Yes, but what does this belief contribute?

What breakthroughs has it lead to?

Also I pointed out that if we can't know what is real because everything is a mind artifact then we can't know that those artifacts don't model reality accurately. — m-theory

The important contribution this makes in modelling theory is that it makes it clear that models involve a reduction in information. If our goal is to make a sketch that captures the essence of a person or scene, the best artist is the one that can do so in the fewest and simplest strokes.

So the "accuracy" is not about the faithful reproduction of all the available information. That is a simulation rather than a model. Instead, what is "accurate" is the reliabilty with which a model allows the world to be traversed in terms of a purpose.

So epistemically, the purpose shaping the modelling relation is itself subjectively separate from the world. And then the relationship has the goal of being efficient - reducing the information involved to the bare minimum for the sake of reliable habit. The model wants to minimise its need for any physical interaction with the world - a single act of measurement to get the equations rolling is ideal.

The world then is whatever it is - some set of constraints that are reliably encountered.

Thanks for your appreciation.

Fodor's claim is understood as which Mentalese is prior to natural languages. English sentences have no meaning, but Mentalese gives meaning to them. — mosesquine

The problem with this kind of old fashioned cognitivism is that it is based on a simplistic computational model of mind and reasoning where states of information are mapped to states of information.

The idea is that - just as with a mechanical computer or Turing machine - input arrives, it gets crunched, an output state is displayed. So thought and conciousness is seen as data processing that results in states of representation ... setting up the homuncular question of who gets to see, understand and consciously experience these output states?

The best counter position to this computationalism is an enactive or ecological view of the mind/brain, especially when fleshed out by a biosemiotic understanding of language use.

Basically it starts with an inversion of computationalism. Instead of minds converting inputs to outputs, minds begin by predicting their output state and using that to ignore as much input as possible.

If you already know that the door knob isn't squishy jelly, the door swings away from you rather than slides up into the roof space, and beyond is the bedroom you've seen a million times rather than the far side of the moon or something else unpredictable, then you can ignore pretty much everything to get from a to b. You filter the world in a way that only leaves a tiny residue for a secondary, more intense, attentional processing.

So it starts with a back to front logic. The brain begins in a state of representation - a representation of the world already being ignored and handled automatically in a flow of action.

In terms of computation, it is a forward modelling or constraints based process. A case of Bayesian inference. The brain is looking at the word in terms of its predictable regularities or signs. By filtering out the noise of the world in predictive fashion, signal is produced automatically as "that which wasn't so predictable".

If you are wandering in the woods, you aren't really taking in the tres and leaves. They become an averaged, expectable, flow of sensation. But a sudden animal like movement or noise will catch your attention. And any bark, squeak or squawk will really pop out as a sign of something demanding closer attentional focus - an effort to constrain your resulting uncertainty by seeking further information.

So you don't need mentalese to construct chains of thought. The brain is going to have a natural flow of predictions that then focus attention on the unexpected. And that focus in turn only has to reduce future states of uncertainty.

A bird squawk in the forest may be dismissed as soon as it is understood as a sign of what it further predicts. But a bark may create ongoing uncertainty.

Anyway, the first thing is to turn the basic notion of information processing on its head, Brains operate as uncertainty minimising devices. They don't start with nothing and build up to something. They start with a well founded guess and wait for the world to force an adjustment. And even the adjustments come fast and easy if the world is being read in terms of signs for which there are already established habits of action.

If a dog sees its owner make a move to put on his shoes, it may recognise the sign that spells walkies.

Which brings us to language and how it functions as a further level of syntactically structured constraints on human thought processes.

The animal brain is designed to work in the flow of the moment, seamlessly predicting its world by reading the available signs and so always arriving at a state of mind that has minimal uncertainty.

But words can act as symbols - a higher, more abstract and spatiotemporally displaced, level of sign than indexical or iconic signs. So words can be used to produce constrained states of mind that are available "off line", or freely at any place or time.

If I mention "that koala bear the size of a buffalo swinging on a palm tree", then you (and I) can form an anticipatory image of such a thing. Suddenly it would be a small surprise to actually be in the presence of such an experience. Only details would differ - like the facial expression of the giant koala as it swings, or the amount the palm tree bends.

So the point is that an anticipatory model of brain computation does most of the heavy lifting. You don't need a mentalese that pre-computes the thoughts that then get translated into overt speech. There just is no such input/output computation going on. Instead, like any animal, we can do a great job of predicting the world and reacting appropriately on an uncertainty minimising basis.

And then along comes the secondary skill of structured language which does have a computation-like grammatical structure. On top of a feedforward mind, we impose a cultural habit of explaining our thoughts in logical, sequential, fashion. We imposed a causal tale of subjects, objects and verbs - short tales of who did what to whom - on the events of the world.

So the brain computes in one direction. Language then encodes computation in the opposite direction. It allows us to do the something new of constructing piece by piece, word by word, a reasoned chain of thought or state of mental imagery in a suitably trained mind.

So talk of mentalese sort of intuitively gets at the fact that there is a rightful brain level of "computation" going on. There is thought separate from the words.

But the cognitivism or representationalism of Fodor's era got it utterly wrong in thinking the brain was an input crunching machine. The cognitivists rejected the connectionists and neural networkers who argued the brain instead had this feed forward, Bayesian reasoning, design.

But then the connectionists were weak on the difference that language makes. So it takes a full modern biosemiotic approach to the issues to get both sides of this story tied together.

There are plenty of examples in nature where abstractions occur.

Golden ratio, fibonacci sequence, and an animal gives birth to a litter of 7. — m-theory

The first two are proper constants of nature - nature being ultimately dissipative or growth based processes.

To call them abstractions is misleading as the ratios involved could not be more physically real as limits on rates.

The 7 in a litter is a stochastic process so the number is not special in a universal sense. It is just related to some particular genetic constraint.

Good luck with your tale of infinite regress.

And who commands/institutionalises the individual commanders. Cmon, this ain't so hard.

Yep.

The point though, is that intention is the property of the individuals, it does not come "from the whole", it comes from the individual parts. — Metaphysician Undercover

You are confusing what was a simple point.

Under hierarchy theory, the whole is more than the sum of its parts because it has the power to make the parts less than what they were. The whole constrains the parts with a common purpose and this limits the freedoms they may have "enjoyed".

If you believe this is not how armies are, then you must have no clue about military life. Why do you think boot camps were invented? To aid recruits in discovering their truest selves? ;)

The army's capacity to "turn people" into "uniform components" is dependent on the willingness of the individual to be turned this way. — Metaphysician Undercover

It may help if the individuals don't actively resist. But the army is what has the idea of what it needs the individuals to be. Point one. And the reduction in behavioural scope shows how components are created by a selective force subtracting degrees of freedom. Point two.

Following your example then, if it is true that wholes actually "shape those parts to serve higher order purposes" they must do this through the intention of the part. — Metaphysician Undercover

But the intention comes from the whole and it's common goal, as you just agreed. So the most you can argue for is a lack of effective resistance - some other goal in play. Materials only need to be pliable.

One could believe anything constrained by demands for consistency, too. — Terrapin Station

And if one's beliefs are constrained by empirical correspondence AND rational coherence, then one has truly arrived at the pragmatist's nirvana of it getting as it good as it gets.

Not everyone has the same views on what's consistent, and folks can rationalize any conceivable belief. — Terrapin Station

Yep. You need empirical test too. But logical coherence is a good place to start.

No--I don't think it would make any difference if space and time were discrete rather than continuous. — Terrapin Station

Being unconstrained by any demand for consistency, one can indeed claim to believe anything.

the form of the particular is the essential properties as well as all the accidentals. — Metaphysician Undercover

But my constraints approach to form would simplify this so that particular forms are simply more constrained versions of general forms. So even a particular form is "all essence". And then accidents are simply aspects of form which are a matter of indifference. They are "particulars" that don't particularly matter.

So you in fact get the largest number of possible accidentals under the most general forms. Generality can afford to be the least fussy - by inductive definition.

That is why the most general law or telos of nature - the second law of thermodynamics - winds up being the "law of the accidental". It is all about randomness and disorder.

Particular forms have to be the most particular, by contrast. A crucifix is a particular form. It can still vary a fair bit but you have to have at least two lines crossing at about a right angle.

So all form is tolerant of accidents to some degree. And particularity arises from generality by narrowing the definition of the accidental - making it also more particular. Or crisper.

I don't think this "triadic/development" is the right direction. What you propose only reinforces the designated status of matter (potential) as unintelligible. it asserts the position of the unintelligible (matter) as more fundamental than the intelligible, placing it out of reach of the intellec — Metaphysician Undercover

Yet it contradicts dialectical reasoning to not accept that there must be the unintelligible for there to be the intelligible. It can make no sense to claim the one except in the grounding presence of its other. So as soon as you commit to crisp intelligibility, you are committed to its dichotomous other - vague unintelligibility - as a necessity.

And that's great because it explains the mysterious nature of matter as naked potential. Material cause ends up being complete, yet undirected, action. Just limitless fluctuation. Then material cause becomes efficient cause when it's chaotic dynanism becomes directed, or in-formed.

Efficient cause thus is the material cause made substantial - concrete and crisp in its identity. Now it is transformed into the kind of static stuff that reliably does things.

Likewise, we have the same move from final to formal cause. Finality is a pure action principle - a vague desire. It may be all direction, in contrast to material cause, but it lacks any means as yet. Finality needs to be cashed out in the shape of some formal cause, some organised and enduring and anti-chaotic structure.

So the deepest causes - the material potential and the telic potential - are both active or dynamical. Then they cash out as static enduring substantial actuality by resulting in in-formed matter (efficient cause) and en-mattered purpose (formal cause).

This will bring matter (potential) out from the designation of vagueness, the apeiron, into the category of intelligible. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you need vagueness to make its inverse an intelligible possibility. The difficulty is then to represent this in some fundamental metaphysical framework.

I've just accounted for it with the familiar four causes organicism of Aristotle. Peirce offers an even more compact representation in his triadic sign relation, or semiotic.

Now in this view we have the three things of vague potential, definite reaction, and constraining habit. You get an actual developmental account of how substantial being occurs.

But it is very densely packed. And it requires familiarity with the new category of the vague~crisp, as well as an understanding of formal and final cause as constraints in a system, not constructive degrees of freedom.

And I should add that Peirce also brings in yet another foundational dichotomy in terms of matter~sign. So at the level of substantial actuality, he discovers the difference that divides the realms of the physical and the mental, the real and the fictive, the entropic and the negentropic.

It is all a bunch of dichotomies. And a triadic metaphysics is the only way to "rotate" them so they map to each other in a completely self consistent fashion.

An entertainingly blunt assessment of this kind of "strict individualism" is www.iupui.edu/~arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/o'hara/csp-plato.htm

It talks of how Peirce viewed Plato's take on universals - how the late Plato was foreshadowing the mature Peircean understanding. :)

Or are there - as I would see it - different levels of abstraction appropriate to different forms of analysis, without the supposed component parts being in some way 'superior' or 'more fundamental'? — mcdoodle

Yep. And a telltale fact from hierarchy theory is how wholes act to simplify their parts. Wholes refine their components so as to make themselves ... even more easy to construct.

Take a human level example of an army. For an army to make itself constructible, it must take large numbers of young men and simplify their natures accordingly. It must turn people with many degrees of freedom (any variety of personal social histories) into simpler and more uniform components.

So wholes are more than just the sum of their parts ... in that wholes shape those parts to serve their higher order purposes. Wholes aren't accidental in nature. They produce their own raw materials by simplifying the messy world to a collection of parts with no choice but to construct the whole in question.

It seems to me that the concept of 'elementary particle' can't really be sustained any more. The original idea of the atom was literally an 'indivisible particle', but I think it's really been rendered untenable by physics itself; fields are now said to be fundamental — Wayfarer

Even the Cosmos had to impose simplification on its parts so as to exist. To expand and cool, it needed particles to radiate and absorb. It need a pattern of events that would let a thermal unwinding happen.

That is why you get order out of chaos. Reality needs to form dissipative structure that has the organisation to turn a sloppy directionless mess into an efficient entropic gradient.

Turn a full soda bottle of water upside down and it glugs inefficiently until a vortex forms and the bottle can suddenly drain fast and efficient.

Wholes make their parts by reducing degrees of freedom and creating components with little choice but to eternally re-construct that which is their causal master.

The various difficulties being raised disappear if you treat finality as a global constraint. To have a goal is to accept a constraint towards which all material and efficient actions must tend.

As a person, it is clear enough that to have the intention of winning the championship is the cause of of some collection of steps I take (or actions, like getting drunk, that I avoid). And the goal has to be clearly foreseen to be effective as a general constraint on my actions.

But finality as a causative constraint is then also something that can be unintentionally accepted. It doesn't have to be a conscious and "freely" chosen thing. Animals follow evolutionary goals that have become embedded in the habits of their genetics. Weather patterns follow thermodynamic goals that are meet the least action principle of entropic material systems.

So telos simply is a way to talk about the reality of constraints as causes.

Because of the great pragmatic success of classical mechanics - treating nature as a reductionist "machine", a blind web of deterministic cause and effect - we find it very easy to accept the notion of causation as nominalistic construction. You take a bunch of Lego bits and build them up into something - the form and purpose of that something being now an arbitrary whim of the human mind.

But through biology especially, we can see that nature is organic. It has a developmental character based on all four of Aristotle's causes - the two upwardly constructive ones of material and efficient cause, balanced by the two downwardly constraining ones of forrmal and final cause.

So the notion of purpose can be generalised to nature by pointing out that nature does serve generalised purposes. And having those purposes results in necessary forms - the ones best designed to serve then. That understanding is now central to modern physics. It is why thermodynamics and the physics of dissipative structure has moved to centre stage as folk try to work out a final theory to unite the dichotomy of quantum mechanics and relativistic mechanics.

Then as to which comes first, which comes second, the whole discussion becomes rather moot if time itself has to be re-thought to make it possible to unify physics.

In a developmental view of the situation - where the trajectory is not so much from the past to the future as from the vague to the crisp - then both existence and essence, both the "material" constructive causes and the "formal" constraining causes, start vague and develop strength as the way they must work together to produce something stable - like a Cosmos - comes into focus.

So neither is first or last. Both mutually co-arise (to pinch the Buddhist term).

Yet also, because the constructive causes are the most local or smallest in terms of spatiotemporal scale, they seem to become established first. They are crisply existent "from the get-go" - even if they happen to be contextless fluctuations or one-off dyadic reactions (Peirce's firstness and secondness) when they first appear.

Then it takes longer for the constraining causes - the forms and the telos - to emerge into view because they are the long-run or global states of being. The essences actually have to develop historically, even if retrospectively, they will be seen as always having to have been a necessary result.

So the paradox is that finality has to undergo an actual history to actually be real in the end. But that end was always immanent - the only real possibility at the start.

Didn't Hegel make that kind of argument for God and the Cosmos - there had to be a journey via "our" imperfection for there to be then the "other" of a heavenly perfection?

So it is a boot-strapping cosmology which Peirce did an even better job on. And now we can appreciate its physical truth as we come to understand the Cosmos as beginning in the chaos of a quantum foam state, the Big Bang, and running down the entropic hill to arrive at its super-dissipated, crisply final, outcome, the infinitely cold and vast Heat Death.

The One can be pretty much be read as the argument for vagueness or Apeiron as the foundation for dichotomous or dialectical being.

For contrarieties to constitute existence, then there must be some deeper symmetry state that they break. The dialogue makes that (triadic/developmental) argument. For there to be flux and stasis, etc, there must be a "prior" state that is neither yet has the potential to be so divided.

And note that the quandaries presented in Parmenides were resolved in the late Sophist in fully triadic fashion. Both sameness and difference, generality and particularity, have being. Dichotomies are separations towards mutually logical limits and so where there is distinctive being, it is the result of a successful process of division. Being needs the emergence of the two ends that thus bound a concrete spectrum of possibility.

It is transparent that you are adopting the tactic of wasting my time by demanding definitions of the obvious. Respond to my original point - that wiki page is all you need.

So you didn't mean the usual Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities? :-}

Well we got there in the end. You understand my point. So what was your clear and precise reply?

If you had in mind Planck length or Planck temperature or "the Planck scale," you know what might be a clearer way of communicating that? If you'd write "Planck length," "Planck temperature," or "the Planck scale." — Terrapin Station

Sorry. I was fooled by your pretence at having some familiarity with the topic in question.

So what causes the experience of motion if it isn't necessarily actual motion?

So motion is both a primary and secondary quality?

I mean, illusory experiences happen all the time. — darthbarracuda

So illusory motion and real motion look the same, but your primary and secondary quality distinction holds?

Sounds legit.

Something can be seen to be moving while actually not moving at all. Something can also be seen to be static and yet be quite dynamic. — darthbarracuda

So then, is motion a primary quality if what we experience doesn't have to be what is really there?











a-HAH!

Primary qualities are things like mass, volume, shape, distance to/from, velocity, etc. — darthbarracuda

So how do we experience motion illusions under this kind of property dualism?

Something like 'the form something must take in order to exist', right? — Wayfarer

Yep. Materiality is free possibility. And it becomes concrete stuff by "fitting in".

The point in relation the OP is that most folk want the world to be constructed of materials which already have inherent form. The essence of nominalism is the belief that has to be the case logically. Substance gets the ball rolling by bringing inherent properties to the table.

But talk about universals is recognition that shape comes from without. Properties are the result of some process of moulding to fit. So wind back the creation far enough and at some point you must have just pure form as "the first moulding action". And you must also then have some kind of ur-material that is both a stuff receptive to such moulding, and yet not yet having any characteristics at all.

Plato called it the chora. Even he had to have something that was not actual matter, yet still could play the matching role of being the receptacle of his forms.

So it's equivocation ... it's perhaps more accurate to call it the Spontaneity Theorem — Michael

Yep. :)

And the human brain is as far from being a memoryless process as you can get. So any residual spontaneity is going to be highly constrained.

So freewill is instead about intelligent future prediction.

It is because we have such a "past-constrained" view of each passing moment that we can see into the future of what is thus definitely possible. Choice results from already knowing what could be.

Constraints are the source of our useful freedom.

The difference is that a coin toss or the weather is in principle determinate and predictable . A computer with enough data about initial conditions can predict it. — Nicky665

Not so fast. Even a classical system - especially when it involves non-linearity or feedback - is not completely determinate because initial conditions can never be measured with complete precision. And even if you plug definite numbers into your computer, there is still going to be round-up error at each step of any calculation.

Folk claim that "in practice" you can still predict the trajectory of a chaotic system. The shadowing lemma allows you to argue that many cases are not going to stray enough from a cluster of trajectories for you to be that wrong.

But still - for the purposes of metaphysics - hardline determinism can't be taken for granted. Even in nature, uncertainty can be constrained, but not eliminated. There is always going to be residual noise in the circuits of existence.

Yes, this brings to mind Peirce's use of "determination" in the sense of constraint — aletheist

Peirce did not use the word, but he clearly employed the concept. In talking about the token~type distinction, for instance, he said:

Each instance is an instantiation of a type that: "itself has no existence although it has a real being, consisting in the fact that existents will conform to it." (1961, 2:292)

So it is all about causality as the concrete limitation on possibility. And constraints - having that concreteness - are real (if not to be confused to that which they produce via their action - ie: the substantial actuality of in-formed materiality).

And this is reminiscent of his cosmogony, which begins with a continuum of vague potentiality that eventually actualizes our existing universe. — aletheist

Hopefully it is more than reminiscent. Peirce was already on to it. :)

You only have 'that instance of A over there', and 'another instance of A here' - but they're not identical. So how can you even retain 'the law of identity' at all? — Wayfarer

The quantum quandry is that you can neither ultimately tell if one thing is the same with itself, or if two things are indeed different. Both identity and separability go by the by as you wind existence back to its Planck scale origins.

When things are hot and small, they all dissolve back into a vanilla mush where the classical notions encoded by the laws of thought cease to apply with any counterfactuality.

The singular exemplifies a universality: the particular stands for nothing but itself. — StreetlightX

That's fine. It is obvious that processes seem separable. So they can be both wholes, in being some particular species of a process, and yet develop in isolation.

Indeed that is what gets designed in by biological information. That's how genetics works. Socrates can be Socrates and not some other bloke due to the particular DNA he carries around in every new cell he ever produces.

Well, of course, for bacteria, genetic material respects no such boundaries. It is hard to talk separably even of species let alone individuals.

And then if we are talking about physical dissipative systems and not complex biological ones, then processes - like plate tectonics - do seem far more actually universal. We can tell the difference between a mountain and a molehill (as we can feel the difference in terms of energy costs in climbing them, or building them), but the metaphysical issue is does nature care? Fractal geometry suggests not. Dissipation looks the same over all (classical) scales.

So the particularity of universals is evidence that complexity develops hierarchically via the having of some kind of memory (the essential thesis of pansemiosis). But a high degree of separability - such that we can talk about the wonderful variety of forms contained within Platonia, including cats, cups and triangles - is not the fundamental condition. The particularity of universals is itself a particular kind of late stage development, not something that is physically fundamental.

Again, this is why Peirce had to introduce the notion of vagueness into his logic and metaphysics. Before there can be particular universals, there must be vague universality. A quantum state, in fact.

The para-digmatic, is what 'stands beside itself' (qua the Greek prefix, para), unable to be subsumed under general rule and thus not a particular. — StreetlightX

Yes, I'm fine with the definition. My point is that the Peircean paradigm resolves the "paradox" of the dichotomy by going triadic and hierarchical. He includes vagueness so that symmetry-breaking or individuation becomes something that is actually possible due to a self-organising developmental machinery.

Deleuze sometimes seems to be climbing the same tree with his repetition and difference, his generative plane of immanence. But it seems much less worked out than Peirce. And given modern advances in science, that would make it doubly obsolete.

The Planck scale. Don't you know the first thing about quantum physics?

That is to say, while induction proceeds from the particular to the universal and deduction from the universal to the particular, the paradigm is defined by a third and paradoxical type of movement, which goes from the particular to the particular. — StreetlightX

I don't see that as abduction. I would agree that Peirce failed to be completely satisfactory in accounting for abduction. But it is not that type of movement.

Instead, it is a retroductive leap. It is being able to see - vaguely - the deductive structure that would explain the particular situation in question.

So at a glance, we can suddenly see the hierarchy of informational constraints which would produce some phenomenon as its most likely outcome. But that retroductive insight is only "paradoxical" in that we know it to be right, in pattern matching fashion, before we have fully fleshed out its detail in our minds.

So in usual triadic fashion, we have the three things here of the general, the particular and - now - the vague. Instead of crisp possibility, we have vague possibility. We have the inkling of the right hypothesis accompanied by a neurobiological feeling of certitude - an emotional aha! of recognition. And the job then - as Peirce says - is to flesh out the hypothesis to make it a crisp and testable deductive statement. That is then followed by the inductive confirmation.

So yes, in human thought and also (more controversially) in metaphysical development generally, there are the three things of deduction from generals, induction from particulars, and abductive leaps - or the symmetry breaking of vagueness itself.

And it is this third thing - the abductive leap - that is the most inscrutable of all. As well as being the most important in being the genesis of all existence - either of our world of ideas or the actual Cosmos which had to guess itself into being in analogical fashion.

But talk of a movement from the particular to the particular is not the same thing as this kind of spontaneous symmetry breaking.

A paradigm entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never be stated a priori. — StreetlightX

Thanks for the quote but isn't it just nominalism redux? I can't see any trace of Peircean sophistication here.

A Peircean "paradigm" is a triadic whole that includes the missing element of firstness or vagueness, along with the generality of habits and particularity of dyadic reactions.

So Peirce argues for an irreducible complexity that can't be simplified to nominalistic particulars in this fashion.

But quantum mechanics says that "discoverable" is now the issue.

On a short or hot enough scale of "discovery", or measurement, everything could be anything. Which rather screws with classical notions of the principle of identity for a start, don't it?

Not at all. It rather shows why (a) physics shouldn't be taken as doing philosophy, — Terrapin Station

So you think the discovered facts of reality oughtn't inform contemporary metaphysics? You don't think the truth of things ought to act as a constraint on our speculative ignorance.

Curious.

I still hesitate at this description, because I am contemplating the alternative that a universal (or a general) is not one single "item" exhibited by multiple particular things, but rather a continuum — aletheist

That's why universals are best understood as constraints. (And why habits too are best understood as constraints.)

The puzzle arises because it is clear that information needs to be present to break a symmetry. If a particle is positively rather than negatively charged, something must have happened in its developmental past to make that be the case. It must have been marked in a way it remembers.

This becomes a problem if we take the nominalist approach and think about the particle as it is now - with its history locked-in by the fact the world is generally, everywhere, too cold for the particle to change its character, its properties.

But it is not a problem if we roll the history of the Cosmos back to when the particle was in such a hot and dense world that it simply existed as a fleeting fluctuation in a generic vanilla field - where effectively no identity was yet locked in.

So for a charged particle, its universality is ancestral. There really was a time it existed in a more generic form - a meaningless fluctuation in a Big Bang plasma. But now it has particularity because of a new generic universal condition - the continuity of a near Heat Death vacuum. And in good time, at the actual heat death, your charged particle will become re-assimilated to that generality. It will be de-materialised back to event horizon radiation.

So physics really does take a substantial approach to generality. The story of the Cosmos is about a phase transition from the vanilla generality of the Big Bang to the vanilla generality of the Heat Death. And more particular states of constraint or individuation - such as everything material we could be concerned about in practice as humans - are just habits of structure that arise to complicate the journey along the way.

Nominalists are not denying the reality of similarities or resemblances. They're denying the reality of multiple things having an identical (in the A=A sense) property. — Terrapin Station

So then nominalism is now disproven by quantum mechanics? - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identical_particles

Note how at the quantum level, identicality and indeterminism go hand in hand. So nature is telling us something there.

An ecology, environment, or even cosmos is precisely - a singular generality - a short-circuit between the poles that is precisely designed to avoid collapsing one into the other. — StreetlightX

But my point is that this is to speak of the substantial actuality - following Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphic form and other such tradititional triadic resolutions of the issue.

So everything that exists is the outcome of a history of process. Yes, that is the (singular) actuality. But then that still leaves the question of how best to deal with the two aspects that are required to produce such a history. And you did seem to be collapsing them in talking about this confusing thing of a "singular generality". Your choice of jargon seems unhelpful here.

That said, I realize that you're irrevocably wedded to your vocabulary, which in the end' works' much in the same fashion, but I'd rather avoid it all the same. — StreetlightX

I'm not wedded to one particular jargon. I'm more interested in the multiple ways people have tried with varying degrees of success to get at the core metaphysical issue here.

I get what you mean when you say "singular generality". Well, I am understanding that as talk of the substantial actuality that arises as some particular history of a general developmental process. But it doesn't seem like good jargon as I don't think the singularity of some generality is the important thought here.

Instead, I prefer the constraints based approach that physics normally takes, and even better, the pansemiotic approach of infodynamics. This says that the generality is a symmetry - some state of constraint that imposes a symmetry condition on material possibility. And then particularity arises via spontaneous symmetry breaking. A history of material accidents develops via the locking in of "random" local acts.

So with a snow flake, the general symmetry in question is the charged configuration of a water molecule. The molecule satisfies its own internal tensions by having the hydrogen atoms forming a 104 degree angle. Then when the molecules are collectively cold enough to crystalise, they can minimise their energy by forming hexagonal patterns - the sixfold symmetry that accounts for snowflake branching growth patterns.

(Note that the individual molecules have to bend wider to 106 degrees, plus twist a bit, to fit the imposed "universal" geometry of a hexagon. So they deform in response to this new collective constraint in a way that increases their internal energy as part of the trade-off to achieve a collective minimisation of the crystal's energy.)

So anyway, the transition from water to ice involves a breaking of rotational symmetry. As water, H2O can spin freely and be "at any angle" in regard to its neighbours. (In fact this again is an idealisation as water has many of its unique properties because it is always fleetingly ordered in its orientation.) But anyway, :) , becoming constrained as a crystal is a breaking of symmetry. It reduces the orientation possibilities to some global hexagon form.

And this then becomes the new (more particular or singular?) symmetry to be broken - by accident. Because by now, nature doesn't care about how exactly a snowflake grows. The attachment of new molecules floating about in the air is a random and unconstrained process. It is different from a body of water freezing (and producing compact hexagonal crystal forms). The process has an extra degree of freedom in the way the snowflake grows.

The point is thus that the real world, in all its substantial actuality, seems like a really messy place. It is hard to pick apart the general and the particular, the symmetries and the symmetry-breakings, the constraints and the degrees of freedom (all ways of talking about the same thing) when dealing with any generative process or developmental habit. Remember, there is nothing much simpler than ice as a substance.

Yet once we get used to thinking hierarchically about these things - that is, used to a triadic logic - then we can see how every level of actuality is indeed a product of the interaction between the general and the particular. Complex structure grows in ways which are locally accidental and yet globally constrained.

It remains too musty for my liking, even when dusted off and treated anew (even 'hylomorphism' leaves a bad taste in the mouth...). — StreetlightX

Yeah, well, talking about musty definitions....

For Aristotle, the distinction between singular and universal is a fundamental metaphysical one, and not merely grammatical.

A singular term for Aristotle is primary substance, which can only be predicated of itself: (this) "Callias" or (this) "Socrates" are not predicable of any other thing...He contrasts universal (katholou)[4] secondary substance, genera, with primary substance, particular (kath' hekaston)[4][5] specimens.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic#Singular_terms

So the singularity is to do with the most highly individuated or constrained state of affairs. And universality is the ability to then point backwards to a developmental history of constraints - the more generic "properties", or states of broken symmetry, like the fact that Socrates is a substance of the genera "Homo sapiens". And humans are in turn a substantial state of being qua the genera of "living things". Etc, etc, all the way back to the Big Bang or laws of thermodynamics. :)

So the central thought is that the singular is the most constrained state of affairs. But then the bit that I argue Aristotle misses (and Peirce gets) is that a constraint is a state of informational symmetry - a modelling or sign relation. It is basically nature saying this much is what I've locked down for sure. All the rest is a matter of indifference. Further symmetry breaking has no effect on what is the case. It becomes differences (or individuation) that don't make a difference.

Is Socrates still Socrates - the substantial actuality, the singular generality - when he trims his beard or perhaps loses his leg in an industrial accident? There is no doubt Socrates is being further individuated by these accidents of history. And yet also no doubt that then don't matter. As events, they are failing to rewrite the informational script that is "Socrates".

Though eventually, enough accidents can overwhelm the script. Real change is possible because states of constraint, conditions of symmetry, are themselves dynamical beings subject to development. So - as with avalanches - things can grow and seem stable, dispersing their forces in even manner, until the tiniest accident, one snowflake landing on the right spot, and it all tumbles down the hill.

This is how physics now understands reality - the new jargon of criticality and dissipative structure. And beyond that, the pansemiotic models of infodynamics which recognises the symbolic aspect to physical existence.

So the thread running through all this - from ancient Greece to modern science - is the need to think of reality in an irreducibly complex and triadic fashion. You need something like the general and the particular, the process and the event, the symmetry and the symmetry-breaking, as the two sides of the dichotomy. And then it is how they recursively interact which produces the third thing of the substantial actuality - the reality that most people take to be the concrete, nominalist, world of ordinary experience.

Better, I think, to speak in terms of ecologies, environments and contexts, all of which impart a flavour of the singular over and against the abstraction of the general. — StreetlightX

No. This just repeats the metaphysical mistake of encountering a dichotomy and trying to turn it into a monism where one pole of being is primary or foundational, the other somehow illusory or emergent.

So sure, existence might be singular in the sense that substantial being is always the hylomorphic outcome of some developmental history. But every snowflake is still the unique outcome of a common process. The geomorphic world has a general habit of producing particular snowflakes. So the general part of the story is as fundamental as the particularity.

I would agree that the usual conception of Universals is faulty because it does express the monistic fallacy. It wants to treat the general as the foundation of being - as in Plato's ideas. But it is just as much a mistake to turn around and argue some variety of nominalism.

Are the physical constants examples of universals or particulars? — m-theory

They are universal particulars in that they quantify some quality absolutely everywhere. :)

So not existence, but function ought to be the wheel upon which the debate turns. — StreetlightX

Yep. In a process philosophy view, both particulars and universals would be the product of mutual emergence. So it is the functional or telenomic level view that will get at it best. It is not about physical existence - either of abstracta, or concreta - but about the self-organised development of a stably persisent process.

. But a physicalist maintains that matter is the entire explanation, and that there are no (non-material) forms; — aletheist

Physicalism is generally understood as a naturalism that excludes supernatural or transcendent causes. So it is against treating the mental aspect of reality as further kind of causal substance, as well as divine causes.

But physicalism can still pose its own ontic duality in terms of matter and sign - the semiotic approach. And this is essential for understanding life and mind as natural phenomena. More controversially - as pan-semiosis - it can even be applied to regular physics and cosmology.

So physicalism can indeed say there is "more" than just material cause. And that is important to discussions of the reality of universals like "cat", "cup", or even the colour "red".

Physicalism proper says that the things that are described in those terms are the only real things, matter-energy ( or matter-energy-space-time) being the only reality. That is why physicalism is called 'monistic'. — Wayfarer

Note that a strict physicalism of this kind is really saying that all we know in the end is how to make measurements that seem to work (they are reliable, they serve demonstable purpose). So it is an epistemic point, not an ontic claim.

Words like energy, matter, time and space become signs of qualities that we consider universal. We know how to make those kinds of basic acts of measurement "whatever the physical situation". But in the end, we arrive at concepts so universal that they themselves lack visualisable properties. It is like trying to describe red if red were the only colour that everything is.

So in the end, we wind up talking about the ability to measure some naked difference. Energy density or spacetime is everywhere we look. And we know that there is "something" only in the sense we can scale its variation. With the three Planck constants in particular - c, G and h - we are down to primal measurements of a difference. What the difference is in, becomes hard to say, even if we give it names like the speed of light, the strength of gravity, or the quantum action.

So if Pierce means that logic is the only gate for perception to first go through in order to arrive at purposive action, then no, I disagree, and I don't mean the same thing as him. — Noble Dust

But that's only because you keep refusing to reconsider your very narrow definitions of things like "logic".

So you are sticking to your premises and arriving back at the same deductions. Yet aletheist has said more than enough to question those premises.

For example, what is "emotion" other than reasonable habits of perception/action picked up over the evolutionary timescales of neurobiological adaptive learning?