path. I'd like to know what our best unified understanding of reality looks like. And so that has resulted in a particular journey through science and philosophy.

If that offends your sense of where boundaries ought to be drawn, that's on you.

We do agree more than we disagree.. — schopenhauer1

Pfft.

but they may matter to different individuals in other ways. — Janus

Everyone has their umwelt. So the semiotic model applies across the board. That is what it says.

Just as it then defines science in terms of the opinions on which a community of reasoning inquirers would arrive at in settled fashion by the end.

You are just pretending to find fault with exactly what semiotics covers.

It seems that what else it is besides that is a matter of taste. — Janus

Why does it seem that?

I say it seems that the alternative you just specified is then ontological immanence. So thanks for agreeing.

Another problem I see for your position is the question as to whether nature really is exhaustively measurable, or even really measurable at all. — Janus

If it ain't measurable, then it would indeed be a "matter of taste". Pull your answer out of the hat and who cares.

[And must I repeat the same old things in every post? Does absolutely nothing ever sink in here?

It is the bleeding effing point of Peircean semiotics that measurement doesn't exhaust the thing-in-itself. Models never eliminate uncertainty. They simply constrain that uncertainty to the degree it pragmatically matters to form the signs we call our facts. Beyond that point it is just differences that don't make a difference.]

But you didn't address the other things in the post.. specifically baby and animal experiences, — schopenhauer1

I did.

"To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent."

But I can't be arsed to correct your every misrepresentation of what I have said in the past.

Peirce not accepted as THE theory but is overlayed on top of other ones post-facto, and the big glaring one, how is the "interpretant" magically turned into experience without the interpretant being experiential. — schopenhauer1

Pfft. I can't even be bothered with an arrogant retort.

You post links to stuff you haven't even viewed. Noted.

Then when the content is discussed, you change the subject. Noted.

I wouldn't call it arrogant. But I would call it something.

I am considering the notion that the so-called ‘firstness’ actually corresponds with, and manifests as, the first person perspective. — Wayfarer

It really doesn't. That has to arise as Thirdness. A meaningful perspective or point of view has to have the other thing of a stable context.

I can know that thing over there is a cat because I know it is not a dog, cow or rocket launcher.

Apperception is then me being able to categories that as a "cat". Whatever it is that it might be as the thing-in-itself, to me, I am reading that part of my world, my umwelt, as the sign of a cat. And so I will act towards it as if it is a cat until further notice.

And I think the reason Peirce didn't devote that much effort to that side of his work was because he was a working scientist and of a mainly pragmatic bent. — Wayfarer

Yeah. He had a foot in both camps. So you get to claim him for yourself and reject him also. You win both ways. Congrats.

Whether they say something interesting about the metaphysics of nature is akin to whether you find a particular poet interesting. — Janus

No it bloody isn't. Not if naturalism is the position that there is something more at stake here than merely "interest".

Some things are actually measurably the case because they are said from within frameworks that make predictions. These frameworks also have their internal logical coherence as well as their measurable external correspondence. So they are truth-apt in the two complementary senses needed. Rational and empirical.

So, Peirce allowed that there might be other kinds of 'truths'; aesthetic truths, spiritual truths, that the community of enquirers would never come to agree upon? — Janus

You can read him for yourself. It is an important question why - given all his monstrous system mongering - he said so little about the aesthetic. He wanted to. But found when he got to that bit, there wasn't much that was substantial enough to formalise.

Certainly he did make some gestures. He came up with a really toe-curling notion of "universal love" or agape. But Peirce scholars - after the first theistic flush of interest in his unpublished manuscripts - tend to note the way he falls silent at about the point Hegel and Kant start to turn up the deontological volume.

He of course made his famous "neglected argument" for God - or some kind of godhood that he said was quite unlike the regular notion - as an idea that can't be avoided by a community of reasoning inquirers, hence it must be the truth.

But I will say again, I don't find that bit convincing. However if you water down the conception of the divine enough - like Peirce had to do to make it consistent with his excellent understanding of evolutionary theory and developmental cosmology - then it is not as if there is some biblical difference from what I see as pure athetistic naturalism. In other forums, where many of the well-read Peirceans were theologians, I never got into any bitter arguments on that score. But those were also academic discussion boards of course.

So for example, Peirce picked out something essential about evolution and cosmology. He rejected the blind mechanical determinism of his day to insist that chance or spontaneity must be as basic to nature as their constraint. Darwinism, for example, could be only half the story as it could only remove variety from nature, not create it.

That was a pretty deep insight so early in the game for evolutionary theory. In the same way, what did quantum physics later come to tell us about the basic indeterminism of nature? Give old Charlie credit there. And what does a Peircean approach to inferential reasoning - where it all has to start with a creative abductive leap - have to tell us about the current dreams concerning machine intelligence?

So yeah. You can find a few false steps and clumsy moves. But I know the difference when someone can appreciate Peirce in his actual historical context.

If your question is whether a community of inquiry would settle on a truth about every possible aspect of life - even a taste in poetry or women - then of course the answer should be obvious. The actual metaphysical system divides the phenomenal into its necessities and its contingencies. Some things have a mathematical strength inevitability. Others - by definition - are just meaningless differences. That free spontaneity missing from the deterministic science you so deride, as if Peirce hadn't done that already.

So you might like detective novels, I might like something else. We live in societies that encourage quite a degree of personal choice - saying that the choices don't need to be determined because the resulting spontaneous variety is also an essential complementary part of society being a developing, evolving, system.

If you but understood Peirce, you would see how silly it is to try to lump him in with your scientistic foe. He explained why the free or accidental was also necessary, why the whole is a combo of the one and the many, why Newtonian determinism was already a scientific crock soon to be rewritten.

Whitehead withdrew from scientific contact with the world. He retreated into the merely poetic. Peirce took on scientism and so recovered philosophical naturalism for the modern era. But for various reasons - too difficult, too early, too cut off from the Continent's academic centres, not exactly great at greasing up his lesser contemporaries - he was very poorly understood at the time he was working all this out.

At least you admit it is a language game. — schopenhauer1

Yes, a semiotic one. And by that I mean a triadic Peircean one and not a dyadic Sassurean one.

How is this not a bias for mathematical totalizing? — schopenhauer1

It is that bias. That is its point.

Also, Whitehead's philosophy was very structured and internally coherent. — schopenhauer1

So is Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or Toy Story. That is a requirement of poetic worlds too. That is what makes them realities which our imaginations can inhabit.

You do have holes in your theory. You have newborns with no experiential qualities. You have animals with no experiential qualities. — schopenhauer1

Huh? To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent.

Despite your arrogance, condescension, and general uncharitableness, — schopenhauer1

Feel free to fuck off anytime you like.