... but regardless of how objective we try to be, we are still fielding a value assertion according to an accepted standard of measure. Who fields the assertion and who fields the value assertions? — Mayor of Simpleton

The point remains that our naming has the choice of either striving to talk about reality in a mind independent fashion, or in a fashion that is unabashedly subjective and seen from the point of view of our own interests.

So there are polar choices to be made. And we don't have to treat one as being then right, the other wrong. It is just important that there is this basic conflict in naming things - which then becomes a source of paradox if it is philosophically skated over, after the fashion of the OP.

So what's the answer? Was Pluto never a planet, or is being a planet not reducible to having material characteristics A, B, and C? — Michael

Again, it is the assumption that real things get reduced to lists of material particulars that causes the confusion.

If material properties are important to the form of some thing, then the formal properties will be the constraint that ensures the right materials are being used.

Is it necessary from a natural perspective that a planet is made of rock and not frozen gas? Well not if gravitationally compact and fluidly spherical are deemed key aspects of specifying "a planet" in naturalistic terms.

And gravity and spherical are formal properties, rather than material properties, in a physical description (even if folk still tend to think of gravity as a "material force" rather than spatiotemporal geometry).

Is there a difference between being a planet and being called a planet? — Mayor of Simpleton

To be a planet would be to talk about the natural process that "makes planetary objects". So we could narrow that to gravitationally produced lumps of heavy matter that are large enough/fluid enough to assume a gravitationally spherical shape (but not so large that they then collapse into black holes).

So if science is trying to decide if something is "really a planet", it would have to be a judgement in light of some theory that defines a natural process.

But humans then can add their own interests to a definition. Is it a planet if it is a gas giant with no where solid to land? Is it a planet if it is so small that you can walk around it too quickly, and it lacks enough gravity to hold you down properly? Is it a planet if it doesn't orbit a sun, but instead either wanders or perhaps is a moon that orbits a planet?

So naming always has this dual aspect - our attempts to speak of the world objectively, and then the degree to which we really want to work our own personal perspective into the naming of things.

I happen to be a composition-as-identity theorist, so whatever Pluto is, I see as dependent on every single part of whatever is seen as Pluto. A single change, changes the identity of Pluto from Pluto1.0 to Pluto1.1, for example. — darthbarracuda

But this is a bad way of thinking about identity because it only names particular states of being, not general states of being. It is far too restrictive a form of classification for the act of naming to be informationally efficient.

Naming seeks to strike a balance between generality and particularity. You want to be able to point to the things you have in mind with the least communicative effort. So if you talk about "my cat", you don't want to have to talk about the great amount of molecular turnover that goes on so that my cat is - even a few seconds ago - was a materially different cat.

So your take on naming is based on the ontic commitments of a mechanist/reductionist view of things. You implicitly take stability for granted, making even the slightest change as something that could be rightfully named. It is presumed there are stable parts which have a particulate claim to identity. The world is a composite of such material/efficient causal particulars.

But a naturalistic metaphysics instead sees reality in terms of balances of plasticity and stability. And flux or change is basic if anything - when we are talking about the material causes or being, the constituting degrees of freedom.

So that is why - in a process or systems view - it makes more sense to focus on formal/final cause as the source of object/process/structure identity. We want to name whatever it is that maintains a consistent identity through time and can either weather change, or indeed, actively maintain a state of identity.

I guess the contrast here is between composition-as-identity theory and constraint-as-identity theory. ;)

What is it that names name? It's not normally the material but the form. So you have created a misdirection in appearing to be talking about the material causes of Pluto - it's degrees of freedom - rather than its formal causes, or its informational constraints.

Then when it comes to the formal properties, we would need to make a further distinction between the natural form (what constitutes "a planet" as a naturally self-organising object/structure/process) and the human classification of forms (which can pick out natural form, but also picks out aspects of our own human scale interests).

So their are mountains, hills and molehills. As tectonic processes, they may have very similar formal causes. But in terms of reflecting the further thing of our human scale interests, there is an extra weight of information that a name would refer to.

The simplest definition would be a common place for free exchanges.

So traffic is different in that while it is an emergent effect of many individual actions, it is not itself a common good, nor are the exchanges particularly volitional. Traffic is something to be avoided, or at least managed in the common interests to minimise the need for the negotiated interactions (like which side of the road to drive on).

And of course the social benefits of free markets is something that the "free marketeers" like to claim for the right. Which is a little ironic.

What makes a fair marketplace is strong regulation - whatever it takes to remove barriers to informed action in the marketplace. The alternative is the rigged market or unlevel playing field. :)

... do they think about justice, virtue, knowledge, souls, angels, God, the infinite, mind itself? Can they understand, judge and reason?), then I haven't seen it. If someone else has, please list that evidence. — anonymous66

You can't think like that without the grammatical structuring of human language. So evidence that animals can't master grammar is enough to bolster the strong case they don't think this way - based on the wider fact that there is no behavioural evidence they do think this way.

You also have evidence from humans who have never learnt grammatical language - like the Victorian deaf-mutes who were considered brain-damaged and animal like. Of course, as soon as the deaf have a access to signing - a fully grammatical language - then the think just as well as everyone else.

So given you seem to be involved in some religious argument, it seems sensible to concede a discontinuity between humans and animals on this basis - grammatical language capability. Humans are intellectualising for this biologically-based reason. And not because they are God's creatures partaking of the divine nous, or whatever.

I'm hardly against the fruits of romanticism. I have the misspent youth to prove that. :)

So my argument is the dichotomising one. There are two parts to living - the rationalising and the experiencing, or however we choose to term it. And both matter to us. And it is recognising their essential difference that would let us do both well.

My beef with romanticism is when it is treated as a model of rational things - in particular, a model of human psychology or society.

And so for instance, psychology focused on the development of mental habits, sociology on the development of cultural ones. But romanticism then focuses on the individual's reactions in the instant - especially those that are the highest in novelty and sensation and reaction. So it puts the non-habitual in first place and rails against the constraint on freedom that is either intellectual or cultural habit.

So we have quite dichotomous ultimate targets of explanation when romanticism enters the arena of metaphysics. It seems obvious to the romantic that the real thing of intense emotion and free evaluation are what the dry old sticks are missing. The romantic then tries to establish a metaphysics of unconstrained feelings. The talk becomes all about poetry and intuition and other "freely creative ways of intellectualising".

Well I guess you can have that other brand of philosophy if it does you good. But I just prefer to experience life and art and girls, or whatever. And I certainly don't see any reason to think that romanticism offers the correct analytical framework for when it comes to doing the job of rationalising about things.

The Peircean point is that it is pointing back to the generative chaos rather than forward to the emergence of regulative habit. It is regressive rather than progressive as metaphysics. It is only progressive in the context of battling Scientism - reminding the reductionists there is more to life. But a holist already knows that.

That is exactly what I mean when I say you're redacting out some aspects of their thinking, so as to incorporate the aspects of it are useful for your approach. — Wayfarer

But it's not me who is trying to pin a single reading on what Peirce, Hegel or Aristotle "really meant" as if they were my spokesmen or my authorities.

I'm quite happy with the fact they were all complex thinkers whose own views evolved considerably over their lifetimes and so involve views that were in contradiction, or even - in my view - quite off the mark. at times.

Furthermore, Peirce was different as a philosopher in having a scientific attitude to his speculative cosmology. So the changes in his approaches can be viewed as a series of goes at striking upon the right formulation - one that would actually result in testable outcomes. In rejecting Newton's mechanical paradigm, he actually started proposing ways of checking to see if the geometry of the Universe was flat rather curved.

TL Short in What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism? 2010, makes the argument that his use of the term objective idealism marks only a phase in his thinking - one of his goes at making a developmental cosmology work. He tried it for a few years and moved on.

Now that is probably too strong. But I think we have to really examine the technicalities of Peirce's conjectures rather than simply flourish the comments where Peirce sounds enthusiastic about Emerson (a family friend) and Schelling.

Key here is Gaudiano's summary of the contrast between a materialistic and idealistic ontology...

(B) the psychical law as derived and special, the physical law alone as
primordial, which is materialism; or,

(C) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone as
primordial, which is idealism. (EP1 292).

So as I say, Peirce tried to account for the cosmos in terms of "psychical law". And by that, he doesn't mean the application of some theistic or dualistic notion of mind, spirit or soul. He actually means the current psychology of his day. Remember that he was close to James. And he himself did foundational work in the application of the scientific method to psychological research.

(On Small Differences in Sensation. By Charles Sanders Peirce & Joseph Jastrow (1885) http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm)

If you google for the link to Short's paper, What was Peirce’s Objective Idealism?, you can see the rather science-informed description of "the mind" that Peirce was applying to his cosmology. And it is basically the usual constraints-based system thinking I'm always talking about. So it is my claim here that "mind" boils down to "psychical law", which boils down to what I mean by organicism or systems casuality.

So as Short notes, Peirce was talking about habit-formation as being the critical dynamical process. And this led him to taking a rather odd, probably frankly self-contradicting, approach to consciousness or attentional level mental proocessing.

So for most people - especially when they think of idealism - they think it is all about the ineffable phenomenological aspect of "being conscious". That is the basis of Cartesian dualism - the apparently inescapable fact that there is something which it is like to be me, or you, or a bat. And then when Peirce starts talking about matter being effete mind, the natural assumption is that he means - panpsychically - that material substance is some kind of very dilute or deadened version of a mental substance.

Yet Peirce talks about consciousness quite differently as Firstness (where habit is Thirdness). So consciousness is associated with the brief fluctuations that are breaks in the smooth (unconscious!) running of habits. And this leads to a reversal of what you might expect.

Peirce's idea is that the cosmos started in a chaos of fluctuations and developed then the regularity of habit. And so the character of this beginning was of the kind of vivid, but undigested, consciousness of the newborn where all is a Jamesian blooming, buzzing confusion. Conscious feeling was at its most intense because absolutely everything is a disorganised surprise. But then also it was at its most chaotic or vague because it was nothing but a flood of disorganised surprises.

So what Peirce means by mind is the steady organisation which imposes order on raw feelings, or wild fluctuation. Law is the emergence of habit. A gradual suppression or constraint on surprise because the mind comes to read events in terms of signs that it interprets. We know that the beep of a car horn or the hand on the shoulder is an understood part of a world with an order. It is another example of that category of thing.

And Peirce was also careful to say he was not talking about individual minds, but the world as if it were a mind ruled by the psychical laws that psychology was establishing. Human minds are the product of neural complexity - Peirce knew that. So his argument was that they retain a lively capacity for surprise - for the flashes of attention that is the first experience of something novel - that then allows for the continual formation of new habits.

And if you follow his analysis of protoplasm, you can see how he hopes to argue a continuity from the extreme liveliness of human material organisation, through to the self-organisation of protoplasm, and eventually towards the now minimal - effete, extinct, dead - liveliness of the cosmos itself. The cosmos that is so past lively flashes of spontaneous thought that it lives as a collection of dry mechanical habits.

Importantly, Peirce point about protoplasm was the thermodynamic one. Thermodynamics had explained existence in terms of an entropy principle. And that made negentropy - the emergence of cosmic organisation a real problem. Even worse for Peirce's developmental cosmology, this new mechanical notion of entropy said the cosmos must begin in a state of high order, and his chaos is what comes at the end in a heat death.

So Peirce was wanting to say no. The ancient's had it right with their organicism. First there was an endlessly lively chaos, then this developed constraints to produce the well organised, very habitual, cosmos we see around us today. And so Peirce foresaw what was eventually proven by Prigogine. Boltzmann's mechanical version of thermodynamics is simply the reduced and deadened version of the livelier thermodynamics of modern dissipative structure theory. And cosmologists like Layzer have been championing a developmental cosmology as a consequence.

Anyway, the point is that when Peirce speaks about a cosmic mind, he means one actually ruled by psychical law and so one in which the key fact is not the emergence of consciousness - a surplus of feeling - but instead about the constraint or suppression of that in order to produce the regularity of habits.

As Short stresses, his objective idealism focuses on the principle of generalisation. Peirce is saying that lawfulness or habits develop via the "spreading" of a confusion of sharply felt instances. Over time, the differences fall away and some commonality emerges - a conception, a schema, a category, a universal. And this comes to encode a constraint on variety. It comes to encode the top-down formal and final purpose that constitutes the being of a habit, with its regulative effect on lively spontaneity.

So you do have a very difficult bit of philosophy here. But what is clear - in my opinion - is that while it sounds like Peirce is simply doing the easy thing of making panpsychic proclamations - the Universe is made of mind stuff - you really have to pay attention to the technical detail of how he really intends to cash out his objective idealism. And there he starts to talk about mechanical/material laws vs organic/psychical laws.

So - as is the case with modern biosemiotics - he really is focused on trying to fix the shortcomings of reductionism by bringing in four causes Aristoteleanism. He is saying life and mind do show there must be more to nature than a mechanist's conception of reality as a clutter of blindly bumping lumps, a rain of atoms in a void. And psychical laws - the story of habit formation in living beings right from humans down to protoplasm - capture the essence of that.

So it is not that nature has phenomenological experience everywhere in some degree - the panpsychic position. It is that nature everywhere is organised by this common "psychical" principle of habit-formation or the universal growth in reasonableness.

You could say in this light that matter is effete mind in having gone right to the extreme of being so habitual as to be deterministic. And humans - because of their complex organisation - are instead a lively balance of feeling and habits. Humans have huge capacity for development in their own lifetimes.

After his objective idealism phase, Peirce did continue to develop his semiotics more fully, which is why I personally would describe his ultimate goal as pansemiotics. If you can drop the apparent appeals to phenomenological experience - Peirce was quite plain he was against this dualistic reading - then you are left with his emphasis on a commonality of a semiotic mechanism. It is the way that minds work - by generalising away a chaos of fluctuating feeling to arrive at the intelligible regularity of habit - which is the insight he wanted to apply to a developmental metaphysics of existence itself.

Actually it wasn't all that great from 1984 to 2000, either. [Some economic historians think that an economic restructuring starting around 1960.] — Bitter Crank

A simple explanation is that the modern economy is based on freely burning fossil fuel and other resources. And the 1950s were the era of the gushing super oil fields. It took about one barrel of oil (in terms of all cost of drilling and transporting) to produce 100 barrels to use. And this ridiculously cheap energy allowed for massive, pretty wasteful, economic expansion.

Then as the easy fields dwindled, the game changed. The production balance fell to 20 free barrels for every 1 barrel spent. Now with offshore oil, tar sands, etc, the balance is down to 10 to 1, or even 5 to 1.

So the usual economic story is the west got rich because it was creative and inventive. But an ecologist would say it was really mostly just the west gobbling up a free lunch.

Conventional oil has now peaked. The show is over there. Unconventional oil is also peaking. So if economic expansion was all about cheap energy and nothing more substantial than that, then dreams of a return to 1950s style US prosperity for all - the baby boomer experience - are dead in the water.

In a realistic world - where people listened to the 1970s limits to growth message - the market might have been allowed to speak. Global economics might have responded to the underlying reality in some useful way.

Instead the story since the 1990s has been about the financialisation of the economy. Massive asset bubbles have been created to load debt onto the unsuspecting. The pretence has been created that the future will see the constant growth of the past. And so people have hocked that future to have some cash to spend right now. Publicly-owned assets have then been transferred to private hands.

But the illusions that financialisation can spin have stopped the wheels falling off so far. And after all, peak oil means that never before in history is so much actually being pumped out of the ground. It is just that the actual profits are minimal. So if you use financial trickery to manufacture cash by manufacturing credit, the current anaemic real growth can be leveraged to look like prosperity era growth. But check the oil companies and you find they are just not even investing in new exploration.

The gloomy view is we are on the edge of Seneca's cliff.

"It would be some consolation for the feebleness of our selves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid." - Lucius Anneaus Seneca

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind? — darthbarracuda

You mean effete mind. Or extinct mind, in Schelling's term.

But what Peirce meant by mind is another question. ;)

The psychologists say that consciousness is the essential attribute of mind; and that purpose is only a special modification. I hold that purpose, or rather, final causation, of which purpose is the conscious modification, is the essential subect of psychologists’ own studies; and that consciousness is a special, and not a universal accompaniment of mind. (7. 366).

It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective, unknowable noumenon "just to say they're realists". It's as if it's just slapped in their in order to avoid being called a full-fledged idealist. — darthbarracuda

You realise Peirce wanted to fix Kant's dualism using Schelling's objective idealism?

Oh for the ignore option that was one of PF's advantages.

Yet although you can draw on Hegel and Pierce for elements of naturalism, I think both were actually 'romantic dualists' in some respects (at least, according to your classification, although I don't think that they would have used the terminology themselves): — Wayfarer

Yep. They both had their mushy edges being people of their times. But if we pay attention to the general logic of nature they were talking about, then we are on solid ground.

So if you go quote-mining their huge outputs, you can always pick out some plum that sounds like it speaks to romantic dualism...

The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws. C.S. Peirce

You say that is Peirce espousing panpsychism. I say that Peirce sought to naturalise a four cause approach in talking about a reality that could develop robust habits. And what we call physical law are the four causes in their most attentuated possible form. They are the least mind-like condition - and yet mind-like in that the causality of constraints, the globally shaping causality of formal and final cause, is what the laws represent.

Absolute idealism is an ontologically monistic philosophy chiefly associated with G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schelling, both German idealist philosophers of the 19th century, Josiah Royce, an American philosopher, and others, but, in its essentials, the product of Hegel. It is Hegel's account of how being is ultimately comprehensible as an all-inclusive whole.

The latter is clearly descended from the (neo)platonic conception of 'the One' in my view (albeit considerably elaborated and re-interpreted by Hegel.) — Wayfarer

Yep. I see natural philosophy as detouring through German naturphilosophie and idealism. That is why German science has produced so many of the systems thinkers.

But in the end - as a pragmatist - one takes idealism as the epistemic condition, not the ontological model. So you accept all the constraints of being in a modelling relation with the world, but then you get on with actually modelling the world in the best way possible.

Aristotle was a naturalist - many would say the first! - but he also argued for a first cause or unmoved mover, etc, which was an essential premise of his philosophy. — Wayfarer

Aristotle didn't get everything right. Parts of what he said are in contradiction with others. And most of what he did say is still understood via the heavy filtering of scholasticism, which had its own agenda to meet.

So first causes and unmoved movers are where it really breaks down. He should have stuck closer to Anaximander, the first real recorded naturalist, here.

Semiosis certainly does offer a non-reductionist account of the processes of life, but at the same time, I don't think it recognizes that behind the idea of the sign an implicit idealism. — Wayfarer

How so? Isn't the whole point of Peircean semiotics that it deliberately starts at the "mind's end" of things so as not to leave the mind out?

So we are very used to the materialist approach of starting metaphysics way over where there is just brute matter tumbling about in a dumb void. The modelling begins in a realm without any trace of purpose, or design, or meaning, or logic. And by doing that, the modelling never gives itself the means to recover what it has deliberately abandoned.

But Peirce did the opposite. He started with the intellect that was doing all the intellectualising. He began with a model of logic and of the human mental processes that underlie that. Then he did the revolutionary thing (well, Hegel tried to the same with the Science of Logic) of seeing how this account of mentality could be also the account of metaphysical being.

Peirce was also of course a top scientist of his day. He could see how evolutionary theory and thermodynamics had put formal and final cause back into the game for science in a big way.

And so he did draw the natural conclusion that intelligibility was itself the driving principle of developed existence. If you have a model of the mind, it is also going to be a model of the world, as the same generic semiotic principles describe self-organisation of any possible kind.

If Plato had been a systems thinker, his Platonia would have been populated by fractals rather than triangles, the laws of thermodynamics rather than the beauty, truth and the good. :)

There is never any point arguing against you WoD as your confused posts always do such a great job of arguing against themselves.

Thanks for your explanation mcdoodle, it seems then that we mostly agree, but use different terminology; what you call "metaphysical naturalism" I would call 'scientism'. — John

Yep. LGU promotes a confusion here. While anyone can coin their own definitions of naturalism, there is a real history of something called natural philosophy that tries to stick to Aristotle's holistic naturalism, and so usually stands against reductionism, mechanics, and scientism.

So naturalism in this tradition is about four causes, immanence, hierarchies, organicism - all those good (pre-scholastic) Aristotelean things. And you can find it popping up all through history in various guises, but, in modern times, particularly in holism, hierarchy theory, systems science, complexity theory, second order cybernetics, semiotics, neural networks, ecology, dissipative structure theory and condensed matter physics.

A confusion is that this organic naturalism doesn't actually reject mechanical reductionism. Instead, it seeks to incorporate it as its natural "other" - organicism being true to it own dialectical reasoning in this way.

So the mechanical view is not wrong. Nature does come to regulate itself in a very simple and mechanical looking fashion. Newton's laws show how the habits of the Universe can become so strongly developed that the Universe looks to run like clockwork - until quantum mechanics comes along to show that such a mechanical determinacy, such a suppression of spontaneity, is only emergent and not fundamental.

Anyway, the reductionist view really works because it is so simple. In a nutshell, it is the view that drops formal and final cause - the universals - out of the picture, and just tells the story of things in terms of material and efficient cause. This really works from a human technological point of view, because of course we are planning to impose our own formal and final causes on nature. We are going to come up with our own desires and designs. Thus we don't need to care about what nature itself might have in mind. Scientism can rule.

But then natural philosophy is meant to be stepping back to take the full holistic view where nature itself is granted as having formal and final cause in a full physicalist sense. They are real causes and not some nominalist fiction.

Now this immanent holism then treads on the toes of theistic and transcendental metaphysics - the same dualism and romanticism that informs the (muddled) Continental conception of the world.

So natural philosophy often attracts the mystic fellow travellers. Its organicism and holism can sound rather woo, so it attracts woo lovers. It has overtones of eastern philosophy especially. And in many ways, it is very much related to eastern "hard" philosophy, especially the doctrine of dependent co-arising, scholars like Nagarjuna, schools like Kyoto. So systems thinking has mushy edges. But within modern theoretical biology (naturally), you have a rigorous and mathematical tradition.

And there, scientists like Stan Salthe (a great friend) call themselves now natural philosophers to openly distance themselves from the scientistic mainstream. Aristotelean naturalism is a banner to rally around.

So I divide the camps into three.

There is material reductionism - the mechanical philosophy of material and efficient causes.

There is romantic dualism - the claim that material reductionism can't touch formal and final cause, these being aspects of the transcendent mind/spirit/value.

And then there is the holism of naturalism - a full four causes approach where the world immanently self-organises into being in organismic fashion.

The big problem for naturalism was doing justice to the apparent dualism that divides minds and worlds, top-down formal and final causes and bottom-up material and efficient causes. That problem was solved by semiotics. Peircean semiotics shows how the world can be divided into matter and symbol, and then interact and develop as a result of its causality being divided in this very fashion.

So three ontologies. And philosophical naturalism is the hardest to understand because it is intrinsically the most complex. It is not monistic like reductionism, nor dualistic like romanticism, but triadically self-intertwined.

This is why people always complain about the opacity of Hegel and Peirce. And yet they are the metaphysicians that really thought things through in systems fashion.

I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude in return for a perceived slight. I still think your account of Anaximander is very sweeping, and reads to me like someone enthusiastic for an idea seeking confirmation in history, rather than a historian's account of how Greek metaphysics developed. — mcdoodle

And there you go. You tell me you don't intend to ad hom me and then repeat the ad hom.

Again, if you dispute aspects of my interpretation, and can back it up, then that would make for an interesting discussion. Instead you just make lazy dismissals with no substance. And get annoyed because I tell you that you are being lazy.

Be honest here. Did you know that there was only one recorded fragment of Anaximander's writings before you read the Wiki page a couple of days ago? Have you read Kahn or any other of the careful critiques?

Really, I think this 'universals' debate ends in stalemate: one finds oneself of one inclination rather than another for reasons grounded in something about one's character, rather than in rational argument. — mcdoodle

You are welcome to speak for yourself. But you insult me in saying that my position is not grounded in rational scholarship.

And to remind again, the question was: why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

There are strong mathematical arguments that hierarchical organisation is inevitable in nature - even when contingency appears to rule that nature.

If you imagine a world of dynamical processes where those processes are free to unfold over any spatiotemporal scale, then that very uncontrolled freedom throws up the big slow global processes that become the context, the potential constraints, on the small fast local processes.

So scale randomness produces hierarchical order as a simple mathematical fact. But to know about this, I guess you have to have studied modern hierarchy theory.

(although I am a little perplexed as to exactly what you are claiming bats don't do. It started off as 'think', then changed to 'have language' and seems to now be 'speak'). — andrewk

I of course never said this was about "thinking" because that is an ambiguous term in the context of comparative cognition. Can animals problem solve or form anticipatory imagery? Of course they do.

But I'm puzzled that you seem to think talking about language capacity and speaking are two different things. You might have to explain what is going on there.

OTOH if it's just a working belief then there's no need to debate it. We all have plenty of working beliefs, but don't elevate them the status of philosophical theories. — andrewk

It's hardly just a working belief when it is the result of an understanding of the relevant scientific literature. And this is an empirical question, not really a philosophical one - although clearly it is a foundational point for the speculative metaphysics of Peircean semiosis.

I gave no indication of whether I believe that bats have language or not. What I do believe is that you don't know the answer to that question. — andrewk

I simply come at this question as a scientist, so never claim absolute knowledge of anything. I only say that considerable research supports my position as the inference to the best explanation. My working belief is that bats don't speak - and so I will be considerably surprised if you can now provide credible evidence that they do.

Are you then the first person to ever know what it is like to be a bat? — andrewk

Don't be ridiculous. If you believe bats have language, present the evidence. The research into animal language capabilities is voluminous. And it says even with all possible help from humans, they can't handle fluent grammatical construction.

What I am still left wondering is what does it mean to say that the differences of humans are 'different in kind'. So far there has not been even an attempt to define what that might mean. — andrewk

Well I did define it - the difference between hearing noises and understanding messages.

Secondly, even if it were true, what would be its relevance to the claim that humans are especially special. I could as easily say
'Who could hear that statement if it were transmitted at a frequency of 40,000 Hz? Only a bat' — andrewk

Surely humans are special because that is something we can easily think, say, or indeed transmit over any chosen frequency given a radio.

But bats? Not so much.

Hearing noises and comprehending messages are unarguable differences in kind.

But I think you show a non-historian's excess confidence, especially in your response to Wayfarer, in believing you know what Anaximander said (we only have a fragment and others' commentaries), and then what others in the Greek world thought or didn't think. — mcdoodle

And you judge my understanding of Anaximander, the result of many years of study, having just done a hasty google search?

If you dispute my interpretation, of course tell me your specific concern. But please drop the superior attitude.

My argument is that hierarchical categorisation is how human thinking works, however 'nature' works, and that human thinking in any given place and era is historically situated. — mcdoodle

Why would human thinking about nature work if that wasn't the way nature works? Explain the logic of that.

And yes, human thinking in "any given place and era" is indeed historically situated - that is, you just gave a definition of being historically situated, not an argument.

So all you are doing is waving the banner of social constructionism and hoping it counts as a position. Lazy.

And not caring either. You are playing the same old tunes I see.

Sorry, did I miss the bit where you explained why it wouldn't be more parsimonious if wishes were indeed horses for idealists?

What are you talking about? The grounding premise was that consistency would be a good thing. If your counter argument relies on a malicious deceiver - the faking of ancient dinosaur bones - then already it is weaker because of a lack of explanatory parsimony.

I agree that such arguments are avoided like hell by ontic idealists of course. :-}

Why not spell it out?

As far as I can see this doesn't follow or support realism. Idealism has never claimed, to my knowledge, that whatever you want to happen happens, nor do I see what would ever commit it to that. — The Great Whatever

And yet it follows that if the world is truly generated from a personal viewpoint, then there has to be some reasonable account of why that isn't the case.

Realism justifies itself on the grounds of recalcitrant nature. It is because the world shows no sign of coming from our point of view that we should believe it to be most likely real.

Yeah, I definitely think some of the classical transcendental idealists could be read as claiming that the universe is procedurally generated based on a starting facticity (roughly, the 'program,' the 'thing in itself') combined with a generation of the empirical world 'on the fly' as the knower's faculties come into contact with it. — The Great Whatever

And so as I suggest, the kind of world that does unfold before our questing gaze ought to be generated in some kind of accordance with our wishes. This becomes an empirical test (even if a reasonably modest one) of idealism as a metaphysical hypothesis.

But I guess that is simply standard. Realism is supported by the world's recalcitrant being. If we kick a stone, our toe still hurts, even if it seems more logical that it shouldn't if our preferences actually ruled.

So I wonder what kind of naturalism could explain the world that the idealist encounters? Why - at some deep level of metaphysical reasonableness - is this the world we generate?

And the failure of idealism to deliver a reasonable account on this point would be further reasonable evidence against idealism.

The answer from science is that language made the distinct difference.

So the neural architecture is basically a standard ape brain enlarged. There is a continuum difference because our brains are bigger. But the development of an ability to structure trains of thought using gramatical rules and combinatorial word units was why homo sap started to think symbolically and rationally.

And it is not about the difference that made just at the individual level. Speech is a social thing and so speech comes to encode social learning, social structures of thought. Ideas have a place to evolve because humans have symbolic culture. Animals are stuck at a biological level where concepts evolve only at that level of existence.

So humans exist at a different level because they have symbolic speech/symbolic culture - the essence of an intellectual life that exists apart from the hurly-burly of the natural animal world.

That doesn't mean animals can't problem-solve or be smart in many ways. They just lack access to our fast-evolving culture of smartness, which completely changes what it means to be smart.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is simple. Phenomenologicaly it is vague, metaphysically it is as simple as it can possibly get.

As Plotinus said, the "One" can only be arrived at by figuring out what it isn't. And so the same thing applies to the Aristotelian Substance, for it cannot be predicated upon but merely identified as a necessary component of Being. — darthbarracuda

Now here you sound like you agree with my approach, so this becomes very confusing.

To summarise, the argument goes that we patently exist in a world of definite objects. So we start with where we are at. And then we look to what could be different in an attempt to figure out how we could come to be in such a place.

Greek metaphysics started with the idea that form was plastic and so there must be some material principle that is the underlying eternal - an ur-stuff. And as you say, something so unchanging must be ungraspable, unintelligible, as it stands beyond the descriptiveness of formed somethingness. It is like a taste so bland it can't be tasted, or a hue so pastel it can't be seen.

Anaximander gave it a name - the apeiron, or the without-limitation. But Anaximander also realised that while form (or limitation, ie constraints) was plastic, it was also based on a dialectical logic. It had to arise dichotomously as a succession of symmetry breakings.

For limits to arise in the limitless, it could only do this by the apeiron "moving apart from itself in complementary directions". And Anaximander - looking around, being empirical - not so unnaturally struck on the prime thermodynamic idea that the first parting of the apeiron would have to be into the warmer and the cooler. And then as this division proceeded to develop, it paved the way in turn for a division into the dryer and the wetter. Again, empirically, heat dries and cold dampens.

And so we have the start of a natural hierarchy of formed substances. We have the Greek elements of fire, air, water and earth as the four resulting mixtures (the hot dry and the cool dry, the hot wet and the cool wet).

Now later Greek philosophy rather messed up the simple natural purity of Anaximander's vision even as it sought to expand upon it. Obviously, the Athenians tried to work a strong notion of the divine back into it - or at least, some account of the mind seemed necessary. There was also the atomistic alternative - which did have some explanatory advantages, like stressing the notions of composition and the void. And atomism did try to argue for a rational naturalness in giving atoms the perfect shapes of the Platonic solids, or else providing them with hooks and other property-creating features.

So the notion of an ur-stuff did get confused. It became a divine spirit stuff - different from material stuff in a dualistic fashion. And it became a fundamentally particulate stuff - concrete particles rocking through an immaterial(!) void. So again a dualistic conception in that now existence was separated into the concretely material and causal contents, and an a-causal, non-material, non-involved nothingness as its cosmic container.

Thus you can see a parting of the ways from the orginally organic and holistic vision of Anaximander. Half the folk go off in a spiritual direction, thinking there is some deeper, or at least other, mind-stuff. The other half go off for the material dualism that is atomism.

But modern science has returned to a holism where existence is the transformation of simple potential via a succession of symmetry breakings, and the duality of atomism has been repaired because particles are excitations in fields and spacetime has material properties.

So we return to the question of what is the ur-stuff, the hypostatic ground, the apeiron, from which our structured existence could arise.

And as you seem to be saying, we can only characterise it in terms of it being everything our well-formed world of substantial objects is not.

So that is indeed how I would define vagueness, or the quantum roil, or the One, or whatever technical metaphysical term we might wish to give to this critical and logically necessary idea.

The things we can say about it are that it must at least be the kind of thing out of which our existence could arise. And so if our existence is about a succession of symmetry breakings, then it is some kind of perfect symmetry. And that's great, because we have some maths to get a handle on it right there.

So what is the ultimate symmetry state? I've argued the standard understanding that symmetry is about changes that can't make a change (just as symmetry breakings are semiotically the differences that do make a difference).

Absolute nothingness seems one candidate for such an ideal initial state of symmetry. But that's logically out as nothing can come from nothing.

The alternative is instead an initial state of everythingness - a complete lack of limitation on action. So some kind of dimensionless, or infinitely dimensional, chaos. Unbound fluctuation. In a state of wildness, nothing is really happening because everything is happening. And logically it is quite easy to understand how the taming of such a roil by the emergence of symmetry-breaking constraints could produce our kind of hierarchically organised world.

The classic example of such a dissipative structure is a Benard cell where global hexagonally shaped convection currents form to organise the previously chaotic thermal motions of oil molecules being heated in a pan. The many directions that the molecules are going in are reduced to the particular directions of the convection flows. The universality of a global form is imposed on the material chaos and the convection cells become a real feature of the oily world.

So we can revisit the notion of the apeiron armed with all the maths and empiricism we have gathered over the past 2300 years. If we have a clear metaphysical model of what has come out of the apeiron, we can in negative descriptive fashion now also say something scientific about the "indescribable" nature of the apeiron.

So that is why I talk about it in terms of things like unbounded fluctuation. We now understand the concrete world of substantial objects in terms of bounded fluctuations. So it is simply logical that the apeiron would be the "other" of that.

Whatever is our current best theory of fundamental being, we can reverse that out dialectically to speak about what must then be the best possible theory of the cosmic fundamental potential - the possibility that must have grounded the actuality of our Universe.

The idea that metaphysics began with Anaximander and goes in a straight line, however relentlentlentlessly, to here would not be supported by most historians of ideas...

I'm sticking with my view that physicists and who-knows-who in 400 years' time won't have the same sort of categorisations of the world we move through as we do. Of course, it's a tricky proposition to test empirically. There you go: this is a metaphysical debate. — mcdoodle

You misrepresent the point I was making. What I said was that metaphysics - as rational inquiry into the nature of existence - got started by understanding that a hierarchy of constraints was what was naturally logical. And that is the vision that has been consistently fruitful, presumably because it is right.

If you can make a rational argument for why hierarchical organisation is somehow against nature, or that there is empirical evidence that natural philosophy has strayed from it in the past, and so may do so again in the future, then please provide that.

And to remind how hierarchies relate to universals, the problem with universals is they refer to constraints - the forms that inform matter - but they lack hierarchical organisation in most people's minds so it sounds like we are talking about a random Platonic collection of ideas. Anything that has a name - like a sparrow, love, the cosmos, my left toe - has an ideal form.

But of course even Plato tried to create some kind of hierarchical order in his realm of perfect ideas. The good stood at the most global level, mathematical truths somewhere further along the spectrum of specificity.

Bullshit. My question was not about some arbitrary programmer's choice but about what would be most self consistent.

And when equations produce positive and negative roots, we know to throw the negative away when it can't make physical sense. So yeah, a naturalness test does get applied.

So you just won't answer my question about naturalness and the expectations we can rightfully derive from such an assumption. Bad faith.

Just address my actual argument. Would a generated world more naturally generate what is contemporary or what is historic?

Some would say that no longer requiring such absolutism of knowledge has been one of the major achievements since Parmenides.

What I'm asking is whether such a world is metaphysically possible and whether it would be empirically indistinguishable from our world.

Well my point - again - is that the existence of a historical aspect to this reality would be one kind of empirical evidence against it being the case.

So I am granting your indistinguishability claim - we can't tell if things were always there or generated as we go along.

But then given that, if this world has a look of history, then that still counts as empirical evidence against it being generated.

Given two options - a metaphysics that is consistent with what we experience, and one that would be in contradiction - then we have a reason to prefer the consistent story. And that is the one where the appearance of history is evidence of actual history (just as a lack of apparent history would be evidence in favour of a "generate as you go" ontology).

I didn't mean to suggest that a real world would have a fake history. I meant to suggest that (in this hypothetical world) the bones we see when we dig don't exist before we see them; instead what "exists" is the "function" that determines that when we dig in a certain spot we will see bones.

How is making weathered dinosaur bones not faking an entropic history?

Sure I accept that your argument is that the bones are only made at the very instant they need to be struck by our spade. But it is the same issue as for creationists. Why go to the extra trouble of building in the look of a history if this is an essentially a-historic world creating process?

It seems illogical for such a world to have a reason to create a look of history in contradiction of what it actually is as a "create it as you go" kind of world.

You're calling Plato a mystic.

Well you seemed to be taking a materialist position and that's hardly Platonic form is it? So you make less and less sense here. If you are arguing Plato, say so.

(And it might make more sense if you did that in relation to Plato's own concept of the chora - the material receptacle of his forms.)

I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance.

Again your use of jargon is confusing. Do you mean prime matter? It seems that you mistake Aristotle's hylomorphic doctrine of substance for material cause.

And I don't think Aristotle's prime matter is a concept that works except as another name for vagueness or apeiron.

So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.

But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle.

My notion instead treats it as the limitless, the unformed, the unmaterial. It is not fixed by conservation or locale. It is just pure open-ended possibility. So it is pre-material in any usual sense of matter, just as much as it is pre-form in not yet having undergone the phase transition which is its structuring organisation to become a something definite.

At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?

The change is the beginning of time and space. Those are both aspects of the emergence of a global dimensional organisation. So it is what "happens" in the earlier time, and the higher energy, which would be the "before" of the Planck scale. Except before the Planck scale, there just isn't anything determinate in existence, so talking about the before does't really make sense.

Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?

I'm not interested in poetic visions. So I agree. If vagueness and this general way of thinking can't be cashed out in real physics, its nothing in the end. It has to be a mathematical strength model or chuck it in the bin of metaphysical speculation.

Luckily, it is a way of thinking that is increasingly common in science. There is a lot of maths to support it.

What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today.

Mechanics is not wrong. It has worked splendidly to serve the interest of humans the last 500 years. If you think of existence in terms of the causality of machines, you start to get good at making machines. So mechanics has repaid its makers many times over. And it is not wrong as - in its carefully limited sphere - it works.

But if you are talking about the bounding extremes of our existence - the quantumly small, the cosmically large, the neurally complex - then yes it breaks down and a bigger modelling paradigm is needed.

What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself.

I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron.

This is what I'm questioning. Is it necessary that a real world incorporates a global history? Or is it metaphysically possible for a real world to behave in the same sort of way where "more world" is generated from a single point of view?

So it seems possible if your existence is just a computer simulation. But if this about a material reality, what could generate the level of accumulated material history that we observe. Why would a real world have to fake a history - like you dig in the ground and find the mineralised bones of dinosaurs?

Sure you might say some magical process just generates stuff as far as your eye can see. But why would it fake layers of entropic history rather than just generate shiny new untouched stuff?

We account for our world in the way it actually seems to be - which is historically conditioned. If this alternative way of making worlds is always making new stuff, it adds considerable implausibility that it would go to the trouble of make the new stuff look "suitably old".

A shadow cannot exist without a body blocking out the light. The properties of the world are like shadows and depend upon a body that has no properties. — darthbarracuda

Ye gods. Outright mysticism.

It's why asking "what caused God?!" misses the entire point of the argument - under the metaphysical scheme from which they are operating, God is a necessary component.

So it is necessary there is a first cause. And it must be a first substance indeed. Otherwise your hypostatic reductionist framework is in deep shit. Isn't that a rather personalised invocation of final cause?

I'd say, because there's no explanation as to how this vagueness exists, as if its vagueness isn't dependent upon anything else and is just floating around somewhere in non-spacetime.

Well the obvious retort is that vagueness exists vaguely. And we can speak about that intelligibly as being the antithesis of the crisply formed world from where we ask such questions.

So sure, one has to use a little poetic licence to introduce the idea. But it is of no real interest unless it can be mathematically modelled. Just like quantum foam, virtual particles, zero point energy, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the many other useful physical concepts that depend on a notion of "pure fluctuation".

I mean do you think our 4D Universe "floats" in anything? Do you think the modern maths of curvature only makes sense if you re-introduce a pre-Goethean embedding space? Do you think infinity only exists if someone has counted all the way to its limit?

You are raising quibbles that have long been left behind in science and math informed metaphysics.

For each time we postulate a process, we need to postulate a stage in which this process is occurring. — darthbarracuda

And you find this a self-evident and undeniable truth because? .... [please fill in blank].

I mean has science found some such ultimate basis? Surely what science is finding that wind the clock back to beginnings and it all goes quantum vague (indeterminate).

And is it even an intelligible clam? Just because most of what we know from our own scale of being seems to have a substantial underpinning, how can it be turtles all the way down? How can there be a first definite stuff with no cause? Doesn't that do the ultimate violence to the very notion of causality you hope to employ.

So a more radical alternative is already demanded as reductionism can't ground itself. We should accept the fact and move on, opening our minds to the other alternatives out there.

Peirce's semiotic approach - which grants that beginnings can be vague, an unstructured sea of fluctuation - is the one that fits a generally informational and developmental metaphysics (of the kind to be found in physics and cosmology today).