It is off topic. So I'll just say how I would respond personally. No to the stimulants as the mechanism is too crude. And no to the educational setting if it seemed a wrong fit.

So I would contrast my organic approach with the mechanical one you are describing. I would be critical of the drugs to the degree they are just a convincing mechanical metaphor. Are these nutrients to help your brain grow and flourish or some kind of turbocharger device you strap on, some kind of strong battery you plug in?

If you can't give an organic reason for why the drugs would be a true benefit, then you don't understand what you are doing. You are just learning to believe that you are essentially a machine - as this is what a machine would do.

Same with the college. If you can't give an organic reason of why what it does is going to help you grow and flourish, then you would be best to not believe in its value. If it is taking a mechanistic approach, again you will only learn to be a machine by going along with it.

I went through my own education with exactly these attitudes. I was sometimes a disgrace, sometimes top in the country. I once went a whole winter in shirtsleeves just because I didn't like the scratchy wool of the school jumper. On one hand, very silly. On the other hand, a formative experience.

But I think this is the secret here. If we view ourselves with a mechanistic logic, then all sorts of familiar discontents follow. Life looks quite different - or in fact, more how most folk would understand it - if seen through an organic lens focused on growth and flourishing.

Philosophy of course has plenty of good things to say about growth and flourishing. Aristotle was an organic thinker, even if he helped lay the foundations of a mechanical view too.

But, as I say in every post, organicism languishes as a well understood world view - as a metaphysics with a mathematical rigour.

Mechanicalism is held in high esteem because the mathematics of that (the very dumb and simple maths) has become something drummed in from birth. What could be more tragic than those parents of newborns who rush to decorate the baby room with the alphabet and numbers?

And this OP was tragic in celebrating a general rejection of totalising systems, just because the mechanical model is so patently dumb (if matchingly useful if you want a thoroughly mechanised life).

So what we ought to be focused on is the organic metaphysics that has the kind of rigour that lets us make better judgements because we know what actually makes life and mind tick.

Straight away we ought to be able to look at pills and schools seeing why they wouldn't lead to the best outcomes because they embody a mechanical crudeness. The reason why they would disappoint would leap out at us as obvious once we had the conceptual frame which allows us to perceive that.

[OK, the short off-topic reply just got turned into the on-topic again long-winded reply. Organically!]

Attempting to explain psychedelic experience to one who has not experienced it is like trying to describe colour to the congenitally blind. — Janus

But it works both ways. What is it like to have a mind that has never been blown? :grin:

Or if we are talking about the advantages of things being revealed, what is it like to have a mind that understands the neurochemistry? Will you ever know what you are missing?

We can all play these games. I say judge them on the pragmatic fruits. Which kinds of revealed truth are going to be of the most value to you over the course of a lifetime.

And of course, I am alert to the fact that our choices of which avenues of experience to pursue are the ones that end up defining us, so shaping our feeling about the answer as to what mattered. Your drug experiences may indeed be fundamental to your resulting sense of self. They did become the invaluable part of "you being you".

So you can't be persuaded they might be trite experiences when they are experiences integral to your ego. I respect that. It is why I say I am not making any high ground moral judgement.

But before you came flashing out of the woodwork to defend something you hold personal and dear, I was making an argument against the romanticised story being told via conceptualisers like Adorno, who talk of shedding their systematising tendencies and romping naked and exposed in the delights of pure unanalysed nature like ... so many acid-tripping hippies.

I still say that romanticism is as trite as can be - in the context of psychological science and pragmatic philosophy. LSD-taking is just another of those romanticised social tropes - a way to define the cool gang willing to cross the line, transcend the world as experienced by the mere normie.

So romanticism is the general target here. Acid tripping would be a particular example of a form of perception being assimilated to the OP's romanticised conceptualisation of experiencing the world in a ... God-like! ... transcendent fashion.

You replied exactly as predicted. So you can have your sacred knowledge of the experience and I'll stick to my sacred knowledge of the cognitive neurochemistry. At the end of my life, I know which will have had more value for me personally.

If drugs could give you greater functional clarity of mind, I might take them. But the boring conclusion is that paying attention to health and training is how you maintain any mental edge in the long term.

I mean, it is an accepted dogma that evolution itself is not 'intentional' — Wayfarer

All I can do is shrug and think of all the theoretical biologists who don't accept this dogma.

They might not accept your theistic dogma either - the claim that evolution might be driven by a divine or transcendent purpose.

But that is also OK by me.

Ever tried it? — Janus

Nope. I've avoided all mind-altering substances on the grounds my neurochemistry seems nicely functional, thank you. ;)

I did get drunk once 40 years ago. No point doing it a second time. I drink coffee a lot. But it has zero detectable effect mostly.

I don't say everyone has to take such a rigorous view of drug use on some kind of moral high ground. But it was a decision I had to make for myself early on - back when hippies were handing around joints and bogans were keen on getting hammered. I see it as a personal health choice. And having studied neurochemistry - of altered states indeed - LSD doesn't have any of the allure of the unknown or forbidden.

So go ahead. Tell me what I'm missing. But I've already read all the phenomenological reports. They will do me.

So, the vague, or the virtual, or whatever you want to call it, can be thought only in terms of everything the determinate is not, it would seem. — Janus

That would seem to be what I said. Internalism would take advantage of the resource that is apophatic reasoning.

Geist is such a versatile, polyvalent idea; — Janus

So vague then? It absorbs all contradictions like a thirsty sponge.

it could be adapted to almost any metaphysic; will, will to power, elan vital, natura naturans, God, apeiron...Or it could be taken just to represent the collective spirit of humankind; the totality of zeitgeists, so to speak. — Janus

But Hegel at least would have wanted it to anchor his general metaphysical scheme in some definite fashion. So it has to be granted some kind of particular meaning in that historical context.

Like it or not, we can't use the term as if it is actually completely vague and without concrete referential intent. It has to be opposed to some "other" when you employ it, not conveniently change its meaning whenever it encounters an objection on how you seem to be using it.

You are treating Geist like a Joker or blank card - something you can lay it down on the table and claim it completes the winning hand, without needing to reveal which proper card it is meant to represent in the game this time around.

Is there anything at all of philosophical merit at the back of all this?

I think what you want to point to is a generalised and diffuse sense of meaningfulness and intentionality - that oceanic feeling which can come over us at the top of the mountain when all feels right about the world spread out below us. Reality as a whole has a ... spirit. Our self, with its purposes, feels less bounded, less demarcated, and becomes one with ... everything.

But to bring this back to psychological reality, I would point out the "other" that is involved. This kind of emotional reaction - this sense of fit, of rightness, of salience, of intentional direction - is a natural cognitive dichotomy. We can feel it both generally - the flow experience - and also particularly, as the aha! experience. When we realise that 2+2 must equal 4, or we find the last bit that must complete the jigsaw, we have that sharp sense of psychic conviction. We have an intense jolt of belief.

We know that this sense of focused rightness - an emotional response to the salient - is basic to neurocognition as we can see what happens when it goes wrong. When it goes wrong, we get the many cases studies along the lines of Oliver Sacks' man who mistook his wife for a hat. Or just the blind certainty that we left the keys on the shelf as usual, so they must have been stolen, when in fact we left them in the front door.

So a logical philosophising frame of mind still relies on a well functioning deep sense of conviction that knows when an argument is actually true ... because it feels true at the level of blind conviction.

And because we can laugh at that view of knowable truth, so we must also laugh at its "other" in the form of Geist - if Geist cashes out as some generalised conviction about a world being experienced in terms of an all-pervading salience, a holistic guiding spirit, lacking any particular structure or definable feature.

Feeling things is not enough. We have to construct the intellectual frameworks that minimise the degree of helpless blind conviction that is involved. That is what a scientific or logico-mathematical level of semiosis is all about.

That is why I hold Peirce above all others involved in this little game. He did not deny feeling. He wrapped it around with a strong enough structure to test it as well as it could be tested. He set things out as the dichotomy of the particular and the general (secondness and thirdness) - acting in concert to separate the vague (or firstness) into a state of hierarchically poised order. Habits of interpretance.

So that is why I say if you want to talk about Geist - even if you mean to refer to the primacy of the purely vague - you have to get back to that having secured your general and particular notions of Geist. You do need a theory of Geist, coupled to a measurement of Geist, that then says something about Geist - even if apophatically as the ground from which Geist is understood in terms of that which it is not. That "other" now being the crisp conceptual framework which is particular Geist and general Geist as the limits of how Geist could be conceived.

A tricky business as usual. But that is internalism and its apophatic manoeuvre by which it catches a glimpse of its own self-origination.

I'm not sure if that disagrees with you or not. — T Clark

My point was that any perception of things inevitably requires the context of systematising thought. So to pose God as an ideal observer who would "see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows," is just a bit of silly propaganda.

An observer is already the taking of some viewpoint. It is an inherently conceptual act in that you choose some place that sets you apart from whatever it is. Perception is thus active and not passive. The self, as a carefully positioned observer, is being constructed in a fashion to produce a distinction which is then the observed observable. A distinction is being produced by an act of framing. To see anything as individual requires this act of contextualised individuation - a positioning of the observer (physically, mentally, conceptually) in a fashion that makes it so.

This is the point of semiosis. The mind produces the sign of the thing-in-itself to construct a "world" - an umwelt. So any reality - if the word has a useful meaning - is embodied in this triadic relation. It is observerhood - the forming of individuated points of view - that constructs a world of observables.

This semiotic view of course seems to raise difficulties. A human conception of the world is linguistically structured. Through physics and metaphysics, we create umwelts that are even mathematically systematic. We impose an intelligible logical structure on a world of observables. We see a nature ruled by laws or principles - and it works.

By moving up a level - away from the world as seen from the point of view of scattered individuals at a certain highly atypical moment in the Universe's history, what we would call "life on Earth" - we can construct the kind of "all seeing/objective" scientific observer that takes a universalised view of the observable. We become minds reading off the facts of reality spelt out in numbers and measurements.

So we already know how how a more God-like perspective works. If we want to construct the objective view from nowhere - the observer that stands outside the observable which is the entirety of creation revealed - then it is going to wind up the utterly systematised view. Everything is going to be reduced to a pattern of marks, a set of symbols standing for acts of measurement, a collection of numbers read of dials.

To speak of God seeing things as they really are is codswallop. Does He see the green of the grass like us? Or does He see the electromagnetic radiation with a certain countable frequency? What does He actually see - be specific.

Either his perception is pseudo-human, but imagined happening everywhere at once in omniscient fashion. He can see inside our bodies to witness the redness of our pulsating heart - even though no light penetrates to illuminate the hue. Or He is a super-scientist who has the measure of every distinction.

Somehow we imagine Him as being present everywhere to notice every distinctive event - every thermalising exchange of energy or information. And He really sees it as He - from his chosen vantage point that places him as the observer, the steady context - can record it as the mark of a difference ... that makes a difference ... to Him .... as He is the one holding steady ... and it moved, or changed, or reacted, within the systematised reference frame that He embodies.

It doesn't work. You can't have a God with a direct and unmediated perception of His own reality. The de-systematised view. Naked distinctions can't exist. The very thing of "a view" requires the conceptual frame that is reading the world as a system of meaningful signs. An observer is an act of constructing a locus of stability - a point of view - that can then reveal surround instabilities as differences that make a difference ... to that supposedly stable point of view.

Again, the hypothesis was: He would "see each thing clearly as precisely that which it is and nothing else, and he would not need to use a concept to catch it and reduce it to something else he already knows."

That is a screamingly stupid sentence. It goes against everything we understand about the psychology of perception and consciousness. Why would anyone want to romanticise it as the proper way to do philosophy?

Philosophy wants literally to lose itself in everything that is heterogeneous to it, without bringing it back to ready-made categories. It would like to nestle in close to what it isn’t ... Its aim is undiminished kenosis, self-emptying. — Adorno

So Adorno sees that observables exist for observers. We have to construct ourselves systematically as "a point of view" to register a world as some ordered pattern of measurements, some memorable arrangement of meaningful and localised responses.

But now this carefully constructed self wants to lose itself back in the world of things as they "just are". It wants the unreduced experience of the unsystematic observer.

As if there are still observables without that construction of a context.

We are back to hippies popping tabs of acid to open the doors of perception. It is that trite.

You keep replying in non sequiturs.

Competition holds the advantage in the short run, cooperation in the long run. It ain’t rocket science.

That's because you assume that rational self interest is always optimal, — Posty McPostface

No I don’t.

You are still talking as if I said something different. If we have all the information, we can strike the balances which best satisfy our mutual interests. But likewise, we can also judge when selfish choices are wiser.

You lost me at the prisoners dilemma. Game theory studies competition and cooperation. You chose the set up that makes cooperation impossible due to lack of an opportunity to interact. Uninteresting.

I beg to differ. — Posty McPostface

Plainly.

Well, just take the Prisoners dilemma for example or the tragedy of the commons, or the fact that economics treats what is rational with self interest. All of these situations arise because we place a higher value of our own welfare than that of others in much of Westernized society. — Posty McPostface

But to the degree these are models of how collaborative good can arise out of selfish actions, then they are hardly egocentric. They speak to the social science understanding that flourishing requires a self-organising and adaptive balance of competitive and co-operative actions. Both are right as both are needed. And that is what the psychological fixes would be targeting as the reality.

So the commons are a good thing - so long at the personal vs group dynamic is balanced by "market forces". Economic self-interest is rational - so long as it is framed within a generally shared social context that generates sufficient real equality of opportunity (and factors in the true long-term costs of its economic activities).

I don't want to turn this thread into a critique of modern society; but, it's almost inevitable that this thread will take that turn. Why is that? — Posty McPostface

Because we are changing everything so fast. Humans are socially constructed and humans are changing the society that constructs them. When else in history has there been such a need to consider the kinds of people we are making?

And it cuts both ways. The Millennials could be making the right world for them, so Baby Boomers and Gen Xers should be shoving over, letting the change happen quicker.

Who can decide without a clearer theory of what really works?

Yeah, so doesn't that prove the point that psychology is in need of a paradigm shift from the ego-centric model? — Posty McPostface

You mean like Positive Psychology? Which is a paradigm shift I've been tracking for some time. Where I live, it's been part of the damn national educational curriculum for a decade now. You can't get much more officially mainstream than that.

And among Millennials generally, it is one of their supposed hallmarks - a pro-social individualism. It expresses itself in social enterprise, the sharing economy, and other economic philosophies meant to roll back the excesses of funny money capitalism.

I'm not saying all of psychology is egocentric; and I sure hope it isn't, but there's really no way to frame the issue otherwise, or is there? — Posty McPostface

Social constructionism does not deny individuality. We are biologically various. So brains can be just broke at that level. And competition is part of the mix that social machinery would want to positively foster. You want people who have some assertiveness, self-esteem and motivation. Society needs creative energy as well as its generalised habits of constraint and collaboration.

So yes, there is definitely another way to frame the issues. But one that incorporates the natural thing of self-interested competition as part of the productive mix.

For example can the "unbridled everythingness" exist or subsist prior to the crisp somethingness of spatio-temporal existence? Does the latter emerge from the former or are they co-dependent, co-emergent? — Janus

It's something of both.

As soon as there is any definite development towards something, it counts also as a definite move away from something. So it is co-emergent in that sense. As soon as there is enough of a history, enough of a developing story, that points in the direction of the crisp, then there is also the direction pointing away from the vague.

Yet when this co-emergence is first the case, it is as vaguely the case as possible. It is only by the end of time that it could arrive at fully actualised crispness. So in some sense, the vague actually exists for a while before it gets supplanted. When the Big Bang first happened, it would have been so hot, so dense, that its physical state counts for something so generally vague and structureless that we might as well call it a state of actual vagueness. It was 99.99999...% vague. We can treat that as a concrete state of being which then gets dissipated by the cooling and expanding that leaves the Universe crisply flat and empty - its state at the end of time when it has hit its Heat Death.

So this is a feature of the language being triadic. The metaphysics requires a pair of dichotomies - the developmental or diachronic one that speaks to the vague~crisp, and the developed or synchronic one that speaks to the hierarchically structure state of being organised in a definite local~global fashion.

So two axes map the story. One tracks the emergence of crisply divided order. The other is like the cross-section view that measures just how well divided everything has become.

At the beginning, when vagueness rules, there is no cross-section to speak of. It is like a debating the width of a point as the local and the global - that is, the local actions and the global directions - are pretty much indistinguishably the same thing. They are so unseparated that they just look like a chaotic froth of quantum fluctuations.

But exponentially the actions and the directions move apart. You get the expansion and cooling that constructs a clear local~global separation. The froth settles and condenses into massive particles blundering around in a yawning void.

It is this duality of the axes of description - the longitudinal view vs the cross-sectional view - which make talking about the character of the beginning so tricky. The beginning is like a now featureless point. It has the least length possible - the shortest distance separating the vague from the crisp. And also the least width possible - the shortest distance separating the local from the global.

So it is simply the nature of triadic metaphysics that you have to be imagining a duality of dichotomous separations.

Dyadic metaphysics is dead simple. Just apply LEM to choose option A or B.

Or upgrade to dialectics and be mildly puzzled by a little ninja move like sublation. Thesis generates antithesis, but is resolved in synthesis, all ready to launch another spin around the same basic spiral.

But Peirce is another level beyond. You've got the longitudinal and the cross-sectional stories of a development that says both the determinate and the indeterminate are being crisply actualised out of the same unresolved initial vague blur.

I agree it can be very confusing. The beginning is when chance rules. You have unbriddled everythingness. But chance in any strongly constrained or determinate sense - chance as actual possibility - only emerges and achieves its fullest expression at the end of time. At the beginning, chance lacks the generality or regularity it gains later in the story. Even calling the beginning "chaotic" is an understatement as chaos is already the product of a definite set of boundary conditions.

I actually haven't stated any metaphysical commitments of my own, or even that I have any metaphysical commitments. — Janus

Not even to Geist? Is my memory that bad?

I think this is much more of a dualistic setup than what I was proposing. — Janus

Well again, do you have a proposal that doesn't retreat back into vague indeterminism every time I give it a prod?

You are happy to be sort of flat, but not radically flat. You are happy to be sort of dualistic, but not arch-dualistic.

So do you see a pattern? You want the benefits of making structural assertions, yet shy away from the costs. You mount challenges based on definite distinctions that you back away from as soon as that hard line is questioned.

A whole epistemology could of course be constructed on "treading lightly" in this fashion. It could be made to sound a good thing. Wittgenstein gets wheeled out all the time to tell us whereof one cannot speak.

But I can only reply in terms of my own objective here - which is to push until even the vague is crisply modelled and we can arrive at some kind of happy metaphysical terminus in terms of the question, "Why anything?".

Meaning, that for much of the past history of psychology, the importance of the self has been elevated over the concerns of society, giving rise to what I call delusional psychology — Posty McPostface

I don't really see that at all. Freudian psychology might be highly egocentric perhaps. But regular psychology has been focused on society's need to jam round pegs into square holes most of the time. Hence the dominance of the medical defect model where people are assumed to be broken parts, not partners in co-construction of self and society.

here's also a deep and insidious ad hominen hidden in what you call "A poor personal fit" here, think the label "mental disorder". — Posty McPostface

But it is me pointing that out!

That's a futile task. I'm reminded of the man who spent a week to detail one day of his life, who was never able to complete his autobiography in time. — Posty McPostface

You say it is futile. But your responses are anecdotal rather than evidential. And one of the skills that positive psychology would aim to teach here is to be able to break out of that kind of self-fulfilling circle where you assume stuff - like that typical psychology is highly egocentric - and then brush off all suggestions to the contrary ... in egocentric fashion.

However, I've noticed a trend happening in the field of psychology where this tendency of the analysis of the self is being replaced with the analysis of the self in respect to reality. This can be seen in CBT and some other forms of therapy, such as 'Reality Therapy'. — Posty McPostface

This just seems an example of what many have realised - we are socially constructed beings. So the focus of treatment for many psychological complaints - to the degree they are not strongly biological - is how people can better negotiate their position within their social world.

Of course, that leads to the political/economic question of whether that society is the right kind of world in the first place. A poor personal fit could reflect on the society itself. And it might be the good copers who suffer a kind of pathology in becoming so well adapted to the demands of their social environment.

Then, more optimistically, there is also the Positive Psychology movement that says "Reality Therapy" should be taught to everyone. It is not just there to fix the ill. It is the learnable basics of being mentally healthy.

Learning about how social construction works - how we get programmed for life by our early social influences - is also how we can transcend that early programming to make what might be more adaptive choices in terms of our attitudes and beliefs.

...actually an even flatter ontology than what I would recommend, because I do not think we can be exhaustively understood in the same way as the rest of the world. — Janus

But I am arguing for pragmatism. So not only am I arguing against an exhaustive account, I have argued that the very logic is instead to find the account which ignores the most that it can. What we are interested in arriving at are our limits of indifference that thus give crisp definition to the "other" that is ourself.

We exist as organisms to the degree we can take the world for granted in pursuing the desires that best define us. That is the autonomous condition towards which we strive to develop.

Also, as i see it, to explain ourselves in the same terms we explain the world is not internalism, but if anything would be more of an externalism, if not an ultimate denial of the whole distinction, since the sign relation is not understood to begin with humans as far as I understand. — Janus

You are still setting this up dualistically. It is the inside vs the outside. The observer vs the observables.

Internalism, in the sense I am using it, is to understand Being in terms of the triadic sign relation that produces both distinctions themselves. It is the difference between immanence/development and transcendence/creation. The observer and the observables are the splitting apart that allow the wholeness of a sign relation mediating that divide in a long-run, habitual, way.

Inside and outside are again our names for the absolute limits within which reality itself would arise.

So internalism certainly starts with the epistemological argument - we are trapped inside our own heads making models of a world.

But then internalism becomes an ontology by saying all reality arises via that kind of "mindlike" relation. This opposes it to externalism which says our minds are in fact completely explainable by objective material physics ... or a transcendent creator.

Externalism lets you pick your poison on that score. Either matter or mind is understood as the world that is larger, and so stands outside, its "other".

As I say, internalism goes the other direction. It brings the objective and the subjective into the one world as two opposing limits in a historically mediated interaction.

I would go for a kind of "flat' ontology, where there is no absolute distinction between inner and outer, higher and lower. That's why I often argue with you that we are not exhaustively socially constructed, because to say that is to valorize a kind of anthropocentric internalism that denies that our experience is in the world, or the world and mediated by the world. — Janus

So it seems you want the benefits of my structured system without having to commit to the notion of that structure. It is to be left "flat". That is vague and beyond contradictions. :)

Look, my internalism is explicitly the triadic internalism of Peirce and not the dualistic internalism of Kantian representationalism. Peirce was trying to fix the issues with Kantianism (and Hegelism), while being quite scornful of Cartesianism.

So yes, it is not "flat" but comes with clear triadic structure. And remember that Peircean semiotics cashes out in ontological pansemiosis.

The internalism might start as the psychological or epistemic reality. But the speculative metaphysical claim (increasingly in accordance with what the physics says) is that the Cosmos itself bootstraps into being via ontic semiosis.

The anthropomorphic story of the human semiotic condition is that we are "modelling the world with us in it". So we are now beyond simple realism and even indirect representationalism in seeing our own selves, as observers, arising along with the umwelt that is our field of observables, the set of signs by which we relate to the actual world as the thing-in-itself.

The dualism is replaced by a trichotomy where the "self" is found in the same place as the "world" is found - both being the complementary aspects of the mediating system of signs that emerges with habitual definiteness in the middle.

The usual assumption is that nature would want some kind of direct veridical connection between consciousness and reality. Our view of the world should be faithful to its reality. But the psychological evidence already tells us that we want to be able to ignore the actual world so as to be able to live in a world of our own creative invention - the world where we are freely choosing beings able to impose our own desires and forms on its inert materiality. And so that is the kind of umwelt we have to develop. A world that is fit for that kind of self. A system of habitual signs is how we construct this mediating tale.

And then - pansemiotically and ontically - the world would also be understood as "a model with itself in it". It becomes a self, an enduring and autonomous state of affairs, by developing a structure of habits that represent it. It develops laws that encode what it means to be "the Universe". It becomes a system of constraints expressing the purpose of being "that thing" until it safely reaches the very end of time.

So I am certainly not denying the world. Pansemiosis is an attempt to explain the world in the exact same terms we would explain ourselves.

No, I actually think both internalism and externalism are wrongheaded. — Janus

And yet it is externalist language you keep using against my account.

Just calling any explanation "wrong" is a sound tactic I guess. But you could instead put forward some clear story on what you might in fact believe here.

If it is neither internalism nor externalism, what is it?

That "unbridled everythingness" would seem to be, for you, the genesis state prior to the existence of anything. — Janus

So I can keep saying that I am attempting to describe a limit and you will keep ignoring that?

I am trying to do justice to an internalist metaphysics. You keep replying to that from an externalist perspective. You are demanding the kind of crisp initial conditions that could be the definite start of things - even if that then propels you straight into your infinite regress of "first moments" and "first actions". I am describing how things are when beginnings dissolve into a vagueness that is less than nothing, as nothing already supposes the actualised possibility of an absence.

Can we say that state exists, or subsists, eternally (since it is atemporal and aspatial)? Insofar as it is prior to any temporal or spatial existence it is utterly indeterminate and indeterminable; and it follows that we cannot say anything about it at all. — Janus

This is just a formula of words to justify a claim of arriving at an externalist perspective. So no. That would be a false victory in my view. Pragmatism is the embracing of internalism. It doesn't have to beat it by the end.

And - treating vagueness as a limit - we can say plenty about it in crisply apophatic fashion.

We know that we came out of it. We know that this somethingness develops via a dichotomous or dialectical logic. We know that the Cosmos is the result of a quite mathematically specific cascade of symmetry breakings.

So we can reverse the physics to wind everything back to a crisp model of a vague limit. We can imagine a definite start in a state of "perfect symmetry". We can form an image of the vague that does some pragmatic work.

And then, in Kantian fashion, we can accept it is then only the image of the thing-in-itself - the metaphysical umwelt we have created to turn the unspeakable into a speakable theory. So it becomes the story secured against the measurable somethingness of the world as we find it to be. Which is of course better than a metaphysics secured against nothing much at all except some shallow reductionist and mechanical conception of cause and time.

If we don't believe in classical physics, why would we believe in classical metaphysics? Why would you keep promoting classical cause and effect thinking as the framework that anything I say must assimilate itself to? That is exactly what I mean to challenge at the fundamental level.

Crisp classicality certainly exists. But as another emergent limit on Being. It describes the world after it has developed into a large cold void occupied by small hot objects. It describes the counter ideal of a world that is simply a completely constrained and deterministic mechanism.

Our human ability to postulate sameness / endurance enables us to conceptualize and count. But it is only an appearance, in a dialectic with 'difference'. — mcdoodle

As usual, folk try to make it reductionistically a case of either/or when it stares them in the face that it is holistically both.

We can see the same because we can see the different. And we can see the different because we can see the same. They are two complementary limits bounding our conceptions.

So the OP is balderdash in striving for some superiority of "direct perception" over "systematising conception". That is not how things work either psychologically or metaphysically.

The general and the particular are both forms of conception used to framed our acts of perception. We don't just zero in on differences, but differences we believe make a difference. So a lack of sameness, the existence of individuation, is a judgement that depends on a prevailing generalisation about what should mostly be the case, and hence what now stands out as a significant difference, not a difference we would merely ignore.

Why isn't it statically present in one spot forever? — TheGreatOne

Our experience of time is anticipatory. The brain works by guessing what is just about to happen (which is mostly going to be a continuation of what has just happened). And so the flow of time is experienced as the degree to which things matched strong expectation while being punctuated at distinct points by various surprises.

Thus our experience of time is inherently dynamic rather than static. If we see a falling ball, we already expect it to drop, hit the ground, bounce up.

Psychologically, time does appear to freeze or hang suspended in moments of very great surprise when we can't effectively react in an anticipation based way. Like in a car crash. The usual smooth flow created by forward modelling gets lost and our experience of time becomes halted in a weird fashion.

You then have the separate issue of how this relates to the block universe story on time.

My two cents on that is the block universe is a convenient modelling fiction. Physics just models time as having time symmetry so it can do its calculations. It spatialises time so that going forward looks the same as going backwards, thus erasing the symmetry-breaking significance of moving beyond some "point in time".

But that leaves energy and thermodynamics out of the modelling. It leaves out the fact that change in the universe has a thermodynamical arrow that is not some kind of illusion.

So no need to take the block universe at face value. It is a model that simplifies reality in a way useful for doing calculations. Physics already knows it likely needs an emergent thermal model of time if it wants to get to a quantum gravity theory of everything.

And so you burble on and on....

I’m not relying on the principle, just explaining why multiverse thinking gets associated with it.

Multiverses are the product of locally deterministic thinking without anything concrete to constrain the infinity of possible worlds that then have to result. So the only constraint left is the non-constraint of the anthropic principle - the quite reasonable conclusion that if every alternative exists, then we live in one of those where we could arise as observers. Survivor bias.

But my metaphysical position is very different. I am arguing constraint is primary and so that already limits existence to the single Cosmos that is mathematically intelligible or coherent.

The fact that we exist to appreciate that is a huge surprise perhaps. It is certainly generally allowed - as intelligence does a good job of increasing entropy production. But constraint by its very nature isn’t directed towards a goal like creating a world fit for humans. We aren’t being reserved for some other more grand purpose as @Wayfarer wants to suggest.

OK. So there is your mystical version and then there is the scientific rationalist version.

But the anthropic principle is only required if the multiverse is the case. We exist in a universe that just by pure accident had the characteristics necessary to produce observers like us.

So I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Do you think that there’s any relationship between these ‘six numbers’ and the ‘constraints’ you’re referring to? — Wayfarer

At the Big Bang, all you had was a cooling~expanding bath of radiation. Too hot for any stability. There was no effective difference between all the different kinds of particles - each particle we know today being just one possible way of breaking the symmetry of the grand unified theory (GUT) force.

So initially, there was very little constraint, apart from the general one of a constraint of action to a three dimensional spatial framework that could in fact cool by expanding. Particles were vanilla in all moving at relativistic speed, all having effectively the same mass, all just being different versions of a generally unconstrained gauge symmetry-breaking. A fluctuation might be quark-like one instant, lepton-like the next. The six numbers weren't yet locking in much by way of stable material identity. It was a hot soup freely flashing through all its modes.

The hard little numbers that stand for the constants are what you would arrive at at the "end of time". It is what all that wildness would look like once it has cooled~expanded and arrived at its classical limit. So the constants weren't there to ensure things got going. They were there in a latent fashion as the values which would be left once all the symmetries got broken down by the cooling~expanding.

The connection between constraints and constants is thus that the vital numbers are emergent from the constrained relations.

The really fundamental constants are the Planck triad of h, G and c which encode - via their various reciprocal or dichotomous relations - the basic attributes of spacetime extent and material action. And being formally reciprocal, the vital number just ends up being 1 - the identity element.

This is rather Platonic as it means we understand them like a shape, a structure, a ratio that is constant. Like a triangle, any material size drops out of the picture. The size of a triangle might as well always be set to 1. It is the structural relationship that defines the existence of the triangle, not its size measured in any material sense.

Rees of course confuses the issue because he mixes up the physical constants that would be mathematically necessary for some kind of cosmos as a dissipative structure, and the "constants" that a particular kind of Cosmos would have to have to be able to result in us as observers of its existence.

So - as usual - constraints also spell freedoms. Aspects of our universe could be regarded as just accidental. And multiverse anthropery applies to the extent that is so. The fine-tuning that gives us life might only exist for some accidental choice of universe.

It is an open question of how much of the contingency will be removed by the progress towards a structural theory of everything. The space of possible existences might be very limited by Platonic-strength principles. Or it might not.

But that is the relation between constraints and constants. Constraints break the symmetry. Constants are the "residue" that is the eventual limit to that symmetry breaking. Constants put a number on the steady balance that emerges when things can't be broken down any further.

So it would be reasonable to think that the 'aperion' is not something 'created' — Wayfarer

You are trying to assimilate the Apeiron to a materialist ontology. So you are thinking of causality in terms of constructive action - everything starting with a material/efficient cause. And so, metaphysically, the question that the Milesian first philosophers were trying to answer was "what fundamental substance is reality made out of?".

Some dude says water must be that ur-stuff. Some other dude says it must be air. Everyone seems to be after the primal element, and so Anaximander is just talking about this other kind of stuff - the inexhaustible Apeiron.

But pay attention. He was talking about the boundless. He was characterising a naked potentiality that is logically all that would remain after all constraint was removed. So now creation becomes constraints-based, not construction-based. It starts with formal and final cause, not material and efficient cause.

It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about creation. We don't start with some uncreated stuff - the material required to construct. We start with the structural limitation of the unformed and the undirected. We begin with the process of reining in possibility itself so as to start to have a material world that expresses the intelligibility of form and finality in its existence.

Sure, construction quickly follows. Indeed, some form of constructive material activity is going to have to be there pretty much from the start. History has to begin by freedoms being physically disposed of in a fashion that makes the past materially concrete.

But you can only understand Anaximander by flipping your understanding of how creation works. It doesn't start with some ur-stuff that then gets busy for some reason, but with some ur-constraint on possibility itself. Materiality is what arises from this.

So the Apeiron is not an "eternal and inexhaustible stuff". To try to understand it as a pre-existing building material is to completely miss the point.

Right, that's exactly the uneducated metaphysical speculation I was referring to. — Metaphysician Undercover

Oddly, you seem happy with what this "uneducated metaphysical speculation" - ie: physics - has to says about perpetual motion machines, but not what it then has to say about dissipative structures.

Try to keep up with the educated view.

If you deny the need for a directing agent, then you are only saying that order could emerge out of disorder. — Metaphysician Undercover

Exactly right. That is what I am saying. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organization

I am taking a constraints based approach. So that would start from a state of unbridled everthingness. It would be action in an infinity of directions, hence a blur of fluctuations with no directions. Then as action started to get organised, form a flow in a limited number of directions - ie: three dimensions - you would start to have a somethingness because all that everythingness had mostly been suppressed.

So that is the general difference. Instead of starting with nothing and wondering how something - something material - appeared for no reason, I take the constraints view were everthing is trying to happen in chaotic and disconnected fashion, and so all that is required is that some form of organisation emerges to limit the chaos and shape it into some recognisable flow of events.

It seems to me that insofar as structured being can be defined it is defined in crisp terms. It doesn't make much sense to me to define something in vague terms; a vague definition is not a definition at all precisely to the extent that it is vague. — Janus

Isn’t that why Platonism ran into problems? We can imagine the ideal triangle. We also accept that no actual triangle would be so perfect. So we can imagine the structure (of symmetries) as being perfect and ideal. And then any material incarnation of those structures is going to be only a material approach to that ideal limit. It will be always vague or uncertain that the ideal has been met.

Say you believe that prior to the BIg Bang there was a "sea" of quantum fluctuations. or some such. Would that be a state of absolute vagueness? Would there be any determinacy in that? Or would there be any determinacy in anything at all independently of us? An undetermined determinacy perhaps? — Janus

You keep trying to trap me into talking your way - where vagueness is understood as something dualistically independent. And of course that way of talking winds up paradoxical. So accept that I am talking in terms of the mutual causation of a dichotomy. The absolute, in being the limit of existence, becomes precisely what can never exist as then it would no longer stand in a mutual relation with its dichotomous other.

I think the problem is the same for the "crisp". — Janus

That was my point. Folk take crispness for granted. The PNC applies without a second thought. I am saying it will always be relative to a point of view. So we sit in the middle of existence and act as if it is completely crisp or determinate. We don’t even consider that it never could be completely as vagueness is always an irreducible aspect of the very existence of any determinism. We only know the crisp in terms of an empirical lack of vagueness. So the vague is what we vanquish by measurement. And measurement is never complete when you are inside the world needing to be exactly measured.

Do you agree that emergence is a type of change? And doesn't change require time? — Metaphysician Undercover

Time is change with a general direction. That general direction is what emerges due to symmetry breaking. So time does not pre-exist change as such when there is only change, or fluctuation, lacking in a general direction.

The vague is to be understood as dichotomous to the crisp. So if we understand what it is to be determinate, then we can understand what can be said about its “other”.

The problem here of course is that you are still trying to make sense of this in terms of one kind of thing becoming its other thing - a dualistically disconnected story of vagueness completely disappearing and crispness completely replacing it, as though the two can’t exist simultaneously.

But my logic is that of a triadic or hierarchical development. So what emerges by a dichotomous separation is the clarity that all structured being lies defined by these two absolute limits - that of the vague and the crisp.

Vagueness emerges also in a retroductive fashion as something now made definite by the emergence of the crisp. So while you might want to arrange them as the start and the end of being - and that may be the temporal story that emerges as the crisp develops, and the vague becomes clearly that which was left behind - the big picture is the vague only has “existence” in a sense relative to what we mean by a definitely structured existence.

If there is no time, then emergence, which is a type of change, is impossible. So it doesn't make any sense to say that there was potential before there was time, — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm saying time emerges. A global temporal organisation emerges as a symmetry breaking (or indeed, a series of them in which time takes on an increasingly definite and classical character).

I mentioned earlier the current cosmological modelling of the Planck scale in terms of relativistic anomalies. The first moment - before there was any proper distinction between gravity and the other forces - was a hot soup of blackholes and wormholes. Spacetime - in any sense that it existed - was so curved and disconnected that we can only understand it in terms of features like time wormholes where past and future did not yet exist. There was no forward and backward direction wired in, so time might as well be going in one direction at one point, a different direction at another point.

So on the basis of the known physics, this is our best retroductive description of the earliest conceivable state.

Now you can ignore what the physics suggests on this score. But I prefer to let the available evidence inform the metaphysics. Especially when on logical grounds, Peirce had already set out the machinery of this kind of radically emergent ontology.

In your kind of model the radical vagueness or indeterminacy is not only "there" at the beginning of time but "always", no? It is the eternal out of which the temporal forever emerges? Do you presume it to be radically indeterminate in itself or merely for us? — Janus

Can one point to what ain't there? Sure. People do it all the time when it comes to negation. From our vantage point - observing from our state of determinate being - It can be crisply determinate that some thing doesn't exist.

Vagueness is then just the same, just more extreme. We are pointing to the very lack of crisp being, the very lack of any determination in any form or material degree, and giving it a name.

For you to talk about what it is "in itself" is already smuggling unwarranted definiteness into the concept of the vague. Old habits may die hard, but questions about whether the vague is inside or outside time, inside or outside space, inside or outside energetic action, are all queries that can only make sense if you presume the distinctions could even apply in intelligible fashion. But the definition of vagueness would be that they don't. As Peirce said, vagueness is that to which the principle of contradiction fails to apply.

So to point to vagueness, we have to "point" at that which is unspeakable in lacking intelligibility. But we can then say some very precise things about it on the presumption that the intelligible itself had to "exist" within that vague grounding potential as the intelligible is clearly what has emerged out of it. The PNC does apply to the existence we know, to the degree it has a crisply developed state - a state composed of its definite presences and definite absences.

Simply put, it states that if at any time, there was only potential, there would always be only potential, because if any actuality comes into existence it requires an actuality as its cause. — Metaphysician Undercover

But didn't you slip up in presuming that time always exists? My approach says it emerges. So when there is only the originating potential in "existence" (which of course, can't be existence as we normally mean it), then there is no actual time. At best, time is one of the possible emergent outcomes of a process of cosmological evolution, along with space and energy.

So there is a suppressed premise here - that time exists before the existence in which I say it emerges.

The argument was intended by Aristotle, to demonstrate that anything eternal is necessarily actual, and it appears to produce an infinite regress of actuality. That's why Aristotle introduced the eternal circular motion. as the representation of this eternal actuality. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. And I reject the premise of eternality, and so I can stop looking for outs that don't work, like a cyclic cosmology. For me, infinite regress is solved by the starting points turning radically vague and indeterminate. Exactly as suggested by Big Bang quantum physics.

In the theological representation, eternal means outside of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

And outside space and energy too. Outside existence in general. Hence the abstract realm of Platonism.

Doesn't really work, I'm afraid.

It views the impetus of motion as "historical weight", inertia, — Metaphysician Undercover

The actual physical argument is way more interesting. There is in fact a limit to the constraint of motion. You can suppress action - breaking its symmetries - right down to the point you arrive at the fundamental symmetries of translation and rotation. So a Cosmos exists because, in the end, there is a concrete limit to the symmetry breaking. You arrive at motions so simple in the form of inertial spin and inertial motion, that they can't be made simpler.

You are taking the view that motion could be completely eradicated and so absolute rest would be the natural baseline state of existence. But inertial motion could be used as proof of my constraints-based approach. The fact that spin and straight-line motion are energy conserving symmetries - symmetries that can't be broken - shows that your atomistic assumptions about absolute rest can't be right. Physics has concrete proof against your metaphysics.