Quality in a formal relation to logic. — Possibility

Hey. That’s my argument! :grin:

The key is to find a logical system that supports variable quality without constraining potentiality. Mathematics is not that system. — Possibility

But mathematics models the relation.

Metaphysics arrives as its ultimate qualities via the dialectic or dichotomy, which is a reciprocal or inverse relation. So in Yin-Yang fashion, this is a self-quantifying approach to qualities. Thesis and antithesis meet synthesis in the degree to which each it’s not its “other”.

To be discrete is not to be continuous. And vice versa. And this dichotomisation of possibility is mathematically expressed as a reciprocal relation. Discrete = 1/continuous. And continuous = 1/discrete.

Each is the limit on its other. Each is the unit which is thus the basis of measurement or quantification in regard to that other.

I can measure discreteness in the world to the degree I can measure no continuity. And vice versa. And that is expressible as the simplest mathematical relation.

It is Peirce’s triadism that can help to ground what may seem ‘unmoored’, by insisting on a relational structure of three aspects where only one or two are argued. — Possibility

Note how the mathematical expression requires the three things that include the unit 1 as its identity element or swivel. It represents the symmetry that connects and which then gets broken.

If we write it out in full, it becomes clearer.

Discrete/1 = 1/continuous. The unit 1 as the symmetry breaking pivot that inverts the relation is present on both sides, but switches sign from being the denominator to the numerator.

Try this reciprocal function on any metaphysical dichotomy that takes your fancy and see how it works.

The familiar ones are chance-necessity, matter-form, flux-stasis, whole-part, one-many, infinite-infinitesimal, atom-void, local-global, rotation-translation, digital-analog, figure-ground, signal-noise, and so on an on

It is the universal trick that allows measurement. We can only ever ground an act of measurement in terms of a claim of what is, within the context of all that it is thus not.

The 'ego' is an 'effect of language' or a habit or a convention. It's a piece of tribal technology. The body cannot be dissolved... or not consistently dissolved. — jas0n

Well put. This is social psychology 101 ... well, for some, like Andy Lock and the semiotic/symbolic interactionist/Vygotskian psychology crowd.

A useful resource here would be Andy Lock's summaries of George Herbert Mead, Jacob von Uexkull, and Lev Vygotsky.

In postmodern distributed systems approaches , all that’s left of the old subject and object are temporary nodes in self-transforming networks. Yet this temporary presencing of elements in a shifting network still harbor enough irreducible content to extend a force on each other, to arbitrarily condition and polarize.

The question I, Gendlin, Heidegger and Derrida
ask is whether such reciprocally causal dynamical
models still invest too much content in their grounding assumptions? That is , is it possible to deconstruct these dynamical nodes to locate a more originary basis for a cultural system than that of reciprocal causality? — Joshs

What seems absent here is the acknowledgement that yes, this distributed systems view of self-organisation and dynamical balance is correct. Even fundamental physics says the same thing in its attempts to create a grand unified theory, such as loop quantum gravity. As do neural network approaches to modelling the brain. So this is not just a now widely held view, there are many mathematical models of it.

But then also, all such models need some pragmatic goal or finality. They are maximising or optimising some value. It is this that determines the patterns of integration and differentiation, of the nodes vs the connections, of the particle excitations vs their vacuum backdrops, etc.

So if a culture is regarded as being deconstructable to its vacuum state - some level ground of pure reactivity; and that flatness would be the general potential that is language as a system of sign - a system that starts untextured by any meanings, and so is the originary state in lacking any intrinsic content, lacking any bumps and hollows or distinctions between what is a node, what is the network; then yes, we can imagine culture having the unbound plurality of that everythingness, that Apeiron which is a vacuum in its ground state.

Yet humans are already neurobiologically enactive systems, embedded in a world that imposes existential challenges on their integrity as organisms. The minute that symbolic language exists to originate a flat and endlessly open world of reference, it is already being closed by the pragmatic demands of negotiating a state of cultural relations that are fundamentally constrained by that prior existence of a body in an actual physical world.

Endlessly deferring reference and infinitely plural interpretation may exist in theory. But in practice, they become just an informational resource to be consumed. The business in hand for the social organism is surviving and spreading in the real world. That is the optimising function. And to the degree that is not being recognised in a culture's organismic economy, the organism is sick, pathological, dysfunctional.

Maybe you have the intention to recover this pragmatic functionality, this natural finality, once you have established the flat plurality of language as a new technology of reference or interpretance?

But that would be my point. The semiotic value of language is that it can indeed refer to anything. Yet there is no actual value in that until sharp choices have been made. The plurality of possibility is what the relevant optimisation function erases. Meaning arises via the constraint of all that is irrelevant. Signal is filtered from noise by the discard of information.

All matter from the atomic to the macroscopic scale vibrates, and it is difficult to think of a vibration that does not feel like something. Perhaps it is intrinsic of waves and wavicles to consist in fragments of feeling as they resonate. — Enrique

But what if in fact the opposite is the general case among those who study the physics of material vibrations?

Given that this is the crucial causal claim underpinning your entire position, the case might need to be actually made for this rather than treating it as something "no-one could really doubt".

(Well, there is also the other little problem of your constant conflation of classical waves and quantum waves - ie: waves of oscillating matter and "waves" of probability amplitude, or the statistics that would narrow some observer's expectations about what happens next in the world. To be wave-like in a purely abstract mathematical sense is very different from being an actual mechanical resonance or vibration in a lump of matter.)

Obsessing over fashion or the faddish moral vocab of the day, at the cost of understanding even basic physics — jas0n

Even just being rational about public health choices, like the crazy anti-vaxx arguments from folk who are then only too keen to take horse worming tablets instead. Or the 5G conspiracies from folk who think a diet of industrial corn syrup and seed oil is not going to kill them faster.

Likewise, I'm confident with these tres hombres Epicurus => Sextus Empricus => Spinoza. — 180 Proof

Systems thinking connects my three. What connects yours? Ethics? Equanimity? How to live?

They understand themselves to be truth-seeking and truth-sharing. What do we make of that? A universal urge to weave myth/science ? — jas0n

Isn’t it a case of the science answer becoming too complex and sounding much more like nonsense than the “facts” one can make up to justify one’s own theories. Plus the clear understanding that knowledge is power and so conspiracy theories are the only way for society’s powerless to reclaim power? To delegitimise the technocratic elite is to legitimate Trumpian rule by meme.

Do you think that's a good thing? You know, evolutionarily...? — Agent Smith

Hell no. It’s game over for a species that depends on toilets that flush, energy, food and lighting at the click of a button or app.

And what is meaning itself supposed to mean if I'm alone? — jas0n

Yep. Everyone wants to be an influencer. TikTok is truly the crucible for the development of your "more ideal community of tomorrow". :rofl:

The age of rationality is ending, the age of irrationality and emotional incontinence is at hand.

And PoMo always played that same influencer card in French society after all. Rebels without a clue ... but looking Parisian cool in a craggy old geezer way as they baffled a nation's TV audience on late night black and white.

Nothing changes, even as everything changes.

While I'm on the sins of Pomo, and the virtues of Peirce and Vygotsky, the Continentalists have an uncanny knack of picking the wrong guy.

Just as they went for Saussure over Peirce for their general semiotics, they went for Bakhtin over Vygotsky for their particular model of how speech is the tool that structures thought.

Bakhtin pushed the open-endness of personal dialogue, Vygotsky was about the social closure of communal habits of thought.

So Saussure and Bakhtin weren't wrong about the half of the elephant they were describing, but they failed to give the full holistic account like Peirce and Vygotsky.

But then as a I said earlier, even until the 1990s, you really had to dig to discover the writings of Peirce and Vygotsky. The manuscripts were lost in the back of a Harvard library, or were untranslated Soviet era books that had already fallen foul of Stalinist politics.

Samizdat like Vygotsky's attack on Piaget that had to be dragged out of the bowels of the British Library, arriving on the clanking trolley three days later.

while I insist that bodies in the same world are more or less foundational. — jas0n

Yep. In case you hadn't seen it, this is Peirce's theory of truth as the limit of communal inquiry.

The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth.

And while I am at it, the Pragmatic Maxim:

Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object.

And in regards to Derrida:

The very first lesson that we have a right to demand that logic shall teach us is, how to make our ideas clear; and a most important one it is, depreciated only by minds who stand in need of it.

And in advance of Popper:

“…out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow.

In fact this whole set of lecture notes on Peirce and his grave misrepresentation by the likes of Rorty and Russell makes a damn fine response to the concerns raised in the OP.

Catherine Legg is great.

Laughter is a reaction of surprised delight. A smile of recognition mixed with an a-ha (or exaggerated hah-hah-hah) of pleasure.

A joke is something that milks that by presenting a situation where the answer to the riddle has an especially surprising and pleasing aptness to its fit.

To increase the degree of physiological arousal, the punchline must be well concealed in the set-up and then very abruptly revealed, forcing the rapid cognitive reframing. And being sexual, scatalogical, or in other ways socially transgressive, cranks up the said physiological arousal, amplifying the whole effect.

So the cognitive neurobiology is easy enough. It boils down to manipulating the natural mechanics of an orientation response - creating a surprise that isn't a nasty one but instead a clever socially-situated play of words and ideas.

Then as for the social utility of "a good sense of humour", it is a way for the group to feel happy and tight-knit while collectively sealing its shared identity by mocking some convenient "other".

Edgy comedy is the funniest as it even makes you embarrassed about the transgressive other - queasy attitudes about immigrants, minorities, country folk, whatever, that you can still find even find in some small hidden corner of yourself.

Nothing beats humour for socially-acceptable norm enforcement! It is both useful and fun at the same time - even for the butt of the joke if they are lucky.

Since saying that knowledge, to be of any use, must be useful, is not really saying anything, — Janus

But that is not what was said.

I said: One metaphysics to rule them all!

Jason said: Why? Is that level of metaphysical economy basic for some reason.

I replied: Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful? Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.

So here, the communal goal is defined as useful knowledge. And pragmatism is given as Peirce's univocal totalising answer that both dishes that up as epistemology, and also as a convincing ontology.

So rather than a tautology, it is a claim of maximal self-consistency. Metaphysics has its central dichotomy - epistemology and ontology. Peircean Pragmatism makes the two a mirror image, thus eliminating all other -isms.

And this shows in that even poetry is meant to be culturally instructive.

I mean, they even teach it in school. And no education authority feels it is there to spend good tax payer funds so you can sit in class pleasuring yourself.

The fact that you will reply that poetry is instead the radical device you chose to disrupt such an institutionalised notion of "self improvement", only goes to show how useful poetry might be in every sense. You too could be John Cooper Clarke speaking truth to power, using words to smash the system.

The fact that utility might be a two-way street is already the central feature built into my systems approach, as I now repeat for the 1002nd time.

The Establishment wants to mould you with its carefully chosen curriculum examples of poetry. It dishes up the poetry that wanted to smash the system of its own fondly remembered youth.

If you were a wild young romantic like me - and you, and Jason, and any kid with any balls at all - you would have dramatically refused to read a single set book, play or poem at school, while also showing them by still getting one of the best English marks in the country and nursing the ambition of shaking things down to the ground with your own artistic revolt.

I mean I was so proud of my art that I spent whole maths lessons carving and inking a design that covered the full desktop. My triumph was complete when I saw it sitting outside the woodwork class as some chore to be given a third former with a sander.

So sure knowledge is useful. Knowledge is power. And society is an organism that flourishes to the degree it is a win-win of top-down wisdom shaping bottom-up free creativity.

And that essential dynamic is something to be expressed over all scales of human organisation. Social democracies hope to strike a balance between a general state education - that includes poetry - and also a tolerance for individuals acting up in ways that seem anti-social, but in fact are the making of some of its most productive and creative citizens.

There is also nothing against an individual themselves combining both poles of the dynamic - being both wise and creative, habitual and exploratory, rooted in the past and focused on the future .... keep adding your own slogans ...

So yes. One metaphysics to rule them all! Why the hell not? It certainly looks to always work, never fail.

Whereas pluralism? Not so much.

If the question was whether knowledge always has to be useful, then you would want to deconstruct the perfectly clear sense of the question by either disputing the definition of knowledge, and/or of use?

Seems legit. :up:

But it seems to me that the shared agreed on rules and shared spirit only really exists as it is animated and redefined each actual engagement at each moment of time by individual participants. — Joshs

That is presumed by the structuralist metaphysics here. Nothing "exists" except as a persistent and self-sustaining dynamical balance. An autopoietic system. A process. A Peircean Thirdness of habit.

I've said it a thousand times. It is totally part of the metaphysics of structure that the whole shapes the parts. And the parts in turn - reciprocally, in complementary causal fashion - construct the whole.

So the internet carves out some space - the enclosure that has the dialogic structure of a discussion board. We all enter knowing what kind of thing to do. Say something ... that gets a response. Sparks up some chain of back and forth that keeps going until it peters out.

This internet space even has a name - a proud boast. It is "The Philosophy Forum". Not even merely "a" philosophy forum. Standards have been set. This is philosophy central ... for all comers.

And then folk arrive, attracted to the free (or at least, minimally regulated) possibilities for personal expression that such a space affords. Havoc ensues. Any kind of randomness gets expressed. But also then chaos exerts its own constraints. Patterns emerge.

If I enter passionate about Nietzsche, and you enter passionate about what you make for your lunch and the chooks in your garden, then some kind of thermalising equilibrium results. For both of you to persist in interaction within the one space, you have to make some kind of connection that is some balance of these two interests. At the very least, you have to be able to fake a tolerance for Nietzsche-speak and chook-speech while each takes turns. But also there may be some degree of interest in how the two topic intersect as some Venn diagram.

This is just like injecting a particularly hot or cold particle into a vessel of particles at some common equilibrium state of temperature and pressure. After a few dozen bounces of the other particles - which have some characteristic bell curve distribution of momentums states - the hot particle would have cooled towards the average, the cold particle heated up to the same general statistical distribution.

So even as whacky and "human" an example as this discussion board can be concretely reduced to the principles of thermodynamics - thermodynamics being based on the metaphysics of self-organising emergence or dynamical balance.

It is the same irreducible triadicity of Thirdness - of global constraint shaping local degrees of freedom, and those local degrees of freedom (re)constructing that global state of constrain - all the way down to the ground. The same metaphysical model accounts for existence as persistence, the top-down stabilisation of bottom-up contingency, whether we are talking of social systems or fundamental particles.

OK. Passionate feelings expressed for the 1001th time. :grin:

What the forum stands for may change for me in a good way or a bad way, making me more or less enthusiastic about wanting to continue participating, or may inspire me to change my strategies of argumentation, or become more or less intense or serious. I may become more or less focused on politically or empirically or spiritually oriented topics on here due to the unfolding interchanges. Other participants, meanwhile, are forming their own changing attitudes and interests. — Joshs

Exactly. We agree on the self-organising dynamic. So let's get back to the question of why Derrida's deconstruction is a project worth entertaining.

Is there some meta-level or vantage from which to characterize how the site ‘as a whole’ changes along with each participant’s changing experience of it , one that wouldn't simply be one more subjective perspective? — Joshs

If you reduce all systems to a thermodynamic basis, that then gives you some simple metrics. We could seek the equivalent of the forum's temperature and pressure. We could look for whatever macro-quality labels the Gaussian average of its microstates. Or given this is the internet and we are also dealing with a space that is only weakly closed, we might have some further discussion about whether we ought to apply a more powerlaw or scalefree analysis to the phenomenon in question.

So yes, it is pretty easy to imagine how to start quantifying the forum's structure - its fabric of interaction - in a model theoretic way. The objective part of the exercise is what any competent social scientist ought to be able to do.

The question that is subjective would be "why bother?". That is, who cares? And what isn't already so obvious that it needs a more exact mathematical description?

I mean why are we all still here - given a discussion board is a crude mechanism for enforcing the aggressive back and forth of the normal academic machine?

Being an academic, being an intellectual, means operating the impersonal dichotomising device of dialogic argument. Lumping and splitting. Finding whatever counts as the "other" view that you can most disagree with - and thus defining your own position as the only truly agreeable one.

The whole set-up is meant to enforce the strongest kind of personal disagreements so that we can all then arrive at the safe harbour of our own certitude. By accident, we find we arrive at some point where differences and no longer be found. And so then further interaction becomes dull. We drift away.

Of course this commitment to eternal disagreement is very odd behaviour for an essentially communal creature like the average human. Folk stumble into PF thinking it should be a happy and agreeable party. You need to have that stern academic training to think precisely the opposite.

So what ought to be the right metric that would make PF the kind of place you would most desire? I'm sure you have some vague idea of what would "make PF great again". And it could be more a low conflict place - a place of education where students learn how to accept given wisdom. Or it could be a more high conflict place - more like the actual bleeding edge of intellectual research. Or maybe you want more human contact, more talk about hobbies and friends.

Again, it is no problem that each of us may have a meta-goal for the forum - something that would describe its Goldilocks ideal state. The range of those meta-goals can then be thermalised to define that equilibrium state (really, such wisdom in a fairy tale!).

There is already the standard academic dichotomy to pluck out of the air - the spectrum spanned by the opposing poles of teaching and researching. That would be appropriate to the bold "this is a philosophical academy" banner place above the clubhouse door. The place is also just an internet clubhouse, so you would expect a lounge and chill out zone for those not that much interested in being taught, or doing research.

Does that capture meta-level vantage point view of what animates PF - the general structure that sets up some persistence of interaction?

And did Peirce or Derrida say it better!!??!! That is the burning issue, the challenge you seemed to want to take on. :up:

The Wiki entry on “trace” - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trace_(deconstruction) - shows that a plain English account of Derrida’s project is perfectly possible.

As an analysis of how language functions, it is perfectly familiar. But as a diagnosis of the human condition it is wilfully perverse.

The structure of language is what makes us human. It is the species defining characteristic. So to deconstruct that structure as a way to reach some more authentic - because unconstrained - state is bonkers.

The Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment taken to its next level. Irrationally opposed to rationality, and in the process, making the case for rationality ever stronger.

Let’s translate this into something more concrete. — Joshs

Yes please.

how would we parse the ‘dance’ that takes place on this philosophy forum among its participants, or just between you and me in the present discussion? — Joshs

Curious that you would answer me in this roundabout fashion.

Is there an overall third-person ( or perhaps second person) logic that can be employed to depict the organizational dynamics of this I-thou system , or the larger system that includes all participants in a thread? — Joshs

Well my presence in this particular dynamic is now most marked by its absence. And I must make sense of that by seeking some larger point of view - a judgement about whether this a deliberate act, even a provocation, or the opposite, some benign and contingent event. You simply forgot/didn’t read/meant to reply separately.

So I see nothing but a web of organisation dynamics that has the usual social complexity of any game. PF has some kind of rules of conduct, some kind of shared spirit and mission, to which all its participants would contribute in terms of their own contingencies of personality, experience and habit.

Even on PF, which is as about as informally structured in terms of “how to productively behave” as it gets, some larger pattern of engagement emerges over time. And the expectations and agendas of participants are reciprocally shaped by that.

Foucault would say yes, Derrida would say no. He and Heidegger wouldnt deny that we can point to cultural
hegemonies and world-views, but they wouldn’t analyze these in such a way that they would take the overarching group dynamic as primary or even complementary to the personalistic perspective. — Joshs

So does that mean the personal is always primary, and also never complementary, to the public? Is that the thesis you wish to defend?

Seems dead in the water to me. But I await the supporting evidence. Along with a stab at translating the difference between Derrida’s binary hinge and Peirce’s triadic switch.

For him , in the beginning there was the mark , trace , gramme, differance ( these terms are interchangeable).
They refer to an identity , subject or ipseity divided within itself in the very act of returning back to itself to repeat itself. Put differently, in order to constitute itself , the ‘I’ must borrow from what is other than itself. In this way there is at once a formal, transcendental , structural aspect to the mark ( that a meaning is being carried forward by being repeated or reflected back to itself) and an empirical, genetic aspect( in the very act of repeating itself or turning back around to glimpse itself it is exposed to alterity). This origin is not a vagueness or an indeterminacy but an undecidability . The mark is undecidable because there is no question of choosing between presence and absence, genesis and structure, form and content , the ideal and the empirical. Both are indissociable in a single mark. This is the complexity of the origin, its hinged articulation. — Joshs

This reads like utter gibberish. Can you give an explanation with a concrete example.

Start with the mark I just made by stabbing the spatulate tip of a stick into a wax tablet. What next?

Derrida writes — Joshs

I thought it couldn’t get worse and it did.

Really. Please try and put the essential idea into an intelligible form with concrete examples.

I don't know if you include Hegel in PoMo, but Braver's charting of the journey of 'anti-realism' from Kant to Hegel to Heidegger to Derrida features holism prominently. — jas0n

Obviously I like that Hegel tried to take a dialectical approach and Kant was also a systems thinker. And there is the Naturphilosphie lineage, with guys like Schelling. But if anti-realism is just another word for idealism, then it’s not solving any problems.

My own line would be Anaximander => Aristotle => Peirce. And I wouldn’t feel as if I was missing much just sticking to those three.

In Saussure, every language user has an (imperfect) copy of the language system in his brain. For Feuerbach, thinking is not a function of the individual. I think in terms of a distributed, self-updating operating system — jas0n

How language structures thought is complicated. A subject for some other day.

Underlined part reminds me of Gadamer. — jas0n

I remember liking Gadamer.

Ha. Well you know I think you are oversimplifying, but I recognize that you don't seem to need them. It's like starting from either the inside or the outside and ending up pretty much in the same place. — jas0n

I think it really matters which path you take to arrive at the centre. Each path trains your brain in different sets of habits.

As I see it, both PoMo and AP are essentially reductionist and never escape that monism - whether they fetishise the monism of the one or the many.

So I say that the holism of pragmatism is the best path to approach metaphysics. Natural philosophy, systems science, etc. That gives you training in the habits of thought which are actually required to grasp the whole that is meant to be at the end of the trail.

My criticisms might sound light-hearted - as no professional philosopher is actually a dope. But also, I'm deadly serious about the systematic intellectual shortcoming of both the left and right of philosophy. They both want to start in simplicity to reach the complexity. And even PoMo's pluralism is a monistic simplicity in being merely structureless complication - unpruned variety.

I say you have to get the core idea - that reality has the irreducible complexity of a holistic relation - to get to the destination that metaphysics has in mind.

My journey was (roughly) literature => philosophy => math, but I never abandoned any of stepping stones. — jas0n

My trajectory would have been biology => ecology => artificial intelligence => human evolution => social pyschology => cognitive neuroscience => complexity theory => systems science => Peircean semiotics; followed by a return run through the sciences and humanities. So picking up from a semiotic view of complexity => fundamental physics, geopolitics, and a catch-up with biology now that it has got interesting again.

There is no privileged medium — jas0n

So the medium ain't the message then? :razz:

I would say there are good arguments why vocalisation beat, say, hand gestures as why language could in fact evolve.

Signing is perfectly fine as a medium for language now that the vocal version exists. Likewise writing.

Even the same parts of the brain are pre-adapted. It is convincing to argue that the hominid brain became both lateralised and got a new "articulate" motor planning area so as to make Homo habilis the first tool user, with nimble fingers and opposable thumb. But then a million years past and no evidence of a gesture based symbolic culture.

Then along comes Homo sapiens with a sudden change to its vocal cords. The throat and mouth had changed so that it was equipped with its own new dexterity - the ability in fact to dichotomise sound into vowels and consonants, and thus chop up the flow of noise into crisply bounded syllabic units.

Couple that trick - evolved for increased emotional expressiveness - with the already existing Broca's area specialised for handling fiddly finger actions, and grammatically structured symbolic speech was all ready to take off.

So maybe vocalisation is a privileging medium here after all. The paleo record seems to say so.

But then even more privileged mediums showed up, like writing, printing, emojis, Tik-Tok?

That is the goal. Why? Is an appreciation for economy something basic? — jas0n

Pragmatism. What use is knowledge that ain't useful.

Even poetry is supposed to be useful according to its promoters.

Funny point, but this is as dense and elusive as anything Derrida wrote. — jas0n

Yes, Peirce is jargon-ridden. The difference is that Peirce is thinking mathematically. Just check out the amphek as the epistemic cut switching device that makes possible the whole of Boolean algebra - a fact known to Peirce in 1880 and not rediscovered until Sheffer in 1913. And even Sheffer got no credit until Bertrand Russell stumbled across it in the 1920s and was compelled to incorporate it into the second edition of his Principia Mathematica.

So Peirce is mathematical rigor underneath all the neologisms. Derrida and PoMo in general are more like the blind people in a dark room giving the elephant a good touch up and feeling moved to poetic outbursts.

don't know much about the physics of the beginning of the universe. — jas0n

I meant to add, given your interest in the real numbers, a physicist would these day say that the complex numbers are more foundational than the reals.

If quantum field theory and its commutativity is basic, then nature counts in complex numbers rather than real numbers. The ground of being is where the dichotomising starts. And that dyadicity is what the complex plane encodes as the dimensionality where rotations and translations share the same unit 1 starting point.

Which leads neatly to....

I did learn Newtonian physics pretty well once. — jas0n

And what was Newtonianism founded on but the (Noether) symmetry of rotation and translation. Or angular momentum and linear momentum.

So you can spin on the spot or roll in a straight line as an inertial degree of freedom. They are the two reciprocal faces of the same unit 1 identity operator that then let you start counting accelerations and decelerations within a coordinate-stabliised inertial reference frame where even being at "rest" is made a strictly relative state of affairs.

Reality is dichotomies, or switches, or ampheks, or signs, or quantum operators acting on infinte Hilbert spaces, or symmetry breaking in general, all the way down to ground. Which is then defined by the Planck triad of constants - that stand in their own final set of reciprocal relations. That becomes the Big Bang cut-off that says you can't go any smaller or hotter as the fabric of reality now becomes just a vagueness - the dissolutoion that is Wheeler's quantum foam.

Something you've probably already touched on and seems relevant is the difficult distinction between sign and non-sign. If a sign is not grounded in a 'mental content' (a signified), then it's just 'out there' in the environment. In other words, what separates a salute from wiping the sweat off of one's forehead? The answer is probably something like the 'play' or 'ambiguity' of the sign/non-sign or trace/non-trace distinction. This is why I say the Cartesian 'ghost' is dethroned perhaps rather than annihilated. Our mentalistic language, however misleading, almost needs to remain legible. This is determinate negation, writing under erasure, etc. Less pretentiously we might talk of switching between language games or perspectives. — jas0n

Well Peirce addressed this for language by making a triad out of the steps towards full-blown semiosis. The most hesitant sign is iconic (a relation of Firstness), the more definite sign is indexical (a relation of Secondness), and the fully realised sign is symbolic (the fixity of a habit, or Thirdness).

For example....

[Peirce] identifies three types of signs as a function of their representative condition: icons, or signs that resemble their object (an image of fire), indices, or signs that are contiguous with, are caused by, or somehow point to their objects (smoke coming from a fire), and symbols, or signs whose meanings are a function of convention, habit, or law (fire as knowledge in the story of Prometheus). Here again, icons are firsts, indices are seconds, and symbols are thirds.

https://undcomm504.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/firstness-secondness-and-thirdness-in-peirce/

And I also addressed this in a more general way by echoing the usual observation that a mark can be granted extrinsic meaning precisely because it lacks intrinsic meaning.

I press my stylus into the wax. It makes a dent. It certainly draws attention to itself as a distinctive physical fact - a small and yet curiously precise effort someone has just made in a world where marks are distributed across the landscape with the maximally generic unconcern of a fractal or scalefree probability distribution.

And then you learn that the mark is in fact part of some larger mental structure - some community-level habit of interpretation. As more marks get made, you might start to think you could crack this cuneiform code.

So at the level of some single mark, it could be "just physics" - a complete material accident in a world composed of material accidents over all possible spatiotemporal scales. Or it could be "all mind" in being a purposeful act of encoding information.

A mark could be a switch. Or not a switch. And so it sits there right at the epistemic cut as an information bit that might also be understood as an entropic microstate.

Shannon and Gibbs formalised the probabilistic maths that made the two kinds of things equivalent - once you strip reality down to its own natural Planck scale cut-off to discover the Boltzmann constant, k.

Again this is why I would sound impatient with Wittgenstein or anyone who wants to just deal with language alone as the metaphysical issue. It is the principles of codes that is at stake, whether they be verbal, numerical, neural or genetic.

And computer science, quantum holography, thermodynamics, and all the other new information theoretic approaches to foundational physics now show that semiosis is not just about the actual codes employed to fashion organisms with life and mind, it also can be given the pansemiotic twist where it becomes a physicalist description of nature in its own right.

Nature is switches or signs all the way down to the ultimate primal dichotomy that is encoded by the intrinsic reciprocality of the Planck constants.

One metaphysics to rule them all. :smile:

I'm a bit of a 'consciousness denier.' I don't mean that I don't have the usual 'sensations' and 'emotions.' But I suspect that the idea of an inaccessible interior is epistemologically useless. — jas0n

Of course I would agree. But also, I would add that this view of consciousness - a little soul inside the physical body that has freewill and is responsible for everything the body chooses to get up to - is socially constructed and has great pragmatic value for the social level of the human organism.

Why was the Catholic Church so historically powerful? Because is fostered precisely this image of the human condition.

If you make everyone self-conscious of their need to constantly watch over their every impulse and weigh it against a culturally-defined norm, then you indeed own their "souls".

Modern neo-liberalism just continues this epistemological tradition. If you can make every citizen guilty for their failures to be self-actualising entrepreneurs, then again you own their "souls" and they become the building blocks that creatively strive to make the social hierarchy that your "consciousness model" embodies.

This is the problem with phenomenology. It is already culturally weaponised. Whether you are a PoMo socialist or right wing think tanker, you want to take advantage of the possibilities that exist in owning the discourse that frames our Cartesian notions of selfhood.

Who needs to enslave the masses when the masses can be trained up to enslave themselves?

Perhaps you can see that Wittgenstein is 'deconstructing' the two-sided Saussurian sign in plainer language. — jas0n

Yeah sure. But this is the Kantian throat-clearing level of the discussion. It should be the bleeding obvious. How many times can one kill the corpse of Cartesian representationalism?

But yes, I realise that is a rhetorical question. Every second post on this forum demonstrates that the grip of this zombie metaphysics is as strong as ever. And I've just said why. Humanity - as a social organism - depends on Cartesian representationalism as its standard operating system.

The cry is a 'cheap' movement of the air that flicks a switch in group's nervous system. Then the trick is viewing human language this way. — jas0n

Yep. That is a nice way of putting it.

This makes sense to me, but I'm tempted to cash out 'think of' in terms of tendencies to behave this way rather than that way, where this behavior is public (back to the Popper's fog.) I very much count speech acts as 'public, — jas0n

Again, precisely my view. Evolution of language and human cognition was where my researches started. Language starts first out in the tribal space to co-ordinate tribal action. Then it became internalised as inner self-regulatory speech once the value of that trick became culturally apparent.

It's Vygotskian psychology 101. But Vygotsky is another Peirce. Someone totally brilliant, yet caught out by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. They both wrote down all the answers, but their manuscripts remained lost to the world until little groups began to rediscover their existence in the 1980s and 1990s.

But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy — jas0n

I've dug out my ancient notes to refresh my mind on where I felt Derrida fits in here. I see that he was dealing with the very Peircean issue of the origin of rational structure.

Must not structure have a genesis, and must not the origin, the point of genesis, be already structured, in order to be the genesis of something?

So he was pointing to the question of how all things - whether we are talking of cosmic structure or human phenomenological structure - could arise from some pure and simple source when structure is already itself, something irreducibly complex. (That is, a systematic, triadic or hierarchical relation.)

Because ordinary thought can see no bridge between some raw simple ground of being and its production of the very first irreducibly complex structure, that creates a foundational issue that can only be endlessly deferred.

It is exactly the same as asking the question of what could be the first cause of the Cosmos. If existence can't just pop into being as irreducibly complex structure, then the only alternative appears to be infinite regress. It was never created and always existed.

But Peirce fixed that by adding the further metaphysical resource of Vagueness (also known as Tychism and Firstness) to his logic of structure.

The ultimate ground of simplicity could be just ... the vague. Neither a this or a that. A complete lack of dichotomy, dialectic, contrast, or relation. A "realm" as lacking in identity as it is in difference. A state that was formally "less than nothing". And a state that was already contained in the laws of thought by being defined as the nullification of the PNC (just as Peirce cleverly derived the opposite of the vague - the crisply general - from the nullification of the LEM).

So in the "beginning" was the vague. And from that most general nullity could spring its other of the dichotomy that was already well on its way to the fully expressed triadic structure that is a hierarchy.

In physics, we would call it symmetry breaking. But the symmetry breaking of vagueness itself.

Yes, there are still ontological difficulties with using a logic of vagueness to ground the irreducible complexity of first beginnings, or originary events. I've spent a lot of time on that issue.

But Peirce's trick does at least take the metaphysical debate to a whole new level, making redundant much of the everyday metaphysics that people still obsess over.

On a related note, I see that Kauffman paper only talks about the Sheffer stroke and not Peirce's amphek.

Again Peirce got there first.

Ampheck, from the Greek double-edged, is a term coined by Charles Sanders Peirce for either one of the pair of logically dual operators, variously referred to as Peirce arrows, Sheffer strokes, or logical NAND and logical NNOR.

Either of these logical operators is a sole sufficient operator for defining all of the other operators in the subject matter variously described as boolean functions, monadic predicate calculus, propositional calculus, sentential calculus, or zeroth order logic.

So what this is is the identity element for all logical structure - a self-dual relation which already packs all possible structural elaboration.

Sounding familiar yet? :grin:

If vagueness is Firstness - the most absolute form of constraint in being an Apeiron, an absolute absence of constraint - then that already is also the nullity that guarantees the existence of its "other" in the form of the first primal actualisation of a constraint, and hence the full triadic irreducibility of the secondness of dyadic relations, and thirdness of enstructured habit.

It is the symmetry breaking which reveals the symmetry by being able be the breaking. First there was less than nothing. Then there was already a complexity only needing to unpack itself.

And Peirce found that story in a way that grounded logic - the amphek as the identity element - along with everything else.

The article I posted above deals with this kind of despair. If we all lose heart, we guarantee the worst. — Xtrix

But what I want to stress is that even if we cannot avoid the worse scenario, this doesn't mean we don't try to mitigate the oncoming damages, there has to be stuff we can do to reduce or resist what's coming. — Manuel

Despair comes from personal helplessness.

So what we need to be individually is realistic about the possibilities of the whole world coming to its senses and acting cohesively vs the likelihood instead of everything fragmenting and becoming a wretched fight to the last.

The call could go either way, so that is the uncertainty. But we can personally keep our heads up and watching, preparing for the range of most probable outcomes.

In some folk's situations, that might involve joining their countries police/military/security on the assumption that the muscle will look after itself. Or it might involve moving to small and remote communities with the self-sustaining basics and high social capital.

Everyone is capable of making these kinds of calculations of where it is better to be if the worst actually does happen, and where it would also be quite OK to be if it doesn't.

The big mistake is to expect the world at the level of its state political and economic actors not to be doing precisely the same. Everyone will be looking at the charts, weighing up the probabilities, deciding how to position themselves in a complicated game where either we all miraculously cooperate - because that turns out to be easy to do, as with the ozone layer - or we all collapse into a fight over what remains.

Look at the pandemic. Look at the Ukraine. The balance of competition or self-interest vs cooperation or mutual win-win calculations is always going to be in play in how the planet handles its crises.

The Pentagon will be gaming out the scenarios - like whether geoengineering could be a risk worth taking to kick the can down the road a few more decades when fusion power might be a thing.

Or whether a fortress America approach in a rapidly self-depopulating world is the bet to back. Bunker down and let the four horsemen of the Apocalypse take care of the global carbon production problem.

Of course one mustn't over-estimate the capacity of state leaders to see their realities in these kinds of big picture ways. The guys at the top often are quite insulated and emotionally beholden to interest groups - their party, their sponsors, their own rhetoric.

But down among the technocrats, they will be gaming out the scenarios and even making the preparatory moves. That's their job.

There’s no reason we can’t do the same with the order of ‘value’. — Possibility

But there is a very obvious reason.

Any claims about quality have to be qualified by quantification. And that is both the scientific method and Peircean pragmatism.

We can’t ignore the fact that theory and measurement go together as a system of mutual constraint. That is the basis of universal reasonableness which Peirce recognised himself.

Hell, his job was to define the standard metre - with all the metaphysical sophistication that such an idea represents.

He had already foreseen the possibility that the geometry of space was non-Euclidean by arguing measuring the angles of a very large triangle would reveal if it did not add up to 180 degrees and so was curved.

He co-wrote a pioneering psychophysics paper that looked at people’s ability to judge fine differences in small weights.

The last person you could cite in support of an unmoored metaphysics of value, quality or idea would be Peirce. His whole thing was about how any claim about qualities hat to be, in practice, supported by acts of quantification.

While we are at, his theory of perception follows the naturalistic evolving block universe approach.

The answer to the Experience-Truth Gap in philosophy of perception is not to split the object of perception in two – postulating one object that is unreal but is actually perceived, and a second object that is real but ‘lies behind’ the first and is only inferred.

Rather than two objects, the answer is time. The percipuum is not a temporal particular. It occurs across a time- span which has at its ‘back end’ a memory of the immediate past (which Peirce calls the ponecipuum) and at its ‘front end’ an expectation of the immediate future (the antecipuum).

This time-span - of effectively infinitesimal duration - forms a ‘moving window’ in which each new perception enters the mind at the ‘front end’ in the form of anticipation just as the most recent falls back into memory. This internal structure is what endows the perception with its meaning.

https://core.ac.uk/download/29202694.pdf

The guy just didn’t miss a trick, did he? :lol:

It doesn't matter much. The big issue whether one thinks the meaning of a sign is grounded in some kind of pure mental stuff or instead the relationship this sign has with others signs. — jas0n

The way this makes most sense to me is that a network of linguistic signs is a syntactical network of semantic switches. And this is lain over the neurobiological substrate of an animal level of consciousness, so as to enforce a further sociocultural level of constraint.

Thus it is neurobiology that is indeed “the pure mental stuff” here - even if one wouldn’t want to use such a dualistic, Cartesian substance, term.

And the network of signs has a rather mechanical aspect in being a structure of syntax that only constrains the state of the brain so as to put it into some state of interpretance that it wouldn’t otherwise be able attain.

So for example, I can say to you: “The fat and hairy caterpillar with a ring it’s nose and purple shoes.”

And you can take that sentence and construct some image - a visual anticipation - of what it would be like to actually see such a thing in the real world.

Take 10 people. Everyone would imagine something both similar, yet also randomly different. One hairy caterpillar might be far more hirsute than the next, or whatever. But the point is that the words can whip up a structure which puts you in mind of a certain thing, which is also completely imaginary, utterly contingent, quite impossible in fact.

So a constraints based approach says the syntax glues together a set of semantic switches. We have to think of the hairy caterpillar, and not the bald or scaly or feathered or clothed caterpillar.

But there also has to be the neurobiological capacity to form anticipatory images just as part of normal perceptual processing. Even animals can form search images to shape their states of intentionality.

And this seems to be where the confusion in where the meaning of words lies.

It doesn’t lie in the words - and yet they form the very necessary structure of constraint. Nor does it lie in the neurobiology - even though that is the equally necessary plastic potential which can take on some constrained state of interpretance.

Clearly, the meaning lies in the way a constrained state of interpretance then has some pragmatic relevance to the job of living in a world where being able to form such states of intentionally - like being able to anticipate fat hairy caterpillars with nose rings and purple shoes - might be a meaningful thing to do.

Even if right here, it is the very nonsensicality of such a perceptual expectation that is what hopefully makes my example instructive.

That is then the Peircean view. You can chase the meaning all over the place. But it is to be found in the holism of the self-world modelling relation. Words are just another level of constraint on our existing neurobiology, which already has to be doing a pretty robust self-world modelling job.

This also emphasizes the importance of context. The meaning of the sign is in its position relative to other signs (the minister, the bride, ...) — jas0n

This is enactivism or ecological perception in a nutshell. Another argument against Cartesian representationalism is that real brains leave as much information out in the world as they can get away with.

The context is always out there in brute physical fashion. So start by trying to predict and thus already ignore it. Let it then intrude on your world conception to the degree that it feels it must.

You like signs or traces more? — jas0n

I’m not getting how it is a distinction that makes a difference. I am already presuming that a signs need to be understood as switches, and that switches already deal with the negative space issue - the not-A - by implementing the logic of the LEM.

Again I come back to Peirce who reduced all logic to the switch that was his amphek - the discovery of the NOR logic gate long before it got officially discovered.

I think that Kauffman paper references that. But anyway, the nature of the sign as a binary switch, and so already including the not-A as the not not-A, is already mathematically presented in Peirce’s writings.

It is another thing I just take for granted and forget to mention.

If the signifier 'actually' refers to other signifiers and not a signified, then the dyadic sign is not so dyadic after all. One has instead a system of traces, neither mental not physical, but that which makes distinction possible in the first place. — jas0n

Oh, I was thinking of that as the feature and not the bug. :gasp:

A monkey randomly bashing a keyboard will in infinite time surely produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Along with the Tractatus and 50 Shades of Grey in even shorter order.

Or like DNA coding for proteins, any kind of nonsense polypeptide chain could be produced. Finite means can produce infinite variety. And it is the judgement being exercised in what exact proteins get made that then adds all the meaning.

So the greater the scope for an endless recursion of sign, the more meaningful it is when we can say almost everything in a remarkably few words.

At the wedding ceremony: "I will".

Chaitin's algorithmic complexity and semantic content as data compression.

Maybe this is because the dyadic switching is understood by me not as a linear chain but hierarchical recursion? That is a further assumption built into my Peircean semiotics that is worth making explicit.

Again, it is the 20 questions thing, so is also in fact built into Shannon information.

A taxonomy is a hierarchy of switches. Ideally, the throwing of a switch at each level bisects the space of probability with 50/50 Bayesian exactness.

So I have in my box here a ....? Well, you already know its got to be that small. So its it animal or mineral? Is it rocky or metallic? Is it shiny or dull? Is it more gold or silver? Is it globular or toroid? Aha, I can guess it is the wedding ring. "I will".

A linear chain of distinctions is how you have to encode messages. You have to break the holism of a thought, a protein, a percept, a mathematical object, into a string of digits. Only a chain of switches can reduce its material cross section to the point where it "escapes" the 4D constraints of the real material world.

But then the trick is the switches can encode the holism of a hierarchical order. Each switch can either expand or contract the space of possibility in logarithmic steps while keep the cost of any step strictly linear.

So a linear code gives you hierarchical holism for next to no computational cost. I can't talk as gaily about the Big Bang as the fleck of dust I've just noted on my screen. In 20 questions I can cover almost any space of semantic possibilities that I might practically have an interest in.

But recall that Derrida criticized Saussure in his own terms, praised Peirce, and showed how the dyadic sign broke down, connecting Saussure's 'phonocentrism' to one of the oldest prejudices of philosophy. — jas0n

I understand Derrida to call out the play/ambiguity of our signs. Since they primarily refer to one another (describe the blur of reality with a set of finite switch-positions like mind/matter or male/female), they aren't grounded in anything but our flexible reapplication of an old sign in a new context. This allows for drift. I read him with Wittgenstein, as a linguistic philosopher I suppose. — jas0n

You are managing to make Derrida seem like a reasonable guy. The question is what kind of sociology would encourage the torture of the accepted PoMo academic style?

It is a first principle of clear writing that global or abstract statements are then always anchored/evidenced in the conviction of supporting particulars. You give the general principle and offer the specific examples that support it.

But both your PoMo texts were all abstractions, no particulars. They never touch the ground and just flu along unchecked by material fact.

As a hierarchy theorist and pragmatist, this can be criticised on formal structural grounds. Understanding is the dance between the local and the global, the detail and the whole, the concrete and the abstract, the measurement and the theory.

And in PoMo, I see no such dance on the whole. Again I wonder what sociological advantage that gives PoMo texts - except to play the poseur too clever to be understood by the likes of me and you,

But hey, you clearly value it. Which makes me curious as to how you don't appear to have had your thoughts scrambled by it.

Saussure had different priorities ? Shows his age? Note that he thought in terms of 'form not substance' on both sides.. The phonic 'image' is something like an equivalence class of actual pronunciations. It's not sound. — jas0n

I have nothing at all against Saussure. He was indeed influential on me when I was looking into why language made such a difference to the human mind.

So within the linguistic space - which was the space he was aiming at - it was all good stuff.

All that matters is the difference between them. This difference is unheard. Each signifier is 'essentially' the negation of all the others. — jas0n

Yep. That is how I would argue it.

The perfect switch implements the laws of thought. Everything divides into A and not-A. And even if it doesn't in fact divide so crisply and easily, the switch is the Procrustean bed that forces such a division on the world.

Language - verbal or numerical - reduces the analog reality to a digital recording. But hey, digital recordings can be as good as the real thing for all practical purposes. And they can be better if you don't like the scratching and hissing of vinyl, or you want the most compressed recording possible.

One might argue that mathematics is biased toward the discrete in the pursuit of an ideal if not actual machine checkability. You end up using a finite alphabet of symbols when talking about towers of differing uncountable infinities. — jas0n

I would indeed argue the same. God invented the integers, as they say. Or at least the identity elements of 0 and 1 around which arithmetic swivels.

So what works as maths is the ability to cash out the continuum - Peirce's synechism - as another atomism. And hence another mechanics.

Peirce and other systems thinkers protest that reality at the fine grain is naked fluctuation. There is no certainty as a base, just the continuous blur that is the vagueness of an uncertainty.

But maths just swoops in and say we will turn all the uncertainty into certainties by axiomatic fiat. We will turn every entropic microstate into a bit of information. Every fluctuation gets its own number.

This seems madness to the organicist. The world can't be treated as a machine!

But then this mathematical mechanics turns out to work. It is a view of reality which lets you treat it very much as just a machine. And bugger the organic niceties.

Group theory comes to mind. Its theorems apply to any system which satisfies certain criteria (intuitively I like to think of finite groups as sets of permutations.) — jas0n

OK. And I just said this week I've been delving into the murky depths of permutation symmetry as the very thing that generates the Cosmos we all know and love. The ontic structural realist revolution in metaphysics (which seem to have been born and then died within the space of the publication cycle of its one manifesto). :rofl:

Funny old world.

(it's not all wordsalad to me, albeit at the limit of intelligibility a little too often) — jas0n

I'm genuinely curious as to what you can get out of it except a bemused poetry? It poses as something that ought to be intelligible, but I am certain that it leads nowhere deep.

This week I've been dealing with GUT theories of Big Bang symmetry breaking - whether leptoquarks would be SU(4) or SU(5) theories. Now that is at the edge of intelligibility for me. But then also, every day brings waves of insight. You can see when something is going to lead somewhere as it has a basis in mathematical rigour.

Saussure does imagine signs as cutting into an otherwise undifferentiated continuum of thoughtstuff. — jas0n

Not sure how to translate that. But from my Vygotskian/social constructionist perspective, language was the new medium that structured the "undifferentiated continuum" of the language-less animal mind.

So to actually characterise the difference language made to animal consciousness, we have to also be able to accurately characterise what kind of consciousness that was.

From there, we might tend to judge the animal state as either remarkably undifferentiated, or already remarkably differentiated. So either animals were already thinking as we generally understand that in folk psychology way, hence they just need words to express a worldview already formulated. Or indeed, the logicism built into syntax was such a big revolution - an entirely novel level of semiosis - that we might as well say animals just don't think in the way we would understand thought.

That is, they aren't self-objectivising, past-reconstructing, present-narrativising, future-formalising, emotion-socially framing, etc, kinds of creatures. In all these key regards, we would judge them strangely undifferentiated.

But I may misunderstand your drift.

Psychologically our thought — apart from its expression in words — is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. — Saussure

That is reasonable - if you step back from an animal which is merely living in the flow of the present. And then also unfair to the vividness of living in the flow of the present.

So it again is a point of view whether one sees a flat continuum or a fractal roughness.

Find the unifying dichotomy to dissolve the problem of defending one or either pole as the preferred monism!

There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language. — Saussure

Ok. So you are quoting from the text that Stotlz points out is problematic as a representation of Saussure's views....

It is widely known by Saussure scholars that Bally and Sechehaye took many liberties when organizing the student’s notes, by relying mostly on Constanin’s notes, reordering the topics, and coloring Saussure as much more settled on difficult issues.

But anyway, treating this as the Sassurean viewpoint, is this too strong when of course there is something that is both the same in being neurobiological semiosis, and yet is quite different in being now neurobiological + socio-semiosis?

So the animal brain is a self~world modelling system - an example of biosemiosis. And then humans are something extra in that language is a further, more logicist and abstracted - level of semiotic organisation.

If we are alert, we ought to be able to spot the trend towards the complete abstraction and God's eye view that mathematico-semiosis would eventually usher in. It was inevitable - given the presumption of the pragmatic payoff - that humans would take the next step of reducing words to numbers, and grammar to logic.

Words evolved to describe possible social worlds - capture those as thoughtstuff. Then number anchored the capacity to describe possible material worlds - capture the sacred realm of Platonia as a thoughtstuff.

With words, we large construct our selves as social selves. With number, we can dare to construct the physical worlds as if it too were an anthropic reflection of our "inner being".

We can domesticate a planet, fill it with the pigs, cows, sheep, dogs and cats which best reflect the what it means to be "human". Or turn the geography of the world into signposted networks of highways and carpentered, interior decorated, habitats.

Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that "thought-sound" implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. Visualize the air in contact with a sheet of water; if the atmospheric pressure changes, the surface of the water will be broken up into a series of divisions, waves; the waves resemble the union or coupling of thought with phonic substance. — Saussure

This seems to go the long way round and never reaching the destination - which is the fact that the human vocal tract imposed a syllabic serial structure on our normally holistic neurobiology. In making emotionally expressive noises - very important in any social creature - there evolved a new facility for injecting some song-like structure into the vocalisation. (Darwin's singing ape hypothesis indeed.) And from there, is was a short step from making nonsensical yet still emotionally interpretable sounds (ouch, eek, yuck, arrgh) to logically-structure speech acts involving grammar and reference.

So a less fluffy exposition would cut to the chase of how serial vocalisation evolved as an extension to primate emotional communication and became the surprise exaptation that opened the door to human rationalised thought patterns.

Language can also be compared with a sheet of paper: thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language, one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from sound. — Saussure

Again, too vague and fluffy. This is the epistemic cut issue. The switch (as the physical instantiation of a sign) must bridge the divide between the logic of the model and the material actions of the physical world.

So yes, this is Janus faced. The switch has a foot in both worlds. But the thought is the logical model - which in the Bayesian brain view, sets the switch in advance as best it can, then discovers the degree to which reality has tripped it the other way, spelling some error in the prediction.

So what can't be divided is the three way deal of the model, the switch or sign as the interface, and the world. The mind predicts, the world corrects, the switch mediates this triadic interaction.

Thus you can see that if this is the Saussure that informs Derrida's own further rewriting of what Saussureanism ought to mean, then yeah, just give it the flick. Start again with Peircean semiosis.

Grand statements are delivered which contain important insights and yet the implicit self-subversion of such insights is ignored. Concrete details are mostly omitted. Examples are sparse. Purple haze. — jas0n

I would go so far as to add that the only signal I can pick up from the word salad noise is the distress call of folk stuck in a misunderstanding of dichotomies.

Every PoMo argument ever boils down to saying this thesis leads dialectially to its own antithesis. Therefore ... paradox! Self-contradiction! Logical breakdown!

But then let's not get all AP about it and just dismiss the dichotomy out of hand as (ugh) metaphysics. Let's dance around the corpse of logic in a mad jig of delight, proclaiming now the victory of ... the irrational, the pluralistic, the absurd!!!

I like the battle over the continuum. — jas0n

Have you come across Norman Wildberger's dissident maths? He has retired now and is going full rogue. :cool:

Wildberger on infinities and continuums

The basic division in mathematics is between the discrete and the continuous. A largely unquestioning uniformity has settled on the discipline, with most students now only dimly aware of the logical problems with “uncomputable numbers”, “non-measurable functions”, the “Axiom of choice”, “hierarchies of cardinals and ordinals”, and various anomalies and paradoxes that supposedly arise in topology, set theory and measure theory.
While engineers and scientists work primarily with finite decimal numbers in an approximate sense, “real numbers” as infinite decimals are idealized objects which attempt to extend the explicit finite but approximate numbers of engineers into a domain where infinite processes can be ostensibly be exactly evaluated. To make this magic work, mathematicians invoke a notion of “equivalence classes of Cauchy sequences of rational numbers”, or as “Dedekind cuts”.
Each view has different difficulties, but always there is the crucial problem of discussing infinite objects without sufficient regard to how to specify them. I have discussed the serious logical difficulties at length around video 80-105 in the Math Foundations series. For example the video Inconvenient truths with sqrt(2) has generated a lot of discussion.
The idea of “infinity” as an unattainable ideal that can only be approached by an endless sequence of better and better finite approximations is both humble and ancient, and one I would strongly advocate to those wishing to understand mathematics more deeply. This is the position that Archimedes, Newton, Euler and Gauss would have taken, and it is a view that ought to be seriously reconsidered. I believe it is also closer to the view of modern giants such as H. Poincare and H. Weyl, both of whom were skeptical about our uses of “infinity”.
- https://njwildberger.com/2021/10/07/finite-versus-infinite-real-numbers/

Let’s consider here the situation with “infinity”. Most modern pure mathematicians believe, following Bolzano, Cantor and Dedekind, that this is a well-defined concept. By what rules of logic is someone going to convince me of the errors of my ways?
Perhaps they could invoke the Axiom of Infinity from the ZFC axiomfest! As a counter to such nonsense, I would like to propose my own new logical principle. It is simple and sweet: Don’t pretend that you can do something that you can’t.
According to this principle, the following questions are invalid logically:
If you could jump to the moon, then would it hurt when you landed?
If you could live forever, what would be your greatest hope?
If you could add up all the natural numbers 1+2+3+4+…, what would you get?
- https://njwildberger.com/2015/11/27/a-new-logical-principle/

In any case, the tension between intuitions of the discrete and the continuous has fascinated me for quite a while. — jas0n

Yep. There has to be some deeper connection. Which is where Peircean vagueness comes in as that to which the PNC does not apply and thus that which can ground the dichotomised as the two oppositions that then get related in the synechism of Thirdness.

So its not a choice between either the discrete, or the continuous. It is how to see the discrete and the continuous (or the infinitesimal and the infinite) as the reciprocal thing of a dichotomy - a case of the mutually opposite and jointly exclusive in logic terms.

The discrete = 1/continuous, and the continuous = 1/discrete. Each exists as the limit of the other. And both exist only to the degree that it is pragmatically useful to keep forcing the issue.

Maths and logic traditionally come from the other metaphysical angle. Reduction to a monism must rule. Mathematical reality can only admit the one grounding choice. Pick your poison. Don't get caught up in nonsense talk about departed Cheshire cats and their still lingering grins.

I can't understand where the 'camera' is positioned when the Cosmos looks at itself, since the inside/outside framing seems to no longer apply, unless it is some kind of Hegelian thing where the stuff on the other side of the concept is itself just more concept and the mental/physical distinction breaks down. What's the relation of this idea to indirect realism? — jas0n

In hierarchy theory, the "camera" is positioned at the reciprocal limits of the large and small, the most global and most local scales. This is where the invariance arises that can thus bound or close a world (of complex variation).

So to put it simply, we exist at a certain spatiotemporal scale of cogency. You and me can be at rest, be at equilibrium, within some shared inertial frame and lightcone.

But then, as we look up to higher levels of cosmic dynamics, eventually we strike a cosmic horizon. There is everything that happens outside the lightcone that can have no influence on us.

If the Sun went supernova right now, it would take about eight minutes for the bright light and sudden gravitational ripple to hit us. A bit of a delay in the news. But if the visible universe is right now beginning to collide with its antimatter double, it would take another 40 billion years or so for either of us to detect anything untoward.

So the point is that the upper bound constraints on our reality can be both dynamic, and yet changing on such a vast and slow scale that they are larger than our local point of view. Like the frog cooking in the pot, nothing seems to change. The global bound of invariance is created where the view completely fills our vision - like standing too close to a blank wall.

Then the lower bound of local degrees of freedom become a cosmic invariance for the reciprocal reason. From a sufficient distance, a highly dynamical small scale of action - like the quantum vacuum filled with virtual particles - will just blur into its own form of continuum. A solid looking ground of invariant being.

So look up, and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constraining laws of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical symmetries.

Then look down and we see the global spatiotemporal invariance that we call the constructive degrees of freedoms of nature. Our physics encodes them as mathematical constants.

Stan Salthe wrote the best two books on all this from the hierarchy theory point of view - Evolving Hierarchical Systems and Development and Evolution - probably the two most important books I ever read.

I wouldnt say agenda. I’d say the eternal transformation of agendas. Is that still an agenda? — Joshs

Well that begs many questions. The erosion of all definite distinctions only leaves behind the generalised pluralism of all the differences that don't make a difference. Thus this is the very same kind of card that the thermodynamic concept of an equilibrium state plays.

But it certainly lays claim to being a totalising meta-agenda. :up:

So freedom is play within an overarching frame? Free variations on a theme? — Joshs

What? Is this too Wittgensteinian?

Yes, everyone has to end up in the same place. Peirce built his probabilistic view of metaphysics out of the notion of individual propensities. Intentionality by another name.

Every degree of freedom that composes a system - as its pluralistic many - is in turn entrained to its overarching intentionality, the oneness of the systems finality.

Necessity and contingency are thus united in actuality. Or good old Aristotelean hylomorphism.

History as pre-assigned boundary conditions of behavior, within which there is freedom to excel or screw up. — Joshs

Yep. One can play the game or cheat the system. And it is the fact that you can play the game that creates the counterfactual that would be instead cheating the system.

If there is good, then you can be bad. Etc.

But look closer at Nature and you find that it seeks the win-win. Life for the sadist is no fun unless complemented also by the existence of masochists.

Or more to the sociological point, individual choice is optimised in the form of the binary of whether to compete or cooperate. Or still more importantly, how to do both within the one long-run frame.

So when I challenge you to a tennis game, I both mean to run you off court and to agree with you when the ball is actually in or out. And afterwards, win or lose, we shake hands and declare it all to be so much fun we must do it again, same time next week.

So don't look for the win-lose in this metaphysics. Understand this is how Nature arranges for the win-win.

A Romantic free-thinking and feeling individual implies more oppressively severe fundamental constraints than an entropy dissipating system. — Joshs

Of course. Nothing could be more remote from the consciousness of Amerikan youth in cultural conflict than that they may be the modern neoliberal/climate denying incarnation of Debord's Society of the Spectacle - a CNN/Fox New curated storm in a teacup while US fracking wells flare 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, just because ... well, who the hell cares?

So the I that espouses my freedom is not the same I that overthrows my current values. — Joshs

Absolutely! Be the change!

[But how much can you in fact change about anything in this world? I've seen politics and economics up close. I've seen how unequal the stakes are.]

The world of maximum social pluralism and the world of maximum social conformity (authoritarianism) are two poles of a binary, — Joshs

Again, my point is that you want to maximise both within the constraints of a win-win optimisation algorithm.

In ecology, the different balances are theoretically modelled as the three natural developmental stages of immaturity (or explosive, weed-like growth), maturity (or steadier mixed state ecosystem), or senescent (which sounds bad, but simply means something so rich with wise habit that it has become brittle to sudden unpredicted perturbations - like the asteroid that did for the perfectly well adapted dinosaurs).

So in the explosive growth phase, it is youthful exuberance that a society would want to optimise. And Homo sapiens even made extra allowance for that, both in the explosive synaptogenesis of the newborn infant, and in the development of the teenager as a further stage of neural plasticity. Adolescents are tuned by recent evolution to be reckless and exploratory because their frontal lobe impulse over-ride machinery is on hold, giving them more time as junior society members to discover the errors of their way.

Likewise senescence is a further evolutionarily-tuned phase in Homo sapiens - part of the neurobiological adaptation for being a linguistically cultural creature. Women don't shrivel up and die after the breeding is over. Being a wise elder is an important part of social inheritance in a creature organised by oral tradition and living memory.

If you let nature take care of things, it can evolve for the win-win.

But with climate change, suddenly we can look up and see the asteroid.

Oh but wait, someone on the internet said something offensive to my values. I must mount up and joust the dragon once more.

And then there is the overthrow of the system of values: — Joshs

Yeah. Fighting about values is far more important than, for example, getting into the street and making violent noise about ... today being just another day that US fracking flares another 1.48 billion cubic feet of natural gas into CO2 ... because at least all that energy going to waste isn't entering the atmosphere as still more problematic methane.

Oh wait. Has anyone been counting how many cubic feet of methane these fracking rigs also leak?

An even bigger picture begins with the overthrow of a value system which depicts a cosmos structured by specific objective laws, and a history that can be probabilistically calculated. It proceeds from this overthrow to what Nietzsche called a revaluation of all values, not a tolerant pluralism or celebration of subjective freedom but a yoking of current self and value system to a non-calculable other history and other self-to-be, an eternal return of the same , always different self, history and values. — Joshs

Well maybe there is only the one actual existential issue of the day? Maybe everything else pales into insignificance?

That application, in my understanding, relies on a five-dimensional structure. — Possibility

I’m not sure I understand what form you think this extra dimension takes. It sounds like a larger embedding dimension for GR - such as a brane. Or it could be a compactified internal one. Or even a fractal internal one.

That is to say, the whole Euclidean/Newtonian conception of a dimension is up for grabs once we get to the bleeding edge of physics these days.

What I’m suggesting is that what enables us to explore and understand this four-dimensional structure at all is by reconfiguring reality according to value/significance/potentiality. — Possibility

Well my view is that the thermodynamic finality driving the show is what needs to be built into the physics. And quantum decoherence is one of the ways that is being done, as is the de Sitter cosmology that builds in a conformal spacetime geometry - a holographic closure that brings an end to effective space, time and energy.

So Peirce can be said to have envisioned the Cosmos as a dissipative structure. And Big Bang cosmology is cashing out that metaphysics as physics.

The difference is obviously that the Heat Death does not seem such a triumphant cosmic achievement from a human self-centred view.

It would be puzzling that all of history would be so marvellously organised to eventually result in … us. But now the future only holds the relentless onwards project of finishing off the infinite nothingness of a cosmos that is its fully matured condition as a universalised heat sink.

Thoughts are already turning to the last resort of geoengineering. Putin may save us all with a little timely dose of nuclear winter. :up:

Just wondering, because I'm not taking US laws and politics in this area, has Biden done anything relevant yet? — Benkei

Think of it this way perhaps. Before Trump, the brakes on fossil fuel had already been tampered with. By the time Biden got in the driving seat, even the steering wheel had been removed.