But this wrapped up could be the very experientialness of matter itself, perhaps. I don't see how it can be wrapped up in any other way other than being a strict dualist- the mystical kind you don't like. — schopenhauer1

So explain to me how this story of correlation actually works then. If the material becomes convolutedly organised in a way that produces emergent organisation and global properties, why does the mental follow suit? Is it being caused to do so by the material changes. Or does it just like going along for the ride for some reason?

Classic correlationism is monadology. So what is this new version that you appear to be suggesting exactly?

And if instead you are claiming panexperientialism or some kind of dual aspect monism, then maybe you can now claim a free ride. But you get into other kinds of idiocy. If experience is a property of matter, then in what sense does it do anything (as properties are normally about the capacity for doing things). Panpsychism becomes just epiphenomenalism by another name unless it is causing matter to behave. So your correlationism looks right out of the window if you want to grant actual occasions the power of agency.

It's not up to me to make sense of the many positions you want to dance between. Although I would agree that none of the ones you have indicated so far in fact bear much critical examination.

Actually that is the opposite- if panpsychism has it, they are a neutral monism of sorts. — schopenhauer1

Yes. Of course. :-}

And I think that panpsychism is immanent. — schopenhauer1

Making the dualism immanent is not a good solution. Naturalism is about nature as a coherent unity.

Um, since when did correlation mean emergence? — schopenhauer1

You did it again. As soon as you feel pinned down to a specific position, you switch the story.

You just about grudgingly tied the correlational story of this mind stuff that tracks the fortunes of the matter stuff - as it becomes complexly organised and shows new "emergent" features - then immediately pull back from the causal implications.

You almost admitted to the causal link - in saying the mental is somehow "wrapped up" in the physical, and therefore more than merely just some "correlation". Now you have to rescue your ghost in the machine by a hasty retreat.

Mind and matter can travel in the same bus, eat in the same restaurants, but never actually be found in the same section of those places. There must be no actual mixing of the races.

Though you do not account for mental events, just how their physical correlate interacts in its realm. Or you jump over the gap and presume the very thing to be explained, thus conveniently skipping that hard part. — schopenhauer1

So you will repeat to your last dying breath. I get that.

But here I am asking you to show the firm ground to your own questioning. Not having much luck so far.

What do you mean by deflationary? Reductionist? — schopenhauer1

Naturally immanent and not transcendently supernatural.

I just gave Marty some references on the kind of emergence that goes beyond reductionist modelling still. But if you mean just references to the reductionist modelling of emergence, then there are tons of really good popularisations.

James Gleick's Chaos and Roger Lewin's Complexity are still great.

Isn't the critical fact of emergence that the emergent properties cannot be predicted from or traced back to, the properties of the constituents? The properties of water can be, at least in this case. — T Clark

That was the original holist proposal really, back around the 1920s level of understanding with guys like Broad, Smuts, Alexander and Lloyd Morgan. Back before there were mathematical models that could predict - at least by simulation - emergent properties as the result of collective behaviour.

So back when modelling was stuck with simple linear equations, then that kind of emergence might as well be magic. Properties may as well pop out as there was no maths that could predict them.

But then with computers and non-linear maths becoming a practical thing, we have had an explosion in the modelling of such emergence. In a sense, the reductionists have claimed back that part of what holism was trying to steal away. :)

It is hard to recommend non-technical books. But there are plenty of systems science or hierarchy theory texts. Ludwig Von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory is one. Stanley Salthe's Development and Evolution is another.

There are plenty of popularisations, like Arthur Koestler's Ghost in the Machine, Fritjof Capra's Tao of Physics and its follow-ups, Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach. Yet they tend to miss the mark for me.

The trick here is that reductionists are right about their version of emergence. That has to be given credit. But then there is still the larger picture which is the kind of emergence that hierarchy thinkers or semiotic theorists would be talking about - where top-down constraints shape the parts.

The entire world would instead operate instead as a totum, to where it determines it's parts as a relationship with itself. — Marty

This is the more sophisticated view.

Unfortunately reductionists can point to the liquidity of water or the magnetic field of an iron bar as simple reductionist models of emergence, or collective behaviour.

H2O molecules already have weak electrostatic forces due to their asymmetrical form - a faint polarity. And so when a gaseous collection of molecules cools enough to let this faint attraction become the dominant organising force, you get the new property of a liquid state. But that faint attraction was "always there". So no mystery as to why the liquid state emerges as a global property.

So reductionism has a good theory of emergence in terms of pre-existing, but very faint, material properties. This then allows reductionism to ignore a bigger story involving top-down causes that actually shape those lower level properties.

So "emergence" turns out to be more than just one kind of thing. A thread about emergence has to make it clear which variety it might have in mind.

this is similar enough to somebody’s comment about “that which breath’s life into the maths”. — javra

Worth mentioning that was Mr Blackholes, Stephen Hawking: “Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.”

One relevant issue that I find interest in is the ontic possibility of novel information creation and information erasure. As it happens, there are some physicists who uphold the possibility that information itself might be both created and erased within Black Hole gravitational singularities (to be clear, non-allegorically). — javra

Landauer was the one who made the information erasure point. Computation is physical because it doesn't have to cost energy to create information. But an entropic price has to be paid to erase it. That is a fundamental constraint which shows information and matter are connected in a deep fashion. Even a Matrix simulation can't be a perpetual motion machine as the laws of thermodynamics apply.

Then black holes are about information loss - so only erasure in being lost over an event horizon. With black holes, we seemed to have a violation of conservation principles. But then the solution was found in the holographic principle. The information can be considered as physically encoded on a surface ... the event horizon. And so it can be recovered ... re-radiated in scrambled fashion, but nevertheless, returned.

Some really crazy ideas turned out to have deeply meaningful consequences. They made predictions which we can observe.

So - so far - conservation of information is proving a powerful principle, just as conservation of matter was.

But then where does that leave spontaneity, creativity, novelty? Is this ontic structural realism the new determinism? Or is material cause - the ineffable thingness that is missing from the formal account - now the pure indeterminacy, the pure uncertainty, the pure notion of "an action", that lurks just out of sight of the phenomenology?

Is material cause now the ghost in physics's formal machinery?

Yes, the relation of things in logical space gives rise to facts, — Posty McPostface

The shift is from things to relations. The things drop out of the picture to leave only the relations.

So it is a shift from material cause thinking to formal cause thinking, which reflects the reality that Reality boils down to its organisation, its structure.

Hence ontic structural realism as the new metaphysical bandwagon - the response to the information theoretical turn in physics.

Of course that then makes "things" or "materiality" rather mysterious. The materialists will cry in reply, the existence of relations surely implies the existence of things to be related? The same old, same old.

But really, what we can be sure of is the existence of patterns or structures. The nature of "the material" in fact is ineffable, beyond our reach.

The ironies keep compounding here. Physics is moving towards a more rigorous epistemology and that flushes out the lingering materialism in most folk's thinking. The old habit that can't be broke.

So, in essence, we seem to be talking about epiphenomena. — Posty McPostface

No. The point is that phenomena are the only thing we can talk about. We have to start from experience itself (which is prior even to a mind~world distinction - the debate between the idealists and realists).

Materialism - as reductionist atomism - made all reality a composite of individuated "thingness". Substantial being was made basic. Relations then became accidental. Form and purpose were not real as causes.

As the basis of physics theories. that was great up until quantum mechanics and general relativity. Then it started to get very sticky as the basic holistic contextuality of nature became grimly apparent.

Now physics has switched over to a more idealist mode of description - information. It no longer makes any real presumptions about the nature of matter. Instead it freely speculates about the "fundamental constituents" in terms of pure forms. Particles could be vibrating strings, or excitations in the geometry of a network, or knots in spacetime dimensionality.

In other words, physics now seeks the pure calculus of relata. A particle isn't a material string. It is instead the symmetries that a string can encode which are now the basis of the modelling of reality.

So for a long time, pattern, form, purpose, universals - all these things were treated as epiphenomenal. But now we are explaining reality in terms of these phenomena - patterns we perceive and can understand "directly".

If reality is about knot theory, or string theory, or braid theory, we can see directly the reasons for the patterns we experience. It is the generic form involved that explains things. We no longer have to invoke some mysterious "uncuttable material constituent particle".

The "rot" started with quantum mechanics. Is reality about particles or waves, or even wavicles, or wave packets? Physics says all we can really know is what we see. Sometimes reality has the pattern that we would derive from the idea of a particle, sometimes that derived from the idea of a wave.

So science is treated by Wayfarer especially as guilty of arch-materialism. He is always searching for examples of scientists who can best confirm that opinion.

And yet here with the turn to information theoretic physics, we have science that is actually now more phenomenological, more idealistic. Thermodynamics even endorses teleology now that it has advanced to talk about the Cosmos as a dissipative structure (see Layzer).

Namely, that information is the description of the arrangements of particles or 'things'. Meaning is derived from the sum total of the arrangement of 'things' in space, which are facts. — Posty McPostface

So it is an ontology of relata rather than things. That is why the talk is of counting degrees of freedom instead of particles or things.

Yeah sorry. The comment was directed at the OP. Your Matrix remark highlighted for me that the literal view is the modern version of idealism.

As to death and the Matrix, a problem literal informatics would seem to have is that it undermines conservation principles. Physicists would want an it from bit Universe in which the information is a conserved quantity. So the death of a character would have to be a disassembly of bits which could always be rearranged - resurrected in theory.

In the end, informational bits or material bits, the bigger ontological issues remain the same. More evidence of why there is an essential equivalence. Idealism always ends up having to "work" just like physicalism. We see that with panpsychism for instance.

Another irony here.

I can't see how 'information' can be understood as something which is metaphysically simple. — Wayfarer

Probabaly the best foundational definition of information - from Bateson and cybernetics - is that it is a difference that makes a difference. So meaningfulness in a nutshell.

Then to quantify such a quality, you need to be able to measure that in terms of what it is not. You need a way of also counting the differences that don't make a difference. You need a metric of the meaningless.

Hence the close connection with physical entropy modelling. You need to be able to count the total number of possible material bits - all the differences that could have been signal rather than noise - so as then to be able to give a value to what turns out to be signal, and not noise.

This is what science is so good at. Taking a basic metaphysical intuition and deriving a system of measurement that then makes the ontological commitments exact and testable. A way of thinking becomes fully worked out.

You are very focused on the issue of "where has meaning gone?". You eavesdrop on the scientists - a librarian's account! - and say clearly they are talking about meaningless bits. They are measuring physical noise and not conceptual knowlege or semantic facts.

But what science is doing is defining difference itself as the baseline for then measuring differences that make a difference.

Once you have Boltzmann entropy, then you have a secure basis for more meaningful thermodynamic models - like dissipative structures which are negentropic and serving a purpose.

Once you have Shannon information, you can then build theories of meaning based on more sophisticated metrics like mutual information or free energy reduction.

Science ain't dumb. It knows that information theory isn't a theory of meaning. It is about establishing a secure foundation for that by being able to measure what is instead the meaningless. Once you have cleared the ground, the real work can begin.

I confess I am helpless against this level of rhetorical idiocy. Reason has completely departed the scene.

This is somehow amusing to me. In terms I think even preadolescent kids might understand, it all amount to: who has the metaphysical rights to the ontology portrayed in the movie “The Matrix” (sans the part of being unplugged from the Matrix)? The physicalists or the non-physicalists? — javra

Hmm. It is ironic that a lot of you guys are reacting in horror at physicists who might take it literally that reality is just a pattern of information. It is after all just a modern version of idealism. You have physicists who are denying materialism and saying things are pure information. Reality is even observer created if you go to the quantum extreme.

So here we have science prepared to talk openly about a concrete idealist ontology. And everyone gasps in shock. No they must be wrong. Matter is obviously real. The Matrix could only be a simulation hanging off an electrical plug.

So in one breath, you seem to accept physical to mental causality, but say emergence as a mechanism feels too mysterious. Well that's a good place to start I would say as I agree that "emergence" of the reductionist "pop out global property" kind is rather too simplistic and magical. That is exactly why I then take a systems science or semiotic approach to accounting for the causality involved.

But then in the next breath you are quite taken by panexperientialism, an utterly different ontology. That jumping about from one explanatory basis to another is what makes it hard to have a discussion. It allows you always to deny any attempt to provide a deflationary account of "the mind" as you reserve the right to invoke mystical being at any point.

. Despite an enormous evolutionary selection that must exist for the property of prediction, I think that imagination has great difficulty arising through cause and effect coupling or any other mechanical definition. — MikeL

Not really as the way the brain "computes" is based on generating a forward model of the world. It attempts to predict its inputs, imagine the world as it is just about to be in the next instant.

Google Bayesian brain theory to get the up to date neuro picture.

So imagination is the basis for awareness, not a difficult to explain bolt-on. We are always expecting something, and so that is how we are capable of being surprised. There is a forward projection to be contradicted.

Semiotics also has the problem of resolving dual conflicts. Lets give our bacterium some more flagella. What happens when the left and right chemoreceptor light up at the same time? The only reasonable argument I can see would be the claim that there is never simultaneity in effector-response nor ever an exact equal weighting of two things, as simultaneous as they may appear. A see-saw with a 100kg weight placed on both sides at the same time will not move. — MikeL

Why would you invent difficulties just to make the argument difficult? It seems an odd habit of thought you have here. Would evolution favour a set up that doesnt work?

But anyway, your left and right chemoreceptors would seem to be on the front end, not the back end, so there would still be a hardwired asymmetry. You haven't yet managed to imagine Buridan's Ass.

I guess it could be a correlationalism. Mental events are correlated with physical. Physical can build up into more complex parts, meanwhile, mental is not accounted for. — schopenhauer1

So your argument here says the physical parts can evolve complexity. We have the functional circuitry that is a brain connected to sensory organs and muscle systems. A machinery that is "computing" in some general sense we can understand. And then the mental is just there as a correlation? It is not caused by any of the functional goings-on, but it somehow completely mirrors them in a non-caused fashion?

And when I ask if this mind has any causal structure of its own, you don't even attempt to answer? It is enough to say the mind seems "wrapped up" in that physical process. We just somehow find the two things in the same place, but you "know" there isn't a causal connection, even if can't offer any reason to arrive at that strong conclusion.

In some instances, actual occasions will come together and give rise to a “regnant” or dominant society of occasions. — schopenhauer1

Other times, however, a bodily society of occasions lacks a dominant member to organize and integrate the experiences of others. Rocks, trees, and other non-sentient objects are examples of these aggregate or corpuscular societies. In this case, the diverse experiences of the multitude of actual occasions conflict, compete, and are for the most part lost and cancel each other out. Whereas the society of occasions that comprises a compound individual is a monarchy, — schopenhauer1

So now we have Whitehead. Isn't this a claim about emergence? If there is organisation of the actual occasions of experience, then this gives rise to full consciousness. And if there is instead disorder and conflict, then emergence does not take place, as fulll consciousness depends on a further global level of integration.

If your answer isn't monadology, then is it now emergence? So you might find mental emergence a valid causal story. And perhaps you then are happy with physical emergence on the same grounds. The form of the Whiteheadian explanation certainly follows the usual physicalist account of emergence.

Yet for some reason you refuse the idea of the emergence of the mental from the physical, where many others might just say the mental is the name we give to this particular physically emergent property.

Does this sum it up so far?

This is taken from this page which aggregates various articles about Landauer. — Wayfarer

Landauer certainly gets a mention. But there is something hilarious about this being a librarian's view of the contributions that information services folk could make to this frontier debate.

How, then, could the information be physical? — Wayfarer

One little fact that should give pause for thought. When Shannon discovered the way to quantify the information content of a message, it turned out the equation was the same as the one Boltzmann had discovered for quantifying physical entropy.

Spooky coincidence or....

No, as I said, mental is wrapped up in physical. — schopenhauer1

So now you are saying the mental is "wrapped up" in the physical. But somehow, that ain't causal?

So where are we headed? Mondalogy? Correlationism? And could that even work in a post-determinism physicalism where the physics is not clockwork any longer?

Define what it is to be "wrapped up".

Subject is wrapped up in object so intrinsically that there is no one without the other. But this does not say anything in favor of physicalism. In fact, if anything, it works against it. — schopenhauer1

You might have to go through that one step by step.

But back to my question. Is emergence something that happens on the mental side of your equation or not. If so, how? If not, why not?

Help us understand what you mean by "mind" here.

It's like the entirety of philosophy just passes you by.

↪schopenhauer1 So does emergence work from the mental to the mental I wonder. Perhaps you can say how, or why not? Tell me more about the nature of this "mental".

There is a green surface, and a white surface side by side. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, that works. :-}

So does the edge of one surface touch the edge of the other at every point? Or are you imagining a faint gap in-between? If touching, then what makes that not continuous. If a gap, let's talk about the colour in-between.

Instead of a dividing line, we assume a transition of :"becoming". In the "becoming", the LEM does not apply, because the surface is neither white nor green. — Metaphysician Undercover

So we now have the third thing of a transition area. And the LEM does not apply as clearly this third thing is a crisply existent generality of it own. So far, pretty Peircean.

But this new transition area that replaces the line now has two boundaries - the one on the green surface area side, and another on the white surface area side. So what colour are they? Or are they further transition areas (and so on, ad infinitum)?

Aren't you really now hoping that the whole boundary question disappears into an amophous blur? The question becomes vague. It becomes impossible to say it is one thing or the other, and so therefore possible to say either could be claimed equally well without fear of contradiction?

Think again about how the laws of thought go, starting from the principle of identity. If the individuated particular is by definition the particular, then it is not not itself, and thus not its "other". The PNC and PEM follow from an axiom that assumes individuation exists.

But that leaves individuation itself unsecured. So when it comes to talk about boundaries or dividing lines, we can't afford to simply attempt to bury the problem out of sight for the moment with talk about further things such as transition zones.

Note that Peirce does follow Aristotle closely on treating the infinite as potentiality. So the number line is considered to have the continuity of a limit. We did discuss this about a year back with a guy who was a decent Peircean scholar. There is also this paper - https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/cognitiofilosofia/article/viewFile/13389/9925 - which relates this back to Peirce and Aristotle's shared conception of time. It might be worth you reading to see the basic degree of overlap.

But then I depart from Peirce at this point in adding in the strong notion of the dichotomy, or symmetry breaking. I employ the convergence to a limit argument to show that the continuity of a limit is a virtual object.

This isn't anti-Peirce, as in his voluminous writings, he touches on the same thing. But it is something I am foregrounding as the critical element. Just as I foreground the hierarchical structure which is also more implicit than explicit in Peircean semiotics.

You mean you have suspicions that I might actually be right, because I can actually provide valid, coherent references to back up my claims? — Metaphysician Undercover

Hah. No. That was just my iPad autocorrecting can't to can.

I'm just complaining how you wave your airy hand at SEP and say look there when I ask for a specific reference. You have always avoided quoting actual sources when citing from authority. So of course I think the reason is that the sources aren't going to be much support to your rather personal interpretations.

Yet this chaos (these random fluctuations) to me is always relative and can never be absolute (absolute chaos to me is logically contradictory); this, then, likewise specifies that the lack of constraints upon the given chaotic system is itself always relative, and can never be an absolute lack of constraint. — javra

But then what meaning does constraint have except that it is relative to a possible action? So how is the actual possibility of that action not prior to the existence of the constraint?

Unless there is something trying to happen, then it makes no sense to speak of that which is preventing it happen.

So the argument you want to employ is the one that is also going to count against you.

I'd agree that the idea of an uncaused fluctuation is unsatisfactory - a brute micro-fact!

So what comes next to dissolve that? We may still have a problem, but at least we have drilled down further to have an actually deeper level structural issue in our sights.

Getting technical, a fluctuation would seem to have to be understood as both an act of differentiation and an act of integration at the same time. Two ends of the same stick in some subtle way.

So yes, you can still make the usual "no cause/no effect" protest. You can point out my talk of fluctuations looks like talk of brute micro-facts. But my argument also hinges on mutuality or dependent co-arising. The two faces of reality will each be seen to be the cause of its other. And that in turn means that follow their present separation back to their root common origin and a convergence to a limit will result.

There will be some scale where the separate things of action and direction (energy and spacetime) become equivalent and indistinguishable. A blur. A vagueness.

Now you have the constituents of reality explained - if each face of reality is the cause of its other. And you have a common limit defined by the logic of convergence. Cosmic development, when inverted, sees everything causal contract and blur, then vanish at some limit.

So does emergence work from the mental to the mental I wonder. Perhaps you can say how, or why not? Tell me more about the nature of this "mental".

There are some speculative developments that seek to quantize spacetime at the fundamental level, — SophistiCat

Interesting how loop quantum gravity takes the condensed matter approach to explaining the emergence of spacetime. So in fact the grainy fabric of reality is organised by top down constraints. Not so bottom up reductionist, eh? But nice try.

Yeah, but we are already using microscopes that exploit quantum effects. That didn't take us long to dig down to the lowest layer. — MikeL

So is seeing believing or not? You can't have it both ways. Either we see the graininess and believe it, or we do what you do and still seek to deny it.

So let me ask, how do they know that a radiating body actually does stop radiating heat? — MikeL

Just turn on your light. Did it vaporise the planet with an instant blast of infinite heat?

And all bodies indeed radiate some heat as they will have some relative temperature. Quantum mechanics assures even the vacuum has a zero point energy.

Interesting. It reminds me of (without necessarily be the same as) differance. — t0m

Hah. Don't get me going on PoMo approaches. They are generally hostile to hierarchical or structuralist thinking. They thus prefer the play of paradox to the resolution provided by dichotomies. They apply Saussurean dyadic semiotics rather than Peircean triadic semiotics.

So yes, often PoMo is feeling up the legs of the same elephant. But the instinct is to draw a different kind of conclusion. Hierarchies and constraints and stuff like that are deemed "politically incorrect". So the metaphysics has the goal of supporting that (Romantic) world view.

Is the quantum level really as far as it goes? That's not very far at all when you think about it. We are only a couple of levels above it. — MikeL

We know it must be so. Otherwise any radiating body would radiate an infinite amount of heat (there being no smallest contribution if the underlying reality doing the radiating were continuous). That is the original problem quantum mechanics was required to solve.

And we happen to be 35 orders of magnitude distant from the Planck (distance) scale. That is 1 followed by 35 zeroes. Plenty enough to make it look a blur.

Surely the decimals in the measurement don't close out. Surely no two electrons are the same. — MikeL

Quantum theory can calculate basic properties to as many decimal places as you like. The difficulty becomes measuring particles with the same degree of accuracy. But famously, the magnetic moment of an electron - every electron - has been checked out to a greater number of decimal places than any other scientific fact.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_moment

nd uncreated and eternal? As I understand the argument for brute fact, it's really about human reasoning. It doesn't matter if existence was always here or whether it sprang from nothing. Both could be understood as brute facts, depending on the theory which included them. — t0m

You are right. Neither are acceptable (to me) as they rely on brute fact claims.

Why should something come from nothing? Well it just did.

Why should existence just exist? Well it just does.

You write a vagueness as origin. Would this not be a brute fact? It's really just the old question of infinite regress. Either the chain of whys stretches forever of this chain terminates in a "just because" or "I don't know." Since I think brute fact is logically necessary, I don't think it's a flaw in a metaphysical vision to acknowledge an "irrational" origin. — t0m

Yes, in the end all metaphysics must arrive at a brute fact. So my claim is that my approach demands the least possible in these terms. There will still remain the question of "why anything?", but instead of the question being "why something rather than nothing?", it becomes "why something rather than everything?".

Vagueness says we know there is in fact something (we exist after all) and really anything and everything also seems possible as its prior (as what would there have been to prevent that being the case?).

So from that, we can reason that our somethingness has to result from the emergence of those initially absent constraints. So rolling back time to define those necessary initial conditions, we arrive at the notion of this raw and unformed state of potential - whatever it is that is the opposite or inverse of a constrained state of actual somethingness.

Also note the argument about irrational numbers and convergence on a limit. If you have two things in play - the thesis and antithesis that make up the two poles of a dichotomy - then infinite regress does get terminated by a limit. We can roll back our state of somethingness - which is some yin and yang of crisply developed opposites - back towards the shared limit within which they converge. Vagueness can absorb the contradictory (or contrarieties, to be more Aristotelian) as each is folding back into its other.

It is just inverse dialectical reasoning. If two things come out of the one prior, then we can run that story backwards to recover its limit. And that limit is how we would define vagueness.

So my approach has a lot of new tools that can be used to minimise the brute factness of metaphysics. I don't need to get carried away and claim it eliminates brute fact. :)

Does Peirce provide any such demonstration as to the type of situation where the LNC does not apply, to support his definition of vagueness? — Metaphysician Undercover

“Let part of a surface be painted green while the rest remains white. What is the color of the dividing line; is it green or not? I should say that it is both green and not. ‘ But that violates the principle of contradiction, without which there can be no sense in anything’. Not at all; the principle of contradiction does not apply to possibilities”.

This is demonstrated by the fact that when time is passing there is a future, and future things are indefinite due to potential. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is the case once time has got going and a concrete history has developed.

So it is not wrong. But it is a different sense of "potential" - one that is now about crisp possibilities or definite degrees of freedom.

History builds up a context or pattern of constraints. This then concretely shapes the possibilities that remain. I toss a coin and the outcome is uncertain. But it is also already definitely going to be heads or tails.

So the LEM certainly applies once history has got going and built up a past to constrain the present. And then the LEM doesn't apply to future conditionals as ... they are still off in the future ... but as definite unknowns, not vague ones.

Then you have the more radical sense of potentiality that is vagueness or firstness. This is where the PNC fails (as yet) to apply.

You say that there are eternal forms, which stand outside of time, then you say that they are "emergent" — Metaphysician Undercover

Their actualisation would be emergent. And spacetime~action, as the most fundamental form of symmetry breaking or dichotomisation, would be itself emergent. Time - conceived of as the necessary medium to effect change - itself emerges to achieve the said change.

Or better yet, just learn to stop thinking of time as a medium - substance - and learn to conceive of it as a process. Time is the general process of a congealing cosmic memory, a steady development of ever greater constraint on action. Eventually the Cosmos coasts to a Heat Death standstill at "the end of time".

Check your favourite, SEP — Metaphysician Undercover

It's always suspicious how you can provide actual references.

So you are presuming that motion, change or action needs a cause and can't instead be spontaneous?

I'm instead making the opposite presumption. Fluctuations are the result of a lack of constraint. The problem that existence has is in developing regulating habits.

The initial conditions are an everythingness of spontaneity that is utterly unruly. There is nothing standing in the way of motion, change and action. Then out of that constraints develop. Chaos is transformed into definite actions having definite directions.

So one view sees stasis, a lack of action, as the obvious de facto state. Nothingness seems quite natural. Any first action must have a cause - the atomist's "first swerve".

The other instead sees flux as the basic unavoidable condition. If constraints are lacking, then of course there is nothing to prevent a chaos of fluctuation. What is stopping spontaneity? Constraints need to develop to produce an orderly state where cause and effect now operates and time flows smoothly towards its completely constrained and tamed Heat Death future.

Small problem. Nature turns out to be quantum. There is a fixed fundamental grain of action and dimension. So spacetime and energy are discrete and not continuous at the bottom-most scale of things.

Fundamental particles also have quantum indistinguishability. Every electron or quark is exactly alike in its essential properties.

Continuity emerges at the classical scale of physics. The grainy fluctuating sea of quantum events turns into a steady looking blur if you step back far enough from it.

Hoffman describes that nicely when talking about how modern instruments can poke water at the quasi-classical nanoscale and actually feel it's quantum "bumpiness". Water behaves differently for biology at the level of molecular machinery in important ways.

All this is also semiotic of course. Information loss due to physical scale of observation. Stand back far enough and the fluctuating quantum realm becomes a smooth blur. But also, that is how universal laws emerge in a developing Cosmos.

The laws of nature could be changing, but so slowly that over our timescales of observation, they seem to be static and eternal. Continuity again becomes an optical effect - semiotic information loss. Instead of looking down and seeing a steady blur, we are looking up and finding ourselves unable to see a change that is so gradual, its edges are outside our field of view.

The classic text on this is Stan Salthe's Evolving Hierarchical Systems.

But asymmetry or symmetry breaking is definitely what it is all about. A hierarchy is what you get when you break scale symmetry. And Salthe shows how an upper and lower bound of "continuity" must emerge simply due to the fact of scale. In one direction a blur, in the other, a change so big its edges can't be seen.

Does this mean that knowledge of the wrench is dependent on language? — Hanover

Does a wrench ever come to exist in a fashion that isn't dependent on a linguistic culture? The argument has to work both ways here.

You are treating the wrench as an example of a material object. They are just things to be found in the world. Even if communities of plumbers never existed, a chimp might stumble on to one growing on the wrench tree, the one right next to the banana tree, or some such.

So the knowledge which manifests "real wrenches" is a product of linguistic habit. It is a social constraint that is imposed on material reality. There is a particular job to be done. And look! (melt...twist...hammer...shape.) Here is the right kind of tool to do it.

Hence the reality of the "wrench" is conceptual as much as it is material. Words do more than merely signify - point or refer. They are causal.

Clearly chimps are also conceptual creatures. They can fashion sticks in the right shape to fish termites out of a mound. The trick can be based from old to young by a natural inclination to watch and imitate. So chimps also can "know" - form concepts with consequences.

Conception is not dependent on language. But it is crucial to allow for the fact that humans fill their worlds with linguistically-dependent objects. And these - because they depend on (semiotically) higher order concepts - are always being rolled out in arguments to prove points about "theories of truth" which they can't in fact prove.

Once a wrench becomes a brute fact of the world, a mere material state of affairs, then we are into unvarnished realism and all the usual confusion that entails.

The mind becomes cut away from the existence of the object in question. And the resulting naive realism in fact turns into the very dualism it was pretending to leave behind.

However, such a levelling can be interpreted as a reification of signs as objects and relations in the world, rather than representations of object-object relations; confusing map for the territory because the concept of representation has been discarded, elided and subsumed within the concept of function. — fdrake

It is to avoid that confusion that I keep reminding folk that epistemology and ontology are separate things.

So subject-object describes an epistemic relation (one that arises ontically due to what Howard Pattee calls the "epistemic cut" of a modelling relation). We are spinning our own world of sign - a lived umwelt - from inside our heads.

And object-object describes ontology itself in terms of a generalised semiosis. Now it is the world making its own meaning via sign relations.

I hope that this is the point you were appearing to agree with.

That leads to a more general definition of sign (within a sign relation). I have been stressing - a point MikeL did more than just mention :) - that a sign involves a reduction of information. It is not a reification - a Saussurian signifier or representation - but an active ignoring of material facticity. A filtering out of the dynamical environment, the thing in itself, so as to respond only to some "useful aspect" of the world. Reality is the totality of all that there is. A sign is a reduction of that to some token to which we feel justifies or secures an appropriate habitual response.

Now that describes semiosis of the ordinary subject-object kind - semiosis as life and mind acting in the world. But an information theoretic physics - an object-object semiosis - sees the same information reduction principle applying in the hierarchical organisation of nature in general. Just because of event horizons, every particle or material object is responding to a reduced view of the total environment.

And that is basic to probability theory (your strong interest?) as the principle of indifference. The ability to filter out micro-causes is how macro-states come to be real. An ideal gas has an actual pressure and temperature because all the detailed kinetics of the constituent particles can be justifiably averaged over, or ignored.

The Piercian model, by invoking an interpretant becomes a mind model of the universe. For it not to be this would require the definitions of object, interpretant and object signifier to specifically state such a thing. — MikeL

With the proviso that the ontology is not ordinary idealism. Instead, it starts with a science of meaning - it starts with where we know that "the mind" hasn't already been left out of the realist picture - and then follows that trail back to where what we mean by "mind" has pretty much vanished, when it has become the least mindful thing we can imagine.

So consciousness is not found at the end of the semiotic trail. Only its rawest form remains - the bare semiotic relation that is the ultimate cause of "mindfulness" of any kind.

You could, but you would be then annihilating the whole premise of signalling and interpretation and replacing it with cause and effect. — MikeL

Which is then what you did in saying chemoreception is "just signal transduction".

In material terms, that might be true. In informational terms, it is missing the point.

Just off the top of my head, it is more likely that an array of chemoreceptors all connected mechanically to the flagella cause an angular change in the propulsive tail relative to the greatest concentration of activation. The angular change would have to happen either way to give directionality right? — MikeL

Remember that the story is in fact more elegantly simple. If the flagella turn one way, they entangle and propel in a straight line. If they spin the other, they untangle and the bacterium tumbles randomly ... until it picks up the right sign to change its mind again.

So there is a strong dichotomy of action built in. Either the bacterium goes purposefully in a single direction or tumbles confusedly in all possible directions. The choice is reduced to a simple decision - either I know what I'm doing, or I absolutely don't. Either I am definite, or I am vague.

As the simplest life form, the humble bacterium is right down there at the base of semiotics in terms of how it understands its reality. It doesn't have the luxury of chosing path A over path B. It just switches in binary fashion between blind determinism and absolute randomness.

There is as little thought or interpretance going on as possible ... yet also the first definite evidence of thought or interpretance.

The reason is to get food. Are you suggesting the interpretant is a sentient entity that decided to make one, or that evolution is sentient? — MikeL

An interpretant is an established habit. Sentience implies free choices (as well as adaptive or intelligent habits).

So is a "hardwired" evolutionary habit evidence of a choice having been made, but there then being also only the one choice? Is it an example of sentience manifest, or instead an example of the ground state in which sentience is first beginning to arise?

Evolution could conceivably permit the bacterium - at least at the long-run species level - to choose a different behaviour. For the sake of argument, it could tumble whenever it found itself on the right track towards food, and swim blindly straight ahead when it isn't. It could reverse its habitual choice (maybe because it exists in a culture run by a mad scientist that feeds it for doing the "wrong thing").

So it might be ambiguous or vague as to whether a creature with a single hardwired habit, a single choice, is properly sentient. But then that same definition does seem to permit sentience at the level of the species over multiple generations. The species can change its mind and make other choices over time.

Once you stop thinking about "mind" as some kind of dualistic soul-stuff, and instead frame it in semiotic terms, all sorts of useful new metaphysics results. You can start to make concrete proposals about the actual world out there.

Better expressed: My own present contention is that the Good as form, for example, is both actual and, in an equivocal sense, simultaneously potential. The Good thereby, imo, exists in and of itself as metaphysical actuality while, from the vantage of all actual people, existing only as a potential state of affairs yet to be obtained by any of us. Furthermore, it would hold this status even if no sentience were to be consciously aware of it so being. — javra

That would seem to fit with my position then. Form stands "at the end of development" as ""emergent necessity". In the end, it restricts free choice as there is only one "right" choice.

It is actual when it is finally realised. And already also definite in potential. The potential seems a state of pure contingency. Yet even before it knows it is constrained, that constraint exists as its definite future. Every free action already faces the inevitably of its eventual consequences.

But remember, I use "vague" and "potential" in a different way from you. — Metaphysician Undercover

Remember that Peirce in fact defined vagueness as that to which the PNC fails to apply. So that is the definition in contention, not something else you might make up for yourself.

It is conditional on the nature of time, Time is passing, and because time is passing, there is a future. — Metaphysician Undercover

That then gets into the metaphysical issue of how existence - the essential elements of time, space and energy - could be created.

Now of course you can argue for the alternative - that existence is simply uncreated and eternal as some sort of always definite brute fact. It doesn't satisfy logically. But that is the other point of view.

However Peirce is very clearly asking the question of how existence could develop. And a logic of vagueness is his answer. And he says without equivocation that Firstness - being vague undifferentiated potential, pure quality without yet quantification - is generative of time and thus essentially timeless. So time (and space, and energy) only properly exist as Secondness.

If you want to talk about time in Firstness, it is by definition vague temporality, the potential for an unfolding temporal progression.

And then modern Big Bang cosmology and tentative quantum gravity modelling takes the same view of time. Time as something historically definite to order events is going to have to be emergent. The Universe did not arise in time. It was the birth of time - as we conventionally or classically understand it.

his allows you to posit a "beginning" point where there is no past, only future, such that the potential of the future is unconstrained by any past. But this proposition is unjustified and incoherent, because unless time is passing, the claim of a future or a past is unsupported, not grounded at all. So your proposal of a point of infinite vagueness, pure potential, as a beginning, before time starts passing, is completely incoherent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, I see that you will forever deny the logic of Peirce's position, or that modern physics might say the same thing.

But it is a coherent argument. Or at least it IS an argument ... unlike the brute fact approach taken be eternalism and "uncaused existence".

In fact the brute fact approach is worse than just lacking in a rational basis for its belief. It flies in the face of the overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang now, and the matching understanding in physics that time has to become an emergent feature of a successfully unified theory of quantum mechanics and general relativity.

When the state has neither A nor not-A present, we can clearly make the valid claim that there is not both A and not-A present, so there is no need for the claim that the PNC does not apply. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, just deal with the argument that Peirce actually makes. Vagueness is defined by the failure of the PNC. Generality is defined by the failure of the LEM.

So the vague is where it simply isn't clear what is the case. You can't what is going on and so there is no way to tell if it is contradictory or not. And generality is then where you can crisply tell what is going on, but being completely general, it is not doing any excluding. Everything within its purview is included.

Then the next bit of the argument here is the dichotomy - the developmental story of how the divisions of nature arise in a way that understands them also as a unity of opposites.

So you have a starting and stopping point - vagueness and generality, or Firstness and Thirdness - and then you need the third thing of the interaction that produce the developmental outcome

Logically then - to the degree one believes the dialectic, or dichotomy, or apokrisis, or symmetry breaking is how development happens - this is the reason why the vague has to "contain within it" the possibility of whatever metaphysical-strength dichotomy is then observed to emerge. And equally, generality has to be able to absorb this dichotomy as its unity of opposite.

Because you are so busy trying to force a scholastic reading of Aristotle on this Peircean developmental ontology, you keep missing the target. And even missing the degree to which Aristotle was arguing the same story in many places.

As usual, you have things backward again. The terms "genus" and "species" refer to the degrees of human understanding, they refer to concepts. Within the conceptual realm, the more specific "begets" the more general, as Aristotle explained, we move from the more well known, the particular, toward the lesser known, the more general. — Metaphysician Undercover

A hierarchical relation is transitive. It works both ways. That is basic to a systems view - the belief in the reality of both top-down formal/final causality and bottom-up material/efficient causality.

So constraints and degrees of freedom. The whole shapes the parts. The parts compose the whole. You have a developmental ontology ... because this is the basic dichotomy that brings anything, including most especially the Cosmos, into crisp and hierarchically-organised being.

Again, how many times must I tell you? This is unconditionally false. Aristotle proved that the idea that "there must be an underlying 'prime matter' that is eternal and imperishable" is absolutely false. He demonstrates that anything eternal must be actual, that's why he posits eternal circular motions. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are just imposing your scholastic version on things as usual. Aristotle - or the way his writings were collated several centuries later - may have seemed to contradict himself at points. But it seems clear enough to me that he was forced towards a hylomorphic duality of prime matter and prime mover as that just is the right developmental/systems logic.

Sure, you need the "eternal mathematic forms" as the ultimate constraints on material action. They somehow do stand outside time - as future finality. But rather than being active drivers of that action (in the way genes organise a body, or intentions organise our behaviour), they are simply passively emergent regulatory principles when we are talking about physics, or the generic Cosmos.

There is a lack of choice - in contrast to the production of choices that define life and mind. So the maths that forms our Universe has the quality of necessity. They certainly fix the inevitable outcomes even before anything has started to happen. But they are not active in the actualisation of those outcomes. They are simply the necessary outcomes that even the most chaotic, free and "choice-endowed" play of material action must in the long run discover.

Then we can understand prime matter as dichotomous to that. It becomes the chaotic starting point - a state that is undifferentiated in being also utterly differentiated. Pure contingency lacking in any habits. A continuity of spontaneity - action that lacks any form.

Or better yet, we can understand it as a vagueness. That removes any lingering notion of "matter" -
substantiality - from the discussion. We can now see that Firstness is just the potential for matter and form. All the apparent contradictions are absorbed by making substantial being fully emergent via the logical machinery of dichotomisation.

There are two distinct forms of the law of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great. Perhaps you can provide a citation on this point ... if you are suggesting it is based on established authority and not something you've dreamt up on the spot.

That is an irrational, unintelligible approach. — Metaphysician Undercover

Funny. That's how maths approaches irrational numbers. It is how they know they are real.

When I suggested that the Planck scale limitations are created by the theories which are applied, you said no, the theory doesn't manifest the observables. Then you went right on to the claim that reality is observer created. When it supports your argument one rule applies, but when it supports mine, the opposite of that rule applies. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are mixing epistemology and ontology. Epistemically, we humans - as observers - produce both the theories and the acts of measurement. Ontically, in an "observer-created existence", the theory wouldn't be a free choice but simply the way the reality actually is structured as a state of constraint. The observations would be then "acts of measurement" - as in actual wave function collapse.

Rather than interpretation you have signal transduction, — MikeL

You could say that about the brain too.

Or maybe a count of food fragments is a sign that points meaningfully towards a food source? There is a reason for the whole chemoreceptor set-up?