As I have said a million times, Non-Euclidean geometry does not refute the axiom that the shortest distance is the perpendicular - among many other axioms that aren't refuted. So you have to explain to me where does this axiom get its certainty from, because it seems that regardless how our space is, it can't be refuted. — Agustino

I'm confused about exactly what you want to argue. But it seems reasonable to derive the least action principle from empirical experience of the world. If a geometry appears to offer many paths, it is rational to suggest one will involve the least effort of all the alternatives. So once energy is included in our picture of physical reality, non-Euclidean geometry should pop out.

If we fire off two objects into empty space on parallel tracks, we can then observe whether they diverge, converge, or stay the same distance apart. The behaviour can then be interpreted either in terms of interactive forces or geometric curvature. And both would be complementary views of a world understood to be organised in terms of the deeper synthetic a priori of the least action principle?

So if the question is does non-Euclidean geometry change anything about our ability to grasp the essence of existence through a leap to rational generality, then it seems not. We just needed to drill down another level beyond Newtonian physics to a view where space, time and energy are combined in the form of the idea of a path in which the least energy gets expended (or equivalently, a space that is globally expanding or shrinking at a non-accelerating rate).

So does this then boil down to either all similarities being a matter of accident vs all differences being a matter of accident?

If so, less Metaphysical violence would be done by extreme realism as there doesn't seem such a problem in differences being accidents of history. Whereas to account for the global organisation of the world as "just an accident" would be more of a stretch.

Of course many worlds would then be invoked to make the observed organisation of our world just a lucky nominalistic accident. In Humean fashion, there is no reason why the way things are couldn't fall apart in the next second or two. The laws of,physics might suddenly cease to obtain, for all we know.

However then it seems reasonable (to a holist) that the organisation of the world is self-perpetuating - a state of regularised habit - and so we would be back to saying extreme realism is the more plausible. Difference could be just accidents - matters of global indifference. The world would have enough sameness to actually be a world, and why should it care beyond having achieved that?

Even many worlds is still a hypothesis that presumes a substantial sameness in the overall shape and organisation of things. So in fact it only supposes localised differences - of the kind that doesn't really matter materially.

Thus extreme realism wins. Extreme nominalism always falls apart because of a lack of metaphysical glue. :)

We infer that space is curved; we do not experience it as curved. — John

So what are we experiencing when we employ gravitational lensing to see distant planets circling distant stars? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_microlensing

When John mentioned this on p2, you dismissed this rather too glibly - talking about spacetime curvature in a way that was out-of-date since Gauss first defined the notion of intrinsic curvature.

We cannot perceive what it would be, because that would entail having 4D eyes. But - we can perceive what it is by analogy to other dimensions (and hence we can conceive it) — Agustino

3D space doesn't require a fourth spatial dimension in which to curve. The Universe could be a hypersphere - a compact curved spherical 3D space - but it wouldn't mathematically need to float in a larger space like a planet in a void.

So if we are talking about actual modern physical concepts, then even watching a falling rock accelerating in a gravitational field counts as "seeing spacetime curvature". A frame of reference is only "flat" to the degree that energy potential differences have been globally constrained to make that the case.

The non-Euclidean argument really ought to be reversed.

The early assumption was that flatness was natural as the simplest state. And that did mathematically appear to accord with the world as experienced at a "classical scale" - a scale of a temperature and extent convivial to human existence. You could build things using Euclidean geometry and experience would seem to say that you could achieve a perfect carpentered fit. A picture really could be absolutely level to some idea of a horizontal plane.

But nowadays, the more natural presumption would be that flatness is the surprising answer to the ontic question of "how much is everything curved?". Naively, spatial extent could have any curvature value. What's stopping it not? And yet our Universe has this remarkably fine-tuned balance where there is this incredibly tiny deviation from perfect flatness - the hyperbolic curvature of a universal "dark energy" - that means there is in fact something rather than nothing.

A Universe that was actually flat couldn't even exist because it would be too unstable. It would shrivel up under its own weight with the slightest nudge of any local fluctuation.

I'm not sure what this says about TI - as the whole issue of synthetic a-prioris makes sense to me only as saying something about the fact that we find mathematical abstractions to be a way to grasp the symmetry principles reality must employ to organise itself.

So you can see why mathematical abstractions seem a special kind of deal - a way to transcend the epistemic and grasp the ontic. But also just as clearly, for humans the grasping of the relevant maths has been a work in progress.

We started by glimpsing the principles in the near at hand, classical scale of empirical experience. Euclid showed how flat spaces could be constructed from straight lines and stationary points. And from there we have reversed around to see existence from its other end - the view of spacetime (and energy even) as the product of top-down organising constraint.

Again, naively (in this more sophisticated ontic view) the Universe could have, so should have, every kind of spatiotemporal curvature. That means a theory of everything has to aim at discovering a mathematical-strength reason it is instead the case that the Universe is - almost - absolutely flat and classical over at least 140 orders of magnitude of empirically-observable scale.

That is a pile of crap of biblical proportions that I am not going to even try and clear up. — unenlightened

I would say that aletheist has it bang on so far. So it is a shame to see you capitulate this way given the thread has been pretty instructive.

Aletheist is showing how our claims about objective reality always wind up being founded on subjectively reasonable seeming beliefs. People get used to talking about knowing stuff - like what's not in their pockets, or what they know they put in a bag, or included in a pack of cards. But in the end, that confidence is rather manufactured - a play of signs that we ourselves create to replace the world (whatever it is as the thing-in-itself).

My own key point in support of aletheist was to draw out how we do in fact go about manufacturing the "objective" grounds of our own certainty using games of chance. We make a physical determination (in shaping a die or printing a pack of cards) that then underwrites our claims to a concept of "randomness", or "accident", or "probability" based on a principle of indifference.

So we have a model of probability that is derived from subjective actions. We construct a machinery that divides the world sharply, counterfactually, into the bit we care absolutely about (some device like a coin that can only land on one of two sides), and then the bit we claim absolute indifference about (the spin that lands unpredictably). And then we compare this construction against the behaviour of the world to talk about "how the world actually is".

What is going on should be transparent. But people seem to hate their metaphysical realism being undermined even slightly.

A universal statement is one in which no individual names occur. — tom

That is certainly right. But it illustrates the bigger issue of how logic relates to the world - which you, as a student of Popper, would understand.

Popper nicely brought out how the universal and the individual (or singular) are formally reciprocal bounds ... or a dichotomy. So really, when it comes down to it, each "exists" only in distinction to its "other". Thus both universality and individuality remain always relative concepts. They are never standalone absolutes. And from that, we can understand the need for a triadic epistemology where the universal and the individual are the bounds "to either side" of the actual thing in question - the entity we invoke by calling out its proper name.

So here is my raven called Raven. We have the three things of some actual "bird" I own (a substantial instance), the form of that being (the generality that constitutes "a raven"), and the matter of that being (the individual materiality or collection of properties that allow Raven to be classed as an actual instance of a universal idea).

The world is thus hylomorphic. The debate about universals and singulars, generals and particulars, only repeats the metaphysical causal debate over the nature of substance at the level of the logical modelling of real things.

Anyway, getting back to the point about universal statements not naming individuals, this is how generality would be achieved - by managing to put as much distance as possible between the universal and individual sense of a word like "raven". And yet by the same token, the distancing achieved is only ever relative to itself, never actually absolute. But people then treat the logic as if it has achieved this absolute (deductively valid) status. And the same people look back at the world and see that it is still (inductively) relative to a history of observations.

As Popper says, scientific laws take the "negative" form of proscriptions or constraints when they are expressed as universal statements. The law of energy conservation sounds like it asserts an absolute generality of nature, but in practice it has to be cashed out in terms of the actual observation or measurement of its "other" - the particular or existential claim that "there are no perpetual motion machines". So universality - in practice, in the real world - obtains only by a failure to find otherwise. The absence of not-A as a particular, is inductive confirmation of the presence of A as a generality.

This reciprocal deal - the reason why scientific certainty boils down to lack of falsification - is why universals do get pushed in the direction of a-temporal and a-spatial statements. It is not good enough to talk about my empty pockets, or whatever, "right here and now". To be as absolute as possible, a statement would have to show that it has pushed away to the extreme margins of observation absolutely everything that could be considered individual or particular in relation to that statement. So that shifts us decisively out of the realm of the actual and into the realm of the possible.

That again is why we have to end up with a triadic or hylomorphic logical system. We want to speak about, and reason about, substantial or actual being. And to do that, we find ourselves having to strike out in both directions "beyond" the actual. We have to head towards universally constraining necessity by simultaneously manufacturing its complementary "other" of completely individual or particularised material possibility.

Thus the (Peircean) triad of firstness, secondness and thirdness - as possibility, actuality and necessity. Or individuals, proper names and universals.

And as I say, the thread seems to revolve around the fact that people can see that the absolutism implied by the standard syntax of logical form does not match the relativity of the world being described.

But this is not paradoxical. It is simply evidence of what I keep saying - that the work of logicians, if they hope to talk about existence with true metaphysical generality, is not done. And you only have to go back to Aristotle and Peirce to see how it is triadicy, or hierarchical organisation, that must be the next step to breath relativity back into the dyadic syntactical forms that have been frozen into static absolutism by Frege and others.

I hate to say it Tom, but this is why the many worlds interpretation, computationalism, digital physics and a whole bunch of other bandwagons are metaphysically doomed. They are "illogical" in this sense. They are extrapolations of a logical absolutism where the Universe is going to have to be a case of logical relativism - the kind of triadically self-organising "universal reasonableness" that Peirce was on to, and which Popper was following up on.

If by "vagueness and propensity" you mean what Peirce called 1ns and 3ns, then yes, that is the working hypothesis that I have currently adopted and continue to explore. So by "ontic uncertainty," I assume you mean what he called "absolute chance." — aletheist

Yep and yep.

Again, it depends on exactly what you mean by that. As should be clear by now, I am opposed to using the term "probability" when what we really mean is (subjective) "confidence" or "degree of belief." — aletheist

This is the tricky bit. I think you may be arguing towards the subjective as being real, and indeed the ultimately real. And I can't deny that Peirceanism heads in the direction of embracing frank idealism or panpsychism of that kind.

But I instead go in the other direction which would attempt to deflate "subjectivity" and reduce it to a scientific notion of pansemiosis. So there is a divide between the objective and subjective, the ontic and epistemic, the observables and the observer. But it is not a dichotomy of matter and mind, but matter and sign. The human observer becomes thus simply a highly complex and particular example of an ontologically general semiotic relation. And there is nothing causally mystic about a sign relation.

So when I talk about nature exhibiting the principle of indifference, it is in that deflationary sense. Nature really is a kind of mind, but only in the sense that minds are a kind of sign relation.

And with quantum physics especially, science now supports that. Quantum theory is not probabilistic in the standard sense (ie: there are hidden variables, so any sense of surprise is simply due to our epistemic ignorance of the details). Instead it supports the more radical view that events like the decay of a particle actually are just propensities. The world is set up in a general way as a state of constraint. Then after that, tychic chance or pure spontaneity takes over - because the world just doesn't care when some atom actually does go pop.

So when it comes to human concepts of probability, as I say, there is this sly trick going on. We impose deterministic constraints on the world (notions about what constitutes a fair coin toss, a fair roulette wheel spin, a fair shuffle of the deck) so as to ensure maximum epistemic uncertainty about the outcomes.

And that kind of modelling of randomness is great for pragmatic purposes. It really helps in constructing the human realm to divide our reality so clearly and counterfactually into the determined and the random.

But now getting back to metaphysics, we have to see past the very instruments we have constructed to "see the world more clearly". And that leads to the radical holism of firstness, secondness, thirdness, as you say. However then there is still a difference between accepting the traditional metaphysical dualism of objective and subjective as talking about world and soul, or matter and mind, and instead making the further radical break of following through pan-semiotically and seeing the mind as a species of sign.

My objection was that probability is not the same thing as epistemic uncertainty. — aletheist

Out of curiosity, how do you deal with ontic uncertainty? Do you treat vagueness and propensity as elements of reality? Would you go as far as extending the principle of indifference to nature itself?

The problem here, as I see it, is that logic and probability as used in this thread depend on strict counterfactuality - the validity of the law of the excluded middle. So either side of the argument still presumes that it deals with a world that is crisp and particular, not vague and therefore also capable of being truly general.

In our mathematical models of probability - like coin flips, roulette wheels, packs of cards and other "games of chance" - the world is ontically determinate. Or at least we attempt to create mechanical situations that are as constrained, and therefore as determinate, as we care to make them. And in constraining nature to that degree, we then grant ourselves the privilege of maximising our own epistemic uncertainty. We can make it completely a matter of our own indifference that we don't know what the outcome of the next flip, spin, or shuffle, is going to be.

So there is a sly transfer from a real world with actual uncertainty (perhaps) to our ideal world where the world is made "ontically determinate" by an act of care, by deliberate design, and therefore we make it safe to assign all uncertainty to epistemic cause - that is, our own personal indifference about outcomes, our own lack of control about whether the next flip is heads or tails, the next swan black or not.

So there is a real danger then to take this rather artificially manufactured state of epistemic uncertainty - one modeled after games of chance - and use it to prove something about ontic reality. Just as it is a similar error to apply standard predicate logic to the real world without regard to the artificiality of the counterfactual determinism that is the LEM-style pivot of its modelling.

I have a black cat. But when it sits in the bright sun, it looks more chocolate brown. If I am reasoning about black cats, or black swans, or the ace of spades, I ignore such quibbles as a matter of indifference - for the sake of modelling. And yet back in the "real world", it could always be a (Gettier style) issue of whether some black swan is really black (their feathers too look chocolate brown in bright sun), or really a swan (maybe it is a plastic toy, or some visiting alien, that is the next example that crosses our path).

The OP, as I understand it, is concerned about how to model the world. So it talks about inductive evidence and the bolstering of states of belief (or epistemic certainty). And that in itself is best modeled, I would say, by Bayesian reasoning. So it is not really paradoxical that green apples might count as evidence in some inductively strengthening sense - even if at a huge remove. Instead it seems quite sensible that if As can be consistently B (apples keep turning up green), then by generalisation, it is more plausible that other As have their own consistent Bs (swans are black, fires are hot, cats have claws).

But predicate logic can't prove inductive beliefs, it can only sharpen their test by deductively isolating the putatively counterfactual. Swans either have blackness as a universal property ... or they don't. The problem then is that reality itself isn't so black and white. Instead - we might have good reason to believe - it is ontically vague and therefore only rises to the state of having certain well-formed propensities. Black swans are highly likely to be always black (given a certain shared history of genetic constraints). But also - as propensities express goals or purposes - at some level there will also emerge a degree of indifference. Blackness might be a matter of degree (some swans might be more chocolately than others - and evolution "doesn't care").

So green apples don't relate to black swans in any direct deductive logical fashion. Only in an inductive one. But deduction itself is founded on the un-reality of black and white counterfactuality. It is "pure model" that by design cuts the umbilical cord to the world it models (that being not a bug but a feature: the formal disconnect of the LEM is why it is so semiotically powerful a move).

And our standard models of probability - games of chance - do the same trick. They are ontically unreal in that they are manufactured situations where it is the absolute determinism (of a sign!: the suit of a card, the heads or tails of a coin, the number of a roulette slot) that underwrites a completely epistemic state of indifference (as to which sign we might next read off a device as "an unpredicted state of the world").

So we have an elaborate machinery of thought - one that by design excludes the very possibilities of ontic vagueness and ontic propensity. Both predicate logic and probability theory depend on it for their epistemic robustness. We can know the world to "be that way" because that is how we have constructed our formal acts of measurement that become all we know of the world. We reduce messy existence to some internalised play of marks - the numbers, or colours, or other values we read off the world as "facts".

But then in realising that is the semiotic game being played, this re-opens the question for metaphysics about what is really the case for ontic existence itself. If we could see past the very instruments of perception we have constructed for ourselves - these rational counterfactual modelling tricks - what would be the reality we then see?

Which is where we have to start constructing a better model - like an understanding of probability that is expanded by notions of ontic vagueness and ontic propensity (which of course is where Peirce comes in as a pioneer).

Yep. It's the "living in a bubble" effect - zeroing in on the particular human weakness of confirmation bias.

People will swallow your lies if they are crafted to match their expectations. The Enlightenment was all about fostering the social institutions of critical thinking. Now Facebook is ushering in the new Dark Ages. The world of checkable facts is turning into the echo chamber of your own opinion. :)

So yes. Targeted messaging is nothing new. And yet it makes a difference when the ability to target folk is increasing at an exponential rate.

It is a good sign that the story of Cambridge Analytics has been picked up and exposed in this fashion. I've just started getting the Vice channel and have been very impressed by its Gen Y journalism.

So long as freedom of speech is allowed to exist, at least there can be a reaction to match the action.

I'm not knocking your theory, at least not here. I'm genuinely interested in - if a little uneasy with - your approach. I'm still browsing the philosophical market and probably will be for some time yet. But don't you see the joke? — csalisbury

I see the joke. But also the issue of the aha! sensation was largely the subject of my first book. And Peirce came along about 20 years later for me.

So for me, it was the neuroscientific story that meant I could feel that shock of happy recognition on discovering Peirce's writings.

It is not the case that I have had to shoehorn all my facts to fit some Peircean template. The reality is that those facts came first and I continue to be surprised how well Peirce anticipated them.

Brain scans reveal that in fact humans need a team of such beings to execute all their various functions.

...a freedom inherent (immanent) within my material being? — Metaphysician Undercover

Who is this "my" you speak of? I only see a reductionist accumulation of cells.

You've lost me in your contradictory ways. Free will is a constraint? That's the problem with your position, you portray the creative results of free acts as the effects of constraints. Do you not see the inherent contradiction? Or are you a determinist denier of free will? — Metaphysician Undercover

Why would you think that is what I said?

As Rich says, we can certainly treat our own freewill as a constraint over our actions and their intended outcomes. That is why we credit our "selves" with top-down causal agency.

I mean you believe you exist, right? You're not just a collective fiction of the independently-acting cells of your body.

Finally! We agree on something. — Metaphysician Undercover

Probably not so much. It was the bit about you not seeing where I was agreeing.

Yep.

The most simple way to choose not to suffer the consequences, is to choose to follow the orders. — Metaphysician Undercover

So by choice ... one simply chooses not to have freewill and the constraints are thus rendered an abstract illusion that you never really took seriously. Gotcha.

Just like if you disobey the law, it is certain individuals who will seek to have you punished. It's not the law itself which acts to punish you, it those who enforce it. — Metaphysician Undercover

So these avatars of the global order - do they have the same kind of freewill. It is their choice to line you up against the wall and shoot you? The constraints are no more real for them either.

Gawd, I would feel really pissed off about that firing squad that just decided to make an example out of me for the hell of it, or whatever.

I don't see how this notion of the whole constraining the parts is a valid notion. — Metaphysician Undercover

True that.

lol, I don't mean this as a dig ( liked the post) but if you wanted to capture apo in two quotes, couldn't do better than this — csalisbury

What do you want? That I should invent some completely different metaphysical system for every post?

Logic is like water to fish. Because most folk only operate in the one register of thought, they can't even see that they rigidly apply just the one version of "the truth". All they know is reductionism and predicate logic, so they just get on applying it willy-nilly.

I can appreciate two complementary modes of thought - the reductionist and the holistic. And while "reasoning about the concrete particular" is admirably adapted to dealing with the near-at-hand, everyday, classical or mechanical conception of reality, reductionism is always going to be the wrong tool of thought as soon as we get anywhere near an issue with metaphysical generality.

So there is a reason I'm always saying the same basic thing. People trying to do metaphysics are always locked into the wrong habit of thought and I'm just constantly being helpful in pointing towards the exit.

Peirce of course most fully developed a metaphysical-strength brand of logic. It's not my problem that it remains a post-grad and not under-grad subject of study.

Therefore, Can we really be sure that the mind needs the world in order to exist? — GreyScorpio

After a few hour in a sensory deprivation tank, people can lose their minds and feel like they cease to exist. So there is good neurocognitive evidence to argue that the patterning the world provides is very much needed for our having an "inner world" of differentiated experience.

Of course, idealists may argue that the experiments that prove such a thing are further fictions of their minds. You can't in the end get anywhere with an ardent idealist anymore than you can with a naive realist. ;)

Any raw recruit can choose not to follow the instruction of the drill sergeant, and suffer the consequence. — Metaphysician Undercover

So they can't choose not to suffer the consequences?

The consequences are thus quite real as the corollary of their choices. It is all a bit like choosing to jump of a tree and fly, then having to accept the consequences that the law of gravity mandates. Nothing you can do will change anything about the consequences in either situation.

You reveal with your words what you really believe, that it is not the army which is doing the regulating, the army is the passive, artificial thing, which is being regulated by the intentions of human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. You just again show a problem with reading skills.

This contradicts constraints arising "immanently", which implies that the constraints come from within the individual part, as I described by referring to intention and free will. So you haven't explained how two apparently opposed processes, "constraints arise immanently", and "constraints of downward causation" are supposed to be the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another thing I have explained to you a thousand times, a thousand ways.

My position is based on the causal notion of synergy. So parts construct the whole, and the whole shapes the parts. There is a dichotomistic mutuality at the heart of all things systematic.

Things are happening in both directions. You only notice them happening in the one direction.

But essentially I'm thinking about the feeling you get when you know you "get" something but aren't sure how to articulate what exactly you "get". — darthbarracuda

That's Peircean abduction - the leap which can be recognised as already the coherent answer as it is still crisply forming.

And it can be explained neurologically in terms of symmetry breaking. Answers form in the mind as we organise a field of uncertainty. The brain starts to suppress some possibilities as "noise", focus attention on other possibilities as "signal". If it is working - the symmetry does want to break itself in that direction - then rapid feedback drives both kinds of action. What counts as noise, and thus what counts as signal, become ever more strongly felt to us as we "tune into" the best inference to an explanation.

This is important to the epistemology of reasoning of course because it shows how induction does ground rational insight. We are searching for a deductive truth. But we can only get there on the back of a snowballing process of inductive confirmation. Each step, as noise and signal start to be divided in the brain, has to feed back either positively or negatively as a "test" for the germinating concept. As an attempt at symmetry breaking, it either finds that it works and so runs to self-justifying completion, or it stalls and dies, quickly forgotten.

Gestalt psychology of course celebrated this as the aha! experience. Or perceptual pop-out. So it applies just as much to our phenomenal impressions of the world as our rationalistic conceptions.

It is pretty much definitional of why brains (in their creative organicism) are not like computers (in their rigid mechanicalism).

What am I missing? It seems pretty simple. — Michael

Well, for a start you made a huge swerve and avoided my actual question about unicorn dung. Let's see how you would run the actual argument I posed to you.

We can see how your own carefully chosen examples - hinging on socially accepted fictions like legalised monogamy and legalised citizenship - are just a dodge to avoid dealing with any physicalist ontic commitments.

So if you are not going to try harder here, what's the point?

I don't know if they understand the mental to be self-organising and closed for causation. But that's not relevant to my question. — Michael

Of course it is bloody relevant. And who is this mysterious "they"? Why are you being so shifty here?

Again, given that you define the physical as being self-organising and closed for causation, it must then follow that you understand the dualist's claim "the mind isn't physical" to be the claim "the mind isn't self-organising and closed for causation". — Michael

I've already explained why it doesn't have to follow in just the same why that it makes no real difference if unicorns shit or don't shit.

Do you take a firm position on unicorn dung? Perhaps you can run me through the irrefutable train of logic that demands that imaginary shitting is something imaginary beasts must do.

I just wanted you to clarify this. You don't seem to have given me an answer. — Michael

You just didn't like the very reasonable answer I have given.

So at the moment you haven't explained how your physicalism differs from their dualism. — Michael

As I said, I can't agree or disagree with the "not even wrong". It doesn't even achieve the threshold of intelligibility.

But if you want to now flesh out the views of this mysterious "they" who can offer a counterfactual account of how their notion of the mental is "self-organising and closed for causation", then I'm all ears. What do "they" mean exactly when they say that (if it is ever in fact actually said).

I do not see how the real existence of "the army" could be understood as anything more than individuals acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. I get you don't see it and likely never will.

There are individuals who chose to act together toward a common goal, and we goal this an army. — Metaphysician Undercover

So there are freely chosing individuals and then ... somehow ... the separate thing of a common goal.

Let's put aside your fanciful notion that drill sergeants offer raw recruits a lot of free choice during boot camp training. We call an army an army (and not for instance a rabble or a rout) because it really is being regulated by some actual state of form and purpose.

And again, my account explains why soldiers exist individually such that they can exhibit collective behaviour. It explains the atomism involved in terms of global limitations on personal freedoms, such that the individual also becomes the interchangeable.

So what you think is so critically important is exactly what I explain for you in causal terms.

Then we seek the internal source of this causation rather than looking for some phantom external top-down causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what I said in the end, eh?

Therefore the two views are not necessarily in competition. — Michael

Well they are. One is coherent, and the other incoherent (according to the position I have taken on physicalist explanation).

Again, my position is distinctive in recognising (nay, necessitating) vagueness as a further category of existence or being. And so dualism - in simply failing to talk about being in properly counterfactual terms - can be classed with the explanations that are merely vague, or "not even wrong".

So my employment of counter-factuality cannot be used against me in the way you appear to be attempting. Again, it is moot whether your imagined unicorn of a position either shits or doesn't shit as a necessary further corollary of its non-existence.

Your disagreement, then, would seem to be simply a terminological dispute. Whereas you use the term "physical" to refer to everything that is self-organising and closed for causation, the dualist uses the term "physical" to refer to just some of the things that are self-organising and closed for causation, with "mental" referring to the rest and something like "real" referring to both. — Michael

Well, in fact consistency demands that in the end I don't really believe in "mind" or "mental" as an ontically foundational category.

As I have said often enough, my physicalism is semiotic. So the deep and foundational distinction would be that between matter and sign, not matter and mind. "Consciousness" is just a word that people bandy about. A metaphysician is going to get a lot further talking in concretely counterfactual terms about habits of interpretance rather than states of experience.

I'll say it again. The inability to think of the "mind", or the "mental", except as another dualistic kind of stuff - a witnessing soul, a phenomenal display, a state of experience, a substantial property - is where philosophy so regularly goes off the rails.

It is just reductionist materialism doubling down, reducing formal and final cause to more of the same old materially-effective "stuff".

In practice.

I don't know what you mean by this question. How would you make sense of the causal connection between one physical thing and another? — Michael

I'm losing interest if you are going to start pretending there is no causal issue regarding mind~matter dualism.

If you define the physical as "self-organising and closed for causation" then you must understand the claim "the mind isn't physical" to mean "the mind isn't both self-organising and closed for causation". I'm just asking you to confirm that this is what you understand the dualist to be saying. — Michael

Again, the incoherence of dualism starts before we even get to such niceties in my view. So I'm struggling to see the relevance of the question. It is like asking whether the non-existent unicorn either shits or doesn't shit.

The claim "the mind isn't physical" is not a claim that holds up under my definition of physicalism. So it becomes moot to worry about whether or not dualism then has self-organisation or causal closure as well-formed properties of its position.

So yes. My approach demands that there be always a self-organising and causally closed dichotomy at the heart of things. But by definition, that is an internalist perspective that stands in opposition - an actual rejection - of any externalism.

So dualism is simply moot - so ill-formed as to not even be dialectically opposed in my view (even if there is a religiously-inspired tradition in philosophy that takes the dichotomy of mind and the physical with all apparent seriousness).

And thus it appears does physicalism. It welcomes light, quanta, emotions, qualia, consciousness, all types of forces including dark forces and dark matter under its umbrella. If we sense it, if we feel it, if it is conjectured, if it is needed for mathematical equations, if it is anything other than God or angels it is welcome. — Rich

I think you skipped over the crucial bit - if it can be measured. So in the end, physicalism reduces to pragmatism.

Quit being an idiot. You said reductionism vs holism lacked rigorous definition. I supplied my rigorous definition. You started bleating in irrelevant fashion. I can't give a fuck about how you might self-identify until you can state it in a fashion that might be relevant to the discussion.

This proposed dichotomy between the mind and the world is a false one. Rather the dichotomy is between the mind and the physical, with both making up the world. — Michael

So again, what is the causal connection?

I myself prefer the dichotomy of mind and world as its speaks to the semiotic modelling relation that is our fullest causal account of physicality.

Your switching it to a dichotomy of mind and the physical suggests you are stuck in the mode of thinking of Being in terms of two imcompatible kinds of "stuff" or substance.

Also, what counts as a physicalist fashion? Presumably a fashion that is both self-organising and closed for causality? Well, that's the question I asked of you. Is the dualist claiming that the mental is either not self-organising or not closed for causailty? — Michael

I confess that I can't make substance dualism a coherent metaphysical position for you. And if you can't manage it on your own, then I suggest you simply abandon it as a bad job.

So what are you calling yourself and what is its rigorous definition?

Can this dualist account for the causal basis of the apparent interaction between mind and world in physicalist fashion?

I'm sure you will launch into an explanation at any minute. X-)

Yep. I am defining physicalism as opposed to the transcendental/supernatural. So I am claiming immanence and naturalism.

How do those terms then cash out?

Well immanence in the end has to be a claim about a self-organising or bootstrapping existence. And that riddle has to be solved through its own dichotomy - the developmental concept of the vague vs the crisp.

And naturalism is a claim about existence being a system closed for causality. So again, it is about self-organisation and bootstrapping. But also it stresses the naturalness of hierarchical organisation as the crisply developed outcome. So the dichotomy that gets recognised is that of complexity vs simplicity, or negentropy vs entropy.

So physicalism has to stand against something. And in being a totalising claim, it has to stand against the brokenness of any actual dualism.

Yet it can't achieve that monadistically - through actual reductionism to material being. Instead it must incorporate all valid dichotomies within itself. So physicalism - as holism - winds up being irreducibly triadic (triadicism itself having these two "internal" complementary moves of vague beginnings vs hierarchically organised outcomes).

Great. So you are talking about people like yourself who would call themselves something, but then who aren't able to define why they would call themselves that something.

Sounds legit.

But physicalists can be both reductionist and holist. I would say I am resolutely physicalist in rejecting any transcendental or supernatural causes of Being. Yet I treat telos and mathematical form as proper physical causes of being.

And then I go one further in being a semiotic physicalist. So it is important to Being that sign or symbol also really exists by virtue of the fact that it (pretty much) escapes or transcends its own physicality to become a source of regulation over the physical.

Even within its own house, the very fact of "strong physicality" conjures up its own "immaterial" other - even if all codes must be a system of physical marks,

So what you describe is physicalism as reductionism or materialism. You are taking the position of a physicalism that wants to reject all the "otherness" that seems dualistically to betray a desire for monadic oneness.

So every time a metaphysical dichotomy arises, one of the complementary terms must be rejected and cast into the wilderness.

Your kind of physicalism wants to be atomistic, local, mechanistic, deterministic, and therefore not holistic, non-local, organic, probabilistic.

And given quantum theory is what we have discovered to lie at the end of the trail of our atomistic inquiries, don't you think your definition of physicalism ought to take that into better account? The material reductionist project ran right off the road about a century ago now.

So you said holism vs reductionism doesn't necessarily have a rigorous definition.

I supplied my rigorous definition (one that I have to say is commonplace among the systems scientists and hierarchy theorists I know).

You continue to reply with fatuous irrelevancies. And there we have it. :)

Thanks for illustrating my point about how a reductionist would want to conceive the causal story.

Mine would be story about cranes rather than sky hooks because I am saying that the constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

So reductionists have changed the definition of reductionism since Bacon so famously defined it?

Perhaps you can explain what has changed?

Why would I be under the impression that I was describing some common definition rather than providing the rigorous one?

Again, if you have a complaint about my definition, then back it up. As usual, your complaint amounts to "this is all news to me".

But I guess from your comments that you haven't even caught up with Bacon's definition of reductionism in the New Organon. (And who do you think wrote the old Organon?)

If you have a quarrel with my rigorous definition, take it up with my rigorous definition.

Maybe you meet all your "holists" down at the yoga retreat. But your arguments from personal incredulity are not actually any kind of argument you realise.