The constraint, as a cause, is inherently passive. It functions as a cause merely by affecting an occurring activity. This presupposes the existence of the activity. So the constraint is a cause only if there is activity. Therefore we still need to consider "cause" in its true primary sense, as the activity itself, which is required in order that a constraint may be capable of being a cause. If we focus on the constraints, as causes, and divide constraints into top-down and bottom-up constraints, we have simply distracted our attention from the true, primary cause, the activity itself, which is being constrained. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again, the reductionist imperative being expressed as a law of thought. If nature seems divided against itself by a metaphysical dichotomy, we must rush in and save it from itself by deciding that the duality is in fact a monadism. So we collapse the complexity and hoist the reductionist flag, proclaiming all is calm and well in the world again. Only one of any two things can be fundamental.

It is laughable. This is what happens because humans have developed an essentially mechanical culture. If you make machines, eventually you want to be a machine.

Anyway. Causality is dichotomous because that is simply how metaphysical development works. To change a vague state of affairs, the vagueness must be crisply divided towards its complementary extremes of possibility. This is the dialectical logic that got started in ancient Greece and now - because people believe themselves to be meat machines (even if infested with some kind of secondary soul stuff) - it can't even be seen when it stares them in the face.

So it is not a surprise but a prediction of dialectics that causality would gain its real world definiteness by becoming divided against itself in logical fashion. Thus we have - in holism - the hierarchically-organised interaction between global constraints and local freedom.

We have bottom-up construction matched by top-down constraints. Each is the cause of the other (as constraints shape the construction, and the construction (re)builds the generalised state of constraint).

And yes, constraints would seem to passively exist as a context ... because the freedoms are in complementary fashion, the active part of the deal. So causality covers all the bases. It gains real world definiteness because it has both its active and passive forms to create some actual state of contrast ... that is another way it is no longer just vague possibility.

If we focus on the constraints, as causes, and divide constraints into top-down and bottom-up constraints, — Metaphysician Undercover

I should note that you keep getting the detail of anything I say quite wrong in your eagerness to shoehorn it into some semblance of what a reductionist might say.

It is freedom that constructs bottom-up. The role of top-down constraint is to give shape to that freedom. So constraints (as the bloody word says) are all about limiting freedoms. They take away or suppress a vast variety of what might have been possible actions ... and in so doing, leave behind some very sharply directed form of action. Or as physics would call it - to denote the particularity that results from this contextual sharpening - a "degree of freedom".

You are missing the point because of your unfamiliarity with basic biological theory.

Dawkins' Weasel algorithm is a simple illustration of the power of constraints - given mutable variety. So not only does he have the computer selecting the letter pattern closest to a pre-existing goal, but also the computer generates a population pool of a 100 sequences at a time, with a built-in variance of 5%. So even the mutational variety is set so as to meet some external pre-existing goal.

Dawkins says the final sequence goal is not a big teleological puzzle because in nature, that becomes just the (now utterly contingent) constraint of some fitness landscape. So first you have a world created by some programmer playing God. Then - in good old reductionist fashion - the world suddenly takes over the goal-setting ... in a way that is as little teleological as it is possible to imagine. It becomes good old random shit again.

Great. And also notice that nothing further is said about the programmer's role in setting up the mutational variety so nicely.

Nor also - the even deeper point - that the whole example skips over the issue of the epistemic cut where physical acts become symbolic acts (and vice versa).

So as I pointed out, the very thing of marks with meanings that could be interpreted - letters that could make words that get read by a mind, or gene sequences that could make proteins that then become the switches and the motors regulating dissipative metabolic processes - goes assumed and not explained. In Dawkins example, we have already crossed the Rubicon between the physical realm and the symbolic realm.

So - as usual when listening to an arch-reductionist - there is a ton of question begging. And my holistic approach addresses all those questions that go to the very thing of how life - as a biosemiotic relation - could arise emergently in the first place.

Hence while your strained attempts at a put-down are mildly amusing, I might wish you would make the same effort to actually read a little deeper before parading your basic ignorance of the issues you have chosen to raise here.

Selection obviously does not create variety. Variety is created by random mutations. — Querius

Why are you babbling about mutations? My point about your weasel was that the letters already exist. So how did that situation develop? Recombination is one thing. But where did that alphabet come from? If you want to say it evolved, run me through the story.

I know you react viscerally against anything you perceive as a 'God idea', but consider other models of cosmic order, such as logos, Tao or Dharma. They too suggest a kind of 'intelligible order' but not along the lines of what is usually described as 'theistic personalism'. — Wayfarer

Talk of an external intelligent creator is simply question begging - displacement activity rather than metaphysics.

But talk of an immanent organic telos is something I can get right behind as being even "quite magical", and a good reason to reject "silly reductionists". So I am always citing the various ancient expressions of this general naturalistic view of existence. You could add Judaic Ein Sof to that list.

I do suppose that at some point your emergence narrative also gets passed the phase of nothingness. — Querius

But the problem is that you don't understand the current science well enough to have a clue what stage the narrative has reached. And you don't seem that interested in finding out either.

Random mutations. — Querius

So natural selection can certainly remove those. But how does natural selection also create them?

(It's a basic issue in evolutionary science.)

The two stories are a perfect fit. — Querius

But they are not the same story at all.

Your scrambled sentence already begins with the counterfactual definiteness of some set of letters ... a conventional set of marks which I know how to read and thus can tell a gibberish sequence from one that has a reasonable interpretation.

And your citing of Dawkins and evolutionary constraints continues to underline that you are nowhere near the kind of holistic emergence I am talking about.

It is a central problem of evolutionary theory that evolution can only explain the reduction in variety. It can't explain the presence of that variety in the first place.

This is why theoretical biology has gone over to evo-devo thinking in a big way. A theory of evolution has to be coupled to a theory of development (or dissipative structure).

They exist if a physical theory postulates their existence, and that theory is successful in explaining various empirical phenomena.

There are two grounds for contending that X exists: X is a subject of direct experience, or X is postulated by a successful explanatory theory. A theory is successful, of course, when it correctly predicts future experience. — GE Morton

Yep. Like the Copenhagen Interpretation, we accept our epistemic limitations. In the end, all we have got is some state of conception that looks pretty consistent. We create for ourselves some forrmal theory. And then we agree with our selves that certain acts of measurement can be taken as signs of the thing we mean to talk about. We can read a number off a thermometre and say "that is the temperature". And away we go, making predictions - ie: suggestions about further acts of measurement.

So the slippery bit is the act of measurement. We have to presume that our instruments are making some kind of proper translation of the physical reality (the thing in itself) into the symbolic currency on which are theoretical conceptions are grounded. The numbers on the dial are phenomenon, not noumenon. But we operate on the expectation that the relation we have establish with the world in this fashion is reliable. It tells us what we need to know - at least in terms of the purposes we might bring to the table.

So "existence" becomes a symbolised reality. We say yep, that is the temperature - I read the number off a suitable instrument.

Of course we can always hope that through all our scientific advance, we are really getting down to the bottom of things. But just from thinking about the logic of this modelling relation we have with reality, we can see that might be a rather false hope.

For a start, the essence of any act of measurement is a severe constraint on physical existence. The needs of computation mean we have to impose finitude on the world to allow sharp observation. Less is more when it comes to information that has meaning. We want the message coming in from our instruments to be all signal and no noise.

And likewise the other feature of modelling is that good models need to be based on (unrealistically) sharp dichotomies. We want absolute separation of that which (as is itself implied by the contrast) not in fact in a state of actual separation.

So we come at reality with a crisp division - like law vs particle. Or formal vs material cause. We break things apart with conceptual violence so as to stand "outside" the world we must in fact stand within in fully participatory fashion. That is a necessary fact of modelling epistemology. But it is then naive metaphysics to think that the needs of modelling mean that the world in itself has both laws and particles that exist in some mysterious dualistic and absolute fashion.

The complementary limits on reality are just its conceptual extremes. That is why it is equally wrong to talk about laws or particles "actually existing". Yet as far as our modelled understanding of reality goes, both would be real in the sense of being real measurable bounds on actual existence. Formal cause vs material cause (what laws and particles represent) are what you would seem to see if there was really such a thing as standing outside the world as it substantially is.

Of course, folk have little problem of understanding formal cause in this fashion. But they get very prickly when it is suggested that material cause is in exactly the same boat - by logical necessity.

And Peirce called our existing universe God's argument, a symbol whose object is Himself and whose interpretant consists of the living realities that it is constantly working out as its conclusions. — aletheist

Forgive me, but I can't take any argument for a divine creating intelligence seriously. There is just nothing about this actual observable world which suggests that minds exist outside a state of semiotic complexity. So I am happy to reduce existence to that abstraction - the notion that the universe itself arises as a kind of mindful, self-organising state in being pan-semiotic. And if you want to say that is what theists might really mean by "god", then fine. But once you start attributing free choice to an immaterial creator or material being, that's another kettle of fish. It goes against the whole point of even in believing the sign relation to be the fundamental seed of existence.

Theism (of the first cause type) is simply contradictory of Peicean semiosis ... even if Peirce himself made some weak arguments for the difficulty in resisting such theism in the end.

And as to what Peirce really thought about maths, its not something I've really looked into, but the commentary suggests he vacillated between constructivism and Platonism - like all philosophy of maths does.

https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/file/index/docid/53339/filename/ijn_00000208_00.txt

But my own argument here is that his oscillation between these two poles doesn't have to mean he was simply confused or inconsistent. Instead, I have argued that this standard dilemma is to be expected because the actuality is in fact that both poles are correct in defining the dichotomistic limits of (mathematical) being. There is both contingency and necessity in play - with actuality being the effective balance.

So at the worst, it is a "good thing" that Peirce didn't just lump for one metaphysical extreme over the other. To reduce to some monism would be contradictory of his own holistic triadicism.

Thus yes, every mathematician in history might have added up two plus two incorrectly. And yet also the mathematics of symmetry could be maths that has a Platonic strength that even "God" could not question.

(As further clarification, the maths of symmetry I hold as the highest form of maths because it is the pure science of constraints. Arithmetic is clearly just the science of constructive acts. That is why arithmeticians do end up making lumpen statements like "God created the integers". If your mathematical metaphysics has to start with concrete atomistic construction, then like all reductionist, you end up with this kind of hand-waving towards foundations as brute facts. Arithmetic's lack of holism is why division is such a problematic operation of course. But I digress even further...)

Correct me if I am wrong, but does the very concept of 'emergence' not imply a lower level of (more) fundamental laws? Emergent stuff emerge from fundamental stuff, right?
Unless you are arguing that it is emergence all the way down, which seems incompatible with the concept of emergence, I do not see the relevance to a discussion about fundamental laws. — Querius

So if more particular laws emerge from more general laws, what's illogical about extrapolating from that observable fact? If what we see is emergence, then why shouldn't we think that is all there is, rather than having to leap to belief in something mysterious, transcendent or supernatural?

All that is required then is a proper understanding of emergence itself. And your claim - the usual reductionist one which makes emergence some kind of elaborate linguistic illusion - is not a proper model of emergence.

Emergence - as it is understood by hierarchy theorists, Peirceans, and others who take it seriously - is a holistic or cybernetic deal. The whole shapes the parts that constructs the whole. So what is "fundamental" is hierarchical development itself. Existence begins not with nothing but instead an "everythingness" - a "state" of unbounded potential. And then limitations develop to produce definite somethingness.

As I say, this is simply a fact when it comes to accounting for the "higher level laws". It is what we mean by them being emergent. Complexity and particularity arises as the general (some generalised set of freedoms) becomes more constrained in specific ways. History locks in its own future by removing certain possibilities as things that could actually happen. And the future is then woven from what was thus left open as a possibility.

So we know this holistic understanding of emergence is right just from looking at the world and listening to how physics actually describes it. For that reason, it is more logical to expect that emergence of this kind can explain it all ... or at least get as near as we are ever going to get to answering that ultimate question of "why anything?".

But instead you have fallen into the usual trap of expecting reality to bottom-out in some fundamental atomistic stuff. And in the 1880s, most physicists would have agreed with you, feeling that the great success of classical mechanics and atomistic metaphysics had basically put an end to physics - leaving it "an exhausted mine". Yet then guess what happened next.

Of course it is just as bad to make the other monistic claim - that everything is instead top-down. That just winds up in mysticism.

If we want to talk about real emergence, it is irreducibly triadic (because everything must emerge - the forms, the materials, and the dynamical balance of these two which is then the substantial actuality).

So you are not even dealing with the actual argument of a proper holist yet. You are just thinking in terms of the reductionism that wants to neuter emergence by treating it as "mere appearance". Or in the slightly more sophisticated defensive position of "supervenience", one shrugs one shoulders and says even if all this top-down stuff is true, it can't change anything important down here at the level of concrete atomistic particulars.

But unfortunately for supervenience, there are no concrete particulars except to the degree that top-down constraints have shaped them.

One can imagine taking an instantaneous snapshot of some material system and transporting its information to make a perfect clone ... that would then roll on as if nothing had happened. Beam me up Scotty! Dissolve my atoms in one place, produce a replica in another. Hey presto.

But science fiction is science fiction. Real science knows it has a fundamental observer problem. The acts of measurement needed to animate the mathematical equations are not reducible to the formalisms of theories. And this is going to catch you out any time you start talking about the big questions of existence.

So supervenient emergence sounds good - if you don't understand the basic problem of observerless physics.

It is something that does catch out everyone. Tom is another example in that he repeats the same error at the level of the information. He believes in observerless computation. And so he has no problem with a scifi story of human minds being downloaded. Or existence itself being a grand computation (finitude being something that can be taken formally for granted and not instead a fundamental problem in being an informal issue of deciding when an act of measurement is "sufficient to purpose").

Anyway, the point is that to dismiss a metaphysics of emergence, one first has to learn quite a lot about what that position entails. Reductionists have conjured up their own strawman versions which they can erect at the boundaries of their domain and say "see we understand, and it doesn't change anything". To people who actually study emergence, you can see why the constant waving of the limp effigy of supervenience or epiphenomenalism is rather annoying. :)

He also insisted that we cannot be absolutely certain that 2+2=4, since human fallibility entails that it is possible - even if very unlikely - that every single person who ever performed this addition made the same mistake. — aletheist

Sure, Cartesian doubt means that all knowledge is in principle fallible. But Peirce then built his career on dismissing Cartesian doubt by insisting on starting right where we are - in some state of belief. And then that the purpose of reasoned inquiry is to minimise uncertainty (rather than pursue the phantasm of absolute certainty).

So what you say seems to cut across the whole tenor of his thinking for me.

What Peirce says is: "Mathematical certainty is not absolute certainty. For the greatest mathematicians sometimes blunder, and therefore it is possible ‑ barely possible ‑ that all have blundered every time they added two and two" (CP 4.478).

So his point appears to be that humans are certainly fallible. Even if infinitely likely, it is still infinitesimally possible no-one has ever managed to get the simplest of all sums right.

But an omnipotent God couldn't be that incompetent surely? And more to the point, there is a big difference in executing a calculation and providing the very world which makes a mathematical model a matter of logical necessity. From certain reasonable axioms, certain deductive consequences (like arithmetical operations or permutation symmetries) must flow.

So either God is constrained Himself by the general principle of intelligibility - existence as the universal growth of reasonableness - or the whole of Peirce's metaphysics collapses for a far more serious reason. Semiotics just doesn't exist unless the sign relation is in fact a sign of something.

Assuming omnipotence, as Peirce did, the only thing that could have limited God's options were God's own previous choices, including the creation of those mathematical symmetries. — aletheist

But it is one thing saying God could choose to create a world in which 1+1=3, quite another to believe it in your heart. Do you think Peirce would have gone along with such a frontal assault on natural reason?

So you now agree that relationships themselves have causal status when we talk about the reality of things.

Gentleman, our work here is done!

Yet another reason not to be a big fan of Sean Carroll. :)

But anyway, the facts are that isolated water molecules have a bond angle of 104.4 degrees, yet the symmetry of the snowflake demands they get comfortable with the new number of 120 degrees.

I mean do you (or Carroll) believe that even the water molecules, or the nucleons of which they are composed, have some absolute fixed shape rather than an effective shape - one that is a holistic dynamical balance or some general average? C'mon.

Chaos is a fully deterministic feature of some time-reversible dynamical laws. — tom

You are confusing the models with the reality being modelled. The map you hold in your hand may be time-reversible, the territory it describes looks to be irreversibly dissipative.

But of course, your time-reversible laws don't take account of the material fact that energy is involved in there being a spatiotemporal process.

So we already know how our current best models of dynamics are incomplete. The motivating force of a matter field has to be inserted by hand still.

Any fool knows that deterministic chaos is reversibly deterministic, exactly as it says on the box. But any fool also ought to know that someone has to go out and make the acts of measurements to feed the hungry system of equations. And at that point, the harsh truth that observers are really involved in reality becomes more than just a sideline epistemic issue.

So just like QM and relativity, chaos theory also has its strong version of the "collapse" issue. That is how we know it to be a "fundamental" theory. We have talked the observables to death and now have to turn around and somehow deal with the still informal issue of the observer.

Again, that is what makes Peirce such a splendid chap. He was on to the metaphysics of this in a big way. He managed to reduce the observer~observables dichotomy to a formal abstract model - his semeiotic relation. He came up with the right approach to quantum interpretation even before the quantum was discovered.

God conceived an inexhaustible continuum of possibilities, and then chose which of them to actualize. — aletheist

But could God have had a choice if mathematical symmetries limited His options rather rigorously?

The tendency to take habits was one of those spontaneous occurrences at first, but its very nature was to persist and reinforce itself, so it did. Then other things began to take habits, and that is how matter eventually came about, with the "laws of nature" serving as its habits. — aletheist

What is missing here - from a modern hierarchy theory point of view at least - is that wholes simplify their parts so that they increasing have a better fit.

Like I said about the way snowflake symmetry has to bend water molecules to shape, the collective level of action acts as a literal shaping constraint on the spontaneity that is doing the reacting. It limits absolute freedom by imposing some common direction or character on all free action.

And this is why habits are absolutely real. They are the cause of regularity all the way down.

Peircean metaphysics certainly gets this irreducibly complex triadic relation. But a minor criticism is that it doesn't really foreground this further crucial wrinkle of the causal deal.

The chaos, the crystal's chance path, during the formation of snowflake fractals is comfortably situated in the context of our orderly stable lawful universe. IOWs it is not chaos all the way down. It is chaos embedded in order. — Querius

What do you think I was saying? The only subtlety is that that I add that the chaos is "embedded in the order" all the way back to the start. Which is what a logic of vagueness would be required to model. Things have to begin with the unexpressed potential for chaos~order as the yin yang synergistic outcome. And so now we have a third thing to label - unexpressed potential. Which is what I am calling Vagueness, or Anaximander called Apeiron, Peirce called Firstness (as well as vagueness), etc.

Moreover the law ‘every snowflake is six-sided’, which emerges due to symmetry/equifinality, is fully determined by underlying more fundamental laws, such as the laws which dictate what binding angles are permissible for water molecules. — Querius

Hah. Snowflakes are a little more complicated in fact. Water molecules actually have to bend more than they want to as their "natural angle" is not exactly that of a hexagonal symmetry. So they are an example of top-down causality or constraint producing the simplified regularity required for the very expression of the hexagonal order that comes to historically dominate the accidents (the accident that is the attachment of further water molecules).

So snowflakes are a good example of an effective solution - a global equilibrium balance that reshapes the very stuff out of which it is being formed. What you call "fundamental" is what has got fundamentally pwned.

My point is: sure you can watch some pretty amazing things emerge in nature by a combination of law and chance/chaos, but this does not tell us that chaos can explain the natural laws. — Querius

Well it should be clear that "chaos" is a pretty bad word once you start to study the reality closely. Even when chaos theory became vogue in the 1980s, it was wildly misunderstood.

So of course I am talking about dynamical self-organisation. And chaos is the state of things when imagined with the fewest possible constraints. But you can't just have ... no constraints, or no boundary conditions.

So chaos doesn't explain natural laws - in the sense that order just emerges from disorder. That would be merely a reversal of orthodox fundamentalism or absolutism. Chaos is not the cause of all things, and order merely its effect.

My argument in favour of effective physics is instead that the chaos~lawfulness dichotomy would be a mutually-formative deal from the vague get-go. It is there as a relation in seed form even before anything "actually happens".

So it is the division that pre-exists the existence that manifests as a result of it being the case. It is the (triadic) relation that is fundamental (triadic as in its vague dyadic initial state, it of course has its whole future developmental history as a compressed axis of action and memory).

We have looked deep into the dark heart of "chaos" and found in fact precise mathematics. Order is inevitable even in chaos as chaos - to actually exist in a way we could then point back at - needs organisation or structure like any system or process.

Thus what I am talking about is an empirical discovery by science which is still recent enough not to have sunk in with that many people. But really, metaphysics should never be the same again.

So if it has any organisation whatever, then it's not strictly speaking chaos, in the sense envisaged as 'primordial chaos'. — Wayfarer

But that's the point. Any attempt to envisage chaos leads to discovery that it has some structure. Any notion of a big great mess still has emergent statistical order - or a lack of order that is precisely defined.

The 'primordial chaos' doesn't exist against the background of any organisation whatever. — Wayfarer

And now you are recounting my usual arguments for vagueness as what we would really mean by primordial chaos. So I do grapple with the standard models of randomness and chaos so as to understand what a "truer unboundedness" would look like - hopefully mathematically as anything less is not worth the effort.

The problem over laws seems to start simply because talking of "laws of nature" suggest an analogy with human laws. So particle A acts like it does because it knows it should follow some general rule. Which is obviously a silly kind of metaphysics - unless you are a Whiteheadian panpsychic I guess.

So the real tension would be over the source of exceptionless necessitation that the notion of universal laws imply. Are laws perfect eternal forms? Or are they approximate and history-derived habits? And the wrangling goes on because they do seem to be a bit of both.

I side of course with the view that the laws of nature are emergent regularities or states of generalised constraint that develop from a history of free interactions. So that is the Peircean story of reality as a habit. In this view, laws would seem to evolve with time. The rules today could become something different tomorrow. It is all quite loose and rather contingent.

However I don't thing that is the whole story because - as now being expressed again in ontic structural realism - mathematical physics also shows that there is a rather Platonic influence on the course of physical history.

There are structural attractors which give the Universe a pre-destined outcome - the symmetries of particle physics being the prime example of a logical necessity that impinges on development. So the force of necessity is not simply an evolutionary accumulation of certain accidents that creates limits (much like mountains randomly arise to block winds and channel water flows in a landscape).

It is reasonable to argue that the permutation symmetries of the standard model would be logically true even if materially there never was any universe. Well, perhaps I wouldn't go that far - as permutation symmetries still rely on something "material" to permute. But still, as a mathematical form, the standard model seems to lie in wait, lurking in eternal Platonia, as something that would have to manifest by force of logical necessity, imposing itself on mere historical contingency as soon as any contingent history of free material action got going.

So there is a genuine tension because two important factors appear to be in interaction. The Universe is more than just a contingent habit - an accumulation of events. There was a structural attractor in the shape of symmetry that always lay in the Universe's future. And yet it still requires that history of all kinds of shit just trying to happen for the eternal patterns to be made manifest as the limits on being.

Which is another way of justifying my claim that reality in the end has to be based on effective physics. The interaction between radical freedom (or material contingency) and radical constraint (or Platonic symmetry) is understood by us as the clash of two species of absolute - pure possibility vs pure necessity. And then the actuality which we inhabit is then the average of these two aspects of nature. Existence is always a mixture, an equilibrium state.

But overall - from the cosmological perspective now afforded us by science - we can see that we are in the middle of an actual transistion in terms of that balance. The Big Bang stands at one end of the spectrum in being a vanilla quantum fireball - radical freedom. The Heat Death is the other end of the spectrum in being the broken-down classical realm of crystallised symmetry.

So in terms of law - as the accumulation of increasingly specific constraints on freedom - it is only by the end that the Platonic forms will be crisply fixed. The latent mathematical structure is what existence is being shaken down towards (although with even the end state - a future as de Sitter universe composed purely of event horizons and their residual black body fizzle of radiation - that approach to the limit is only effective, in the manner illustrated by random sphere packing and the impossibility of reaching actual crystalline perfection in a world that has to employ freely-permuting material parts).

In summary, laws are kind of hybrid like this. They mix the Platonic and the accidental, the eternal and the historic. So that is the reason why they are effective, yet not then actually "just a habit". There is also the fact of structural attractors that (from our point of view) pre-determine the outcome. There is also something mathematically fundamental in play - except it really calls to materiality from its future, not sets the direction from its past, and acts top-down in constraining fashion, not bottom-up in a constructive one.

‘Symmetry’ implies repetitive patterns, which are, as I envision it, absent in chaos. — Querius

Chaos is more subtle than that. It does have characteristic organisation. The primary symmetry of "chaos" is the fractal or powerlaw pattern that is scale symmetry. In a fractal system, you have fluctuations over all scales and thus a state without any average size of fluctuation.

So chaos as an absence of constraint still has a strict kind of patterned order. It has a wildness that mathematically regular.

Given unlawfulness, particles could pop out of existence for no reason at all. The collection of particles could turn into anti-matter and/or form a conglomerate — Querius

So you say. Yet the forment of the quantum vacuum generates particles with a spontaneity that is also completely statistically predictable. What we observe in nature is thus a spontaneity that can't help also being ordered.

Just to have an energetic event you have to have spatiotemporal separation. And to maximise the randomness of the spacing of the events itself is an imposition of an organisation. There is a limit on even making things as unpredictable as physically possible. Go past the point of effective randomness and you start getting back towards the overly orderly.

Again the ideal gas illustrates the issue. Low entropy or order would be all the particles gathered in one corner of a flask. So therefore maximum disorder ought to be every particle as spread out as possible, right? But then that would put every particle spaced out an even distance on a grid. So now we are back into a state of high order that won't last long.

It's another version of the sphere packing story and why effective physics rules.

What you are talking about are events and laws that result from more fundamental laws. I have no problem with that idea, as long as it not offered as an "explanation" of laws at the fundamental level. — Querius

I don't follow. But anyway, the Goldstone mechanism started out as a mathematical curiosity, then an explanation of macrostates and quasiparticles, now it explains the Higgs and effective mass. So it is working its way down towards the "fundamental" quite nicely.

I am talking about laws and their constituents. — Querius

What do you mean by constituents? Laws certainly relate variables.

All this is to say you may tell me the best way to parent when you have some inkling what it entails. — Hanover

Needless to say I have kids. They are pretty much all growed up. And you will know that the first lesson of having children is to be able to respect their differences without pampering to them.

It is thus quite a creative process. If you actually understand that yet would address someone you don't know in such Trumpish fashion, then that is a definition of dickishness I say.

Why is it eminently sensible? Because life is hard, and people who do not take responsibility for their own well-being and self-support are likely to find themselves in various unenviable positions later on in life when mother is no longer alive, and when one is getting a bit old to do entry level work. — Bitter Crank

Just because "the world" - or the place you happen to live - might be a hard place, doesn't mean you just ought to go along with its ways.

So yes of course. Your cultural environment might greatly narrow your personal choices. So you ought to bring up your kids to be practical - equipped for the way the world is. But also to be self-actualising - as the higher ambition - you don't want to just present them with the one rigid definition of success (which boils down to be like Daddy ... or at least don't repeat the way he let down his daddy.)

Question isn't, after all, a mentally deficient ward of the state. He wants to earn a PhD in philosophy. — Bitter Crank

Does he really want to? Is he really capable? I'm not seeing clear evidence of that. Which is why - putting myself in the position of a parent - I wouldn't start labelling him simplistically as a lazy, mummy's-boy, quitter who ought to be ashamed of himself.

Only a dick does that.

Is Thorongil being a dick for outlining the unpleasant realities of pursuing a PhD? — Bitter Crank

If he attacked anything, it was a questionable culture. Hanover attacked the person. A slight difference don't you think?

So it is quite useful to know in advance that something might not be as fun as its sounds. Hanover instead was simply projecting his own tired stereotypes on a person he has never met.

OK, but the issue was whether or not it is possible to have a perfect circle, such that you could not tell its rate of spinning, or even whether or not it is spinning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Why is that not what I was discussing?

That's what I am trying to get at, the nonsensicalness of this notion of spinning, which appears to be totally incompatible with the pure symmetry of a circle. — Metaphysician Undercover

You see a featureless disc. How do you tell if it is spinning or not? Would you see anything different if a stopped disc started to move, or a moving disc stopped?

The difference between a spinning vs motionless triangle, pentagon or - most especially - any irregular shape is always going to be obvious to the eye. And yet a circle is an unbroken symmetry in that regard. So that is a mathematically important and distinct property - hardly a nonsensical one.

And then - surprise, surprise - rotational symmetry is one of physics foundational facts. Nature can't prevent what it cannot see. And so rotation is built in as an inertial property. Any object - in the absence of impressed forces - will continue to spin at the same rate forever, in just the same way as it will move in a straight line forever due to translational symmetry.

So again, the notion is hardly nonsensical. The theorem linking the maths to the physics is pretty famous - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether's_theorem

It is the fact that you construct your reality in terms of these binaries which gives the game away. You are having to now justify your Tiger parenting extremism in terms of its equally bad "other" - the anti-Hanover who would be passive mummy to the mummy's boy.

So I get it. I just don't buy it. Good parenting would be something else beyond your dire alternatives.

I've not suggested living with mom isn't a short term solution, but it's not a lifetime plan. It's no plan. It's easy and lazy. Quitting is shameful. Deal with it. — Hanover

Jeez, what a dick. But clearly it simply reflects your own cultural upbringing. You do as was done to you. And so repeateth the cycle of dickery.

But all your comments about quantum physics have been grandly sweeping and lacking in metaphysical precision. That is the substance of my complaint here.

And you have failed in particular to make it clear how the field's notable epistemic humility - the Copenhagen Interpretation for crying out loud!! - makes it guilty of over-reaching any descriptive account of the world.

Surely only a true scientist would accept a humiliation as complete as CI. :)

Quantum physics is a new way of thinking about the behavior of fields and matter, but much is still left to be discovered and understood. It doesn't appear to be absolute or final, and it appears to be evolving. Beyond this, it appears to be practical for certain types of applications. — Rich

So what's new? Isn't science meant to be self-correcting inquiry in that fashion. You are simply now criticising science because it is in fact epistemologically modest and doesn't go about claiming ontic absolutism (those guys represent the modern religion of Scientism).

So science could only be failing in its goals in your eyes if you yourself are a supporter of an unreasonable level of ontic absolutism. (Just another bloody fundamentalist :) )

Wouldn't further spin increase the rate of spin? Do you think that the rate of spin is not an actual difference? If not, then there is no difference between spinning and not spinning either. Your statement seems to imply that there is no difference between a static circle and a spinning circle. But surely there must be, and if there is a difference between these two, then the rate of spin is also a difference which needs to be considered. — Metaphysician Undercover

As soon as you break the symmetry of a circle - put a nick or a mark on its circumference - immediately you can see (from this imperfection) that it has some relative rate of motion (or rest).

So you are simply now describing the situation in terms that are crisply different - where the disc is semiotically marked and the symmetry quite radically imperfect.

A marked spinning disc can no longer be confused with a marked still disc ... unless - sneakily - its spins so fast that the mark becomes a grey blur, and we restore a symmetry because our eyes become indifferent to "the reality". (You see, as usual there is no escaping the logic of hierarchical order. Go to either extreme and it all looks the same again - just for exactly the opposite reason!)

Law, as commonly used, implies an invariance... — Rich

...and an invariance is a symmetry.

So everyone is talking about the same thing, sort of. But there is a historic division between those who think about nature in terms of self-immanence versus those who conceive of limits or constraints being transcendentally imposed (and freedoms as being transcendentally created).

Greek metaphysics started out with an immanent story - Anaximander's tale of the Apeiron. And Aristotle cashed that out in his four causes model of development. He understood causality as a matter of constraint. And so Aristotle was happy with a reality that largely lives by its habits, yet is still capable of spontaneous accidents. Things can happen that "break the rules" in a way that doesn't make a difference.

But even in ancient Greece, the alternative view was brewing. The Stoics adopted the atomistic view that chance was simply ignorance of the deterministic detail. Fate rules the future by force of necessity.

And so the debate went back and forth through metaphysical history. It turned out that - being simpler in eschewing formal/final top-down causality - a reductionist approach to lawfulness was the most pragmatically effective ... in looking at existence purely in terms of material/effective cause.

This was in particular the Newtonian breakthrough. The laws could be up there in the mind of God. Then down here on Earth, everything was some tale of impressed forces. A curious dualism crept in where science appeared to both need and eschew universal constraints.

But in practice, it was useful. You frame some Platonically invariant description of a symmetry relation - like change in motion being temporally proportional and directionally orthogonal to impressed force - and then you can get on down here on Earth measuring such changes as particular events and imputing the materiality of the effective cause needed to bring about those states of observation.

So local observables came to stand as signs of global unobservables. The Lord or the Law of Gravity operated in mysterious fashion. But as Michael doesn't tire in saying, all we actually see right here and now is some behaviour, some event, which we read off in terms of an "unreal" universal abstraction. ;)

However the bigger picture of causality never went away. And following the thermodynamics revolution in particular, science has started again to think about causation in contextual or holistic fashion. We are getting back to self-organising immanence with our Big Bang cosmology and more thermally-inspired, condensed matter style, models of quantum gravity. Formal and final cause are back in the picture, along with the possibility of spontaneity or accidents as the class of physical behaviour that quantifiably doesn't make a difference.

That again is why it is irritating that you draw the wrong conclusion from quantum indeterminism. We can now measure "pure accidents" with complete precision. It is the law that there is an irreducible degree of lawlessness in the world. It is simply a corollary of the fact that classicality can fulfill its determinstic desires to the degree it makes any real difference.

The analogy referred to a spinning circle, and by this description, "spinning" implies necessarily that it is actual. Therefore the analogy refers to an actual circle, which according to your statement above, cannot be a perfect circle. However, the description in the analogy described the spinning circle in a way which could only refer a perfect circle. Therefore the situation described by the analogy is impossible, contradictory. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not that difficult.

If you want to talk about actual circles, then the form of a perfect circle represents their exceptionless limit. So it is what actuality can both aim for, yet never completely attain.

And yet by the same token, actuality can attain effective perfection if it gets close enough so that it makes no bleeding difference.

So if we grant actuality the purpose of being circular, it can get there as close as can possibly be measured. The very idea of "having a purpose" entails the further idea of "there being a point beyond which there wouldn't be continuing reason to care". Which is the pragmatic fact that saves us getting hung up on Platonistic paradox - ie: purposes can be satisfied, at least relatively speaking. :)

So pragmatic purposes already pre-suppose their limits because a purpose definitely conceived is one conceived in terms of what then counts as a matter of generalised indifference. Logic says eventually, a purpose gets satisfied and so further action in that direction becomes an irrelevance.

Which is what spinning a circle (or talking about rotational symmetry) illustrates. You can spin until you create a circle. But continuing to spin then doesn't make any actual difference. Once action has expressed its limit, further action doesn't change anything.

And that is the way to understand why nature develops lawful or habitual behaviour. In breaking symmetries, it eventually arrives back at symmetries. We exist in a Newtonian classical paradise of inertial freedoms because - in the end - the two principal symmetries of translation and rotation can't be washed away by any conceivable spatial action. And then relativity includes Lorentzian boosts in this picture - uniting the spatial story with the energetic or temporal one.

Finally along comes quantum mechanics to scale the actual size of the fundamental indifference our Universe displays. Our spatiotemporal geometry is effective or emergent. QM says here is the Planck ruler which we can use to measure the actual gap between what reality can manage to achieve and the classical perfection we might think it was always striving after.

The fundamental behaviour of things is, by definition, fundamental. There is no further explanation. — Michael

Which is why fundamental is a word that a process metaphysician would only use in quotes.

An ontology of self-organising habits sees everything as instead emergent. Instead of reality being constructed bottom-up from irreducible parts, it instead arrives at its own irreducible limits by way of a generalised constraint on free possibility.

Suppose that I am holding a stone. If I were to let go of it, then it would fall to the ground. This proposition is true, regardless of whether I ever actually let go of the stone. It expresses a tendency or habit - a conditional necessity - that really governs the stone's behavior in an inexhaustible continuum of possible cases, so it is not reducible to any actual occurrence or collection thereof. — aletheist

Yep. There was no comeback on that.

Michael wants to focus nominalistically on instances of behaviour, and yet at the same time, he accepts that the behaviour in question is exceptionless. If we let the stone go, there is zero expectation it will rise, let alone float. So we would have reason to talk about laws or habits of nature unless there were constraints defining the very freedoms we are pointing to.

We can call the behaviour of the stone an example of universal gravitational action because the stone apparently has many directions open to it, but moves - indeed accelerates - in always only the one. And if we have both freedoms and constraints, that is two things to talk about. You can't just label them the one thing of "instances of behaviour".

I like your circle metaphor. However, how does one get from “unlawfulness” to a (perfect) circle? — Querius

The circle simply illustrates the basic principle that a symmetry is defined by differences not making a difference.

Unlawfulness comes in once we start talking about symmetry in the sense of dynamical equilibrium states - or broken symmetries that can't get more broken and so ... become effective or emergent symmetries again.

And this is better illustrated by a gas of particles. At equilibrium, every particle is as likely going forward as going backward. So all action settles to a collective average.

But if you really want to get into it, you could consider the physics of Goldstone bosons - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldstone_boson - which are local spinless excitations resulting from global symmetry breakings.

The usual crude description of this is that this kind of irreducible excitation arises like the way a ball balanced on a Mexican hat. The ball has no choice but to roll down the slope (breaking its initial symmetry). But then nothing stops the ball rolling around in a circle in the trough of the hat. It makes no difference to the energetics of the system which way a broken field actually points. And so - being free - it must happen. The ground state becomes a new effective symmetry - the ball rolling around in the circle of the trough - which the world then reads off quantumly as a new degree of freedom or an actual particle.

Also I don’t see how the circle metaphor elucidates the existence of various fundamental constants, which could have been very different; see the multiverse hypothesis. — Querius

Are you talking about laws or constants? Or laws with different constants? That is, do you have a clear story on how they are the same or different kinds of things?

Personally I'm not a great fan of multiverses precisely because of the muddled thinking on these issues.

Consider again a circle and ask whether pi, as a constant expressing the ratio of radius to circumference in Euclidean space, could be different in a different universe? Doesn't pi have to be pi in all conceivable (flat) universes?

The constants of nature scale the actions of nature. So they put a ruler on the local degree of symmetry breaking. It should be no surprise if they turn out to be effective balances - themselves "geometric ratios" - as, for instance, string theory might suggest from the internal structure of compactified dimensionality.

Another simple analogy is random sphere packing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_close_pack

You can take a bunch of balls and stack them carefully - with maximum order - and fill 74% of the available space with balls. So 26% always remains free space. But if instead you are only allowed to shake the balls into place - do things nature's way, the probabilistic way - then you can only get down to a 64% to 36% ratio of ball to void.

So naively, nature ought to be able to achieve its absolutely orderly ground state. But instead - there always being irreducible jitter - one would expect ground states to only be effective. They would reflect an average behaviour that emerges because freedom is as constrained as possible, and yet that average is itself based on a free symmetry.

With sphere packing, that emergently "grounding symmetry" is the ability of the balls to still slip about. If any balls happen to get stacked for an instant with ultimate crystalline regularity, that can't last long as the greater mass of balls will jostle them back towards the more typically random and loosely packed arrangement.

So in nature, you have to start with a global symmetry (that gets broken). But also end in a local symmetry that puts an effective limit on that breaking. Otherwise you really would end up with nothing rather than some fine-grain groundstate blur of action that is the thermal differences that can no longer create a real difference.

If accuracy is defined by a probability wave then accuracy had taken a left turn. Physics is very useful but hardly precise. — Rich

Huh? Our measures of reality now have such precision that we can even measure the residual indeterminacy that persists despite our living in an era when the Universe is now so large and cold.

I'll say it again. We can now quantify uncertainty to about as many decimal places as you might require.

Perhaps you remain unimpressed. I merely then point out that you communicate with me using the resulting quantum technology and not ... telepathy or carrier pigeon.

As history has shown, nature is constantly changing, our knowledge of nature is constantly changing, mathematics is constantly changing, mathematical equations to describe our knowledge of nature is constantly changing, the ideas that the mathematical equations represent are constantly changing and debated. — Rich

You mean history has shown that our scientific models just keep getting remarkably more comprehensive in scope. Our ability to describe the world accurately has been improving exponentially.

After all, if there can be a single 'big bang' event, what 'law of nature' says that it can't happen more than once? — Wayfarer

The second law of thermodynamics is the obvious one.

Of course the second law is itself framed rather mechanically in terms of reversible Newtonian motions. And so it is quite easy to "prove" theorems about eternal recurrence ... given that time symmetry is being taken axiomatically for granted.

Yet meanwhile back here in the real world, the Universe expands and cools eternally. We know that from observation rather than theory - the discovery of the hyperbolic curvature due to "dark energy". So we already had the problem of writing time asymmetry into theories like GR and QM by hand - we have to add a directional time signature that is not to be found in the symmetry-describing equations. And dark energy is another observable that shows we really do have a big hole in current theory.

But anyway, at the very least, the expanding and cooling is now certain to reach a heat death, an actual Planck limit on entropification. So while it might be highly probable (with a certainty of 1) that a quantum fluctuation as hot and dense as the Planckscale would result in a big bang universe (as argued by spawning multiverse scenarios, for instance), it is matchingly (reciprocally) improbable that a heat death universe would be able to re-produce a Planckscale fluctuation of that requisite magnitude.

Once you have struck a match and burnt it out, it is "quantumly possible" if you kept striking it that it might eventually catch fire again. Some probability can be attached to anything happening. But I think we could also say that a probablity of "almost surely zero" is zero for all practical purposes, even for metaphysics.

We can never rule out a story of the universe as the original perpetual motion machine. On the other hand, we can empirically assert that it is screamingly unlikely to be the case. It is far more likely that we just haven't figured out the problem rather than that we can extrapolate from the success of simplifying our models of the world by presuming time symmetry - and writing in the right direction for time in ad hoc fashion to make the models actually fit the world as we experience it.

Pity that it has to come down to ad hominems, isn't it? — Wayfarer

You can take it personally but it was the collective "you" I was addressing.

I think it's a near-certainty that the universe will turn out to be a cyclical process of expansion and contraction, as is everything in nature — Wayfarer

Again, on what grounds - except a belief that time symmetric laws support a time symmetric reality, thus ignoring all the evidence that that time symmetry is irreversibly broken back here in reality?

What if there is no beginning? — Wayfarer

I prefer to get beyond such claims of definiteness. You can't be radically indefinite unless you abandon a lack of beginning along with the beginning of beginning.

the universe is indeed a cyclic process of expansion and contraction, starting from beginningless time. — Wayfarer

Yep. So like Tom and everyone else, you are stuck with a classical notion of time as a space in which there is an endless symmetry of succession. And yet we know that time and energy are in a reciprocal relation which the goal of a replacement quantum theory is to explain.

Cycles are what you end up with if you can't get passed the symmetry of your own mathematical equations. If you can go forward, you can go back. And then from there you can repeat without making a difference.

So sure, cyclic metaphysics seems very logical. But that's the problem. It shows you aren't ready to break out of the mental box you have constructed for yourself. A final theory is going to have to figure out what time really is. And if the theory is cyclic or reversible, then it still starts your ontology with a Platonic symmetry and not an Anaximandrian potential.

Moreover a bottom-up process from bosons to physical laws would be in need of constraints (laws?) in order to produce a limited set of universal laws — Querius

Nice question. I really like Paul Davies but that column is mix of the good and bad.

The way I would look at it is that the fundamental laws describe mathematical symmetries - which are in effect the limits on un-lawfulness. With a circle, for example, disorder can do its damnedest - spin the circle at any direction at any speed - and the circle will still look unruffledly the same. All that disordering has no real effect as the very form of the circle is indifferent to every kind of action, or attempt to break its symmetry.

So this is a standard thing. Symmetries are emergent equilibrium states on the larger picture. They are the constraints that can't be broken because there is no possible action that could make a substantial difference. And we can apply this to a dynamical process like a Big Bang universe or other entropic systems.

An ideal gas has particles going off in all directions, but they can't change the overall temperature or pressure of the system - its global symmetries ... (unless all the particles decide to all go in the same direction - something that can't happen in a Big Bang universe that is always cooling/expanding of course.)

Anyway. Davies makes the useful point that most laws or constraints are "merely effective" - locked in due to symmetry breaking. It is easy to see that as the Universe has cooled/expanded, bosons have attained stable local identity and so have behaviour that is accounted for in terms of symmetries that got broken. Antimatter and matter were once in thermal equilibrium (a state of symmetry). Now all the antimatter has fizzled away leaving matter as "the law". Effectively we can chuck away the right-handed interactions of the weak force because only the left-handed ones exist to result in physical laws.

And now my suggestion is to just roll effective law all the way back to the beginning. We don't have to work our way back to a fundamental Platonic state of being which is a perfect symmetry. Instead - if we understand laws to always be the emergent limits of disordering, the dynamical equilibrium balances that must always develop because "continued differencing makes no further difference" - then we can start the whole shebang with both disordering and ordering being the "symmetry" in play. We don't have to pick one over the other - disordering, or the quantum action, over order, or the symmetries of spacetime. Instead the two co-arise as themselves the deep asymmetry. The story is simultaneously bottom-up and top-down.

So this is synergistic. The laws need disorder (or violent physical action - quantum fluctuations) to exist. They represent the equilibrium limits that regulate the Cosmos in being the effective symmetry states that "just don't care". Disorder loses its teeth because it can spin a circle all it likes and the circle already immanently exists as the limit of that very possibility for action. Try every form of disruption and in the end, what can't be disrupted is what is left as necessarily being the case.

Of course that still leaves plenty of mystery in trying to track things back to the beginning. Physics can now describe a whole sequence of emergence when it comes to the development of effective laws following the Big Bang. There were a whole series of phase transitions to produce more complex states of order as the energy density dropped and the scale factor increased. However we are still trying to work out whether gravity was part of some vanilla quantum force and so there is some grounding symmetry state for reasons that will seem self-evident once we have its number.

Yet the metaphysical problem here is that Davies (although he is big on top-down causation) is still too wedded to a Platonic conception of symmetries as "substantial things" - like something that might break like a plate if you drop it on the floor.

If instead you go the completely effective theory route - where any foundational symmetry would itself have to be emergent along with the disordering it "ignores" (that is, the quantum action that is needed to manifest it as "a real physical thing"), then you have an elegant way past the usual "first causes" and "prime mover" quandries of metaphysics.

The thing is we absolutely understand the nature of effective law. It is not a mysterious thing. So why not extrapolate backwards from that (as some major metaphysicians, but really no modern physicists, have done).

Hello. What does it mean for something to exist? Does existence have an essence? — mew

As you can see from the confusion of replies, you are asking for a simple definition of something that has irreducible complexity.

The essential idea is that to exist is to have actuality. And as Aristotle argued, that kind of individuated substantiality is a combo of material and formal cause. There has to be some kind of materiality that explains the reactivity. And it has to be constrained in some fashion that gives it its particularity.

So even thought about in simplest terms, two things have to come together in a way that results emergently in a third. Reactive potential has to be given a particular shape. Then we have some thing that is individuated - that is in physics-speak a degree of freedom. Or in semiotics-speak, a difference that makes a difference.

So one can point to ideas or the things we might agree to talk about. They are certainly part of the story of the road that leads to substantial existence. Even a fairy story might be true - if made material.

Likewise one can start over at the other side of matter. Something definite exists when quantum indeterminism is organised into an observable state - like a field's potential for a particle. But unformed potential does not actually exist in itself. It needs to be formed to have the kind of actuality that allows definite causal interactions.

So existence should be considered as the highest state of hylomorphic development. It is the concrete limit of a process of emergence. And we do then also want to grant reality to the two factors that are in interaction - the formal and material causes of being. They seem to "exist" in that they both really have an effect. But metaphysics has to respect that they don't themselves exist in a substantial fashion, otherwise it all collapses into a confusion of jargon.

Geometry is the study of possible spatial relations. — Agustino

But only as conceived in terms of relata like points and lines. Or at a deeper level - one that includes the reality of material being. - in terms of least actions and the global symmetries they break.

So geometry certainly started out as a maths of space (thus excluding time/energy). But that turned out to be an incomplete view of spatiotemporal reality.

So, I think there is both a transcendental aspect of the phenomenal, and beyond that a transcendental noumenal. Of the latter I don't believe it could be appropriate to refer to it as either ideal (in the sense of being a function of our minds) or real (in any empirical sense as a phenomenal existent). — John

This is all pretty compatible with my triune metaphysics which would call the noumenal a vagueness - a naked unformed potentiality. The noumenal would thus have no character apart from that which develops via phenomenology - that is, shaped up into intelligible divisions by a (perceiving and willing) mind.

So beneath the jargon, there looks to be a lot of compatibility. All metaphysics of any interest tends towards a triadic or hierarchically organised view - the only kind of metaphysics that can do justice to the three things of observers, observables, and their shared developmental or causal history.