If the identity of an object is lost, through the use of relative reference frames, then this is illogical and unacceptable as an ontological principle. — Metaphysician Undercover

It might be a problem for predicate logic. But that already presumes the existence of definite particulars as part of its axiomatisation. That is what the principle of identity is about. Starting off with that as the assumption already granted.

Should ontology limit itself to that kind of atomistic or nominalistic reasoning? Why would you think so?

Diddums.

It seems obvious to me that they'd have to obtain in conjunction with each other. — Terrapin Station

In the end, that is what I would be saying too. In the "beginning" - before some kind of ordered notion of time or action exists - there would just be the complete nullity of a vagueness. Relata~relations - as the holistic enterprise - would have to emerge together, each being the ground to the "other".

However, having said that, it also becomes useful to envisage starts and ends in terms of that which most dominates the scene. And cosmology tells us that in the beginning, we have the maximal state of uncertainty that is the "quantum fireball" of the Big Bang. Then at the end, we have the maximal state of classical certainty that is the Heat Death.

So material fluctuation rules at the start, and formal constraint rules by the end. The two causes of being would always have to be co-present in reality. But the balance shifts from the dominance of the one to the other.

The structuralist story is thus that structure has to develop. The cosmos exists because it was possible for disorder to grow the regularity of lawful habit. Essentially the Universe represents a phase transition which will be complete once it expands and cools to the point where it arrives at the generalised temperature of 0 degrees.

So in this picture, we begin over at the extreme represented by material uncertainty - the Universe as a super-dense plasma without any particular structure to its fluctuations. Then we end at the other pole where all material fluctuations have been reduced to their simplest possible form - a lingering quantum sizzle of blackbody radiation "emitted" by the cosmological event horizon.

And then in-between - like right about now - we have the middle ground story of little atomistic bits of crud still floating around at sub-relativistic speed. We have all the fermionic matter, like protons and electrons, that are locked up knots of substance - structural defects in a spreading~cooling spacetime fabric that is wanting to flatten itself right out.

Morally, what would you say is superior- the employees frivolous pursuits that are more satisfying to the employee or the 8 hours of tedious soul-crushing work that produced a life-prolonging process? — schopenhauer1

I would say morality is aimed precisely at the issue of how we make those kinds of social trade-offs as social creatures. The social system is founded on the natural dynamic of a balance of the competitive and the co-operative, the individual and the collective. It is all about negotiating that give and take.

So you have worked up an example that presents an obviously unhappy balance. And it is just as easy to present one that is a more constructive picture of life.

Now imagine you work as a much appreciated medical researcher in hot start-up with the possibility of doing great good for public health in the worst parts of the world. Work in that light is so rewarding, so sociable, that you don't even want to sit around on your own binge watching another lame Netflix series.

Morally, which would you say is superior in that light. Eight hours in front of the TV or eight hours doing the job?

Fundamental to an object's identity is it's spatial temporal location — Metaphysician Undercover

And what do you think happens to that in the case of a system of entangled particles?

So they deny the very thing which provides the identity of an object, its spatial temporal location, as not necessary to its identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

So you want to wind physics all the way back to absolute Newtonian reference frames? Sounds legit.

The inability to determine the spatial temporal location of a particle, and therefore identify that particle, is a direct result of the mindset of modern physicists which makes spatial temporal location relative rather than absolute. . — Metaphysician Undercover

MU has spoken. Physics is rocked to its core.

Materialists think that all of Reality consists of the physical world. — Michael Ossipoff

Structuralists would take an expanded view of physicalism - one in which information becomes part of the picture. A context or history is the information that bears down to constrain the possibilities of what might happen at some locale.

So it is Wheeler's "it from bit". Materialism believes that substantial, already in-formed, matter sits at the bottom of physical existence. An informational or constraints-based ontology flips it around so that the material is whatever is left as a concrete possibility after a context has restricted its variety.

It recognizes that there’s no reason to believe that experience isn’t the fundamental reality of the describable world. — Michael Ossipoff

If your idealism rejects physicalism, then you won't have any interest in OSR as a species of physicalism.

As I say, I don't take idealism seriously. It's a joke. And It has nothing to do with the OP. So it is off topic.

That seems an unjustifiable belief, that observers create. Reminds me of devotees of the Copenhagen interpretation of QM who consider observation to cause wave function collapse. — Relativist

When I say observers, I'm not talking about human consciousness causing a wavefunction collapse. I'm talking about how thermal contexts would decohere. So I would be taking a quantum information approach - accepting that quantum "weirdness" is bound up in the structural fact that you can't ask a particle about two contrary properties, like position and momentum, in the same act of measurement. You get quantum behaviour at the limit be cause you can't constrain the uncertainties of an event in both its complementary directions in the one go.

So it is a structural feature - an ultimate failure of a physical context to be able to constrain uncertainty - that produces quantum behaviour at the limits of material being. And that is of course a notion of observerhood or wavefunction collapse that is in keeping with OSR.

We could suspend belief about whatever it is that might move the needle on the dial. But why even bother doing metaphysics then? That sounds like no fun at all.

Besides, you are taking the position that there are in fact objects that are unobserved. Which is hardly a stance eschewing an ontic commitment. You are just being the usual kind of material realists who fully expects QM to reveal its hidden variables some day. There is nothing philosophically neutral in this take on OSR.

So I am happy to instead to change the game and replace the unobserved object with the observer-created relata. Objects are what emerge as a vague everythingness becomes constrained. And structuralism is all about those kinds of systems of constraint. Permutation symmetry now formalises the notion of differences that don’t make a difference and so a nautural limit to constraint or symmetry breaking itself.

So no need for metaphysics to suspend judgement. Physics has already told us that hidden variables and other conventional materialistic notions have failed. That judgement is in. Now make of it what you will.

The peacock's tail. Is it frivolous or is it promoting the survival of the species?

Could a medical process on an individual past reproductive age be considered moral in the sense you want to apply it?

Are humans now more defined by their cultural evolution than their biological, so would that put cartoons in a different light?

Frivolity would need some kind of theory to pin it down here. If the issue is the moral value of our collective survival - an imperative that quite naturally informs our being - then what is the frivolous in that context?

Most folk would say it is stuff that we might do that makes no essential difference to the fulfilling of that major goal. And our moral stance in regard to that would be a collective shrug of the shoulders. That becomes the morally meaningful thing to do.

If cartoons and jokes instead seem to matter, then they probably do. They aren't actually frivolous on closer examination. They have meaningful survival value.

This directly opposes what you stated above — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. So particles and spacetime points would be objects in a minimal sense. That minimal sense would include a "violation" of the law of identity - in the sense that the principle of non-contradiction would fail to apply. It would not be the case that x is x', but nor would it be the case that x isn't x'. Thus what is being asserted is that the identity of x is fundamentally vague - under the Peircean view that vagueness is defined by the failure of the PNC to apply.

Sounds good to me. The game thus moves on from ontologising objects to ontologising vagueness.

It does not eliminate the material principle. My point, as stated in the OP, is that we shouldn't expect structuralism to be able to do that when it comes to relata. But it is a radical change to ontologise uncertainty, indeterminism, instability and fluctuation as what is "materially fundamental".

The vague is definitionally that which lacks individuation ... and hence is also the prime material for any consequence process of individuation.

This object which is not an individual, what is it, a multitude of objects? — Metaphysician Undercover

In OSR, objects are the individuated. So they are the result of a multiplicity of possibilities being limited.

Why do you find metaphysics such a struggle?

Our knowledge of the world, in terms of fundamental physics, is not settled. — Relativist

On the other hand, a heck of a lot of alternatives have been eliminated. And we have arrived at the inevitable truths of permutation symmetry. The progress of physics is undeniable. The old theories haven't been disproved. They have been absorbed into ever more mathematically general frameworks.

Should we treat quantum fields as fundamental? Quantum field theory is not even complete, since it doesn't include gravity. Are points in spacetime "individuals"? Do we depend on haeccity for individuation? What about string theory? — Relativist

You are complaining about the fact that science has both moved so far and seems to have clear ideas about the issues that still need to be resolved.

Sounds like success to me.

If physics doesn't have a firm answer, how can ontology? — Relativist

Metaphysics should be more like science then. The goal is not to claim absolute certainty but to support a position of minimal uncertainty.

And that is precisely what OSR would do in going off mathematical-strength constraints on material uncertainty.

You are setting an impossible standard for knowledge. And that makes it easy to say, well guys, let's not even try then. But as a pragmatist, I accept already that the task is to minimise our uncertainty about what might be the case. And progress in that sense is always possible. But you now have to be willing to make some intellectual effort.

But, you're mistaking the forest for the trees here. Dimensionality is not captured in a single image. — Posty McPostface

Well take the next step and realise that the duality of dichotomies speaks to the triadicity of hierarchies. The ur-dichotomy - in a world with complex development - is one divided by the distinction between the local and the global, the particular and the general.

So you mention the forest and the trees. The phenomenon in question is united in the sense that it has both the particular and the general. It is composed by its individual trees. And constrained by the general fact of being "tree-ed".

Thus the hierarchical view that can see both these things at once is capturing the phenomenon in a single image. It captures both its essential ontological dimensions. It sees that the forest is both composed of its trees and that being part of the forest is a constraint on the identity of the trees.

Eventually, dimensionality is captured when going to a higher dimension. — Posty McPostface

Correct. But we only need to count up to three - as CS Peirce showed.

We start with one - but logically a oneness is a vagueness, a chaos, a symmetry lacking any distinctions. It is a world without intelligibility.

Then we have two - the breaking of a symmetry, the separation of a dichotomy, that now introduces a primal distinction into the picture. We can have hot because we have cold, left because we have right, good because we have evil, stability because we have flux. A counterfactual comparison has arisen.

Then we have three - the arrival at the limit of a symmetry breaking in terms of a maximal asymmetry. We have the ultimate kind of division that is the local separate from the global, the particular separate from the general. There is a stratification in scale and causality. There is the parts that compose and the whole that constrains.

Now we have an image of an actual system, an actual world. A complete description. Ontically, we don't need to count any further. Adding a fourth or fifth ontic dimension is redundant.

You need multiple overlaying images at different angles and degrees to do that. — Posty McPostface

But you are just expressing a standard prejudice. The history of thinking provides us with a foundational dichotomy - that of the one and the many. Either we must argue for monadic unity or unlimited plurality - so it seems.

But reducing your philosophical options to a binary either/or is what is the big mistake. Instead you should recognise the unity of opposites - and how their unification results in the irreducible triad that is a hierarchy - is what is really being said.

If the one and the many are a convincing dichotomy then that must be the output of some wiser metaphysical understanding.

Sure, your over-arching unity would be of the kind that would contain multiple angles and degrees. That is the point. It is a single general co-ordinate space that then definitely contains all these particular different slices across it.

So plurality is possible because there is a unity large enough to contain its individuated variety. Before that dichotomy arises, there would only be the featureless monadicity of a vaguess. Dichotomies begin the making of the distinctions that are the basis of any intelligibility. And then hierarchies are the terminus. They are intelligible order fully expressed.

My belief is that consciousness develops alongside improving language. — Tim3003

This is correct. Self-awareness is a linguistic habit that evolves culturally. We are socially constructed as individual beings. Check out Vygotskian psychology or symbolic interactionism for the arguments.

So this is something that is not widely believed or appreciated. Yet within social psychology, it just pretty obvious.

Because it oversimplifies things to simple binary states, which you of all people know that's not how nature operates in practice. (Human nature). — Posty McPostface

Modelling is about maximising simplicity. You've been going on about bipolarity. Why do you think logic relies on reducing possibilities to crisply counterfactual choices?

It's basic information theory. If you want to separate signal from noise, you arrive at the ultimate simplicity of a binary code. To model an analog world, you find that a digital representation is the most universal machinery.

And speaking of human nature, the nervous system itself is a hierarchy of dichotomies. That is how we process reality. It is the optimal solution that evolution uncovered.

Our brain is divided according to the unity of opposites. Physically - in the design of its pathways - it separates the what from the where, the focus from the fringe, the active from the passive, the event from the context, the novel from the familiar.

So it is nuts to complain about over-simplifying. The world is complex. The job of a model is to simplify it in the most effective possible manner. Nothing can be simpler than breaking things down into a choice of two options - two options that meet the logical requirement of being mutually exclusive AND jointly exhaustive.

So your choices are either a) no analysis at all, or b) founding analysis on its optimal case. Philosophy and logic arose when folk realised that was the game. The principle of bivalence or bipolarity is the method that yields the most information about reality. That's a mathematically proven theorem. Ask Shannon.

I recommend reading the article at the SEP. It is a good survey of the various flavors of SR, and identifies objections to each. — Relativist

But it is also pretty dismissive of all those objections. It shows that they are ill-founded. Or that atomism makes its own even wilder leaps of faith in claiming the brute existence of relata while trying also to deny the causal reality of constraining structure.

So my OP points out that OSR can't simply ignore the problem of relata. However it can work towards a completely minimalist version of relata as "mere accidents" - meaningless fluctuation.

And as SEP says, that is how some in OSR see it too:

In any case, eliminativism does not require that there be relations without relata, just that the relata not be individuals. French and Krause (2006) argue that quantum particles and spacetime points are not individuals but that they are objects in a minimal sense, and they develop a non-classical logic according to which such non-individual objects can be the values of first-order variables, but ones for which the law of identity, ‘for all x, x is identical to x’, does not hold (but neither does ‘x is not identical to x’).

So you don't require the brute existence of primitive individuals to stand as the relata. All you require is some principle of individuation - a constraint on random accidents or chaotic variety such as for there to be something "there" to get the game of stable existence going.

My takeaway is that there's more reason than ever to be agnostic to ontologies. — Relativist

But why take that view when mathematical physics has added so much to what we know about fundamental reality? Why would you suddenly lose faith in metaphysics right at the point science is delivering so many answers?

You seem to agree with Ontic Structuralism, but why Realism? it's an obvious truism that all we experience is our experience. Then why make up a Realist metaphysics? I suggest that what makes sense is Ontic Structural Subjective Idealism. — Michael Ossipoff

Well, I do take reality seriously. And so that motivates a concern to arrive at its best model. Idealism doesn't make any sense. It doesn't address the central fact of experience ... which is that it seems divided into a part that is recalcitrant world for some reason.

So as I say, I already accept it is about our pragmatic models of something that actually needs explaining. Just saying "everything is experience" explains neither the "we" that is doing the experiencing, nor the "world" that resists our wishes.

Dichotomistic thinking is the bane of philosophy. — Posty McPostface

What makes you say that? Is this a prejudice you can support? Why would you disparage the ability to discover unity in opposites?

But, what if an agreement is of higher value than truth itself? Is that a problematic position to hold? — Posty McPostface

So what are your grounds for agreement being of higher value - in the context of worthwhile philosophical debate?

As I said, I would have no problem with Rogerian reasoning in a context where conflict resolution might be the goal.

And really, if you think about it, it would be odd if you objected to my point that dichotomies reduce philosophical conflicts to their fewest number of possibilities. If you boil the choices down to two mutually opposing/jointly exhaustive alternatives, you have already agreed on the most important thing.

Well, I do philosophy, not physics. — Metaphysician Undercover

So given this thread is about ontic structural realism, it may not be the discussion for you.

Does that sound overly simplistic? — Posty McPostface

If there is nothing much in particular at stake, then we can all gather around the campfire and sing Kumbaya. Differences of opinion can be shown to be ignorable accidents - a reflection of other essentially random points of view - and nothing more.

But there is a reason why philosophy of any depth finds itself polorised. The way to get to the bottom of things is to find the two reciprocal extremes that form the equally "true" limits on possibility.

It is the dichotomy itself which is the fundamental truth of any sufficiently deep inquiry, in other words.

If you say reality is discrete, then the best matching truth to oppose that is its precise inverse - the claim that reality is continuous. Then having identified the possible limits that must bound the issue in question, you have actually arrived at the issue that matters. And you can see that happy agreement then has to exist with the dynamic spectrum of possibilities now properly outlined. You can share the same metaphysical frame while also adopting for some reason some particular, purpose-suited, point of view.

The success of philosophy has been all about outlining the intelligible limits of Being. Through dichotomies, we agree to the reference frame for a productive discussion. Both horns of the dilemma are the truth in that sense.

But just to seek agreement - promoting a simplistic tolerance of "other viewpoints" - shouldn't be the main way of progressing philosophy.

Sure, that is the right attitude to take when you realise that nothing fundamental is actually at stake. If it doesn't make a difference that you believe X and they believe Y, then why not just spend time in another person's shoes. That is its own useful exercise.

However philosophy is dialectical for a good reason. What you have to see past is the division to the unity of opposites that is actually being uncovered when fundamental inquiry is doing its job.

...in between are flavors of the ontic that still believe relations must have relata. — Relativist

Yep. The Ted Sider paper references some of these. So my point is that structural realism is either guilty as charged - it fudges the issue on relata. Or as Sider wants to argue, it is left with some pretty unappealing answers - unappealing as they boil down to some kind of standard, if mumbled, materialism.

So my approach is to take relata seriously, but take them to what would be the other extreme for the materialist. Instead of relata being the fundamentally definite and individuated, I would make them the fundamentally indefinite and vague. I would reduce the material aspect of the story to mere fluctuation or accident. That then lets structuralism come in and claim responsibility for all the resulting organisation of the meaningless mess it got presented with.

So you can claim the relata precede the relations. But the relata then have no kind of stable identity that could dignify the claim that they "exist" in a way that "precedes". There are in fact no relata before the formative hand of the relations arrive to constrain things to the degree there now seem to be relata to pick out.

Even if you're right that "structural realism has to be the fundamentally correct ontology" rather than just the right epistemic attitude, it remains to be seen if the eliminativist version will blow away the others. — Relativist

Yes. As I say, a monistic approach based on relations is no better than a monistic approach based on relata. When faced with a chicken and egg dichotomy like this, the proper resolution is not to try to win by eliminating one or other half of the dyad but instead, accept that the bigger story is the one of a triadic relation. Each half of the equation becomes now the other's cause.

The question is what does that then actually mean in terms of the metaphysics. My argument is that we have to reconceive the material half of the equation in a way such that it is the precise opposite of how materiality is normally conceived.

(And that way, structural realism does win! :) )

but it's blatantly contradictory to say that there is a change which isn't a change — Metaphysician Undercover

If you bothered to read with care, you would see the claim is that some changes make a difference and others don't. And if you understood physics, you would know that Newtonian mechanics was founded on the fact. Inertial freedoms exist because nature believes in the symmetries of translation and rotation. Spinning on the spot is the kind of change that doesn't make a difference to the structure of an inertial frame.

:ok:

Whence are these informational models? — schopenhauer1

Genes, neurons, words, numbers. The basis of a symbolic modelling relation aren’t a secret.

Sharing of valence electrons, attraction based on forces, sharing of chemical molecules, etc. — schopenhauer1

So what goal is served such that it “works”? In what sense is causality closed such that it is a “system”?

You are not really saying anything about a process yet.

First though, are you familiar with the second law of thermodynamics? — Metaphysician Undercover

You mean that obscure theory about all the many ways to arrange some system that are differences that don’t make a difference? When a system arrives at equilibrium, changes no longer result in a change?

but your claim is that nature only produces differences which make a difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

Wrong.

They were not created by human beings, so they were created by nature. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't know what "nature fails to limit those differences" could even mean. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hmm. Nature creating seems to pose no issue for you. Yet nature failing to prevent accidents does.

Backwards as usual.

So, the onus is on you to demonstrate why nature would create differences which do not make a difference, when it doesn't care about such differences. — Metaphysician Undercover

But my claim is that nature fails to limit those differences - they are simply accidents that don't change anything - while your claim is that nature creates them, and thus somehow they must exist for some (still undefined by you) reason.

So the onus is on you to support your crazy theories about nature.

Physically interacting in a way that they work together in a system. — schopenhauer1

What is it about the physical interacting that meets a definition of working and a definition of system?

And when do you start talking about processes that are informational models and processes that are material flows?

What do you mean by integrated? In what manner exactly?

All these words/phrases bolded, can you please provide a definition of each — schopenhauer1

Maybe. If you can define "process".

(mind as substrate) — Anthony

Make up your mind then. Did you intend to defend a substance ontology or a process one in talking about this "substrate" you call "mind".

If "nature' was as you say, so that it didn't care about such differences, then why does nature make each individual unique? — Metaphysician Undercover

Because it doesn't care enough about preventing differences.

I see that you have things backward. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course you do. If you learnt to stand the right way round, everything might look the right way up for a change.

But ontologically, every individual is different and unique despite the fact that we classify them as the same. — Metaphysician Undercover

Show that nature cares to prevent what it appears to permit.

The agency is automatically confounded. — Anthony

No it bloody isn't. The psychological process produces the difference between a "self" and a "world". That is the function. To become an agent by gaining prediction-based control over the material flows the world that is "not us" can offer.

Isn't it interesting how the most important meters, physiological processes and biochemical pathways keeping us alive are autonomic/automatic? See, this is where I'd say we must stretch the definition of cognition to include perfect absence of automation. — Anthony

Sure. You start with the simple and then build up the complexity.

But the mistake you are making is to presume that the goal would be to escape from unthinking automaticity. Cognition is all about building up so many layers of practiced habit that you can get by with thinking as little as possible to achieve whatever goals you could reasonably have.

So yes, we need attentional level processes to work out what to do when things go wrong - when we get caught out by a prediction failure. But the general goal being instantiated is always to be able to predict the world with the least cognitive effort.

So the ideal situation would be the kind of "flow" celebrated in psychology where you can do everything with effortless ease. There would be an absence of attentional effort and hesitation, not the perfect absence of automation.

If you're careful in your definitions, you'll notice that there's only one act of cognition/every moment, picosecond, whatever. After this, we have a re-cognition, a re-presentation of what once was. — Anthony

I am happy to be careful about psychological science. So if you wanted to talk "frame rates", then it takes about half a second to complete some attentional act, and only about a fifth of a second to make a skilled automatic decision. Habit shortcuts things so we can fire and forget.

Then when it comes to reportable awareness - the re-presentation of states - that gets us into another whole conversation about the role language plays in structuring human cognition and self awareness. That is a further level of sociocultural regulation, a further level of human habit, that we all have to learn.

Nonetheless, there can be no cloning of a mental impression, let alone the mind itself. A mental impression would be the concept of functionalism, like an algorithm with a goal. Whereas, a mental impression has no goal. — Anthony

A perception is an act of measurement. A conception is the theory being tested. The whole of this would constitute the psychological function that is the one of modelling the world in a way that minimises its capacity to confound our agential intentions.

So again, you are not being clear about what point you mean to make. But the mental impression is the evidence whether the functional goal is getting met. It is not the goal but the signal. That would be why it "doesn't have a goal", and the function is what does.

This sounds like Gregory Bateson. — Anthony

It is Bateson. Cybernetics was biosemiotics back in the 1950s.

But not the same place and time...so there IS always a difference, fundamentally. — Anthony

But a difference that matters fundamentally or a difference that is instead fundamentally accidental?

There's a big leap from the difference that makes a difference to a function. — Anthony

Not really. A function is a semiotic process. It needs signals - feedback - to tell it if it is doing wrong or right.

So a difference making a difference - to some point of view - is definitional of a function. At the very least, it distinguishes a purposeful function from a mere material tendency when it comes to an ontology of processes.

The mind doesn't function at anything at all. — Anthony

Uh huh.

When you're identifying an individual every difference makes a difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

Sure. If you care. But that is epistemology. My claims about process philosophy are ontological. So now it is about the process that is individuation. And nature only seems to care about differences that make a difference in some practical sense. Nature is essentially statistical.

"What" is being emerged from the process? — schopenhauer1

The "mind". Whatever that is best understood to be.

(Remembering that there is no reason to think that it wouldn't feel like something to be in a modelling relation with the world - especially when that modelling relationship it is as complex and agential as the one instantiated by a socialised human brain.)

A claim that there is a mind isn't perspectivally related to panpsychism. — Anthony

The issue is how we view a "mind". And the contrast here is between viewing it as some kind of process or instead as some kind of property. Is "substantial being" merely emergent, or is it brutely fundamental? And panpsychism usually winds up on the non-process side of the issue when you get down to it.

You participate with the cosmos through your thought-forms, through a storehouse of memories you take as your self and the order you identify with, all at once. — Anthony

Here you appear to be siding with my own biosemiotic approach.

By what definition. Not functionalism, first of all, because every object is truly different from every other, as they do not and cannot occupy the same space-time. — Anthony

I disagree as the same function can be realised at many different places and times. New minds are being born constantly. So sure, every organism is an individual. But also every organism is an expression of some common set of functions. As processes, there is a shared history informing what they are.

Every bottle of my Michelob isn't exactly the same as the next even though it appears that way. — Anthony

But the differences can be insignificant. So that is not an issue.

Does the beer drinker care? Only to the extent it makes a difference in terms of their purpose.

If you agree on a definition of mind, then you have to talk about local and nonlocal causality involving mind. Gravity, as a plausible place to start, is action at a distance. Does gravity affect the mind? If gravity can effect the mind at a distance, is there anything else that impels the mind from a distance? — Anthony

Again, are these differences that make a difference to the mind in question? Your response is all over the shop.

What you want to say isn't very clear. But I guess it boils down to a panpsychic claim that there is such a thing as "the mind" and our minds participate in the greater mind that is the Cosmos, or existence, or God's mind, or something.

Or alternatively, you could be just making the apophatic argument that whatever reality is, however we should conceive of it, it definitely ain't the kind of simple objective material reality of classical ontology. In some sense, the holism of a process view must be the way to think about things.

Panpsychism can be dismissed as it is not a process view. Instead it is claiming that mind is a substantial property of substantial being. Consciousness "just is" a brute fact of reality. It does not emerge as the result of some particular form of process we might hope to describe.

But if we are talking about a holistic view of nature - and one that accounts for observers along with observables - then I would say a key point is that the separability of the observer is the crucial thing. The mind, as a natural process, is about semiosis or points of view. It is about being able to step back from the general physical flow of events to then be able to impose some "personal" level of constraint or regulation on that flow. So mindfulness is all about organismic agency. The disconnection - even if it can't be absolute - is how a different kind of connection, one imposing its own wants and needs, could arise.

Now all this is pretty standard from a scientific perspective if you are a systems type of thinker. The flow of nature is the thermodynamic flow of the Big Bang on its way to its Heat Death. It is the flow of entropy production. And then that driving gradient becomes something life and mind participate in as negentropic dissipative structure - the complex informational organisation that arises to break down any local blockages in that generalised flow.

Life and mind are then "what it is like" to have that modelling relation with the world. It is how it feels to be an organismic agent with intentions and regulative possibilities.

So in a general sense, life and mind are not about simply participating in nature. They are about standing aside from that material entropic flow in such a fashion that the flow can be informationally regulated from a "point of view" that transcends it.

So a process philosophy view - beyond the usual woo - would be anchored in an understanding of the Cosmos as a dissipative structure, a vast entropic flow, and then an understanding of life and mind as a second kind of parasitic process. The cosmic entropic gradient suffers local blockages. They become the food source for more complex structure with the necessary agency and organismic design. Thus life and mind as a process would then have its own more specific description. Biosemiotic is the scientific term I would favour.

Life and mind can only live in the material world. They colonise its flow. But life and mind must stand apart from that flow so as to live off it. They must be able to form their own information or memory based point of view from whence to plan and act.

They're status of facthood. — Posty McPostface

If facts are definite things, then they would have to obtain by being judged in terms of some metaphysical strength dichotomy. We would need an essential distinction - along the lines of claiming some hard and sure contrast between facts of the mind and facts of the world.