Hey, the fact you don't know stuff is probably less damaging to my self-esteem than you might think.

Following this logic, does semiotics pull down the wall between the real and the…unreal? — MikeL

One thing that looks missing is that semiosis stresses the purposefulness or usefulness of "having knowledge". So it is about having a functional relationship with the world - a physical or embodied engagement and not just a passive intellectual one.

So semiosis always keeps us in the world, even as it does that by separating us from that world. It is a way of stepping back that then means we can become "a self" that has "a purpose". And "knowledge" or "truth" doesn't claim to go beyond that.

That is why instead of knowledge being all about how many facts you can amass, it is about how many you can functionally afford to ignore. Attention is an information filter. Perception is a reduction of the world to simple "arrangements of objects". Wisdom is about knowing what to do without even having to think it out.

So God - as your chosen example here - is either a functional belief in your life, or not. There is no real need to tear down the Kantian wall between mind and world, between belief and truth. At the core of Peircean semiosis is simply the pragmatism of belief that demonstrably works.

Perhaps your prayers and faith will cure your cancer. It's a hypothesis. Try it and see.

Or perhaps, in seeking to exist successfully in the world, following the optimum path of the inductive method, God just drops out of your mental picture as an explanatory irrelevancy. It becomes an idea serving no real function.

Everywhere science looks, it doesn't seem to find Him. So belief just falls away. No need to "disprove" His existence as truth is an illusory goal. A purpose false to the nature of the semiotic process itself.

Your ideology is Daoism in a nutshell, Cosmic Purpose, Qi energy, and all. — Rich

Oh you whacky westerners! Align your chakras and boogie on down to your dharma. Everyone in the house go "om". :D

That it's what it is Cosmic Intelligence. The Mind. — Rich

Typical western new age cultural appropriation.

Although it's insightful to say humans live in dao as fish do in water, the insight is lost if we simply treat dao as being or some pantheistic spiritual realm. Dao remains essentially a concept of guidance, a prescriptive or normative term.

Rather than peddling esoteric spirituality, focus on how Taoism is about the naturalness of constraints and the organic emergence they foster. The world has a way.

Continuing on the rationale for pansemiosis - and touching on something critical Mikel did mention - the hierarchical organisation of causality in nature does depend on information loss between the levels. Otherwise we would be stuck in LaPlacean determinism.

Macrostates of nature have to be multirealisable. Indifferent to their particulars. An ideal gas has a temperature and pressure despite the fact that there are any number of ways the particles composing that gas could have distributed their motions, their kinetic energies.

So the actual arrangement of the particles is information that needs to be shed for more macro levels of reality to emerge. The dynamics of the micro scale are averaged over.

Newtonian concepts of causality are locked into determinism. Quantum indeterminacy does undermine that fundamentally. But also our models of nature need this idea of hierarchical information loss to explain how higher organisation - habits or laws - could even emerge from "fixed motions".

At the microscale, particles seem fixed in their relations. They have no means to be indifferent to a world of impressed forces. So a capacity to be indifferent is the physically new macro property that emerges. Global states, like temperature and pressure, become real to the extent they don't have to sweat the detail. A capacity to shed information is the key to the macro scale having causal meaningfulness.

So this can be treated as metaphorical. And yet semiotics is the actual metaphysical model which makes sense of this "paradox". It explains why systematic information loss is key to the hierarchical self organisation of nature. It provides a way out of traditional reductionist causal thinking based on efficient/material causality.

Why would i object to being compared to Tao? I've often made that comparison.

The purpose of thermodynamics is artificial or emergent. It's like having a 12-sided dice with 11 faces having a value of 1 and only one side having a different value. — Agustino

That's a spectacularly bad description as it mushes all the different aspects of a dissipative structure ontology together.

But anyway, it should be remembered that teleology at the base cosmic level only needs to be considered a globalised tendency. At the biological level, we could talk about it being a function. Then at a psychological level, we could talk about it as a purpose.

So a continuity is claimed. It is finality all the way down. But constraint at the cosmic level lacks choice. It is what it is. Then when the flow of entropification gets blocked, that is when more local choices start to need to get made. More complex structure must arise to restore the generalised tendency. And this complex structure is free to find any method that works to do the job. That explains the development of intelligence and anticipatory planning. You start to get evolved functionality and even conscious choosing.

I really don't need you pseudo-scientific gibberish. — Rich

LOL. Rich did hit the bullseye there.

Zzzzz....

Another God-botherer, eh? Feel free to make an argument though.

there is in some important sense an incommensurability between the physical and the semiotic. It is precisely this incommensurability which you then claim to have overcome by 'pansemiosis' - when this is actually the point at issue! — Wayfarer

Once more, you can leave pansemiosis out of it if you like. Biosemiosis alone makes the crucial point when it comes to how life/mind can be both a physical process, and then more than physical in being informational.

Then pansemiosis is the larger view which shows how an informational view can be applied to the purely physical.

Now the epistemic cut is not due to some internal coding machinery - a memory that provides the constraints that shape the organism - but is a physical feature of material interactions themselves. All interactions are limited by lightspeed. And so this creates an event horizon when it comes to the history that is the shaping context of any material events.

It is this fact that creates a sharp topological discontinuity. You can't be affected by what hasn't yet had time to affect you. So in a real sense, every physical event is being shaped by a "personal" history. It is seeing the Cosmos from a particular point of view.

This is what the holographic principle is about. Event horizons aren't real in the sense of being material. They are just the fact that it takes time for distant events to impinge upon you as now part of your history.

But then this situation is best described as informational. Whether you know or not makes an actual difference. It is meaningful to you. Or if you are a particle, it is the context that determines your state.

So physics does have a need to make a distinction - draw a line, make an epistemic cut - to mark the event horizon which is not a physical thing itself but is an definite informational effect.

Well at least that is where the information theoretic approach begins. As you get properly quantum, and materiality gets totally slippery, the event horizons start to look like they are creating our reality as a holographic projection.

That is getting crackpot of course. But that is another reason for liking pansemiosis. It stops the metaphysics going that far and becoming nonsense.

What level are you talking about here? — MikeL

The flipside of a molecular structure that has critical instability is that it is matchingly open to small nudges.

So it is perfectly poised. It faces two-ways in terms of its causality - both back towards the self-organising complexity of dissipative chemical structure and and also towards the newly available possibility of informational regulation.

The irreducible complexity is about a triadic semiotic relation. You can't have semiosis - a modelling relation - with less than three elements. A world, a sign, an interpretation.

And so abiogenesis would be about the first time this arises. And as a possibility to be exploited, we can see that it is already there - as a potential - as soon as you have critical instability in the form of a dissipatively structured material process.

Firstly atoms forming biological machines is an absurd notion, — MikeL

It's not absurd if the thermodynamics enormously favours it.

That is the point. Folk have this notion that life is extraordinary because the Universe can only promote disorder. Well here is the evidence of how wrong that view is. Mechanical order can be hugely favoured. Hoffman gives you the actual numbers.

Secondly, that the specificity of the machines found in the nucleus must be encoded in the DNA. — MikeL

Yep. It's all about semiosis. You need to keep a blue print somewhere to build your molecular machines.

But again - if you read up on the biophysics - you will see how little DNA control is in fact required. We might call it molecular machinery, but it is also in fact the most unstable kind of machinery you have ever seen. The molecules want to fall apart and only hang together by going in the "right" thermal direction.

So the machinery doesn't require the kind of genetic control we used to think it did - the kind of "distant hand exerted by blind code" that left life still a mystery. The machinery only needs nudges to encourage it to keep it generally hanging together and continuing with its job.

So again - as a biologist - wow! We never knew. This is a revolutionary change in view. Life is a much more a natural and inevitable set-up then we ever could imagine. It is not a problem that complex organic molecules struggle to hang together for more than a few seconds or minutes. That is why they are "unreasonably effective". If they weren't always on the cusp of thermal dissolution, they couldn't be so easily nudged to keep doing their thing. That is the physical trick which makes informational control possible.

Ultimately I guess its an engineering problem. Randomness cannot account for it in any sensible way. It may lay the materials all over the ground, but they will not assemble randomly into a racecar. And the degree of regulation inside the nucleus is staggering. — MikeL

You are missing that the conversation in biology has gone way beyond this stage now. The organism is neither a random assemblage nor a deterministic machine. It already starts its story with the irreducible complexity of a semiotic relation.

The critical instability of the molecular machinery of life is the point. It both wants to fall apart and put itself back together. And so it comes to exist with any stability only then as an expression of the larger desires of the whole. Yes, you need DNA to encode that wish. But now that DNA only has to deliver gentle nudges, not tell every molecule what it must do the whole time. The simple fact that entropy flows through the circuits keeps the show hanging together and pointed in the right general direction.

So from both sides - the random emergence of order, and the deterministic control of that emergence - the new biophysics has immensely reduced the credibility gap. It used to be hard to see how life could evolve on Earth. Now it is hard to imagine how it could not.

As it stands there is no substance to the points being made in favour of abiogenesis- as you saw I used the same points of molecular machines to argue against abiogenesis.. — MikeL

Remind me how molecular machines argue against abiogensis?

If it is demonstrated that a tiny fragment of biological machinery can harness a vast amount of entropy, then that makes abiogensis vastly more probable. It goes from being a freak of nature to an inevitability of nature.

And you are saying....?

There's your problem in a nutshell - an inherited image which conditions your thinking (and not only yours). — Wayfarer

Yeah. I just find it so hard to imagine reality in any but the most stereotyped and hackneyed old ways. You got me. Forever guilty of the unthinking Scientism you find in anything that doesn't immediately sound like it is agreeing with you.

It's more that in the Western philosophical tradition, there is the seminal idea of 'nous', — Wayfarer

Gosh darn. How did I never hear about that?

But I don't think you recognise anything that corresponds with that, whilst still seeking to retain some of its products. You will acknowledge that 'mind has been there all along' but if anyone suggests that this might amount to a notion of 'spirit' then you vociferously object (because of the 'subterranean mountain'). But quite what is the nature of 'nous' or 'mind' in that naturalistic sense, is obviously a very hard thing to conceive of. — Wayfarer

Gee whiz. Well maybe nous could be understood as a claim about "soul stuff", or maybe it could be understood as a claim about reason - semiotics - as a metaphysically general reasoning process?

I mean did we ever decide what Aristotle might have been arguing for in saying nous was the form that shaped the rational in the animal? Seems kind of an embodied approach. And so not so much your disembodied mind stuff.

So from your cite.....

In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness which allows human beings to think rationally. For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do. This therefore connects discussion of nous, to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way, and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories the same logical ways.

...well that sure seems reasonable. Pretty straight semiotics.

Then...

Deriving from this it was also sometimes argued, especially in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type. By this type of account, it came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it.

...Oh there you go. Now we are into the soul stuff business. Unless you take a detour into pansemiosis where the Cosmos is a "mind" in that strict deflationary sense.

In my philosophy, 'mind' is never an object of perception, but is nevertheless an ubiquitous reality. But it's not a 'that' to us, it is not something we can objectively know. — Wayfarer

Yep. Your position is that what you say is true and cannot be falsified ... as if being above factual disproof is a good thing.

So the Cosmic mind is everywhere and nowhere, baby, It is immaterial, imperceptible and disembodied, knowable only via faith and deep meditation. That's your "philosophy" and it is impregnable to anything science might have to say.

But, I'm learning a lot of stuff thinking about it, which is after all why we post here. — Wayfarer

Me too. :)

You've got to bend these things, over-extend these things, to find whether they break. That's why I hope you can bring up stronger arguments in regards to your universal mind. I need more push-back.

In the end - as I've said - the sheer fact of existence seems the most remarkable thing of all. Whether we are talking experience or world, the "why anything?" question is basically mind-boggling.

In that light, God-causes and soul-stuffs just strike me as mundane. It is obvious they don't even get started at illuminating the big question.

I haven't read the book but that's seems like a no brainer. I find it hard to see how it is an argument rather than an observation. — MikeL

Hmm. I'm sensing a connection here between the "not reading" and the "failing to see".

Trust me. This stuff is fundamentally surprising to the biologist. It makes you go wow! :)

The only problem is it doesn't explain the origin of life at all. It only explains the propagation of life from life. — MikeL

It explains how life even makes sense thermodynamically. It explains how it is quite wrong to think in terms of a "chemical soup". And so it is critical to the general abiogenic explanation.

If you want to talk about specific abiogeneic scenarios - like alkaline hydrothermal vents - I pointed you already in the direction of Nick Lane's books.

So I don't consider any of these to be huge inroads at all into explaining abiogenesis. — MikeL

Err, OK.

"Counting" without anyone who counts, "knowing" without anyone who knows. That's the problem I have with 'pansemiosis'. — Wayfarer

Fair enough. And I have the same problem with imagining some big daddy super-mind in the sky who counts or knows.

Given that you too want to avoid that kind of transcendental/supernatural entity, then what is your alternative option - reality as just some kind of generalised, disembodied, counting and knowing stuff? Where does your "mind" exist in physical reality?

Do you want to argue for panpsychism?

If so, why isn't pansemiosis better, in that it doesn't seek to found itself either on meaningless physics, nor mystical disembodied "mind-stuff". It starts from good old obvious semiotics - the fact that counting and knowing are a particular kind of useful epistemic habit based on "a sign relation".

So there is a science of meaning-making. Semiotics. And it begins right at the intersection of physics and symbols. It is embodied or rooted in an pragmatic interaction between "a mind" and "a world".

It seems just obviously the best place to begin the larger metaphysical project of recovering nature from the mangling jaws of the reductionist scientists and the reductionist theists.

It's another way to avoid the mire that is "not even wrong" mystical mutterings.

I don't understand what 'a countable degree of freedom' is. — Wayfarer

A degree of freedom of a physical system is an independent parameter that is necessary to characterize the state of a physical system. In general, a degree of freedom may be any useful property that is not dependent on other variables.

The location of a particle in three-dimensional space requires three position coordinates. Similarly, the direction and speed at which a particle moves can be described in terms of three velocity components, each in reference to the three dimensions of space. If the time evolution of the system is deterministic, where the state at one instant uniquely determines its past and future position and velocity as a function of time, such a system has six degrees of freedom.[citation needed] If the motion of the particle is constrained to a lower number of dimensions, for example, the particle must move along a wire or on a fixed surface, then the system has fewer than six degrees of freedom. On the other hand, a system with an extended object that can rotate or vibrate can have more than six degrees of freedom.

In classical mechanics, the state of a point particle at any given time is often described with position and velocity coordinates in the Lagrangian formalism, or with position and momentum coordinates in the Hamiltonian formalism.

In statistical mechanics, a degree of freedom is a single scalar number describing the microstate of a system.[1] The specification of all microstates of a system is a point in the system's phase space.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom_(physics_and_chemistry)

Furthermore - and without wishing to sound trite - who is counting? — Wayfarer

Well obviously physicists in the first instance. But in an information theoretic model, reality itself is "counting". Or rather, a countable number of degrees of freedom are just the totality that emerges dynamically. It is what counts when things have gone to their limit.

Right now, we can say there is an electron here and moving in direction x. The universe knows that too. Our realities have thus converged. We are both saying the same thing about what is happening in terms of the countable, or physically orthogonal, ways they could otherwise be happening. Description has been reduced to fundamental bits of information, or formal signs.

Does 'physics' really think that? — Wayfarer

http://www.phys.huji.ac.il/~bekenste/Holographic_Univ.pdf

The Physics and Metaphysics of Biosemiotics, by Pattee, seems to acknowledge that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living matter: — Wayfarer

Of course. There is a vast difference to information (constraints) being internalised. This is what creates an autonomous point of view. Life and mind are discontinuous from physics (dissipative dynamics) because they can construct an epistemic cut.

But pansemiosis then also allows us to talk of a fundamental continuity with nature.

Your complaint about Scientism is that it negates Spiritualism. It pretends nature - even life and mind - are fundamentally meaningless.

My pansemiotic reply is always that the trick is then to see nature, the Cosmos, as also meaningful ... in some properly justified sense, not merely a transcendental, supernatural, mystical hand-waving fashion.

So the new information theoretic physics is about doing that. In measurable fashion, it anchors metaphysics in the basic notion of "a sign".

Whereas, you seem to be saying that there is no such 'topological discontinuity' at all? Am I understanding you right? — Wayfarer

You are doing your usual best to misunderstand I would say.

Pattee is hardly sympathetic to the metaphysics you want to promote here. He is just honest that abiogenesis remains a tough nut for science to crack.

And yet even as we speak, huge inroads are being made due to new experimental possibilities. Pattee was writing before one of the most critical discoveries I have mentioned to you many times now - the realisation that life arises at the quasi-classical nanoscale where a variety of different forms of energy all converge in scale (in the chemistry of water) and so become eminently "switchable" when you stir in "information" (or molecular machines).

See - http://lifesratchet.com/

Which is the source of the so-called 'observer problem', is it not? — Wayfarer

It would be why I like quantum interpretations that now take the information theoretic approach and explain quantum uncertainty in terms of the fundamental impossibility of asking "two opposite questions of reality at the same place and time".

Instead of there being an observer problem, reality is now viewed as "observer created". It comes down to being able to ask a meaningful question.

But the flip side of that - which you won't like - is that any notion of a mind or conscious observer gets reduced to a thermal decohering environment. At the fundamental level there is "nothing else going on".

I still think this is mistaken - if everything is information, then 'information' has no meaning. — Wayfarer

Semiotics isn't saying everything is information. It is saying "everything" is the sign relation that has the three parts of an interpretation, a world, and a mediating sign.

So information is the physical mark that stands in-between the "self" and its "world". The information bit is a Janus-faced element that points in both directions. It can be freely read as meaningful precisely because it is so actually lacking in the usual "physical meaningfulness".

An ideal bit of information is a mark or a symbol. It has the special quality of being permanent and unchanging. That makes it really unlike "normal physics" which is all about dynamism and entropy and wear and tear.

If I scratch a rock with my name, the mark is likely to still be there in 10,000 years. So that endurance puts the mark at the limit of normal physics. It is an exceptional thing. And it is also just as exceptional (well, a lot more so) that a rock face might have my name scratched on it. Physics left to itself would be highly unlikely to produce such a striking pattern. What could have done it naturally - a succession of micro-meteorite strikes catching the face of the rock just so?

The point is to recognise that a "realm of information" or semiotic interpretance becomes possible at the limit of physics. It is itself a natural or immanent fact. The world is on the whole entropic and dynamic - always in motion and running down an energy hill. But immanent in that is then inherently the "other" which is the possibility of a "non-physical" mark. Well, of course every symbol has to be some actual physical mark - a negentropic constraint on dissipation. The circuits of a computer don't want to be organised like that. But we can make them behave that way ... by plugging the computer into some wall socket and paying the electricity bill.

So the first point is to establish what we are actually talking about when talking about "information". We are talking about physics in a special way. We are talking about the material world's own limits on its dynamism and erosion. That is why information theory has become so central to modern physics. We can model reality itself in terms of "marks" or countable degrees of freedom. We can measure the negentropic constraints that form existence in a direct fashion.

Physics was once classically atomist - reductionist in presuming reality was just composed of definite lumps of matter. We learnt better. So now we use the notion of information to describe reality in terms of its formal limits. The "ultimate stuff" becomes the "outputs" that regulate being - the emergent constraints - rather than the "inputs" that supposedly compose it.

So at the level of physics (or pansemiosis), we are finding a different way to describe nature. The true material world is being understood in terms of its indeterminacy and dynamism. Materiality wants to be going off in all directions with no regularity. There just ain't any stable atoms to count.

But then we can start to count that mess of action in terms of its own limitations. We can imagine it converted into some giant collection of scratches or marks, each one symbolising a conserved "degree of freedom", or bit of "negentropy". And pragmatically, that new way of doing physics - of conceiving of material reality - really works.

So physics has found a way to distance its descriptions of nature. The Universe is mediated by its own system of sign. The unholy mess that is the continuity of physical interactions can be understood as being organised via its own emergent limitations. The meaningfulness that is incomprehensible at the one level - as the confused blur of material motions - is rendered comprehensible by viewing it now as an arrangement of information, each bit standing as the token of a primal event or interaction. Or rather, a physical and spatiotemporally localised act of constraint.

OK. That is what "reduction" amounts to in talking about information and semiotics as applied ontically in the physical modelling of reality. Instead of being Scientism - the claim that material reality is essentially meaningless (and observerless) - this is now a formal way of building those things into the scientific picture.

The material world is now flooded with meaning - more things going off in more directions than could ever be counted. You might as well be living in a multiverse where everything happens.

But if we can now build a constraining observer into that world - one that reduces the blur to its critical individual events, its countable degrees of freedom (exactly the bits which escapes constraint) - then we can construct the kind of meaningful relation with the world we are interested in. Or pansemiotically, see existence as the state that emerges out its own meaningful self-interest via this basic "epistemic cut".

So to return to my initial point, the key to "information" is that it is becomes meaningful to a system of intepretance as it is also the arrival at the limits of material meaning.

A mark like a name scratched on a rock is just a nothing to the ordinary material world. It is having just no effect - unlike the wind, the rain, the volcanic eruptions, and all the other hot shit going on. If materiality is defined by its hot mess dynamism, the physical mark is the most immaterial aspect of that world.

And then in being so apart from regular dynamics and flux, the physical mark becomes the start of something else. It can become the rock-solid sign that anchors an interpreter. It can be the basis for meaning at a different formal level.

But what prevents this then being unnatural is that systems of interpretance or sign relations must always be pragmatic. They actually have to live and survive in the worlds they arise from. They may regulate material flows, but they can't transcend those flows. In the end, any local system of interpretance has to be entrained to the generic purpose or meaning of the most global or cosmic level system of interpretance.

So again, that throws us back into the arms of physics. Although a physics itself now hopefully understood pansemiotically and so not "bereft of meaning" in any simplistic sense,

Potential is difficult to understand, because it is not any definite thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. So it is vague ... in relation to the definite actuality that it then gives rise to.

It is defined by Aristotle by referring to the dichotomy of what is and is not, but it is not defined dichotomously. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. It is defined dichotomously - A and not-A. Or rather it is the prior state when there is neither A nor not-A present. That is, the PNC as yet fails to apply. So it is defined as that which must be capable of yielding the dichotomy and an actuality that is ruled by the PNC.

Dichotomy is formal, through and through. Matter has perfections and imperfections, completeness and incompleteness, but all these dichotomies are with respect to the form, not the matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again yep. Formal cause - a calculus of distinctions - is what produces an intelligible actual world out of "bare material cause". There is nothing substantial except that it has been formed by informational constraints. And the dichotomy is just speaking to the "how" of the distinction-making.

Aristotle saw that reality is a hierarchy of increasingly specified distinctions, or dichotomies/symmetry breakings. Genus begets species by critical divisions. Man is generically animal (and thus not mineral), but also more specifically rational (and thus not irrational or lacking in reason).

So actuality is the product of a hierarchy of constraints that impinge on localised matter, giving it concrete shape. And that seems to be the case "all the way down". Even the simplest forms of materiality - like fundamental particles - already have formal shape due to mathematical-strength symmetry-breakings.

Quarks are stuck at an SU(3) level of symmetry-breaking - locked into a state due to the cooling universe and their stable confinement by their own strong force. Leptons are then particles that managed to decay all the way down to bottom-most U(1) symmetry. So fundamental physics agrees it is formal cause - a hierarchy of dichotomies or symmetry-breakings - that turned the vague potential of the hot Big Bang into a cascade of actualised particles. Cold shards of pure structure.

And that means that we both know - from reason - that there must be some "stuff", some "material", that gets formed in this way, and yet this material cause becomes the ultimately elusive part of reality. We can't pin it down - see it in its raw formlessness - as it only becomes something definite and "pinnable" if it has a form.

Aristotle was dealing with exactly this issue in discussing the prime matter that must underlie four elements.

Now the four elements themselves - fire, air, water, earth - we can today recognise as the four phases of matter. Plasma, gas, liquid, solid. Those four distinctions have become purely formal ones - the different states of atomic interaction due to changing temperature.

But nevertheless, the same reasoning applies. Some material principle - some principle of energy/matter conservation - must provide the continuity, the imperishability, that allows the observed phase transitions, or perishings and generations, that are clearly part of the actual world.

So note the very reasonable assumption here - which is in fact a pretty impressive leap of the human imagination. From observation of the world, it was assumed that matter is ultimately conserved in quantity. Or rather, the quantity of potential action was fixed. Action or dynamism could be converted from one form to another, but the actual total quantity of action is conserved.

So Anaximander's Apeiron was an open system view. The Apeiron was like an inexhaustible supply of action. (Although a conservation principle was embedded in the idea that everything produced by dichotomous formation - fire, air, water, earth - would then return to Apeiron as that form eventually degenerated.)

Aristotle pushed for a sharper distinction. The Comos became a closed material system. There must be an underlying "prime matter" that is eternal and imperishable, endlessly taking new shape without in fact being used up, or being generated anew. And it was from that assumption that the idea of a creation event - a birth of all this imperishable matter - became a great metaphysical difficulty.

So Aristotle was taking the metaphysical argument the next step. He was making it clear that the choice was between a Cosmos open for causality (freely fed by an Apeiron) versus a Cosmos closed for causality (getting by on an eternally fixed quantity of prime matter). That then led to the apparently necessary conclusion that the material principle was the passive and imperceptible part of the equation.

Well seeing the Cosmos as a closed system, a conserved quantity of matter, doesn't ultimately work. But it does then allow the even more sophisticated metaphysical point of view. We can ask how closure itself could arise. We can seek an immanent model of self-organisation where a classical, materially-closed Universe, is the rational outcome.

This is where we get to modern dissipative structure thinking. This is where a logic of vagueness, a logic of hierarchical emergence, comes into its own.

So Anaximander understood reality in terms of an open flow action that self-organises to have emergent structure. Aristotle then showed what this reality looked like by going over to the other extreme - how we would imagine it as a system, still with hierarchical structure, but now closed and eternal.

Then following that sharpening of our thinking, we can understand reality in terms of self-organising material closure. We no longer rely on Anaximander's admittedly very material conception of the Apeiron, nor Aristotle's maddenly elusive notion of prime matter, but understand that there is a vagueness beyond both material and formal cause. We can't grant primacy or priority to either material cause or formal cause because they themselves are the dichotomy that emerges from a "pure potential" that is both neither of these things, yet necessarily must be able to break to yield these complementary things.

This is A's formulation of the law of identity, that a thing is the same as itself. It doesn't matter if the thing is changing, so long as it is itself, it is the same thing. If we stick to logical identity though, then every moment that a thing changes, it is a new thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. The formulation of a conservation principle - the law of identity - is the basic step to get formal logical argument going. It is how you ground a pure calculus of distinctions. It literally is the making of pure form by abstracting away the real world materiality - getting rid of the inherent vagueness of the actual world. Or rather, ignoring the vagueness, the ontic indeterminacy, that still inheres on close examination.

So identity - a conservation of "fundamental stuff" - is an epistemic presumption. It axiomatically grounds the ontic modelling. And from that assumed basis, we can compute arguments using the "pure forms" of the laws of thought.

But then to argue backwards from that set of assumptions to say that is how reality actually is, well that is the obvious mistake. Just because logic "really works" doesn't mean we should believe it is "the thing in itself".

That is why a systems approach to metaphysics would embrace Peirce's approach the laws of thought. He saw that they describe the regularity of a world which has developed rational habits. So yes, the laws of thought do describe the final outcome with great accuracy.

But when the question turns to how could such a world develop, we have to bring in vagueness - firstness, tychism, spontaneity, fluctuation - as the logical corollary. The starting condition of the crisply organised, the definitely closed, the conserved and (future) eternal, has to be its own formal "other". Creation has to be explained in terms of its own reciprocal being - the inverse of what it becomes.

Vagueness lies here within this continuity, where the laws of logic, if applied, would result in infinite regress. — Metaphysician Undercover

The infinite regress of causality is asymptotic at worst. So it converges on a point. And that point both defines the limit and stands "outside" it. So this is exactly how I have argued for vagueness - as a limit which itself is formally "not real".

If you are going to make the accusation of infinite regress, you have to also acknowledge that this is a special kind of regress - one that converges on an "actual" point. It is like pi. We can never arrive at the actual final decimal expansion of pi. Yet the very fact that we can get arbitrarily close shows that pi "definitely exists" .... as a formal limit.

This is why he presented the cosmological argument which he is well known for, to refute it. After he accepted this impossibility, the impossibility of a beginning in vagueness, then he proposed the eternal circular motions. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Once you argue for a generalised conservation principle, then you have a real problem with understanding reality as any kind of creation event. And yet modern science shows the Universe did emerge from a "Big Bang". So we can't simply pretend that our existence doesn't have some kind of creation moment.

The metaphysical question then becomes how can we best explain the situation as we now know it to be? Is there a logic of self-organised development that can get us a step closer to "the truth"?

So sure Aristotle made some arguments. Those have been tested against reality. They clearly don't hold. We can thank him for so clearly presenting the contrasting alternatives that made them actually thus testable, and move on.

Aristotle's mistakes were valuable ones. Imagining matter as the passive principle is an example of getting it exactly back to front in a way that allows us to then flip to the other better perspective eventually.

Because the Planck limit is completely dependent upon the theories employed to explain the features of the universe, it is just a manifestation of those theories. That these theories produce a boundary to distinguishability reveals the inadequacies of the theories, not true boundaries to distinguishability. — Metaphysician Undercover

Now you are simply misunderstanding the pragmatic foundations of belief. It is the whole point of theories to deliver confirmation in terms of measurables. But the theory doesn't manifest the observables. They are what we actually measure when we apply the theory in modelling our reality.

But in the actual world of individual material things, there is no such thing as a thing's other each thing is unique in its own ways. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is only true to the extent that materiality has become locally complex and historically specified. I can tell one oak leaf from another due to all kinds of microscopic accidents - blemishes - which have become incorporated into its material structure.

But down at the fundamental level of quantum particles, individuation disappears. That is why quantum matter becomes "entangled". Two particles, supposedly separate in regards to their location and momentum, are in fact acting as if it is impossible to tell them apart.

So you are building your classical notion of individuated substance on incorrect foundations. We now know from observation that your foundational notions about the "actual world" are simply wrong.

You seem to be using "dichotomy" in two distinct ways here. In the first case you present what I call a categorical difference, a thing and its property, action, direction. In the second case you have opposition, change and stasis. — Metaphysician Undercover

A "metaphysical strength" dichotomy is how categories are themselves generated. If there is quantity, then its formal other is quality. For form, there is matter. For one, there is many. For discrete, there is continuous. Etc, etc.

The job of metaphysics is then to try to describe reality using the least number of such dichotomies. Or arriving at the most basic ones.

For me, that leaves you with two foundational dichotomies. One encompasses "what is" - the hierarchical or structural notion of the local~global. And then the other speaks to how what is can develop into its definite state of structured being. That dichotomy is the vague~crisp.

So a generic dichotomy for measuring reality in terms of its synchonic structure, and another one for doing that in terms of its diachronic development.

If you are proposing a relationship between potential and vagueness, this must be justified, or at least explained. — Metaphysician Undercover

Potential is defined dichotomously by Aristotle. It is about the production of "what is" in contradiction to "what is not". White is a definitely possible quality because blackness is the "other" that underwrites that. The less black something is, the more white it is. The PNC can thus apply to the actual outcome. If the change - the suppression of blackness, the production of whiteness - is complete, then we have the counterfactual definiteness of the PNC where some thing is either white or black.

But clearly the differentiation of black from white is a developmental process that passes through many shades of grey. And some shade of grey will seem exactly poised between blackness and whiteness. It will be as much black as it is white. So really it is just vague as which it truly is. It is simply now the potential to develop towards either end of the spectrum. The PNC fails to apply at this point even weakly.

So the vagueness here is not a simple matter of not knowing what is actually the case, it is a matter of it being impossible to know what is the case, because it has not yet been decided. The reality is, that what will occur tomorrow will not be decided until tomorrow, so there is no truth nor falsity with respect to this. The LEM is violated, and there is vagueness. Do you agree with this ontological assessment of the future, and that this is what "potential" refers to, the future, and why it is designated as vague? That one chooses to violate the PNC rather than the LEM when dealing with the future (potential) is a matter of metaphysical preference. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, future conditionals are an example of vagueness. The reason then for talking about the PNC not applying is that Peirce made the argument that it is with generality, or universality, that the LEM does not apply. (And note also, rather than speaking of "violations" - as if a law is broken - the claim is that the law simply does not apply, there being "no fact of the matter".)

So a general is a form or substance that has crisp or definite actuality. It is a concrete possibility which is "all middle". The general is understood by what it manages to definitely include ... and so what it fails to exclude. The PNC is then about the vague as it neither definitely includes nor definitely excludes. Vagueness swallows up all distinction at a more primal level.

So here's the problem. There is no actuality of the past, only pure potential, infinite possibility for the future. But if there is no past, that means that time is not passing, there is no time. From this position of pure future, with no past, how do you propose that we get time started? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. Both time and space, and energy as well, would all have to "get started". In a metaphysics based on Apeiron, a pure potential, all the basic substantial furniture of existence would have to self-organise into definite, actualised, being.

This is then made intelligible by energy (or action) and spacetime (or direction) being themselves recognised as a dichotomy, a symmetry breaking, harboured in that pure potential. A state of everythingness can't prevent itself from becoming divided against itself in formal fashion.

Being grey can't prevent the division that would be the separation that is moving towards black and white. If a greyness fluctuates even a little bit at some point, it is moving towards the one and moving away from the other in the same act. All it takes is for this kind of simultaneous departure to be a more intelligible state for it to develop then into a definite universal habit. Greyness disappears as the broken symmetry of white vs black takes over and makes for a world of definite being.

So all physics has to show is (1) that a fundamental dichotomy - like action vs direction - has that basic complementarity. It must produce a fluctuation of that form even in a "pure state of initial symmetry". And then (2), that that fluctuation would be self-sustaining and have reason to grow. And here, the argument is that the fluctuation will prove to be dissipative. There is some discovered advantage that drives a phase transition or fundamental change of state.

So yes. It is a big ask of physics to cash out this metaphysics. But even time is being looked at in this fashion now in fundamental physics - as thermally emergent rather than ontically basic.

So we need to introduce something which accounts for time passing and this is why he suggested eternal circular motions. But this is to deny the pure potential of the aperion, which is all future and no past, by introducing eternal time. — Metaphysician Undercover

But Aristotle instead argues that there is no beginning. It is because he can't imagine a "beginning" which is a vagueness - a "state" where there isn't even a fact of the matter in regard to "time" - that he feels forced to conclude existence is eternal ... timeless in the opposite sense. And it is to make sense of that which leads him to an argument for an unmoved mover.

A vagueness-based ontology also has its unmoved mover as I say. The maths of symmetry, or invariance under transformation. There is a principle that "eternally" wants expressing. And it "exists" outside of time if you like. The Apeiron seems - retrospectively - a principally material state, as it is easiest to describe it in terms of the "chaos of unbounded action or fluctuation that got things going". Then the definite symmetries that were "always going to organise it" can be understood as "eternal mathematical truths" in being the regularities that were always going to manifest by necessity.

In that view, it is no surprise that Aristotle was already thinking in terms of the most symmetric form known - a circle. Or rotational invariance. That bit of reasoning is correct and shared. Particle physics has arrived at the same conclusion. All particles (or quantum excitations) have their definite form because there are only those invariant states of rotation or spin available to them.

The big difference of course is that particle physics invokes spin symmetries at the smallest scales of being. The Cosmos itself, by contrast, lacks rotation. Or at least, rotation of the Cosmos makes "no sense" as there is nothing to measure that in a relative fashion.

But also, modern physics recognises a dichotomy of "unmoved movers" in that the Cosmos is based on a pair of inertial symmetries, or free motions - rotational symmetry and translation symmetry.

So my point is that the idea of an "unmoved mover" is a general feature of metaphysics. In discovering the Cosmos to be rational and mathematical, this of course gets us thinking in terms of timeless or eternal principles that must become manifest in any material destiny. Even if matter tries to be maximally chaotic, that very attempt will reveal the limits to chaos. A "deeper" order will show through as the attractor - the final cause, or the actuality towards which the potential must "aspire".

This is evident from the principles of the Fourier transform, the shorter the period of time the more difficult it is to determine the frequency, until in a very short period, it becomes impossible. It is not the case that the two aspects of reality, actual and potential (past and future) are really indistinguishable, it is just the case that physicists have not developed the appropriate means for distinguishing them and so they get lost in the vagueness of symmetry math. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, it could always be the case that more might be discovered and there is something definite "beyond the Planck scale". One can never prove a theory, only show it has not yet been clearly falsified.

However a vast weight of evidence and theory has been accumulated which points to the Planck scale as a true boundary to distinguishability - to counterfactuality and separability.

So the astounding progress of the last century of physics stands against your nay-saying here. If you want to argue the physicists are all missing something, you would have to provide a better motivation for your position on that.

The problem here, is that the notion of motion already presupposes the passage of time. You have proposed a point, pure potential, at which point there is no passage of time, or else there would be an actual past, and not pure potential. So you cannot turn to motion, or any physical activity, to conjure up the start of time, because all of these imply that time is already passing. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are missing the power of dichotomous reasoning. It is always simply the case that for one thing to be, so must its "other". You can't have figure without ground, event without context. So what you point out as a bug is instead the metaphysical feature.

As I said, you can't have action without direction, and vice versa. If this is the most foundational dichotomy or symmetry breaking (and in physics, it is) then you always will get these two for the price of one. For anything to happen, both these complementary things are what must happen together.

So time is change, and change is time. That is, the possibility of a particular action also calls forth the possibility of generic action. "Time" gets started when a distinction of this kind can itself begin to get made.

Note also that we can read off the passage of time either by seeing a local change as happening against a static global backdrop (a fixed cosmic temporal dimension), or instead as a local lack of change against a dynamic global backdrop (as is more the modern physical picture given that the universe started as a spreading bath of radiation, nothing happening "slower" than lightspeed).

So there is indeed both a dichotomy at the heart of things (change vs stasis) and thus a situation that can be read in either direction.

It is no surprise that Aristotle - admirable thinker though he was in every way - took an obviously human-centric view of his metaphysical story. Matter fell because the Earth was the centre of the Universe. Mind was fundamental to the Cosmos because it was fundamental to thinkers like himself. Motion needed explaining while stasis did not. And so forth.

The dichotomous or dialectical reasoning employed by the Ancient Greeks was very powerful and correct. But also, the tendency was to read the dichotomies the wrong way round. The human-centric qualities of nature - those most readily perceptible - were taken as the fundamental rather than as the emergent. Now that - through science - we can see reality in a more holistic and cosmic fashion, the same dichotomies can be used to make better sense of what the big picture really is.

The problem though, is that "limits" are by definition constraints, and therefore formal. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's not an issue in my triadic/hierarchical approach. A hierarchical relation has both an upper and a lower bound. Constraints come in two kinds - one that you might call material, the other formal.

We see this coming through in fundamental physics. The world is formed by two kinds of constraints - the formal laws and the physical constants.

So limits aren't by definition "formal". A triadic approach sees substantial reality emerging from material and formal cause. And both of these can then be "formally defined" in terms of a constraining limit.

Your complaint here is really just word play.

We can take "matter" right out of the picture if you want, and it is still illogical to say that the potential is prior to actual existence, because potential only exists as a property of something actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

Note again how you are relying on terminological slippage.

I agree that definite properties require actual substances. They are the possibilities that "subsequently" arise due to some state of formal limitation of material potential.

But then there is this other thing, this third thing, of a foundational Apeiron or Vagueness. That is the more standard understanding of "potential" - a materiality that is vague in lacking yet a positive direction. Now form follows in creating that definite direction.

And as I then add, the idea of the Apeiron or Vagueness as a "pure potential" goes beyond even that as the argument is it contains the very dichotomy of matter~form as a seed action.

So there are a variety of meanings of "potential" in play. You may keep asserting that Aristotle offered the only "right one". But even there you interpretation seems back to front - or overly theistic - in wanting to credit creation on a prime mover rather than on prime matter (or better yet, the interaction between the two). You simply try to define prime matter out of existence, leaving only a prime mover, despite what mainstream interpretations are cited as believing.

But then you refer to a "vaguer state of unformed possibility". So you have jumped to a different category, and want to call it by the same name, "possibility". — Metaphysician Undercover

Obviously I was contrasting unformed possibilities with definite possibilities. So I am happy to call vagueness by its name. But also, somehow, it have to offer an intelligible contrast to explain what it could mean. A die is engineered so that it has counterfactual definiteness. Understanding what a die has then got - 6 exactly equal sides - allows you to understand what a die has got to lose ... what it would mean to be vaguer.

As much as it may appear like the possibilities are endless, they are not, the tree is of a particular size, the wood a particular type, etc.. Each possibility is a definite thing which can be done with the tree, and there is no such thing as a vague or unformed possibility with respect to the tree. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure, to the degree something is actualised and particularised, then it has lost any vagueness or generality. That is exactly the way it goes.

But before the tree grew, there was much about its future that was indeterminate. If you want to be epistemic, who knew the tree was going to be chewed up by borer or smashed by last Saturday's lightning bolt?

And if we go deeper, to quantum fields with fundamental particles, the possibilities are still definite, limited by the form of the tree. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are being optimistic now. If we go truly "deeper" into the tale of cosmic development, the Universe is blazing bath of radiation and nothing else. All action is lightspeed. The average temperature is billions of degrees above what matter can stand.

So yes, look around right now when the Universe is less than 3 degrees above absolute zero, and matter looks like fixed stuff with fixed properties. But that is not the "deep" view.

But any existing action is a particular action. It doesn't make any sense to talk about an action which is not an action with a direction. This is like saying that something could be moving, but not moving in any direction. — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet physics shows these two aspects of reality become indistinguishable or symmetric at the Planck scale. There is a fundamental convergence where indeterminacy then definitely takes over. Hence the uncertainty relation between location and momentum in quantum mechanics.

Or I could just as much point out the relativity of notion of motion. A context is needed to decide which one of us is doing the moving. Or even - in some absolute sense - not moving at all.

You are just applying a naive physical point of view to metaphysics here.

His published work is on the internet, seems like a random internet dude to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure. Oxford always be handing out PhDs to random internet dudes. I'm sure yours is in the post too. :-}

I find that in general, your quoted website is very inaccurate, and often misleading. — Metaphysician Undercover

Naturally. I look forward to your citation to support your own stance.

The fact is, that Aristotle went on, in BK 10-12 of his Metaphysics, after discrediting the idea of prime matter, to describe eternal circular motions. The concept of eternal forms (circular motions) is clearly inconsistent with the concept of prime matter. If there is eternal forms then it is impossible that there was ever pure matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

Alternatively, for me, it is only natural that matter and form should express such a dichotomous pairing of limits.

Aristotle was wrong about the fact of the matter - that the prime mover was "circular motion". But a prime mover to match the ur-matter is metaphysically logical. For there to be action, there has to be a direction. The laws of thermodynamics show how the Cosmos is indeed pointed in a universal entropic direction - moved according to that.

So again, the triadic view is that both "prime matter" and the "prime mover" would be the two aspects of the one basic relation that was present as a potential in an ontically vague beginning. You wouldn't talk about the Apeiron as "pure matter" as it was neither, as yet, in-formed matter, nor en-mattered form. It was only the potential for this metaphysical division which then yields a world of actual substances.

In any case, you now need to provide new definitions of matter and form, as well as actual, because the Aristotelian definitions are not applicable. In other words, your use of "potential", is meaningless unless you provide a new conceptual structure to house it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or maybe you should drop archaic definitions of the potential and actual.

A potential is the power to cause motions, set in train events. So it is efficient cause for a reductionist. For me, it is more complex as a holist. I would say a vagueness is a state of potential in containing the seeds of self-organised action. It is first a chaos of impulses - undirected action. But then, as I say, just as much the potential for the emergent organisation that gives generic direction to all action.

So yes, if I have to use the word "potential", it does gain a specific twist in a Peircean holistic context. And I have presented that "new conceptual structure" often enough.

Then actuality - in the Aristotelean sense - speaks to finality. It is the goal which defines the ideal form towards which some material development is tending. It is the global constraint, in my parlance.

But the actual, in ordinary language, means the reality of here and now. The physically realised. And a weakness in Aristotle/Plato is that the actual form of things is as much a matter of contingency as necessity in the real world. An acorn might want to grow into a tree (thanks to its genetically encoded constraints), but the tree could be proud and tall, or wizened and wind-blasted, depending on the vagaries of the landscape where the acorn took root.

So I would go with the ordinary language use of "actuality" as that simply means the physically realised form of something - a particular instance - without making a distinction between the parts of that material form which are accidental vs the parts that are intended due to some finality.

Then if I wanted to highlight finality - as the shaping global goal or constraint - then I would use those teleological terms explicitly.

Another confusion - which keeps cropping up with you - is that you then want to insist that finality precedes potentiality.

In my view, finality calls forth its material being from the future. Or at least, it may be there right at the beginning, but only as a pretty invisible tendency. A habit has to grow and harden via repetition. It is only in retrospect that it was clear the final outcome was "well anticipated".

I can also see what you or Aristotle might mean by saying that the potential arises out of a form being materially realised. A horse can gallop, a kangaroo can hop, by virtue of their bodily design. But I would more correctly call these their possibilities or degrees of freedom.

A die has six numbered sides. So out of that form comes the completely crisp and definite possibility it will land on a number between one and six. But when I talk about potential, I mean a vaguer state of unformed possibility. It is possibility without yet a concrete form.

So this weakens emphasis on the potential as a directed source of action. It is just action in some direction. That is why we talk about electrical potential, or potential energy in general. In physics, the word is normally used to talk about a vaguer form of material cause - one that is generic.

Note that actuality was called energeia by Aristotle in places. And now energy is how physics instead talks about generic potential. Energy is in fact matter now. The passive principle you defend has become the active part of the equation.

There are good reasons for the slippage in the Aristotlean conceptual framework. Important aspects of the ontology did end up facing the wrong way round.

If it is necessary that form and matter "co-exist", then they are inseparable, and one cannot be prior to the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

For them to be separated, they must have once not been separate. Seems logical to me.

To give co-existence to matter and form, would have to be to disassociate matter and form from potential and actual. — Metaphysician Undercover

Consider it done.

Or rather, the new dichotomy is the developmental axis of the vague~crisp. Matter and form become separated with ever greater definiteness as existence evolves from tentative beginnings to solidified habit. And to become separated, that process must have begun by them being together - in indistinguishable fashion.

Now when we look at the relationship between potential and actual naively, we say that potential must be prior to actual, because the potential for something is always prior to the actual existence of the thing. But then we must account for the fact that the potential must be actualized in order that there is something actual. To avoid the infinite regress of co-existence, we must designate either potential or actual, one as prior to the other. If potential were prior to actual, then there would forever be just potential, because there would be nothing to actualize that potential. Therefore we assume actual as prior to potential. — Metaphysician Undercover

The naive reading still seems better.

But in my view, the potential is simply an undifferentiated vagueness. A state without either definite material action, nor formal direction. So it is easy to accept these twin faces of reality becoming the separation that needs to develop.

If actuality comes first in time, then how on earth does that conjure up the necessary materiality to physically realise its desires?

Of course I agree that a matter-first ontology is almost as bad. So that is why my ontology is based on the notion of both matter and form co-arising, each emerging via the other.

If you find it stated on the internet, that he promotes and believes in the idea of prime matter, just like you'll find it stated on the internet that the world is flat, then the people making these statements on the internet simply left out the core of his Metaphysics. Perhaps it was too difficult for them to understand, or it wasn't consistent with their materialist prejudice. — Metaphysician Undercover

You're being a bit rough on an Oxford lecturer whose specialism this is. Ainsworth ain't some random internet dude.

If prime matter had form this would be contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree that a dualistic reading of prime matter doesn't work. It makes a mystery of both the forms and the material principle.

But that is why I support a triadic vagueness-based metaphysics - Peirce's answer. I argue the interactive story where the naked potential contains within itself this very dichotomy of form and matter within it. And the two co-arise as each other's limitation.

So from the first moment of actuality, there is the substantial being of in-formed materiality. The game has already got going as constraints are shaping material degrees of freedom. Of course also in this first moment, the state of this first substance is as vague as can possibly be imagined - a mere fluctuation that looks as much an accident as a organised tendency. With as yet no history or context to stabilise it, the first formed material fluctuation counts as merely a suggestion. A spontaneity that has yet to show it will lead anywhere.

So vagueness "contains" the potential for en-mattered form itself. What ever comes out of vagueness - gets crisply actualised - is logically what that vagueness contained as a potential. And the most metaphysically basic thing to come out of that vagueness was the mutual deal of formal cause and material cause - the possibility of the constraints that could form the material actions which, in turn, could construct the definite history, the physical context, which could go on to become the increasingly fixed habits, the fully realised global forms, which then constituted the Cosmos.

You are going on about this being contradictory - that both matter and form would "co-exist" in the bare potential that is the Apeiron. But in this triadic metaphysics, form and matter, constraints and degrees of freedom, are understood as being causally joined at the hip. Each is the other face of its "other". It is the dichotomy itself which exists in potential fashion and then realises itself via the spontaneity of a symmetry-breaking fluctuation, or "first accident".

I don't pretend this ontological formula solves all problems. The claim is only that this is the simplest story we can imagine, taking what we know of existence and rolling it back logically to an origin point. It is the ontology that minimises the mystery by starting existence with a lucky accident ... that was also historically inevitable.

That is where the symmetry maths argument comes in. As soon as there is any random action of the slightest kind, already that brings with it the hard possibility of the limitations of mathematical principle. If there is a group of transformations, then there is also a definite fixed invariance already waiting to greet them and bind them in their collective future. A purpose - a tendency towards this mathematically-described equilibrium - is exerting its finality over events already.

It doesn't really matter what Aristotle thinks because it is a Peircean triadic metaphysics which I am defending. But of course Aristotle is also important in traversing the same ground and highlighting the important elements in such an argument.

But potential requires an actuality to actualize it, it cannot actualize itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is only a problem if the potential is imagined as being passively material. That is why I talk instead of a sea of chaotic fluctuation.

What comes out of the Apeiron is definitely determinate in being either more passive or more active. Actuality is divided between these opposed limits on being. So it is quite logical that the Apeiron must contain both these contrasting limits within it ... as its potential. It is the dichotomy itself that the Apeiron contains in seed form. Thus it is not a contradiction to claim the Apeiron contains two opposed tendencies. It is this very contrariety which it must contain ... as a potential division of nature.

And so we are saying the Apeiron contains within the very means of self-actualising.

The trick is seeing how form and matter really are just two ways of looking at the one thing. A fluctuation is an action with a direction. As an actual Cosmos develops, these two counterparts take on a hierarchically developed identity.

They start off as indistinguishable - action and direction have no real size or result as yet. With no history, the action has nothing to change, the direction as yet offers no context to be the limit of such a change.

But over time, there is a regularisation as a context of such events build up. Local action takes on a fixed and repetitive nature as the global context comes to provide definite directionality. You arrive at mechanical picture of nature as atoms in a void - an ontology of concrete objects acting with the regularity of eternal law.

I took a course on Aristotle's Metaphysics in university and one of the first things told to us in the introductory classes, was that in this text, prime matter is proven to be impossible. Aristotle is well known as the originator of the cosmological argument, which is commonly adapted by theologians to demonstrate the need to assume God, as the actuality, which creates matter, as the potential for material existence. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's as maybe. Can you provide a cite to back this interpretation up?

I agree that Aristotle's story had holes. But it sounds here like you are speaking for a Christian apologetics interpretation of his writings. And the cosmological argument for a Christian god has huge, vast, gaping holes.

n his Metaphysics he questions the possibility of a prime matter, a matter without form, the underlying thing common to all physical existence, the basis for being. Aristotle's cosmological argument, which demonstrates that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality, shows how it is impossible for prime matter to have real existence. Anyone familiar with that argument will recognize this. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet....

The traditional interpretation of Aristotle, which goes back as far as Augustine (De Genesi contra Manichaeos i 5–7) and Simplicius (On Aristotle’s Physics i 7), and is accepted by Aquinas (De Principiis Naturae §13), holds that Aristotle believes in something called “prime matter”, which is the matter of the elements, where each element is, then, a compound of this matter and a form. This prime matter is usually described as pure potentiality, just as, on the form side, the unmoved movers are said by Aristotle to be pure actuality, form without any matter (Metaphysics xii 6). What it means to call prime matter “pure potentiality” is that it is capable of taking on any form whatsoever, and thus is completely without any essential properties of its own. It exists eternally, since, if it were capable of being created or destroyed, there would have to be some even lower matter to underlie those changes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/

In Metaphysics the real existence of prime matter, matter without form, is denied. — Metaphysician Undercover

So prime matter is denied? Or defined by some other modality other than "real existence"? And was the assertion ever just that it is matter without form rather than being beyond either (actual matter always being actually formed).

It is hard to discuss the lack of ambiguity in a text when you make such ambiguous pronouncements.

No shit.

But isn't your 'metaphysics' fundamentally a function of physics? — Wayfarer

It is fundamentally constrained by the physics that has resulted from the past 500 years in particular.

I hope you see the difference.

What appears to be creativity, the exuberance of nature, some might say, is really an accidental by-product of an essentially mindless process. — Wayfarer

Them's your words, not mine. No matter how regularly you try to insert them in my mouth.

I challenged that point, on the grounds of it being cynical - no reply. — Wayfarer

If you say something really dumb and ad hom that, its like a fart. It seems more polite to pretend you didn't go there.

True or false? Is that what you're driving at? — Wayfarer

As if you don't understand sarcasm. Nice one.

Are you serious? — Metaphysician Undercover

To say that there is nothing equivocal in Aristotle's handling of the question is just silly.

In addition to disputing the correct interpretation of these passages where Aristotle explicitly mentions prime matter, much of the debate has centered around, on the one hand, whether what he says about change really commits him to it, on the other, whether the idea is really absurd.

Some opponents of prime matter have argued that Aristotle does not, after all, wish to insist that there is always something which persists through a change (see Charlton 1970, Appendix, and 1983). In particular, when one of the elements changes into another, there is an underlying thing—the initial element—but in this case it does not persist. They point out that in the key passage of Physics i 7, where Aristotle gives his account of change in general, he uses the expressions “underlying thing” and “thing that remains”.

While readers have usually supposed that these terms are used interchangeably to refer to the substance, in cases of accidental change, and the matter in substantial changes, this assumption can be challenged.

In the elemental generation case, perhaps there is no thing that remains, just an initial elements that underlies. The worry about this interpretation is whether it is consistent with Aristotle’s belief that nothing can come to be out of nothing.

If there is no “thing that remains” in a case of elemental generation, how is an instance of water changing into air to be distinguished from the supposedly impossible sort of change whereby some water vanishes into nothing, and is instantly replaced by some air which has materialized out of nothing?

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/form-matter/

Second, I do not have a reductionist metaphysics, I have a dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Dualism is reductionism. Just doubled down. Instead of one variety of brute fact - material substance - you offer two. There is a spirit stuff or res cogitans as well.

First, Aristotle's metaphysics is nowhere near like yours. He denied the reality of the apeiron, and as I explained to you already, provided decisive refutation of this principle. It's in his Metaphysics Bk. 9. — Metaphysician Undercover

It is well recognised that Aristotle was ambiguous and inconsistent about what prime matter might be in his scheme. There isn't a single interpretation. And that likely reflects the fact Aristotle hadn't got the last bit of the puzzle sorted out. He had thoughts but not a decisive answer to offer.

Exactly, you lose that difference to category error, and the result is your assumption that vagueness is ontologically real. — Metaphysician Undercover

You keep presenting my arguments back to front. Vagueness - in being limitation on being - would be ontically unreal. It marks where actuality begins. So itself, is the unactualised or the purely potential.

A confusion here is that the notion of entropy itself becomes relative at the Cosmic scale. So talking about life in terms of negentropy or dissipative structure is metaphysically straightforward. The local definitions are well defined against a cosmological backdrop. But when the conversation switches to the creation of existence itself - as has happened here - then the metaphysics becomes more subtle.

So a simple way to describe the Universe is that - entropically - it is digging the hole that it is falling into. Yes, we can say it is running down an entropy gradient - cooling. But it is doing this by expanding. It is dissipating its Big Bang energy into a heat sink it is creating.

The normal way to understand entropification is that energy or order is dispersed into the larger world via friction or disorder. The wider world grows messier, not larger. But the Universe instead stretches light by its expansion, redshifting its frequency and so lowering its relative temperature, or ability to do work.

The baseline condition of the Universe is adiabatic. It begins in thermal equlibrium and changes smoothly in a fashion that entropy - measured in terms of the indistinguishabilty or homogeneity of microstates - does not change its count. There is no entropy production, relatively speaking, due to the cooling/expansion.

Yet of course something is happening as we can see from wanting to say that the heat of the Universe diminishes in exact proportion to the increase in its spatial extent. There seems a conversion of something into something else in some sense.

That is why entropy accounting has switched to an information theoretic approach - the holographic information content of event horizons. You can track the progress of the Universe in terms of the current Hubble radius. The Heat Death is now defined by that radius arriving asymptomptically at a fixed steady state width. The quantum information content of the cosmic event horizon will arrive at it physical maximum.

So two take-homes.

The Universe is different in that, entropically, it is falling into a hole that it is digging. The creation event had to involve the discovery of the possibility of the making of a cosmic heat sink.

Then entropy counting is not a simple art when it comes to the holistic view of creation. It is no longer regular thermodynamics as taught to deal with Boltzmann ideal gases or other standard models of statistical mechanics.

Ordinary entropy modelling just presumes the existence of a heat sink. More advanced models (and metaphysics) is required to understand a self-organising cosmic heat sink.

I'm not talking about generality or vagueness, I'm talking about the LEM and the PNC. — Metaphysician Undercover

I can see why you only want to talk about the particular and not the vague or the general. I'll just remind you that I am talking about a triadic holistic metaphysics - such as Aristotelean hylomorphism - and opposing that to your reductionist metaphysics.

If there is an aspect of reality to which the PNC does not apply, what you call vagueness, then this aspect of reality would be unintelligible because it allows for contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

It doesn't allow for it. It swallows it up. It absorbs it. It removes the very fact of there being a difference that makes a difference - a fact of the matter, an individuation of either kind.

However, if assuming the reality of vagueness requires that we forfeit the PNC to allow for this assumption, then clearly this is a deficient epistemology, because the PNC is fundamental to any epistemology. — Metaphysician Undercover

It makes the PNC an emergent feature of reality. It explains the PNC itself.

We don't know yet. We probably never will. — Agustino

Isn't it interesting how theists are quite happy to take so much of what they believe on faith and yet as soon as it is science, nothing ever meets their requirement of being "absolutely proven".

Shows both a personal inconsistency and a failure to understand the epistemic basis of science.

The funny thing is that the story you always love to paint is just as much an article of faith as anything else. It too is just a story made up of a few facts we do have, which may be the wrong story. — Agustino

So you are pointing out that science has facts. And facts can always be disputed. And somehow that is a "problem" for scientific inference. Therefore you conclude science is "no better than faith" - faith not even having facts.

You are a card.

Namely that order and chaos aren't a symmetrical dichotomy the way you'd want them to be. They don't both arise from an X which is both ordered and chaotic. Rather the whole point is that order is primary and chaos is secondary and relative to order. This is what Aristotle sought to show with the primacy of act over potency and form over matter. The point being that your infinite potential - your vagueness from which everything emerges - is incoherent. Your vagueness by itself is inert - in fact, non-existant. There cannot be any such vagueness - nor, if there ever was such a vagueness - could anything ever "emerge" from it. But there is something. Hence why we need a First Cause, which is entirely act and not potency. — Agustino

If order and chaos are a dichotomy, then the claim is that they arise from an "X" that is neither ordered, nor chaotic, as this X is a vagueness, and order and chaos - being a complementary pair of limits - are crisp or definite.

And putting your scholastic version of Aristotle aside for the moment, the modern physical view is that energy rather than matter enjoys primacy. What is fundamental is not inert prime matter but (quantum) action itself.

I am taking an emergence approach where both material cause and formal cause are .... causes. Neither is passive when it comes to individuation. Both are active players. And they form a complementary pair. Material cause has the mode that it comes to construct. Formal cause has the mode that it comes to constrain.

To argue against my position, you need to understand that passiveness or stability or limitation is what emerges at the end as the fundamentally dynamical becomes self-regulated or tamed.

The problem with Hegel is what the first trio critiqued way before him - he assumed that negation has an equal standing with determination, and that's false. — Agustino

Well we know from modern physics that Aristotle didn't work out so well in important respects. Starting from Galileo/Newton, it was shown that the world is not a story of things at passive rest and always needing to be pushed into motion. Inertial motion is instead the baseline condition.

So that switches things around. Action is basic. The interesting causal question becomes what negates or constrains this freedom to change?

Again this is just a rationalisation, the equations certainly don't "blur into each other". — Agustino

Of course it is a metaphysical rationalisation. The equations themselves would break down. The point is to explain why this is the case.

You are speculating that a quantum fluctuation gets caught into the rapid inflationary period which effectively accounts for everything that exists in the Universe today. That's possible, but it still wouldn't account for the origin - why is there a fluctuation in the first place? — Agustino

Again, I was laying the metaphysical ground for a general approach to "primal fluctuations", not speaking to any particular physical theory. I was talking about the maths of spontaneous symmetry breaking. That doesn't apply to a quantum mechanical model of the Big Bang, but it is hoped that it would be the basis of a quantum gravity theory.

Now the question becomes why is it that the fastest entropic gradient is the one that produces negentropic structures? — Agustino

It is not about being having a faster velocity but about producing a local acceleration. Subtle difference.

If we can know how the Universe started 13.8 billion years ago, why can't we know what the weather will be like in 5 days? — Agustino

Hmm. Do I really have to explain the difference between linear and non-linear calculations?

Remember - my disagreement with you is not over your physics, but over your metaphysics, and your physics, whatever they are, have no bearing on these metaphysical issues we're discussing. — Agustino

Science challenges some metaphysics and supports others. I've shown how the evidence conflicts with any metaphysics that presumes nature to be fundamentally passive or static. So you need instead a metaphysics - like Peirce - which speaks to the development of constraints on freedom.

Actually, this is a situation where the principle of excluded middle does not apply. — Metaphysician Undercover

No. It is generality to which the LEM fails to apply. The PNC fails to apply to vagueness.

You should learn to differentiate between these two. — Metaphysician Undercover

You need to brush up on your definitions of generality and vagueness by the looks of it.

Intelligible and unintelligible refer to what is potentially apprehended by an intellect. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is about ontology, not epistemology. The claim is about reality itself having rational structure. Though that in turn would be why we can understand reality in rational terms.

Also I have not read this thread as thoroughly as might have been proper so I have not seen Apo claim an Apeiron as a fundamental and absolute scientific truth. — Gooseone

Yep. The argument is one of metaphysical logic. And then I also show how science supports it.

But note also that "intelligible" has a technical meaning in this discussion. It is about metaphysics. And it means the Cosmos is rationally structured, therefore capable of being understood in those terms.

The unintelligible then means a "state" where that structure is lacking.

When the PNC does not apply, it is and it is not. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or rather, metaphysically as a state, it is neither one thing nor the other.

Where you just went wrong is to talk about vagueness or Apeiron as an object. An object of course is defined as an already crisply entified thing, although it may have vague properties.

The reason why these things appear to blend into each other is that we are lacking the capacity to distinguish them, our theories which deal with these actions are faulty, not because there is some ontic vagueness about them. The vagueness is epistemic. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm sure you're now about to reference the part of quantum theory which supports your assertions here. Any minute now...

To me, it appears to say that symmetry maths says that when every permutation is permitted, then none are omitted. — Metaphysician Undercover

Huh? If different permutations have the same outcome, how many different outcomes would you count?

I don't think you've really thought through what it means for the PNC to fail to apply. Vagueness is defined by it not being actually divided by a contradiction. It is the intelligible which is the crisply divided.