Yeah. Just look at everything made impossible in just the past 50 years. Chaos theory. Complexity theory. Fractals. Dissipative structure theory. The list of advances in mathematical modelling that did not happen due to this “disaster” just goes on and on. ;)

Rosen’s point about incommensurability in all those fields still stands. But it was also overcoming the issue in a pragmatic fashion that has brought home the underlying trick involved.

Non linear maths demonstrated that measurement error is not necessarily linear. Indeed, as Rosen says, it is almost generically the case that it ain’t.

But rather than mathematical modelling just curling up and dying, it seems rather invigorated at finding ways to handle non linear measurement error.

You don’t understand Peircean triadicism.

Secondness is the particular. So it arises from firstness as brute reaction and then becomes a repeatable act of individuation after the thirdness of a global habit is formed.

So it starts out as accident. Then it becomes a habitual regularity - the reliable repetition of a difference.

And as to your dualistic moaning about the phenomenal being absent, I’ve just explained how it is you who ache for both a noumenal self and a noumenal world. Peircean semiotics is an internalist metaphysics. It is the view from the phenomenal. But with enough dimensions to capture the structure of phenomenal being.

Self and world are not dualistic realms. They are the complementary limits on a phenomenology rendered finally intelligible by that structure-recognising move.

And I don’t know if the Greek philosophers really did think in terms of a ‘creator God’ — Wayfarer

OK. Blame that on the scholastic rewrite if you like.

there’s no biological reason why a species ought to be able to know the kinds of things we already know — Wayfarer

But once culture, language and technology came along, could it have ended differently?

That was the further level of semiosis that laid the ground. What then prevented a mathematical/rational level emerging on top of that?

So as soon as language became a thing, a formal grammar was on the cards, no?

That is not explained by physicalism, which refers to some unsupported, random and therefore unreasonable speculation of abiogenesis. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you show no signs of being up to date on that science. @Read Parfit gave you excellent reading suggestions from a researcher in the front line. So your comment here is supported only by your ignorance of the available evidence.

Nick Lane’s latest book indeed makes the case that life anywhere could only take the form of electron respiratory chains and proton gradients.

This is a neat conclusion as it fits the predictions of a biosemiotic approach to abiogenesis. And it even flows from the very particle asymmetry that permits a Cosmos that is more than just a featureless bath of radiation.

A universe with proper matter - lumpy bits of gravitating stuff with charges and sub-lightspeed inertial freedoms - is only possible because electrons wound up having the negative charge, and protons the positive charge.

And then life also depends on this fortunate asymmetry. Because of the physical size difference, electrons could be used to capture the energy to drive life as a process. Protons then could release this energy back in a controlled fashion to spin the molecular machinery.

So it is not all a tale of irrational randomness. That semiotic distinction between rate independent information and rate dependent process is not just about the genotype-phenotype distinction. It arises directly out of the possibilities created by fundamental particles being of different size.

Suddenly all it took was a membrane to hold protons back and then a turnstile to let them pass in a regulated fashion.

As accidents go, in a place like a warm alkaline sea vent, it was an accident waiting to happen. Abiogensis in this form suddenly seems so reasonable that alternative stories become matchingly hard to imagine.

There is an activity which creates and interprets the information. — Metaphysician Undercover

And which bit of this creating and interpreting of genetic information can’t be explained by physicalism?

You say logically there must be something beyond the physical goings on. And yet there is no evidence of that.

And it wouldn’t even be hylomorphism for the formal/final aspects of substance to exist in some removed and non-substantial sense. It isn’t actually logical on that score.

Sure. We can grant noesis as an advanced skill of a suitably trained human mind. We can have such a well developed concept of the abstract that we can perceive it’s structures in a mental imagery sense.

But your thesis is stronger. It follows from the Greek claim that what we humans can do with our rational faculty is a diminished form of the omnescient rational vision that would be native to a creator god.

So I say we climb the semiotic ladder of our own ability to conceive of the Cosmos as a whole.

You are aiming at the story that we aspire to the kind of rational perception that a creator would be endowed with. We are cut down gods rather than cranked up animals.

Your theory of meaning is that the name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of you. — Banno

You missed some vital punctuation. It should be: The name "Harry Hindu" refers to my mental image of “you”.

And really, even your “my” should be in quotes. Or is there some you that is separate from the sum of “your” willing actions? How do you hope to escape representationalism concerning pictures in the head while still talking about the kind of conscious self that could have that type of detached observing, rather than embodied and enactive, relation with anything?

But as I think we have agreed, the 'furniture of reason' is not the product of the brain. At that point of evolution, the mind is sufficiently advanced to discover a pre-existing order: — Wayfarer

But what we see is a world divided into its structural necessities and its material accidents. And is the world actually divided, or instead hylomorphically whole?

So it is impressive once we reach a mathematical level of semiotic engagement with the world. But it is still a modelled “world” we end up “perceiving”. You are talking as if the mind is the kind of thing that eventually arrives at direct access to the truth of being. All we have is a more sophisticated umwelt forming our phenomenal experience.

Yes. There is something deeper about that view. It sees the whole of the Cosmos in getting down to the structural necessities of “existence” itself.

But it is still a model - indirect. The mind does not discover in some simple fashion, like finally opening its eyes to find what is nakedly right there. It has to build up to an understanding by way of conceptual abstraction. It has to in fact erase and forget every particular or detail it can. The grand structure is then whatever is finally left as that which cannot be cancelled away.

Semiotics does overcome this to some extent, but only by its ability to impart or project mind-like attributes to the natural domain; however this is still supposed to be a result or consequence of an essentially mindless process, so ontologically it is still derivative rather than primary. — Wayfarer

Nope. Semiotics does reimagine the fundamentally simple as being pansemiotic and thus as much mind-like as matter-like in some good sense. But consciousness - and its material technological products - are derivative of this simplicity in being the product of complexity. Or multiple levels of increasing informational and abstracted semiosis.

So the simple becomes semiotic. And complex semiosis arises out of that. You are conflating the simplest form with the most highly complex form in talking about the world being mind-like in some conscious, and even super sensible or divine sense of the word.

So we have humans and their machines. We have the semiotics of maths piled upon speech, piled upon neurons, piled upon genes, to result in some sharp division between conscious beings and their mechanised environments. In one tiny corner of the Cosmos where a steep entropic gradient was begging to be colonised, there was a brief eruption of this fantastical complexity.

But only hubris would lead you to want to read that exceptionalism into the generally far simpler tale of a thermalising Cosmos, doing everything it wants with far less semiotically developed machinery.

So “disaster” is claimed merely for dramatic effect. Thank goodness for Pythagoreanism. It reveals the true epistemic nature of modelling. We could become scientists having established the clear difference between formal model, acts of measurement, and the world “as it really is”.

How splendidly Peircean!

Your question isn’t clear. But perhaps you mean that what we signify by “consciousness” is a really complex lived relation with the world.

I’ve given the sparsest possible description of the semiotic relation - the point of view that is the taking of a sign and then a shrugging of “whatever” about anything that might be thus ignored. There is then that basic trick being a lived and mindful process. And it gets really complex. The point of view becomes not some single static instance but itself a constantly adapting and predictive state of affairs - the self that is assimilating a world as a flow of perceptual experience.

In a curious way, I think your dualism is convincing you that any such talk of the self - as just the emergent fact of a continually adapting neurocognitive point of view - must be talk of some “thing-in-itself self”. Beyond the play of habitual signification - the realm of the phenomenal - there must be the noumenal self. The soul, the spirit, the will. The force behind the scenes that gives selfhood a sturdy dualistic reality.

So as I say, you are trying to make sense of what I say from a dualistic position. But that is then why it seems a necessity that there is both a real self and a real world beyond the realm of the phenomenal. You can’t be content with a theory of mind that is merely one of semiotic emergence, no matter how hierarchically complex the tale.

A triadic paradigm has the extra dimension to see that hierarchical complexity in a holistic fashion. It can see emergence because it can see development - the change from the vague to the crisp.

So think about that. You must keep thinking that my triadic account leaves out the noumenal self that “has to be there” ... according to the paradigmatic conditions of dualistic representationalism. No noumenal observables without also that noumenal strength self ... experiencing a phenomenology of sign perhaps. :)

What is this "our" and "it"? — schopenhauer1

The separation of the observer from the whatever by the semiotic formation of an umwelt.

So “we” are the point of view shrugging our shoulders about the thing-in-itself because that world of possibility has been reduced to our own world of experience - some configuration of habitual signs.

Try thinking about all this triadically rather than dyadically. It may then click into place.

Such things as logical truths and geometric proofs are known with a directness and intuitive certainty that is not characteristic of the knowledge of the sensible (sense-able) domain — Wayfarer

If this is so, why do 99% of humans really suck at maths in this fashion? :razz:

Either they lack a rational soul or in fact it takes considerable training to routinely look past the immediate world and “see” it’s abstract structures.

So very simplistically, intellect perceives the form (morphe), and the senses perceive the matter (hyle) which is 'accidental'. But this is very different from Cartesian dualism, because there's no conception of 'spirit' and 'matter' being separable in that way. I suppose it is more like a dual-aspect monism in some ways; 'the soul is the form of the body'. — Wayfarer

This works better. It speaks to the information theoretic view of physical reality. You have the complementary duo of information and entropy.

So it is a kind of dual aspect monism. But that says the two faces of reality are simply ontically different. And I would argue that everything slots into place once we can see the two aspects composing physical reality as being formally complementary. We need them to be a dichotomous pair of limits connected by a reciprocal relation.

So Aristotle - before the manglings of scholasticism - was on the money. Form does in-form material accidents, or entropy/degrees of freedom, with necessary limits.

The physical - that is the substantial and not just the material - is a story of the complementary things of top down constraints and bottom up accidents of history. Forms stabilise the instability of unrestrained potential.

We do need a duality of some kind at the heart of substantial being. And physics now agrees with hylomorphism to the degree it understands information and entropy as the complementary faces of the one physicalist world.

That leaves out “mind” of course. Physics talks about the simple and life and mind are another angle on the story - where you get to when the basic semiotic trick of the informational regulation of entropic instability evolves to have incredible hierarchical complexity.

If the living body only exists as directed activity, then the thing which directs the activity must be prior to the physical bod — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean, like the information of a genome?

Physical configurations encode constraints and thus tendencies generally. So finality, as globalised or collective tendencies, can simply evolve so long as physical configurations are a thing. You just need enough cohesion for the world to have a history being written into its state.

Time itself can thus evolve like the way a river gets established with a direction. Once constraints arise on material possibility, you get the emergent thing of a past as the information now fixed in a physical configuration, the future as the limits being imposed by that configuration, and the present as the point in between where possibilities are being actualised and being added to that configuration information.

The signs sums up what matters to us about our relation with it. So beyond that begins all we don’t need to care about. It becomes the possible differences not making a difference.

Of course this might then become some kind of ultimate reality that obsesses folk who want an exhaustive account of all those indifferent differences as well. They want to take every possible point of view .... even when the very point of the semiotic relation is to create that selective thing of there being just some actual concrete point of view that represents the indifference the observer can afford to have towards the thing-in-itself. The mediating sign by itself becomes enough. Until some difference that makes a difference arises and an observer is forced to modify a habit.

Your thinking is reductionistic, not in the atomistic materialist sense, but in the sense that you want to objectify and reduce everything to being understood by science and mathematics. — Janus

Sure. I am reductionist in the sense of reducing things to models. In this case, a general holistic model of causality that stands in self-conscious contrast to the atomistic/materialist one.

So that means I see structure or form as an element of reality. I don't eliminate them. Modelling is reductionist only in homing in on what matters in having explanations.

I think this is probably due to the fact that you lack a feel for the other three senses of the numinous, you have a kind of 'tin ear', I think. — Janus

Unfair. I have a highly educated aesthetic response. And you seemed to agree that an appreciation of the structure of nature can be a numinous feeling.

It is true that I don't feel any generalised thrill contemplating the kind of mystic and religious social constructs you might have in mind.

What we are at root is all about what we feel, not what we think. — Janus

I've taken the opposite message. It is so easy to socially construct our states of feeling that one has to accept a post-modern absurdism about them. We have to wear our emotions lightly because they are not authentic in that root Romanticist sense.

A sense of the mysterious, a sense of the holy and a sense of the beautiful, senses that require no particular knowledge or intellectual mastery to drive them. — Janus

I'm tempted to draw attention to the lack of intellectual mastery here. :naughty:

But instead, I think all three of yours require quite sophisticated cultural training. And that itself should be telling. We have to learn the general attitude - mystic, religious, aesthetic - which then allows us to perceive the affective state in a noumenal fashion. As a feeling painted across the world itself.

So we likely disagree deeply here. You seem to think the sense of the numinous is something simple, direct, unmediated. I reply that it seems very much the product of cultural learning, a sense of awe and rightness that can be reliably evoked from within a well-developed conceptual frame.

And as such, it stands on the side of the phenomenal. The brain needs feelings of certainty and uncertainty, salience and irrelevance, attention and disinterest, just to navigate life with pragmatic efficiency. Ultimately I am sure when I feel sure. Unsure when I feel that.

To be simplistic, the brain is designed so that the ability to recognise the familiar, recognise the unfamiliar, are emotionally rooted at a very basic level in the brainstem and limbic system. It is a basic dichotomy being imposed on the ever present flood of life so as to create an intelligible divide on experience from the get-go.

So a generalised sense of awe or salience is not difficult to explain. We would even know all the sympathetic nervous system hallmarks to look out for - the physiologically-appropriate orienting responses like widened pupils, quickened heart-beat, sweaty palms, paused digestion, etc.

Thus it can all be explained away. But then it also seems a marvellous thing to me ... that everything makes natural sense when looked at with a dialectical or dichotomistic logic. Makes me tingly all over again. ;)

What about also....

4: sense of scientific and mathematical wonder that the structure of reality has intelligible form

What has been lost is precisely a sense of related-ness to the cosmos, and also a sense of purpose and meaning. — Wayfarer

The pre-modern view was animistic. The human social sphere included the whole of nature. The sun and stars were personified. So were the winds, the mountains, the rivers, the forests.

So what we have lost is that pan-spiritualism or pantheism. Organised modern religions reacted to philosophical inquiry by contracting towards a strong mind/body dualism. And in doing that, it shot right past the social sphere within which our individuated being - our personification - is constructed, to develop a mystic or supernatural realm that is supposedly the home to spirit or essence.

Science showed that this shrinking of personification or animation until it had shrivelled right out of material existence couldn't be right. There was no evidence that our essence sits outside nature. Science could see that life was a material process - an expression of a systems "four causes" ontology. And then even "mind" is becoming understood in the same naturalistic way through neuroscience and social psychology.

So we have this wild swing from a too generous pantheism to a too miserly religious dualism. One personified the whole of nature. The other withdrew personhood from nature entirely.

But science - of the holistic systems thinking kind - can locate humanity in humanity. It can identify the social and biological causes of being. That creates a sound natural metaphysics as our modern departure point.

This is writ large all over Modern Culture, and manifests in the form of many social ills and ailments, such as anomie, depression, addiction, compulsive consumption, and so on. This is how the belief that you're the outcome of an accidental collocation of atoms manifests, in my view. — Wayfarer

I agree that mechanical thinking about nature has bad results. But that is part of the overshoot story. We had to de-animate nature to the appropriate degree. Both reductionist science and organised religion took their halves of a shared dualism to unwarranted extremes.

So you are making the call to re-animate our understanding of nature. Again I agree. That is what scientific holism would aim to do. But how do you avoid overshooting the social sphere, and our biological heritage, as you make that violent course correction?

You want a personified cosmos. And you accept that would have to take the vaguest or most ambiguous form. Yet isn't the danger that you then still want to wind up with some kind of ultimate binary victory that puts you on the right side of the conventional dualism? The cosmos must be ultimately mind-like or divine in some fashion?

So I do think it is a pendulum story. We went from extreme animism to extreme dualism. Science de-animated the material world, and religion said that was OK as the divine realm stood quite separate at the back of all that ... with its super-animate powers to compensate.

But the human is to be found in the humanity of our biological and social development. Then animism reaches as far as organisms in general - life and mind as a semiotic form of complex order. And the Cosmos is nature understood at its most general or undifferentiated level possible. That is yet another story - possibly pan-semiotic according to modern physics. So re-animated to that degree - the one that sees the universe in properly organismic terms as a structure serving a (thermal) purpose.

But what is existence? — darthbarracuda

Persistence. Stability. Equilibrium. The limitation of flux or change.

Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is. — darthbarracuda

So it would be better to say actuality is a sum over potential histories.

Entities are a fiction in this hylomorphic view I am taking. There is nothing individual, just the many things that are individuated.

So yes, if you believe in "existence" and "entities", then you are stuck with a metaphysics too impoverished to deal with the questions you want to ask.

It is not until you get beyond that thinking - based in actualism and substantialism - that you would understand what even Aristotle or Anaximander had to say on the issue.

What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. — darthbarracuda

But does science still do that? Or does it now understand entities and existence in terms of ontic structuralism?

As to the difference between being and Being, you yourself make it sound pretty semiotic - the difference between a sign and the thing-in-itself.

So reality can be quite "psychological" in that the problem physics has to overcome is telling a tale of the Cosmos that has observers along with the observables. Physical theory has to achieve this goal of internalising the semiosis that indeed actualises the potential.

That is the big question. My routine point is that we can't just toss "mind" into the theory - some spiritual, substantial, notion of consciousness. But we do have to weave in something like a "point of view" - a semiotic relation.

And Being is all about the having of a point of view, isn't it? Well, maybe you understand it differently.

Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long." — darthbarracuda

Hmm. Are you sure you haven't got this back to front? To be measurable demands something more primal - a separation of an observer from an observable. It is that semiotic distinction that has to arise for either "to be". And right at the beginning, the relation would be symmetric. It would be merely a brute reaction (Peircean secondness) where neither side was clearly yet the one or the other.

So being four foot long follows the measuring of four feet. It is the broken symmetry where some observable is "four foot long" in terms of some observer - some now encompassing reference frame that serves to individuate that length as an actual concrete event.

Being is actualised stable existence to the degree that it has been "observed into fixed quiescence".

So again, you are starting your metaphysics from a presumption of already individuated material being. Yet that kind of classical state - an object oriented metaphysics of a world of medium sized dry goods - is only a late-in-the-day emergent outcome of cosmic development. It is what has condensed out due to expansion and cooling, a result of there being a well-establish reference frame of cold vacuum against which a few bright flashes of concrete activity will stand out in apparent isolation.

You are insisting on a metaphysical starting point that science has already shown to be not primal. So you haven't even begun to explore the options that science offers in terms of what primal actually looks like to the best of our investigative knowledge.

We keep using the word 'tree', but it's actually a terrible example considering the point of the OP which is to imply that some progress could be made in philosophical discourse if words were defined first. — Pseudonym

Oh I agree heartily that starting with definitions is the last thing we would do. You are absolutely correct that meaning can't be analysed by interrogating the terms we use themselves.

The word 'tree' actually seems to derives from the root 'deru' which means strong and steadfast. So It was originally trying to get at the tree's firm and unyielding nature, not it's multi-branching form. — Pseudonym

I'd be surprised if there weren't terms even back then to distinguish trees - as tall plants branching off from a single trunk - from shrubs. Maybe every tree was an "oak" or whatever. Certainly we would expect the concrete noun to precede its metaphoric use. So deru would not have started out as steadfast and then trees be called that by analogy.

But whatever. My point was that nature does indeed have ontic structure. So words can speak rather directly to universal essences in that sense. The meanings of language can be constrained by reality in that fashion. The social construction of reality has its actual limits, as well as its actual creative freedoms.

This matters for philosophical language where the ability to pick out the universal in language use is a contentious issue. But that is a step beyond the original argument you were making, I see that.

All we can say is that all future uses of the word 'tree' will be somehow constrained by our preference for pattern over randomness. — Pseudonym

Again, it comes back to my greater interest in language as a form of semiosis. So I want to go the step beyond the pragmatics of "meaning is use" to the story of the actual general mechanism by which that is true. Thus a speech act becomes a state of interpretive constraint which is "understood" in terms of a suitable sign, a suitable act of measurement.

The meaning of "the cat is on the mat" is some kind of agreement to that being a perceived fact. And the agreement hinges on being able to ignore a whole bunch of potential differences as to that being understood as the case. The cat could be a squirrel - a remote possibility, but we could be mistaken. Or the mat could be really a rug, in someone else's eyes.

So this strengthens the psychological aspect of semantics. We can only agree a meaning to the extent we agree to ignore the endless possible differences of nature, of the real world. Word use corresponds not to things in themselves but to where we agree to stop debating the open-ended differences that will always remain.

So word definitions are doubly useless. Word use is by design open-ended. A word only constrains a space of interpretive possibilities. We could use "tree" to mean a whole bunch of things in creative fashion. Then even worse, where "tree" ceases to apply is also a product of pragmatic agreement. We simply decide that despite the endless possible ongoing differences, we will draw our boundary here, for the moment. For the duration of this speech act.

But then, in having this generalised character, words are pretty good at capturing the abstract. Words are intrinsically philosophical in that they generalise so easily. They don't sweat the detail. They are quite happy having a loose or universal fit.

That is how constraints work. And so - the even bigger picture - language is like nature in that regard. It is a structure that can be tightened as much as necessary to achieve a result. But that openness is closed by reaching some shared point of unconcern, or equilibrium, or diminished returns. Eventually differences no longer make a difference so far as the meaning goes.

Or the other way to put it is that nature is like language - semiotic. Which is another metaphysical story of course.

Being is definite existence. It takes structure or form to make anything definite. Structure is organisation that limits meaningful difference or uncertainty. So the antithesis of being is not nothing but formless uncertainty. A bare potential. A kind of unexpressed everythingness or anythingness.

We can forget about something out of nothing. It has no metaphysical logic.

What is logical is an unbounded vague everythingness that develops a logical or orderly structure.

If everything could be possible, if everything could actualise even by accident, then most of those impulses would be mirror opposites and cancel each other out. They would negate each other’s possibility of being. So in fact only some integral of the total could manage to actualise. The variety would be self limiting as to what could be the developed case.

Quantum field theory already describes that. It is how the vacuum works. Existence is a sum over histories. We have the strongest scientific support for the idea.

So we know that there is being. We know that being is the definite structure that results from the constraint of anythingness. We know that the principle of least action rules nature right down to the quantum limit.

The “how” of being is really quite well understood to a large degree.

Is there anything left to puzzle over? Of course.

It isn’t “why something rather than nothing” as now nothingness isn’t even a realistic possibility. The Heat Death vacuum is as near as we could get. And that is alive with virtual quantum fluctuations. To be empty is just to be self cancelling in terms of the mirror actions.

But still, something about the idea of bare uncaused fluctuation feels in need of explanation. It is the lingering material aspect.

It is nice that ontology has this last little puzzle to keep chewing on. But what is an action ... without a direction? Or without a reaction? What will we have left when we do strip away the last shreds of shaping structure or context?

The enlightenment naturally. Instead of feeling, I would talk in terms of reason. So habit, intelligibility, purpose, structure, semiosis, etc.

Yeah. But "consciousness" is a bad starting point. It is as far away from the primal, or the ultimately simple, as Nature can get.

So you are speaking of spiritual stuff - simple substance. And we know mind is about the complexities of brain architecture and a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

we ourselves are fundamentally an emanation from this mysterious primordiality. — darthbarracuda

No we are not. Not if we are actually a structure of modelling.

An emanation from a primordiality is structureless substance talk. So you are presuming a particular metaphysics - that of Romanticism.

The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear. — darthbarracuda

Bingo. Yes they are.

Primal, ominous, ennui, insomnia, striving, lurking ... all the anthropomorphic jargon of the Romantic tradition imported to address the basic metaphysical question of "why anything?".

That'll work. :)

The ‘sky-father-god’ which Apokrisis mentions above, in some ways skews the debate. That’s because for Apokrisis [and many people], the whole ‘conception of the divine’ is inextricably bound up with that understanding. — Wayfarer

Well given that was the kind of god the OP refers to, it seems fair enough to be focusing on that.

And I was pointing out how you were defending the same conception to the degree you thought there is some "physical singularity" whose structural form is in need of a materialistic "cause-and-effect" explanation.

Sure - if you think about 'God' as on the same level of existence as the kinds of things that science investigates, then I would certainly agree that there is no such thing. — Wayfarer

Again, I pointed out to you two things.

Expecting our metaphysical speculations to be constrained by actual evidence seems to have emerged as the best way to go about reasoned inquiry. You don't seem to disagree.

So if a theory can't be cashed out in acts of measurement, it is classed as an idea that is "not even wrong". You seem to think this is a good argument against string theory for instance. So let's apply the same principle to all metaphysical speculation, including theism.

Then I also pointed out that your principal complaint is that materialism doesn't work as a causal story, and yet you are still talking like a materialist to the degree you accept there is some kind of necessity for a creating God.

Of course you can take refuge in ambiguity here. You can say you don't buy the concrete notion of a big daddy in the sky who actually decides to construct a Cosmos by knocking up some set of laws and constants - a God who is a substantial agent acting with material effect. But how else are we to understand the idea of "a creator"?

A systems view of the divine would see "god" as the name given to some kind of generalised finality and even Platonic form. That could be the immanent cause of being in delivering a telic drive towards order out of chaos. The cosmos would self-organise due to a purpose.

But now this is a radically different notion of a divine hand behind creation. There is no kind of specific creator making His choices about purpose or structure. Being itself is the coming-into-being that expresses some structure-producing tendency which cannot be denied.

At which point, we have an image of God so ambiguous you might as well give up the divine influence tag as we now have a well developed physicalism of that kind of self-organising systemhood. Mentioning anything supernatural feels rather redundant. The story of creation no longer needs an answer to the materialist riddle of who moved something first. Instead, we now have a more interesting story of what could have stopped a Cosmic tendency towards definite order in the first place.

How could creation have been resisted given the mathematical-strength necessities we now understand pretty well?

The whole God issue can be neatly turned on its head in that fashion. The scientific question now - or at least it will be the telling question once we get to a Theory of Everything - is what prevented the Cosmos becoming as we observe it?

So the religious are naturally inclined to believe in a Creator, for which many arguments can then be adduced, whilst the non-religious will be naturally inclined to argue the contrary. — Wayfarer

But the non-religious might have the advantage of having an argument that hinges on the test of evidence?

One might scientifically keep an open mind on the possibility of eventually encountering this Creator face to face at some point. And yet we are also able to say - as cosmologists - we've gone all the way back to the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, and He ain't showed up in any essential way thus far. And everything we understood by that scientific route reduces any telic role He might have played to plucking a few constants out of the air for no obvious good reason.

Did God care so much about the mass of a quark or electron that he "fine-tuned" the number? Rum sort of Creator, if so.

the idea that the Universe springs into existence from an infinitesmally small point sounds suspiciously like 'creation ex nihilo'* — Wayfarer

Yeah. Which is why I always promote the systems-thinking alternative of creation as an emergent structure of constraint on unbridled material freedoms.

Something from nothing is the problem for notions of causality that already presume causality is about material/efficient cause. Rather than wheeling in a creator god to make that nonsense idea work, it is better to just say it doesn't work and get on with an Aristotelian four causes/immanent/systems approach that sees creation as the constraint on a plenum of chaotic potential.

however, one can always ask, how is it that what emerged from total disorder was order? — Wayfarer

And modern science has the answer. It has mathematical models of order out of chaos. Those models are being applied in cosmology.

You can't peer back in time past the 'singularity', nor can you see anything beyond the horizon of this universe. — Wayfarer

Again, these are points that count against a "creating god" notion of causality, and for a self-organising systems approach to cosmic causality.

So your shotgun is pointed squarely at your own foot here.

If you can't go back earlier in time to reach this mythical singularity - the place where this God of the Blue Touchpaper must reside in prime mover fashion - then maybe time itself is thermally emergent. What we are talking about is the first moment when time starts as already a symmetry-breaking.

Likewise the fact that we are bounded by cosmic event horizons. Everywhere we look around us now, we see that broken symmetry. The self-organising nature of cosmic structure is the scientific fact staring our metaphysical musings in the face.

But I don't see you factoring that in to your own line of thought. You seem to be suggesting some behind the scenes prime mover can rescue the standard materialist conception of causation for you.

Give it up. Move on. A creating god is the kind of last ditch myth you would invent if you can't in fact let go of a materialist understanding of creation events.

You want it to be true that existence has a first cause. The principle of sufficient reason appears to demand it. And yet you agree cosmological science finds no evidence of that right back to the first measurable instant. Why not just let go of this materialist conception of how the metaphysical answer ought to look?

Start by examining the universes origins. The Big Bang. — Devans99

Next examine the universe itself. It’s incredibly unlikely for a randomly selected universe to be life supporting so we live in a fine tuned universe. — Devans99

If you accept cosmological science as a believable starting point, then already a heavy constraint has been laid on your theological Bayesianism. The "logical alternatives" are not as you are outlining them.

To accept the Big Bang as the creation event is already to accept a scientific tale of existence in which a deity is materially absent AND where chance and purpose are accounted for as complementary aspects of that materiality.

The Big Bang is a story with both necessary and contingent features. It must have unfolded due to global laws or conservation symmetries. We "know" the rules in play all the way back to the effective "first moment". We also "know" what seem to be the contingencies or accidents.

It may not be a final theory yet - we know that too. But it is a strong constraint on any Bayesian reasoning. We have established that the rules of quantum physics would have had to have been in play. And that those rules say something about the material fluctuations that would have been de novo possible.

Then likewise the fine-tuning issue. This is more speculative in terms of cosmology. But the strongly divided form of the choice is either that our own creation event is part of a multiverse of creation events, or that there are structural necessities in play that made our particular universe the only creation event that could actually happen.

Again, quantum physics - with its path integral formalism and employment of the (telic) least action principle - says it is certainly possible, if not even highly probable, that we exist in the one universe that has the configuration optimal for material existence.

But either way - whichever cosmological option you feel inclined towards - neither answer on fine-tuning gives any credence to a fine-tuning creator. Fine-tuning is either just an actual random accident - and so the multiverse applies. Or fine-tuning is our illusion in not yet having a better grasp of the physics. We haven't yet got to the mathematical reasons why different flavours of particles have their varied coupling constants, for instance.

So to the degree you accept existing physics as a constraint on assessing the probabilities, fine-tuning is divided on the degree of mathematical necessity involved in our own form of universe. But a creator of fine-tuning is already ruled out as a 0% option.

Or at least, now you have to start arguing that God had the freedom to invent a different maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking. Good luck on that.

If the word had a meaning before the author writes it, then it's meaning cannot just be whatever the author intends. There is some property of the word 'tree' which already exists prior the the author's selecting it, which make it good choice for him to convey the idea of the tall plant in the woods. — Pseudonym

It can't be difficult to agree that this is a two-way street. Linguistic communities create the general game. And individual players make creative use of the resulting space of free actions. Eventually new linguistic habits can emerge from those creative uses because they seem generally useful at the communal level (rather than just tentatively useful at the personal creative level on some occasion or other).

So any argument that tries to establish that only one side of the deal is in control - the community or the author - is a waste of breath. The interesting question is about characterising the dynamic in play. (Which is where a systems style constraints approach makes the most sense.)

The question of meaning is not about how a word comes to mean what it does within the language community, its about what it means already within that community, and we've just established, it must mean something already before the author uses it, in order for him to make a non-arbitrary selection. — Pseudonym

Yep. So you are forcing the synchronic, history-flattening, view on the issue when the diachronic, or developmental, view is the one that is going to see the whole deal.

Actual human experience of society and culture tells us that games evolve their rules all the time. They are always fiddling with the rules of rugby, Wall St, or the highway code.

No, we don't. If an author uses the word 'tree', I assume he means either the tall plant, or maybe some multi-branching diagram. — Pseudonym

This goes to something else. It backs up @Harry Hindu on the strangely contested idea that words do refer to essences in some fashion. We can see the common "treeness" connecting these two examples of acceptable language use. A general hierarchical branching structure.

So whatever the author means in either case, it is essentially that. Trees - the plant kind - are indeed a particular expression of a more general, and strikingly simple, rule for growth-based symmetry breaking.

And in being a mathematically general fact of that kind, it undermines the view that it is all "just a language game". Talk of trees, and their treeness, isn't arbitrary. It is talk about some deep fact of the world - a fact about how the world plays its "games" of structuring form. The universe has actual "rules" - or rather, its universal forms, its simplest possible and so most widely observed constraints on random variety.

The meaning of a word is its use in the language game. It's determined by the interaction of both players and the millions of language speakers who have gone before them, and the nature of the language game being played. — Pseudonym

It is more complicated than that as the language game is also being played with "the world". It interacts in pragmatic fashion with that.

The language game is in addition being played from the foundation of the perception game. That too is a semiotic interaction in which developmental neurology is a genetically constrained game of making pragmatic sense of "the world". We can see its "colours", we can smell its "odours". We can experience the full variety of "its" sensory qualities.

So calling language a game does get something right about language. The puzzle is how this small point then gets turned into a general stance of saying "it is only a game".

Sure, humans are different in living linguistically structured lives and so having a very socially- constructed relationship with the world. But there is a world out there. And even perceptual level semiotics is seeking to understand it in terms of its essences, generalities or global habits.

Maybe if we were discussing Wittgenstein's Tractatus — Sam26

The issue is the flip from one extreme to the other extreme.

Recognising that there is no definite atomistic foundation leads to the jump to the other extreme of anti-foundationalism.

I just seek to make it clear that there is a middle path that sees foundations as what in the end get constructed via a collective system of constraints.

So don't take it personally that I quoted you on a particular bone of contention.

The central issue is that language does not work propositionally, even if language can be employed pretty well in that regard.

So these threads seem to get hung up on the idea that language stripped bare would reveal its secret propositional structure. And yet when language is stripped bare - disaster! - that logicist structure appears to evaporate. The logicist is so disappointed that he/she proclaims language to lack any proper objective or intrinsic structure at all. It is all just games of pretend.

But a constraints-based understanding of language gets at the structure it has due to self-organising dynamical principles.

Instead of the atomism of logicism - where meaning must be constructed from the ground up, fixed part connected to fixed part - meaning is holistic.

Anything might have been meant at the beginning. While you wait for a speaker to speak, your own state of understanding is a vague receptacle. No communicative possibility (and a host might be buzzing), has yet been definitely dismissed. There is neither understanding nor misunderstanding. The symmetry is yet to be broken in terms of that logicist disjunct.

Then speaking starts to constrain that open state of mind which is entertaining a plenum of the possible. To some degree, a host of interpretive possibilities get eliminated.

Information theory models this in detail. The 20 questions game illustrates how you can arrive at any word in the dictionary if you just ask a question that divides the field of possibilities in half with each question. You get an exponential elimination of alternatives. Is it real, is it fictional? Is it a form or life or is it not? Language allows the systematic construction of states of constraint. Meaning becomes whatever set of possible interpretations is yet to be positively eliminated.

So words don't carry cargoes of meaning in truth-apt style. They construct socio-cultural boundaries to acts of interpretation. Agreement is "meaning is use". But agreement is also agreement on a deep structure - the structure that is needed to restrict free possibility in that pragmatic fashion.

It's not just catastrophic misunderstandings, but also subtle misunderstandings, so subtle that much of the time they're missed. — Sam26

So the goal of communication is to limit misunderstandings by constructing a shared mental frame of constraints.

Misunderstandings then separate into those that matter and those that don't. Catastrophic misunderstandings would be meaningful. The logicist constraint of either/or - the constraint that is intolerant of ambiguity - would have some pragmatic point to it. Something matters about the misunderstanding that is worth correcting.

But then, from a constraints view, no state of understanding ever bottoms out in concrete atomistic definiteness. The old logicist hope of that kind of foundationalism has long gone. So, in the pragmatist account, the only thing that terminates the possibility of "subtle misunderstanding" is a generalised agreement not to sweat the detail. Pragmatism is self-grounding. Top-down constraint is eventually matched by a principle of indifference. Part of the deal is knowing when either/or choices - binary bits of information - cease to make a material difference to the formal structure of constraints in place.

It is an easy trick to bring up subtle misunderstandings that lurk in any speech act - as if that were a telling blow to language structuralism. But that just reflects reductionist thinking at work. It could only matter if you thought meaning has to be constructed bit by bit, atom by atom, from the ground up.

When speech is understood as a semiotic story of constraints, then the open-ended bottom is part of the point. It means speech has irreducible creativity and spontaneity. The fine-grain possibility of misunderstanding is an important organic part of the deal.

And then a ground is always found as the other part of the deal. In ordinary speech - not so much in philosophical discourse - folk tend to share a common level of indifference. A fine-grain of misunderstanding is not a big issue as it doesn't make a real difference to the communicative intent - the structure of thought or structure of constraint.

Before using words, you have to think of what it is you want to say, and it doesn't always come in the form of other words, rather it comes in non-verbal sensory impressions that we translate to words in order to communicate those ideas to another person. — Harry Hindu

We can go a step further. I keep seeing "Hairy" instead of "Harry", and as a result my image of Harry Hindu is sometimes like this: — Banno

Between the picture theory of language and linguistic behaviourism there is a middle ground position.

Mental imagery or non-verbal content is the brain doing its thing of anticipating its perceptual future. To act in the world according to a model of the world is to act on the basis of a running forward prediction. So mental imagery is the development of constrained states of expectation. And that constraint can range from vague inklings all the way up to vividly exact sensori-motor states. Language then becomes a way to achieve those kinds of anticipatory mental states in the minds of others, and even - though self talk - yourself.

So when we think "tree", we set up a state of constrained expectation in ourself that could be quite vague and permissive - a generalised sense of tree-ness. Or if we make the attentive effort to flesh out some particular predictive image, which takes about half a second to generate, we may have some strongly developed and vivid picture of a particular oak in a forest clearing in mind.

And likewise, when we say "tree", we can rely on fellow language users to respond with more or less accuracy in line with our own learnt habits of thought. Their mental imagery or states of expectancy will be well enough constrained to achieve the same intents.

The point is that no word needs to have completely defined meaning - if meaning is understood as some kind of exhaustive veridical content. That is merely importing naive realism into the story.

Words only have to constrain states of expectation to the degree that it is useful. And sometimes being vague is more useful, given the future is often not all that exactly predictable. So arguing over whether words have some exact correspondence with reality is rather missing the point. The goal is the modelling one of words having some useful kind of correspondence with the certainties and uncertainties of the near future.

So a constraints-based approach says meanings are open-ended. Any expression is unlimited in its potential interpretations by any reasonably competent speaker. There will always be a way to misunderstand ... a way to avoid agreement.

But well co-ordinated speech will put one speaker in mind of the same thoughts, the same states of mental expectancy, as another, to the degree it is useful. And that will reflect both the certainties and uncertainties that are inherent in the pragmatics of predicting the future in meaningful fashion.

To then try to map propositional notions of truth on to the psychology of forward modelling or perceptual anticipation is of course then the importing of naive realism. Propositional truth likes to ignore the issue of vagueness for a start. It wants to deal in crisp yes or no only.

Is that an image of Harry I see before me? Answer one way or the other. Let's pretend that ambiguity or uncertainty are not inherent in the business of making psychological predictions about the future of our experiences.

I can usually tell a duck from a rock, but I have no idea what a duck-essence might be, nor a rock-essence. — Banno

Performative contradiction?

The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/

So we know what is essential when we know what is not accidental.

And language use in turn relies on us using words in ways that emphasise the essential. When we employ a term like "duck" or "rock", we don't want folk to get hung up on their various possible inessential or accidental interpretations.

So if I say "duck", you can already take it for granted that something essential is being asserted. And being sufficiently like-minded ensures you understand what that is well enough.

I describe the relationship between order and chaos as a tension, like a game of tug-of-war. Regarding the dice-rolling analogy, the "pull" that causes the dice to want to produce random results is the pull of chaos, and the "pull" that causes the dice to want to produce an ordered sequence is the pull of order. — mysterio448

The idea that existence is a unity of opposites, the pairing of chaos and order, or flux and logos, goes back to the first metaphysical speculation of Ancient Greece. Check our Anaximander and Heraclitus especially.

But I think where you run into problems is imagining the situation as two kinds of "pulls" as that puts you back into a reductionist metaphysics of causal forces. You have a literal antagonism of one thing against another thing rather than a complementary pair of things, each of which is essential to the other in a way that justifies talk of a resulting unity or synergy.

So the complementary way of talking about this is constraints vs degrees of freedom. Order is the structure that emerges in development to regulate chaos or randomness, giving it concrete shape. You start with complete spontaneity - Anaximander's unbounded Apeiron. Then it begins to divide and get organised in intelligible fashions.

Anaximander's version said first the hot separated from the cold, then the resulting dry separated from the moist. You wind up with the four elements - dry heat being fire, dry cold being air, wet heat being water, wet cold being earth.

Anyway, this dialectical approach to metaphysics is literally how metaphysics got started. And it is now a well modelled concept in physics - especially in condensed matter physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and other "order out of chaos" approaches.

And does your dice story fly when there is no reason to expect a "pull" in terms of order at all. The point of a die is to design out the possibility of a correlation between outcomes. The goal is to make a "machine" that maximises our uncertainty by creating a symmetry among the alternatives.

So nature is being constrained in a special way - one that conforms to a reductionist definiton of randomness as a defined or bounded ensemble of possibilities.

It is actually a cartoon version of spontaneity or actual "pure chaos" when you think about it.

This can be demonstrated by many examples. For example, take snowflakes. Snowflakes are beautiful, ornate, symmetrical designs that materialize out of random activity in clouds. Another example is gemstones, which are orderly-shaped minerals that materialize from random geological processes. The sphericity of stars, planets and moons is a product of the force of order emerging from the chaos of mindless astronomical activity. — mysterio448

Yep, these are all examples of the new physics. But the metaphysics is understood as that of collective and emergent constraints on local degrees of freedom. Spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The theory exists.

There are more sequences like this in the decimal of pi. One might think that such sequences are merely "accidents," statistically inevitable instances of randomness stumbling upon structure. — mysterio448

Or rather this shows that even "chaos" is bounded. The kind of chaos we can model statistically is not "pure chaos" as the very idea of statistics imposes constraints on uncertainty. If nothing else, we have to draw a boundary around a collection of events and say that is the system we are now measuring. So the structure arises from at least some kind of minimal constraints being imposed in a way that results in something to be measured.

If 9 becomes a number that can be rolled, then strings of 9s must occur periodically in a fashion that is itself certain as a "sufficiently random excursion from the mean". You would start to suspect your random number generator if it failed to produce enough such sequences according to a formula you could calculate.

Murphy's law is essentially the opposite of the randomness paradox. — mysterio448

Again, this isn't a surprise but a prediction if you adopt a metaphysics based on constraints of freedoms. If nature is inherently spontaneous, then that spontaneity only ever gets limited, never eliminated.

So that is the power of a complementary approach. One thing already accounts for the other. Order includes these mistakes. Limits only limit them to being on the whole insignificant as perturbations. Disorder is suppressed to the degree that it can cause much actual disruption.

It is possible to simulate our world according to physics. — tom

And physics also puts an entropy constraint on the fidelity of the simulation surely.

So how many bits do you think the simulation requires? Would it not quickly exceed the black hole entropy bound of any imaginable hardware? Wouldn't the computer involved collapse into a black hole due to the gravity of its own information content? The hardware would be too concentrated a lump of matter to survive in a way that could do any actual processing.

To say "according to physics" is to accept the constraints of physics as we know them. Otherwise one might as well grant the simulation hypothesis as being true "according to magic". A conclusion that is less technically impressive.

It is like we can conclude there are no earth-sized planets made of solid gold anywhere in the universe. They could not avoid being black holes.

Computers are also physically restricted in ways important to any simulating they might be doing. They are not infinite resources but finitely bounded - "according to physics".

I argued in another thread that algorithms are not physical - they are logical. — tom

So we agree that physics doesn’t account for that part of the structure of reality that is an algorithm?

Great.

Now what is it that says an algorithm is logical as such? The universe of randomly produced rule sets would be infinite. What would select among all those to create ones we would call a logical system?

Then I guess your algorithms have to have data to work on. Again, how would the input get selected so that it had physically relevant meaning?

I suspect mostly the same as you. Amenable to some form measurement resulting from replicable procedures. — Arne

Fair enough. I'm reacting mostly from the point of view that sees a common method to what we mean by "rational thought".

CS Peirce in particular pinned it down as the three steps of abductive hypothesis, deductive reasoning and inductive confirmation. So creative leaps, formal logical expression, then a checking against reality ... whatever that then means. (Pragmatism being clear what it means, and science being distinctive in following that on the whole.)

And unlike philosophy and with the possible exception of QA, the rational method of philosophy is not the only method of philosophy. Please see Thus Spake Zarathustra by F.W. Nietzsche. — Arne

Seems like we are too much on the same page. Sigh.

(It won't last.)

are you making your own statement or do you want me answer questions? — Arne

I want to start an argument obviously. That is going to be hard if you won't disagree. :)

I get it that people who have grown up into or adopted a scientific disposition may be a bit uncomfortable with propositions that are not amenable to empirical confirmation. — Arne

How are you defining empirical evidence? Isn't the rational method of philosophy just like the rational method of science in that one puts forward some reasonable general concept and then suggest that these kinds of particular consequences will serve as the truth-makers?

Science defines itself more by narrowing its domain to the physical or natural - speculative generalisations that might actually get cashed out in terms of perceptible particular consequences.

Or indeed, being more rigorous, science prizes mathematically framed conceptions in which the particulars are now numbers read off dials. Philosophy is happy with actual perceptions - what you might think you see, hear, touch and feel. Even a sense of "hey that is correct" - a psychological registering of a jolt of certainty - counts as the empirical validation for the reasonableness of some proposition.

But science is different in reducing the scope of the empirical to acts of measurement - numbers read off dials.

Sure we still need our eyes to do that. But epistemically, which of these activities are more withdrawn from concrete claims about the world, more reliant on modelled conceptions of what is the case?

The good old rational vs empirical divide soon breaks down on closer examination. Science is different largely due to the degree it reduces the empirical to an almost entirely idealist or conceptualised basis. Philosophy is either a case of anything goes - a form of cultural self-expression like poetry. Or where it gets rigorous itself, a more general polishing up of the habits of logical and critical thinking.

The ability to make well-formed propositions - that can be tested even in everyday life without instruments and experiments - is still a generally useful educated skill.