And so you burble on and on....

I’m not relying on the principle, just explaining why multiverse thinking gets associated with it.

Multiverses are the product of locally deterministic thinking without anything concrete to constrain the infinity of possible worlds that then have to result. So the only constraint left is the non-constraint of the anthropic principle - the quite reasonable conclusion that if every alternative exists, then we live in one of those where we could arise as observers. Survivor bias.

But my metaphysical position is very different. I am arguing constraint is primary and so that already limits existence to the single Cosmos that is mathematically intelligible or coherent.

The fact that we exist to appreciate that is a huge surprise perhaps. It is certainly generally allowed - as intelligence does a good job of increasing entropy production. But constraint by its very nature isn’t directed towards a goal like creating a world fit for humans. We aren’t being reserved for some other more grand purpose as @Wayfarer wants to suggest.

OK. So there is your mystical version and then there is the scientific rationalist version.

But the anthropic principle is only required if the multiverse is the case. We exist in a universe that just by pure accident had the characteristics necessary to produce observers like us.

So I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Do you think that there’s any relationship between these ‘six numbers’ and the ‘constraints’ you’re referring to? — Wayfarer

At the Big Bang, all you had was a cooling~expanding bath of radiation. Too hot for any stability. There was no effective difference between all the different kinds of particles - each particle we know today being just one possible way of breaking the symmetry of the grand unified theory (GUT) force.

So initially, there was very little constraint, apart from the general one of a constraint of action to a three dimensional spatial framework that could in fact cool by expanding. Particles were vanilla in all moving at relativistic speed, all having effectively the same mass, all just being different versions of a generally unconstrained gauge symmetry-breaking. A fluctuation might be quark-like one instant, lepton-like the next. The six numbers weren't yet locking in much by way of stable material identity. It was a hot soup freely flashing through all its modes.

The hard little numbers that stand for the constants are what you would arrive at at the "end of time". It is what all that wildness would look like once it has cooled~expanded and arrived at its classical limit. So the constants weren't there to ensure things got going. They were there in a latent fashion as the values which would be left once all the symmetries got broken down by the cooling~expanding.

The connection between constraints and constants is thus that the vital numbers are emergent from the constrained relations.

The really fundamental constants are the Planck triad of h, G and c which encode - via their various reciprocal or dichotomous relations - the basic attributes of spacetime extent and material action. And being formally reciprocal, the vital number just ends up being 1 - the identity element.

This is rather Platonic as it means we understand them like a shape, a structure, a ratio that is constant. Like a triangle, any material size drops out of the picture. The size of a triangle might as well always be set to 1. It is the structural relationship that defines the existence of the triangle, not its size measured in any material sense.

Rees of course confuses the issue because he mixes up the physical constants that would be mathematically necessary for some kind of cosmos as a dissipative structure, and the "constants" that a particular kind of Cosmos would have to have to be able to result in us as observers of its existence.

So - as usual - constraints also spell freedoms. Aspects of our universe could be regarded as just accidental. And multiverse anthropery applies to the extent that is so. The fine-tuning that gives us life might only exist for some accidental choice of universe.

It is an open question of how much of the contingency will be removed by the progress towards a structural theory of everything. The space of possible existences might be very limited by Platonic-strength principles. Or it might not.

But that is the relation between constraints and constants. Constraints break the symmetry. Constants are the "residue" that is the eventual limit to that symmetry breaking. Constants put a number on the steady balance that emerges when things can't be broken down any further.

So it would be reasonable to think that the 'aperion' is not something 'created' — Wayfarer

You are trying to assimilate the Apeiron to a materialist ontology. So you are thinking of causality in terms of constructive action - everything starting with a material/efficient cause. And so, metaphysically, the question that the Milesian first philosophers were trying to answer was "what fundamental substance is reality made out of?".

Some dude says water must be that ur-stuff. Some other dude says it must be air. Everyone seems to be after the primal element, and so Anaximander is just talking about this other kind of stuff - the inexhaustible Apeiron.

But pay attention. He was talking about the boundless. He was characterising a naked potentiality that is logically all that would remain after all constraint was removed. So now creation becomes constraints-based, not construction-based. It starts with formal and final cause, not material and efficient cause.

It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about creation. We don't start with some uncreated stuff - the material required to construct. We start with the structural limitation of the unformed and the undirected. We begin with the process of reining in possibility itself so as to start to have a material world that expresses the intelligibility of form and finality in its existence.

Sure, construction quickly follows. Indeed, some form of constructive material activity is going to have to be there pretty much from the start. History has to begin by freedoms being physically disposed of in a fashion that makes the past materially concrete.

But you can only understand Anaximander by flipping your understanding of how creation works. It doesn't start with some ur-stuff that then gets busy for some reason, but with some ur-constraint on possibility itself. Materiality is what arises from this.

So the Apeiron is not an "eternal and inexhaustible stuff". To try to understand it as a pre-existing building material is to completely miss the point.

Right, that's exactly the uneducated metaphysical speculation I was referring to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oddly, you seem happy with what this "uneducated metaphysical speculation" - ie: physics - has to says about perpetual motion machines, but not what it then has to say about dissipative structures.

Try to keep up with the educated view.

If you deny the need for a directing agent, then you are only saying that order could emerge out of disorder. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly right. That is what I am saying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

I am taking a constraints based approach. So that would start from a state of unbridled everthingness. It would be action in an infinity of directions, hence a blur of fluctuations with no directions. Then as action started to get organised, form a flow in a limited number of directions - ie: three dimensions - you would start to have a somethingness because all that everythingness had mostly been suppressed.

So that is the general difference. Instead of starting with nothing and wondering how something - something material - appeared for no reason, I take the constraints view were everthing is trying to happen in chaotic and disconnected fashion, and so all that is required is that some form of organisation emerges to limit the chaos and shape it into some recognisable flow of events.

It seems to me that insofar as structured being can be defined it is defined in crisp terms. It doesn't make much sense to me to define something in vague terms; a vague definition is not a definition at all precisely to the extent that it is vague. — Janus

Isn’t that why Platonism ran into problems? We can imagine the ideal triangle. We also accept that no actual triangle would be so perfect. So we can imagine the structure (of symmetries) as being perfect and ideal. And then any material incarnation of those structures is going to be only a material approach to that ideal limit. It will be always vague or uncertain that the ideal has been met.

Say you believe that prior to the BIg Bang there was a "sea" of quantum fluctuations. or some such. Would that be a state of absolute vagueness? Would there be any determinacy in that? Or would there be any determinacy in anything at all independently of us? An undetermined determinacy perhaps? — Janus

You keep trying to trap me into talking your way - where vagueness is understood as something dualistically independent. And of course that way of talking winds up paradoxical. So accept that I am talking in terms of the mutual causation of a dichotomy. The absolute, in being the limit of existence, becomes precisely what can never exist as then it would no longer stand in a mutual relation with its dichotomous other.

I think the problem is the same for the "crisp". — Janus

That was my point. Folk take crispness for granted. The PNC applies without a second thought. I am saying it will always be relative to a point of view. So we sit in the middle of existence and act as if it is completely crisp or determinate. We don’t even consider that it never could be completely as vagueness is always an irreducible aspect of the very existence of any determinism. We only know the crisp in terms of an empirical lack of vagueness. So the vague is what we vanquish by measurement. And measurement is never complete when you are inside the world needing to be exactly measured.

Do you agree that emergence is a type of change? And doesn't change require time? — Metaphysician Undercover

Time is change with a general direction. That general direction is what emerges due to symmetry breaking. So time does not pre-exist change as such when there is only change, or fluctuation, lacking in a general direction.

The vague is to be understood as dichotomous to the crisp. So if we understand what it is to be determinate, then we can understand what can be said about its “other”.

The problem here of course is that you are still trying to make sense of this in terms of one kind of thing becoming its other thing - a dualistically disconnected story of vagueness completely disappearing and crispness completely replacing it, as though the two can’t exist simultaneously.

But my logic is that of a triadic or hierarchical development. So what emerges by a dichotomous separation is the clarity that all structured being lies defined by these two absolute limits - that of the vague and the crisp.

Vagueness emerges also in a retroductive fashion as something now made definite by the emergence of the crisp. So while you might want to arrange them as the start and the end of being - and that may be the temporal story that emerges as the crisp develops, and the vague becomes clearly that which was left behind - the big picture is the vague only has “existence” in a sense relative to what we mean by a definitely structured existence.

If there is no time, then emergence, which is a type of change, is impossible. So it doesn't make any sense to say that there was potential before there was time, — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm saying time emerges. A global temporal organisation emerges as a symmetry breaking (or indeed, a series of them in which time takes on an increasingly definite and classical character).

I mentioned earlier the current cosmological modelling of the Planck scale in terms of relativistic anomalies. The first moment - before there was any proper distinction between gravity and the other forces - was a hot soup of blackholes and wormholes. Spacetime - in any sense that it existed - was so curved and disconnected that we can only understand it in terms of features like time wormholes where past and future did not yet exist. There was no forward and backward direction wired in, so time might as well be going in one direction at one point, a different direction at another point.

So on the basis of the known physics, this is our best retroductive description of the earliest conceivable state.

Now you can ignore what the physics suggests on this score. But I prefer to let the available evidence inform the metaphysics. Especially when on logical grounds, Peirce had already set out the machinery of this kind of radically emergent ontology.

In your kind of model the radical vagueness or indeterminacy is not only "there" at the beginning of time but "always", no? It is the eternal out of which the temporal forever emerges? Do you presume it to be radically indeterminate in itself or merely for us? — Janus

Can one point to what ain't there? Sure. People do it all the time when it comes to negation. From our vantage point - observing from our state of determinate being - It can be crisply determinate that some thing doesn't exist.

Vagueness is then just the same, just more extreme. We are pointing to the very lack of crisp being, the very lack of any determination in any form or material degree, and giving it a name.

For you to talk about what it is "in itself" is already smuggling unwarranted definiteness into the concept of the vague. Old habits may die hard, but questions about whether the vague is inside or outside time, inside or outside space, inside or outside energetic action, are all queries that can only make sense if you presume the distinctions could even apply in intelligible fashion. But the definition of vagueness would be that they don't. As Peirce said, vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply.

So to point to vagueness, we have to "point" at that which is unspeakable in lacking intelligibility. But we can then say some very precise things about it on the presumption that the intelligible itself had to "exist" within that vague grounding potential as the intelligible is clearly what has emerged out of it. The PNC does apply to the existence we know, to the degree it has a crisply developed state - a state composed of its definite presences and definite absences.

Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy.

So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges.

The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics.

In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

And outside space and energy too. Outside existence in general. Hence the abstract realm of Platonism.

Doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, — Metaphysician Undercover

The actual physical argument is way more interesting. There is in fact a limit to the constraint of motion. You can suppress action - breaking its symmetries - right down to the point you arrive at the fundamental symmetries of translation and rotation. So a Cosmos exists because, in the end, there is a concrete limit to the symmetry breaking. You arrive at motions so simple in the form of inertial spin and inertial motion, that they can't be made simpler.

You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics.

Nice summary. — Galuchat

Thanks, Galuchat. Much appreciated.

There are really two stories here. Kauffman originally came up with the adjacent possible as a law of life and complexity. So it has a semiotic twist.

Once an organism masters a particular constructive act, then that opens up some new space of possible things it could construct. So it is about how evolution can get going once there is a source of requisite variety. Once you can make proteins, all sorts of protein based innovation becomes evolvable.

But the ordinary physical world is simpler, less semiotic. It is just a set of historical constraints that have locked in the accidents of the past and shaping the possible range of accidents in the future as the whole world rolls down its thermal gradient as a developing field of meaningless accidents.

So the physical world produces complication rather than complexity. It blindly develops as dissipative structure, where life and mind are about the invention of construction and the new constraint of evolutionary selection that goes with that.

I remember Kauffman pushing the adjacent possible in a quantum context, so he did stray beyond his initial point. But it seemed one his less impressive moves (and generally I really like his stuff). I think it reflects the fact that the Santa Fe brand of complexity lacked the clarity of more semiotic approaches (like Rosen, Salthe and Pattee). DST had the same problem. The dynamicists tended to blur the line to make everything a simple story of constraints and self-organisation. But for life and mind, the fact of memories, codes and algorithms have to be included as the part of the story that doesn’t reduce to the physics.

So the adjacent possible was a weak idea in not highlighting the difference between the increasing negentropic possibilities of complex construction and the diminishing thermal possibilities of simple dissipation.

No one can actually say what the meaning is, and people have conflicting ideas about it, as is evidenced by the different religions. So, whatever the meaning might be, it cannot be known because it is indeterminable, and there is therefore simply no alternative for any individual but to trust their feelings about it, and place their faith wherever their feelings lead them to. — Janus

Just quickly, the problem here is that you still treat meaning as something to be discovered. You simply place that discovery in the individual, rather than the collective, view.

But what if - pragmatically/semiotically - meaning is something to be constructed. And so the objective part of this is the correct understanding of that process of construction.

The issue isn't what, but how. Once we have a model of the how, we can run the process to produce the what.

And this is how we get into a developmental naturalism where we can see how individual psychology is dependent on both the naturalism of a linguistic social super-organism and a genetic biological super-organism. We, as individuated beings, have to participate in semiosis taking place at two quite different levels - the cultural and ecological. We have to situate our selfhood with the systems of both nurture and nature, as it usually put.

And the general problem - for this selfhood - is that the two systems are not that well aligned in the modern world. Hence all the moaning about an existence lacking clear meaning.

So it ain't about discovering meaning itself, but about discovering the natural process that produces meaning.

From there, we can see how being a human individual is semiotic, but a semiosis that relies on two general levels of semiosis - the linguistic and the genetic. And the obvious philosphical project is to get these two levels of self-making in better alignment ... given we all seem to agree that they are rather out of alignment to some degree that causes dissatisfaction.

My argument with @Wayfarer is that he dismisses biology's general goal of entropy dissipation. That kind of denial prevents progress on the problem.

What if human biological flourishing is defined by psychological flow - the rush that is smoothly managed energy expenditure? Maybe driving a fast car is as much the point of life as much as anything could be?

But of course, ecosystems thinking relies on there being limits. If we want a long-run future, culture needs to find some way to make a flow psychology work within the ecological constraints. Then again, if technology can remove those constraints, what then spells a meaningful and flourishing life?

However, until we have a clear model of the reality of flourishing, a clear view of its semiotic mechanics, we can't address the useful questions. Neither the self, nor the society, are going to discover anything, just blunder on helplessly into whatever eventuates.

What do you think it means that all our knowledge of the physical - SR, GR, QM, QFT, QG - boils down to what we can measure? The best we can do is say, I have this idea, this conception, of a quality. And here is the semiotic process by which you or I can extract a measurement during our interactions with Nature.

The very epistemology of science relies on the "non-physical" idea to ground any conception of the physics. And the measurement itself is just a further idea in that, in the end, we represent the measured state of the world as a number. We assign a value. At the very least, we tick a box to mark a presence or an absence. So the whole of the epistemic operation involves having an idea of what to look out for in terms of some system of signs, and reading those signs off the world, updating our conceptions of the world accordingly.

There seems some critical duality of matter and symbol, or matter and information, at work here, surely? We don't have direct access to the world - the Kantian thing-in-itself. We just have systems of thought where global conceptions are intimately tied to localised acts of perception. We understand our interactions with reality only in terms of a constructed realm of ideas encoded as signs.

This is the epistemic truth that ought not be buried. And that should be science's great strength - in being founded on the philosophy of pragmatism. It recognises that we only model the world and so, in the final analysis, construct a useful working story about it. Which in turn means - as we consider metaphysics, the ontological story of Being itself that we hope to tell though all our fundamental physical theories - that we have to incorporate this epistemic fact into any telling of that tale.

If we construct physics as a tale of the observables by placing the observer outside the physics - in some nonphysical realm! - then at what point are we going to finish the job and include that observer in the very tale we want to tell?

This is the deep dilemma that runs through all modern physics. It is also the problem for neuroscience. And Aristotle's philosophical pondering on time was pretty deep as it focuses on this as the issue.

He pointed out that change looks to be what we are really talking about. Things are not still, but dynamic. There is difference in terms of one thing becoming another thing. But that seems continuous. It is always the case. There seems some sort of constant flow where the past is fixed, the future opens up, and there is no now, no present moment, that interrupts.

But to measure time, we have to start counting intervals. We have to start numbering differences. And we want to number the past and the future in the same way - even if one is the already actualised, the other some kind of unactualised possibility. So we start counting time in terms of spatialised passage of moments. We impose a conceptual framework on our experience that allows us to imagine change happening "in time". There is a crisp stopping and starting to events.

Or critically, there is the stopping that is our ability to shout out "now!", while watching the hands sweep the numbered dial of a clock. A continuous world gets stopped, then started, then stopped, by a ticking second hand ... in the world that is now the one conjured up by our scientific imagination.

So I think you risk rushing right past the basic philosophy of science issues that any talk of "the physical" must answer. And Aristotle was certainly on to it.

Of course most serious philosophers have come around to materialism by now, agreeing with the central conclusions of modern neuroscience: the mind is a physical product of the brain, the operations of the mind depend on brain states, and consciousness cannot actually exist apart from a physical brain. — Uber

But a lot of folk still believe that consciousness is an informational, or indeed computational, state. It is a kind of form - in the Aristotelian sense even - in being accounted for by a functional ontology. Consciousness - in this view - would be multi-realisable. You could build a "brain" out of tin cans and string so long as it replicated the functionality that is the processing structure of the actual human organ.

So a really modern neuroscientific understanding would dispute this. Or at least, it would say there is something special about the hardware of brains that the hardware of computers lacks. Computers are machines and so depend on completely inert and stable parts. Bodies are organisms that depend on the opposite thing of all their parts being in a state of generalised critical instability.

That is how life and mind bridge the "explanatory gap" of causality. States of information can regulate states of material organisation because it takes virtually no effort to nudge an unstable system in a desired direction. The cell is a thermodynamic storm of material structure constantly about to fall apart. And life is the trick of just delivering the right well time nudges to, instead, keep it constantly falling back together. The mind does the same balancing act in terms of behaviour.

But anyway, the point is that some kind of dualism - that seems very much like a form vs matter, or non-physical vs physical debate - runs through both the epistemology and ontology of science. So any scientist, who cares about the big picture being painted, can't afford to simply brush away the issues as somehow anachronistic and not still top of mind.

The way we have constructed our own physical model of the world has ultimately left us standing on the outside of that construction. We got there by sharply dividing the observer from the observables.

And then our best neuroscientific theories have been probing what that means. And the upshot is the emerging dissipative structure or infodynamic view, where life and mind are understood semiotically as the informational management of material instability. Form shapes material plasticity to create substantial being - Aristotle's hylomorphic view of "the physics".

Then even fundamental physics is undergoing a revolution where information is being granted some kind of physical reality. It is intelligible form, structure or constraint that shapes plastic material potential. Again, Aristotle's hylomorphism is being cashed out finally. Or at least ontic structuralism is top of mind in fundamental physics.

As you say, the deep assumption seems anti-dualistic. Information and matter must together compose the one world somehow. The mind is somehow still a product of the brain (or the structure of the brain a product of a lifetime's habit of being mindful?). The Universe is still a product of local material events - even if in the end, there is nothing at all but the blackbody radiation sizzle of cosmic event horizons, the zero-degree excitations being produced by the rather immaterial holographic bounds of a de Sitter spacetime.

So physics wants to reject actual dualism, and yet it can't do without the dialectically divided. Just as the Ancient Greeks got science going by establishing the basic dialectical divisions of nature.

And so - as Peircean pragmatism argues - the only other choice is Hegelian synthesis. If you want one-ness, and have to get there by incorporating a two-ness, then the only way to resolve that is hierarchical three-ness. The holistic or systems view. Which again would be Aristotle's answer with hylomorphism.

So the marvel is how quickly the Ancient Greeks got down to the metaphysical basics. And science has been a long time working back around towards that ontological framework.

But there's a sense of "prior" here which is difficult to grasp. — Metaphysician Undercover

But doesn't this come back to our usual sticking point? I say the problem with the Aristotelian telling is that is seems to put actuality before potentiality - in time. And Peirce would put it the other way round in seeing crisp actuality arising out of vague potentiality, with the Forms being the a-temporal midwife, so to speak.

So the Aristotelian story - actuality generates the potential - does work in the sense that historically actualised states of constraint do then act to give concrete shape to all remaining future possibilities.

Once a river has forked at a certain place, then that choice tends to persist as it becomes a difficult choice to reverse. And likewise, if I make a cube with six flat sides and which is evenly weighted, then I have an actual die which can potentially fall on any of those six faces with complete freedom.

So as we extrapolate from the simplicity of nature - the river and its fractal branching - to human mechanistic control, our desire for a "machine" that is a random number generator, we can see how the Form shifts from something that is smeared out in time, to something that is clearly present in a mind that wants to make the thing in question.

The river is feeling the constraint of a global form from the moment it was a first fresh trickle of rain creating rivulets on a new cooling volcanic slope. Over millennia, it carved out some very definite persisting (because self-reinforcing) pattern of channels while operating under exactly the same Form of Being. So the constraints that made the river were there at the beginning - as finality at least. But also as form, as the form is always fractal. And then steadily some river becomes a particular entrenched form - the Nile or the Tiber. So it becomes hard to pin a before or after on the formal/final cause. It is imperceptibly there from the start. And it is powerfully there at the end. But it is always there, shaping things - placing its restrictions on material spontaneity.

But with the die, it got made because some mind saw it as a form that could serve a rather human purpose. Nature breaks symmetries - as in a fractal. But humans can imagine a world in which symmetries get unbroken - as in a perfect Platonic solid. And so randomness can be idealised and thus realised on demand. We can imagine a cube that has six numbered sides, and we can imagine rolling it in a fashion where we "don't care" about the one it lands on.

Of course, a die is an odd sort of machine. Mostly we want to do the opposite of harnessing randomness to produce order. An engine is a system of cylinders, pistons and cranks aimed at constraining a petrol vapour explosion, pointing all its energy in a certain completely predictable direction to do work. But the causal principle is the same. First the human purpose and the form that inspires, then the actual building of a machine that expresses that system of material action constrained to achieve an efficient cause.

So yes, the Aristotelian story - bricks exist because someone wanted to build a house - does reverse the temporal sequence. And that fits with the notion of a creator god.

But I am talking naturalism where formal and final cause are always present, yet also they begin in that radical uncertainty we call the potential, and wind up in that habitual certainty we call the actual.

So the Tiber or the Nile might have had completely different stories. Maybe the first burst of rain could have been on this naked volcano slope over here rather than that one over there. All the water might have carved out a slightly different initial channel pattern. In 40 million years, a very different landscape might be the result - still fractal in its drainage pattern, but your map of the Nile or Tiber would not help you much.

If the unexpressed future is non-physical, and the past is physical, then the present is the act of expression, whereby the non-physical produces the physical (future gives way to become the past). So if at each moment, as time passes, the non-physical produces the physical, then if this is not instantaneous (which by the nature of "becoming" seems impossible), then we have to account for this expression, as a process. Hence the things which come out of the future first, those which are nearest to the purest of the non-physical, are "prior" in that sense. This order is understood in Neo-Platonism as procession, or emanation. — Metaphysician Undercover

The present is where the actualised past is exerting its historical weight of established being on the possibilities that may ensue to mark out its future. So every moment has some limited set of choices. But the choices are free ones - either properly random, at the level of physical nature, or ones that reflect the kind of options that life and mind can construct for themselves in having their own memories, habits and intentions.

You speak of time then passing, and that passage making the difference. But I am talking about the choices actually happening, and thus establishing a further concrete fact about historical existence. Another brick in the wall that further limits future choices. So time - as something global - does not pass exactly. It gets fixed in place as history. Actuality is getting baked in as the still available free potential gets energetically consumed.

But the things that come out of the future first will in some sense have to be the simplest, the purest, the least complex.

And that is the take of the Big Bang. In the beginning, science agrees, the symmetry breaking command was "let there be light". :)

Well actually, light - as electromagnetic radiation - was several symmetry-breakings later. The first act was the organisation that was the splitting of reality into action and direction in the form of a vanilla grand unified theory (GUT) force and a cooling~expanding gravitational backdrop.

Current cosmology speculates about this first Planck-scale act. The potential that came just before would have been a "quantum geodynamical foam" - a mix of spatial blackholes and temporal wormholes. Matter densities and temporal anomalies.

A bit poetic perhaps. But that seems a solid extrapolation from known physical models to start to try to understand these things. As you push right up to the smaller and hotter limits that define the ultimate Planck scale, you start getting fluctuations so pure and indeterminate that we can only recognise them as equal parts blackhole and wormhole.

This is a nice intro on that - http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html

My [evolving and constantly subject-to-revision] understanding is that the Sky Father is indeed a cultural projection based on an amalgam of archetypes. — Wayfarer

Somewhat irrelevant, but surely there is the earth mother also in the metaphysics of any agricultural society? So always that duality of the thunderous law maker and the fecund materiality.

Anyway, my point is that ordinary language has an agential grammar - as it should, as ordinary speech is all about organising our social worlds. But that then creates a rationality, a view of causal relations, predicated on minds with desires and intents. And so theistic metaphysics just super-scales that basic animism. Although - particular in regard to the Western Christian tradition - you had this new thing of a logical grammar, the root of an abstract or philosophical view of causation, enter the theistic picture.

So we wind up with a scholastic hybrid that tries to preserve a super-animism while appealing to Ancient Greek metaphysical rigour, setting up its own later strong conflict with objective science in this regard.

Does Buddhism protect you from the fray? Does it resolve these issues (in the way I say Peircean naturalism resolves them)? Or are you simply deploying the social animism you find there to attack the mechanical view?

The problem with Buddhism (in my view) is that - like PoMo - it avoids clear assertions about the issues. It enjoys and plays with the paradoxes rather than seeks to resolve them. And so it manages not to be found wrong by remaining strategically ambiguous.

But anyway, my point is about how there are two grammatical attitudes at work - the everyday agential one where even the wind seems to either favour or curse us, like another social player, and then the new mechanistic one where the Cosmos is ruled by Logos ... and somehow Flux still has to fit into that metaphysical equation.

The majority of posters here side either with an agential view of philosophy, or a mechanistic one. And probably that is because unless you have that kind of foundational disagreement, what else the heck would give you an excuse to post when the very nature of "a discussion" is the opposition inherent in a dialectic?

Again I come back to Peirce as the guy everyone is happy to disagree with as he takes the third position which is the resolution of all dialectical argumentation. He strived to create a grammar that was holistic - a story of constraints and freedoms, logos and flux. Semiotics is that more advanced grammar. Hegel and Kant were getting there, but Peirce - as also a scientist - sorted out something with foundational clarity.

That's fine. You've got a good understanding of stuff from the science side - you kind of got me from the moment you mentioned Karl Friston, certainly the smartest guy I came across when getting into functional neuroscience 25 years ago.

Apokrisis, if understanding Forms required tying them to some kind of "energetic change," wouldn't that make them physical in some weird way? — Uber

Of course. But are you prepared to enlarge your notion of physicalism to match?

Again, what is actually happening in physical theory? First biology realised that it is rooted in the informational regulation of material dynamics - the thermodynamical view where genes organise dissipative form. And now physics has been making the same information theoretic shift. As you say, suddenly the macro story of constraints has become basic as we take a condensed matter view of particles and states of materiality.

So this is what I recognise as semiotic - an ontology founded on the complementary reality of matter and information. This is not a dualism, but a dichotomy, as the two are formally reciprocal or inverse. They can be rotated into each other mathematically - the feature that blew everyone's mind about AdS/CFT correspondence.

There is big stuff going on here metaphysically. Action and direction must come to be seen as the two complementary halves of the one reciprocal relation. They must be the formal inverse of each other.

So time has to decide whether it stands on the side of action or direction. Or maybe it stands in the third place - as the manoeuvre which flips from one extreme to the other.

There is a really good post on how this connects with the three Planck constants - Okun's cube of physics - http://www.science20.com/hammock_physicist/physical_reality_less_more

But quickly, you can see how you need the three things of h (to scale local uncertainty or spontaneity), G (to scale global constraint, or energetic flatness), and then c as the speed of coherence (the rate at which quantum decoherence happens to relate the two opposing things of action and direction).

Then we grow up and our brains change, our knowledge of language increases, until the point where abstract thinking becomes possible around the early teen years (and even before to an extent). — Uber

I'd just mention that you are conflating two things. There is nothing that special about human brains when it comes to its neural architecture. It is a larger ape brain, with some greater capacity for visuospatial thinking and planning, probably due to the evolutionary demands of being tool-users as much as anything, but not radically different in a way that explains "reasoned thought".

It is the grammatical structure of speech itself that starts humans on the path to reasoned thinking. Speech demands that the world be broken down into tales of who did what to whom - some division into subject, object, verb. So it is the evolution of human culture - those grammatical habits - that sees us stumble into something (semiotically) new.

Our ape brain does not grow its syntactic structure genetically. It has to learn syntax by exposure to actual linguistic communities.

Of course, the human brain picks up those rules very easily. It has become adapted for that by - among other things - a prolonged period of brain plasticity in infancy. But still, the rules have to be learnt by exposure to cultural constraints.

And then a properly rational mindset - one organised by modern mathematical/logical syntax, the laws of thought - is the next step up. We must also grow up in that kind of world to wind up thinking in that kind of way.

Anthropologists find that native people react oddly to western IQ tests. They don't reason in the same abstract fashion. They seem to apply "magical thinking" - or a rationality that is very much based on the agential dynamics of ordinary human social interactions. At least that was the case 100 years ago. These days, everyone on the planet gets some education on how they should think to pass as properly "rational". :)

Anyway, @Wayfarer would be right that rationality is its own culturally discovered, or invented, thing.

The ape brain is great at induction, generalisation, prediction. That is what it evolved to do. And we just have a version with somewhat more horsepower.

But a logical mindset is usually defined by the further cultural thing of deductive thought. Some kind of grammatical or syntactic habit where chains of reasoning are produced for public consumption. We learn to explain ourselves in a rational cause and effect fashion.

Well, as I say, first came the "magical thinking" - the basic social style of speech - where everything is some combination of a subject, an object, and a causal action. The world is understood and communicated as some play of agents expressing their intentions in a way that caused events to happen.

Then later - around the time of Ancient Greece - we all took another big cultural step in objectifying and abstracting that agent-based causality. We discovered that reality is regulated by deep and impersonal forms. At that point, we started to loose our faith in an idealist reality - one where everything had an agential cause - and began to believe in an objective reality, where now nature became impersonal ... and eventually even mindless and computational. The semantics was washed away, leaving only the naked Platonic syntax.

A long-winded way of explaining how we have wound up so regularly split into the theists and the reductionists. Socially, we have one foot stuck in the past represented by magical thinking. All causality must have a moving mind at the back of it. The other foot is then stuck in the present with its mechanical or syntactical ontology. Reality is a fixed machine. Causation eventually becomes some kind of illusion as the Cosmos is a time-frozen logical block where nothing every really happens.

I advocate for the middle path that is Peircean pragmatism - the actual science of semiotics. Once you can see genes, neurons, words and numbers as a cascade of constraints, the same informational trick carried out in increasingly abstracted fashion, then you don't wind up throwing out the baby with the bathwater. You can minimise the subjectivity of syntactical argument without pretending to have eliminated it.

The Cosmos can be agential and spontaneous in some fundamental way (agential when complex, spontaneous when simple) while also being mostly in a highly constrained and mechanistic condition in its current "2.725 degrees from its Heat Death" state.

And so the agential vs the machine models of reality - which themselves reflect a historic shift from a grammar of social relations to a grammar of grammatical relations(!) - can be resolved in the thirdness of a pragmatic relation.

The ultimate kind of rationality is the one that results in the view of the world with us in it. Subjectivity emerges alongside the objectivity it believes it observes. We arrive at the Kantian realisation that we exist in our own semiotic Umwelts. But that is all good. It is how "we" get to exist. And it is all thanks to some developmental journey in terms of constraints - an education that was plugged into the world as being functional.

So theism becomes fine, even if it is "magical thinking" ... at least in the kind of minds it constructs within certain kinds of worlds.

And scientism is fine too ... on the same kind of judgement.

The question becomes where is this really leading - which is what was being discussed earlier in regard to the fate of the planet in the next 50 years. My criticism is that we are living socially as agents according one grammar, and then trying to understand our situation philosophically according to another, the grammar of abstract grammatical relations. The machine model of reality which patently leaves "us" out of it (even though we are then clearly there as the "gods" that make that mechanistic world for our own now unmodelled, unconstrained, purposes).

Neither of these grammars of thought are actually the grammars of metaphysical naturalism - the semiotic approach which is about seeing a world with us in it.

Theism legitimated the notion of transcending godhood. Machine rationality gave us the technological means to pretend to be those gods. We could enact the new modern project of Romanticism. We could believe we were aiming at beautiful creations while exponentially shitting up the planet.

So between the rationality embodied in social grammar and that embodied in mathematical grammar, there has to be another grammar that is both larger than these, and yet resolves these as aspects of that larger whole.

I mean biologists (like Aristotle) already think in that ecological or systems fashion. Naturalism of the full four causes kind has ticked along at the back of things. But a forum like this really brings out the historic division between the idealists and the realists - those that tend towards agential thinking and those that insist on a machine model of rationality.

[Sorry Uber. This isn't all directed at you. I'm just letting a reaction to your post run for the fun of it.]

So throw out these, but keep his understanding of time right? — Uber

MU set you a good challenge relating to a physical understanding of time. Even if Aristotle could be considered wrong on other things, this was the thing you were questioned on.

And it is clearly right that there is some ambiguity about whether time is a something of which change is predicated, or whether change is the measurable differences of which we imagine a temporal flow to be composed.

Time and energy are clearly connected in physics - all change being energetic. But they also stand in an inverse relation to each other. In relativity for instance, the faster something goes, the slower it’s clock ticks.

Physics also seems to contradict itself on time with the reversibility issue. Our microphysics is modelled as time symmetric, while our macrophysics sees it as a flow with an energetic direction, a thermal arrow. And when we get down to the quantum physics, we have to make the unmodelled choice of whether to believe there is or isn't a physical collapse of the wavefunction to remove the ambiguity of whether the symmetry is broken, as we experience, or not.

And to take the next step, to reach a theory of quantum gravity that might account for time, the wheel looks likely to turn again towards a constraints-based view where the past is the actualised and the future is the potential. Having spatialised time for so long, we may have a QG theory based on reality's thermal history.

On this basis, I challenged the notion that Forms can somehow be active in time without being active in space as well. In other words, what does it mean for them to be active, if not in spacetime? — Uber

So here we now get to something interesting. The traditional notion of the Forms is rather spatial and geometric. They are static mathematical shapes that would have eternal rational existence.

Well in fact the ancient view was more than that. Horses and humans were forms that had a substantial thermal structure too - they acted energetically in pursuit of characteristic ends. They were organisations expressing energetic tendencies.

So how would we understand forms in modern physics, once we move away from the spatialised version that incorporates the local symmetry or reversibility of direction that space has, and understand time instead as the generalised irreversible constraint which is a thermalising flow?

Are we going back more clearly to Aristotle now? Are the forms to be understood as latencies waiting to be expressed through striving - the shape of the structure that will emerge to organise a flow?

Is the non-physical simply the unexpressed-as-yet future then? MU will want to be more scholastic and place the forms clearly in the past - prior to that which actually exists. And they might be prior in the sense of being latencies.

But when it comes to physics having all the answers, clearly physics knows that it has gone a long distance following a certain track - one based on microphysical time symmetry. It is assumed by the modelling that time is a spatialised dimension which exists - it has actuality. And so change or potentiality becomes reduced to being some kind of relativistic or epiphenomenal illusion.

Yet eventually we need to take the other view of time more seriously. It does seem better assimilated to our notions of energy and action. We have to do justice to that macroscopically obvious fact that it is an organised structure, a flow, with a direction. The past is a collective (thermally coherent) history that constrains the freedoms of the as-yet unlived future. In time, nature's latent forms and purpose will be expressed.

So how can forms be active if not in spacetime? The trick is to see that they are active in themselves once time is understood in terms of the very possibilities of the expressions of energetic change.

Physics boils down to action with direction. Time has been partnered in our microphysical models with direction for a long time. But it likely makes more sense being unified with the action in some way - the potential for change that remains despite the past being now concretely actual.

hat, that they're pointing at nothing. The alternative is, they're pointing at something you're not seeing. This is why, whenever I refer to idealist or Platonist elements in your purported philosophical source, C S Peirce, you will peremptorily dismiss them as being 'not essential'. — Wayfarer

I support the structuralism that is the essence of Peirce. He himself was dismissive of any aesthetic imperative - a good test of where he stood. And his idealism was of a general structural kind, not some claim about cosmic consciousness. That’s a really big difference.

Meaning, we also need someone to build and maintain windmills. — Wayfarer

LOL. The windmills were Don Quixote's imaginary foe. "Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants?"

So no. The need is for a decent pair of glasses to see what is actually there.

I also think it is undesirable that individuals should be coerced by collective institutions. There's no harm in trying to convince someone that a particular view is the right, or the best, one; but the convincing should always be done by sound argument, and evidence and always by appealing to the other's own lived experience, and never by appealing to fear or guilt. All viewpoints and perspectives should be up for open and transparent analysis and critique. — Janus

But your language betrays the totalising framework that is in play for you. And that is what I would challenge.

You talk of coercion, institutions, fear and guilt as the things that any right-minded citizen among us (as near identical products of our moment in cultural history) would seek to be on the watch for when it came to what we collectively view to be clear signs of something that is wrong.

So you have already socially constructed the frame of discourse you expect me to operate under. That is where your open and transparent analysis and critique will take place.

My reply is that this is a very conventional and now rather dated frame. In sensitising you to the threat of social force, it blinds you to the essentiality of social constraint. I am not who I am - I am not an individual - except that I developed within my particular cultural context. There isn't even a "me" to speak of without the shaping "other" of the collective social order.

So my view would be that we are all rather good at doing the natural thing of arriving at an ongoing negotiation between our scope for creative free self expression and the complementary need to give a definite shape to our personal existence in terms of being rooted in the norms of some cultural context.

The problem of modernity is more the burden it places on many people. Too much individuality is expected of them. They are not allowed to feel comfortable living an "ordinary" life. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur shooting for the stars. And those that do think that is what they should want often seem not to be happy with that as a new cultural norm.

So I don't say things are perfect. Definitely not. But the diagnosis is not that we are seriously at risk of collective constraints in modern society. The existential threat has morphed into its opposite - the dread of having to be authentically unique in the manner that appears generally demanded.

That is why I prefer to start any philosophising from the solid basis of social psychology.

We have to learn to live within our (planetary) means, to treat life as sacred, and to develop an economic culture based on something other than endless growth and meaningless consumption. — Wayfarer

Or we can go extinct.

The issue here is that there may be a good reason why you are dreaming. Life is actually a manifestation of the second law and so humanity is responding to that thermal imperative.

So sure. I agree it would be nice if the world suddenly did go all eco. But arguing for the moral correctness of hippy values is pissing into the wind. There is a good reason why that is dreaming!

To have a choice, we would have to create a choice based on a realistic assessment of the human condition. That is why I would see it as indefensible to push cosy mythologies at this point in history.

The fact that spiritual philosophy is seen as 'old' or 'archaic' or 'out-moded' is one of the entailments of materialism. — Wayfarer

But if your foe of materialism has already out-moded itself so far as science is concerned, then you are merely tilting at the windmills of your youth.

And the totalitarian imposition of meaning by the collective on the individual is nihilism full-blown, at least in those cultures where individual creative aspirations have begun, or continue, to exist. — Janus

What is actually being protested here, I would say, is the machine model of constraints where our individuality would be completely suppressed by the collective psyche.

But actual societies ought to be understood as organisms, not machines. They are evolving and adaptive systems. Semiotic. And so they are founded on a complementary dynamic - competition and co-operation, local part and global whole.

In that view, what is natural is the striking of some balance between individuals expressing creative freedoms and collectives expressing constraining norms. Each is an action that shapes its "other". So each is symbiotically necessary to the other's being.

The only issue is what kind of balance is optimal given the wider context of some environment. Should things be tilted towards the free individual - technically, the immature stage of an ecosystem's lifecycle - or towards the collective norming, which is technically the senescent or habit-bound stage.

What could it mean for all individuals to honour a "higher truth"? Whose "higher truth" would they be honouring? I can't see how it could be anything but a retrogressive return to life "under the aegis of tutelage"*; a capitulation, a loss of nerve, a cowardly going back to a life which the spirit of the Enlightenment rightly sought to put behind it. — Janus

So as individuals, we would see our position as part of that collective balance. We are not ruled by some monadic over-riding concern. We want to express both natural aspects of our being - competition and cooperation, creative freedom and mastered habit - in a way that "works best".

The sticky point then becomes the clarity with which we can envision the general goal that all this organismic activity is meant to lead us towards.

Our first imperative is to attend to our own organismic flourishing. Which in turn depends on that of our ... community, race, nation, planet, noosphere, cosmos ... whatever level of embodied organismic being we can rightfully claimed to have achieved. :)

So that is where things break down. As simpler language-less organisms, we didn't have much choice but to get by as best we could in hunter/gatherer fashion. We had no particular say over nature.

And now we haven't quite got our heads around the next step of our evolution - the path that rationality has opened up.

Are we simply just Homo entropicus, the burner of a short-lived fossil fuel bonanza? Are we the forerunner of something Singulatarian and cyber-organismic?

The old theistic myths - the wisdom suited to an agrarian stage of human development - are no help at all on these questions. And even Enlightenment humanism, with its Romantic response, are not much of a signpost to our future.

As things stand, we don't know how the human experiment is about to turn out in the next 50 years. And to the degree we haven't thought the realistic choices through, we don't even have choices.

So it is weird to be wasting too much time with the mythologies of a past that has gone when we need to have answers about future social myths it would be sensible to be motivated by.

One of their fundamental criticisms is that string theory doesn't make testable predictions at all, and nor can the proposed multiverses or 'the landscape' ever be empirically demonstrated. So they are arguing that it doesn't pass muster as science. — Wayfarer

So isn't there some irony here that string theory is good evidence that science is Platonistic enough to bend its own alleged empirical rules when the mathematics seems so reasonable that it must be true?

If string theory had a single calculational outcome, then it would be game over. But it turned out to have a "landscape" of possible solutions.

If you then look at most of the critics of string theory you cited, they are then pushing their own particular Platonistic barrows. They have some alternative "reasonable" mathematical model, like loop quantum gravity.

So a cynical reading of the situation is that you are hearing from the experimental physicists getting concerned that the theoretical physicists were getting to much attention for just doing mathematics. They need those guys to produce "testable models" - preferably models like the Higgs particle which are bang in the energy range of the next generation collider they want funded. And then the other critics were the various mathematical physics wanting oxygen for their own Platonistic theories.

So, the nature of 'naturalism' is well and truly an open question. You can't sanguinely gesture at science as if we have it all worked out, we're just waiting for some additional details to flesh out the whole picture. We could well be on the cusp of a much greater revolution than the Copernican. — Wayfarer

Again, is this evidence that science is getting it wrong, or getting it right?

If you are wanting science - at the grand level of cosmological speculation - to be more Platonistic, well it is more Platonistic. It treats mathematical structure as being real.

And if you want science at that level to be less Materialistic, well it is that too. Atoms have dissolved into particles, which have dissolved into excitations, which have dissolved into informational degrees of freedom. The physicists don't believe in matter as the kind of substantial material stuff you criticise them for believing in.

So as the Platonic structure has become more real, the material stuff has become matchingly less real.

And that just happens to be exactly the kind of Naturalism you would find in the metaphysical tradition that connects Anaximander to Aristotle to Peirce.

I am having a hard time seeing how stasis, non-existence, the so-called ‘Heat Death’, comprises ‘a purpose’, any more than the purpose of an individual life is to be cremated. — Wayfarer

Again, this is something I have replied on multiple times. The answer is the same. Life and mind - as natural systems - can be understood to have a purpose that is orthogonal to this baseline entropic tendency. It is all a point of view.

So the second law prevails in the cosmological long-run. It is the baked-in tendency. But shit happens along the way. The Big Bang "wanted" to be a simple spreading~cooling radiation bath, but then it cooled to a degree that massive gravitating particles condensed out of this general smooth flow. The breaking of the electroweak symmetry by the Higgs field created a sudden clutter of hydrogen and other simple atoms. The smooth entropification was interrupted by a sudden production of negentropic matter.

That led to planets and stars. Stars are one way all that negentropy is being fizzled back into radiation. But stars leave a heavy atom residue. So now we have the conditions where life and mind could arise as further re-entropifying systems. It is part of nature's global desire that if anything could accelerate the return of that residual negentropy to the general entropic flow, then that kind of dissipative structure must inevitably develop.

So it is completely reasonable that life and mind should conceive of their reason for existing as being some kind of cosmic necessity. The Universe needs us organisms to break down the negentropic lumps that have developed in its entropic flow.

Humans are the most amazing dissipative structures in known creation. We can heat up entire planets in about a century. Our second law awesomeness in this regard is easy to quantify.

So yes. You do look at humans and think we must be really special. But the reason we are so focused on our own personal negentropic development is because our resulting entropy production is so matchingly spectacular.

We have developed mythologies - cultural, political, economic - that enable us to pursue the Universe's central goal by apparently aiming our lives at the very opposite of what it is doing. It is entropifying, but we are negentropifying.

But look closer. All that negentropic structure is what is managing to burn the millennia of trapped fossil carbon that "fell out of the entropic flow" by getting buried under rock. We are doing an amazing job of eating up all the coal and petroleum.

Pay attention to what we are actually achieving. Don't get fooled by the mythologies we spin around the social structure and cultural attitudes needed to pursue the Cosmos's grand plan.

Surely it must be the opposite to believe nature is imbued with an over arching purpose?

You say you accept a ‘four-causes’ cosmology - material, efficient, formal and final - but here the ‘ultimate Heat Death’ represents ‘the final cause’, in the sense of ‘that to which all things are directed’. Does it not? — Wayfarer

Yes. I’ve said exactly that plenty of times surely? That is the most fundamental global cosmic tendency.

That doesn’t stop complexity arising along the way. But it is the final game that underlies all others.

You seem to be obsessed with the ontological nature of constraints. ... Maybe God set them there. Maybe they are eternal and fundamental conditions of reality. Perhaps the most basic ones did not come from anywhere; they are just the default states of reality. — Uber

The simple answer is that constraints develop. They are the historical breaking of physical symmetries. The past gets fixed as the result of an accumulation of such constraints. A complex world arises as one breaking creates the ground for some further breaking in a hierarchically cascading fashion.

So to believe in a constraints-based ontology is to believe in existence as a product of development - the regulation of instabilty.

The ontology of constraints is not a great mystery. It is the ontology of a developmental, evolutionary or process view of metaphysics. That brand of naturalism, in other words.

So states of constraint become fixed in place in a historical fashion. The material organisation of the world instantiates them. The material world becomes a structure that is stable enough to remember its past and can enforce that as the persisting context which is shaping its remaining uncertainties or freedoms.

As an ontology, it contrasts with Platonism, Computationalism, and other essentially timeless views of the Cosmos. That is because constraints develop. Structure is that which emerges as a cascade of symmetry breakings.

And it contrasts with Atomism as well. Matter is regulated instability. So in the beginning, there was only instability or unregulated fluctuation. Atoms are the result of global historical contexts having developed and become relatively fixed.

So we exist because of the development of constraints. And to understand that history of symmetry-breakings, we have to melt the rather frozen block of constraints that now compose the structure of a Cosmos which is only a few fractions from its ultimate Heat Death.

Physics understands this is how it works as a practical matter. But oddly, the public metaphysics seems to have got stuck on the Platonism vs the Atomism.

We seem to have to make a choice of which team to follow - that of the timeless structures or the moving parts. Yet both are simply the complementary aspects of a Cosmos that has managed to lock in a complex state of self-regulation by growing so cold and large.

So to be clear, you mean to deny that the block universe was already a consequence of SR? We had to wait for GR?

The block universe was consequence of Minkowski space, so no idea what you are on about in emphasising GR as your speculative basis here.

I am saying that reason is always involved in this activity as a constituent of the process of cognition. How could it not be? That is how discursive thinking operates. So it can't be understood as the attribute of the brain as it transcends such objectification. — Wayfarer

Well induction or generalisation may be fundamental to all animal cognition, but deduction would seem to be something secondary that it rather special to linguistically and culturally constrained cognition. It is a further habit that us humans learn to apply and so not fundamental to the mind, or consciousness, itself.

It is an attribute of humans being language-using socialised creatures living in a modern world, post the Ancient Greek development as rationalisation as a general population skill. It is part of the brain's evolutionary wiring only in the sense that the brain has become more hierarchically organised in a fashion that action and behaviour can be constrained in a "deductive" way. The higher brain can form the general goals and leave it to a cascade of increasingly more specified habits to execute the particular actions need to achieve those goals.

But running a hierarchy of control from the top-down - reversing inductive learning to produce retroductive sensorimotor predictions - is still different from the brain implementing the laws of thought. Those are the product of cultural learning.

And that is important to any notion of subjectivity. Culture and language are the constraints that produce that kind of human psychology - the one with a private sense of self. Humans learn to feel like perceiving essences standing apart from an objective world as part of what it means to be a (modern) human.

I am saying that the naive scientific attitude is that there is an observer apart from the thing observed. Is that not the case? And isn't it the case that it was the 'observer problem' that came up in the early twentieth century that challenged that understanding? — Wayfarer

I agree there. That was what reductionism was about.

Well, what you're describing as 'a proper naturalism' might not be the mainstream view, which I think is considerably more 'mechanistic' than yours. — Wayfarer

Again true. I'm not mainstream I guess. :)

You keep saying this, but what does it mean, in practice? Where does intention or intentionality enter the picture? Is that part of the schema at the outset, or does it only arise at the point where there are conscious agents? — Wayfarer

Naturalism would recognise finality as something that is itself dichotomised. There is the most general kind of finality - the kind of universal tendency encoded in the second law of thermodynamics in particular. And then there is the highly complex kind of finality which it the intentional and autonomous type of being enjoyed by humans as linguist/social creatures.

So for the project of naturalism to be successful, it would have to be able to see how these two poles of finality are essentially the same while also being essentially different.

A tendency and a purpose are the same in that a system has to be guided by an idea that works. Given a presumption that chance, chaos or instability is fundamental, Being can only persist if it is functional, or tellic. It has to be a structure "wanting" to rebuild itself continually.

But a tendency and a purpose are different - as different as they can be - in that the Cosmos could only reflect the most generic of all purposes (to exist by encoding whatever tendency leads to persistence), and the Mind would be an expression of the most subjective or self-interested kind of goals and purposes (as they are the levels of goal or purpose that subserve the persistence of a complex and individual selfhood).

I wasn't really focusing on the burden of proof question. The problem there is that naturalism takes on that burden as epistemically foundational - nature is defined in terms of the observable. And supernaturalism has a history of equivocating.

Either it presents "evidence" (like the existence of miracles), or it argues from "reason" (the need for a first cause, a prime mover), or it argues from one of the supposed failures of naturalism (an inability to explain freewill, goodness, whatever).

So the dichotomy there is that naturalists expect empirical validation, supernaturalists show they aren't that bothered.

...but I think this approach can at least put to rest the interminable controversy over whether ontological priority belongs to mind or to matter, and leaves the way open for more interesting investigations. — Janus

So are we agreeing that a semiotic naturalism has the advantage of being triadic and so able to include both matter and mind in its one scheme?

True, but in a like sense naturalists could also be wrong in arguing immanence over transcendence or unity over duality (or plurality), since just as there is no transcendence without immanence and no plurality without unity, there is no immanence without transcendence or unity without plurality.

So...Hegelian sublation? — Janus

Peircean semiosis is better as it resolves itself into a hierarchical relation - global constraints of local freedoms.

So an Aristotelian/Peircean naturalist could not be wrong as they are arguing for a transcendence that is "merely" the kind of transcendence that is a development of hierarchical complexity. And with complexity comes a greater degree of locally meaningful individuation or plurality.

So immanence goes with emergence. A system that is closed for causation and yet also capable of open-ended complexification ... at least up until the time it runs out of sustaining resources. (ie: It is, in the end, a system closed for causation.)

Transcendence generally tries to deny that thesis so it presents a genuinely opposed ontology. Although of course - like Hegel, like NaturPhilosophie, or even Peirce in his cranky old age - theism can try to work its way back to an immanent ontology, one where the divine is self-causing.

But still, equivocation has to be in operation. My brand of naturalism says that "the mind" is a complex particular rather than a simple general. That is why it sits within the world as modelled by physicalism. Physicalism can understand what that means.

A naturalism that wants to embrace the supernatural elements of the "spiritual" or the "divine" have to talk about those as simple generals - basic universal essences or substances. So in that way, a (super)naturalism could be distinguished still from a physicalist naturalism based on semiotics, pragmatism, information theory and complexity theory.

Immanence is the claim that reality is self-organising or bootstrapping. And science is cashing that out in terms of models that work.

Theists can also be attracted to immanence as the rationally best ontological story in being a causally closed ontological story. But then the other half of that - the empirical evidence - is at best equivocated. Well also, the theoretical half is equivocal as it lacks the necessary mathematical framing. There aren't the definite ideas to be definitely tested.