I don't see how this is relevant. — darthbarracuda

It is relevant that in one breath you tout the mood enhancing benefits of pot, the next you imagine it as the very worst advice I might give you and Schop (when it is as far away from sensible as any advice from positive psychology would get.

So the protest is double, You both strawman me and also do that in a way that is inconsistent with your own expressed views.

Thus the relevance is illustrating what awful arguments you make.

So why are you hanging around a philosophy forum instead of being out there jiggling your booty. Is dance ... not enough?

Strawberries are red, pixels are blue,
Indirect realism still isn't true — unenlightened

So another vote for idealism? Michael will be pleased.

Direct experience is what is required not a constrained set of incomplete and inadequate symbols. — Rich

Ah. Direct experience. Good luck with that. :)

Question: I would have thought that the ability of the mind to heal itself from brain injury, by re-routing its activities to other areas of the brain via 'neuroplasticity', demonstrates the ability of mind to 'rewire' the brain. That is the substance of the book 'The Brain that Changes Itself', by Norman Doidge. — Wayfarer

Hah. That's a dreadful book in terms of its over-egged celebration of plasticity.

But remember that my own take on neurology is semiotic. So I don't explain the mind as a material state of affairs. The mind is a system of signs. It is an interactive model of the world. So in some sense, the brain has a distributed or holistic memory of how it needs to be to continue to function the way it normally does. This is how - top-down - it reconstructs itself even after serious insult.

So in the semiotic view, what is important is that the material parts of the machinery are maximally unstable. Life depends on molecules that are always on the verge of falling apart (and equally, just as fast reforming). That is, the hardware of life is the precise opposite of the hardware suitable for computing. Life needs a fundamental instability as that then gives signs, or encoded information routines, something to do - create stability.

So from the get-go - down at the nanoscale quasi-classical scale of material process - "consciousness" or semiosis is giving the biophysics just enough of a nudge to keep the machine rebuilding itself. Proteins and other constituents are falling together slightly more than they are falling apart, and so the fundamental plasticity is being statistically regulated to produce a long-running, self-repairing, stable organism.

The brain then just repeats this basic semiotic trick on a humongously complex scale of organisation. That is how brains can effect repairs - rearrange and regrow to keep doing what they have learnt to do.

Holistically, they have to be able to regulate plasticity the whole time anyway. The half-life of structural elements of neural tissue like microtubules is about 10 minutes. A large proportion of what was your brain this morning will have fallen apart and rebuilt itself by the time this evening comes around. So viewed on the nano-scale, you might say the brain's ability to maintain its identity in the face of the chaotic thermal flux that is the molecular level of cellular machinery is far more remarkable than any recovery from stroke.

That is not to deny that physical changes don't lead to affective consequences, but it is to question the degree to which this is a one-way relationship. — Wayfarer

It is absolutely a two way relationship. But one of sign and matter, not mind and matter.

If you don't know, just admit it! — tom

You need to try harder to keep up with the thread. You are still wanting to construct your numbers, and yet the point being made is that the continuum needs to be cut or divided - which is an act of primal constraint, not construction.

So every cut of the continuum must leave behind a continua that is capable of being cut again. Thus every naming of some "first number" must allow the naming of yet still earlier numbers ... as the continuous can never be computationally erased. Constraint isn't just subtraction or negative addition. It is what it says, a limitation marking continuity. And the divisibility of the continuum is inexhaustible. Every named number - in attempting to cut a part of the line away from the whole - still leaves a bounded line segment.

So the answer in terms of a constraints-based understanding of number is just obvious.

And if your own constructive viewpoint actually could account for the numberline, then you would be granting a zero dimensional point some actual size. Which is why the paradox implicit in your constructive viewpoint was also the bleedingly self-evident since Zeno first put stylus to wax.

Contingency means that "either P or not-P might not be actual." — aletheist

So to complete the pattern, 2ns would need to be characterised by a failure of distribution of the principle of identity. And you are saying 2ns is really to be labelled contingency rather than actuality?

I can't really agree with your framing here as my point was that P is only truly actualised to the degree that not-P (as its generic 3ns context) is also actualised.

Returning to my original remark about a "tension", vagueness is pure contingency while 2ns is constrained or contextualised contingency. That is, 2ns is about actualised degrees of freedom - a degree of freedom being a determinate direction of action, or an existent with a predicate.

So it is confusing to call 2ns contingency when 1ns is usually regarded as the maximally contingent. Really, 2ns is contingency limited, regulated, contextualised.

My argument has been that the principle of identity makes a claim that a thing is the same as itself by definition - it appears no context or larger relation is needed and no contingency or uncertainty could be involved.

The laws of thought make identity the concrete and completely uncontingent starting point for then reasoning about the particular. Particularity is claimed as an atomistic fact and so off logic can merrily trot to derive its further two laws.

Peirceanism then stands against that with its holism. Now the concrete particularity of identity - the category of the actual - is instead the emergent intersection of the possible and necessary, the local potential and a wider context of constraint.

So actuality or 2ns becomes the transition zone. It reflects the mixing of the polar extremes of being - vague possibility and crisp generality. Or total freedom vs total constraint. Actuality is actualisation - the process of coming to be framed by the limits on being. A developmental arc is being described that (for me, if not for you) goes from vague 1ns to generic 3ns via the concrete foothold or symmetry breaking which is bald 2ns - a difference that can make a difference in that it does serve to construct, or at least continue to reinforce, some large state of 3ns habit.

The emergent nature of 2ns or the concretely particular is what makes for ambivalence. We are talking about actuality - but the concreteness is secured by the 3ns it anticipates. Context is what gives the particular its definite character, what allows it to be seen and remembered as an occasion that is the same as itself/different from aught else. And this in turn means the particular has been sharply formed by the pruning away of all unnecessary possibilities. Identity is arrived at apophatically.

So there is a pattern to be completed. The law of identity ought to have an exact apophatic definition in the "true meaning" of 2ns, or actuality.

And what does identity presume most? It presumes brute existence instead of emergent development. It presumes a pure state rather than a mixed state. It presumes it stands at the beginning rather than arriving at the end.

Yet then "actuality" in semiosis requires the wholeness of 3ns (the 3ns that incorporates the 2ns and 1ns). So the identification of 2ns as actuality - or better yet, actualisation - has to be understood in that light.

Thus in terms of your logical formalisation - "contingency means that "either P or not-P might not be actual" - it seems to me rather that we are talking not about contingency but about actualisation. So the category of contingency reduced to its deterministic minimum by the constraint of a generality - ie: a freedom that has a direction.

You simply seem to be re-stating the fact that the PNC does not apply to the vague (the vague being the radically contingent).

So Vagueness means that "both P and not-P are possible." = Vagueness means that "either P or not-P might not be actual."

Although, as I say, vagueness defined directly is the degree to which P and not-P are co-jointly not actual. This captures the anticipated 3ns which is the further rule that actuality is irreducibly contextual. So it takes a matching degree of P and not-P for actualisation. And a matching absence of P and not-P for there to the maximum indistinctness or lack of identity.

In vagueness, P is indistinguishable from not-P. In actualiity, they are as distinct from each other as possible. And in generality, that actualised counterfactuality is not merely a one-off event but a habit, a law, a routine state of affairs, an irreversible fact of history.

So again, explain stimulants.

Oh, yes. matter can definitely deaden or kill consciousness (physicians do this all the time when they prescribe opioids) , but it takes consciousness to know this. — Rich

So you have changed your claim now? Consciousness no longer creates matter. Instead matter can kill it, yet not create it?

Yet what is happening when physicians prescribe stimulants? And consciousness finds itself enhanced, enlivened? What are the consequences of admitting that matter appears to affect the state of mind in predictable fashion in either direction.

Apokrisis appears to be saying that there is no use in assuming such a principle of identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

This seems to be the way that apokrisis speaks of identity, we give a thing an identity relevant to the purposes at hand. — Metaphysician Undercover

You seem uncertain that this is my actual position for some reason. Is that because you know you're just making up things I never would say?

- if you can entertain the notion that consciousness creates matter which is far more likely than matter created consciousness. — Rich

Yeah it's just so obvious. Alcohol doesn't cause drunkeness, drunkeness causes alcohol. Lobotomies don't cause a destruction of integrative thought, a lack of integrative thought cause lobotomies. Etc, etc.

So perhaps contextuality means that "P is whatever is distinguished from not-P." — aletheist

Or formally, each is the other's context. As in the logic of a dichotomy - that which is mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

So mathematically, it is a reciprocal or inverse relation.

X = 1/not-x. And not-x = 1/x.

This is why I say the degree each secures the other contextually is strictly relative. Each is only as precise as its alter ego allows it to be. If not-x is vaguely defined, then x remains just as vague too.

This ties identity directly to the strength of the answering context. And so put together, it allows for a controlled way to go from 1ns to 3ns via 2ns. You have every degree of mutual definition on the way from one limit (the 50/50 completely vague state of not knowing which is which), to the 1/0 limit which would represent absolute counterfactuality or completely secured identity).

Following on from the point about Brouwer, memory and action, I am reminded of Landauer's erasure principle - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

This ties computation to physical actuality in a helpful fashion here.

Memory or history is irreversible symmetry breaking created by some expenditure of energy. So 3ns can be neatly defined in information theoretic terms as the erasure of 1ns. While 2ns is a still locally reversible state - the dynamics can be read off in either direction until fixed by a 3ns context.

Hence the continuum does model time as memory and action. The past is 3ns - the information fixed by irreversible acts of information erasure. What was possible as 1ns is now decided with counterfactual definiteness one way or the other.

The present is then 2ns, the instant when there is just an event that could be read in either direction. Which is action, which reaction? All we know is that there is an event - a symmetry breaking - that could be about to be fixed as something definite and 1ns erasing in the 3ns memory of a developing history.

Then the future is 1ns or the vague. It is open possibility. It is the freedom waiting to be dissipated by acts that steadily rob the system of the energy to locally distinctive rather than globally generic.

So the continuum can't just be freely divided or counted without limit. Computation has been defined by Landauer in terms which spell it out as a game of diminishing returns. The Brouwerian requirement that the actual numberline needs a memory (context being primal) means that constructing the memory is dissipative. It costs to erase possibility.

In our universe, this is captured with complete precision by quantum mechanics. There is a holographic limit on computation. Try to do too much of it and the resulting heat would even melt spacetime, turn it locally into a black hole.

Of course maths can simply ignore all these issues - imagine numberlines as spatial things with no time, no memory, no action, no dissipation.

But while that might make a paradise for Hilbert, mathematical physics might believe that it wants mathematical conceptions much more in line with reality as it is observed. Which is where a Peirce comes in.

The difference is infinitesimal, however, so it is in principle indiscernible. If the difference is indiscernible then we might easily say that A and B are the same.

So MU, you quote Peirce in a way that directly contradicts you and directly supports me.

Interesting argumentative strategy.

The point is the difference is meaningful, no matter how much you might pretend otherwise-- a thing's identity is not found in what it is to you (i.e. your experience of it, semiotics, your "epistemic cut" ), but rather itself. There is a difference ( "This one dies, not the other" ) no matter if you care about it. Your generality is a myth, a dishonest story you tell yourself to eliminate subjects in the contexts of your "practical" concerns. — TheWillowOfDarkness

If you could define meaningful in a meaningful fashion here - ie: in a way that makes a quantifiable difference - then there might be something to talk about.

So how do you define meaningful exactly?

I'm liking Brouwer's "two-oneness" intuitionistic approach to the continuum that Zalamea mentions. It gets the pan-semiotic point that existence depends on memory (or 2ns on 3ns).

So the first mark (or cut of the line) anchors the second mark by becoming the memory - the context in which a difference can now make a difference.

This introduces the direction of time, and hence energy and dissipation, into axiom-level mathematical thinking. The past is spent (gone to synechic 3ns), and yet the future is still open (still primal or tychic 1ns).

So the continuum does have this neighbourhood property - this extra hidden dimension - which is its memory. The first cut becomes the context for a second cut (and together they underwrite an endless repetition of cuts). And this is where counting and even ordinality gets justified. Effort has to be spent in constructing a history of what has happened. But the future extends to infinity and beyond - underwritten by its own past success.

In appreciating the intuitionistic approach to the continuum, we can see what the set theoretic approach simply freezes out and takes for granted. The Cantorian infinity is timeless and effortless - and thus patently unreal on that score.

If maths wants to speak more truly of nature, we can see how memory and action must be added back into the mix.

Cantor was the first to rigorously define the continuum in 1870s and all the dissenters have been forgotten. — tom

You really do live in your own private Idaho. Underground like a wild potato.

Yes of course it would make a difference. The one I chose would be the one that I eat, the one I didn't choose would not be eaten by me. Do you think the difference between being eaten and not being eaten is not a difference? — Metaphysician Undercover

But how did it make a difference to you that you ate one and not the other? And how even did it make any difference to the world, if the world had any discernible interest in the matter.

So - as has been repeated ad nauseum by both me an altheist now - it is not that there isn't a difference, but there needs to be a difference that makes a difference ... which is the difference that makes a difference in this discussion.

You are talking about meaningless differences and claiming they are now meaningful. But you can't say why that would be so (except you would then be able to count some points being scored on your private anti-apokrisis metre ... Bing! MU scores another (own) goal!)

Information, of course, needs to be accurate. — darthbarracuda

Or meaningful in fact.

And this is the semiotic point. Information is not noise but a message when it is a sign connected to our desires.

So there are two views of information. One is that it is a material difference. That makes even noise countable as bits of information.

The other says differences have to make a difference. And that happens when there is a context of purpose which interprets a difference in terms of its meaning. A signal now also has a message.

There is a science of these things you know...

If everything was perfectly known, there would be no need for a mind. No thinking would be required. Thinking is the process in which we evaluate different sorts of information and construct a path of action. — darthbarracuda

I often drive long stretches of road with no conscious memory of a lot of pretty technical and dangerous actions. We are designed to automate our awareness of the world so that we can do everything at the most habitual and inattentive level possible.

So attention and thought are reserved for dealing with the unpredicted, the novel - the things we hope to turn into habits in the future.

That is why the old are wise. They know all the answers already. Correct thought appears effortless.

. If we wanna go the psychoanalytical meta-psychological route, then consciousness is the (painful) method in which the unconscious satisfies its endless depth of want and need in a temporal world of insufficiency. — darthbarracuda

No. Let's not go into the bogus science/dressed-up romanticism of psycho-analysis.

So apo is right in that for biological organisms, less tends to be more. Efficiency is what's up. But of course the mind has to be modelling the world somewhat accurately, otherwise theories like apo's wouldn't even make sense themselves. — darthbarracuda

You just don't get the nuances correctly yet.

The whole notion of "re-presentation" is a psychological fallacy. The mind - as a modelling relation - wants "efficiency" in always knowing the shortest path between its desires and their fulfilment. So it is that shortest path which fills awareness, not the totality of all the world's facts.

To denote science (or anything else) as the "highest" form of consciousness is sort of ambiguous in my opinion. Higher than what? What measuring system are we using here? — darthbarracuda

I defined it - going the furthest in reducing awareness of reality to a matter of signs - that is, the theory we create and then the numbers we read off our instruments.

The soccer goalie does just the same in the end. Success or failure is ultimately read off a score board ticking over - the measurement of the theory which is the rules of a game.

One-nil, one-nil, onnneee-nilllll-ahh! Comes the happy chant of the home crowd.

If anything I would have to say philosophy is the "highest" form of thought, since it deals with abstract concepts in a purely possible modality. Or, hell, even just daydreaming. — darthbarracuda

You are forgetting the role of measurement. Ideas must be cashed out in terms of impressions.

Science is the metaphysics that has proven itself to work. It is understanding boiled down to the pure language of maths. And so measurements become actually signs themselves, a number registering on an instrument.

What? — darthbarracuda

This.

Smoked some weed for the first time last night at a concert. — darthbarracuda

Then.

I'm legitimately curious as to why you think it's alright to blatantly ignore everything I just wrote by pretending it's the words of a seasoned stoner. Is it the impersonal culture of the internet, cognitive dissonance, or do you have some wisdom from above that isn't just scienced-up "suck it up"? — darthbarracuda

If you can't join the dots between the superficiality of Pessimism as a philosophy and the superficiality of pot as a solution to life's problems, then maybe you shouldn't risk knocking off even more neurons.

MU wrongly attributed it directly to Peirce and claimed that the latter relied on it to support the proposition that a continuum is divisible. — aletheist

MU's thoughts indeed form an undivided continuum. :)

At the end of the day, your version of understanding nature amounts to you standing there and saying the words "I understand nature". There is nothing more to show.

Science demonstrates its control over existence in everything that in fact makes your own modern existence possible.

So your cry of protest here could hardly sound more feeble.

The continuum was discovered via set theory! — tom

You need to get out more. The mathematical world is larger than just set theory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(topology)

The continuum made of glued together points is complimented by the continuum made of glued together relations.

And the true continuum of Peirce (or Thom, or Brouwer) goes beyond that duality in being the source of that duality.

The specific language of "a difference that does not make a difference" comes from apokrisis, not Peirce — aletheist

Bateson must get the actual credit - http://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/

If course we must rely on symbolism to communicate, since mind to mind communication is not available, but before such communication is performed, one must first probe nature directly and then admit in any use of metaphors that the metaphors are incomplete. — Rich

But why do you presume the job of the mind is to see reality "as it is"? That makes no evolutionary sense.

So pragmatism/semiosis is a realistic theory of the epistemic modelling relation we have with the world (and then ontologically - the surprising bit - that reality has with itself so as to indeed form "itself").

This flips everything around. Now the job of the symbolising mind is to take as little note of the actuality of the world as possible. To the degree the mind has detached itself from brute actuality, then it is starting to see the world only in terms of its future possibilities.

So for consciousness - as attentive level processing - less is more. The goal is to reduce awareness of the surrounding to the least amount of detail necessary to make successful future predictions, and thus to be able to insert oneself into the world as its formal and final cause. We gain control in direct proportion to our demonstrable ability to ignore the material facts of existence.

This is why science is the highest form of consciousness. It reduces awareness of the world to theories and measurements. We have an idea that predicts. Then all we have to do is read a number off some dial.

The fact that reality might be continuous is the reason why psychological mechanisms evolved to extract semiotic discreteness from it - a tale of distinct signs. The mind is designed to zero in on some single telling point of view in any moment - to attend. And in doing that, everything else can be ignored as noise. The world outside the focus of attention is simply ... vague.

My point is that you, like MU, are arguing from a particular set of presumptions. There is this wrong idea that the mind should see everything exactly as it really is. But that is illogical in evolutionary terms - in terms of the principles of modelling. The mind wants to do the exact opposite - transcend the world, so as to gain the power to re-imagine the world.

Of course the world still exists in brute continuous fashion. It has its recalcitrant being that ultimately acts as a constraint on our desires. Yet that doesn't mean we should just give in and give up. The highest state of consciousness is the one that is most semiotically developed - the best able to impose its own reality on reality through the creativity of a sign relation.

Therefore, apokrisis' claim, from Peirce, is that two distinct things can have the very same identity, if we allow that there are differences which do not matter. But of course these differences really do matter, because these are the differences whereby we distinguish the two things as distinct. And it is simple contradiction to say that these differences do not matter. — Metaphysician Undercover

If I offered you the choice between two McDonalds cheeseburgers, would it make a difference which one you picked?

If there are differences that don't make a difference, then there are differences that do. And on that logical distinction would hang the pragmatic definition of a principle of identity.

You may insist on your own unpragmatic definition. It would be interesting to hear what it might be. How does difference end for you? What makes something finally "all the same" for your impractical point of view?

You might as well just tell pessimists like me and Schop1 to go hit up the bong. — darthbarracuda

You smoke your first joint yesterday and today you talk like a seasoned stoner.

For Spinoza possibility is necessary. It never ends or ceases. — TheWillowOfDarkness

If that is truly Spinonza's view then at least we can cross him off the list. ;)

Spinoza understood the need for pure potential more than anyone else. He realised it must be beyond "firstness" (or "secondary" or "tertiary" ), finally realising potential's poisonous grip on metaphysics, where it thought to be something a force (i.e. a final cause) must "add" to the world for anything to make sense. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It would be nice if you could support your claims with references or quotes for once. This sounds wildly made-up.

But of course this better place has to be existence, right? — darthbarracuda

And that existence is what you make it.

Of course Pollyannaism is as superficial as Pessimism. There are limits to what any individual can change. So Pragmatism accepts the necessity of working within limits.

Yet in accepting responsibility for playing a part in the making of a better world, at least we start acting like a grown-up. And that responsibility starts at home with ourselves - hence positive psychology.

What's the point of repeating what you can't understand?

The very thing of a purpose defines its own epistemic boundaries - the point at which differences don't make any difference. And if you can't follow that argument, then that's your problem.

Some excerpts....

Peirce observed that, among those metaphysics that recognize all three categories, “there are other philosophies which seem to do full jus- tice to Categories Second and Third and to minimize the first, and among these perhaps Spinoza and Kant are to be included” (PPM 172). However, by the next lecture, Peirce had changed his mind. He listed as proponents of the ontology that recognizes only Secondness and Thirdness “Cartesianism of all kinds, Leibnizianism, Spinozism, and the metaphysics of the Physicists of today” (PPM 190), but listed Kantian- ism and especially Aristotelianism (to which Peirce this time paid particular attention) as among the metaphysical systems that accept the reality of all three categories (PPM 190).

So the Peirce initially thought Spinoza didn't get firstness, then later wanted to change his mind...

Thus, Peirce not only identified metaphysical systems that embrace all three categories as fundamentally Aristotelian; he also linked Aristotle’s metaphysics (and, by extension, those metaphysics that embrace Firsts, Seconds and Thirds) with evolutionism.16 During the same period, he made the difference between real Aristotelianism and the “imaginary” Aristotelianism of the scholastic period to rest in the for- mer’s evolutionism and the latter’s rejection of same. Finally, in a text from the same period, he praised Spinoza’s “slightly modified” Aris totelianism, maintaining that Spinozism shows no trace of influence by the scholastics.

So the true Aristotle got it, the scholastics didn't. And Spinoza was lucky in being uninfluenced...

[Peirce...M]y chief avocation in the last ten years has been to develop my cosmology. This theory is that the evolution of the world is hyperbolic, that is, proceeds from one state of things in the infinite past, to a different state of things in the infinite future. The state of things in the infinite past is chaos, tohu bohu, the nothingness of which consists in the total absence of regularity. The state of things in the infinite future is death, the nothingness of which consists in the complete triumph of law and absence of all spontaneity. (CP 8.317)

So here, from logical considerations, Peirce describes the trajectory from a hot Big Bang to a cold Heat Death about 50 years before science confirmed it....

Elliptic cosmologies accept the reality only of percepts and reject both the origins and the telos of those percepts as fictions.24 Peirce in more than one text identified this position with Epicureanism,25 although we might think of Humean and statistical mechanical cosmologies as likewise exemplars of this type.

The second possible cosmology also accepts the reality of percepts but sees these as emerging not randomly but from a real origin. This position is, however, analogous to a parabolic curve in that its origin and terminus are coincident. Parabolic cosmologies hold that the universe’s telos just is its origin—that the universe will end as it began. For parabolic thinkers, there is no genuine Firstness, only Secondness and Thirdness. Peirce labelled this position pessimistic.26 However, those infused with Nietzschean amor fati would call it optimistic. It is a position with considerable Stoic affinities,27 and one, it is worth observing, that most would identify with Spinoza.

The final cosmology that Peirce laid out is his own. This is the view of those who regard Absolute Firstness and Absolute Secondness as both real and as really divergent from one another. In geometrical terms, the curve described by two points infinitely distant from one another is hyperbolic. On Peirce’s account, if you hold “that the whole universe is approaching in the infinitely distant future a state having a general character different from that toward which we look back in the infinitely distant past, you make the absolute to consist in two distinct real points and are an evolutionist” (CP 1.362).

And here Peirce employs non-Euclidean geometry to model the various metaphysical cum cosmological alternatives in explicit fashion. He really was running rings around absolutely everyone....

In an 1891 article for The Monist, entitled “The Architecture of Theories,” in a section on the nature of space, Peirce inferred from the revolution in geometry an anti-deterministic revolution in metaphysics. “It is evident,” he wrote, “. . . that we can have no reason to think that every phenomenon in all its minutest details is precisely determined by law. That there is an arbitrary element in the universe we see—namely, its variety. This variety must be attributed to spontaneity in some form” (CP 6.30).

In your face MU. :)

But then the paper struggles to identify any grounds by which the Spinozean absolute is Peircean firstness in another guise. It shows Peirce thought Spinoza wasn't fooled by his own "Euclidean" concreteness. But the reasons for being so charitable are not then adduced in any convincing fashion.

Dea says this...

Spinoza’s commitment to conatus underwrites his criticism of Cartesian mechanics. On Spinoza’s account, Descartes was mistaken to regard matter as inert. For Spinoza, matter, like mind, is active; it is in its very essence dynamic. The important role that Spinoza accords to dunamis in his physics no doubt influenced Peirce’s linking of Spinoza with “historical Aristotelianism.” And, since Peirce cites Aristotle’s own principle of dunamis in support of his
attribution to him of evolutionism, so the traces of Aristotelian dunamis in Spinoza’s principle of conatus almost certainly played a role in Peirce’s association of Spinozism with hyperbolic cosmologies.

Then offers a sketch....

To say that Spinoza was a possibilist is not to deny that he was a necessitarian. He was a necessitarian in the sense that he recognized necessity as real. However, he was also a possibilist, who regarded possibility as real and as extending beyond actuality—just as Peirce did. The details of Spinoza’s possibilism go well beyond the scope of this essay, and will have to wait for another time. However, here is a sketch of how the story goes.

For Spinoza as for Peirce, being is at bottom indeterminate; individual things are not substances. Indeed—and here we glimpse another aspect of Spinoza’s pragmati(ci)sm—they are only individuals to the extent that they have effects. For Spinoza, however, for a thing to have a determinate effect is for other possible effects to be closed off to that thing. Thus, to be an individual thing, on Spinoza’s view, is not to perdure (like a substance) but to have limitations....To be a substance, for Spinoza, is to be utterly unlimited—to be pure possibility.

Yep. But now Spinoza in his own words - where it gets less convincing....

All of the passages that are usually adduced in support of the necessitarian, mechanistic-deterministic account of Spinoza confirm this. CM 1,iii: “The Possible and the Contingent are not affections of things [rerum].” E1P33: “Things [res] could not have been produced by God in any other way or in any other order than is the case.” E1P33S1: “I have shown here more clearly than the midday sun that in things [rebus] there is absolutely nothing by virtue of which they can be said to be ‘contingent’. . . . a thing [res] is termed ‘contingent’ for no other reason than the
deficiency of our knowledge.” These passages all explicitly make reference to things [res]. Things are not possible but fully determined. In Spinoza’s idiom, this is not a grand metaphysical claim; it simply follows analytically from the definition of “thing.”

So we seem to end up with the claim that Spinoza defined substance in untraditional fashion - not the formed secondness of hylomorphism or even Peirceanism - but as the pure potentiality of a vagueness.

Yet I don't think that adds up. At best, Spinoza might have dimly realised the need for pure potential (he was Aristotelean), but still made the mistake of thinking Firstness was still some kind of "material stuff", hence already in the hands of thirdness or the habits of form/purpose.

And this is not surprising given a theistic goal where the stuff of existence must be an expression of some mind's meaning - even immanently.

So summary is that Peirce certainly said by the end that Spinoza seemed a fellow triadicist. But so far no evidence to show that Spinoza really got it at a deep and explicity level. The similarity stems mainly from being a developmental process philosopher trying to make an immanent conception of the divine work out. So any logical properties of the metaphyics are consequences of that general orientation - that goal! - not well worked through arguments that carried the day in their own right.

But when one is forced into a negative situation due to social challenges of the existing structure, and then when one realizes that at the end of these challenges there are only vague notions of entertainment experiences- this is not very consoling. — schopenhauer1

You seem to view this arse about face for some reason. You appear to treat misery as an inescapable end rather than the escapable beginning.

So misery exists (in nature) as a signal to get changing. It says you are in the wrong place and need to head to a better place.

Of course pessimism thrives on the claim that misery (for us, in this era of history, due to the way we live) is inescapable.

But that is what makes it superficial as philosophy.

If you want to be taken seriously, talk sense.

Thanks, but none of that really clarifies the issue.

There looks a good article on exactly this topic - Firstness, Evolution and the Absolute in Peirce’s Spinoza by Shannon Dea - http://files.bloodedbythought.org/texts/On%20Peirce/Dea-44.4-Peirces%20Spinoza.pdf

I'll give it a read, but put the link here in case you want to consider it too.

Yeah, so you will be with those who feel that nature frustrates you with its fundamental quantum indeterminism and general relativity. You want existence to be exact and totallly knowable, even if that has already been discovered to be a kind of mania.

So the idea is that the context of x is not-x, and defining the identity of x as not-not-x recognizes this, rather than making it a contextless tautology? "x is x" does not apply to the contextual, but "x is not-not-x" does apply as an apophatic alternative? — aletheist

Your understanding seems not incorrect.

If it matters to you, then you have a reason to enquire. So where is the difficulty.

Mind you, if you claim that everything actually does matter to you, excuse me if I think that is patent bullshit. Does it make any difference to you if I wear a red or blue shirt tomorrow? Do you need that to be another determinate fact ... or do you believe in free will in contradiction to your what you just posted?

Which statement? Which terms? I want to make sure that I clearly understand what you are saying here. Also, how would you fill in the blank with some formalized version of the principle of identity? — aletheist

If x is not not-x, then it just seems straightforward that it is claiming its identity apophatically. I don't get that there can be any difficulty.

I am what I am because I am not what I am not.

But the difference is that now I have made the natural relativity of the question of identity explicit. I can suggest some feature as a characteristic that is "me" - like I am male. Because I'm not female. Then I can start to measure my maleness in terms of its,distance from femininity. Like perhaps I'm really hairy, so more truly male. Or perhaps I've got shapely legs, so that seems more ambiguous.

A silly example but it illustrates the principle. To state I am male is not very helpful. To state that I'm not female is to anchor the statement in a Universe of relative measurement. The context is now made fully part of the deal.

While I am at it, do you agree or disagree with my other "first cut" definitions of "contextual" that parallel what Peirce wrote about "vague" and "general"? — aletheist

But contextuality leaves it open whether the further possibility is 1ns or 2ns. It could a future condtional (the coming battle with the Persian fleet) or it could be some event already fixed by a determination (what will I discover when I finally check my ticket for the lottery drawn last week?).

So contextuality is simply 3ns or the generality of a constraint. And possibility divides into two kinds - that already determined by the past yet simply unknown or unmeasured, and then the true spontaneity of an undetermined future. Newtonianism talks about the first. Quantum theory is our best model for handling the latter.

Which is what, in your view? — aletheist

Following the second law of thermodynamics, I put it quite simply - to dissipate vagueness.

This is of course a very weak kind of telos from a theist point of view. But there you are. The world exists because vagueness proved to be intrinsically unstable. To the degree it existed, it already contained the possibility of regulation that could organise it to turn it into a crisp nothingness - a Heat Death void.

And throw all the Peirce quotes at me that you like. Semiosis starts with 1ns and so is radically at odds with any conventional transcendent monotheism - any 3ns notion of a higher purpose or creating mind or pre-existent harmony.

This is one point at which I am having consistent trouble tracking with you. I understand 2ns in Peirceanism to be about brute reaction/resistance, the absence of freedom (1ns) and reason/purpose (3ns). — aletheist

Why should any reaction be determinate in itself? Two things may collide and bounce. But how do you know which hit which, or who came off worst? You need some kind of fixed backdrop to close the story - give it a context against which the elements of the reaction can be measured. So that was what Newton's three laws of motion were about (and the triadicity was hardly an accident).

As I say, once we talk about 3ns or generality as constraint or purpose or law, then 2ns becomes the constraint of 1ns and hence the determinate thing of constrained possibility ... or a material degree of freedom.

Any point particle has six degrees of freedom - three directions of translational symmetry or straight line inertial motion, and three directions of rotational symmetry, or inertial spin. So Newton captured this fact that the fixing of a Euclidean flat backdrop then left these irreducible degrees of freedom. Constraint could stop everything but these last, now crisply definite, forms of local symmetry breaking. A rolling ball or spinning top - in a frictionless world - would remain in motion without change forever.

So Newtonianism is about a set of absolute freedoms. And thus also the corollary of absolute constraints.

Of course then along came relativity to demonstrate all this classical definiteness was relativistically contextual and quantumly indeterminate. That is why Peirce gets credit for foreseeing the physical revolutions about to come.

This is the basis on which I have elsewhere suggested "extreme realism" as the view that reality consists entirely of generals, or at least that everything real is general to some degree. — aletheist

This of course is what I deny. There is only relativity, never the absolute.

However, vagueness can't be absolute either. And generality can approach its own limit asymptotically. So certainly the Universe can be expected to wind up as totally generic as possible - the shorthand description of its ultimate Heat Death.

[edit:] So where I agree is that it is "constraints all the way down". There is no foundation of actual material being, just always a constraint acting to suppress free variety. Reality is thus always contextual (while remaining also irreducibly tychic). And if that's what you mean here, then I guess that is extreme realism in deny non-emergent or transcendent reality to brute particulars.

As a second cut: If x is contextual, then it is not necessarily true that under all circumstances, x = ¬¬x. — aletheist

Huh? X is being made its own context. That is the tautology here. The assertion is being made that the context is crisply existent too.

The upshot then is that the statement is true only to the degree that either term is true. But also each is true in direct proportion to the truth of its "other". So as least we do have a definite form of relative truth in play. Each term is as true as the other, even if neither might never be a perfect truth ... and that also is stated in the reciprocality of the relation. If either one was perfectly true, it would negate its other - erase it from existence and so lose the other as that to which anything was being related. So it is a limit statement - with each limit having to have the positive existence of its other (in familiar yin-yang fashion).

So yes, in the end, it is a statement of contextuality. But contextuality "absolutely divided". So that is why 2ns is about emergent particularity or individuation and the 1ns of identity is about the brute facticity of the same. The triadic scheme makes the middle the last thing to emerge from an organic process of constraint on absolute possibility. Monadic reductionism presumes it is the first brute fact to get the mechanics of construction started.

Hence if one or the other does not apply, negation is left undefined. — aletheist

Yep. I have said that there must be this coupling of constraints and unbounded freedom that then leaves the third thing of determinate possibility - material degrees of freedom. So it is a pincer movement to arrive at where reductionist ontology wants to start itself.

There is nothing to prevent almost any sort of difference from being conventionally neglected in some discourse ... — CP 3.63, 1870

So note Peirce argues here by implication for the pragmatic principle of indifference. If we are now talking cosmology, it is the Universe that is indifferent to any difference that doesn't make a difference in being beyond the needs of its genenralised purpose.

Of course the theist will run into real difficulties here because beyond the Universe is some further 3ns of a god with a mind. Peircean semiotics was heading so nicely in the direction of pure self-manifestation on the logical grounds that "nothingness is impossible". And then the theist has to do a sharp 180 when this dangerous final answer eventually does show itself. 1ns can't be the true initial conditions of existence as Peirce's own logic makes necessary. And from that balking at the final hurdle, the whole point of the metaphysics falls apart. Transcendentalism re-enters to claim its false dominion.

Anyways...

This distinction between the absolutely indivisible and that which is one in number from a particular point of view is shadowed forth in the two words individual {to atomon} and singular (to kath' hekaston); but as those who have used the word individual have not been aware that absolute individuality is merely ideal, it has come to be used in a more general sense. — CP 3.63, 1870

So this is dichotomistic reasoning. The general and the particular are defined via their mutual opposition. And so they both only exist in a relative fashion. Nothing ends up real - except to the degree its own reality is secured by a sufficient distancing from its apophatically reality-erasing "other".

Thus you have not fully surrendered to the essence of semiotics. Everything is ultimately emergent, immanent, a matter of relative development. Even the universals that are real under semiotics are only historically realised - ideal only relative to their own developed degree of expression.

So any law is not exceptionless. It may approach the Platonic ideal, but it can't arrive there. That makes even laws or 3ns emergent and not really real (in that wishes can change things still - as we humans demonstrate in defying laws like universal gravitation with wings and aeroplane engines.)

Thus when we are talking about the mirror that are the three laws of thought and the semiotic triad, it is this kind of immanent mutuality we would seek on each level. And in your language, you keep wanting to talk about generality or vagueness in unsuitably specific terms. You are treating the categories as hard and existent, not developmental and relative to the business in hand.

So as I say, there are three laws of thought that constrain naked possibility so that only brute substantial actuality appears left. The world is a nominalistic totality of facts, a cause-transcending state of affairs. We only then need a mechanical mode of reasoning - the atomism of predicate logic - to make complete sense of existence.

But then Peirceanism is the counter to that - the counter that doesn't destroy the particular, but instead flips the perspective to show how it is the irreducibly emergent and not the brutely foundational.

So that then is how generality and vagueness emerge as the "other" of the LEM and PNC.

Generality denies the LEM by saying that particularity is always contexted by a purpose. So middles have to be excluded to the general satisfaction of some constraint. There has to be a semantic act of judgement, an act of measurement.

But then that purpose can be satisfied often quite easily in practice. So constraint is self-limiting in its essence. There is always a point beyond which even the universal law doesn't in fact give a bugger. So indiscernability arises for that self-interested reason.

The 1ns of vagueness then stands against the "2ns" of the PNC. With generality vs the LEM, it was 3ns against 3ns - top level against top level. But now we have an odd mixing of levels that seems confusing.

However it seems to work out right. Where the PNC talks in terms of crisp possibility, vagueness says no, crispness is only relative to its "other" of the vague. So what the laws of thought treat as having simple existence - bivalence - semiotic shows to be an emergent property that has to erupt via a fluctuation of vague suggestiveness, followed up by the solidification of established 3ns, or universalised habit.

Then we arrive at the 1ns of the laws of thought - the principle of identity. This then is made to stand in dichotomous contrast to what? It stands in apophatic relation to 2ns/actuality ... whatever that really means in Peirce-speak.

So in fact we already find this a well traversed issue in Leibniz's doctrine of indiscernibles. But where the reductionist thinks that the differences that make a difference are atomistically unbounded - there is no reason why we could ever in principle cease the pursuit of further detail, chase down the last decimal of the expansion of pi until we are exhausted - the Peircean system offers principled relief. We can stop when the differences cease to matter to our over-riding purpose. And the same goes for the Universe (whose primary telos is thermalisation as far as we can discern).

So the laws of thought presume the brute existence of the indiscernible difference that secures the principle of identity. And Peirceanism flips this to say indiscernability kicks in at the point where some 3ns ceases to have a reason to care, and so 1ns is left undisturbed.

Thus indiscernability describes some prevailing state of equilibrium where there is enough 3ns to create generalised order, and enough 1ns to generate freedoms to be regulated. 2ns as actuality is the fractal balance where we can put a definite number on the real actions of integration vs differentiation (flattening and curving) going on.

So again, 2ns in Peirceanism is about the emergence of crisp possibility or determinate degrees of freedom. And this then stands "other" to the 1ns of the laws of thought in denying their assertion that crisp possibility or determinate degrees of freedom are instead the brute foundational facts in nature.

The laws of thought in turn try to dismiss vagueness as merely semantic, not ontic. Any vagueness in logic is due to informal issues like measurement error ... or indifference to the finer facts, an insufficiency in taking care.

So quite neatly, the laws of thought also employ the same dichotomistic othering. They just take for granted what semiotics demands be tracked via some developmental history reflecting a "growth of reasonableness".