Most people haven't looked into the issue rigorously so they would share your lack of rigorous insight.

...reductionism versus holism isn't necessarily defined that rigorously. — Terrapin Station

Reductionism aims to reduce all causality to material and efficient cause - ie: bottom-up constructive cause. The story of substantial parts in contingent combination.

Holism reduces causality to Aristotle's four causes. So formal and final cause are taking to be (physically) real as well. And together they are the downwardly acting constraints. So a difference in kind is recognised (as cause via constraint is fundamentally difference from cause via construction).

Advanced holism shows how upwardly acting material freedoms and downwardly acting formal constraints are then each other cause, so closing the circle. Each is the emergent product of the other.

Constructive cause is made possible by a restriction on local material degrees of freedom (parts gain particular properties because they are prevented from trying to do "everything").

Global constraints are then the states of general coherent organisation that collections of these parts must consequently exhibit, or perpetually re-construct.

I'm asking in what sense strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism are not forms of dualism, as laid out in the OP. — Marchesk

They certainly all suffer the same issue of severing causality and so creating disconnected realms. But strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism would still presume that mind arises from material systems "somehow" (a material system is all that is needed for the magic to happen) while dualism usually would be taken to be a claim about the need for a proper "other" to the material ... ie: the spiritual, the divine, etc.

So it boils down to whether mind is being considered as a property of material organisation, or a property of an immaterial substance. And both break down in the same way because they do reductively think about nature only in terms of "substances with properties".

That is, they both fail when it comes to explaining the causes of causes. They both in the end point only to the existence of "brute unexplained properties".

You offered to make sense of your post.

Might be a reach, but sure, give it a go.

To put it another way, the physical state of the universe does not logically determine strongly emergent or non-reductive properties. They could not in principle be deduced by all the rules and facts of the entire state of the universe before they came into existence. — Marchesk

This is the advantage of a pansemiotic physicalism.

The meaning of symbols cannot be read off the physics of marks. The realm of sign or code is opaque from the brute physicalist point of view.

And yet physicalism predicts the constraints to which the freedom of any naturally arising code system will respond. Any symbolic form of existence will have to have the general purpose of furthering the goal of the second law of thermodynamics.

So physicalism predicts the existence of symbols - the zeroed dimensionality of a code being a physical freedom that can't be constrained (because how can you restrict dimensionality to less than nothing?).

And then physicalism predicts what will happen as a result of the evolution of symbolic complexity. Global entropy will be significantly increased.

By say that the particular is a generality you have denied that there is a dichotomy between the particular and the general. — Metaphysician Undercover

Idiotic. THAT particular is A particular, but THE particular is A generality. It's basic grammar - the dichtotomy of the definite and indefinite article.

Dissolved? Seriously, WTF?

Strewth. What's so difficult about seeing that "general" and "particular" are both names for generalities?

One, or both of us, is not making the required effort to understand the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

Give me strength...

A dichotomy opposes generality against generality. So it is not about the other thing which is the hierarchical division between the general and the particular, or the universal and the singular.

So when it comes to viewpoints, the dichotomous contrast here would be between the notions of the one and the many, or the fixed and the variable.

The Newtonian view presumes one fixed spatiotemporal backdrop. The Relativistic view presumes as many variable backdrops as you like (because now, under relativity, local mass is what breaks the symmetry and fixes "some point of view").

. The abstracted ideas "space" and "time", exist within the human minds. This is what you continually neglect, and overlook in your semiotic descriptions, the necessity for a human mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. So why do I/semiosis call it a "sign"? In what way is that ignoring observers rather than invoking them?

No, there is no time operator in quantum mechanics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Really? Or do you just mean that it doesn't completely work out because in the end, Newtonian continuous time is something QM has to assume as its backdrop. So the fact that there is indeed - empirically - an uncertainty relation is further evidence against the correctness of the Newtonian conception.

So what kind of an ontology is that then, if you have no approach to the material aspect of existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

How is a model of vagueness as unbounded action not an approach? I'm just not over-claiming about what in the end explanation might achieve.

Until you recognize the weakness of this attitude, you will never recognize how often it is that "everyone" is wrong. See, the vast majority are followers, the leaders are few and far between. — Metaphysician Undercover

Uh, yeah. Nah. You've given an accurate description of the typical crank.

The principle called "relativity of simultaneity" demonstrates this very well, the importance of the point of view. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who calls this an example of a metaphysical dichotomy apart from you?

The observer is making a judgement about a pair of events (so that's three things already). And the observer could now have "any" momentum - which is a new lack of constraint on "material content" that leads to the viewpoint being a "relative" variable.

So yes. You are showing you really, really, don't get it.

Well, if we assume that there is consistency in the amount of time that it takes for the repetition to occur, then the "amount of time" is something other than the repetition itself. Therefore time is something other than the repeated change, it is derived from it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Amazing, clocks and rulers measure space and time and yet only take up some interval of space or time. One would almost think that signs of things were not the things themselves. What inspired insight.

Actually you very distinctly said that spacetime is God's way of causing the separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was very distinctly being facetious. Its an old joke in physics.

If the temporal separation is only determinable by us through the means of a spatial separation, how does this produce the logical conclusion that a temporal separation is necessarily a spatial separation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Who said it was a spatial separation. Isn't it an energetic one? Doesnt quantum physics take time and energy as the two complementary operators of an uncertainty relation for that reason? Doesn't time stop for a body travelling at light speed while its energy density goes reciprocally to infinity?

Isn't this exactly what you do, "duck" into the symmetries necessitated by the general theory of relativity? — Metaphysician Undercover

But as I say, I don't pretend that this explains the material side of the deal, only the ontic structure of reality. Of course suitably advanced physics might even explain matter by maths. But everyone who does even string theory knows the matter fields still have to be inserted into the compactified dimensions by hand. They don't fall out of the maths as yet.

.

Any random designation of "it is not this.." could be wrong if we have not first made a designation of what it is. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again this is just you not getting the logic of a dichotomy - what if means to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

It was neuroscience/philosophy of mind that led me to biosemiosis as the best ontic model. So it is the empirical support that convinces me.

It explains things like the very fact that our models of the world are not driven by the kind of philosophical completeness that you hold up as the only criteria. Modelling is Pragmatic.

And so right there again is the counterfactuality. You may not have framed your opinions in that fashion, but I have.

It could be the case that brains evolved to faithfully re-present the noumenal. So phenomenology becomes some sort of knowledge failure.

Or it could be the case that phenomenonolgy - the world reduced to bare signs - is precisely the way that minds ought to work. That is, semiotically.

Given two sharply contrasting paradigms, my approach can positively compare itself to others - even the shrill hermeticism of the circle SX is won't to form wiith himself. :)

So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong — csalisbury

I missed this. You're wrong because the Peircean system is a hypothesis set up counterfactually. If it fails to accord with nature, then nature will make that plain.

So for instance a prediction of Peircean metaphysics is that the universe and its laws evolve. Peirce actually suggested experiments to measure the curvature of space as Euclidean flatness shouldn't be taken Platonically for granted. And his whole philosophy - based on a metaphysics of propensities - foreshadowed the current quantum probabilistic conception of nature.

So sure, the metaphysical model has pleasing completeness in comparison to other schemes. It is much more mathematically definite in what it claims. And by the same token, that makes it empirically testable. It could be wrong - where the majority of metaphysics ought to be dismissed as the "not even wrong".

Poor SX. Not waving but drowning.

When we count a repetitive change, to provide us with a notion on passed time, there is an assumption that each repetition takes the same amount of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. And....? (I mean if that's how we design a clock, then what else do we expect?)

To represent the cause of separation as "spacetime" is what I affirm is a mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I said that the requirement for separation is the cause of spacetime.

So separation must be first, then (temporal) order, then (spatial) relation. Notice that the primary separation is therefore not a spatial separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

We've been through this a thousand times. Separation does come first. Time and space (or change vs stasis) is then what separation looks like.

You are just doing the very thing you complain of in reducing your notion of "separation" to "not being spatial separation". Your attempted apophatic definition of temporal separation in terms of not being "a spatial separation" ends up resting on a spatialised notion of separation as its primary distinction.

That is why I prefer to make vagueness primary. In immanent fashion, it avoids that error of metaphysical reasoning.

The Peircean or systems view is that possible difference becomes actual difference as it is regularised by constraining habit. The further category of repetition makes sense once there is sufficient similiarity (in terms of the freedoms that have been suppressed) to talk of the the freedoms that concretely remain in play. What incompossibility weeds out becomes the definite variety that compossibility enforces.

And (tricky ain't it?) this compossible variety is itself dualised into the purposeful and the accidental. There are the acts that are desired by telos - even if it is the dilutest possible form of constraint in the being the second law's desire to entropify. And then there is - by mutual definition - all the other compossibilities that are beneath the notice of any such active law or constraint. I can buy a blue car or a red car. It makes no real difference to anything really.

Anyway, can we make any sense of the Deleuzean project to reduce existence to bare difference? Clearly - as a self-proclaimed inversion of Plato - it as least foregrounds the "other" to constraining sameness. And so it is going to sound Peircean in at least also taking difference or development as fundamental.

SX is hopeless at explaining the actual machinery that might link virtual differencing (this frozen sounding multiplicity) to actual "almost repeating" difference. It is dangerous for him to even to attempt an explanation of course as the whole metaphysic project will immediately unravel. He will start to have to talk about the dichotomous othering that is used to achieve a reductionist monism. And once you start talking openly about dichotomies, well that leads to the inevitable triadicity of a hierarchically organised relation. Holism has arrived and your dreams of monistic finality have just gone up in smoke.

So how do others handle this. I'll look at Todd May's "Gilles Deleuze, Difference, and Science" - www3.nd.edu/~hps/May=Deleuze.doc

We start - as is PoMo convention - with wisdom as paradox. We know we are really being deep when our very words contradict themselves.

...seeking to understand what Deleuze means when he says that “difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing.”

Then fair enough, the issue is to get away from tales of transcendent perfect order to talk about the "imperfect" immanent order that can arise via self-differentiation (and self-integration of course). For Deleuze, this is achieved in Spinozian univocity (noting Peirce was also a big fan of Duns Scotus for the same reason).

What is the significance of embracing the concept of a single substance and thus the univocity of Being? It lies in the abandonment of transcendence. Here we might recall Nietzsche’s critique of transcendence, a critique with which Deleuze is in sympathy. The effect of positing any form of transcendence (of which the transcendence of the Judeo-Christian God would be the prime example) is to set up a tribunal, a judge that is not of this world but that nevertheless evaluates it and always finds it wanting. The transcendent is always the more nearly perfect (or the Perfect itself). It is always pictured as higher, above this world. It is the ideal toward which this world must strive through self-denial but which, because of some inherent flaw—be it the existence of the flesh or the finiteness of its creatures—it can never fully achieve.

Now note two bum notes in this reading of univocity. Already we are lapsing back into substance talk - the ontology of form materially actualised. And we are setting up an illegitimate grounds for rejecting the eternal "other".

Dichotomies are being read as always having to generate a good guy and a bad guy as thesis and antithesis. But it is a bad dichotomy that does that rather than producing two generalities that are of equal (because necessarily complementary) status. Instead of focusing on what makes a good dichotomy (as I do), this is clearing the ground to reject dichotomies in toto.

Then the sensible question...

With the embrace of the univocity of Being, however, two questions arise. First, how is it that the perceived world exists as a manifold of differences in continuous evolution when there is only a single substance that comprises them? How can the univocity of Being be reconciled with the manifoldness of existence? This, of course, is the traditional philosophical question of the One and the Many. The second question, bound to the first one, is,What is the relation between the single substance and the manifold of existence? As Heidegger might put the question, what is the relation between Being and beings?

Yes indeedy. Where is the mechanism that connects? (In Peirceanism, it is semiosis.)

And here the beginnings of a bad answer.

The first question presents no insurmountable conceptual barrier if we jettison the idea that a single substance implies some kind of identity. For Deleuze, the single substance of Spinoza must be conceived not in terms of identity but in terms of difference. Substance, Being in its univocity, is difference itself. “Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.” Difference is behind everything, but behind difference there is nothing. If substance in some sense contains or comprises the differences that manifest themselves in the world, then there is no difficulty reconciling the One and the Many. The One is many; it is difference, difference itself, or, in the later term used in the collaborative works with Guattari, it is multiplicity.

So now we are talking from the point of view of actuality - already formed materiality, or substance.

Yes, it does make sense in the usual Aristotelean fashion in that substance is actuality with attributes and properties. A dog has the characteristics of its species. It has that family resemblance than means it is quite liable to chew your shoes, piss on your fencepost, slobber on your carpet.

But this is metaphyics and the question is how does substantial being itself become? How does it develop as informed or constrained materiality? And therefore, how do we account for the sameness that is form, the difference which is material haecceity?

Peirceanism explains them by putting them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Materiality is brute firstness or potential. Form is the regularity imposed by the seiving necessity of compossibility. Each is placed at sufficient distance from the other for them to have a formally inverse or reciprocal relation. (Remember, form = 1/material, and material = 1/form.)

Anyway, this indicates why SX wants to treat the virtual as itself a species of substance. Which is also then why he cannot in fact explain anything in terms of some actual developmental relation. Difference becomes just a property of a higher level notion of substantial being. Repetition is as repetition does.

Luckily May is alert to these issue. An urgent paradox arises....

For if Being is difference, doesn’t it collapse into beings themselves? If Being is as manifold as the beings that it comprises, doesn’t Being just reduce itself to nothing more than the manifoldness of our particular world?

The day is saved by capitalisation - or dichotomisation that conceals its "othering" by using the same term, just discretely denoting generality by using a big B (while continuing blithely to undermine generality's ontic connection to formal cause by treating Being as already formed Univocal Substance!).

Deleuze denies this reduction, claiming instead that the kind of difference associated with substance or Being is distinct (different) from the kind of differences associated with beings.

Then follows a Bergsonian analysis of time vs space which we can skip as I sort of agree. Let's get on to where there is some attempt to account for an interaction between virtuality of differencing and actual substantial differences. ;)

The relation between the virtual and the actual is, however, very different from that between the possible and the real. As Deleuze uses these terms, the real is the mirror of the possible; it has the same structure as the possible, with the sole but ontologically crucial exception that it is real and not merely possible. So there are two ontological realms, a realm of the possible and a realm of the real. By contrast, the virtual does not lack the reality; it is part of the real. There is only one reality, comprising aspects that are at once virtual and actual. The virtual actualizes itself in order to become actual, but in actualizing itself it does not gain in any reality it had lacked before, nor does it stand outside or behind the actuality that is actualized. It is not part of the actual, but it remains real within the actual.

OK. So does this work, anyone?

The virtual contains the structure that produces difference. Then material difference is what gets actualised.

So far, so Platonic.

But then the virtual is a substance. It "actualises itself". So not only is the virtual the general form or the general structure of difference-generation, it seems to possess its own material means too.

Where I would have a more traditional conception of the virtual as a principle of formal necessity - expressing the telos of the least action principle in interaction with the material restriction that is the complementary principle of generalised compossibility - Deleuze wants simply a tale of a "ground difference" that substantially exists as a generating mechanism (a hopper complete with the materiality to fulfil its desires) and only needs to be turned on so that it starts spitting out actual instances bearing a family resemblance to the originating seed (or - snort - rhizome).

So we see why SX strains so hard to find a generating seed difference in calculus. Materiality is the obvious issue for this Deleuzean scheme (as it is for all metaphysical schemes I agree - even Peirceanism). If you duck into maths - the science of patterns, the conjuring with pure immaterial forms - then you can simply sideline the very issue that your metaphysics must address. You can appear to be speaking about substantial actuality when really - in shifting into the register of the model - you most definitely ain't.

(How does Peirceanism answer the foundational question of materiality or primal action - the question of "why anything?". Well as I say, it doesn't in the final analysis. But it does make it explicit that it is a different kind of question and does not try to subsume in into a substance ontology like SX/Deleuze. Instead, it set it out apophatically - it approaches it via a model of vagueness or firstness.)

OK, so having emphasised some differences, let's look for some reconciliations....

In his discussion of Spinoza, Deleuze utilizes the term “expression” to indicate the relationship between the virtual (substance) and the actual (attributes and modes). In contrast to medieval creationist or emanative theories of causality, in which God is said to cause the beings of this world either by explicit authorship or by emanation, Spinoza holds an expressive view of causality, in which that which is expressed is not ontologically distinct from its expression. Attributes and modes may explicate, involve, and complicate substance, but they do not emerge from it on a distinct ontological plane.

Again, this is utterly wrong ( :) ) from a fully holistic point of view - the synchronic view of a development of regularity out of vagueness. But it is - in Aristotelean hylomorphic fashion - quite reasonable once understood diachronically as a slice across temporal development (so as a slice not across a moment in time, as such, but across the transition from vague to crisp "coming into being").

Once substantial being arises, it can of course host further development in the usual hierarchically complex fashion. Physics - in closing off one set of possibilities or differences, as it does with describing some universal telos like entropification - then itself creates the further possibility of its own counter-action. In the case of life and mind - or even just dissipative structure in general - that reaction is of course negentropy as a counter-telos.

But anyway, this hierarchical logic holds as a generality. It is precisely the system's take of constraints and the further freedoms they can't help but create. In - via compossibility - imposing a limit on free variety, that produces the now far more definitely defined freedoms which can start to do their next level of interacting and habit formation.

So yes. Examine reality at any particular level (look at it either side of some "singularity" or symmetry breaking critical point) and you will find that substantial being is "intrinsically" dual. An object is both a species of a genus (it has attributes due to a context), and it itself possesses further properties or freedoms of actions (as that is why we would indeed distinguish it as a concrete object - it has been transformed into the context for new happenings, or novelties.)

But what do you do when faced with the need to make substantial Being univocally fundamental still....

First, the virtual is not a mirror of the actual, as the real is of the possible. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze marks this by saying: “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualization of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.”

...you quietly change the spelling of the word just a little bit to hide how big an explanatory gap you want your fanboys to vault.

A proper dichotomy is one that openly proclaims the absoluteness of its reciprocal transformations.

If you invert the continuous, you bloodly well get the discrete. You don't just get the discontinuous, let alone the continious, or some other rat-swallowing circumlocution. You get an upfront assertion of a proper categorical difference.

In contrast to the possible/real distinction, the virtual/actual distinction involves three kinds of difference. First, there is the difference in itself of the virtual; second, there are the specific differences of the actualization of the virtual; finally, there is the difference between virtual and actual difference, between differentiation and differenciation.

Oh hold up! Not triadicism to the rescue?

Does this sound like 1) vague difference - the raw possibility, 2) reactive difference - actual particulars now having actual reactions, and 3) habitual difference - the stably broken asymmetry of a hierarchically developed organisation between globalised or general differencing vs localised or particular differences to you?

Well yes indeedy. Got there backwards, but that is now where this line of thought has arrived.

I think we can leave it there for the moment. SX - being the tough samurai kid he is - is probably doing the honorable thing of self-evisceration right about now.

But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well we can count the changes, can't we? Or is "sequence" a notion alien to you?

And the reason we can count changes is because they are locked into as history. When changes stops (when it is equilibrated and looks to change no more) then we can count the change as "being over" and "part of history, not part of the future".

A metre is not the same as a thing which is a metre long. — Metaphysician Undercover

Merde! The French bureau of standards have a problem with that strip of metal they've got locked up in temperature controlled vault then.

It is the fact that the vast masses of humanity accept this relation as ontologically sound, without referencing ontologically sound principles, which horrifies me. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. MU right. Humanity wrong. Sounds legit.

But you don't seem to get that spacetime relativity is God's way of preventing everything happening all at once. It creates the separation between events that is ontically essential for there to be anything interesting in the form of a "world". If forces acted instantaneously and without dilution across any span of time and distance, where would we all be, hey?

So if you want to talk about sound principles, begin with the fact that physical action needs to have an interesting structure. Things must divide and connect, differentiate and integrate. There must be separation, but only relatively speaking.

Plato was a dualist. Deleuze wanted to collapse his dialectical distinctions to be a univocal monist. Peirce was a triadicist who argued instead for an irreducibly complex or hierarchical relation as the basis of being.

So for Peirce, actuality is a process, an eternal coming-to-be. It can be talked about as being monistically "one relation". And it also "starts" with a monism in the grounding notion of Firstness, or Vagueness. But through a principle of incompossibilty - not everything that might want to be, can be, because it clashes and contradicts in a way that suppresses its actualisation - it describes how regulation or constraint emerges to organise a world bound by habits.

So similarity or generality emerges to organise difference itself. Vagueness is not nothingness, but chaotic everythingness - unbounded fluctuation without structure. In Deleuzean fashion (it seems), vagueness is multiplicity - but more than multiplicity as it includes even the actions that coming-to-be must suppress (through incompossibility).

Vagueness is thus an ultimate kind of difference - the difference of an infinity of disconnected impulses that sum to nothing.

And then from that chaos you have developing the regularity of actuality. The raw energy falls into dissipative patterns as the wildness of possibility falls away and the sum over possibility - the least action path - emerges. Difference changes character so that now it is regulated and well behaved - repetitive in the way that properties and attributes are the developed habits of concrete beings. Development ends up producing a classical world of atomistic material objects at play within a blank void - the spacetime backdrop that is all those other now well-suppressed fluctuations or opportunities for action.

So that is the triad. Vagueness is every possible difference (and thus a state of utter indifference and lack of constraint). But as soon as differences start to react against each other (the Secondness that follows Firstness), you get a collective or emergent effect. Some differences cancel each other away, other differences reinforce each other by feedback. (This is all standard non-linear physics or chaos theory.) And so in short time you have the beginnings of self-organising global regularity or generality.

As with the water draining out of your bath, a vortex begins as a slight suggestion of a symmetry breaking. In the beginning, the twist could be to the left of the right. Both are going to be happening - it doesn't make any difference which way the symmetry breaks. But the breaking of the symmetry - spin left or spin right - then makes a big actual difference. It quickly locks itself in, completely suppressing its "other" as an accidental fact of history.

In Peircean terms, the world (or the draining bathwater) is now ruled by the Thirdness of persistent habit. But Thirdness itself is a monism in that it incorporates Secondness and Firstness. We are talking about the wholeness of a relation. So just because there is one symmetry breaking that gets things started doesn't mean that the new state (this singularity, as SX terms it after the notion of a phase transition) can't break again.

Vague potential will still remain within the system. Reaction could set in. A higher level of organisation could break out that regularises this grounding action, gives it shape, turns it into a repetitively generated action that constructs a more complex state of habit or law.

Biophysics shows how life and mind arise as that kind of further semiosis. The "vortexes" of chemico-physical gradients can be harnessed and turned into the complex hierarchies that are bodies with cells and organs.

Anyway, it is foolish to talk of doing away with similarity to found metaphysics on "pure difference". Instead we must recover difference from difference by way of similarity. Vague difference (that is of course not even a difference, being a differencing lacking any relations) must be turned into crisp difference by a general relation (a habit of constraint, a principle of least action) that sorts difference into its various forms of dichotomous actuality. So for instance, we can speak with definiteness of differences that are purposeful versus those that are accidental.

So Deleuze gets some things right. If we are going to make something fundamental, it has got to be process, change or development. Plato needs to be inverted to make sense.

But then just to invert is only half the story. It is the invertibility of all things that is the foundational relation. So really, Being is still founded on stasis. It is just that it is equally founded in flux. While your metaphysics has to explicitly include an axis of development (as in the vague~crisp), it also has to have within itself a matching axis of "equilibrium balance" (as in the stable local~global, or part~whole, hierarchical structure that Thirdness describes).

So Deleuze makes the mistake of simply "othering" to arrive at a reductionist monism. And the error can be seen in that he ends up - like Plato - lacking the resources to account for how differencing actually happens. Plato could only say rather weakly that matter ends up "participating" in the ideal forms to achieve an imperfect repetition of similarity. Deleuze - as channeled by SX - is burbling something about virtuality as the (Platonic sounding) multiplicity which generates difference as its eternally different actuality.

The Peircean view places differencing - or dichotomisation, or the secondness of reaction - in the middle of a hierarchical sandwich. It is the individuated or particularised actuality that arises from vagueness - possibility in its rawest sense - in interaction with generality or habit, the emergent order which provides the other "eternal" thing of a system of constraints or "transcendent" necessitation.

But emerging is an activity which necessarily requires time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Or instead, emergence IS time, time being what we call a sequence of change or development.

Apo wants time to emerge from space-time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I would want a model of thermal or thick time that is consistent with the theory of relativity. And spacetime really is a thing in physics, despite your horror of all metaphysics that is post Newtonian.

And Apo isn't exactly some innocent wide eyed lamb whom I've been eviscerating; — StreetlightX

Biggest laugh of the day. But whatever keeps your spirits up sunshine. :)

If everything's the necessary and the accidental, then to say ollie, this cat (hey this cat) is the intersection of the two, is to say nothing, at all, about ollie. You could be talking about a star or a cell or a neutron. That's self-evident. Isn't it? — csalisbury

I think you've stop trying.

Talk of similarity and difference could be extended to the level of the genus "Cosmos". But here we are talking just of the already highly constrained genus of "Feline".

It can thus be taken for granted that "my dead cat Ollie" is not a gas cloud undergoing explosive fusion, or something you would need a microscope or particle accelerator to interrogate.

Indeed the reason you can only think in terms of mutually-constraining limits is precisely because you are unable to countenance exactly this reality of the virtual.

Which is just another way of saying that you are unable to properly consider the process of individuation because you can only ever look at it from the perspective of the already-individuated. And from that POV, all you will ever see is limits and a process of othering.

As usual, you are trying to shoehorn my Peircean approach into some more familiar (to you) metaphysics to which you have a prefab template answer.

If everything begins in vagueness, that is hardly beginning with the already-individuated, Perhaps you are confused because the argument to define vagueness (firstness, apeiron, the indeterminate) is apophatic.

We do have to start with the highly differentiated and highly organised world in which we find ourselves in. Whatever was the "source" of this developed state of being, we at least know what it has to be able to produce. So if differentiation and integration, or material difference and formal organisation, are what are produced, the image of the vague is formed apophatically as that which must "contain" both as its prime possibility.
— StreetlightX

As Deleuze puts it, "Negation is difference, but difference seen from its underside, seen from below. Seen the right way up, from top to bottom, difference is affirmation." In other words, if we reverse the picture and look upon individuation from the perspective of individuation, what you see instead are differential relations - coupled rates of change - and distributions of singularities which define thresholds of mutation. — StreetlightX

OK. So Deleuze's key party trick is to invert Plato - replace identity as sameness with identity as difference. How trivial.

My constraints-based approach instead makes the generating seed of Being a story of integration and differentiation. And how this is achieved - unlike Plato's "participation" or Deluze's hand-waving - is explained in transparent fashion. But you might have to read some books on hierarchy theory to get it.

Of course hierarchy theory does explicitly model individuation in terms of a cascade of phase transitions. Which is kinda what you are saying. But a phase transition or symmetry breaking involves both differentiation and integration.

It begins because a difference makes a difference. Water turns to ice because the balance between thermal dissociation and atomic bond forces pass the singularity of a critical point. But then the freezing stops once a new state of global integration has been achieved. The broken symmetry runs its course until ... a new state of symmetry terminates the change. Keep cooling ice and it doesn't get more crystalline. The atomic bonds have arrived at a state of constraint where the remaining differences of molecular orientation no longer make a difference. The ice state has lowered the general entropy to the degree that it is equipped to "care".

So my Peircean approach is different because it doesn't rely on Plato's pure sameness, or Deleuze's pure difference. Instead it argues for the irreducible complexity of the dynamic duo of constraining sameness (to the degree the sameness matters) coupled to the freely different (to the degree it doesn't matter).

And if you could only realise it, this is how to arrive at a Husserlian notion of thick time. The past becomes the current constraint on future free action. History, having happened, locks in all the accidents of the past and so place crisp limits on what can happen next. But the future is then free to disposed of those degrees of freedom as it wishes. The present is then the "epistemic cut" that relates the two. It defines when the past has stopped - as an event horizon on "prior" interaction - and so when the "to be created" future begins its process of becoming.

One can think of an economic system this way: flows of labour and capital, rates of birth and death, employment and wage (all of which reciprocally determine each other as coupled rates of change), together with thresholds of mutation (environmental carrying capacity, minimum survival income, etc): these are the parameters out of which 'economic individuals' are crystallized from - companies, trade agreements, tax rates, etc. The 'virtuals' here are not 'possibilities' which are then culled by a process of mutual limitation to give rise to actualities: the virtualities are fully real and they engender creativity at the level of the actual. Given these rates of change, given these singularities which define thresholds of tolerance, in what way should 'economic individuals' go about achieving whatever it is they do - in what manner do they become the individuals that they are ? — StreetlightX

But this is what my approach says. The individual is shaped by general dichotomies or coupled relations. These are the constraining boundary conditions on individual possibility.

The difference again is you then want to shoehorn the complexity of a dynamical hierarchical system into your prefab monisms.

To avoid talking about generalities that are Platonic ideas, Deleuze talks about them as virtual differences. But generality makes no sense except as complementary limits on being. And so - as you just did - generalities are identified using dialectical reasoning.

Then what is missing is the further category that is complementary to the general - vagueness. Which is where the power of the virtual to "be" pure difference (in the symmetry breaking form of differentiation~integration) would have to develop out of.

So virtuality fails on two scores from what I can understand of your definition. Its reality is already crisply developed in your telling. And it is pure difference (of some hand-waving brute kind) rather than the dynamical relation of differentiation~integration (with its bootstrapping logic).

Not 'symmetry-breaking' but problem-solving is the model for the process of individuation: — StreetlightX

That's fine for talking about complex being - especially life and mind which indeed is negentropically problem solving.

But if we are talking at the simplest possible level of physical existence, then as I described, symmetry-breaking is a self-limiting process (otherwise existence would disappear gurgling down its own fundament). Symmetry-breaking ends with the arrival of some new state of symmetry - some persistent equilibrium state where all further fluctuations are a matter of general indifference.

Evens: "The function thus takes shape gradually, progressively, as the singular points shift and glide relative to each other, tense and relax to alter their configuration. — StreetlightX

Yep. I noted Evens very shaky grasp of physics. His descriptions of chaotic atttactors is especially off-track.

But the least action principle is fundamental to the ontology of physics. If you want to call that "problem-solving", I bet you think that your brain does maths to work out how to catch a ball.

Individuation as symmetry-breaking in comparison is an incredibly basic and rather naive approach to the whole issue. — StreetlightX

I think you blew your credibility by quoting Evens describing conformational change as:

one would never suspect the whole network of differential calculations that take place in this instant.

what I wanted to convey is that on Deleuze's reading, the difference between these two functions is not simply quantitative but rather qualitative. What does this mean? Negatively, that the differential cannot be a magnitude or a quantity — StreetlightX

It means that the derived function is less constrained in adding a further dimension. And yes, it would be fair to dichotomise that in terms of quality~quantity. The quality is the "twist away" that this extra dimension of change represents. And that is quantified by some value which is a measurement of the degree of "twist".

Negatively, that the differential cannot be a magnitude or a quantity: at the point at which dy/dx = 0/0, — StreetlightX

But 0/0 is the limit. So the point never exists - except as an idea, a goal, a virtual object (in the way that singularities, event horizons, virtual particles, renormalised fields, etc, are all virtual objects in physics).

So all we can do is imagine the point as the virtual locus - a bare property-less location - to which we can then start artificially gluing dimensionality (the general or global quality that is constraint!) back on to.

0/0 of course refers to a 2D realm - the complementary extrema of the x and y axis. In a 3D realm, we would have to specify "the point" as 0/0/0. So yes, the idea of a point already - dichotomistically - invokes its own local neighbourhood. In a flat Euclidean space or Newtonian inertial frame, the lack of curvature indeed means the idea of the point in fact defines the global space out to infinity. And advantage of simplicity or linearity.

So 0/0 deals fully with one quality - location - if we are safe to presume that the point lives in a flat plane as its quantities (zero x change, zero y change) implies. And then that point can start being granted further qualities - like the energy of a velocity. It can be seen to be speaking about, in fact, a trajectory or line.

So 0/0 specifies a point that can stand for a line - if you add a velocity term. 0/0 certainly does not contain that "difference" itself in speaking only for some definite lack of change (qua a flat plane). All it does - for the sake of easy reductionist representation - is erase the world (the plane with its lines and locations) of all possible change so that change can now be added in, degree by definite degree, by hand.

Now, the point of this giant mathematical detour is that insofar as the differential is understood as this element of pure quality ('the cancellation of quantity in general'), it serves as the model for Deleuze's notion of pure relationality. — StreetlightX

But plainly the located 0/0 point has the quality of being located on an x/y plane. So change as an actual quality has been cancelled - it now measures zero in both directions on the change scale. But in reciprocal fashion, the quality of locatedness is at its maximum. It measures infinity (or reciprocally, any deviation from absolute and ideal locatedness is infinitesimal - too small to make a difference).

So this mathematical detour exposes some really sloppy thinking.

Again in Bowden's words: "even though dx is totally undetermined with respect to x, as is dy to y [[dy/dx can only be determined in relation to each other, without each each value is nothing], since the relation subsists, they are in principle determinable with respect to each other" (my emphasis). — StreetlightX

Again this is bogus as x/y specifies a relation - the quantifiable quality of being a fixed location on a plane. The generality is that the plane has infinite locations as an attribute. And that global attribute can be picked out as a point with arbitrary precision. The transcendent modelling machinery of x/y - the idea imposed on the plane in a sign relation - can be used to quantify the quality being claimed.

So even at the zeroeth derivative, there is a complementary dyad of quality and quantity - general concept and particular fact. The x/y definition of a quality waits to be cashed out as (3,7), or some other pair of actual co-ordinate values.

Then first, second, and further derivatives are the tacking on of further qualities, further degrees of freedom. And it takes tangents - new global co-ordinate frames - to give these further qualities (the many varieties of possible change) some definitely measurable character.

One point turns out to participate of a hierarchy of worlds of measurement, each with its own general quality of change (when measured against the point as a reciprocal absolute lack of change). We can tell they are qualities because we give them substantial sounding names (or terms) like "velocity", "acceleration", "jerk", "snap"....

What we can measure is always then "a thing". ;)

this model itself has a distinctive trait that allows Deleuze to set himself against a position that his entire oeuvre pitches itself against: the idea that what exists prior to individuation is an indeterminate generality which is then progressively differentiated though limitation or negation (which itself calls for a correlative abandonment of any hylomorphic model of individuation). In other words, Apo's entire metaphysical picture. — StreetlightX

It's great that Deleuze may offer a different view. That's why I am interested. But in the past, I've found it to be half-baked. And so far you have done a great job confirming that view.

But as to my own position - the Peircean one - you misrepresent it. Indeterminism is explicitly distinguished from generality. Again to remind you, one does not participate in the principle of non-contradiction, the other does not participate in the law of the excluded middle. So the distinction is clear just in terms of the way they "other" the standard laws of thought.

So the indeterminate is the vague and undivided. The general is instead the crisply dichotomised, the crisply symmetry-broken. So generalities are the emergent habits - the triadic relation that is what it is to be the actuality, the substantial, hylomorphically formed by there being complementary bounds to that existence (as in globally structuring constraints vs local material degrees of freedom).

I agree this is a sophisticated and subtle metaphysics. It tends to go over heads. But you need to understand it right if you don't want to look such an idiot when going off on your epic whinges against me.

On the contrary, he will argue that this pre-individual, undifferentiated sphere of being is entirely determined - and determined precisely in the qualitative form as outlined above: this is it's 'distinctive trait' that I mentioned. — StreetlightX

But there is a deep and obvious metaphysical argument against any such scheme that wants to found itself on stasis rather than flux. The primary fact of nature is that it has this direction - this irreducible broken symmetry - that we call time.

So space and matter are locally symmetric qualities. You can erase a spatial change by going back and forth, or erase a material change by introducing any particle to its anti-partner other. But time stands apart in being a globally broken symmetry. It has only the one direction - entropically downhill forever.

So that makes change a fact that exists "before" stasis. Metaphysics has to be done in terms of process or development.

That can be cashed out itself in terms of differentiation. But we would have to be talking globally general differention - as in the Big Bang story of a cooling/expanding. Deleuze is making the classical error of taking the humanly local scale of being - the Universe as it is for us right at this small moment in its history - as the metaphysically typical scale of description.

So right now, we humans clearly live in a world that is a big, dark, cold space, and yet also filled with this mess of concrete objects (like stars, planets, mountains, bacteria, iPhones).

The proper long run view of the Universe is that it is simply a cooling and spreading featureless bath of radiation to close approximation. At no point in its history does the small scum of "complex material objects" amount to anything significant or fundamental. We can literally quantify that level of insignificance. If all the objects in the visible universe were vaporised to radiation immediately rather than waiting for another 100 billion years, it would add only a percent or two to the sum total of its radiative being.

Anyway, we can see why Deleuze may again return metaphysics to a focus on "differentiation" in terms of highly negentropic local structure. It is of course what we humans must care about most for pragmatic reasons.

But in terms of metaphysics, its just dumb to take the negentropic exception as foundational. We already know from cosmology that entropy rules - it provides the arrow of time that is the primary fact of nature.

It's ultimately over the question of the determination of the pre-individual that the debate between me and Apo turns. Apo is unable to recognize - perhaps because he's never encountered it before - the idea of a determinate but undifferentiated realm of the pre-individual. — StreetlightX

It's more the case it is so transparently confused that I give the benefit of the doubt that it could be truly meant.

if you haven't noticed already not all of this post is for you TGW — StreetlightX

I'm sure he noticed that you only kept mentioning me. LOL.

I wasn't just being snide when I said earlier that the whole edifice is self-referential - it really is — StreetlightX

So you were being snide as well. Cool.

But the charge of being self-referential is hardly going to bother me when a bootstrapping self-organising
relation is what I seek from a sophisticated metaphysics.

Although reading Smith's essay and seeing your OP is basically a crib of that, Smith also relies on dichotomies to define the singular. Traditionally it might be opposed to the universal, but he is drawing on geometry to talk of ordinary vs singular points. And also phase transitions with their critical points.

So Smith is absolutely relying on dichotomies to define terms epistemically and also making the ontic connection to physical symmetry breaking with its critical point behaviour.

This makes your replies still more inexplicable.

To get back to the question you failed to address, your accusation to me was that I am unable to think the singular. What you meant by that has not been made clear.

I'm guessing you mean monism in some sense. And in the OP's case, the suggested monism is that of relations being all you need to account for becoming. You don't need "terms" (relata?). Dan Smith says terms are just "packets of variable relations" - whatever that might mean.

Anyway, I suggested how the Peircean would view this (surely one is alllowed to try to make sense of a strange and disjointed OP by seeing how it is similar or different to an established and respected metaphysics?).

So yep, triadic semiosis is a monism in the sense it is an irreducible whole. And even better, it is a developmental ontology - based on a becoming which is radical by most lights. And better yet, it is "pure relations". It doesn't begin with the usual existence of things like material substances or even necessary ideas. These regularities themselves must arise, or become, from the pure possibility of vagueness.

So Peircean metaphysics seems to fit the bill you describe. It is different just in being a highly structured or systematised view of becoming/relating. And so, as said, it achieves monistic holism only via an irreducibly complex sign relation.

But for some reason, rather that responding to my argument, you just immediately launched into a personal attack.

Perhaps now you will reconsider and actually explain what the difference might be if it exists. What am I not understanding about your notion of singularity?

Is it more that some thought that such a singularity would have to be ultimately simple and structureless? Yet then I would have to wonder about how a relation could be structureless. What could that even mean?

Even Smith seems to think terms or relata cash out as packets of variable relations. So in some way, they certainly can't be simples, let alone the same simple as the "singular" relation of which they appear to compose a part.

So your OP does spark a set of questions as it seems on the face of it to be patently self-contradicting. It would be nice if you could focus on legitimate questions and not go into further tirades of abuse.

Getting it off your chest yet? :D

Of course I would employ the same analytic tools on every question. It is what everyone does - they just call it being logical. I simply make the added distinction between the kind of logic that is good for thinking in terms of atomistic particulars and the kind of holistic or dialectical logic that is traditional at a metaphysical level of thought.

For some reason you take it terribly personally. And that will limit you professionally.

My point, though, was that being (identity) since it is grounded in the human eternalistic doing called 'logic' cannot be grounded in the human temporalistic doing called 'ontology', because in the latter there is no being that is not becoming, when we examine and think about 'what is'. — John

I'm not exactly sure but this certainly sounds the same as what I'm saying. :)

You may focus more on Geist or spirit - which I say is treating mindfulness as a substance rather than a process. I take the Peircean route that mind is the process of semiotic reasoning - it is an enactive relation with the world based on sign.

But in some sense, "eternal" reasoning or intelligibility is what results in the "doing" that is a materially actual world.

However when it comes to being and becoming, I take a (no surprise) tradic approach in which becoming seems to take two forms - vague potential and crisp degrees of freedom. And most talk about becoming - ever since Aristotle - has focused firmly on the modal and atomistic later, the definite possibilities that are the result of having become largely well-organised.

So vagueness is what begets being and becoming dichotomistically. That is a deep state of unformed and unlimited possibility that is pretty impossible to imagine (it seems).

But the world as we find it is grown up and set in its ways. It has a history that tightly constrains its raw possibilities. True vagueness has largely been dissipated.

Yet in becoming constrained to become Being, that also makes definite some remaining set of generic properties or freedoms that material objects can possess. So now from definite Being arises the kind of equally substantial becoming which is what Aristotle was talking about. It is actually possible that a horse is white because we are in a world where there are these definite states of being that can be thus combined with (relative) freedom.

So dichotomies simply serve to dispel vagueness. They get the party started by separating existence in complementary fashion. Then as crisp states of being, the separated can now be mixed and combined in free fashion. That sets up the secondary play of Becoming which is the evolution of complex Being.

And complex Being is an ascent that is unbounded. We can imagine minds even more powerful and marvellous than a mere humans. We can imagine subjectivities unlimitedly more ... intense.

Or is that too a bounded fact? Are their material constraints on such complex being? (Answer: yes. Too much computation concentrated in the one place is going to melt with its own heat, or exhaust all resources, or - failing that - eventually find its ontic limit in gravity. It will curl up and become a Black Hole when its massiveness can no longer be sustained.)

These two incommensurable kinds of reasoning cannot be grounded in ontology simply because one of them is firmly grounded in logic. — John

Personally I am much more on the idealist side than that. We can't ground belief in ontology at all. We can only truly know our own "ontic commitments".

I mean at least we know what our own (rationally expressed) ideas are, right? But beyond that, we have to leave it to the world to suggest we might be getting it wrong somehow.

This is just circular reasoning. What I'm asking is to ground the dichotomy in ontology, rather than to base your ontology in dichotomy, simply because dichotomy is logical. Why would you think that existence has to adhere to logic? And if not, then why assume dichotomy as a fundamental ontological principle? — Metaphysician Undercover

If you think that a modelling relation is circular - and that active cybernetic relation is a problem - then fine. I'm not explaining it yet again.

Whether or not it "works", is relative. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great. Relativity is all there is in the final analysis.

I don't understand how you can claim a dichotomous holism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. True that.

And I don't understand what you mean by "crisp existence". — Metaphysician Undercover

Again something I've explained to you ad nauseam. Things are crisp when they are sharp, definite, fixed, energy degenerate, etc. All the different ways of saying fully and unambigously individuated. (Which as I also keep saying, is a state that nature can only approach with arbitrary closeness, never in fact completely achieve - as bloody quantum theory makes bloody convincingly clear by now.) 8-)

This "need" you refer to must be justified, or else it's not a need at all, just an assertion. — Metaphysician Undercover

But dichotomies are justified logically. They are crisply defined as an operator or symmetry-breaking relation in being mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

So yes, one still needs to argue the case that something about the real world can indeed be best explained using this standard dialectic template. I have no problem with that.

But the validity at the level of logic is another matter.

As usual, the worst case scenario is that it might be an arbitrary scheme to impose on nature in being axiomatic. Maybe because there is such a vast gulf between phenomenon and noumenon, even our best tools may still be inadequate for approaching the thing in itself. And yet, if it works, it works.

You may claim that there can be no knowledge or understanding without dichotomy, and this may be justifiable, — Metaphysician Undercover

You are not listening because I frequently say that there is nothing wrong with reductionism, mechanicalism, atomism, predicate/modal logic, and other such tools of thought, from a pragmatic point of view. Where human purpose is limited to the "close at hand" - our own classical scale of existence - then this kind of general framework is indeed the most materially efficient way of thinking about nature. It shortcuts things by cutting out the very question of formal and final cause that a holistic view of nature is concerned with.

So sure, reductionism works to build laptops and cities. But by definition, it is not holism.

And my argument is that the two are in fact related by the reciprocity of a dichotomous relation. If we understand reductionism vs holism properly, each is "true" as the inverse of the other.

So one does not have to reject the other. Instead each represents a different natural limit on our modelling of nature. We have the choice of thinking either in terms of the particular or the general. And both are right - so long as we respect their appropriate scales of description.

I'm the only one around here who doesn't in fact get stuck in some monistic rut of thought. I can switch between reductionism and holism with ease as I have two complementary logics with which to do the work.

The problem of course is that the whole of human education is organised around a reductionist mentality because that is what is materially efficient. Virtually no one can get a interdisciplinary training in holism. You have to be at least post-grad to find your way into some obscure university institute that might pursue that explicitly.

And once you allow for the possibility of non-dichotomous existence it gives you a completely different perspective on the relationship between existing and knowing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well if you can explain what kind of crisp existence is not the result of a symmetry breaking dichotomy, go for it.

I've already asked SX to name a single generality that does not come trailing the "other" that is its context. He failed to come up with any term that could possibly stand alone.

Maybe you can do better?

the virtual - which refers here to the register of coupled rates of change - is precisely opposed to the possible, and in fact is more or less defined directly in distinction to it: — StreetlightX

Yep. So as I said. A limit is defined "directly in distinction" - dichotomously - with the immanently realisable or actually possible. Becoming ends in being. Or rather, more subtly, being is our conception of an absolute state, a limit, that can be approached arbitrarily closely without ever being perfectly grasped. That is why it might be called virtual in some metaphysical jargons.

Your conception of limits - as having ‘negative reality’ that constrains a general ‘vagueness’ could not be better described as exactly what Deleuze considers to be the entirely wrong approach to things. — StreetlightX

Well maybe Deleuze does say it is exactly wrong. But in my view it seems Deleuze who muddles things up now.

As far as I can tell - it is hard to make sense of what doesn't actually make sense - Deleuze wants to reduce existence to differencing or individuation. Which is fine. That is a constraints kind of thinking.

But then he doesn't get the need to remain dichotomous. The systems view is that a world forms by a reciprocal action of differentiation and integration. What is separated must also mix. Divisions must be globally coherent to persist in a general long-run fashion.

So at the top, constraints define sameness rather than (directly) difference. They encode an idea or purpose (ie: traditional formal/final cause) that thus - negatively - encodes also a matching idea of indifference. Constraints are semiotic relations which "know" what differences make a difference ... and so also define and ignore all the differences that don't make a difference.

They are a sieve that acts on reality. A sieve that separates the causes of actuality into the necessary and the accidental. So if "anything is possible" in an initial state of vagueness or symmetry, constraints emerge to organise this brute potential into a space of the lawfully possible. And laws have the character I just described. They define the regularity that is a necessity - the generality that is the form a local symmetry breaking must take. And then they leave to informal measurement the other part of existence which has been now rendered the contingent or accidental - the degrees of freedom which are the values we measure as some physical state of affairs and plug into our symmetry breaking equations.

So this is what seems missing if one seeks simply to invert the traditional formula where identity is defined in terms of "being similar (to an ideal)", to one of identity being "difference all the way down".

Both ways of looking at it leave out the actual reciprocal relation involved by trying to describe reality in monistic terms - as bounded by one kind of action, either cohering or differencing.

My way of looking at it - or the systems way, ably represented by Peirce and modern hierarchy theorists - instead explains how constraint carries within itself a limit on caring, in being actually (or virtually really) caring. In being a definite limitation on possibility - and yet vague potential being still unlimitedly fecund - constraint only exerts its influence so far on existence. There is point at which constraint doesn't care because it can't care. Its purpose has been met and the rest becomes just a sea of differencing that doesn't make a difference.

As for the Evens paper, the irony of complaining that I have a comprehension problem is kinda hilarious considering that the whole paper is geared towards treating the differential not as a question of limits, but as a question of generative production that is everywhere opposed to understanding the differential in terms of limits. — StreetlightX

But that is just your misunderstanding of calculus as others note.

This "differential" is indeed a mathematical singularity - that is a violence against nature. A singularity of that kind is "a bad thing" in that it becomes a Pandora's box of (vague) possibility. Physics knows it has a problem when it arrives at a singularity.

So what is really going on here is that the dynamics of geometry are encountering this useful fiction of the zero dimensional point - the point that does not exist. It is a limit on existence in being the ultimate possible constraint on dimensionality, and so - as I say - the very thing that cannot itself be real except negatively as pure idea. (We can certainly talk about zero dimensional points.)

So what you call the differential - the seed relation - is simply the unlimited possibilities of a zero dimensional fiction. A point could be tracing out any kind of trajectory. So it embodies infinite freedoms - once we imagine its zero dimensionality now inhabiting some actually dimensional space.

This mathematical device alllows us to start to cloak the point in derivatives of motion. Even though the point has no extent, we can place it within a hierarchy of motions. We can "add back" the constraints we have just abstracted away. We can grant the point a first degree of freedom - a velocity or constant motion. Then a second degree of freedom - an acceleration. A third degree - a jerk. A fourth degree - a snap.

So the "differential", as you call it, is just the ability to strip down dynamical geometry of "everything" that is an actual state of change to a bare potential - strip away all possible constraints to produce the radically vague, infinite possibility of a zero dimensional point - in a way that allows us to build reality back up in terms of localised degrees of freedom.

So reality, as we know, tends to energy degeneracy. Constraints over time remove meaningful degrees of freedom. The calculus then is a way for humans to imagine reality as a negentropic inverse of that. We can pretend reality is constructed bottom up by gluing together degrees of freedom. So - by adding energy - we can set balls rolling inertially, accelerate them with a constant force, accelerate that acceleration with a steadily increasing force, and so on.

But the mechanical nature of that way of creating real states of affairs is the reason why you wouldn't want to start taking it as the metaphysically basic picture of reality. So that is where you conception of the singular differential seems wildly astray. You are falling straight into the usual trap of understanding the point as a definite thing and not actually a singularity - a radical vagueness that can take on any crisp identity (or set of bounding constraints) because it has none itself.

And speaking of preaching - dude, if it were up to me I wouldn't engage with you ever, except you can't help but spew your babble in every thread I post in. Trust me, I have never once initiated a conversation with you except when you barge in telling me how I got it all wrong from the perspective of your ready-made monotone pseudo-system. The only one who incessantly rocks up time and time again to spread the gospel of symmetry-breaking and general-particular bullshit here is you. So if you feel hard done by feel free to fuck off any time - you won't exactly be missed. — StreetlightX

You have a hard life ahead if you can't tell the difference between a challenge to your arguments and an attack on your person. I've really tried to help you out in the past because I could see you were following a similar trajectory to me, so I thought it useful to point out folk like Peirce, Rosen, Salthe and Pattee who I found to be at the end of the trail (in my opinion of course).

Instead you seem to be so wedded to PoMo and its own realist counter-reactions that any mention that others have got there long ago sends you into a fit of anger.

But, ah well. At least its entertaining. ;)

it is incredibly apparent that I can imagine an inexistent object right now - namely a 2 x 2cm box. — Rawrren

So we can imagine what is not. We can be ready to act in every way that is "realistic" to something that could physically exist.

The reason we can do this is because of symbols. A symbol is a physical thing - some mark, a vocal noise, a gesture, a DNA sequence, a brain state. It takes up time, space and energy. But it also has a meaning that exists outside the physical world.

And so symbols give the power to think about what is not. We can think about the world as any kind of other. We can indeed think about the world from the generalised idea of being a self in a purposeful or pragmatic relation with the world.

So intentionality arises because we can act on the wish of the world being physically other than it actually is. Symbols, or a modelling relation, create a space for ideas that exist outside the physics of the world even though the means of being outside that world are always still unmysteriously physical.

Deleuze warns exactly against this conflation - of which you engage in every time - of what he calls the virtual with the actual, wherein the terms of the reciprocal relation are taken to be themselves terms rather than relations — StreetlightX

So you added this further idiocy. Explicit in my description of limits is that they don't "actually exist". Limits are what actuality can approach - with asymptotic closeness. But by the same token, actuality can never arrive at the limit. The limit is where existence ceases to be an intelligible possiblity.

Thus a limit is virtual - in having this kind of negative reality. The reality of a general constraint on actualisation or individuation.

But I guess you are just desperate to misrepresent my position. It can't be that your comprehension skills are that weak.

Its like the way you rail against my talk about constraints-based causality and top-down hierarchical order and yet preach to me about Bateson's cybernetic restraints and differences that are signs to a system.

It is boggling that you can't see they are the same thing using slightly different jargon.

But Evens was your cite. You brought up the maths of limit functions. So maybe you don't understand math, maybe you don't read your cites, or maybe you are just the perpetual Mr Angry. Probs all three.

Did I say that generals were terms or complementary limits on being?

Terms are a term you introduced. You might be thinking epistemically of concept formation or "names for things". I am thinking of an actual ontic process - symmetry breaking.

check out Aden Evens's paper on this: — StreetlightX

What a surprise. It makes the very case you so strenuously want to deny!

It points out that dy/dx is a reciprocal relation. It is entire to itself because it is a dichotomy. The x axis and y axis are orthogonal - mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive as dimensionality. Change is then mapped to points by allowing for a hierarchically organised cascade of constraints - the derivatives that internalise actual change by measuring it against the imagined tangent.

So the first derivative is just linear y/x. The velocity change in both axes is symmetric and so we start with each velocity a perfect image, the simplest possible reflection, of each other. We have a general symmetry waiting to be broken in some particular way. We await ... the swerve.

Now we see the line created by a moving point is curving or accelerating. And we need some means to measure this new kind of change. It looks like y is growing faster than x, or vice versa. The symmetry is being broken in one of its reciprocally defined directions.

So a new "lack of change" has to be imagined locally to give a secondary symmetry which the curvature breaks. Hence the tangent. The tangent is a line which is flat to the change. You can see the symmetry it re-imposes on the scene because the tangent has equal angles either side of where it brushes the curve. It is the new flatness from which there can be a definite degree of change.

And so it goes on. You can keep repeating the trick for ever higher derivatives. The differential is always tracking the same notion - the dichotomy of a change as revealed against a flatness. If you can hold one end of existence absolutely still, you can measure exactly how much the other end is definitely changing within a reciprocally exact reference frame.

We can say as apo does, that the property is related to the object in some way, such as habituation, or we can say that the property is related to the subject by predication, depending on how you categorize "property" — Metaphysician Undercover

But what I actually say is the predicate relation - as the "thing" that exists between "two other things" - is, as holism recognises, a relation between particulars and generals. Or particular things and general things - if one must continue to use a metaphysics that relies on entification.

So this is perilously close to transcendent Platonism in granting existence to abstracta, ideas, universals, etc. But only if one insists on reading my words (or holism generally) from an object-based, non-process, point of view. From the process point of view, there are no crisply singular entities. Everything reduces to vagueness. It takes triadic symmetry breaking - the kind of symmetry breaking that is itself asymmetric, divided by its particulars and generals - to produce persistent regularity, or the usual classical realm of (apparently existent) objects with (apparently inherent) properties.

Again, a property is a relation, just with an arity of 1 rather than 2, and everything said about it here could be said of properties as well. — The Great Whatever

But there is a distinction to be had between simply a reaction between two objects and the relation between an object and its world.

So a property is some propensity or habit of an object. And the relation is one of generality. There is something general about the world (a symmetry) that makes it possible for the property to exist as something the object "has" (as a broken symmetry, or particularity).

Let's say Bill is an obtuse sort of fellow. If that is a property, then it characterises Bill's general reaction to the world. It is a habit or regularity. And one defined by the world being - in some generally matching sense - not obtuse.

In Bill's world, it is at least expected that the majority have the property of being completely with it. A general state of symmetry is defined (in terms of the majority being in a similar state). And Bill can then "have" the property of obtuseness as a breaking of this symmetry that persists in every situation he seems involved in.

But if we just see Bill interacting with Fred, then it might seem that Bill is being frustratingly uncomprehending for some reason. However, is Bill really in possession of the property if we only see the one instance? It could be Fred who is simply a bad explainer. Any relation taken as a one off could be read in either direction. The relation is not yet one in which either Bill or Fred can be said to be owners of the relevant properties - either a general tendency to obtuseness or inarticulacy.

So (just as Peirce argued), a property or propensity has an arity of 3. A property doesn't exist except as a persistent habit, and so as a fact of a hierarchically organised triadic relation. A property is a relation between the particular and the general, which develops after a history of relating between the particular and the particular (the dyadic relation of Secondness). And then it all begins back in Firstness or Vagueness where there is only the monism of some brute quality - the possibility that on first appearance seems a bare particular, not yet in reaction with anything, let alone stablised to have a regular identity due to some generalised world history.

So yes. Frege certainly argued the reductionist version of logic - the one that constructs more complex relations by addition. But Peirce nailed the holist story where persistent particularity is instead the product of contextual constraints.