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.

But does it make sense, in response to the question "What is Time?", to point to a clock? — hypericin

Well if you believe a clock can actually measure time, then surely that answers your own question?Whatever a clock is, it represents the way you already conceive of time.

So you're trying to justify logic, in terms of other criteria that are external to it. — Wayfarer

But there is still a reason why we might choose one axiomatic base over another. The laws of thought have got to seem self-evidently right.

That is, every normal person learning about the principle of identity or sufficient reason should feel aha! , yes I get it, at least the first few times they think about them.

And it is that forging of an emotional bond to a logical precept that then makes it so hard to get people to question the foundations of their belief systems of course.

The brain evolved to evaluate the world. So you see what is happening and then how you feel about it is part of the overall reaction. If you see a snarling dog, one part of you might be searching for a rational plan of action. But the other needs to be gearing you up physiologically in terms of the machinery of fight or flight.

So thinking and feeling always go together with perceiving. It's a package deal. The body has to be aligned with whatever "intellectual" choices are about to be made.

Then the same applies even to just evaluating our own planned actions. When we think about what we might do next, our emotion centres (to put it ridiculously crudely) respond to the picture we start forming. We get a positive feeling about whether it is going to work or not. We can feel aha!, exactly right. Or oh no! this could go very wrong.

Hitting upon the right answer that connects the dots of an intellectual puzzle is exactly the same as finding a mango tree when you are lost and hungry in the woods. The brain lights up with the same physiological orientation response. Your pupils dilate, your attention narrows, your heart rate changes. It may be just the answer to a puzzle, but you know the answer in fact feels right because you have this conviction in your bones - or at least in the neurotransmitters of your autonomic nervous system.

So to use syllogistic reasoning is a rather dry and learnt habit. But we then believe the results of such a process of assembling evidence in a cascade of steps because we can feel it all actually does fit together in recognisable fashion.

Or often we can see the argument seems to work yet we feel troubled. That is where we might look more closely at the premises until - aha! - we spot with satisfied conviction the flaw we seek.

So really, on one level, all this reasoning is very dangerous stuff. We end up believing anything only due to some emotional reaction. We check in with our rather subconscious and automatic orienting responses and discover which way our feelings want to point us.

But on the other hand, our evaluative responses are highly evolved and pretty reliable for most real life decision making. So the trick is educating people to actually reason in a dispassionate fashion - or rather, to create the kind of fact-checking mindset where every step of any argument is fully exposed to a passionate response of the type that actually motivates strong self-questioning.

You may be right that negation is built into the structure of the brain, as in on/off switches, but I think it is thought that turns these switches off for the most part. — Cavacava

Selective attention can certainly modulate the receptive fields of neurons in top-down fashion, either suppressing or enhancing their responses.

So what you say is right - if "thought" is understood in terms of attentional processes. It is certainly what would be meant by thought in pre-linguistic animals.

Researchers from MIT, along with a scholar from the University of Tokyo believe that human language is a grafting of two communication forms found elsewhere in the animal kingdom: first, the elaborate songs of birds, and second, the more utilitarian, information-bearing types of expression seen in a diversity of other animals. — Cavacava

I've only got the time to quickly skim the paper.

But it is certainly reasonable in a general fashion. One of the things we know is that the lower level limbic system control over human expressive noises - our rather involuntary acts of swearing - had to have a higher level motor planning control built over the top.

So that is why you get Tourettes, for example. Humans evolved new connectivity so pre-motor areas - what we now call the grammar areas, but which are just as much tool using or other complex action planning areas - could start to over-ride the more instinctual or emotional level of vocalisation. And Tourettes is where the wiring doesn't quite give full control. And also why we actually shout fuck or shit, or some actual word, when we hit our thumb with a hammer.

So the paper's connecting of bird song and honeybee dances is a bit strained. Not wrong, but you can also talk more directly about the known neuroanatomy of the brain and see that speech is a combination of complex goal-directed planning and simpler emotional social expressiveness.

That is why speaking does always involves both what you say, and how you say it. Prosody feeds in from another part of the brain to give every word an appropriate social inflection.

Nevertheless, whenever you talk about 'constraints' at all, then - why those constraints? — Wayfarer

That is focusing on the material questions. And I am stressing the semiotic dimension to existence.

So the fundamental question in that light becomes about the historical inevitability (or conversely, the contingency) of the critical levels of semiosis.

The Planck scale would define the most basic scale at which something pan-semiotic happened. There is a reason why three spatial dimensions was the optimal solution for organising a dissipative chain reaction - the emergence of the Big Bang universe as a cooling-spreading heat sink of radiation.

Then life would be another level of semiosis. And biophysics has indeed discovered that there is a particular nano-scale thermal regime - poised between the quantum and classical scale - where molecular machines can organise cellular metabolism with almost magical effectiveness.

And also over the past decade, biology has realised that another very remarkable semiotic transition had to take place at the scale of bacteria and archea. These simple single cell lifeforms, on their own, could never have evolved into anything more complex. And yet each - in arising as complementary ways of milking work from respiratory chains and proton gradients - could then get combined to allow large multi-cellular life.

In essence, archea could ingest bacteria and turn them into mitrochondrial power-houses. The waste product of one kind of simple life could become the fuel being produced inside the other form of simple life, closing the dissipative loop in the one creature.

So no, you won't see much if you just focus on the material aspects of being like most cosmology does. You have to have the larger semiotic perspective to see what were the critical transition thresholds and so make some judgement about the historical inevitability/historical contingency of what followed.

For example, the theorising about archea and bacteria symbiosis would seem to dramatically narrow the probability of complex life ever arising. Only an organic chemistry that was very earth-like indeed could seem to do the trick.

But anyway, then after single cell genetics and multicellular genetic combos, you then get neural semiosis and linguistic semiosis as further crucial advances in semiotic mechanism. And mathematiical cyberspace could be next.

So what I mean by constraints is the semiotic approach to constraints, not merely a materialist approach.

But I don't want to convey the idea that I believe in 'God's plan' in any kind of literalistic sense. There are other religious models - the Hindus see the Universe as 'the creative play of Brahman'. Buddhists don't even really concern themselves with 'how it all began' — Wayfarer

From memory, it was Conway-Morris who is Christian and so wrote in ways sympathetic to ID. Eastern philosophy is generally more immanent and organic in its thinking as you say.

However, there's an interesting philosopher of biology, called Simon Conway-Morris, one of whose books, Life's Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe makes a similar kind of case in elaborate detail. — Wayfarer

So that is the intelligent design argument? God created our particular kind of Universe because it had the constraints within which Homo sapiens becomes a historical inevitability?

I think I go one step further than that. ;)

I say constraint itself has a logical inevitability sufficient to conjure up worlds. You don't need a God of the Blue Touchpaper to figure out the initial conditions. Platonically, some kind of semiotic organisation or regularity can do it all for itself, no need for a divine maker.

Whereas the transition from primitive hominid, to upright, language-using, cave-painting hominid was relatively rapid, i.e. the last 100,000 years. — Wayfarer

Well upright walking hominids have been around for about 5 million years - an evolutionary response to the retreat of the jungles with climate change.

And then the use of fire is at least 800,000 years old. Stone-tipped spears were being used 500,000 years ago.

And it can be argued that the spectacularly life-like cave paintings of animals betray what is in fact a simpler stage of language sophistication. They seem eidetic, and so painted by minds less structured by a linguistic habit.

If you check kid's art, they paint houses and people as if they are assembling a collection of words. A crude circle for the head. A few dashes to represent hair or fingers. It is the opposite of photographic in being linguistic.

So yes, hominid evolution has been rapid - in ways that can be explained primarily by rapid climate change. Why did Neanderthals die out? Were they too physically adapted to the ice ages and so it was the lighter bodied, but bigger brained, lineage of Homo - us - that had the more general purpose design that could survive through warm and cold abrupt climate shifts?

So it depends on your level of magnification whether the story looks gradual or abrupt. But certainly, the rise of civilised Homo sap - wearing clothes, living in small villages with a hierarchical social organisation and rich ornamental culture - was much too abrupt for it to be explained genetically.

And the most plausible way to account for that degree of shift is that Homo sap was pre-adapted for articulate speech, the climate then allowed Homo sap to flourish in population numbers, and then the social density/complexity was the fertile ground on which a new social habit - speaking in grammatically organised sentences that supported rational trains of thought - could quickly (over just a few hundred generations) get established.

As did, at the same time, the massively-enlarged forebrain that enabled abstract thought and conceptual representation — Wayfarer

Well that might be how you think of the prefrontal cortex. But as you say, there was only the relative enlargement of areas, not new areas evolving. So if you are claiming that some part of the brain is responsible for abstraction and conception in a big way in humans, then by the same logic, it does the same in a small way for squirrel monkeys and lemurs.

What is indisputable when it comes to sharp discontinuities is that the human vocal tract is unique. And the brain changes that went with that are really just an increase in the top-down connectivity needed to have intentional control over what comes out of the mouth.

It is like the opposable thumb in that regard. Or even bipedal walking. Standing up right allowed us to carry stuff across an open landscape. Carrying stuff meant there was a reason for hands to become specialised for manipulation and thus pre-adapted for a culture of tool-making.

So for paleoanthropology, there is a reasonably standard way of explaining the co-evolution of bodies and culture. And it doesn't need to involve hopeful monsters.

And speaking of 'walking through the door', the transformation to the two-legged gait, when combined with the enormous enlargement of the fore-brain, required the development of infants with soft skulls, due to the narrowing of the birth canal (which also lead to large increases in infant and maternal mortality compared to earlier primates) and also the requirement for very long periods of extrasomatic adaption, again very unlike that of the preceding species. — Wayfarer

Again you are ignoring the gradual story. Bipedalism wasn't a problem for early hominids as they still had small brains. But it did then become an issue as brains got larger.

The result was that babies got more immature and helpless at birth. So this would have driven the need for a particular level of sociality and technological sophistication in late hominids (as compared to even extremely social chimps). And being born with barely formed brains would also have made late hominid infants far more "programmable" by whatever their cultural environment happened to be. Again this is a pre-adaptation. There was a natural window of the first 7 years in which the rather unnatural thing of grammatical organisation and phonemic structure could be hardwired by experience.

So there are lots of pieces to the puzzle that fit together quite nicely.

Even adolescence looks to be a relatively recent evolutionary change. The brains of Homo erectus up to 400,000 years ago seem to jump straight from the child to the adult. But we have a further 10 years of teenagehood where the highest levels of impulse control and social thinking are still busy maturing.

So every thing about our brain maturation is stretched out in ways that apparently maximise the chances for culture to get in there and shape the patterns of what goes on.

Again, the popular view of human evolution - to which Chomsky falls prey - is that it is all about the magical development of the thinking and feeling self conscious human individual. This is the romantic picture of the ape that found its rational soul.

But the science supports a much more prosaic co-evolutionary story of culture and biology, All the action when it comes to the impressive intellectual advances are about cultural evolution - the rationally-structured habits of thought that language enables. Human biology - via a mix of accidental pre-adaptation and consequent purposeful fine-tuning - then changed as much as it could to support that cultural evolutionary trajectory.

So it is culture and the collective that led the way, not the genetics and the individual mind.

Chomsky thinks that humans language ability arose from a single mutation about 100,000 years ago and it quickly spread. — Cavacava

That's an example of where you can go off the rails if you can only think about recursion/negation in crisp computational terms.

To Chomsky, it seems like the basic trick of articulate speech is an all or nothing affair. And therefore, if the ability for language is biologically based, it had to emerge abruptly as a "hopeful monster" mutant.

But neuroscience should tell you that recursion and negation are a generalised feature of brain architecture - brains being organised by dichotomies and hierarchies. So the kind of nested hierarchical organisation that characterises syntactical speech acts is simply the general rule for all motor planning. Even opening a door or chipping away a flint axe is a hierarchically developed plan with general intents and a sequence of sub-acts.

So what Chomsky sees as the hard part - the evolution of recursion - is already a general fact of brains. It is just that other kinds of motor act are less socially programmatic, more fluid and dynamic, than grammatical speech. The rules for opening doors and chipping flints exist, but only in a much vaguer or more localised sense. They are task specific assemblages, not universalised and abstracted.

The far more plausible evolutionary hypothesis is the "singing ape".

Hominids are social species and making emotional or expressive noises communicates a lot of useful information. Chimps screech and howl and chatter. So there would have been selective pressure that would have led to an articulate vocal tract in early humans. A greater complexity of noise-making would have justified changes to the mouth and throat so that air could be vibrated and bitten into phonemic chunks, and chained together with syntactic variety.

It is in fact quite a neural feat to be able to control the vocal cords so that distinctive trains of noise can be produced at the rate of five or more contrasting sounds a second. The underlying morphological changes would have taken at least a few hundred thousand years to evolve, and so must have had a good justification just in terms of the advantages in social co-ordination they allowed.

So we start with apes making analog expressive noises - the screeches and mutters that communicate indexically by how loud or soft they are, how angry or reassuring they sound. There is modulation and pattern, but it varies in continuous fashion and so any communicative distinctions are vague. It is noise making of a kind that couldn't represent the sharp binary distinctions of symbolic logic, for example. Well a chimp could hoot a morse code perhaps, but that level of binariness is unnatural even for us.

Then as an extension of this, hominids developed the trick of vocal digitisation. The voice box, throat, tongue and lips all changed so that rapid and distinctively varied patterns of noise could be produced.

Exactly when this happened is controversial. There used to be good arguments that Neanderthals lacked the vocal equipment of Homo sap - no fat tongue in an arched palate, no dropped larynx and altered hyoid bone. But now the evidence seems to be swinging towards Neanderthals being more human-like both in vocalisation ability and symbolic capacity.

But whatever, the morphological changes involved are all standard gradual genetic adjustments. Nothing new needed to evolve. It was just the shape of existing structures being tweaked. So that argues for a steady reason for a direction of change that pre-existed the cultural development of actual grammatical habits of reference. But once the vocal machinery had been refined, then it would have been only a matter of time before the habit of rules and words got invented.

So in paleolinguistic circles, Chomsky's hopeful monster story seems puzzlingly naive.

However Chomsky is an arch-rationalist/semi-Platonist and he sort of argues what I argued partly in jest - that the Cosmos has ideas it wants to express, and we are its evolutionary vehicle. So the habit of universal grammar is like Turing computation or Boolean logic - something so damn mathematically true that it was just lying there in wait to pounce as final cause. As soon as some creature evolved vocal equipment (or in Chomsky's view, neural circuitry) that contained the basic digital elements of computation, such as the power of recursion and negation, then the whole weight of abstract symbol processing machinery was going to come tumbling out of the closet.

As I say, I agree on this. It is what has happened. Humans lucked into a semiotic regime where suddenly there was all this sequentially ordered, computationally rational,stuff just waiting to exert its machine like grip over the world. The evolutionary leap was not about us humans as thinking individuals. It was about the eruption of a mechanistic social order that could interact with the entropic world in its own new way - a way that expresses universalised abstraction.

But Chomsky is wrong in thinking the genetic advance was about some computational novelty arising in individual brain structure - and that in itself immediately unlocking computational or rational thought capacities.

As I argue, the computational novelty was far more prosaic - the rise of a digital noise-making ability which, with its sequencing demands, put a new kind of constraint on the already hierarchically organised brain. From there, it was a short step at the cultural level to stumble into the vast possibilities opened up by a collection of minds all getting organised to think and speak in a language-structured fashion.

Give or take the interruption of a few ice ages, the exponential development of Homo sapiens in terms of symbolic culture and collective rational control over the environment is then clear in the historical record. A door had been opened and we walked right on through.

We can imagine space as a 3D euclidean space, divided into a mesh of invisible little points or cubes. Motion then has an absolute meaning, as moving with respect to this mesh. — hypericin

But you have then added the extra thing of a change in location to your static grid. So now there is something extra in the this grid world that is not fixed to a location. And its position can change in regard to location in a way that you would feel moved to describe as where it was "previously", where it is "now", and where it could be in the "future".

So you started with a spatial grid and smuggled in notions of matter and time to create a model of a world of objects in motion (or not, if their positions are seen to be unchanged during the time that other objects do change their position).

But what if we treat time as a 1D line, analogous with space? Then, unlike with space, every object is at the same point, and moving through time at the same rate. Which, unless you imagine absolute points along this 1D line, analogous to the lattice of cubes in space, is also like saying that every object is motionless in time. Or, if you invoke relativity, then objects are only moving in time to the degree that relativistic effects are observed. — hypericin

But that is just to treat time as a further spatial dimension. If time actually was just like that, we should be able to travel backward in time with the same ease we move forward. And we should be able to remain at rest in time.

So while a spatialised representation of time is useful, it doesn't seem true in a deep way.

What physics is working towards is a thermal model of time which accounts better for its apparent character. So time now becomes the rate at which the contents of the Universe in general are cooling as - spatially - the Universe expands. There is an entropic curve that the entire Universe is running down at a general rate.

So now we can look at the most general material feature of the Universe - the cooling and spreading bath of cosmic background radiation. Everywhere, the temperature of the CMB is falling at the same rate. It is changing at the same speed. And this now gives a concrete backdrop of steady change against which we can measure different local rates of change.

It defines simultaneity in terms of a standard temperature. Right "now" the cosmic time is 2.725 degrees above absolute zero. And there is a thermal arrow that points from when the Universe was hotter to when it will be even cooler still.

So time is how we can measure change in terms of whatever it is that we can find as not changing. And time also has some intuitive features - like a locked-in forward direction, and a universality in terms of there being some common "now" where everything in some sense stands in the one spot - that a spatialised Newtonian model is not good at representing.

Therefore we need better ways of modelling time that produced these other features in a more intuitive fashion. Talking in terms of temperature rather than location is a way to do that. Even if we are standing still, we can see that a process of entropification means we are getting older and colder at the same general rate as the entire Universe.

Or can we dispense with time altogether? Everything is just process, at rates relative to each other and nothing else, in an eternal present? I am ignorant as to whether physics actually requires an ontologically existent time, as opposed to a formal notion which makes the equations work. — hypericin

Don't forget that the rate of change we care about most is that of massive objects. Light travels at only its one speed (and so, for lack of comparison, radiation is pretty "timeless"). Massive objects are free to move at any speed between rest and c. So massive objects have the kind of variety relative to a pair of absolute bounds on motion that lets us talk about them moving at different rates in comparison to this backdrop difference.

So when you are talking about the speed of mass x, you are saying it is y times faster that being at rest, and z times slower than being at c. That is why masses appear to move "inside" time. There is both an upper and lower absolute bound that between them define a range of meaningful speeds.

Mass always thus exists somewhere on a spectrum of speeds. There is always a faster and a slower from wherever they are now.

Or at least this is the case for the Universe as it is thermally right "now" - a Universe that is largely in its classical regime being neither so hot and small that it is a Big Bang bunch of thermal fluctuation, nor so cold and large that it is just a "red-shifted to buggery" Heat Death sea of thermal fluctuations once again.

What if the reason for the development of language is precisely the need to express abstract thought? — Barry Etheridge

Or it could be the step that allowed human culture to think. The necessity could lie in sociality achieving a concrete memetic presence in the evolutionary game itself.

Again, a dyadic way of thinking about origins always has to decide which is chicken, which is egg. Humans obviously evolved to get where they are. So either the power of abstract thought came first, and speech became the way to express those ideas to others, or the communal habit of language came first, and abstraction became possible through the use of this new tool.

You can argue either as the necessary first step forever and a day because - dichotomously - each is the perfect "other" of the other.

A triadic view recognises that both sides of the equation do in fact emerge together. And then can be "caused" - in finalistic fashion - by their future outcome.

So cultural evolution was already a (vague) fact even before articulate speech came along. It can be seen in the tool use and other survival practices of chimp troops and other primates even.

But then this nascent level of memetics - that we can say encodes a preformative desire in "wanting to join the evolutionary game as fully as possible" - got properly expressed once human language finally started to take shape.

A lot of tool use didn't really change the game for culture. But the tiniest inkling of speech suddenly broke things wide open. Culture could express its latent desire to exist in fully autonomous fashion. A play of abstraction, a play of symbols, could become part of the wider evolutionary game.

So in a sense, language could be the product of the needs of abstract thought. But now this doesn't mean that Homo sapiens had evolved an individual biological capacity of abstract thought that needs its expression. We are now talking rather more Platonically of the Cosmos as a realm of ideas that had to have a speaking animal to use as the vehicle of its expression.

One minute, we were hunter-gatherers slathering our faces in red ochre and painting magical eidetic images of our prey, the next we found ourselves spouting the eternal truths of maths and philosophy, eventually even science. The Universe had discovered us as its suitable mouthpiece. :)

Of course I am exaggerating the cosmic-ness of it all. But the point is to illustrate that we habitually think about issues of origination as a problem of bottom-up construction. For humans to start speaking, they must have already had a definite reason. And a frustration at not being to articulate the big ideas buzzing around their brains seems the kind of definite reason - the crisp first cause - that has persuaded many in the traditional "thought first vs language first" philosophical debate.

But a triadic logic allows for finality to be a true cause of origination. Abstract thought - of the definite kind we are now familiar with - could have acted to favour the evolution of articulate speech right from the beginning. Even the tiniest first steps towards organised symbolism - words and rules - was an opening that was going to grow itself every wider.

It established a disconnect between individual psychology and social mental habits that was hierarchically-enduring, and so also the most powerful form of connection. The constraints organising individual minds no longer depended on those minds but became cultural-level systems themselves in inter-tribal and inter-generational competition.

But I am arguing that time has no absolute speed. We can easily accept that motion can have only a relative speed, this accords more or less well with our intuitive understanding of motion. But with time, it is much more difficult. It clashes with the intuitive notion that time is plodding forward at a constant rate.

So the problem remains: there are at most minute measurable differences, in most cases, in the relative speeds of time. But there is no such thing as an absolute speed of time. And without a speed, how can time, as we understand it, operate at all? — hypericin

What you are dealing with is that change or flux can only be measured with absoluteness if we can establish some absolute backdrop of stasis or a complete lack of change. And in the end, we can't find such an absence of dynamism. We can only find a relative absence to construct our desired backdrop for measurement.

So our notions of time are an attempt to arrive at an image of "least change". That is is why you find yourself talking about a Newtonian model of time as a spatialised dimension - a line with points. And then why you worry about why motion along this temporal line should be itself constant and not variable in its speed.

But you give your own answer already on that. If everything was "sped up" or "slowed down" by time changing its speed, it would make no difference. It would be the same as if the speed of time was constant anyway. And so, the whole question of "what speed is time moving at" can be seen as irrelevant. Treating time as a Newtonian dimension is already as simple as it gets. To have a global dimension that is eternally there in always the same fashion is already the least amount of change that can be conceived.

This should be apparent from Newton's own classical laws of motion. Constant linear motion or constant angular momentum are inertial - a form of change that is not really a change in dynamics. A rolling ball can roll forever at the same speed. This is a consequence of time being a "statically existing" global symmetry. A realm of objects in eternal inertial motion is already as rock-bottom unchanging as you are going to get.

But Newtonian dynamics has been found to be too static even with its already irreducible degree of "constant change". Relativity required a more dynamical picture on the large and cold scale, quantum mechanics required it on the small and hot scale.

So time is just the way we talk about measuring change. And that in itself involves establishing some general backdrop of relative "no-change" against which we can then measure the other thing of some particular or local change.

This is why the very notion of time appears to be based on the "necessary self-contradiction" of being a static or unchanging backdrop thing. It is the fixed container of everything that changes.

But even with Newtonian time, critical aspects of the dynamics of things are made part of the global picture. Inertia - the kind of motion that is constant - is a universal property of masses. So Newtonian physics simplified our notion of time in putting the cause of constant motion "elsewhere" in its physics. But as we moved towards the kind of physics that could unify our notions of spacetime as a container, and matter as its contents, inertial motion came back to haunt everyone. Time had to be reimagined in the more dynamical fashion that could underpin relativity and quantum mechanics.

It allows this because negation is what allows language to refer to itself (it introduces recursion into language) insofar as to say 'not-x' is to refer to one's use of language, rather than some positively existing entity. — StreetlightX

I agree in general, but I think it is more technically precise to talk of dichotomies or symmetry breaking rather than negation alone, and of hierarchies rather than simply recursion.

The point is that a logically crisp idea like "never" has to arise not just as a negation, but as a dichotomous division. It's logical counterpart - always - has to arise in mutually grounding fashion.

So we can imagine a basic distinction in language - frequently~rarely. And then through inductive generalisation or abstraction, this becomes the absolute distinction of always~never.

Now this shift to proper abstraction is hierarchical rather than simply recursive as recursion is already happening at the level of the dichotomy. Even the notions of frequently and rarely are negating each other in self-referential fashion. And always and never are a stronger version of this self-referential act of mutual definition.

But the strong version of the dichotomy brings in the further thing of the concrete representation of the global symmetry they break. Always and never appeal now to the backdrop notion that is eternal time.

Frequently and rarely speak about the occurrence of events - the foreground action. Always and never make it clear that they are the absolute poles marking the extremes of some idea still larger than themselves. They point hierarchically to the third thing which is "time", the global symmetry from which they could spring as a dichotomy.

So a hierarchy is about the memory, the backdrop higher level idea, that can fix a local distinction in a definite fashion. It stabilises a negation.

No doubt this might seem a pedantic analysis, but it makes an important shift from a dyadic to a triadic logic of sign relations. Negation and recursion frame matters in terms of this against that - A vs not-A, and the repetition of a distinction. Complex reference might emerge as a result, but it is essentially unaccounted for. It simply is treated as emergent in an open-ended fashion.

But a triadic sign relation closes the story. Unlike negation, the dichotomy has recursion built in as each half of the dichotomy refers to its "other". And unlike recursion, the hierarchy explains how dynamical uncertainty (where is recursion going to lead?) gains generalised stability. The third player in the triad - the global symmetry that the local symmetry-breaking claims to break - is itself now named. Always and never get their meanings fixed in terms of the further notion of time, a temporal dimension.

Triadic sign relations also introduce vagueness and asymmetry in natural fashion.

Dyadic logic always demands counterfactual crispness. The middle gets excluded. It only wants to speak of either/or. But triadic logic creates room for middles, both as points of departure and places of arrival. Middles are what get developed by dichotomisation or symmetry breakings. You start off with a vague potential and break it into a definite spectrum of states bounded by two complementary poles of being.

So frequently~rarely is a little vague as a dichotomy as it simply states that some thing is either more or less. And then always~never takes that nascent relation to its crisp or absolute limit - a polar pairing that then admits of every intervening shade of "occasionally".

Likewise, triadic logic is large enough - it has enough dimensionality - to speak directly about asymmetry.

Symmetry breaking comes in degrees of hierarchically-fixed definiteness. The simplest and most unstable symmetry breaking - because it is single-scale and easily reversible - is a negation. It is like positive and negative charge. You can produce both for free from the splitting of "nothing", but then they are so weakly separated (so eager to get back together) that they annihilate back to nothing in the next blink of an eye.

So to fix symmetry-breakings, a separation must be achieved across hierarchical scale - an asymmetry must be formed. And this is what a hierarchy does. It disconnects the global from the local, the global becoming a state of "memory" for the system, its long-term prevailing constraints, while the local becomes its individual degrees of freedom.

In the example of always~never, time is the general idea that stands orthogonally to the notion of "the event". The event itself can freely either be or not be on the local view. It seems a perfectly reversible state of affairs - a fluctuation - at that level. But step back into the background notion of time and now the event can be seen as either always or never (or occasional, periodic, intermittent, unpredictable, etc).

When it comes to language evolution, the triadic point of view allows for negation and recursion always to exist vaguely in any language use. It is there in weak form even indexically. I could shake my head to signal negation, in the way any infant would twist away from food it didn't like. As a metaphoric sign, it could gain meaning quite naturally, building on already dichotomised and hierarchically integrated reactions of approach and avoidance that we all share as part of the same biological inheritance.

But language proper is a machinery for a social memory. Habits of abstraction can become fixed in a way disconnected from the individual and held collectively as named ideas. So as you say, that makes all the difference in the world. There is the open-ended meta-possibility of infinite levels of recursion or self-reference.

So the idea that basic language - some kind of proto-speech - must have preceded more advanced language is problematic. The essential trick - the division of communicative intent into words and rules - must have been there from the start.

Again, the standard approach to language evolution relies on dyadic logic. So either the habit of naming, or the habit of grammatical organisation, must have come first, in this view. There is the classic chicken and egg dilemma that dogs anthropological speculation.

But a triadic logic has the advantage that if words and rules are the dichotomous elements of speech acts, then they must co-arise, being each other's context. The habit of abstraction is already built in from the get-go, even if its first expression is a vague as hell.

However reasonable the explanations sound, however habituated we are to accepting them, how do we in fact justify our faith in an elaborate structure very different in nature from the play of shapes and sounds that make up our experience? — Dominic Osborn

You are reverting to a demand for absolute knowledge when I am describing what can be justifiably believed as the result of accepting a particular epistemic process - pragmatic reasoning.

So it will always be the case that scepticism wins against claims of absolute certainty. I accept that.

But then I shrug my shoulders and get on with life in the most well-founded way possible. And that is to follow a process of empirical reasoning based on hypothesis and test. Even "stuck inside experience", we can divide our experience into the ideas we hold and the impressions that result. I can have a theory about physics and then I can read the numbers off a dial. It is all "just experience". But it has now a structure in which what I think is causally tied to what I see.

So it is not just that the explanations sound reasonable. They look reasonable. I can directly experience the consistency of the connection between my ideas and impressions.

I am asserting that the “play of symbols” is Reality itself. That it is not about anything, that it is not in fact a play of symbols at all, that it is an illusion that it is about anything, and an illusion that there is something that it is about.

This assertion is a rejection of the noumenon. It is a rejection of the material world. It is a rejection of anything outside my mind. — Dominic Osborn

Fine. But if we can achieve a tight causal connection between our ideas and our impressions by presuming that there really is a world out there acting as the third thing of a constraint on our acts of interpretance, then why would we have any good ground for disbelieving in such a vital prop of our state of experience?

So your inconsistency would be in depending on the noumenon to justify the game having a consistent structure, and then - for no other reason than that absolutism entails scepticism - turning around and rejecting the noumenon.

You see the self-defeating paradox in what you argue? The noumenon is required to get you to the point that it is sufficiently established that you can then "meaningfully" reject it.

If you don't really have any strong thoughts about the noumenon, its existence is neither here nor there. To accept it, or to reject it, makes little meaningful difference.

It is only after you have strong reason to believe in it, that you can meaningfully talk about turning around and not believing it.

So sure, scepticism just comes for free with strong belief as a crisp rational possibility. If you can say yes, the very meaning of "yes" is that you could have said "no". But just because you could have said "no" doesn't mean no is now the right answer - what you ought to be saying instead.

Thus there is always the formal possibility that the noumenon is not the case. But you would be arguing now for a belief in the logical alternative that completely lacks any supporting evidence, and against the logical alternative built around the existence of all the supporting evidence.

In the end, that doesn't sound like sound reasoning does it? The proper use of scepticism surely is just to discover unexplored alternatives - gaps in our current explanatory beliefs - and not to simply disbelieve our beliefs.

So mild suffering sucks only relatively and not - per your original statement - absolutely?

And thus if this permits prioritisation, then you have no issue with a little bit of suffering being balanced against a greater amount of pleasure?

Or even a fleeting amount of suffering being outweighed by long periods of fairly neutral affect - no strong feelings at all?

It can only be if you take some essentialist approach to suffering that you could object to these logical consequences.

A pragmatist understands a calculus of risk and reward. No pain, no gain, the say. But you have been taking a purist line which seems fundamentally intolerance of chance or "imperfection".

it's because suffering absolutely sucks and I recognize this. — darthbarracuda

Does mild suffering suck absolutely or only relatively?

Do you see your problem yet?

It's wrong to say that vegetarianism can only be arrived at by romantic thinking. — darthbarracuda

That's why I didn't say it. Instead I highlighted two ways people approach the natural world, and thus the question of the good.

My criticism of your approach is that it is essentially from the romantic perpspective and not from the enlightenment or rational humanistic perspective.

So you are always seeking purity or perfection. You reify suffering as pure qualia for instance. And the slightest imperfections of existence become intolerable for you as a result.

Darth, it's not easy when you pretend you said something else....

Please explain to me what exactly is involved in the reasoning of vegetarians and Nazis that make them both "romantic" according to your book. — darthbarracuda

??? The question was what romantic connection could explain Nazi vegetarianism.

You asked what the connection could be. I said notions of purity. So your rant aside, I take it you agree about that then.