They don't provide references for classified information — wuliheron

But you can provide a reference to support your clam about this being a fact? This is something you know because it has been reported somewhere credible you can now point too?

But mathematically it starts with an infinitesimal rather than a zero if we are talking about the other "end" of infinity.

It never tells us anything about the intrinsic nature of matter, in so far as its 'intrinsic nature' is more than its structure. — Wayfarer

Well does matter have an intrinsic nature? Hasn't structural realism been the answer since Aristotle's hylomorphism?

Whereas, I think naturalist methodology assumes the reality of the objects of experience, — Wayfarer

Not sure why scientists call themselves modellers then.

Its essential character is that here all opposites are undivided, or one.

That's why Parmenides is so useful as the dichotomous contrast to Heraclitus in teaching Ancient Greek philosophy 101.

But remember Heraclitus was actually a dichotomous thinker - flux and logos, or local degrees of freedoms and global "ratiional" constraints. While Parmenides only leveraged Zenoian paradox and made zero sense if taken literally.

So I'm happy if Parmenides has to be crossed off the list of proto-system thinkers. He was never on it to begin with.

I don't understand the significance of your mechanic/organic distinction here. — csalisbury

If you want the full answer from the biosemiotic perspective, that would take some explaining. You might want to google howard pattee + biosemiosis, or stan salthe + infodynamics, for the sharpest analysis in terms of dissipative structure theories.

But the simple systems science answer - which bases itself directly on Aristotelean naturalism - looks at it in terms of the four causes.

So the mechanical is reality modelled in terms of just material and efficient cause. In other words, formal and final cause have to be supplied by an external creator, a transcendent mind. Then the organic is immanent by contrast as all four causes, including formal and final, arise internally through self-organising development.

Are you just dumbing it down for those of us who can't do math? and, if so, why are you doing that? It's a little patronizing. — csalisbury

If you have no problem coping with Pattee and Salthe, then great. Let me know how you go.

But he wouldn't pretend that a crisp distinction between x and y is 'mathematical' because he respects his interlocutors well enough not to pretend that stark differentiation *is* math. I assume, based on your assurance, that you have similar mathematical facility (right?) so i wonder what accounts for the difference in approach? — csalisbury

I'm not talking about maths as maths. I'm talking about the particular maths I would employ - such as symmetry breaking, statistical mechanics, hierarchy theory, quantum mechanics, non-linear dynamics.

So there are certain mathematical/logical structures that I would appeal to here, not maths in some general sense as a practice.

And remember my response to the OP was that SX ought to use crisp formal mathematical concepts in place of his vague terminology. I said he should think in terms of reciprocal relations - as in dichotomies - rather than his "selection". Or hierarchical relations rather than his "hinges".

So if you want examples of what a more mathematically rigorous approach looks like, that was already it.

Huh? You are confusing an epistemological point with an ontological question. Hume ain't relevant here as this was about specific models, not the underlying possibility of modelling.

Well, if as the OP says, 'to have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'; and if you say that the 'kinds of things that exist' are limited to 'the kinds of things that the natural sciences are able to discover' - then is that an open or a closed model? — Wayfarer

Open. By design. So it is axiomatic. The process claims only to minimise our uncertainty.

If you believe in some different epistemology derived from an alternative axiomatic basis (one less idealist perhaps) then go for it. Justify away. (Revelation, Platonism???)

A convenient explanation need not always be the correct explanation. — darthbarracuda

But also if you advance a positive doubt here, it needs to be constrained by what appear to be the facts, dontcha think?

You seem to be claiming that causality fails in some generic sense. I ask where are the facts that suggest that?

Your worldview determines what you will regard as 'data'. — Wayfarer

So do you choose a closed worldview that doesn't update its beliefs, or instead an open one that builds in continuous inquiry?

Aristotle 'selects for' specific difference, while ruling out, as ontologically illegitimate as it were, generic difference — StreetlightX

Don't you mean he argued for generic sameness?

That's the logical point. The general and the particular are asymmetric or dichotomous in that one is about sameness, the other about difference - in the familiar "mutually exclusive/jointly exhaustive" fashion required by fundamental thinking.

What I'm interested in is your understanding of the status of this model in relation to all the other fragile, tenuous structures out there. Is the model itself of their kind? — csalisbury

My argument would be that I describe the meta-model. So it is the most general level description that captures the abstractly utterly necessary. And then - as the model itself models - it would support a hierarchy of increasingly less specified, increasingly freer, sub-descriptions. Thus the model indeed models itself in all its potential for local variety as well as its central certainty.

So if for example the discrete~continuous defines some ultimate dialectical bound on existence - in the limit, everything would be either discrete or continuous - then that also then means everything can then in actuality be some kind of mix of the continuous and the discrete. Everything would be intermediate cases in a freely various fashion.

So it is not a bug that the core metaphysics is a tightly curled mathematical knot that then becomes the generator of rich organic variety. That epistemology exactly mirrors the ontology it claims. It is its important feature.

If you think you have spotted a weakness in this regards, it shows that you are operating from - ironically - a classical, mechanical, mindset. You understands machines and their weakness. But then you still remain trapped in that paradigm in making that the antithesis you hope to reject.

You have accepted your enemy's legitimacy in his own terms by engaging me in those terms. Yet I've already long moved on to a fully organicist point of view (in which machinery, of the semiotic variety, is the useful emergent feature).

Let's get romantic and non-crisp and quote yeats: — csalisbury

I'd rather stick to mathematical rigour. It's more beautiful and true in the end.

But is your model that kind of non-natural enamel bird? or is it of a piece with nature? — csalisbury

It arises out of biophysics, for instance. So it is based on particular nano-scale facts that we couldn't even hope to measure 10 years ago.

Doesn't it worry you that you might be building your own confident world-view on very obsolete data?

If we argue from Big Bang models, i.e. extrapolate to a definite earliest time, then other infinites just show up instead, infinite density and temperature. — jorndoe

I certainly agree with a thermal approach to time. But other infinities don't show up at the beginning. Instead, all things have the same Planckian scale.

So even temperature or energy density is not infinite at the Planck scale. It has a size - at least when measured against an extrapolated version of a Newtonian system of clocks and rulers with scales that go "all the way up" to zero (just like Spinal Tap's amps!).

but then you say you're a physicalist, — Wayfarer

But not in a strict materialist sense. I would be a pan-semiotic physicalist - meaning that my ontology involves both matter and sign (or matter and symbol).

So signs and symbols are "made of material" in some sense - but in the most minimal possible sense, as a sign is that which manages to isolate itself from the thermal entropic flow.

Thus a sign is the forrmal inverse of matter in the pan-semiotic scheme. It is "anti-matter" in the truest possible metaphysical sense, ;)

In any case, though, the notion of causality has been attacked, many times. — darthbarracuda

That's a little hand-wavy. Where do we have evidence that on the whole causality fails the locality principle?

Yes, we definitely also have good evidence that "at the quantum scale" causality breaks down in a particular fashion. But we rely on causality being pretty conventional at an emergent classical scale.

So this is why we would want an emergent model now. It is not a reason to just throw away classicality. That still "works".

US federal government has finally admitted they have classified a few jokes as "Vital to the National Defense." — wuliheron

References please....

Probably all wrong, but anyway it's striking that your own model is clenched and curled up super tight brooking only those findings and ideas which will reinforce (or add subtle shading to or furnish new examples of) a set and sedentary framework. — csalisbury

Alternatively, this is what all the possibilities distill down to. If you understood the natural sciences in their broad sweep, this is where we are at.

Physics, however, does make a declaration about what is considered a valid object of analysis, namely, something which can be physically measured, something which registers on an instrument or plate or bubble-chamber. — Wayfarer

So physics is then idealist in saying reality is only what can be measured by someone? If it ain't a number on a dial, it isn't real? :)

I think if you get beyond Scientism you will see that science (pragmatically) takes idealism more seriously than anyone else.

And again, I question whether C S Pierce sought to ground his metaphysics in what we take to be 'the physical'. — Wayfarer

As I say, the whole point is giving up on the lumpen materialism of the lay person. Do you think quantum physicists can believe in the reality of "stuff" anymore?

Quantum field theory - our most advance formulation yet - doesn't even pretend to deal with "real fields". The "field" only describes a spread of observer probabilities. It is a calculus of how we might expect the needle on the dial to bend.

And how many times have you now wheeled out that exact same Peirce quote and apparently forgotten my lengthy response on its proper contextual interpretation?

Even though 'the way our knowing operates' seems to be more the subject of epistemology, — Wayfarer

Yes. Metaphysics divides according to the classic dichotomy of epistemology and ontology - or the observer and the observables.

And Peirce was radical in finding a pan-semiotic metaphysics that could unite the two again. Quantum physics shows that now to be absolute necessary for any further progress.

The problem is modern western science has focused on her beauty to the exclusion of humor — wuliheron

So beauty = ideas with mathematical precision, and humour = measurement uncertainty? Where then is there a problem if science has mathematically precise models of measurement uncertainty?

That's the kind of "dancing wu li master" nonsense that gives serious systems science such a bad name.

It seems to depend on the idea that time moves forward in one direction; an intuition that is theoretically refuted from deduction of scientific observation (I can't remember the specificities, perhaps someone like apo will). — darthbarracuda

You are right the argument would be suspect simply because it depends on a particular notion of time. And while modern science might not be able to offer a concrete "better model of time" right at the moment, it does have plenty of evidence to doubt the kind of simplicities the argument assumes.

Why a temporal mobius strip would be the way it is, I have no idea. It's just a funny idea I've been toying with. — darthbarracuda

But the problem here is that you have just destroyed causality, and causality is something we would expect to be able to extract from "a better model of time". Causality is what we observe in the world - it is why we believe it to be "time-like" - and so at the very least, an arrow of time ought to be the emergent feature of any good model of time.

That was the problem of Newtonian time, and the reason for recent thermal models. Newtonian time could not build in a direction. As a result you can get insane metaphysical notions like "the block universe", or "eternal recurrence".

An odd argument I came across recently: — jorndoe

A modern version of this argument is used to show the Big Bang could never have happened. If eternal Time exists (in big-T Newtonian dimensional fashion), then there would have had to have been an infinite amount of time elapsing before - suddenly, in a bright flash - our Universe got created. So therefore never enough time could pass to arrive at that point.

A better answer is that the Big Bang was the start of time, as well as space. So we can't think of the pre-Bang as a temporal dimension - except in some far simpler metaphysical sense yet to be articulated scientifically.

grave doubt about whether any philosophy can reasonably bottom out (forgive me) at a discipline like physics that has largely given up on talk of the causal and can barely bring itself to think much of time's arrow — mcdoodle

But isn't physics bottoming out in the statistical and the informational - the very turn that the last of the great systematisers, Peirce, foresaw?

The statistical is the ontology of self-organising emergence. Information is Janus-faced in talking about mind and world in the same coin - the inherent uncertainty or spontaneity of a "degree of freedom".

So science certainly is pursuing a naturalistic course when it comes to metaphysics. And it now describes "everything" in terms of propensities and distinctions - or Peircean habits and signs.

My working definition for a while was metaphysics as being that which relates to the 'first and last things': where things come from (origins), and where things are going (ends/teleology). ....
.... to 'have a metaphysics' is to have a way to 'select' among the kinds of things that 'exist'. — StreetlightX

There's always a kind of 'hinge' which sorts out what belongs where (what does the selecting - a kind of metaphysical Laplace's Demon). — StreetlightX

Rather than selection and hinges - which both speak to transcendent mechanism, imposed distinctions - metaphysics has groped its way towards immanent and self-organising symmetry breakings. It seeks nature's own logic in terms of dichotomous separations - immanent distinctions in terms of reciprocal, dialectical or inverse relations where vague possibility is strongly separated into complementary limitations on actuality.

And this mode of thought already shows itself "naturally" in your OP. Metaphysics is divided into first and last.

Some similarly sharp reciprocal distinction is sought between metaphysics and ontology in terms of metaphysics being the hinge between what is and what isn't, then ontology becomes a sub discipline studying what is (with the unspoken implication that it then itself gets organised as a hierarchy of dichotomous symmetry-breakings in Aristotelean genus~species fashion).

And thus what also shows through in the OP is the Pomo urge not to acknowledge this naturalism. Pomo politically favours multiplicity over any totalising discourse. It favours equality over hierarchy.

This of course is merely further naturalistic symmetry breaking or dialectics - the dichotomy of the one and the many for a start. Or the part and the whole. But it encourages the misreading of Aristotle which Nagase picks up. It is an attempt to bend the argument away from the direction it naturally wanted to go.

The metaphysical thread that links the naturalism of Anaximander, Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce (I don't know about Deleuze :) ) is that the full story of self-organisation is triadic. In the beginning is the monadicity of a vagueness, a perfectly symmetric potential. Then that becomes divided against itself by a dichotomisation or symmetry breaking. That then results finally in a hierarchical state of stable asymmetry - a persistent state because the two critical aspects of the world are now arranged orthogonally as opposed limits.

So that is why for instance Aristotle pushed both the dichotomies - like matter vs form - and the hierarchies, like genus~species. The two are different aspects of the one whole. You need the symmetry-breaking to get the divisions started, then the asymmetric local~global state of organisation which can put these division stably at the "opposite ends of existence".

So the OP shows several prejudices in the reading of the history of metaphysics. First it thinks transcendently about what needs to be immanently self-organising. Then it wants to resist both the notion of the dichotomy and the hierarchy, and so falls somewhere muddled in between in Pomo fashion.

For the sake of post-dialectical politics, dichotomies are safely neutered as "teasing paradox". And hierarchical organisation is mistaken for "the egalatarian freedom of multiplicity".

Depending on what you mean, it could be a good sign.

The simple view of philosophical questioning is that there should be only the single right answer at the end of the day.

But the rich or complex view is instead dialectic or dichotomistic - yin yang even. Big questions always end up as crisp interplay of opposites. You need thesis and antithesis to have the resolution which is their synthesis.

So arguing strongly for one thing should bring its complementary "other" also sharply into view.

Right now you should already be saying, well if this guy says it's not one right answer, but instead two complementary poles of being, then what could contradict that in some strong fashion? Maybe I can stack up a counter-argument in terms that oppose the one and the many. Maybe I can suggest it is neither one, nor two, but a multitude.

That's the way it goes. (And the one and the many is of course simply another standard dichotomy - so "paradoxical dialectics" wins again!) ;)

I am who I am regardless--I can't really be anything else. — Bitter Crank

The problem there is that there is no such "you". There is an accumulated bundle of habits with certain tendencies, and also a capacity for creative unpredictability. But the idea of there being some essential self - a sensing Cartesian soul - as the fixed centre is itself a psychological construct.

So sure, we wear social masks. And they become as much a sign of who we are to "ourselves" as they present a sign of who we are for others to interpret.

Modern life is of course so complex that we need to become skilled at swapping masks to suit the social occasion. We are actors with many roles. And that fact in itself can become depersonalising. It leaves us with no clear "me" when we stop to examine who we are beyond a multiplicity of personas.

The best we can hope for is some generic sense of our tendencies over time as opposed to the moment to moment skill we have at fitting into social roles. And so that might focus on more biological traits like introversion, competitiveness, conscientiousness, etc.

But generic traits or preferences are by definition general and lacking the kind of specificity that seems demanded by the question of "who are we?".

So talk about authenticity is difficult. We know what it means when people really seem to fit their job in life - as a farmer, a parent, a teacher, or whatever. But people striving to be authentic - by visibly standing out against the crowd in some fashion - can often come across as the biggest posers.

So the "social masks" are a bigger part of "being real" as a person than we probably think. It is at that level we need to be most comfortable with "ourselves".

The debate boils down to the difference between what is publicly acceptable and what is privately acceptable. And what can't work is if one side tries to claim some kind of absolute right over the other. It has to be worked out as a "healthy balance" (which is where the actual philosophising would start).

So clearly hardcore porn is acceptable in liberated western society. The people involved get paid - and a business contract makes pretty much anything OK under that norm. But also it is not acceptable to then enjoy your purchased hardcore porn in a public setting. You don't sit there on the train or with your kids on the couch watching it, unless you want to be classified as a sicko.

So as an activity, it has a highly negotiated status. It is a legitimate private pastime. Until society decides the rules of decorum need to be changed again.

The objectification of woman debate is then about the public realm end of this public~private negotiation.

Can women be treated as porn objects if they don't get properly paid in some fashion? Is it a public realm problem if men are being encouraged to think of women generally in this socially limiting fashion? Are the cliches of fantasy gamers eroding a valuable distinction hardwon by social justice movements of the last century, or instead are they post-modern enough to wear their sleaze lightly and self-consciously?

One can have all sorts of views about what is in the end the healthiest balance between the social and private sphere. But it begins with a recognition that both are legitimate interests. And then that the really difficult moral question becomes "well, what is the ultimate goal here?".

What kind of society does modern society want to be?

Incidentally I do––yes––“demand absolute knowledge” though to put in this way makes me sound hysterically unreasonable (!) — Dominic Osborn

The problem is that "knowledge" requires the two definite things of the knower and the known. So it is inherently dualistic. And yet you want to claim a monism that is simply "experience".

So talking about absolute knowledge of your experience (or even like Descartes, claiming the certainty of I think, therefore I am) is to have already divided or structured that state of experiencing in a more particular fashion.

We do have an idea of what "just experiencing" is like - when "we" are lost in the flow of events or actions in unselfconscious fashion. But to then reflect on the fact that that is what "experience is like" is what introduces a counterfactual level of thinking that we call "knowing". That is, it is now logically entailed that there is something which experiencing is not. And how can we be sure that absolutely is the case - except pragmatically, as a belief supported by adequate doubting and testing?

The debate between pragmatism and skepticism seems to presuppose:

1. The sceptical position is a kind of hellish prison which must be found a way out of.

2. We know that the sceptical position is false, in advance of the discussion of it; it is just that we can’t quite find the conclusive argument with which to dispatch it. — Dominic Osborn

I don't accept that characterisation.

First, pragmatism values scepticism. But also points out that in practice it is self limited to the differences that could actually make a difference. So in regard to solipsism, if it makes no difference in practice to how you act in the world, then your indifference in that regard shows that you are simply pointing out a difference that you believe makes no difference.

The world could be real, the world could be an idealistic illusion. But if you carry on regardless, that proves the distinction is moot and lacking in meaning. It's just something you are saying for the sake of argument.

Second, pragmatism doesn't need to find a conclusive rational argument. It just needs to show that in the end, it makes no difference to the way you decide to act. Again, you don't really doubt unless that doubting makes some kind of difference to what you do.

This thinking presupposes something that you know (your experience) and something that you don’t (what is outside it). — Dominic Osborn

Well really it supposes three things. It is not dualistic but triadic. So there is "you", your "experiences" and "the world".

Except - in the Peircean semiotic original understanding of pragmatism - the "you" becomes a state of interpretance, the "experiences" become the signs that mediate interpretation, and "the world" becomes the noumenal.

So the notion of the self rather dissolves into a habit of interpretance - that we end up itself naming as the egoistic "I", taking it as a sign of a thing. That thing being a noumenal "self". It is because "I-ness" seems such a regular feature of our structure of experience that we come to believe there is this actor just beyond experiential reach behind the scenes.

So you see that you are taking a Cartesian view of the mind as a perceiving soul. Peirce strips that right down to a general structuring relation.

Pragmatism belongs to that perennial strain in philosophy: the back to common sense strain. — Dominic Osborn

That is the popular notion of pragmatism - the one that William James bastardised. Peirce had to start calling his philosophy pragmaticism because of that.

Well, time is just duration, so every change requires a duration of time which is appropriate to that change. Now, imagine a period of time which is a lesser amount of time than that required for the fastest change. In other words, imagine a period of time which is so short that no change could possibly occur in that very short period of time. Then you have conceived of time without change. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is precisely the argument by which talk about durations less that the Planck time is considered to be physically meaningless. The Planck scale tells us what the smallest possible unit of change is. And its already "larger than zero".

This was unimaginable to Newton. It remains unimaginable for most people still as "quantum mechanics can't be understood". And yet it is now a fundamental fact of modern physics.

You're a waste of space. :)

So why do you say "time itself" makes no sense then? Can't we conceive of the backdrop without the events in the foreground? — Metaphysician Undercover

That's my point. No I can't. An absolute lack of change makes no sense to me. What kind of thing is that?

But I can easily imagine a reciprocal deal where a backdrop relative lack of change allows there to be a foreground relative presence of change. So events and their contexts can be distinguished in the various ontically basic ways familiar from metaphysics.

If there is stasis, there can be flux. And vice versa. Each makes the other a possibility by the possibility of its own existence.

Ah yes.. so conditioning approved by the Village Green Preservation Society's standards of what counts as "the world's" fault and "your fault".. — schopenhauer1

Or alternatively, it is therapy aimed at uncovering the sources of your conditioning so you can consider the value of that conditioning for yourself.

I think you simply downplay the human ability to imagine for simply looking at established habits. — schopenhauer1

So tell me more about this imaginative ability. What is its psychological origins?

Is it "computational" or "inspired" would you say? Or "somewhere in-between"?

Well, you haven't answered the question, how does it get up to speed, so that it can start slowing down? A wind up toy accelerates rapidly until it reaches peak speed, then it starts its steady decline. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your wind up toy first has to overcome the inertia of being at rest. And even before that, someone has to wind it up, and set it down on a surface where it can start to react to the forces applied.

And then its speed declines as the countering force of friction comes into play. If your wind up toy was in a frictionless world, it could spin or roll forever (as long as it wasn't attached to its internal spring or whatever that becomes another brake).

Is the rapid acceleration supposed to be prior to the Big Bang? — Metaphysician Undercover

That's what God is for. :-}

Remember even in talking about the Big Bang in this cartoon fashion, it could be the Newtonian case that "nothingness" was coasting along inertially with no net applied force - no acceleration source - and all that had to happen was the sudden appearance of friction. Or entropification in other words.

We can conceive of time passing without any change occurring, yet we cannot conceive of change occurring without time passing. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is what I said. We conceive as time in the backdrop sense of what is no change. Or at least, the minimal imaginable change. And then events are the local changes that stand out against an unchanging backdrop in some sense.

So who makes the decision about the "faultily" part? — schopenhauer1

You of course. If positive psychology has anything to offer, it is empowering you with the skills to discover what is your fault, what is the world's fault.

One already presumes it is going to be a mix of both (although you may be without personal flaw?).

if Romantic means a greater self-awareness.. the label really doesn't matter to me". — schopenhauer1

Unfortunately, while it might claim that, it's not true.

You are unfairly characterizing my ideas as "special souls" or "meaningless machines" . I disagree with both, but you do not pick up the nuance or choose to downplay it to make a characterization. — schopenhauer1

You are free to add nuance. But it won't change anything if it turns out to be simply marking some particular position on the spectrum of possibilities represented by these dialectical limits on being.

The two extreme oppositions would be soul vs machine, mind vs matter. If you can talk about people and groups in ways that sidesteps that most basic dichotomy in modern culture, go for it.

Time doesn't imply anything about entropy. — Terrapin Station

That's right, because it IS process(es). It's identical to that, identical to process/change/motion. — Terrapin Station

So I am wasting my time because any argument I offer is going to be "rebutted" by your un-argued assertions of personal belief?

Fine.

What you seem to downplay is EVEN THOUGH we are shaped by the group, we still have WHAT IT FEELS LIKE to be an individual.. — schopenhauer1

I simply explain that the feeling is a product of socialisation.

So if feeling like an individual becomes a problem, it could be either that society is what you are going to have to fix, or it could be that you are faultily socialised and so have that particular problem - not the global problem - is what has to be somehow repaired.

Which is where positive psychology comes in. >:)

f civilization also brought with it the self-reflection of how the individual fits with the group, then so that is what we have. — schopenhauer1

But as you know, there is the problem that modern life has also brought with it a "cosmological" level view of our personal existence.

So that was the big reason for Romanticism as a cultural backlash. Enlightenment science seemed to be saying our existence was a giant meaningless cosmic accident, while at the same time our every action was already pre-determined by the fact we were simply complicated meat machines.

So culturally, that Romantic backlash is what is informing your own current socialisation some 400 years later. It is the backdrop picture on which you "self-reflect".

And the irony is this Scientistic picture of the Cosmos is not even correct. It is another social image of reality. So you are juxtaposing your existence against a brightly coloured stage fiction.

It seems a really big issue to me. Even in philosophy - which is suppose to have a handle on these things - folk just don't have a clue about the proper definition of "being human" in a way that speaks to what is natural. Whether you think we are special souls or meaningless machines, these are both vivid cultural myths (that are serving their own largely unreflected-upon purposes).

What?? No. That processes are "of material" and have locations doesn't amount to time not being process(es). — Terrapin Station

So you choose incoherence? You are not even wanting to say time is a property of a process. or some such. You are simply conflating terms in way that makes no sense of a relation about acts of measurement and what is claimed to be measured.

I wish I could somehow ban all "explanation" talk. ;-) I don't know if I agree with your comment there, but "explanation" is vague. — Terrapin Station

Explanation is causal talk. We construct models of causal relations that are meant to describe the esssence of the structure, process or system in question. And from those models, we know what to measure so as to particularise those models. We know how to plug numbers to make the equations do something useful.

So proper explanation is the least vague of human activities.

I don't at all agree with tying time up with entropy. If entropy didn't obtain, or if it were different than it obtains, that wouldn't affect time in any way. — Terrapin Station

Yes. If things were different, then they would be different. Brilliant deduction!

Now show me why one would believe entropy doesn't obtain - the second law of thermodynamics being the most fundamental known constraint on material existence.

Perhaps you have a perpetual motion machine, or a time travel machine, that might make me start to suspect the second law?

Yeah, processes are of material, and they have locations. That's not an objection to my view (in my opinion (re your "but")). — Terrapin Station

So you accept my "but" in the sense of dropping the claim that "time just IS process"? At most, time is just one of a combination of abstracted limits we use to describe the Cosmos as a dynamically-evolving process - the others being principally space, matter and energy?

I don't buy that anything is "transcendent of existence itself." That idea is incoherent on my view. — Terrapin Station

Yes. But it is useful also to mention that to explain the Cosmos, we have to imagine standing outside it. Or at least standing at its absolute limits.

So the trick for modern physics is now to establish an immanent model of cosmic existence in which "time" is an emergent limit, not a Newtonian-style transcendent limit.

Understanding the deep epistemic issue is how we can hope to untangle the ontological presumptions the OP makes.

So time in the modern sense is about two things.

It is about the possibility of history. Things change in some global (entropic) direction.

And it is also about the possibility of change at different local rates. In a radiative state, everything is happening at c and so it is a pretty much timeless state. There is only a single speed. But when the electro-weak symmetry breaks, the Higgs mechanism is turned on, you then get the new possibility of masses moving with any speed between c and absolute rest.

So now there is a world of very time-ful histories. Every massive object can tell its own personal Newtonian story. Talking about "time" starts to have real meaning - in the way we more normally think about it.

But then at the Heat Death, once massive black holes have fizzled away the last any matter, returning it to timeless radiation, talking about local rates of change will lack material meaning. There will be nothing around that is moving slower than c to measure. And even radiation itself will no longer continue to get cooler via metric expansion and red-shifting. Even that last measurable index of change will have dissolved away.

So time starts with a bang and ends with a whimper. And for a while in-between, it has a bit of extra material richness in terms of not everything unfolding in vanilla process fashion. There is some added thermal complexity to the description of things.

So it is the case that we are born as individuals... — schopenhauer1

Or to be more accurate, we are born highly unindividuated. A newborn infant has an unwired cortex and is little more than bundle of reflexes. Then becoming meaningfully individuated is the journey of life.

The responsibility to work with the established group norms, institutions, and settings are foisted upon the individual, and thus, one has been forced into the situation. — schopenhauer1

Again, we are born unindividuated and socialisation is the distinctive aspect of becoming a human animal. There is no human individual to speak of until norms, institutions and settings have done their work to make that a fact.

Though one may feel a personal obligation out of enculturated habits and personal preferences it is not anything more than an individual preference or habit of thinking. — schopenhauer1

Nope. Those habits are your "individuality". If you have been socialised in the normal human way, the obligations are how you will balance the good of the social whole against the good of the biological self.

So yes, there is still the animal in the human. Animals also are individuated by their physical development. They develop meaningful habits in that regard.

But humans are more than just animals in that their individuation is far more constrained by a social history. Their lives have another whole level of cultural meaning.

Which is closer to the more accurate view? — schopenhauer1

Clearly the second. It makes little sense for "you" to reject what makes "you", at least in some blanket fashion.

But socialisation is more complex than that anyway. Especially in modern society, it encourages you to be individually creative and questioning. It doesn't just tolerate individual preferences, it pressures you to develop them.

And ironically this is likely the main reason for your pessimism. You exist in a consumer culture that wants you to decide what colour of iPod is "you". You exist in a Romantic culture where everyone must be the star of their own existential legend.

Actually being individuated in such an extreme fashion is a lonely form of existence. It feels unnatural for an animal that has biologically evolved for a highly connected and social lifestyle.

So there is definitely a problem - an imbalance. And it starts with believing we are "born an individual" rather than that individuality is an acquired life skill. And that for quite natural reasons, most people may in fact feel happier "fitting in" rather than "standing out".

So fitting in should be the culturally encouraged habit of preference. And yet standing out has become the odd and unnatural desire. What, at this point in human history, could be fueling such a turn of events? ;)

A thermometer measures temperature and perhaps represents a conception of temperature, but in no way can you say a thermometer *is* temperature. — hypericin

And I didn't say it "is" temperature.

A clock is a device that is meant to locate events in time. So - to the degree a clock seems to work - this is due to a presumption about what "events in time" means.

You keep asking about "time itself", as if that notion made sense. It doesn't. It's the philosophical equivalent of the sound of one hand clapping.

But we can talk about local change being measured against a backdrop of no change. We can talk about differences of rates. So now all we need is a backdrop which has usefully minimal change in terms of the aspect of change we are interested in measuring.

With Newtonian mechanics - the laws of masses in motion - that resulted in the kind of time that you think "is time". But that notion of time turned out to be not very realistic once we started measuring the Universe at hotter/smaller scales, or larger/colder scales. It turned out that at a more general scale, time, space, momentum and energy are all entangled - as the Planck scale constants show.

Of course we can still measure time in Newtonian fashion with a clock. But we now have to remember to include corrections as we start to approach the extremes of scale. So if you accelerate a clock towards the speed of light, you know it is going to tick slower.

Yet it would be great to have a model of time, a way of measuring change, that doesn't have to involve a collection of corrections - especially once we get down to the level of a theory of quantum gravity.

Of course. I am asking why, if time really *is* every process, how is it possible that it's state can be communicable with a single number? For instance, seconds since the big bang? Or, from the discussion with apokrisis, 2.725K? — hypericin

The single number is just your way of locating yourself as an event in a wider sense of passing time.

So if you have a model of the Universe as a bath of radiation spreading~cooling at a geometrically determinate rate, then you can hope to pin-point your location within that cosmic history by measuring the current CBR temperature (or equivalently, the current average energy density of outer space).

So you don't measure time in some direct sense - as time is not itself a thing. What you measure is a local surrogate of the globally unfolding process you believe to be taking place.

An actual clock with hands and a face is a surrogate for Newtonian time in that it presumes you can regulate the continuous uncoiling of a spring with a system of toothed cogs and an alternating escapement mechanism - the physics of that will work fine because the Universe is not so hot that the clock melts into radiation, or so cold that there is no available energy to wind it up.

So a clock as a measuring device presumes that time actually is a detached constant backdrop with no local entanglements with the device doing the measuring. But again, accelerate that clock towards c and you will find it always was in fact entangled with that "detached" backdrop. So as a model of time passing - a means of locating events in time - it isn't really getting at the fundamental level of what is going on.

I would say that the clock actually IS time, just as all processes (all change/motion) are. — Terrapin Station

But a process is an unfolding causal pattern. So it involves changes, but also materiality and location.

What you may mean is that in talking about time at the cosmological level, we need to be able to see it as an immanent aspect of the Universe considered as a process (a disspative process for example) rather than something transcendent of existence itself (in the way Newtonian time is).

So in that light, we need to find what changes least about the process that is the "Universe coming to be", and thus can stand as our global static backdrop for local acts of measurement.

In modern physics, the Planck scale triad of constants gives us that kind of fundamental dimensional yardstick. So time or duration (as measured by any clock) is derivative of a relation between h, G and c - the basic units of quantum action, gravity's strength, and the speed of light.

For "time" to "pass", there must be an effective distance as scaled by the relation: h x G/c. Or more accurately, a unit of Planck time is t = square root of h x G/c^5.

That is, starting from the Big Bang, the Universe must have grown big enough, and flat enough, for the quantum spreading and cooling of its contents to have begun - the first tick of the thermal clock.

So from a Newtonian frame of reference, we talk about the Big Bang starting at 10^-44 seconds. But that is imagining time in a way that is detached from existence as a thermal quantum process. It is imagining the Big Bang as happening in time as opposed to the Big Bang being the first tick of time.

From the Big Bang point of view, time starts from an already physical size - the one where there is already also a maximum local energy density or heat, and a minimum possible spatial extent.

Even if you pack a huge amount of power into a small thing, then let it go, like a wind up toy, that thing has to accelerate to get up to top speed, before starting to slow down. How is time supposed to get up to top speed, before starting to slow down? — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep, the Big Bang exactly represents the situation of a wind up toy. Your argument is devastating.

Yep. Except the entropic clock ticks in logarithmic units, not linear. It's cooling is an asymptotic curve.

So if the first tick was a second, the second tick is 10 seconds long, the third 100 seconds long, and so on, if you get my drift. Thus the last tick will last for bloody ever.

Remember the geometry that underlies this view. We are talking about an expanding sphere of gas. So the temperature or energy density drops fast if the sphere is an inch wide and grows by another whole inch. But once the sphere is a mile wide, growing an inch makes very little difference.

So to achieve constant temperature drop, each tick of the entropic clock must be exponentially longer than the last.