There will not be, and more importantly, cannot be a utopia on this planet. — Thorongil

There is no dealing with it at a social level, I agree with that. No perfect society — Agustino

But that still leaves the natural philosophy argument that "perfection" involves only a constraint on variety in pursuit of some global goal. So the goal could be achieved "perfectly" - as in some system level flourishing measured in natural terms, like growth or entropification - and yet individual variation in terms of achieving that goal is not a problem. It is not evidence of some imperfection or failure, but a necessary feature of it being a natural system we are talking about - the "requisite variety" that underpins adaptive tracking of said goal.

Now human society may have sufficient freedom to decide it wants to pursue loftier global goals - like happiness, freedom, creativity, religiosity, military prowess, or whatever. Within the constraints of physics and biology, it can self-define its own cultural utopia.

Yet still the same systems logic applies. The cultural system needs variety to actually be capable of tracking its goal adaptively.

So pessimism fails because it expects reality to be unnatural. Or supernatural. Perfections and utopias are defined in ways that are brittle and mechanical, not fluid and organic.

Randomness can be described equally well as either epistemic uncertainty or ontic indifference. We don't know which number the roulette wheel will roll. And the design of the roulette wheel has a symmety that makes it indifferent as to which number it rolls.

It doesn't make sense for you to classify x as the unknown unknowns and then start to tell me about all the known unknowns that constitute x. Besides which, even knowing there could be unknown unknowns constitutes the pragmatic beginnings of knowledge.

So in dividing knowledge this way - into y and not-y - you remain completely in the ambit of scientific reasoning as practiced by Peirce.

That experience happened in 1892; he wrote "A Neglected Argument" in 1908. — aletheist

But he does rely on that kind of direct experience of the divine - that firstness - in making the neglected argument. Yet a "community of minds" approach to pragmatic inquiry would logically require everyone to have the same kind of experience in repeatable fashion under the same conditions. And I'm pretty sure no amount of musement is going to see me finding theism an idea too wonderful not to believe.

So I do take the sceptical view here. I would look at Peirce's madcap business dealings and other evidence of his apparent unworldliness and poor social judgement. As a pragmatist, he could be very impractical - or just so brilliant that, like a lot of mathematical thinkers, he couldn't fit into the everyday.

Of course the neglected argument needs to be considered on its own merits. I'm just rationalising why Peirce could also write something I find so weak.

This is a popular claim in some circles, but it is refuted by Peirce's explicit and emphatic statement in three different drafts that he did not mean by God something "immanent in" nature or the three Universes of Experience, but the Creator of them and all their contents without exception. — aletheist

You may be right. You have made a particular study of this and I have skipped over it because life is too short.

But I don't see how this argument can possibly be consistent with the actual pragmatic/semiotic philosophy that Peirce produced. A does not lead to B. And that is what always most impressed me about Peirce - the completeness of how his central scheme connected up.

With all due respect, this is nonsense. Peirce was no doctrinaire Christian, but he was quite clearly a theist, and there is no evidence to suggest that he was intellectually dissatisfied with that position. — aletheist

But that is why I wish he had stuck with an atheist version and arrived at a through-going pansemiosis.

Newton, Einstein and plenty of other intellectual heroes all believed in God. But that helps my own case. The logic of nature still can speak through even when blinkered by personal theism. The method of scientific reason is that powerful.

So sure I wish Peirce was an atheist as the result of his style of reasoning. But also it doesn't matter. Peircean metaphysics is interesting to me primarily as it forsees the way modern science has to go.

Sure, and so do I. — aletheist

If your essay gets published, send me a link. Its been a long time since I read the neglected argument and you may have ideas how it makes better sense in the context of a metaphysics of semiotic self-organisation.

Abductive reasoning is always reckless! But as you say, then comes the deduction and induction which justifies it as the right thing to have done.

And the honest truth is I need to be pushed.

I'm basically so lazy I need to be made to justify my views by plunging back into the literature to make sure I actually understood what I thought I knew.

So there is a method here - even if it grates on some.

I make dangerously bold statements knowing that I'll really look stupid if I get the basic facts wrong. I make the stakes very high for myself so as to give myself no choice but to go do the homework and make sure I'm right.

But that's enough explaining. Everyone knows this is the internet and that naturally polarises people so they either excessively agree or disagree - and take it all completely personally either way.

If you want threads on the biophysics of substance or the thermodynamic imperative, I could start providing those again. But be careful what you wish for. ;)

Hey, you go on a philosophy forum and not just your arguments, but your premises too, get picked apart. Get used to it.

You made the assertion that science just systematises commonsense. I provided a counterargument. Now apparently I'm guilty of not just sitting here nodding in encouraging agreement???

I find myself tediously re-explaining the same things to you. Good job I enjoy rehashing the same story in various ways. :)

Firstly - at this level of metaphysics - the question of how could something come from nothing already faces the problem of being nonsensical and incoherent given that there is in fact something.

Nothingness could never be the actual state of affairs. It is bad enough that, logically, nothing can come from nothing. But also, it is a brute empirical fact for would-be nihilists that existence exists. And so talk about nothingness as something "actually possible" is redundant.

So that leaves metaphysics having to move on to more coherent lines of questioning.

Perhaps existence is just a brute something - accidental and eternal. There is no logic to it all - even though that is in utter conflict with the fact that the Universe is so strongly intelligible. Intelligible to the point that it conforms to the simplest mathematical forms we can imagine as being self-evidently true - such as the lie group symmetries which exactly explain by force of necessity why the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces have their particular observed character.

So it could all be brute eternal somethingness. Yet even that is in strong contradiction to the tightly mathematically constrained Cosmos we observe. And of course, a Cosmos that was also born as a "Big Bang" symmetry breaking or phase transition some 14 billion years ago.

So we move on - if we are logical - to the further, and most ancient, of metaphysical tales. It was possibility itself that was the symmetry that got broken by actualisation. A state of vague everythingness had "no choice" but to produce the regularities that would actively suppress the wild chaos - the undirected dynamism which made it a vagueness - and leave behind the orderly state of dichotomy (constraints and degrees of freedom) which we observe all about as scientists.

And why was this foamy apeiron stuff there? Where did it come from? — darthbarracuda

Stuck record. The fact that you still have to talk about Apeiron or vagueness as "a stuff" shows you are presuming a substance ontology and just don't get hylomorphism. You need to keep thinking harder.

Why this outcome? Was it inevitable? — darthbarracuda

Yes. The argument is that the Comos is the product of mathematical strength necessity. If you are going to break a symmetry, you wind up with only a single simplest way of doing that - like the circular U1 of EM I cited.

But another great advantage of a Peircean, or emergent constraints-based view of actuality, is that it explains chance too. The contingent, spontaneous or accidental is all the kinds of possibility which escape constraint. If a possibility is not being actively suppressed (through self-cancellation, as described) then it not only can happen, it must happen.

And again, this is exactly why quantum mechanics turns classical notions of the causal machinery of the Cosmos on their head. If a particle can self-interact, it must self-interact in every way possible. And using QM, we can sum those contributions to account for physical phenomena - like the magnetic moment of an electron - to a ridiculous number of decimal places.

So the idea that existence involves the suppression of possibility - and what can't be suppressed like that, is then exactly what exists - couldn't be more certain according to our best experiments.

That's the story at the fundamental quantum level. But the same logic applies to the development of Cosmic complexity - dissipative structure like life and mind in particular.

The general constraints in this case are encoded in the (still classical and mechanical) laws of thermodynamics. So no material system can exist that is not entropy producing on the whole. It is absolutely forbidden. The possibility is utterly suppressed.

And yet "on the whole" is a constraint that doesn't care if you gain a little negentropy for yourself by wasting a suitable extra amount of heat. You can do what you like within that limit.

And if something is possible, it must happen. Biological complexity doesn't just do the least amount of dissipation it can get away with. It just grows - like bacteria in a petrie dish - at headlong exponential rate until it bashes it head up against the limits of the possible under the second law.

You're still implicitly avoiding the question of Being: why does anything exist? Why something, rather than nothing? We can always ask "why"? — darthbarracuda

In fact I am explicitly demonstrating the logical hollowness of the question you keep insisting on asking.

You can always keep asking "why?". You certainly do that. But you are just asking the same old incoherent and nonsensical question based on bad metaphysics.

What do you make of Peirce's theism? It was unconventional, to be sure, but he still explicitly affirmed the reality (not existence) of God as Ens necessarium and Creator, most famously in his article about "A Neglected Argument." — aletheist

Difficult one. I see his theism as firstly a product of his environment. His family and the Massachusetts of that time was intensely religious. US academia was notorious in resisting Darwinism, atheism wasn't tolerated in John Hopkins faculty, etc, etc.

Also - as his career and state of mind disintegrated in later life - there was financial incentive to sound more theist as that was his last hope of publishing income.

And then his neglected argument was a very poor paper - quite un-Peircean in its lack of rigour. I don't want to blame the drugs and the mania, but his moment of ecstatic transport on entering a church at a particular low point may be both an important personal phemenological sign for him, yet clearly the weakest kind of evidence for the kind of scientific pragmatism he espoused.

So I discount the neglected argument as an argument.

For sure, if you contemplate the very fact of existence - both personal and cosmological - it does have to evoke some strong state of response. To exist is ... such a surprise ... once you also have a scientific point of view in which you know pretty much how complicated and arbitrary it all is, yet also full of direction and organisation.

But to then cash out that abductive sense of generalised awe as "God" seems such a cop-out. Calling existence divine or mindful - the much vaguer hypothesis of immanent pantheism - you could get away with. And that was more what Peirce, in his religious unorthodoxy, was really going for.

But in my view, if he had been less culturally influenced, and more faithful to his own metaphysical insights, he would have stuck with a strictly atheistic and anti-Cartesean pansemiosis. Even the mind and the divine would have dropped out of the equation so that existence would be understood to arise directly out of the generalised sign relation - formal constraint on material possibility that is the evolutionary "growth of Universal reasonableness", and nothing else.

So Peirce's actual metaphysics is holistic. He stood against the mechanicalism represented principally by Descartes (and the dualism of mind and matter this then forced an old school theist like Descartes into). Peirce was adamant that reality involved finality - a mind-like organising drive that emerged from material chance to produce an existence of stable habit.

And he argued this from science - as in his Monist articles. He already saw where thermodynamics was going in terms of self-organising complexity.

So the philosophy which argues rigorously is all to do with semiosis and providing a scientific view of teleology as immanently self-organising habit - existence as matter and sign.

Yet Peirce then does weaken - through both cultural constraints and personal needs - to pen some bad stuff about traditional transcendent creators.

If you read his objective idealism as a metaphorical pantheism - because. after all, actual full-strength pansemiosis is a really tough proposition to wrap your head around - then you can focus on his strong writing and ignore his weaker "crowd pleasing" efforts. Semiotics just doesn't lead to any conventional notion of a creating God.

But on the other hand, if you were the theistic scholars searching for pantheistic arguments by clearly the smartest philosopher of modern times, then Peirce could seem a god-send. Theists don't see the science that grounds pragmatism/semiotics - the fact that Peirce was arguing for a scientific organicism against the prevailing scientific mechanicalism. They hear some sympathetic ramblings that "put the scientific atheists in their place".

Of course, anyone would say I read my own biases into Peirce. But I can't find a strong logical argument in his writings for jumping from semiosis as an atheistic explanation for how existence can develop finality, to any normal notion of a divine creator, or even some kind of luminous, panpsychic, immanently divine, universal mind (as that kind of psychism falls straight back into the trap of treating "mind" as a dualistic Cartesean substance, and not a sign relation - a structuring process - at all).

Could be a mild case of it, I'm an audio engineer, but I was more referring to anechoic chambers where supposedly you can hear the sound of your nervous system because it's so quiet — Noble Dust

A true fact .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otoacoustic_emission

Spontaneous otoacoustic emissions (SOAE)s are sounds that are emitted from the ear without external stimulation and are measurable with sensitive microphones in the external ear canal. ... The relationships between otoacoustic emissions and tinnitus have been explored. Several studies suggest that in about 6% to 12% of normal-hearing persons with tinnitus and SOAEs, the SOAEs are at least partly responsible for the tinnitus.

Haven't I explained this to you before? If everything tries to happen at once, most of it will be contradictory and so will self-suppress its own existence, cancel itself away to nothing.

You are familiar with Feynman's path integral approach to quantum mechanics, and the least action principle of physics generally? You understand what cosmologists mean when they talk of the Universe as the result of collapsing the universal wavefunction?

Emergent order is basic to modern physical thought. As is the idea of things starting in a state of "maximum indeterminism".

Physics still hasn't managed to crack the quantum gravity issue to general satisfaction - explain spacetime via a wavefunction collapse of pure quantum possibility. But it sure is widely accepted that being able to explain time as an emergent regularity has to be part of any real unifying Theory of Everything.

...to me it's common sense knowledge that visits to the healer, with the culture's beliefs and expectations built into the encounter, sometimes make people feel better even if the healer's potions are made of sugar or wood pulp. — mcdoodle

But what is the source of this "commonsense" understanding of magical thinking? It can only be that you are benefiting from a tradition of scientific rationality.

So you are talking about a sense that was decidedly uncommon outside of a scientific metaphysics.

What science does is take such common sense knowledge and systematise the study of it, — mcdoodle

You invert the causality for reason of polemics. It was the systematic study of nature that has resulted in naturalism (rather than supernaturalism) becoming widespread commonsense in modern society.

Medical science for a long time had a physical, physiological bias, and resisted scrutiny of what have become known as placebo effects. — mcdoodle

Doctors are the most mechanical of thinkers. I found it quite horrifying as a biologist to start doing neuroscience and be exposed to what seemed the most primitive thinking about natural causality.

So yes, medical science does have a particular problem. It is after all a discipline that earns it keep by "fixing things". And treating the body or brain like a broken machine is the simple place to start on when you don't really understand the complexity from a deep biological point of view.

However again, even medical science is science in that in the long run it will be pragmatically self-correcting. So paradigm shifts are possible, and will happen if they deliver better outcomes.

Indeed there seems to a new phase of bright young researcher-practitioners who are trying to bring first-person accounts into the frame. — mcdoodle

Yep. A good doctor in the front line knows it is about dealing with people holistically. And modern medical training gets that too.

So your argument boils down to there being a problem with Scientism and an overly-reductionist, overly-mechanical, approach to understanding nature. And it is easy to agree that that mindset has become widespread - especially in popular culture.

But actual scientists are rarely that dogmatic. Even that arch-reductionist, Francis Crick, replied that he pushed his more wacky hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness simply in the spirit of putting up ideas that others could actually knock down.

And my position remains that all phenomena - including ethics and aesthetics - are expressions of natural principles, hence comprehensible by the methods of scientfic reason. Which to be precise, is the triadic cycle of abductive creative guessing, deductive theorising, and inductive confirmation, as outlined in Peircean pragmatist epistemology.

So indeed, one method to rule them all. :)

However Apeiron doesn't seem to answer anything either, since it doesn't exactly explain why anything started at all. — darthbarracuda

But Apeiron - when understood as primal chaos - says that everything is already happening. It doesn't need starting, because it is already an infinitely rowdy state of dynamism. What it needs is taming. It needs settling by the emergence of stabilising regularities.

Of course we then also modify the rather substantial understanding we would have of this ferment of fluctuation. We have to see that time itself is part of the emergent order. So the chaos is a chaos of possibility rather than actuality. A chaos of form and direction as much as matter or reaction.

So the whole notion of "starting" becomes vague when talking about vague beginnings. There is no "before" before before itself becomes an actuality in being a meaningful distinction in terms of talking about "after".

Personally, I discount Aquinas as he latched on to what was most wrong about Aristotelean metaphysics - the idea of the need for the further thing of an unmoved mover.

Self-organising organicism officially starts with Anaximander's story of the differentiating and integrating Apeiron. So in the beginning was vagueness, not a divine first cause.

The dichotomy is thus between those who believe existence is change created against a static, eternal, backdrop and those who take the process view that existence is enduring regularity emerging out of chaotic variety.

In the beginning for one is stasis. For the other, flux.

So Aristotle got the emergent story right - how existence looks once it has developed a mature causality. But his story on causal origination was confused (or rather his writings were cherry-picked for what fitted the needs of Christian belief best).

if you're talking about a metaphorical supercomputer creating the world, you're basically talking about God. It's just a crappy metaphor. — Noble Dust

Or maybe it exposes the essential incoherence of that familiar notion of a creating God?

It seems nuts that anyone would want to create our flawed world as some kind of "interesting experiment". Why would any super-being - alien, computational, or divine - give a stuff about doing something like that?

So if the computer simulation explanation seems lame as it lacks any sufficiently high-minded motive, then maybe it is a metaphor that focuses attention on what seems lame about a monotheistic creator.

At least the ancient Greeks imagined their gods to be a bunch of binary divisions that naturally led to love, strife, and general gameplaying. And in the beginning was a chaos that god-hood brought the basics of organisation to.

I was wondering if we are forgetting a possibility that theism and atheism may converge into the same conclusion after figuring everything out about the universe. — FLUX23

The argument is over causality - what could cause existence? And both conventional theism and conventional atheism flounder in the same way. They think about causality from the point of view of a reduction to material and efficient cause. They both want to put formal and final cause in "the mind of the maker" - the only difference being atheists see that maker as a human person, theists see it as a supernatural person.

Where theism and atheism could then start to converge is by starting to understand formal and final cause in terms of metaphysical naturalism. Design and purpose would become immanent features of nature - the machinery of self-organisation.

That "full four causes" approach to metaphysics has a long tradition - starting with Aristotle. And it has flickered along in the background of thought ever since - showing up for instance in the organicism of Needham and the systems science of von Bertalanffy. Also of course, Peircean semiotics.

And you do indeed find both theist and atheist scholars having a lot in common once they start talking at this level.

But still, I think theists have much more to lose in this four causes resolution. It is much easier for atheists to give up their conventionalised notion of materiality than it is for theists to give up their conventional notion of the divine or spiritual.

Or at least, for the scientist, it is expected that their fundamental ontic conceptions will change in the light of better evidence. For the religious, the game is based on faith and being "other" to that very practice of methodological reasoning.

Yep. Sort of.

The argument would be that accelerating entropification would be the most general of all imperatives - the one rule that all existence is driven by. But constraints aren't absolute. They irreducibly have their associated freedoms. So humans - as the most complex and rationalising form of dissipative structure - can do "whatever they like" within that most general constraint.

Every material action of humans just has to be entropy producing by physical law. No perpetual motion machines allowed.

But for example, it is open that a choice could be made to produce as little entropy as possible. So one could withdraw as much as possible from the race, so to speak.

On the other hand, if you actually measure the collective material actions of humans, our entropification activities are on an exponential curve. All the evidence points at us in fact having the goal of maximising our global rate of entropification.

So a few people might form a personal goal - like having the smallest ecological footprint possible. However that so far has put no visible brake on humanity as a whole.

So the thermodynamic imperative is alive and well. Burn, baby! Burn!

Yep. It will keep on going in the wrong direction. The definition of disoriented.

And they go off in whole groups. There were 15 in the group that walked past me.

So you can believe a film-maker or you can believe a scientist. But your "video evidence" is a joke to me.

So I see a disoriented penguin in Herzog's film.

A few years ago I was standing next to a penguin researcher when a whole gaggle of Adeles came waddling past us in the wrong direction in McMurdo Sound. They looked happy enough even though the researcher said there goes another lost bunch headed towards certain death.

Animals are always wandering off because it makes sense to explore the world for new territories. Especially in a changing environment like sea ice where a randomly calving shelf can float in and block off your feeding ground that summer.

Still regurgitating his factoid?

Such a separation is only a beginning in the sense that it is the end of the old and the beginning of the new. So we must account for the old then. — Metaphysician Undercover

Being the beginning of (space)time, it is also the beginning of the dichotomy that we call old vs new, past vs future, change vs stasis.

To talk about things as they were "before" the time there was a "before" is nonsensical. Or at least, only a logic of vagueness - which talks about things "before" the principle of non-contradiction applies - can make sense of such a statement. :)

But if that is the case, how is it that the thing which is prior to the co-dependent whole and parts, the symmetry itself, not actually a whole, a whole with no parts, which later becomes a whole with parts? — Metaphysician Undercover

What's the problem if the whole with no parts is formally equivalent to the parts with no whole? That's what vagueness - as standing prior to the PNC - says.

The article of course does not mention the actual mainstream hypothesis of modern biology - which is that life arises as an expression of the more general purpose of the second law of thermodynamics.

People now go out to measure the temperature of the air above rain forests and other complex ecosystems these days. The hypothesis is quite testable. It can shown that life is driven by the imperative of maximising entropy.

Co-dependence is unacceptable because it produces an infinite regress with no beginning. Therefore the assumption of co-dependence is a negating of the beginning rather than a looking at the beginning. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nonsense. Instead of having to start with either a whole, or the parts, things start with the more foundational step of the beginning of their actual separation.

So the triadic part~whole relation goes from being something dormant as a pure possibility to something which actually starts to happen - a division that becomes crisply developed as it is self-sustaining due to feedback.

So yes, this still leaves metaphysical questions. But it kills the kind of mechanistic regress you are talking about because the first step is already irreducibly complex in being a symmetry-breaking relation. There is a concrete limit on any "beginning" which the "perfect symmetry" of vagueness marks.

As soon as you have the slightest bit of the one (wholes, constraints, global "formal" organisation), you also must have already the same degree of its other (parts, degrees of freedom, local "material" action).

Dialectical logic gives you no choice about this. Every action has its reciprocal reaction. Every thesis is intelligible only in the light of there being its antithesis.

Varela in 'The Embodied Mind' made an impassioned plea for scientists to open themselves up to first-person narrative, but it seems to have fallen on stony ground so far. — mcdoodle

You can blame the scientists. But it is the scientists who actually investigate and support the idea of a placebo effect. Its a huge area of research.

Who you really ought to blame are the public who are so susceptible to woolly mystic beliefs - like that antibiotics can fix their viral infections. Or SSRIs can take away their depression.

You could also give big pharma a kicking. It is in their financial interest to foster a mechanistic view of pharmacueticals.

So your fingering of "science" as the problem could hardly be wider of the mark. Science actually pays regards to the evidence in forming its views. You would never have heard of the placebo effect unless it had come to light as a result of research.

I go back to your example of a vortex in water. You can't just scoop out a vortex. Similarly I have a hard time visualizing what a constraint is supposed to be independent of a material basis. — darthbarracuda

So are solitons and electron holes material things in your book? We can use them for computing. They obey the quantum rules of particles.

And for the millionth time now, this is not about imagining reality independent of a "material basis". Why do you find a hylomorphic understanding of substance so difficult?

The difference is in the view one takes of the material side of the deal. For you, the material basis is itself substantial. Matter is already matter - which begs every important metaphysical question.

But my view explains materiality as emergent from contextual constraints - formal and final cause. It is the limitation on possibility that crystallises substance as something "physically actual".

Protons and electrons exist because the cooling/expanding Cosmic context freezes them out as expressions of broken gauge symmetries. They have actual mass and move about at less than the speed of light because the further global Goldstone symmetry is broken by the Higgs mechanism.

So modern particle physics says the basic substance of existence - quarks and leptons - are made substantial by material possibility (pure radiation) being trapped into formal regularities (broken symmetries) which they can no longer escape (because the Big Bang has removed that freedom with its cooling and expanding).

If you want to "visualise" a constraint, just think of the symmetries that underlie the standard model of particle physics. As forms, they have a logical necessity.

You can't get simpler than the U(1) symmetry of electromagnetic charge - the symmetry of a circle - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_group

So that puts an irreducible limit under Cosmic existence. If you have a reduction of degrees of freedom going on of the kind that produces particles as the minimal possible states of excitation, then EM winds up being the bottom level particle property for the very good reason that nothing could be simpler.

And yet even that simplicity still has a structural complexity - exactly as Peirce's triadic view of relations argues.

So in any form of existence which involves the kind of constraint on action which produces an organised dimensionality (ie: a universe), the realist thing is the fact of mathematical form. Matter can try to do whatever the heck it wants. At the Big Bang, matter fields could fluctuate in ways to contain every kind of symmetry-breaking particle. But as a context develops - as the Universe expands and cools - then only the simplest modes of being can actually survive. And so everything reduces down to whatever mathematical form says is the simplest kind of ... mathematical form.

If I sound frustrated, its only because the first time we corresponded, it was about ontic structural realism. You seemed to love the idea - yet clearly reading the Ladyman/Ross book has left zero impression on your thinking.

Fraid not. But there is now a real industry of secondary sources. So things are miles better than even a decade ago.

Cheryl Misak is good for a summary that puts him in context. She's done a new book as well as papers.

Peirce's populist articles for The Monist are a good introduction in that they clearly written.

But because Peirce never summarised his mature ideas in book form, only left a heap of notes that went unread for decades, there just isn't a canonical text that everyone can focus on.

You just keep repeating the only question that makes sense from your own reductionist ontology. What is it made of, what is it made of, what is it made of?

As explained, a constraints based view of materiality sees matter being produced via the limitation on possibility. So solidity arises as freedoms of actions are removed.

This is why Peirce notoriously described matter as effete mind. When spontaneity is deadened by the accretion of constraints, you wind up with what we call matter.

So what is material/efficient cause made of? Top down constraints on possibility.

Holism requires material cause too. The point is that there is always more than just that.

The fact that you have to resort to arguing your case in terms,of an engine demonstrate that you are only thinking mechanicallly and not organically.

A clue: machines are designed to operate only by efficient/material cause. Formal and final cause is engineered out of them so that these facets of reality are made a matter of human free choice.

So try again with my earlier example of scooping a vortex out of a flow in a bucket.

Yep. Self-awareness is narrative and hence propositional and deductive. It is essentially backward looking retroduction. If I just pushed that button, I must have made that decision.

So humans have an extra level of socially constructucted rationalising habit, based on language, that we use to structure experience - force it into rationalistic patterns that can account for everything in retroductive fashion. And also of course, a habit which we also use to control the body and its responses by setting up the novel states of constraint to which it must respond. So we can tell ourselves not to push that button until the light also turns green, or whatever other narrative constraint we might have reason to construct.

And then there is the biology of consciousness itself. The brain is an inductive predictive engine. It is always forward modelling to predict the future - predict the constraints on behaviour that will be coming from the direction of the lived environment.

So in terms of temporarility, the biological brain is pointed inductively at the future. It doesn't dwell on the past. It can't even dwell on the past. Animals don't reminisce. And the present only exists as the sum of a history. It forms the constraints that are the basis for future predicting. What has happened is done, but it in turn leaves open new possibility - the possibility into which the animal miind can creatively insert itself as an imagined player.

And then humans developed their new level of semiosis that allowed them to step outside of this natural flow and reconsider it in reasoned fashion. Through the structure of narrative, we can talk our way backwards in time to create a reasonable story about the past. That then gives us - or rather our cultures - the opportunity to build a quite different kind of psychology on top of the neural one. We can learn to think of our selves as "free willed, autonomous selves" ... who then can creatively insert themselves into the rather more abstract workings of a social community as an imagined player.

So the habit of retroductive explanation gives us the ability to now construct our own internal states of constraint. We can regulate our behaviour in a way that animals just can't. We can construct this thing of a personal identity, a collection of meaningful memories, a series of persistent purposes ... all done in our own name, but actually just reflecting our social construction.

Awareness is entropic induction. Self-awareness is negentropic retroduction. One looks continually to the future and runs down whatever is the easiest path. The other learns to act from "the past" and instead starts to devote itself to larger projects - the negentropic needs of the society which wants to shape "selves" as its tightly-regulated component parts.

So your claim is that the existence of the parts precedes the whole, in a manner of vague existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

I've said it hundreds of times now. When things begin, both parts and wholes would be maximally vague. It is in their co-dependent arising that they together dispel the mists of unformed possibility to revealed their mutually supported actuality.

But it is also true that part and whole have their most definite state of existence on quite different spatiotemporal scales. So what you are seeing is what you would expect to see as an observer existing inside what is happening.

To you - looking at the story from the middle ground scale - the parts coalesce first. The whole is present largely as a desire to be achieved in the long run future. So the parts shed any vagueness fast and the whole remains vague for the longest possible time.

But as I say, this is an optical effect. It is what you see when you regard creation from some scale intermediate between its local and global limits. Of course the parts look small and definite "by now", while the whole looks large and mysterious, still to make itself absolutely clear to us.

Hey, that paper is in fact a pretty decent defence of Panpsychism. But you are right. Being a pansemiotician myself, I would fundamentally disagree with it. :)

So the guts of my objection would be that nothing can be solved by positing a dualism of substance. In metaphysics, progress is always achieved by discovering the formal complementarity at the heart of every phenomenon. And arguing for two kinds of substance is making a brute claim about there being two types of the same general thing (a substance) that have no particular reason to be locked into a mutually formative interaction.

So positing a microphysics of matter plus mind cannot work. It has no internal logic. There is nothing to show how the existence of one requires the existence of the other. There is no holism or unity that binds these two ontic catergories. This is Panpsychism's essential problem. Matter and mind can't be shown to be the two halves of one whole, the two aspects of the one symmetry breaking.

With pansemiosis on the other hand, we are talking about the symmetry breaking that is matter and sign (or matter and symbol). And now the two categories are related as a symmetry breaking dichotomy. The two-ness is a fact of logical necessity rather than merely a brute and arbitrary claim.

Materiality is all about material degrees of freedom - the entropy to be dissipated. It is physical dimensionality.

But then the very fact of materiality makes room for its complementary opposite - information or the immateriality of symbolised meaning and sign relations. As I have argued in another thread, the universal expressiveness of a language is due to an extreme constraint on dimensionality. When materiality is reduced towards the ideal of a zero-D point - as it is with any serial code - then this active lack of materiality becomes the birth of the something different, the something opposite, that is the "immaterial" realm of symbols. Or negentropy.

Of course the play of signs, the play of symbols, still has to obey the second law. It takes work to run a computer or brain. Both must produce a lot of waste heat. But from the point of view of the play of symbols, the entropic cost of every bit, every operation (like executing a program or uttering a thought) is effectively the same. There is always a cost, but it is immaterial in not making a difference to the computation or the brain activity.

So the pansemiotic view can argue it's merit on first principles. Matter and symbol are formally complementary in that the existence of one makes the existence of the other a necessity. You couldn't have a material world and not then have "immaterial" sign relations with that world as a logical possibility.

So in general you start by arguing that reductionism is a failure - its reliance on a rather mystical notion of emergence being a symptom of that. I of course agree. Emergence is always itching to be reduced back to supervenience in the mouths of reductionists. A reductionist only wants to believe in an emergence that is sanitised by quote marks.

And then you argue that if monistic reductionism fails, then maybe mind - that horribly ill defined notion - is the second substantial ingredient that must be discovered in the microphysics. And yes, if all else fails, perhaps we have to accept such a brute fact posit.

But all else hasn't failed. Science already has a science of sign. It is perfectly normal in neuroscience or biology to treat the phenomena of life and mind as sign relations with the material world.

And the matter~symbol dichotomy has the required Metaphysical validity. Sign - living in its zero dimensional realm of digital bits - can be shown to be the outcome of material constraint taken to its physical limits. Negentropy is defined as the inverse of entropy.

The rapid emergence of an information theoretic approach to "everything" - microphysics and cosmology too - shows that this is the universal Metaphysical duality that is working. Information encodes the Janus face relation between sign and matter. Information theory describes entropy as both epistemic uncertainty and as ontic degrees of freedom. The two sides of the deal are now mathematically joined at the hip. Their essential complementarity has been recognised as a quantifiable quality - the holy bit. ;)

But Panpsychism has not fared so well. There is still no metaphysics, let alone physics, connecting the brute and disparate categories of matter and mind. As a possibility, it was raised a century ago and has proved a complete dud.

Pansemiosis, on the other hand, has become science's new dominant paradigm - even if cashing out all that which is implied is still a work in progress across the span of the sciences.

So now you recognise that to "have a collection" one must add the further thing of "a container for the parts"?

Cool. You have conceded my point in regards to taking a set theoretic approach.

But this is metaphysics, and metaphysics is an area in which all is speculation and belief. — mcdoodle

But demonstrably, historically metaphysics is founded on the assumption that nature is intelligible, rational, logical, organised by mathematical patterns.

It is then a speculative turn - only possible given this positive central thesis - that nature might be other.

I said part or aspect to try to bridge the obvious gap between my holistic point of view and the reductionist language which DC wants to conduct the conversation in. So understand my use of "thing" as part of the same effort. Start by presuming it is being as neutral as possible in terms of its ontic commitments.

Good luck with your creative mysticism - which you seem to have faith in without even being able to justify it as a method.

Meanwhile scientific reasoning - as defined by Peirce - started producing extraordinarily powerful insights from the moment the ancient Greeks first got going with it.

So no surprise that the "two dimensional polarity" of Metaphysical dialectics and hierarchical organisation are what folk stick with. It's success has been "unreasonably" spectacular. We know how and when the Universe began, how and when it will die.

The standard model of particle physics is based on the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking. Relativity likewise is derived from imposing a demand for general co-variance on nature - a global spacetime symmetry.

So it is a particular branch of maths that does the heavy lifting. And all physics reflects its essential natural logic.

You could consider symmetry and symmetry breaking as ur-physics rather than just a branch of maths. It is the "realty" that breathes fire into any equation, even QM. (And note an equation is a statement that encodes a symmetry, or unity, in terms of the components it can be broken into.)

In language evolution, the puzzle was why did we all not end up using sign language - hand gestures are naturally more expressive and quicker to learn than making croaky noises. The has been the fad of signing to your kids as it gets them communicating sooner.

But again, the restrictions of articulate speech - the way a serial flow of words is more restrictive on the forming of thought - is in fact its advantage. In filtering out more of the potential semantics, having to make a single step at a time really focuses the meaning that gets expressed. It makes every sentence special that you chose to say just that and not all the other things that could have been said (and at the same time too in a language with higher dimensionality).

As the dimensions of written language increase its functional repertoire should (I think) increase. — TheMadFool

Consider again the essential trade-off. Using SX's example, you could create a language for talking about organic chemistry using 3D plastic molecular models. And we already do. You can buy colour coded balls to represent the different atoms, little sticks to represent the atomic bonds. We can thus speak about organic chemistry in a fully dimensional fashion that conveys essential information better than flat drawings or serial verbal descriptions.

But being so physical, there is not a lot else you could ever talk about with this particular language.

On the other hand, a binary code able to express a pattern of Boolean switches has an expressiveness that is computationally universal. It is a language that can be used to talk about "anything" because it is not bound by the physicality of any thing.

A computer language can code for a 3D virtually reality display that simulates little plastic ball and stick models of molecules - and add animation to give the further dimension of action in time. But a second later, the same computer speaking the same binary code could be "talking" about any other 4D virtual reality one could possibly imagine.

So fewer actual dimensions for a language results in a greater power to then speak about (that is, reconstruct) any number of dimensions.

Note how if you really do what to imagine 4, 5, and n-dimensional worlds, you need to speak the even more pared down language of maths. Less is more because the simplest building blocks have the fewest constraints on their freedom of combination.