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?

Intelligible on the other hand you could claim has - it follows a logical structure. — Agustino

Intelligible is something that makes sense according to the prevailing worldview/culture - in other words, an action that others can understand. — Agustino

I agree that your definitions are too fuzzy. Intelligible means logical structure to me. It is not about being in accordance with custom. It only make sense to others because it is rational.

But anyway, the issue seems to be that creative intelligence is clearly something more than just "pure intelligibility". Reasoning is not merely computation.

And we can see this in the computer chess example.

Intelligence is the ability to recognise and exploit intelligible patterns - discover the generalities that predict the particular.

A computer is not really being intelligent if it is merely making an exhaustive search of every possible combination of moves to find the winning choice. To be like the human player, it would have to start to generalise in a fashion that would allow it to constrain its play so that it is limiting its possibility of making bad moves.

The need is to restrict the patterns of the pieces so they leave the player in "a strong position" - one that, in complementary fashion, steadily reduces the options of the opponent until s/he only has bad ones.

It is impossible to "figure everything out" - especially in an inherently unpredictable world. And even in the highly regulated and predictable world of a board game, it is more efficient to limit your scope for mistakes. while attempting to force your opponent into a realm where there can only be "mistakes".

It is just the same on the tennis court or any other sport. You want to move your opponent into places where all the choices are weak ones.

So you seem to getting at the point that intelligence is not strictly intelligible because reality offers always a near infinite variety of "intelligible" paths. If you focus on trying to predict particulars, that is in fact cognitively quite dumb. The better approach is to work to constrain uncertainty. Do that, and eventually the smart path is going to pop out, all the less smart options having been filtered away.

Of course that still leaves room for the smart flashes of insight in which a pattern of connections can suddenly be recognised.

But insight always comes to the prepared mind, as any psychological study of creativity shows. Hard work constrains the possibilities. Then it becomes easy work to make the last step.

I would agree that outside of Pragmatism - which of course argues for abductive reasoning - philosophy shows a poor understanding of this constraints-based approach to reasoning or problem solving.

Philosophy is largely either analytic (in love with deduction and suspicious of induction), or continental (in love with romanticism and thus itself). ;)

Analysis is a good thing. It is a mode of thought that is great for producing machines like computers. But life and mind have a holistic or Bayesian approach to reasoning that is based on the ability to constrain possibility in fruitful fashion.

Logical structure is great for churning out concrete possibilities. A computer is a machine for generating every conceivable alternative.

But the world already has an over-abundance of possibilities. Real intelligence is about reducing them by applying generalisations. To locate answers, we just need to trap them into some tight enough corner.

You can be authentic as an individual because you hold a unique set of values. No two people will hold all of the same values. — aporiap

And yet still that variation would be measured in terms of cultural norms? So there has to be something collective there as the backdrop against which you can then claim to find (pretty minor) variation.

I think striving to act in accord with what you truly, viscerally feel or believe is part of authenticity as well. — aporiap

That's the traditional romantic notion of selfhood. And the problem is that it is very easy to change your "visceral" reaction by reframing whatever it is you happen to be thinking about.

You can go from finding a squawking baby "repulsive" to "cute" just by viewing it with a different set of cultural attitudes. So to rely on visceral responses is dangerous. Feelings follow rather too easily in the wake of how you construct some situation.

Is the wind in your face spendidly bracing or nagginaly annoying? Is that kitsch art marvellously ironic or dreadfully uninspired?

You can find authenticity in your visceral responses because they always simply go along with whatever habits of thought you have developed via socialisation.

If a person asks your opinion on how they are performing or how they are dressed or some current event or other subject-matter, you respond with what you honestly feel is correct or true. You don't modify it because your opinion may be offensive or controversial, etc. — aporiap

So choosing to be nice is inauthentic?

You see the problem. If you are trying to lock yourself into some single mode of operation - the search for the "real you" - you lose all the natural complexity of being a self within a community. It is a recipe for rigidity, not creativity.

This is compromising! I think we certainly have to balance -- but that balance would need to take into account our own interests and values. — aporiap

Most people have way more personal freedom than they will ever know what to do with these days. Folk get by on minimal compromise. And they are mostly not that happy because of it.

What I'm trying to say is that living in a more 'stable state' doesn't necessarily mean you have to transcend sociocultural limits. It just means you have to find a niche/web-of-relations that better aligns with your own values. — aporiap

That's why people are so stressed in modern life. Everything is changing and developing over all scales. It is hard to find a stable backdrop against which "the self" can find its "authenticity". Kids can't even decide their sexuality anymore in simple terms.

The search for personal meaning made some kind of existential sense 100 years ago when an industrial/military society created a lot of hard restrictions. But we are in a completely different era now, with different issues.

There is more freedom and creativity, and thus personal uncertainty, than most can cope with. Hence Trump. People yearn for brutal simplicity even if it is a dangerous pretence.

Striking a balance may involve doing what you enjoy doing in certain contexts (i.e. within the context of a job or career), but that doesn't mean you're sacrificing your interests for the sake of something else. — aporiap

But in what sense is modern culture forbidding you to pursue your own interests? Isn't it instead telling everyone to get off their arse and do their own thing?

So the Romantic dream is what modern culture aims to offer. But it has its predictable consequences. Things fall apart if everyone is too busy striving to be individual.

How to achieve balance in such a slippery world is the new philosophical question. Existentialism is old hat.

No, I think they exist but they have be predicate-able. To me, it doesn't even make any sense to talk of something that has no discernible nature but somehow is causally relevant. — darthbarracuda

So you don't think that things can be predicated of formal and final causes?

And the Peircean distinction between real and existence seems to have gone over your head.

Peirce says:

"I myself always use exist in its strict philosophical sense of “react with the other like things in the environment.”

"I define the real as that which holds its characters on such a tenure that it makes not the slightest difference what any man or men may have thought them to be, or ever will have thought them to be, here using thought to include, imagining, opining, and willing (as long as forcible means are not used); but the real thing's characters will remain absolutely untouched."

So to exist covers the usual material case of substantial being. And to be real covers the usual notion of universals.

Why can't we say that there are some properties that exist thanks to a history and some properties just are, brute fact? Saying that a "principle" exists and yet denying that abstract transcendental properties exist seems like word play. — darthbarracuda

Good job I don't say principles "exist". Or that they are "brute facts".

And saying that about properties would be inconsistent too.

You realize this is, as of now, an unjustified opinion? — darthbarracuda

Sigh...

You said yourself that there are some persistent basic ingredients — darthbarracuda

Well, only the one. Apeiron. Or however we would best understand that appeal to material principle in our best physicalist theories.

I agree there is an issue here. I'm the first to point it out when ontic structural realism is raised, for example. String theory and quantum field theory have precisely that problem - the material action to breath life into the formal descriptions (of symmetries and symmetry breakings) do still have to be inserted by hand.

But the whole point - following triadic hylomorphism - is that whatever the material principle is, it can't be itself substantial in the kind of sense you have in mind. It can't already possess properties, as positive properties are the product of formal causes, or constraints.

Then what would you consider him to be? — darthbarracuda

A mystic. A pseudo philosopher.

Yet this becomes a monism. You reduce substance to process, in the same way Aristotle would reduce process to substance. — darthbarracuda

A "monism" that is irreducibly complex in being a triadic process.

So, the fact that you think beauty, goodness and truth can best be modeled in physicalist terms ... cannot ever be more than a person belief that is not demonstrably true. — John

Well that's hardly a problem given that universal scepticism is no longer an issue once you have already given up the pipedream of "demonstrable truth".

I happy with states of belief that are open to falsification while demonstrably minimising uncertainty. We seem to be uncovering the secrets of existence at an exponential rate doing that.

Remind me of some actual question that is in fact being begged.

You might not like the answers that physicalism gives when used as a framework to analyse beauty, good and truth, for example. But that's another matter.

And again, those physicalist universals can tested because they are mathematical-strength concepts. They are not vague ideas that are "not even wrong".

So you complain about the self-contained strength of my approach. Yet that is why it is epistemically better. It does make an argument that actually could be wrong when we test it against reality.

Well it all depends on how you think about phenomenological observation. It's always going to come down to the question of whether you prefer one set of presuppositions or another. — John

Yeah. And I have reasons to prefer one set of presuppositions. They are the ones that happen to be demonstrably better at making phenomenological predictions.

If something exists, and if this something can be known to us, then it must be able to be predicated upon. The predicates latch on to properties, or at least describe a collection of simpler properties. — darthbarracuda

I'm not getting your difficulty. Once things start to get stabilised, they become the platform for further development. Its hierarchy theory 101.

So after the Big Bang, the bath of radiation cools enough and massive, slower than light, particles emerge. A lucky asymmetry means that nearly all of the negative anti-protons have gone, likewise nearll all of the positive anti-electrons. That lets you have some persistent basic ingredients - oppositely charged electrons and protons. From there, you can get stellar physics and planetary chemisty.

So the emergence of complex materiality - stuff with properties - is no big deal at all. What is a big deal is getting behind that to the story of how anything could emerge to start the story in the first place.

Well cause I remember sometime in the past you thought people like Whitehead were too extreme in their metaphysics and that there had to be a middle ground between process and substance. — darthbarracuda

People call Whitehead a process philosopher. I don't. I am arguing pansemiotics, not panpsychism.

And you don't need a middle ground between substance and process as the argument is that substantial being is a process.

Being a triadic or hierarchical metaphysics, the middle ground is what you get automatically. When constraints interact with freedoms, something arises as the persistent equilibrium balance of that action. And we call that "something" things like substantial being, particularity, or actuality.

You said they were similar to Plato's realm of ideas - are they "less real" than the concrete stuff we experience everyday? — darthbarracuda

One can only face palm at a comment like this. Does this everyday concrete stuff exist, or is it simply how we construct our experience of it?

I thought you didn't like the binary between substance and process. — darthbarracuda

What do you mean? I'm saying substantial being is a process. And that is opposed to the view that substance has fundamental existence rather than pragmatic persistence.

Right, I agree. There are no such things as enduring objects — darthbarracuda

Great.

In truth, I think the only proper atheistic response to theology ought to be sheer indifference, right up to the point where it starts making claims about naturalism or the sciences. — StreetlightX

I agree. And I'm even quite sympathetic of theism to the degree it puts forward a coherent opposition to Scientism and hardline reductionism.

Religious philosophers were the early leaders in the revival of Peircean scholarship for example. It is quite possible for theists to be reasonable people.

Given physical principles derive from phenomenological observables, it is pretty obvious which way round things in fact arose epistemically.

So physical principles ARE used to analyse the Platonic triad. Cool.

But also because you use a framework to explain the same framework. Universals exist, because symmetry is a universal. — darthbarracuda

Where did I make that circular argument?

You need to explain why universals have to exist without just ignoring the actual question — darthbarracuda

I tried instead to show you why your "actual question" doesn't even make sense in my holist and pansemiotic paradigm. And I mention infodynamics as the particular current scientific project that takes a broadly Peircean metaphysics seriously.

So it would be circular for a metaphysics to try to account for dynamical particulars in terms of "just more dynamics". A semiotic approach to metaphysics is different precisely because it accounts for universals in terms of sign relations. The realm of symbols - or informational constraints - gives the "universals" a real place to exist, much like Plato's realm of ideas. The difference is that this informational aspect of existence is thoroughly physicalist and doesn't need the mind or ideas to be a second kind of substantial being.

And I hardly need point out again that actual physics is undergoing just this entropic or information theoretic revolution. Event horizons - as informational limits - are so "real" that they structure the cosmos and may even account for forces like gravity. It is bit, etc.

So for a start, I have a positive thesis about the physical basis for "the existence of universals". Modern physics is cashing out Peirce's notion that the cosmos is the self-organised product of a triadic sign relation.

Whoosh. I hear the noise of words flying right over your head again. But you can hardly claim to be saying anything interesting about metaphysics these days if you throw up your hands in horror when someone mentions holographic bounds and least action principles.

And then another important point is that Peircean realism would not regard the particular as particularly "existent" either. Like the quasi-particles of condensed matter physics, or the actual particles of the standard model, the uncuttable atoms of material existence turn out to be merely the excitations or localised frustrations of a field.

So as it says on the bottle, this is process philosophy. And both the particular and the universal are things that only "exist" in the sense of being features of processes.

The best way to ontologise that view is then - as Peirce did - to divide reality into constraints and freedoms. Universals are the contextual reality. They are the general habits, the global tendencies. And particulars are the events that are regularly produced, the outcomes that may share family similarities but also express an irreducible spontaneity or indeterminism.

So in a church, there is a fairly fixed propensity to burst into prayer. The context shapes the behaviour. And if for some reason the prayers begin to cease, the church is no longer really a church. The mutual relation between the universal and the particular is what gives birth to the physical whole. If that reciprocal interaction falters, then the whole dynamical structure fades away again.

Reality is the process of becoming real. And reality is characterised by its general stablity - its long-run, self-sustaining, dynamical equilibrium. To exist is really just to persist in a way where continuing change does not result in significant change.

And that kind of reality, that kind of existence, is now something we have exact scientific models for. Dissipative structure theory (as the next step along from "far from equilibrium" thermodynamics) has given us metaphysics we can go out and measure.

To call that huge advance in human understanding "esoteric" is simply to be ignorant of modern progress.

The question is, how much of Aristoteleanism remains without a 'first cause'? If you retain some notion of telos then indeed many of the issues around reductionism are ameliorated, but I can't see how to square that with the idea that life is really just a heat sink (or a way of maximising entropy), or for that matter with a lot of current thinking in evolutionary biology. — Wayfarer

It's the scholastics who need that first cause. And also some high flown purpose for human existence. So we can park those prejudices one side,

The supernatural is also excluded in the sense of an appeal to the external or transcendent. Naturalism is an ontic commitment to immanence or bootstrapping existence.

Review of Pierce and the Threat of Nominalism Notre Dame Reviews. — Wayfarer

Have you got some spellchecker that keeps insist on misspelling Peirce's name? (It rhymes with purse.)

From the various musings on the 'naturalness problem in physics' which is closely related to, or might be simply a perspective on, the 'fine-tuning problem'. That is, the universe has just those attributes that are required for stars, matter and living things to form. Those constants can't themselves be explained - hence the 'naturalness problem'. — Wayfarer

So you offer the kind of problems that bug a reductionist in answer to my holist position?

The reductionist issue here is that because they are only imagining a constructive or additive picture of causality, it seems "natural" that either every quantum contribution adds to infinity (as there is nothing to stop it), or else all quantum contributions should symmetrically cancel to nothing (as everything time you add anything, you have to add a plus and a minus value).

But my holist position is all about the production of definite reality through the suppression or constraint of vague possibility. And so it is now "natural" that you get left with some minimal residue. Variety is suppressed to the point of indifference - but still, that leaves some irreducible variety or quantum spontaneity.

It is like trying to reduce noise in analog electronics. You can minimise it but never eliminate it.

Sure, explaining constants is a big problem for reductionists. Explaining everything about boundary conditions is a big problem when you are determined to view existence solely in terms of bottom-up material and efficient cause - acts of construction.

But for the billionth time, my model of causality is Aristotelean - all four causes in play. And Aristoteleanism is the kind of metaphysical naturalism I'm talking about, not the very recent adoption of the term within particle physics.

Ego boundaries in a person with high self-esteem are well defined along with a deep understanding of one's natural talents and limitations, which brings me to my main point. — Question

Confidence in your competence is the phrase that immediately sprung to my mind. So I agree.

How do we analyze beauty, goodness and truth other than by analyzing the way we think about them. which includes the way we use the words, as you already said? — John

The search for symmetry, equilibrium and the minimisation of uncertainty - the usual physical principles?

But there has to be order for anything to emerge whatever. — Wayfarer

Order is explained within thermodynamics as the negentropic investment that is made to increase the production of entropy. So it is order that emerges and that allows there to actually be something - a dissipative flow.

Q: Why does expanding spacetime exist? A: To give the Big Bang something to spill all its heat into.

Naturalism assumes order, or takes it for granted - once it begins to try and explain that order, then it's dealing with a problem of a different kind. — Wayfarer

Where are you getting this definition of naturalism from? Clearly I'm talking about process philosophers like Peirce and Anaximander who cottoned on to the fact that in nature, order can emerge from disorder so long as it serves the global purpose of disordering.

Yet talk of rates, limits, self-optimization, flows, regularities, symmetries, all that stuff is still referring to something. — darthbarracuda

That's right. That's why I am arguing against nominalism.

What we want to know is that properties themselves are without a regress into vagueness. — darthbarracuda

But how do properties emerge into crisp being if vague being isn't what they are leaving behind?

The problem with your kind of ontology is that it can't explain existence as a causal development. Existence is just some dumb brute fact. Or maybe God invented it.

My approach takes the evidence that existence evolves seriously.

We already know that stability occurs and habits emerge, but nominalism doesn't deny this. It simply denies that these habits are actually repeatable entities that are multiply instantiated. — darthbarracuda

Shame that hypothesis doesn't fit the facts then. The evidence that the cosmos keeps spitting out the same entities, the same patterns, can be seen everywhere we look. (Have you heard of fractals or powerlaws?)

The problem shouldn't be on the existence of universals but the nature of universals themselves, i.e. abstract transcendentals vs immanents or something else. — darthbarracuda

So why the problem when I take something like universals to be real, and then offer a modern infodynamic account?

Were there not such constants as Planck's constant and so on, then there would be no 'symmetry-breaking' in the first place, would there? — Wayfarer

Constants emerge as the rate limit on self-optimising flows. So they describe the regularities that a process of symmetry breaking creates. They don't cause the action. They are a measure of it.