A sense of the mysterious, a sense of the holy and a sense of the beautiful, senses that require no particular knowledge or intellectual mastery to drive them. — Janus

I'm tempted to draw attention to the lack of intellectual mastery here. :naughty:

But instead, I think all three of yours require quite sophisticated cultural training. And that itself should be telling. We have to learn the general attitude - mystic, religious, aesthetic - which then allows us to perceive the affective state in a noumenal fashion. As a feeling painted across the world itself.

So we likely disagree deeply here. You seem to think the sense of the numinous is something simple, direct, unmediated. I reply that it seems very much the product of cultural learning, a sense of awe and rightness that can be reliably evoked from within a well-developed conceptual frame.

And as such, it stands on the side of the phenomenal. The brain needs feelings of certainty and uncertainty, salience and irrelevance, attention and disinterest, just to navigate life with pragmatic efficiency. Ultimately I am sure when I feel sure. Unsure when I feel that.

To be simplistic, the brain is designed so that the ability to recognise the familiar, recognise the unfamiliar, are emotionally rooted at a very basic level in the brainstem and limbic system. It is a basic dichotomy being imposed on the ever present flood of life so as to create an intelligible divide on experience from the get-go.

So a generalised sense of awe or salience is not difficult to explain. We would even know all the sympathetic nervous system hallmarks to look out for - the physiologically-appropriate orienting responses like widened pupils, quickened heart-beat, sweaty palms, paused digestion, etc.

Thus it can all be explained away. But then it also seems a marvellous thing to me ... that everything makes natural sense when looked at with a dialectical or dichotomistic logic. Makes me tingly all over again. ;)

What about also....

4: sense of scientific and mathematical wonder that the structure of reality has intelligible form

What has been lost is precisely a sense of related-ness to the cosmos, and also a sense of purpose and meaning. — Wayfarer

The pre-modern view was animistic. The human social sphere included the whole of nature. The sun and stars were personified. So were the winds, the mountains, the rivers, the forests.

So what we have lost is that pan-spiritualism or pantheism. Organised modern religions reacted to philosophical inquiry by contracting towards a strong mind/body dualism. And in doing that, it shot right past the social sphere within which our individuated being - our personification - is constructed, to develop a mystic or supernatural realm that is supposedly the home to spirit or essence.

Science showed that this shrinking of personification or animation until it had shrivelled right out of material existence couldn't be right. There was no evidence that our essence sits outside nature. Science could see that life was a material process - an expression of a systems "four causes" ontology. And then even "mind" is becoming understood in the same naturalistic way through neuroscience and social psychology.

So we have this wild swing from a too generous pantheism to a too miserly religious dualism. One personified the whole of nature. The other withdrew personhood from nature entirely.

But science - of the holistic systems thinking kind - can locate humanity in humanity. It can identify the social and biological causes of being. That creates a sound natural metaphysics as our modern departure point.

This is writ large all over Modern Culture, and manifests in the form of many social ills and ailments, such as anomie, depression, addiction, compulsive consumption, and so on. This is how the belief that you're the outcome of an accidental collocation of atoms manifests, in my view. — Wayfarer

I agree that mechanical thinking about nature has bad results. But that is part of the overshoot story. We had to de-animate nature to the appropriate degree. Both reductionist science and organised religion took their halves of a shared dualism to unwarranted extremes.

So you are making the call to re-animate our understanding of nature. Again I agree. That is what scientific holism would aim to do. But how do you avoid overshooting the social sphere, and our biological heritage, as you make that violent course correction?

You want a personified cosmos. And you accept that would have to take the vaguest or most ambiguous form. Yet isn't the danger that you then still want to wind up with some kind of ultimate binary victory that puts you on the right side of the conventional dualism? The cosmos must be ultimately mind-like or divine in some fashion?

So I do think it is a pendulum story. We went from extreme animism to extreme dualism. Science de-animated the material world, and religion said that was OK as the divine realm stood quite separate at the back of all that ... with its super-animate powers to compensate.

But the human is to be found in the humanity of our biological and social development. Then animism reaches as far as organisms in general - life and mind as a semiotic form of complex order. And the Cosmos is nature understood at its most general or undifferentiated level possible. That is yet another story - possibly pan-semiotic according to modern physics. So re-animated to that degree - the one that sees the universe in properly organismic terms as a structure serving a (thermal) purpose.

But what is existence? — darthbarracuda

Persistence. Stability. Equilibrium. The limitation of flux or change.

Existence is a sum over histories. But a sum over histories is an entity, or a series of entities. I want to know what the being of this series is. — darthbarracuda

So it would be better to say actuality is a sum over potential histories.

Entities are a fiction in this hylomorphic view I am taking. There is nothing individual, just the many things that are individuated.

So yes, if you believe in "existence" and "entities", then you are stuck with a metaphysics too impoverished to deal with the questions you want to ask.

It is not until you get beyond that thinking - based in actualism and substantialism - that you would understand what even Aristotle or Anaximander had to say on the issue.

What I'm trying to hammer in is that every time science explains existence in terms of entities, it fails to capture the metaphysical distinction between being and Being. — darthbarracuda

But does science still do that? Or does it now understand entities and existence in terms of ontic structuralism?

As to the difference between being and Being, you yourself make it sound pretty semiotic - the difference between a sign and the thing-in-itself.

So reality can be quite "psychological" in that the problem physics has to overcome is telling a tale of the Cosmos that has observers along with the observables. Physical theory has to achieve this goal of internalising the semiosis that indeed actualises the potential.

That is the big question. My routine point is that we can't just toss "mind" into the theory - some spiritual, substantial, notion of consciousness. But we do have to weave in something like a "point of view" - a semiotic relation.

And Being is all about the having of a point of view, isn't it? Well, maybe you understand it differently.

Being is not a "thing", it is not measured but is a necessary condition for something to even be able to be measured. Thus there is a difference between "four feet long" and "being four feet long." — darthbarracuda

Hmm. Are you sure you haven't got this back to front? To be measurable demands something more primal - a separation of an observer from an observable. It is that semiotic distinction that has to arise for either "to be". And right at the beginning, the relation would be symmetric. It would be merely a brute reaction (Peircean secondness) where neither side was clearly yet the one or the other.

So being four foot long follows the measuring of four feet. It is the broken symmetry where some observable is "four foot long" in terms of some observer - some now encompassing reference frame that serves to individuate that length as an actual concrete event.

Being is actualised stable existence to the degree that it has been "observed into fixed quiescence".

So again, you are starting your metaphysics from a presumption of already individuated material being. Yet that kind of classical state - an object oriented metaphysics of a world of medium sized dry goods - is only a late-in-the-day emergent outcome of cosmic development. It is what has condensed out due to expansion and cooling, a result of there being a well-establish reference frame of cold vacuum against which a few bright flashes of concrete activity will stand out in apparent isolation.

You are insisting on a metaphysical starting point that science has already shown to be not primal. So you haven't even begun to explore the options that science offers in terms of what primal actually looks like to the best of our investigative knowledge.

We keep using the word 'tree', but it's actually a terrible example considering the point of the OP which is to imply that some progress could be made in philosophical discourse if words were defined first. — Pseudonym

Oh I agree heartily that starting with definitions is the last thing we would do. You are absolutely correct that meaning can't be analysed by interrogating the terms we use themselves.

The word 'tree' actually seems to derives from the root 'deru' which means strong and steadfast. So It was originally trying to get at the tree's firm and unyielding nature, not it's multi-branching form. — Pseudonym

I'd be surprised if there weren't terms even back then to distinguish trees - as tall plants branching off from a single trunk - from shrubs. Maybe every tree was an "oak" or whatever. Certainly we would expect the concrete noun to precede its metaphoric use. So deru would not have started out as steadfast and then trees be called that by analogy.

But whatever. My point was that nature does indeed have ontic structure. So words can speak rather directly to universal essences in that sense. The meanings of language can be constrained by reality in that fashion. The social construction of reality has its actual limits, as well as its actual creative freedoms.

This matters for philosophical language where the ability to pick out the universal in language use is a contentious issue. But that is a step beyond the original argument you were making, I see that.

All we can say is that all future uses of the word 'tree' will be somehow constrained by our preference for pattern over randomness. — Pseudonym

Again, it comes back to my greater interest in language as a form of semiosis. So I want to go the step beyond the pragmatics of "meaning is use" to the story of the actual general mechanism by which that is true. Thus a speech act becomes a state of interpretive constraint which is "understood" in terms of a suitable sign, a suitable act of measurement.

The meaning of "the cat is on the mat" is some kind of agreement to that being a perceived fact. And the agreement hinges on being able to ignore a whole bunch of potential differences as to that being understood as the case. The cat could be a squirrel - a remote possibility, but we could be mistaken. Or the mat could be really a rug, in someone else's eyes.

So this strengthens the psychological aspect of semantics. We can only agree a meaning to the extent we agree to ignore the endless possible differences of nature, of the real world. Word use corresponds not to things in themselves but to where we agree to stop debating the open-ended differences that will always remain.

So word definitions are doubly useless. Word use is by design open-ended. A word only constrains a space of interpretive possibilities. We could use "tree" to mean a whole bunch of things in creative fashion. Then even worse, where "tree" ceases to apply is also a product of pragmatic agreement. We simply decide that despite the endless possible ongoing differences, we will draw our boundary here, for the moment. For the duration of this speech act.

But then, in having this generalised character, words are pretty good at capturing the abstract. Words are intrinsically philosophical in that they generalise so easily. They don't sweat the detail. They are quite happy having a loose or universal fit.

That is how constraints work. And so - the even bigger picture - language is like nature in that regard. It is a structure that can be tightened as much as necessary to achieve a result. But that openness is closed by reaching some shared point of unconcern, or equilibrium, or diminished returns. Eventually differences no longer make a difference so far as the meaning goes.

Or the other way to put it is that nature is like language - semiotic. Which is another metaphysical story of course.

Being is definite existence. It takes structure or form to make anything definite. Structure is organisation that limits meaningful difference or uncertainty. So the antithesis of being is not nothing but formless uncertainty. A bare potential. A kind of unexpressed everythingness or anythingness.

We can forget about something out of nothing. It has no metaphysical logic.

What is logical is an unbounded vague everythingness that develops a logical or orderly structure.

If everything could be possible, if everything could actualise even by accident, then most of those impulses would be mirror opposites and cancel each other out. They would negate each other’s possibility of being. So in fact only some integral of the total could manage to actualise. The variety would be self limiting as to what could be the developed case.

Quantum field theory already describes that. It is how the vacuum works. Existence is a sum over histories. We have the strongest scientific support for the idea.

So we know that there is being. We know that being is the definite structure that results from the constraint of anythingness. We know that the principle of least action rules nature right down to the quantum limit.

The “how” of being is really quite well understood to a large degree.

Is there anything left to puzzle over? Of course.

It isn’t “why something rather than nothing” as now nothingness isn’t even a realistic possibility. The Heat Death vacuum is as near as we could get. And that is alive with virtual quantum fluctuations. To be empty is just to be self cancelling in terms of the mirror actions.

But still, something about the idea of bare uncaused fluctuation feels in need of explanation. It is the lingering material aspect.

It is nice that ontology has this last little puzzle to keep chewing on. But what is an action ... without a direction? Or without a reaction? What will we have left when we do strip away the last shreds of shaping structure or context?

The enlightenment naturally. Instead of feeling, I would talk in terms of reason. So habit, intelligibility, purpose, structure, semiosis, etc.

Yeah. But "consciousness" is a bad starting point. It is as far away from the primal, or the ultimately simple, as Nature can get.

So you are speaking of spiritual stuff - simple substance. And we know mind is about the complexities of brain architecture and a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

we ourselves are fundamentally an emanation from this mysterious primordiality. — darthbarracuda

No we are not. Not if we are actually a structure of modelling.

An emanation from a primordiality is structureless substance talk. So you are presuming a particular metaphysics - that of Romanticism.

The idealist/panpsychist undertones are clear. — darthbarracuda

Bingo. Yes they are.

Primal, ominous, ennui, insomnia, striving, lurking ... all the anthropomorphic jargon of the Romantic tradition imported to address the basic metaphysical question of "why anything?".

That'll work. :)

The ‘sky-father-god’ which Apokrisis mentions above, in some ways skews the debate. That’s because for Apokrisis [and many people], the whole ‘conception of the divine’ is inextricably bound up with that understanding. — Wayfarer

Well given that was the kind of god the OP refers to, it seems fair enough to be focusing on that.

And I was pointing out how you were defending the same conception to the degree you thought there is some "physical singularity" whose structural form is in need of a materialistic "cause-and-effect" explanation.

Sure - if you think about 'God' as on the same level of existence as the kinds of things that science investigates, then I would certainly agree that there is no such thing. — Wayfarer

Again, I pointed out to you two things.

Expecting our metaphysical speculations to be constrained by actual evidence seems to have emerged as the best way to go about reasoned inquiry. You don't seem to disagree.

So if a theory can't be cashed out in acts of measurement, it is classed as an idea that is "not even wrong". You seem to think this is a good argument against string theory for instance. So let's apply the same principle to all metaphysical speculation, including theism.

Then I also pointed out that your principal complaint is that materialism doesn't work as a causal story, and yet you are still talking like a materialist to the degree you accept there is some kind of necessity for a creating God.

Of course you can take refuge in ambiguity here. You can say you don't buy the concrete notion of a big daddy in the sky who actually decides to construct a Cosmos by knocking up some set of laws and constants - a God who is a substantial agent acting with material effect. But how else are we to understand the idea of "a creator"?

A systems view of the divine would see "god" as the name given to some kind of generalised finality and even Platonic form. That could be the immanent cause of being in delivering a telic drive towards order out of chaos. The cosmos would self-organise due to a purpose.

But now this is a radically different notion of a divine hand behind creation. There is no kind of specific creator making His choices about purpose or structure. Being itself is the coming-into-being that expresses some structure-producing tendency which cannot be denied.

At which point, we have an image of God so ambiguous you might as well give up the divine influence tag as we now have a well developed physicalism of that kind of self-organising systemhood. Mentioning anything supernatural feels rather redundant. The story of creation no longer needs an answer to the materialist riddle of who moved something first. Instead, we now have a more interesting story of what could have stopped a Cosmic tendency towards definite order in the first place.

How could creation have been resisted given the mathematical-strength necessities we now understand pretty well?

The whole God issue can be neatly turned on its head in that fashion. The scientific question now - or at least it will be the telling question once we get to a Theory of Everything - is what prevented the Cosmos becoming as we observe it?

So the religious are naturally inclined to believe in a Creator, for which many arguments can then be adduced, whilst the non-religious will be naturally inclined to argue the contrary. — Wayfarer

But the non-religious might have the advantage of having an argument that hinges on the test of evidence?

One might scientifically keep an open mind on the possibility of eventually encountering this Creator face to face at some point. And yet we are also able to say - as cosmologists - we've gone all the way back to the first 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000001th of a second, and He ain't showed up in any essential way thus far. And everything we understood by that scientific route reduces any telic role He might have played to plucking a few constants out of the air for no obvious good reason.

Did God care so much about the mass of a quark or electron that he "fine-tuned" the number? Rum sort of Creator, if so.

the idea that the Universe springs into existence from an infinitesmally small point sounds suspiciously like 'creation ex nihilo'* — Wayfarer

Yeah. Which is why I always promote the systems-thinking alternative of creation as an emergent structure of constraint on unbridled material freedoms.

Something from nothing is the problem for notions of causality that already presume causality is about material/efficient cause. Rather than wheeling in a creator god to make that nonsense idea work, it is better to just say it doesn't work and get on with an Aristotelian four causes/immanent/systems approach that sees creation as the constraint on a plenum of chaotic potential.

however, one can always ask, how is it that what emerged from total disorder was order? — Wayfarer

And modern science has the answer. It has mathematical models of order out of chaos. Those models are being applied in cosmology.

You can't peer back in time past the 'singularity', nor can you see anything beyond the horizon of this universe. — Wayfarer

Again, these are points that count against a "creating god" notion of causality, and for a self-organising systems approach to cosmic causality.

So your shotgun is pointed squarely at your own foot here.

If you can't go back earlier in time to reach this mythical singularity - the place where this God of the Blue Touchpaper must reside in prime mover fashion - then maybe time itself is thermally emergent. What we are talking about is the first moment when time starts as already a symmetry-breaking.

Likewise the fact that we are bounded by cosmic event horizons. Everywhere we look around us now, we see that broken symmetry. The self-organising nature of cosmic structure is the scientific fact staring our metaphysical musings in the face.

But I don't see you factoring that in to your own line of thought. You seem to be suggesting some behind the scenes prime mover can rescue the standard materialist conception of causation for you.

Give it up. Move on. A creating god is the kind of last ditch myth you would invent if you can't in fact let go of a materialist understanding of creation events.

You want it to be true that existence has a first cause. The principle of sufficient reason appears to demand it. And yet you agree cosmological science finds no evidence of that right back to the first measurable instant. Why not just let go of this materialist conception of how the metaphysical answer ought to look?

Start by examining the universes origins. The Big Bang. — Devans99

Next examine the universe itself. It’s incredibly unlikely for a randomly selected universe to be life supporting so we live in a fine tuned universe. — Devans99

If you accept cosmological science as a believable starting point, then already a heavy constraint has been laid on your theological Bayesianism. The "logical alternatives" are not as you are outlining them.

To accept the Big Bang as the creation event is already to accept a scientific tale of existence in which a deity is materially absent AND where chance and purpose are accounted for as complementary aspects of that materiality.

The Big Bang is a story with both necessary and contingent features. It must have unfolded due to global laws or conservation symmetries. We "know" the rules in play all the way back to the effective "first moment". We also "know" what seem to be the contingencies or accidents.

It may not be a final theory yet - we know that too. But it is a strong constraint on any Bayesian reasoning. We have established that the rules of quantum physics would have had to have been in play. And that those rules say something about the material fluctuations that would have been de novo possible.

Then likewise the fine-tuning issue. This is more speculative in terms of cosmology. But the strongly divided form of the choice is either that our own creation event is part of a multiverse of creation events, or that there are structural necessities in play that made our particular universe the only creation event that could actually happen.

Again, quantum physics - with its path integral formalism and employment of the (telic) least action principle - says it is certainly possible, if not even highly probable, that we exist in the one universe that has the configuration optimal for material existence.

But either way - whichever cosmological option you feel inclined towards - neither answer on fine-tuning gives any credence to a fine-tuning creator. Fine-tuning is either just an actual random accident - and so the multiverse applies. Or fine-tuning is our illusion in not yet having a better grasp of the physics. We haven't yet got to the mathematical reasons why different flavours of particles have their varied coupling constants, for instance.

So to the degree you accept existing physics as a constraint on assessing the probabilities, fine-tuning is divided on the degree of mathematical necessity involved in our own form of universe. But a creator of fine-tuning is already ruled out as a 0% option.

Or at least, now you have to start arguing that God had the freedom to invent a different maths of symmetry and symmetry-breaking. Good luck on that.

If the word had a meaning before the author writes it, then it's meaning cannot just be whatever the author intends. There is some property of the word 'tree' which already exists prior the the author's selecting it, which make it good choice for him to convey the idea of the tall plant in the woods. — Pseudonym

It can't be difficult to agree that this is a two-way street. Linguistic communities create the general game. And individual players make creative use of the resulting space of free actions. Eventually new linguistic habits can emerge from those creative uses because they seem generally useful at the communal level (rather than just tentatively useful at the personal creative level on some occasion or other).

So any argument that tries to establish that only one side of the deal is in control - the community or the author - is a waste of breath. The interesting question is about characterising the dynamic in play. (Which is where a systems style constraints approach makes the most sense.)

The question of meaning is not about how a word comes to mean what it does within the language community, its about what it means already within that community, and we've just established, it must mean something already before the author uses it, in order for him to make a non-arbitrary selection. — Pseudonym

Yep. So you are forcing the synchronic, history-flattening, view on the issue when the diachronic, or developmental, view is the one that is going to see the whole deal.

Actual human experience of society and culture tells us that games evolve their rules all the time. They are always fiddling with the rules of rugby, Wall St, or the highway code.

No, we don't. If an author uses the word 'tree', I assume he means either the tall plant, or maybe some multi-branching diagram. — Pseudonym

This goes to something else. It backs up @Harry Hindu on the strangely contested idea that words do refer to essences in some fashion. We can see the common "treeness" connecting these two examples of acceptable language use. A general hierarchical branching structure.

So whatever the author means in either case, it is essentially that. Trees - the plant kind - are indeed a particular expression of a more general, and strikingly simple, rule for growth-based symmetry breaking.

And in being a mathematically general fact of that kind, it undermines the view that it is all "just a language game". Talk of trees, and their treeness, isn't arbitrary. It is talk about some deep fact of the world - a fact about how the world plays its "games" of structuring form. The universe has actual "rules" - or rather, its universal forms, its simplest possible and so most widely observed constraints on random variety.

The meaning of a word is its use in the language game. It's determined by the interaction of both players and the millions of language speakers who have gone before them, and the nature of the language game being played. — Pseudonym

It is more complicated than that as the language game is also being played with "the world". It interacts in pragmatic fashion with that.

The language game is in addition being played from the foundation of the perception game. That too is a semiotic interaction in which developmental neurology is a genetically constrained game of making pragmatic sense of "the world". We can see its "colours", we can smell its "odours". We can experience the full variety of "its" sensory qualities.

So calling language a game does get something right about language. The puzzle is how this small point then gets turned into a general stance of saying "it is only a game".

Sure, humans are different in living linguistically structured lives and so having a very socially- constructed relationship with the world. But there is a world out there. And even perceptual level semiotics is seeking to understand it in terms of its essences, generalities or global habits.

Maybe if we were discussing Wittgenstein's Tractatus — Sam26

The issue is the flip from one extreme to the other extreme.

Recognising that there is no definite atomistic foundation leads to the jump to the other extreme of anti-foundationalism.

I just seek to make it clear that there is a middle path that sees foundations as what in the end get constructed via a collective system of constraints.

So don't take it personally that I quoted you on a particular bone of contention.

The central issue is that language does not work propositionally, even if language can be employed pretty well in that regard.

So these threads seem to get hung up on the idea that language stripped bare would reveal its secret propositional structure. And yet when language is stripped bare - disaster! - that logicist structure appears to evaporate. The logicist is so disappointed that he/she proclaims language to lack any proper objective or intrinsic structure at all. It is all just games of pretend.

But a constraints-based understanding of language gets at the structure it has due to self-organising dynamical principles.

Instead of the atomism of logicism - where meaning must be constructed from the ground up, fixed part connected to fixed part - meaning is holistic.

Anything might have been meant at the beginning. While you wait for a speaker to speak, your own state of understanding is a vague receptacle. No communicative possibility (and a host might be buzzing), has yet been definitely dismissed. There is neither understanding nor misunderstanding. The symmetry is yet to be broken in terms of that logicist disjunct.

Then speaking starts to constrain that open state of mind which is entertaining a plenum of the possible. To some degree, a host of interpretive possibilities get eliminated.

Information theory models this in detail. The 20 questions game illustrates how you can arrive at any word in the dictionary if you just ask a question that divides the field of possibilities in half with each question. You get an exponential elimination of alternatives. Is it real, is it fictional? Is it a form or life or is it not? Language allows the systematic construction of states of constraint. Meaning becomes whatever set of possible interpretations is yet to be positively eliminated.

So words don't carry cargoes of meaning in truth-apt style. They construct socio-cultural boundaries to acts of interpretation. Agreement is "meaning is use". But agreement is also agreement on a deep structure - the structure that is needed to restrict free possibility in that pragmatic fashion.

It's not just catastrophic misunderstandings, but also subtle misunderstandings, so subtle that much of the time they're missed. — Sam26

So the goal of communication is to limit misunderstandings by constructing a shared mental frame of constraints.

Misunderstandings then separate into those that matter and those that don't. Catastrophic misunderstandings would be meaningful. The logicist constraint of either/or - the constraint that is intolerant of ambiguity - would have some pragmatic point to it. Something matters about the misunderstanding that is worth correcting.

But then, from a constraints view, no state of understanding ever bottoms out in concrete atomistic definiteness. The old logicist hope of that kind of foundationalism has long gone. So, in the pragmatist account, the only thing that terminates the possibility of "subtle misunderstanding" is a generalised agreement not to sweat the detail. Pragmatism is self-grounding. Top-down constraint is eventually matched by a principle of indifference. Part of the deal is knowing when either/or choices - binary bits of information - cease to make a material difference to the formal structure of constraints in place.

It is an easy trick to bring up subtle misunderstandings that lurk in any speech act - as if that were a telling blow to language structuralism. But that just reflects reductionist thinking at work. It could only matter if you thought meaning has to be constructed bit by bit, atom by atom, from the ground up.

When speech is understood as a semiotic story of constraints, then the open-ended bottom is part of the point. It means speech has irreducible creativity and spontaneity. The fine-grain possibility of misunderstanding is an important organic part of the deal.

And then a ground is always found as the other part of the deal. In ordinary speech - not so much in philosophical discourse - folk tend to share a common level of indifference. A fine-grain of misunderstanding is not a big issue as it doesn't make a real difference to the communicative intent - the structure of thought or structure of constraint.

Before using words, you have to think of what it is you want to say, and it doesn't always come in the form of other words, rather it comes in non-verbal sensory impressions that we translate to words in order to communicate those ideas to another person. — Harry Hindu

We can go a step further. I keep seeing "Hairy" instead of "Harry", and as a result my image of Harry Hindu is sometimes like this: — Banno

Between the picture theory of language and linguistic behaviourism there is a middle ground position.

Mental imagery or non-verbal content is the brain doing its thing of anticipating its perceptual future. To act in the world according to a model of the world is to act on the basis of a running forward prediction. So mental imagery is the development of constrained states of expectation. And that constraint can range from vague inklings all the way up to vividly exact sensori-motor states. Language then becomes a way to achieve those kinds of anticipatory mental states in the minds of others, and even - though self talk - yourself.

So when we think "tree", we set up a state of constrained expectation in ourself that could be quite vague and permissive - a generalised sense of tree-ness. Or if we make the attentive effort to flesh out some particular predictive image, which takes about half a second to generate, we may have some strongly developed and vivid picture of a particular oak in a forest clearing in mind.

And likewise, when we say "tree", we can rely on fellow language users to respond with more or less accuracy in line with our own learnt habits of thought. Their mental imagery or states of expectancy will be well enough constrained to achieve the same intents.

The point is that no word needs to have completely defined meaning - if meaning is understood as some kind of exhaustive veridical content. That is merely importing naive realism into the story.

Words only have to constrain states of expectation to the degree that it is useful. And sometimes being vague is more useful, given the future is often not all that exactly predictable. So arguing over whether words have some exact correspondence with reality is rather missing the point. The goal is the modelling one of words having some useful kind of correspondence with the certainties and uncertainties of the near future.

So a constraints-based approach says meanings are open-ended. Any expression is unlimited in its potential interpretations by any reasonably competent speaker. There will always be a way to misunderstand ... a way to avoid agreement.

But well co-ordinated speech will put one speaker in mind of the same thoughts, the same states of mental expectancy, as another, to the degree it is useful. And that will reflect both the certainties and uncertainties that are inherent in the pragmatics of predicting the future in meaningful fashion.

To then try to map propositional notions of truth on to the psychology of forward modelling or perceptual anticipation is of course then the importing of naive realism. Propositional truth likes to ignore the issue of vagueness for a start. It wants to deal in crisp yes or no only.

Is that an image of Harry I see before me? Answer one way or the other. Let's pretend that ambiguity or uncertainty are not inherent in the business of making psychological predictions about the future of our experiences.

I can usually tell a duck from a rock, but I have no idea what a duck-essence might be, nor a rock-essence. — Banno

Performative contradiction?

The distinction between essential versus accidental properties has been characterized in various ways, but it is currently most commonly understood in modal terms: an essential property of an object is a property that it must have, while an accidental property of an object is one that it happens to have but that it could lack.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/essential-accidental/

So we know what is essential when we know what is not accidental.

And language use in turn relies on us using words in ways that emphasise the essential. When we employ a term like "duck" or "rock", we don't want folk to get hung up on their various possible inessential or accidental interpretations.

So if I say "duck", you can already take it for granted that something essential is being asserted. And being sufficiently like-minded ensures you understand what that is well enough.

I describe the relationship between order and chaos as a tension, like a game of tug-of-war. Regarding the dice-rolling analogy, the "pull" that causes the dice to want to produce random results is the pull of chaos, and the "pull" that causes the dice to want to produce an ordered sequence is the pull of order. — mysterio448

The idea that existence is a unity of opposites, the pairing of chaos and order, or flux and logos, goes back to the first metaphysical speculation of Ancient Greece. Check our Anaximander and Heraclitus especially.

But I think where you run into problems is imagining the situation as two kinds of "pulls" as that puts you back into a reductionist metaphysics of causal forces. You have a literal antagonism of one thing against another thing rather than a complementary pair of things, each of which is essential to the other in a way that justifies talk of a resulting unity or synergy.

So the complementary way of talking about this is constraints vs degrees of freedom. Order is the structure that emerges in development to regulate chaos or randomness, giving it concrete shape. You start with complete spontaneity - Anaximander's unbounded Apeiron. Then it begins to divide and get organised in intelligible fashions.

Anaximander's version said first the hot separated from the cold, then the resulting dry separated from the moist. You wind up with the four elements - dry heat being fire, dry cold being air, wet heat being water, wet cold being earth.

Anyway, this dialectical approach to metaphysics is literally how metaphysics got started. And it is now a well modelled concept in physics - especially in condensed matter physics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, and other "order out of chaos" approaches.

And does your dice story fly when there is no reason to expect a "pull" in terms of order at all. The point of a die is to design out the possibility of a correlation between outcomes. The goal is to make a "machine" that maximises our uncertainty by creating a symmetry among the alternatives.

So nature is being constrained in a special way - one that conforms to a reductionist definiton of randomness as a defined or bounded ensemble of possibilities.

It is actually a cartoon version of spontaneity or actual "pure chaos" when you think about it.

This can be demonstrated by many examples. For example, take snowflakes. Snowflakes are beautiful, ornate, symmetrical designs that materialize out of random activity in clouds. Another example is gemstones, which are orderly-shaped minerals that materialize from random geological processes. The sphericity of stars, planets and moons is a product of the force of order emerging from the chaos of mindless astronomical activity. — mysterio448

Yep, these are all examples of the new physics. But the metaphysics is understood as that of collective and emergent constraints on local degrees of freedom. Spontaneous symmetry breaking.

The theory exists.

There are more sequences like this in the decimal of pi. One might think that such sequences are merely "accidents," statistically inevitable instances of randomness stumbling upon structure. — mysterio448

Or rather this shows that even "chaos" is bounded. The kind of chaos we can model statistically is not "pure chaos" as the very idea of statistics imposes constraints on uncertainty. If nothing else, we have to draw a boundary around a collection of events and say that is the system we are now measuring. So the structure arises from at least some kind of minimal constraints being imposed in a way that results in something to be measured.

If 9 becomes a number that can be rolled, then strings of 9s must occur periodically in a fashion that is itself certain as a "sufficiently random excursion from the mean". You would start to suspect your random number generator if it failed to produce enough such sequences according to a formula you could calculate.

Murphy's law is essentially the opposite of the randomness paradox. — mysterio448

Again, this isn't a surprise but a prediction if you adopt a metaphysics based on constraints of freedoms. If nature is inherently spontaneous, then that spontaneity only ever gets limited, never eliminated.

So that is the power of a complementary approach. One thing already accounts for the other. Order includes these mistakes. Limits only limit them to being on the whole insignificant as perturbations. Disorder is suppressed to the degree that it can cause much actual disruption.

It is possible to simulate our world according to physics. — tom

And physics also puts an entropy constraint on the fidelity of the simulation surely.

So how many bits do you think the simulation requires? Would it not quickly exceed the black hole entropy bound of any imaginable hardware? Wouldn't the computer involved collapse into a black hole due to the gravity of its own information content? The hardware would be too concentrated a lump of matter to survive in a way that could do any actual processing.

To say "according to physics" is to accept the constraints of physics as we know them. Otherwise one might as well grant the simulation hypothesis as being true "according to magic". A conclusion that is less technically impressive.

It is like we can conclude there are no earth-sized planets made of solid gold anywhere in the universe. They could not avoid being black holes.

Computers are also physically restricted in ways important to any simulating they might be doing. They are not infinite resources but finitely bounded - "according to physics".

I argued in another thread that algorithms are not physical - they are logical. — tom

So we agree that physics doesn’t account for that part of the structure of reality that is an algorithm?

Great.

Now what is it that says an algorithm is logical as such? The universe of randomly produced rule sets would be infinite. What would select among all those to create ones we would call a logical system?

Then I guess your algorithms have to have data to work on. Again, how would the input get selected so that it had physically relevant meaning?

I suspect mostly the same as you. Amenable to some form measurement resulting from replicable procedures. — Arne

Fair enough. I'm reacting mostly from the point of view that sees a common method to what we mean by "rational thought".

CS Peirce in particular pinned it down as the three steps of abductive hypothesis, deductive reasoning and inductive confirmation. So creative leaps, formal logical expression, then a checking against reality ... whatever that then means. (Pragmatism being clear what it means, and science being distinctive in following that on the whole.)

And unlike philosophy and with the possible exception of QA, the rational method of philosophy is not the only method of philosophy. Please see Thus Spake Zarathustra by F.W. Nietzsche. — Arne

Seems like we are too much on the same page. Sigh.

(It won't last.)

are you making your own statement or do you want me answer questions? — Arne

I want to start an argument obviously. That is going to be hard if you won't disagree. :)

I get it that people who have grown up into or adopted a scientific disposition may be a bit uncomfortable with propositions that are not amenable to empirical confirmation. — Arne

How are you defining empirical evidence? Isn't the rational method of philosophy just like the rational method of science in that one puts forward some reasonable general concept and then suggest that these kinds of particular consequences will serve as the truth-makers?

Science defines itself more by narrowing its domain to the physical or natural - speculative generalisations that might actually get cashed out in terms of perceptible particular consequences.

Or indeed, being more rigorous, science prizes mathematically framed conceptions in which the particulars are now numbers read off dials. Philosophy is happy with actual perceptions - what you might think you see, hear, touch and feel. Even a sense of "hey that is correct" - a psychological registering of a jolt of certainty - counts as the empirical validation for the reasonableness of some proposition.

But science is different in reducing the scope of the empirical to acts of measurement - numbers read off dials.

Sure we still need our eyes to do that. But epistemically, which of these activities are more withdrawn from concrete claims about the world, more reliant on modelled conceptions of what is the case?

The good old rational vs empirical divide soon breaks down on closer examination. Science is different largely due to the degree it reduces the empirical to an almost entirely idealist or conceptualised basis. Philosophy is either a case of anything goes - a form of cultural self-expression like poetry. Or where it gets rigorous itself, a more general polishing up of the habits of logical and critical thinking.

The ability to make well-formed propositions - that can be tested even in everyday life without instruments and experiments - is still a generally useful educated skill.

There is a reasonable thought in your OP. At the Heat Death, there will only be a sizzle of photons with a temperature of the empty vacuum and wavelengths redshifted to the size of the visible universe. So that would be the ground state towards which everything tends. Just a generalised bath of radiation of zero degrees but moving at c, being in nothing but a vacuum.

Also the speed of light is the speed of gravity. The idea is more general.

Our brains cannot be more than computers, according to physics. — tom

Are algorithms physical? In what sense are you using the term physics to mean a scientific model of both hardware and software?

You can start with a Turing machine if you like.

I see the simple gate mechanism that switches the state of a symbol. I see the infinite length of tape on which those marks are recorded. I try hard not to mention the problems the second law creates for this imagined material device.

But then this machine needs someone to write it some rules, supply it some data, understand the results.

In what sense are you saying that all that rather mental stuff is reduced to the same materialistic physics used to imagine the hardware?

It seems simple.

If we need to numb ourselves, that spells some kind of problem. We would want to tackle the cause and not the symptoms.

If we want to enhance our cognitive state, that sounds useful. We would want to understand the causality of that so we can produce the said symptoms. Although there may still be a question about why we think it is such a good thing ... like all the time, in some extreme superhuman way.

So if drugs are being used as a numbing mechanism, that ain't a good thing if it is to avoid an underlying problem being addressed. But then, hey, maybe this idea of being wired - cognitively energised all the time - is bad too as relaxing, chilling out, goofing off, are part of being human too?

However are drugs actually good at producing relaxation. Isn't mediation or exercise way better?

And maybe there is a third thing - social lubrication. People feel very self-conscious and distant from each other. Drugs are a way to blur those interpersonal boundaries. But isn't it better to address the causes of this more than the symptoms? What is it about society and other people - or your own habits - that could be changed to remove the same awkwardness that booze or weed allegedly removes?

So actually, it's all a bit complicated.

But the posts that focus on the social framing of the perils and benefits are more relevant than the ones that talk about personal neurobiology.

Pharmaceutical science sure likes us believing that neurotransmitters are like the volume and contrast knobs on the side of the TV set. Others like the Romantic notion that there is some secret little door in our heads that opens into another more splendid world.

But drugs are really crude and rely on their social framing to produce most of any effect.

Inject some adrenaline and the jolt to your sympathetic nervous system will be read as excited or irritating depending on the context. You are suddenly aroused. Now you have to work out whether that is to get you busy in a good or bad way because of what is happening in the world around you.

Personally I have found that it is the boringly obvious stuff - hard exercise, quality sleep, clean diet - that does the most you can do for your biology. Then you have to deal with the social side of life the best way you can. You have to strike some balance of engagement and detachment that results in a long-term strategic sense of growth and flourishing.

And the toughest part of that is it is never something structurally stable. Shit happens. Circumstances change. Rebuilding is part of the game.

But anyway, everything people seek from "recreational" drugs is ultimately about that social thing, and so ought to be judged against other social mechanisms (like hiking, clubs, whatever). What impresses is that drugs seem more potent than the other choices as they promise to go right to the neurobiological source.

That is true in the bullshit sense they stick a crude spanner in the works. But then that still leaves you having to make sense of what you just did. And that in turn takes things back to the social context which is the ultimate arbiter on the issue.

So, there's no escaping reality then. — Posty McPostface

Has anyone found it yet? :)

Thanks. I'm not claiming anything original. An embodied approach to cognition would be pretty mainstream these days.

The OP was about drawing sharp baseline boundaries. My answer is that there is no sharp boundary really until you get right down to a state of matter that is not alive and mindful. A lump of something that is in no sense modelling a world.

But then you can start filling back in the obvious degrees of mindfulness/world modelling represented by the distinctions between reflexive behaviour, automatic behaviour, attentive behaviour, self-aware behaviour. That's just the neurobiology of complexity. The modelling steadily becomes more sophisticated in terms of a relation between "a self" and "a world".

Obviously understanding neurochemistry will broaden or simply alter your perspective; albeit in a different way than imbibing hallucinogenic substances will. So will hiking in the wilderness, studying physics, biology, mathematics, literature, history, political science, religion, as will surfing, playing or listening to music, painting and drawing. writing or reading poetry, belonging to a religion...the list of activities is endless. — Janus

I just posted on that. Perception depends on conception. And for humans, conception depends on intellectual systems. Even hiking qualifies as a holy sacramental activity - a socially-valued method of shaping perception - within particular cultures.

So to have a mind that hasn't been blown is to have a mind that lacks a radically different perspective. — Janus

If that different perspective has significant value, why hasn't it become shamanistically woven into modern common experience? Has society made other choices for good reason?

Yeah, I get the obvious answer. Drugs disrupt the smooth functioning of The Establishment. So they get suppressed. But I think it more likely that the supposed benefits are trivial.

Society already makes a place for drugs that get you whacked. The lubricants and anaesthetics. So health risks are endorsed for rather questionable personal rewards.

But here you are talking about a magical cognitive enhancer. If it safely worked, why wouldn't we?

Again, maybe society does value cognitive enhancement it seems. Although probably only for the few, or of the general form that is pro-social by being pro the norm. But granting that cognitive enhancement appears to be regarded as a general social good, hasn't acid been tried and found wanting? Or at least underwhelming.

I don't find any sort of rituals to be of any actual significance to anyone apart to some idealized vision, which I don't share. I'm glad our shamans of the past have become more strict and logical instead of metaphysical and mystical. — Posty McPostface

I see @Bitter Crank made the important point in your other thread that shamans did create a guided experience. The rituals created a social framework which gave the production of an altered state its culturally useful meaning.

So it is the opposite of trite or insubstantial hedonism. Again to connect with this thread, it was constructing the conceptual framework within which that kind of perceptual state would make complete sense.

No different from going to church. Or an art gallery. In some general way, culture does want to frame our perceptual experience so that it has proper social meaning.

Which is where hippies come up. There was of course some cultural authenticity in the "counter-culture" movement. There would be good reason to want to alter people's perception of their social, economic and political reality.

LSD or pot was that sacrament. It could have been Ecstasy as it was a few decades later. Or it could have been the alcohol and cigarettes of their parent's generation. It could be EST sessions, yoga, Mozart, or the whole variety of things which are there to construct human perception in a culturally conceptualised fashion.

Even maths and philosophy are "drugs" in this sense. We are meant to be initiated into their mysteries by shaman guides and see the world through different eyes as a result.

So what I see as "trite" is the Romantic notion that one sees the world all by oneself, naked and simply. As if it is all about altered biology, not about social learning.

Perception is conceptual and systematised. For humans, it is culturally constructed. And so what becomes our individual choice is whose poison do we take? What culture do we consume to become the people we will thus grow to be?

You become wise or clear-minded by picking your influences carefully, not by altering your neurobiology or accessing a different plane of being.

If we want labels, perhaps something like: 'direct conception'. — StreetlightX

LOL. Direct systematisation! Even more honest.

We could easily tell if it had degrees if we had a good handle on what it actually is. Measurement and theory go together.

My general definition of consciousness or sentience would be being in a semiotic modelling relation with the world.

Rocks don’t model anything.

Microbes are a first glimmer of world modelling, but we would hardly say they see a world. They have some chemotaxic reflexes, but not some kind of integrated picture of an environment that changes from moment to moment in some modelled fashion demanding variety of behaviour.

And so we can move on up the chain to organisms with those kinds of complex world models. But being in a modelling relation would be a suitable dividing line. It marks off all of life with a reasonable sharpness.

Processes of individuation are a mix of purposeful constraints and material accidents. So the story is more subtle. Individuation is the limitation of accidents. Without constraint, the accidental would be unlimited. You would have the least globally individuated state of a generalised chaos - a meaningless host of localised accidents or fluctuations.

So it is not either/or. It is Aristotle’s four causes story, Peirce’s Hierarchical story, of purposeful global limits on freely occurring accidents. Individuation is the process of limiting those accidents - up until the point there is some reason to care.

Acts of individuation always wind up with plenty of accidental details that don’t matter in terms of whatever telos was in play. Twins with identical genetics could wind up with or without some particular mole. To the degree skin pigmententation mattered in a wider evolutionary sense, it was being controlled. Variety was being limited.

But if moles don’t matter in that sense, then they become unsuppressed freedoms. They are one of the accidents that genetics didn’t care enough about - a difference that doesn’t make a difference.

there's my apo! — csalisbury

Look at c trying hard to be all nasty and offensive. Just so cute.

[How does being a hippie on acid help you realize biosemiotics and talk about it often ] — csalisbury

Keep up. My attack was on the usual Romantic guff that motivates these kind of PoMo threads. Ooh, if only we would stop conceptualising and systematising everything, then we would really see things for how they are!

Hippies promoting altered states of perception was an example of how familiarly trite this advice is.

If you now feel compelled to bring biosemiosis into it, that's your look-out. It certainly betrays your fears about there being systems out there in philosophy-land well above your paygrade. Quick. Pretend to laugh it off with your trademark wit. Hit us between the eyes with a lack of capitalisation, textspeak and deconstructed paragraphing that speak to your outsider persona.

Yes, you are that easy to decode.

Pleasantries aside, you could pay more attention to what I actually posted now. :)

We create these stories in through thinking in an attempt to make sense of these forces. — Read Parfit

But the forces are also a "just a story". So what makes sense of what here?

Sure, that means we are in an epistemic bind. We only ever "talk about" reality. But what I'm picking you up on is the idea that one part of this talk is pure constructionism, the other might be talk about something concretely actual.

You are going with the usual reductionist division of epistemology that says our perception of abstracts or universals are just ideas, free inventions of the human mind, while our knowledge of the concrete particulars is something else - proper physical fact. And that framing is what I would question.

So yes, generally epistemology is a social construction of reality. That applies to the universal and the particular, the abstract and the concrete. It is all modelling.

But then modelling - if tied to the world in proper fashion - says the abstract and the concrete have a persisting reality. They are the forms and the actions that keep emerging as we hold our gaze. Symmetry is somehow just as real as the force which is the result of its breaking.

So the story is trickier. Platonism isn't just flat wrong. Symmetries are elements of reality, part of the ontic furniture of existence. Everything is a model. But also, we are seeing something true when it comes to the kind of abstract objects that force themselves upon physicalist theory.

You've squeezed from hippies what you can, so all that's left is an abstract, schematic [hippie]. — csalisbury

It was acid-tripping hippies. I was more specific.

So it is now you seeking to assimilate what I said as something carefully particular into a more generic conceptual frame - the one that allows you to exclaim, with smug triumph, there is surely more to hippies than just LSD or Carlos Castaneda.

As if I would have said otherwise.

Nuff of that hippie talk! what about sitting in silence and thinking about peirce and being vaguely mad about it and so getting online and posting?? Thats the real pragmatic ---- — csalisbury

My day is large enough to do lots of things. Isn't yours?

It is true that the number 1 does not directly describe something else that is physical, but directly describing something physical is not the purpose of generic thinking aids like math and logic truths. — Read Parfit

But 1 exists as the identity element. It is the name we give an actual universal symmetry. And can nature escape being a story of symmetries and their breaking?

Between Platonism and constructionism there is the middle path that realises maths is doing its level best to directly describe something that is actual and fundamental about reality.

Tom's universal computation is clearly not in that class. It is the mechanistic caricature of how the world really is. One of the convenient fictions.

But when you get down to the maths of symmetry and symmetry breaking, now you are closing your hand around something fundamentally true - true because its truth is simply inescapable as a necessary fact of existence in any sense.

That doesn't mean we have the whole story of mathematical symmetry either finished or correct. But there is a reason why we are not merely inventing happy fictions to pretend we exist in a reality of intelligible structure.

Some maths is just a game of patterns. But the core maths is a science of patterns.

Which is pretty well how I see things also. — Wayfarer

We sort of agree except I talk about sign rather than mind.

What I object to is the lingering dualism of treating consciousness as a substance, an immaterial soul-stuff or transcendent spirit.

But still, the other side of that traditional dualism - the one that speaks about matter as a material substance with all its own spooky actions and tendencies - has to be dissolved too.

And that is what I see semiotics doing. It dissolves both mind and matter as species of substantial being. They both become emergent states of semiotic organisation.