The difficulty is in determining which aspects of reality are continuous and which are discrete, because to treat one as if it were the other is to err. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. But I am arguing that both are practical conceptions. When we speak of them, we are only pointing to the fact that reality must exist between these two reciprocally-defined extremes. Both represent the measurable limits to existence. And so existence itself has to be the bit that stands in-between.

That is why every actual thing we encounter in the real world is never quite perfect like the model would suggest. The continuous things are still always a little bit discrete. And the discrete things are always a little bit continuous. And indeed most things will be far more obviously a mixture of the two possibilities. They will not be clearly divided in either direction.

This is easy to see if we look at any actual natural feature - the outcome of a dissipative process - like rivers, mountain ranges, coastlines, clouds. They express a fractal balance that puts them somewhere exactly between the discrete and continuous - in a way we can now also measure in terms of fractal dimension, or the notion of scale symmetry.

So you are taking the view that the world actually exists as either continuous or discrete in some black and white, LEM-obeying, PNC-supporting, fashion.

I am saying, sure, that is a useful basic epistemic model to apply when measuring the world. Acts of measurement depend on having that commensurate yardstick. And the way we achieve formal closure to construct a "world of measurement" is by applying that dichotomising logic. We speak of the two extremes which mutually, reciprocally, ground each other as conceptions.

But then the idea of the discrete~continuous remains just a pragmatic conception - an idea robust enough to launch useful acts of measurement. And as our modelling of reality has progressed, we have arrived at "surprises" like fractal dimensionality and other non-linear maths. The discrete and the continuous can have some exact balance which itself becomes a useful metric. We can apply them to systems that energetically grow in that kind of endless budding fashion of natural dissipative systems.

Clouds look pretty vague. Where do they really stop or start? But fractal descriptions can employ the discrete and the continuous as themselves a ratio - a log/log formula of endless, but also recursive, growth. The open and the closed in the one trajectory.

So modelling can play any game it can invent. And some of those games are surprisingly effective - as if we are actually encountering reality in a totalising fashion at last.

Continuing that line of thought, I forgot to mention the importance of your employment of the notion of a convergence on a limit as the way to achieve effective closure - turn infinite openness into something with a now internally closed definition.

The pragmatic modelling relation approach says this is so because we accept eventually that difference cease to make a difference. The way we have everything set up means that we will reach a point where there is just no conceivable reason to care. The differences that speak to an incommensurability will cease to be measurable. They will be infinitesimal - the formal reciprocal of our notion of the infinite. And so they will themselves have become a symmetry, a blur of continuity, and no longer discrete countable entities. Modelling arrives at conceptions that are self-truncating - truncated by the a formalised principle of indifference that can achieve epistemic closure for a modeller.

That sounds pretty pragmatic then.

So when it comes to the issue of an incommensurate world - as the thing-in-itself never fully grasped - we do have to approach it via commensurable acts of measurement. The world might be analog or continuous (as our best characterisation, as the noumenal escapes complete description), but our embodied modelling relation with it demands that we measure it in a method that is digital or discrete.

That is, semiotically, we must form a mediating sign that allows us to most effectively relate to the thing - the world - we have every good reason to believe to be out there, existing in recalcitrant fashion as that which waits to be encountered.

So the world is an unbroken wholeness. And modelling relies on fragmenting that in a useful way so that its wholeness becomes a tractable construction of parts. Paradigms are where we have achieved an acceptable level of correspondence for the purpose in mind. A lot of important problems are being handled adequately. A lot of unimportant ones make no important difference, so can be swept under the carpet in respectable fashion.

There is no particular "disaster" about this. It is business as usual. That is how a modelling relation has to work for good reason.

So infinity, as a concept, stands for the principle of the open or the unlimited, the unbounded, the endless. And that contrasts with what the modelling mind seeks - closure. A digitised tale composed of signs, or acts of measurement, which has the formal property of being closed for efficient cause.

The thing-in-itself is still beyond any such actual disclosure to the modeller. But the modelling itself sets up this closed vs open ontology. It produces the concept of the infinite, the perfectly open, that must logically be a corollary of its own hunt for this perfect closure.

Thus I would agree the infinite doesn't exist in some Platonia of abstract objects. It very much arises as an opposition within modelling itself. We encounter it as we probe the nature of what we like to call the finite. The usual dialectical deal.

And here is where I would point out the advantage of going a step further - like Peirce.

The infinite and the finite, the open and the closed, are very crisp or determinate conceptions. And recognising that characteristic should draw attention to their own corollary - the vagueness that would need to stand opposed to this canonised crispness.

Vagueness becomes another useful mathematical/logical resource that can be brought into play with our encounters with number lines and other habitual signs of the infinite.

do you also admit the Aristotelean concept of substance? — Esse Quam Videri

Yes. Hylomorphism was a good early stab at understanding Being. The problem would be that there was a lot of scholastic rewriting of what it might mean. But the systems view would take it as being essentially right, once shorn of any transcendental or supernatural aspects.

So the significant feature would be the irreducibly triadic or hierarchical complexity of substantial being.

There is monism - everything is one kind of substance or principle, whether it be ultimately mind, matter, whatever.

Then there is dualism - we always seem to wind up needing two realms or two aspects to describe substantial existence.

And then there is the systems view of causality which says there must be a three way relation that together produces substantial existence.

So the Aristotelian story would say that triad is the one of prime matter, form, and the substantial being that emergently results in the middle of that. Substance is the meat in the sandwich.

Or another way of putting it is that we have a reality that is composed of the three things of contingency, actuality and necessity.

Prime matter is pure material contingency - not yet any particular matter with a shape and hence a character, just a generalised potency for action waiting to be formed. A kind of chaotic freedom.

Then necessity is the downward acting constraints, the order or mathematical regularity that chaos cannot escape in finding some route into actual substantial being.

We have physical models of this idea from modern self-organising dissipative structure theory -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rayleigh%E2%80%93B%C3%A9nard_convection

And so between the two - pure contingency and unavoidable regularity - we have something actual, something we call substantial because it has a stability and necessity imposed on its contingency and volatility, emerging into persistent existence.

Encounter in the POMO sense — fdrake

How is that defined then? Genuinely curious.

but the problems it addresses are those which were engendered by an encounter with infinite mathematical objects. — fdrake

So, Platonism? There is a realm of commensurate entities to be encountered?

Naturalism would be a distinctive position, especially in the systems science, hierarchy theory and theoretical biology tradition, where nature is understood in terms of all four Aristotelian causes being regarded as both real and immanent.

So the stress would be on the developmental and self organising nature of Nature. No outside hand delivering the formal and final causes. Yet also, formal and final cause are just as real as material and efficient cause. A system has real global constraints or habits that have evolved. Local chance or creative spontaneity is real too.

This contrasts with scientific reductionism that would treat any global order as mere appearance. Complication rather than the actual cohesive thing of structure and complexity.

And it contrasts with theism or Platonism where something supernaturally dualistic is needed to provide the world with its order and purpose.

So a general loose definition would say naturalism simply asserts everything that is real results immanently from materiality. And a stricter Aristotelian definition specifies this includes the downward constraints that give nature its form and purpose.

The delights and possibilities that have resulted have never been giddier. Hence FOMO and anxiety about losing it all becomes the pervasive mood. :razz:

Unreal. The posture I am calling you out on is the one where you want to act like you are doing me favours here. It is the posture you would call arrogance.

Stop being a time suck. If you want to engage in the ideas, get on with it. Drop the attitude that I need to be grateful for your favours in this regard.

I'll be very charitable and try to digest this behemoth and get back to you. — schopenhauer1

I'm pretty sure we had this whole semiotic conversation before. I would have posted the same links.

And why not drop all the posturing if you want to continue the conversation. Park your ego at the door.

...learning more about the ideas does not mean consenting with it or at least everything about it, obviously. — schopenhauer1

Why would you even feel the need to say that?

I agree that the individuated would seem to need to come from the unindividuated. — darthbarracuda

Right. So now there is a clear direction to concentrate on. Now next steps, avoiding false moves.

The basic, fundamental "theater" is a single unity. Lately, I prefer to simply call this the posteriority. There is the puppet theater, and while the illusion is that the puppets are operating on their own, we understand that there is something "behind", pulling the strings. — darthbarracuda

OK. I see a problem here in claiming posteriority pulls the strings. I would agree that all individuation might be contextual - shaped by constraints that are outside it, behind it, more fundamental than it.

But note how much ontic furniture creeps in with all those terms. They all conjure up some kind of concrete image of a relation which is dimensional or has an already present causal direction. And there is a confusion if all of them seem equally applicable, and none is being preferred.

So we have to start distinguishing the grades of contextuality that produce individuation. That itself must become a developmental story which begins with a general lack of individuated context.

To be outside is spatial context. To be before is temporal context. To be pulling the strings is energetic context. All these must be dissolved together to get closer to posteriority as a lack of either definite individuation OR definite context.

So posteriority has to be somehow a fundamental resource or potential - where individuation~context springs from - but not itself some kind of actuality with definite dimensions of structure or material.

There is the anterior appearance, and the posterior ... "whatever". — darthbarracuda

Yep. But is the anterior the "appearance" or the actuality? Again, the words really matter as they are how ontic commitments creep into the game.

Calling the posterior the "whatever" seems pretty good. It is going to be the unspeakable or ineffable to a large degree. We can point towards it as "something" that must have been "there" - after we have dissolved away both thingness and thereness in our metaphysical acid bath.

But "appearance" is again speaking to a type of relation that ought to be in question. Yes, our actuality must have emerged via development. But it might have been its own cause of that emergence too. The appearance might be the necessary state and not an accidental result of something else.

In space-time, we can always move beyond. There is always more. But the posteriority, by its nature, cannot be finite, there cannot be anything further behind it. It is where we move to once we move beyond all else, including space-time itself. It is infinite, but dimensionless. When we talk of nothing existing, we may say that there are zero entities. Yet zero is still a description, an entity. So paradoxically, one comes before zero. There is before there is not. — darthbarracuda

Good. @wellwisher's quantum symmetry breaking is on the right track. But all quantum mechanics then has to explain why its rules would apply. As regulatory facts or laws, they would need a developmental explanation for their existence as a structuring necessity of worlds in general.

So spacetime extent and energetic content - form and matter - must be folded back into each other to arrive back at posteriority. Jumping ahead, they must have the right kind of complementary or reciprocal nature to cancel each others individuated existence away.

The problem with the quantum fluctuation which naturally splits into matter and anti-matter is that this is both true, and yet does not account for the quantum laws themselves. Time, especially, is the dimension that stands completely outside the quantum laws as a presumed fixed backdrop. That is why quantum gravity theories - which would unite spacetime and energy density - are taking the view that time needs to be incorporated into a final theory as a further emergent feature of the deal.

So, as you say, we must arrive at some kind of big fat zero as the cosmic starting point. And then as quantum cosmology suggest, there is every indication that this does happen because everything that has emerged does all seem to cancel away in the required reciprocal fashion. Spacetime extent and energy content are opposites that cancel in some absolute fashion as we run the clock back to the Planck scale.

Our Universe is composed of the two orthogonal actions of expanding and cooling. Each is the cause of the other. And wind the clock back, they do mutually annihilate to create a "quantum foam". Curvature without connection. Action without direction. Fluctuation without bounds.

Or in relativistic terms - that see this from the point of view of classical mechanisms - you have a cosmic fabric composed of matched anomalies. You have a realm of blackholes and wormholes. Again curvature without connection, or curvature which makes connecting relations impossible. Space is curved like a blackhole everywhere - due to Plank-heat energy density. And time is likewise curved into thermally-closed loops. The Planck density bends time so it cannot even have a causal direction. Every event is its own beginning in being a wormhole.

So physics - by winding known physics backwards - actually tells us some pretty concrete things about the initial conditions. We can see what posteriority looks like from established science. Although we still need a theory of quantum gravity perhaps ... if the asymptotically safe version of quantum field theory ain't already enough. Well there is dark energy also to fold into the quantum story now. We know there are more ingredients to be explained. But we are closer perhaps than many believe to a reasonable view of how everything that actually observably exists is a spacetime extent and an energetic content that cancels exactly to nothing at the beginning.

But that is not then a "nothing" in the conventional sense of an absolute absence. A zero that exists. It has to be a nothingness that is the everythingness of the absolutely unindividuated - the kind of unactualised resource that is a grand symmetry just waiting to be broken in its possible complementary directions.

Is this fundamental reality what we mean when we refer to Being? Do entities Spinozistically participate in Being as clumps of transient solids participate in a non-Newtonian liquid? — darthbarracuda

Now you are offering an image of a quantum foam or geometrodynamical fluctuations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometrodynamics

This is good. But the danger is again seeing it as a solidity, a state of materiality. There is some stuff that fluctuates, rather than fluctuation being the form that "stuffs" - that causes material being to be individuated as a substantial fact of a world.

Does the fluid take on the appearance of those little fluctuating shapes? Or do those shaped fluctuations create the appearance of there being some underlying fluid?

Which of these two intuitions are you reading into the same picture?

I'm addressing the confusions in your own questions.

So your phrasing focuses on individuation. And I agree that is key. So is individuation something that happens - is caused by - a process? And if so, doesn't that mean it emerges from - in some sense or other - the unindividuated?

Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed.

And now that constraints-based developmental view can be contrasted with its "other" that might seek to make existence something eternal and unchanging. We now switch to the materialistic view that asks what is the unchanging stuff or substance which underlies all the more superficial changing and transforming?

Again, the conversation is fleshing out. We are getting somewhere. We can contrast two approaches. We can see that the eternal material story has a problem if cosmology and science generally is telling us that everything develops into being out of some deeper undetermined or unindividuated condition. If there is actually a creation issue, then we encounter the problem that something can't come out of nothing. We are being pushed towards the other alternative. We need to explore that more seriously.

Of course if reality is uncreated and founded on material being - individuation is some kind of emergent and superficial illusion - then no problem for Existence. It just is as you are claiming it has no cause for its Being.

It is only because creation seems a hard fact - we have the Big Bang, as well as all the science saying we have developed and evolved too - that an uncreated story of Existence is not good enough.

So again, focus. Follow the logic of agreeing individuation is what it means to exist in a strong sense as far as you are concerned. Then begin to follow that trail backwards to where it rationally has to lead.

My complaint is that you aren't following either option with any rigour. You are mixing them up to perpetuate a state of confusion.

I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself. — darthbarracuda

Existence in the sense you are using it here means to be individuated. So you are asking what causes individuatation. What are the options you are then willing to entertain on that?

http://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

Modelling. Information. What I always tell you. Do you keep forgetting?

Look I know this applies to science; I already agreed with that. I just don't accept that it applies to philosophy — Janus

What about metaphysics? What about philosophical naturalism.

It doesn't matter to me if people want to go off in all sorts of esoteric directions. Whatever floats their boat. I'm happy to hear of their travels.

And yet also I assert my own right to follow a path. I'd like to know what our best unified understanding of reality looks like. And so that has resulted in a particular journey through science and philosophy.

If that offends your sense of where boundaries ought to be drawn, that's on you.

We do agree more than we disagree.. — schopenhauer1

Pfft.

but they may matter to different individuals in other ways. — Janus

Everyone has their umwelt. So the semiotic model applies across the board. That is what it says.

Just as it then defines science in terms of the opinions on which a community of reasoning inquirers would arrive at in settled fashion by the end.

You are just pretending to find fault with exactly what semiotics covers.

It seems that what else it is besides that is a matter of taste. — Janus

Why does it seem that?

I say it seems that the alternative you just specified is then ontological immanence. So thanks for agreeing.

Another problem I see for your position is the question as to whether nature really is exhaustively measurable, or even really measurable at all. — Janus

If it ain't measurable, then it would indeed be a "matter of taste". Pull your answer out of the hat and who cares.

[And must I repeat the same old things in every post? Does absolutely nothing ever sink in here?

It is the bleeding effing point of Peircean semiotics that measurement doesn't exhaust the thing-in-itself. Models never eliminate uncertainty. They simply constrain that uncertainty to the degree it pragmatically matters to form the signs we call our facts. Beyond that point it is just differences that don't make a difference.]

But you didn't address the other things in the post.. specifically baby and animal experiences, — schopenhauer1

I did.

"To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent."

But I can't be arsed to correct your every misrepresentation of what I have said in the past.

Peirce not accepted as THE theory but is overlayed on top of other ones post-facto, and the big glaring one, how is the "interpretant" magically turned into experience without the interpretant being experiential. — schopenhauer1

Pfft. I can't even be bothered with an arrogant retort.

You post links to stuff you haven't even viewed. Noted.

Then when the content is discussed, you change the subject. Noted.

I wouldn't call it arrogant. But I would call it something.

I am considering the notion that the so-called ‘firstness’ actually corresponds with, and manifests as, the first person perspective. — Wayfarer

It really doesn't. That has to arise as Thirdness. A meaningful perspective or point of view has to have the other thing of a stable context.

I can know that thing over there is a cat because I know it is not a dog, cow or rocket launcher.

Apperception is then me being able to categories that as a "cat". Whatever it is that it might be as the thing-in-itself, to me, I am reading that part of my world, my umwelt, as the sign of a cat. And so I will act towards it as if it is a cat until further notice.

And I think the reason Peirce didn't devote that much effort to that side of his work was because he was a working scientist and of a mainly pragmatic bent. — Wayfarer

Yeah. He had a foot in both camps. So you get to claim him for yourself and reject him also. You win both ways. Congrats.

Whether they say something interesting about the metaphysics of nature is akin to whether you find a particular poet interesting. — Janus

No it bloody isn't. Not if naturalism is the position that there is something more at stake here than merely "interest".

Some things are actually measurably the case because they are said from within frameworks that make predictions. These frameworks also have their internal logical coherence as well as their measurable external correspondence. So they are truth-apt in the two complementary senses needed. Rational and empirical.

So, Peirce allowed that there might be other kinds of 'truths'; aesthetic truths, spiritual truths, that the community of enquirers would never come to agree upon? — Janus

You can read him for yourself. It is an important question why - given all his monstrous system mongering - he said so little about the aesthetic. He wanted to. But found when he got to that bit, there wasn't much that was substantial enough to formalise.

Certainly he did make some gestures. He came up with a really toe-curling notion of "universal love" or agape. But Peirce scholars - after the first theistic flush of interest in his unpublished manuscripts - tend to note the way he falls silent at about the point Hegel and Kant start to turn up the deontological volume.

He of course made his famous "neglected argument" for God - or some kind of godhood that he said was quite unlike the regular notion - as an idea that can't be avoided by a community of reasoning inquirers, hence it must be the truth.

But I will say again, I don't find that bit convincing. However if you water down the conception of the divine enough - like Peirce had to do to make it consistent with his excellent understanding of evolutionary theory and developmental cosmology - then it is not as if there is some biblical difference from what I see as pure athetistic naturalism. In other forums, where many of the well-read Peirceans were theologians, I never got into any bitter arguments on that score. But those were also academic discussion boards of course.

So for example, Peirce picked out something essential about evolution and cosmology. He rejected the blind mechanical determinism of his day to insist that chance or spontaneity must be as basic to nature as their constraint. Darwinism, for example, could be only half the story as it could only remove variety from nature, not create it.

That was a pretty deep insight so early in the game for evolutionary theory. In the same way, what did quantum physics later come to tell us about the basic indeterminism of nature? Give old Charlie credit there. And what does a Peircean approach to inferential reasoning - where it all has to start with a creative abductive leap - have to tell us about the current dreams concerning machine intelligence?

So yeah. You can find a few false steps and clumsy moves. But I know the difference when someone can appreciate Peirce in his actual historical context.

If your question is whether a community of inquiry would settle on a truth about every possible aspect of life - even a taste in poetry or women - then of course the answer should be obvious. The actual metaphysical system divides the phenomenal into its necessities and its contingencies. Some things have a mathematical strength inevitability. Others - by definition - are just meaningless differences. That free spontaneity missing from the deterministic science you so deride, as if Peirce hadn't done that already.

So you might like detective novels, I might like something else. We live in societies that encourage quite a degree of personal choice - saying that the choices don't need to be determined because the resulting spontaneous variety is also an essential complementary part of society being a developing, evolving, system.

If you but understood Peirce, you would see how silly it is to try to lump him in with your scientistic foe. He explained why the free or accidental was also necessary, why the whole is a combo of the one and the many, why Newtonian determinism was already a scientific crock soon to be rewritten.

Whitehead withdrew from scientific contact with the world. He retreated into the merely poetic. Peirce took on scientism and so recovered philosophical naturalism for the modern era. But for various reasons - too difficult, too early, too cut off from the Continent's academic centres, not exactly great at greasing up his lesser contemporaries - he was very poorly understood at the time he was working all this out.

At least you admit it is a language game. — schopenhauer1

Yes, a semiotic one. And by that I mean a triadic Peircean one and not a dyadic Sassurean one.

How is this not a bias for mathematical totalizing? — schopenhauer1

It is that bias. That is its point.

Also, Whitehead's philosophy was very structured and internally coherent. — schopenhauer1

So is Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or Toy Story. That is a requirement of poetic worlds too. That is what makes them realities which our imaginations can inhabit.

You do have holes in your theory. You have newborns with no experiential qualities. You have animals with no experiential qualities. — schopenhauer1

Huh? To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent.

Despite your arrogance, condescension, and general uncharitableness, — schopenhauer1

Feel free to fuck off anytime you like.

But, you agreed earlier that your thinking is reductionist in this, but not in the 'mechanistic', sense. — Janus

Sure. Reductionist in the sense that modelling, and cognition, are about forming the umwelts that successfully distance "us" from the "thing-in-itself".

So reductionist in the way that forms the autonomy of being a self in a world. Hence reductionist in a way that speaks to "being human" as an example of that relation.

And I have never heard you say you found anything of interest or value in, for example, Deleuze, Heidegger, or Whitehead, or in fact any 'unscientifc' thinker, for that matter. You always seem to be dismissive of such philosophers. — Janus

Yeah. To the degree they are meant to be saying something interesting about the metaphysics of nature, I find them not wildly exciting. They are peripheral figures, rather late in the day, at best. And Whitehead not even that.

But I can't remember you saying much about Deleuze or Heidegger either. So I'm not sure what missed insight you mean to draw my attention to. What would repay that investment of my time?

The value in what you say does not exclude the value in very different kinds of discourses, though. It's not a matter of it being a contest between competing attempts to produce a theory of everything. — Janus

What do you want? If you think I ignore different discourses, that's bad. If I make posts giving my reasons for dismissing them, that becomes insufferable.

And if I go about my project of tracking the history of metaphysical theories of everything, you get on my case with your own theory of everything which is a rival theory of everything in wanting to reject every totality by fragmentation, implode every constraining unity by asserting creatively unbound pluralism.

Do I just impose all these dichotomies on you, or instead reveal the dialectics tacitly in play?

You really are sounding so bloody hard done by.

I don't agree with Peirce's formulation of truth as being what the community of enquirers would at the end come to agree on; for me, this seems to be a very scientistic notion of truth. — Janus

OK. You don't agree. Next step, you justify that if you think I should care. Why is it wrong?

And it is more than just "very scientistic". Peirce was trying to define science as an inquiry into truth - forever rooted in phenomenology and pragmatism.

So it sounds like you are accusing him of being "overly" correct. What you see as the bug was the feature.

Anyway I would apologize if you felt insulted, but I know there is no need, because you, like me, do not take anything said on here personally, or at least so you have avowed on several occasions if my memory serves. — Janus

I don't take it personal. But I will respond in kind. And finding people to disagree with is what it should be about. Who wants to be surrounded by the like-minded all the time? That is why I ask you to actually set out some concrete arguments when we have the luck to stumble into an area of basic disagreement.

If you could show me Whitehead said something I simply couldn't afford not to understand, that would be terrific. So ball in your court.

I honestly think your thinking is mired in reductionism in the sense that you think everything can be explained by science, and that any thinking which is not scientific is therefore pretty much worthless. — Janus

So you "honestly" think that. Thus you call me a liar when I explain otherwise.

Last time I checked, I seemed a functional member of society. I past the cultural tests even on a "poetical" level of expression. I have a life that seems worth the living.

I'd agree that I also live a highly abstracted life as well - the one that exists in that mathematico-scientific space. But again, more than most who do that, last time I checked, I actually manage to bridge the two umwelts in a way that many appreciate. I get well rewarded for the insights that result from being able to do that.

So, I don't believe that you have demonstrated that your ideas are cogent when it comes to the 'humanities' aspects of human life. — Janus

If you want to dispute their cogency, that is what I'm here for. If you just want to attack me as a person, then maybe take a closer look at your insecurities.

It's true that the human cannot find a home in your "mathematical strength umwelt" which means that it is not really an "umwelt" at all, but an ivory tower construction. — Janus

Such pedestrian ad homs. Not worth a response.

In all the time I have participated on this forum and the old one, I have never seen you show any interest in any philosopher other than Peirce (with the exception of perhaps Kant, Hegel, Aristotle and Anaximander insofar as you believe they agreed with or anticipated Peirce) or any approach other than semiotics. — Janus

So what? I've always said my interest is in systems thinking. That is the particular philosophical issue which I want to track through its historical development. It is the one relevant to naturalism as a metaphysical project.

It seems you think Peirce was the greatest philosopher who ever lived and that no thinker who comes after him said anything worthwhile unless it was something that had already been said, or implied, by Peirce. — Janus

Such hostility.

I agree it is a little surprising that Peirce sums up so much in pivotal fashion. But read it as a fluke of historical circumstance - a case of being in the right place at the right time.

If you listen closely, you would also see how much I say Peirce left rather muddled. If you want hero figures, I would point to Howard Pattee and Stan Salthe as two contemporaries who have added a hell of a lot of polish to anything Peirce was in a position to say.

But this is a philosophy forum. So talking about the philosophical legacy makes more sense in the context provided.

I don't read philosophy in order to discover the One True System. I read it to diversify my ideas and familiarize myself with creative new approaches. — Janus

Fine. You have your projects too.

It seems to me that you suffer from an anxiety, a horror even, that you might entertain any idea which does not correspond to Reality as it is portrayed by science, Good luck with that; I don't share such anxiety or proscription. — Janus

Don't you feel embarrassed by this level of insult? It is pretty clear which one of us is being thrust into a state of high anxiety by being confronted by their "other".

Again, do you think I should be apologetic for pursuing naturalism as a metaphysical project, going wherever it seems to lead? Am I being such a bad boy? Why are you shaking such a worried and angry finger now?

(Although I can appreciate that you view me as an alarming intrusion on your own chosen familiar umwelt. Your taste for intellectual diversity has its limits, after all.)

One of the take-aways from this is that the very idea of the (continuous) number-line is a kind of fiction, an attempt to glue together geometry and arithmetic in a way that isn't actually possible — StreetlightX

Zeno's paradoxes are paradoxes of intuition. This is because it's quite easy to circumvent Zeno's paradoxes with sufficiently precise definitions of what limits and continuity are; the celebrated epsilon-delta and epsilon-N constructions of Weirstrass. You can go on as if the paradoxes are resolved because pure mathematical inquiry is largely a conditional enterprise; given these assumptions (which characterise a structure), what can be shown and what does it do? You can posit yourself past the paradoxes if you so wish, and as is usually done. — fdrake

Nice discussion. The core problem is that this is a tension that always exists because it speaks to an underlying metaphysical-strength dichotomy, and thus it raises the issue of what it would mean to resolve the tension without dissolving also the useful division.

So the mathematical debate seems to hinge on whether "the real" is discrete or continuous. The intuition being applied gets hung up on that. And clearly - Rosen's point - maths depends on the trick of atomistic constructability. Arithmetic or algebra are seen as fundamental as a continuity of form can be built up step by step from a succession of parts or acts.

But then continuity - the grounding wholeness that geometry seems to speak just as directly to - also seems to exist just as much, according to intuition. The geometer can see how the operation of division is a cuckoo in arithmetic's nest. Zeno's paradox shows that. There is more to the story than just the algebraic acts of construction - addition, subtraction and multiplication.

Then continuity shows its face in other ways. Non-linear systems contain the possibility of divergences at every point in their space. As Rosen argues, systems that are safely enough linear are in fact rare in nature. Linearity is non-generic. Perfect constructablity must fail.

So the problem is that the tension is real. Construction seems to work. Used with care, maths can formally model the world in ways that are powerfully useful. The world can come to seem exactly like a machine. And yet also, as any biologist or quantum physicist will know, the perfectly mechanistic is so non-generic that ultimately a machine model describes nothing in the real world at all.

It is the pragmatics of modelling that really bring this tension into the limelight. Maths can simply ignore the issue. It can keep deferring the problems of constructability by pushing them ever further away as the limit, just as @fdrake describes. It is a respectable working practice. Maths has benefited by taking this metaphysical licence. But scientists modelling the world with maths have to deal with the ill-fit of a purely mechanistic description. Continuity always lurks and waits to bite. It needs to be included in the modelling game somehow - even if it is just like Rosen's essays, the planting of a bunch of "here be dragons" signs at the edge of the intellectual map.

But the way out for me is the usual one of Peircean semiotics. Where you have a dichotomy, you actually have a pair of complementary limits. The discrete and the continuous would both be a matter of "taking the limit". And this is in turn founded on a logic of vagueness. You can have the discrete and the continuous as both merely the emergent limits on the real if they have some common ground of indistinction that they are together - measurably - serving to divide.

So now you don't have to worry if reality is fundamentally discrete or fundamentally continuous. It is neither - always being vaguer - but also it is forever moving towards those crisp limits in terms of its actions. If it is developing, it is the discrete vs the continuous dichotomy that is becoming ever more strongly manifest. It is approaching both limits at once.

At this point, we might need to more from the overly spatial dichotomy of the discrete~continuous - the idea of a 0D location and its 1D line. The simplest possible space that would be formed via a translational symmetry and the definite possibility of it being broken. The real world needs to incorporate space, time and energy as its triad of irreducibly fundamental components. A maths suited to actually modelling nature would need to align itself with that somehow.

Or indeed, being biologists, concerned with the study of organisms, we might leap all the way to a focus on agency and autonomy - the modelling relation, or semiosis pure.

Now we can reply to the issue of atomistic constructability in terms of the dichotomy it forms with the notion of holistic constraints. The real world - sans modelling - just is a product of constraints on freedoms. But modelling itself has a pragmatic goal regulating it. The goal of being a modeller - the reason organismic agency and autonomy would evolve within an agent-less cosmos - would be to gain machine-like control over nature. A model is a way to construct constraints so as to achieve purposes. And hence mathematics reflects that modelling imperative.

Maths gets it "wrong" by pushing constructability to an unreasonable seeming metaphysical limit. It makes the "mistake" of treating reality as if it were a pure machine. And yet that is also what is right and correct. Maths is useful to the degree it can construct a world constrained enough by our machinery that it achieves our goals reliably enough.

Biology itself is already a mechanisation of physics. It is the imposition of a system of molecular motors on nanoscale material chaos. So scientific modelling is simply an intellectual continuation of that organismic trick.

Rosen is a bit conflicted in that he complains about the flaws in the tools we use, and yet those flaws are only apparent in the grandest totalising metaphysical perspective. The largest model.

So what he gets right is that the mathematical approach, based on mechanical constructability, can only constrain uncertainty, never arrive at certainty. That is all maths ever does - move towards the limits of being, imagined particularly in the form of the dichotomy of the continuous and the discrete, the geometric and the algebraic, the structures and their morphic acts.

Maths can point to the limits where uncertainty of either kind - either pole of the dichotomised - would finally be eliminated. But the uncertainty must always remain. Which is why maths also keeps advancing as every step towards those limits must spring a leak that is then worth our while trying to fix, so setting up the need for the further step to repair the still smaller leak that will be now be exposed.

So it is an interesting game. Nature is the product of the symmetry-breaking tango between global constraints and local spontaneity. Uncertainty is basic. Yet also it becomes highly regulated or lawful.

Then organisms arise by being able to seize control of the regulatory possibilities of a modelling relation. If you can construct constraints - impose mechanistic structure on that natural world - then you can become a world within the world. You can use your ideas to make the world behave locally in ways that suit your interests.

Eventually humans gained such mathematical mastery over their realities that they could afford to get upset about the way even the best-constructed models were still full of leaks.

But apophatically, flip that around, and you have now your best metaphysical model of reality as a system of constraints. Uncertainty - as vagueness - becomes the new anti-foundationalist foundation. Atomistic construction comes into focus as the emergently individuated - the machinery being imposed on nature so as to limit that vagueness, corral that spontaneity or fluctuation, that spoils the way it is "meant to look".

It might be good to learn about Whitehead through Rorty. — schopenhauer1

A very nice talk, but I'm puzzled by what you would see as its take home message.

I would say it clarifies something important as far as I'm concerned. And that is some language games are better than others ... from a metaphysical point of view. Rorty says Whitehead's approach is poetical. And I would say that's the problem. Peirce's approach is at another level because it is mathematical.

So when it comes to language games, there is this rather vast step up from ordinary language (and its own highly refined forms in terms of poetry, music, art) to mathematical-strength language (as in logic and other universally abstract grammars).

Metaphysics has always depended on mathematical-strength language - principally the dialectical argument that speaks to symmetries and their breakings. So while I agree with Rorty's Wittgensteinian point - philosophy is a self-evidential language game designed to disclose "worlds", or metaphysical umwelts - we can also recognise why some metaphysics is at another level. The mathematical beats the poetical as the mathematical is designed to talk about universal abstractions while the poetical is very much about embodied sociocultural meaning - the umwelt that happens to be defining what it would mean to be human at some moment in the story of human development.

So it is not that the poetical is wrong, or inadequate. It is the right tool for the particular task being done - the invention or social construction of the world that humans "find themselves living in by learning to live within it". The poetical can sketch out the map of what is culturally meaningful, and we become structured by that to the degree we can use this map to navigate a life.

But then mathematical language is a different order of semiosis. It has a larger ambition in terms of being a way to construct maps that disclose a world. It wants to go beyond a merely human identity to "see reality as it actually is".

Now we can both recognise the Quixotic nature of that ambition, and appreciate how unexpectedly and surprisingly powerful that next level of semiosis actually is. We can achieve much more than might have been thought - even if it all remains a (mathematical) language game.

This is why Platonism, Logicism and Computationalism seem to have something to them. They are only mathematical umwelts - the worlds disclosed in a language game. Yet they are a clear step up from the sociocultural boundedness, the subjectivity, of a poetical umwelt.

Again, poetry is fine. But maths and poetry are tools with different goals. They aim to disclose umwelts of essentially different kinds. And metaphysics is about mathematical-strength umwelts. Peirce was playing that game. Whitehead did and then dropped out.

Whitehead's process theology is a comfortable fable that tells a lot of people the sociocultural message they want to hear. Hey buddy, you live in a world that is fundamentally experiential and divine. Therefore experience and divinity do make meaningful sense. Like all good theories, a formal closure is achieved by reading everything in nature to be essentially "human", from the smallest event to the super-human scale of being represented by the Cosmos itself.

From this point of view - an umwelt contructed by a poetical use of language - you can actually wall yourself off from all that nasty mathematical metaphysics. That becomes scientistic baggage to be left at the door of belief. Welcome to the cosy world of pan-experientialism. Take off your work boots. You are home again.

He doesn't "absorb" oppositions or contrasts and explicitly rejects any kind of Hegelian synthesis or sublation where they are resolved through absorption rather than upheld as contrasting relations And what do you say? — Janus

I didn't say he resolves them. I said they sink without trace in his ambiguity.

Hegel at least saw it as a hierarchical spiral where each level of synthesis makes the ground for a fresh bout of symmetry breaking. We can understand what is suppose to be happening in terms of a metaphysical mechanism.

Whitehead talks about stuff getting stuck together to form more complex arrangements. If you look for a mechanism, it is just the same old bottom-up composite story. Bits of experience replacing bits of matter. With - as you note - something vaguely Platonic about God as a possible source of the global something or other.

Tychism=creative advance indeterminism meaning a genuinely open future). — Janus

Peirce says initial free spontaneity becomes regulated by globally developed habits of constraint. That is a very general systems science statement.

Whitehead says the human mind seems creatively spontaneous in pursuit of their wishes, so why not fundamental particles too? That is mystic woo.

Firstness= universal and primordial feeling or "everythingness" (in your terms) — Janus

Yes, Peirce said such things and I say that is OK in a metaphorical way that gets at a basic unity of nature. If we accept phenomenology as our necessary epistemic starting point, then that is what Firstness looks like from that descriptive position. Then we move to what it looks like once we have developed a more general scientific and cosmological framework. Now it becomes what we would understand by spatiotemporal fluctuations. We would understand Firstness through the lens of quantum theory.

But at times Peirce also looks to have slipped into mystical woo. How much that was due to social circumstances - like his financial dependence on religious benefactors - is an interesting biographical question.

However my position is that the woo is completely dispensable. The epistemology and ontology doesn't depend on some undefined notion of "experience" as it does with Whitehead.

pan-semioticism (although I'm not sure Peirce himself advocated that) = pan-experientialism — Janus

Peirce's speculative cosmology is pretty well advertised. You wouldn't call it pan-semiotic?

And again the difference is between spelling out a structuring mechanism - semiosis - and simply saying everything has experience as an inherent property, even when there is no measurable support for that vague claim about nature.

It is not even controversial in science that life and mind have semiotic structure. Nor I guess that they all support grades of experience. Organism have the organisations that give them lived points of view of their world (via an Unwelt, a mediating system of signs).

So what would be speculative in science is saying the Universe also is semiotic structure all the way down. Except this is what quantum physics and a general information theoretic turn in physics suggests.

And it would be non-experiential semiosis to the degree it did not have "a point of view". Semiosis at the cosmic level becomes just a developing set of boundary conditions. A totally generalise or objective state, not one that is locally individuated and particular to some subject.

So I am happy that pan-semiosis can account for the similarities and differences of the levels of nature's complexity as they are actually measured and observed.

I don't see any of this in Whitehead except from the very superficial gestures towards a contextuality and holism in his direction of thought.

That is the usual vague reply on Whitehead. His system is a system that successfully absorbs all categorical differences ... which would be why I consider it a failure.

Are we talking about processes or actual entities, transcendence or immanence, material things or mental things, creativity or constraints? Whitehead. He say yes!

...but whether you like his system or not, I don't think it can be denied that Whitehead's ideas go well beyond Perice's in the scope of development. — Janus

And why can't that be denied? Only because you won't spell out how exactly Whitehead goes beyond Peirce in your estimation.

I think every supporter of Whitehead I've ever come across only is so because he said "experience is basic". He rejected the logicist project and turned to God and universal mind. He mixed in quantum physics too. So he sounds like the sort of guy one should proclaim as a metaphysical genius.

But I've yet to meet anyone who believe they understand Whitehead well enough to stop and explain him in ways that makes sense - especially in relation to Peirce and other structuralist thinkers. Funny that.

Are you denying that Whitehead has produced a complex, comprehensive and systematic metaphysics that owes something, but by no means everything, to Peirce? — Janus

I just don't see any important similarities. So I would welcome you explaining what they might be.

Every time I try to delve into Whitehead, it just seems maddening rubbish. Every time I take another dip into Peirce, it feels the opposite. So please tell me what I'm missing.

In the meantime, here is how others have summarised the connections between the two....

Lowe writes "Whitehead knew Peirce's logic of relatives when he wrote Universal Algebra, but there is no evidence of substantial knowledge at any time of anything else that Peirce published."

Although it has been common for readers of Peirce's metaphysical writings to notice a considerable similarity to some features of Whitehead's philosophy, a study in depth of each one shows wide differences between them.

According to Lowe, "the more likely picture is of paths which, though touching at certain important points, were for the most part so separate that whoever thinks to make further explorations must choose the one and reject the other, and as he looks back at Peirce and Whitehead, he must then be ready to reconsider the significance of those similarities"

http://www.unav.es/users/PeirceWhitehead.html

I am claiming a heightened state of experience, not a "truer one". An ecstatic experience is not necessarily "truer" than a banal one. So, the contradiction is, again, a projection of your own. — Janus

So what follows from it merely being "heightened"? Where does that leave us?

The contradiction still has to be answered. Or are you conceding that it is resolved by accepting the neuroscientific view would say the affective state is an over-excited one?

A well functioning brain with affective states that make cognitive sense - that would actually ground a mental response pragmatically in tune with the world as it is - would only be excited to an appropriate degree. Thus you can have the non-functional affective responses that are either under-excited or over-excited - too flat or too aroused.

Or did you have some other story on how there is no contradiction between how the feeling feels and what it would be for a feeling to be a suitably functional ground to neurocognition?

Well, Whitehead developed a whole complex metaphysical system which is certainly not Peircean through and through, although there are commonalities. It takes a long time to make sense of Whitehead, which I am beginning to do. I suppose the same can be said for Peirce. I've made less progress on that front. — Janus

Right. So you have made your judgement. But you can't give the grounds for it.

I guess it's just a gut feeling. So at least you are being self-consistent then.

There certainly seems to be a lot of Peirce in Whitehead (judging from what I have read of Peirce, which has not been a real lot, but just slowly, over the past fifteen or so years, working through two volumes of his selected papers), but he also goes well beyond Peirce in important ways, I think. — Janus

Oh please. If you can make any sense of Whitehead and how he goes "well beyond", here is your perfect chance to lay that wisdom out.

Local to where, though? — Janus

Well, Australasia. I've had good mates from both Ashburton and Warrnambool. You wouldn't know the difference.

That like anything else drugs open up different possibilities for experience. — Janus

Does that seem enough of an answer to you?

You are claiming a heightened and truer state of experience from what the neuroscience would say must be a faulty misfiring of the brain. Not sure how you resolve that contradiction, until you tell me.

OK. And what do you conclude from knowing that it was only the drugs causing that state of mind?

Unreadable bunk.

A bogan. It’s a local speciality.