I don't agree. I think physics qua philosophy is in a state of complete and possibly terminal confusion. — Wayfarer

Easy to claim, but now let's see the evidence.

Is naturalism terminally confused? How are you to explain away 2500 years of success then?

The central question of philosophy as far as Plato is concerned, is the state of one's soul. — Wayfarer

Uh, yeah.

I mean it is important to be able to place ourselves in the world in some meaningful relation. We want to understand the truth of that.

Again, I don't see evidence of naturalism's failure.

I agree that in some true sense, modern society feels sick and badly adjusted. Humanity is quite carried away and artificial, or superficial, in its relation to the natural world on which its existence ultimately depends.

But that is all down to Romanticism and its belief that we are all individuals with a soul or spirit, answerable only to whatever we ultimately "find within".

So it is the way of thinking you want to support - the supernatural one - which is the source of our misunderstandings. Romanticism is what has led us away from nature.

Oh, I agree that Scientism has done that too - man's technological triumph over nature. But the Scientism you bemoan is part of Romanticism. It is just the final disconnect where the metaphysical belief in some higher transcendent purpose becomes completely internalised as a selfishness of purpose. If nature is made meaningless, we become our own god. Because what else is there.

So that is why I am arguing your metaphysics is in a tangle. You agree about the general diagnosis of the modern condition, yet you are blaming on naturalistic inquiry what is just the other face of a failure to be truly naturalistic.

But as far as I am concerned, philosophy has to be existential, not simply explanatory in the physical sense. — Wayfarer

Yeah. Existentialism is Romanticism taken to its Scientistic conclusion. Nature has no meaning. All meaning has to be constructed by "your self".

That is why it is so important to feel our continuity with nature. Which is what got the thread started - the fact that physics now recognises that continuity at the most fundamental level of entropy and information.

We are not different from nature. We are a thermodynamic expression of nature.

You then reject that as you think we can't just be entropy producers. But a holistic understanding of nature sees that the dichotomy of entropy and negentropy is intrinsic. One does not deny the other. Each requires its other. It is a harmony and not the war you imagine - even if it is not exactly a "harmony" either. :)

Thomas Nagel. And the sentiment is not too remote from Peirce's idealistic side. — Wayfarer

Sure. Let's use metaphysics to connect to nature.

I'm just pointing out the degree to which you presume nature to be mentalistic and "not physical" at root. What you focus on is evolved agency rather than raw potential.

This is why you seek a monistic idealism in Peirce's writings. This is how you can know you "win".

But this is just so anthropomorphic. It makes the human state of being the centre of the Cosmos. Existence becomes "a state of mind, a state of spirit, a soul-stuff".

Science is a method for forcing us to look out into the world and seeing it in its own terms. It is a de-centering project.

Yes, you can complain it is dehumanising. But that is just Scientism doing its best to turn human civilisation into an unthinking thermodynamic engine. It is a consequence of not realising the Romantic view is wrong in encouraging us to look inwards and ignore what is happening with nature.

You've made naturalism your philosophical enemy here. And that is the sad thing.

I have a hard time with the concept that B following A always happens, but it could also not happen. — Marchesk

History has a way of constraining possibility. So it is true that the world seems to be fundamentally causal in this fashion. We can describe some general law that must be obeyed by every particular material event. Regularity gets locked in by a context.

However physics also now tells us that at the fundamental level - once history and context have been stripped away - then action seems to become a-causal or indeterministic.

Take the decay of an atom. It is a Poisson process. In any instant, the probability of it happening or not happening remains the same. There is no temporal sequence in which we can say that the pressure to decay built until it was an inevitability. The decay remains a spontaneous or "un-caused" event.

Of course, there are still the distal or contextual causes of the decay. Someone or some history would have had to prepare the atom that does the decay. But our conventional deterministic notion of causality breaks-down at the quantum limit. The determinism we assign to the world is revealed to be an emergent feature - a statistical property of large numbers.

So this does not support what you call a Humean view of causation - that it could all be just one mass of amazing coincidences. There is good reason to think in terms of general laws that cause particular events to happen. The weight of history, the weight of context, is a real thing. Completely predictable statistical regularity does develop on the large scale.

But it also has to change our understanding of what we could mean by law or causal determinism. We are only justified to talk about the general constraints on spontaneity. We have to accept that anything could happen next - at the primal or small scale level. Fluctuations rule.

Yet then, the expectation that "anything could happen" recedes to the degree that some regularising history has developed. Once we are dealing with large numbers, the probability that A is followed by B - that the sun will rise tomorrow - becomes "almost sure". We may as well call the probability to be 1, absolute certainty.

Of course, our belief that the sun will rise is bolstered by our having a rational explanation. We know that stars last billions of years, and earth rotates as it orbits the sun. We have a mechanical story of the causes involved.

But again, mechanics is just an account of a system in a state of "absolute constraint". All the degrees of freedom, all the spontaneity, have been adequately suppressed. We can throw away any doubt and model the system as a clockwork.

So mechanics is just a limit state description of fluctuations gone to equilibrium. It is not the way the world fundamentally is - at the small or primal scale. But it is certainly the way the world has pretty much become once it has cooled and expanded enough to be completely constrained by its own history.

To put it a slightly different way - Perhaps you could say science is concerned with ‘what we can explain’; metaphysics with ‘what explains us’ (including the abiility we have to explain) — Wayfarer

I dunno. As I've just described, I think physics is doing a good job of advancing the ontological project of metaphysics.

Greek metaphysics - if we date that to Anaximander - has been a huge revolution in human thought because it has shown how immensely successful the assumption of natural causes could be. If we are asking ontological questions, naturalism has been winning hands down ever since. Yet you want to take the curious position that supernatural causes are still just as much in play.

Now reason understands that remote possibilities can never be eliminated. Yet any fair reading of the history of ontology would have to agree that naturalism rules. That has been the presumption that has worked.

So yes, not all mysteries have been conquered. But we can understand why. When questioning becomes self-referential, it reaches an epistemic limit. In the end, not every question can be answered. But that doesn't then prove the ontological existence of woo. It just accepts we can't completely eliminate uncertainty, even if we can minimise our uncertainty to the point we really ought to cease to care.

Then when you talk about metaphysics having to deal with the issue of the intelligibility of existence, our capacity to explain, then that is epistemolology rather than ontology. And yes, naturalism has worked there too.

Or at least that is what semiosis is all about. We don't need a supernatural explanation of rationality or mind. Semiosis or meaning-making is world-modelling. It is a biological process, based on the epistemic cut.

And the last neat Peircean twist is seeing that the Cosmos itself is pan-semiotic. So epistemology gets united with ontology. The Cosmos is self-making in that it logically develops from primal fluctuation (Firstness, Tychism) to become a self-regulating set of habits (Thirdness, Synechism), by way of the intermediate interaction that is a play of reactions or concrete particulars (Secondness, dyadicity).

What is doing the acting? Or constraining? What, on your view, would be an example of a formal cause and a material cause that does not originate in a hylomorphic substance? — Andrew M

That's a good reply. Clearly when we are talking about actuality or being, it is always concretely substantial, always in-formed materiality. So material and formal cause can't be said to exist in some isolated, non-incarnated, way.

Yet still, the ontological question is what is the cause of being. And it is an important point that being must always be already hylomorphically developed. Two things - material and formal cause - have come together with a result, implying that those two things exist separately in their own right, and yet they can't in any proper sense exist that way.

So there is a logical bind when you get down to the root question of what causes being itself.

My triadic approach accepts that bind. That is why I say reality/being/existence is irreducibly complex. You can't dissolve what is really a process, a relation, into some simpler set of components - either a material (or idealistic) monism, or even a dualism of prime matter plus prime mover, or whatever. Bottom level is a three way hierarchical knot, a self-making process.

To make sense of that requires a further ontic dimension - the vague~crisp - which can allow existence to start off with an ultimate tentativeness yet swell and grow a definite substantiality as its own limit.

This would be the Peircean improvement on Aristotelean metaphysics. And of course it is not a well understood argument.

But you are right that the very first scrap of being would have to be already hylomorphically substantial, in some way a particular. Yet also the most general possible kind of particular. And in being the most general of all particulars, it would be the vaguest or most indeterminate state of being.

That is the logical argument. And then we can imagine this most general hylomorphic particular as "a fluctuation" - an action with a direction. So the most general notion of materiality - an action - coupled to the most general notion of a formal cause, or a constraint, which is the having of a direction.

So we can wind the clock backwards from where we stand - in a world of concrete particulars - to imagine the least concrete/most general initial conditions of hylomorphic being. A fluctuation is our best intuitive picture of this primal undeveloped state.

The very idea of an action implies a direction, and so should the very idea of a direction imply an action. We can see that each arises from the other - or at least this should be obvious since quantum mechanics showed it to be the case.

Anyway, I agree with your point - being is always already hylomorphically particular. We can't claim that material and formal cause somehow existed separately before being brought together. That's not the way it works.

But then the triadic approach says we can understand the genesis of substantial being by seeking the most generalised image of its particularity. The ontic question becomes what is the most primal incarnation of hylomorphic being? The best answer would be a fluctuation - an action~direction. That is still "a particular something" from one point of view, but it is also the most generalised, or rather the vaguest possible, particular something.

Again, if this seems a weird metaphysical claim, comfort can be found that this is just how modern physical "theories of everything" are having to imagine the creation of the Cosmos.

Loop quantum gravity approaches in particular have been finding that they all wind up back at this position of positing "bare actions" as their foundation. For mathematical reasons, attempts like causal dynamical triangulation to weave 4-dimensional models of evolving spacetimes out of "pure relations" all arrived at having to presume the notion of a bare action with a single direction. Spacetime dissolves into causal 2D shards at the primal level.

So materializing a palace in the middle of the Himalayas is just "coincidence"? — Agustino

Did that happen or didn’t you say it was a fantasy?

So let’s get back to miracles. Usually they are things that happen. Then intelligent folk would have to decide whether to attribute them to divine intervention or mere coincidence.

Where ought we draw the line would you say?

That's true as well. So we would seek to explain the causes for the chair's existence in terms of other particulars. For example, the person who made it. Or the particles that it is composed of. But it is always the particular that is the locus of cause and effect whatever the mode of causal explanation. — Andrew M

But that is just a modern atomist/reductionist notion of causality. It is far from an Aristotelean account.

So are you trying to do anything other than assimilate hylomorphism to your unquestioned atomism?

But the chair can't be ontologically separated into matter and form. That is the false premise of dualism. — Andrew M

Again, I would say the sensible understanding of hylomorphism is triadic. So it is the intersection of formal and material causes that produces the third thing of substantial being.

It is not dualism that is at the heart of things here, but the hierarchical relation of bottom-up constructive actions and top-down limiting constraints. That is how systems thinkers would read Aristotle.

As to what constructs or constrains a substance, the answer on a hylomorphic view is: other substances. There is no formless matter or immaterial form lurking in the background. — Andrew M

And yet Aristotle was concerned with the reality of prime matter and prime movers.

Instead the particular is the primary constituent... — Andrew M

Why wouldn't you say that the particular, the substantial, the entified, is the ultimate resultant?

This interpretation of Aristotle's hylomorphism makes no sense to me given the context of everything else he has to say about metaphysics.

So, for example, the wooden chair has four legs. It is possible to describe just the material of the chair (the wood) or just the form (it has four legs), but it is not possible to separate out either the material or the form from the chair. They are not more basic constituents. They are simply different modes of description. — Andrew M

Right. So in what sense is the four legged wooden chair either "primary" or a "constituent"?

It is certainly particular and constituted. It is in-formed material being. It is what it is. But it can't be a primary constituent just because it denies primary constituency to other levels or degrees of substantial being.

Clearly the four legged wooden chair just simply is a highly specified or particularised mode of description - materiality suitably constrained to the degree that it formally matters.

We could talk about its wood as a more generalised notion of materiality, its leggedness as a more generalised notion of form. The four legged wooden chair stands sharply delineated in the world due to it being so highly particular in both its material and formal qualities. And so when it comes to talk about the chair's "constitution", we can point to the general matter from which it is constructed - the wood that is its efficient/material cause. And we can point to the general forms which constrain its being - the leggedness that is its formal/final cause. The chair is some kind of high point of organised materiality in this sense.

But then we can analyse wood in the same hylomorphic fashion. And leggedness. To the degree these are emergently substantial, they can be deconstructed in both their causal directions.

So to be "constituted" is what is hylomorphic - some actualised intersection of constructing materiality and constraining formality. Hylomorphism is just another way of saying everything substantial is emergent from some particular balance of bottom-up and top-down causes.

It is the particular and only the particular that has causal efficacy. Why does the chair hold our weight? Because it is made of solid wood (a material cause) and has four legs (a formal cause). But matter and form are not themselves things that have causal efficacy or have an independent existence. — Andrew M

Again, this seems far from Aristotelean intent.

Substances of course harbour further potentials. Their enduring particularity gives character to their properties.

But the analysis of substances is in terms of the causes that produce them. It is their very being that is being explained, not their further causal efficacy.

So matter and form don't have independent existence. It is only in the unity of substance that they show their reality. Yet hylomorphism is all about how substance is emergent from the intersection of bottom-up construction and top-down constraint - the two varieties of causation in a systems view.

Yet still, my position sees the top-down causation in terms of naturalistic emergence. It is the constraints part of the deal. And you are claiming something that is instead supernaturally existent and imposed.

So which is it that maths describes - unavoidable regularity or some accidental divine choice?

You seem to be taking the metaphysical route which creates two further problems. It seems the maths could be different - if it is all up to some creator. And then how maths gets imposed on the world is the usual Platonic mystery.

So why isn't my self-organising metaphysics better?

What? We both agree that maths talks about limiting principles, but where I stress their natural immanence, you want to claim their supernatural transcendence? Where I see limits as materially emergent regularities, you want to say they are divinely imposed accidents?

In your view, did God have a choice about the maths he created? Let's get at the consequences of your position and discover how rational they seem.

Scientists are always tub-thumping about 'the importance of reason' - but their notion of 'reason' is such that it is bound by the physical sense, there can't really allow any such thing as an apodictic or self-evident rational truth. Rationalism, which used to be the jewel in the philosophical crown, is now an inconvenient truth. — Wayfarer

I would say rather that scientists correctly realise that the forms of nature are emergent. So everything does get tied back to the "corporeal" for a good reason.

Mathematical objects are not material substances. They exist only as a nexus of relations (i.e. signs) initially abstracted from sense perception and constructively elaborated by the intellect. — Aaron R

But, it's real in a different sense to corporeal objects such as tables and chairs, is it not? i.e. Aquinas' ontology allows for the reality of incorporeals in a way that naturalism generally does not. — Wayfarer

Mathematical objects would seem to express something true about the limits of corporeality. So they speak to the reality of constraints. And they are thus real more as generals than particulars.

Consider a table or a chair. What kind of "deep maths" do they represent?

Well, as objects, they speak to symmetry-breakings and least action principles - the natural limits on concrete material actuality.

A chair or table are significant in that they break 3D space with a 2D plane. The definition of chair or table can be reduced to being "a plane" upon which we can either rest our arse or perch our elbows.

And then this is coupled to a least action principle. We want to achieve this broken spatial symmetry with the least material effort. So the plane must be supported by legs. And these would naturally be the thinnest and fewest number of supports we can manage. That is, at least three legs would be needed for a self supporting chair or table, but five or more would usually seem an extravagance.

So the maths that rules nature is about the "simplest actions" - achieving the most definite symmetry-breakings with the least amount of effort.

The debate about forms is about identifying the essence of things. As chairs and tables illustrate, the mathematical essence appears as we arrive at some universal natural principles. And the core of mathematics is about how the most difference can be produced with the least effort.

Chairs and tables are obviously objects to people. They are "chairs" and "tables" because they actually have some fit in terms of the human form, the human point of view, the way humans themselves break the symmetry of the world. So the fact that universal principles can be constraints that then harbour more particular points of view, or localised purposes, is one source of confusion in these discussions.

Then the other standard confusion is that actualised forms, or substantial forms, can freely incorporate material accidents. A chair could accidentally be brown or blue, wood or gold, etc. If the constraint is only the idea of "something suitable on which a human could balance an arse", then that definition is indifferent to many kinds of materially actual chairs.

So form is a hierarchical business - which becomes more obvious once we talk about form in terms of the causality of constraints. And form also avoids being overly-specific as, in expressing a global purpose, it doesn't need to sweat the accidental details.

Don't you mean, why do some "highly intelligent folk" believe in miracles rather than coincidence?

They would also be directly aware of their bodies; and that is precisely what I mean by "raw feeling". — Janus

So you mean that "raw feeling" is about the division that gets made in terms of self vs world? It is the primal distinction between self and other?

I would tend to agree this is the most basic level of "perception". Everything starts from the epistemic cut of this difference-making.

So I object to qualia talk as it already dualises self and percepts. It is a faux realism about the contents of a phenomenal space.

But I agree with the semiotic position which sees all awareness beginning from the complex knot that is a self~world symmetry breaking.

That basic feeling of ourselves, that really cannot be put into words adequately is the primal basis upon which everything else is constructed. — Janus

But now you switch back into a constructive mode of analysis where some thing must be foundational, rather than some process.

So instead of a phenomenology of world being basic, you talk of the phenomenology of selfhood as being basic. And this is sort of right. You are talking about the bare fact of there being "a point of view". There is a directionality in play - the one that points from a self to a world.

But I would stress that the deeper analysis would be the semiotic view where what gets everything going is a symmetry-breaking process.

It starts with the lack of any self~world distinction, just a vagueness. So the primal foundation is "a state" that is not even divided as yet. Then both self and world are what co-arise as the two necessary ends of the one pointing arrow.

The semiotic approach ensures that we don't have to claim that mind, or spirit, or some other kind of mentalistic substance, is the "foundational stuff". We can avoid the usual reductionist bottom-up causality that bedevils philosophy of mind.

To claim that would be to deny that non-social animals don't have raw feelings. — Janus

I would indeed claim that non-linguistic animals can't have "raw feelings" as they don't have introspective awareness.

Animals would just be aware "directly" of the world. They would not have the linguistically-scaffolded ability to be "aware of the contents of their own consciousness". That is, they wouldn't have the learnt attitude that is being "directly aware" of mental appearances.

So what I am trying to get at here is that this notion of "raw feelings" is very much a particular way of construing phenomenology. Yes, there is certainly this general thing we call "mind" going on in our heads. There is experience. But to talk about qualia or raw feelings is already to have entered into a narrative version of what is going on. To introspect is a conception-heavy action, not some kind of direct perception of a set of self-independent mental facts.

This comes back to my point about perception being bi-directional. The self gets produced in the process, as much as the world viewed. Both the subjectivity and the objectivity get formed as the complementary parts of the world modelling relation.

To introspect is "perception" of the contents of awareness. So really, it involves the production of the kind of narrative selfhood - the one that can call itself by a name - which can then turn around and "see" that it is seeing, or hearing, or tasting, or feeling. This narrative self - after it has been formed in the right fashion by a school of philosophical thought - can come to "see" that it is seeing qualia or raw feelings. It will know the way to frame its experience so that it appears to be pointed at the redness of red, or whatever.

Attention will be focused so that awareness of everything else is suitably suppressed for a fleeting moment. The redness of red will dominate the mental view. It will seem the most intensely noticed aspect of that instant of phenomenology. A snapshot of that moment will be made and held in working memory so it can be discussed in philosophical fashion as evidence for a theory. The narrating self will protest that it has raw feelings - as it just managed to adopt a socially-constructed attitude where that was true.

So I am questioning your too easy claim that you can introspect and directly perceive that there are a bunch of raw feelings "in there" - along with a narrative self that is beholding these raw feelings and passing comment on them, describing them, understanding them as real "intention-independent" phenomenal qualities.

If even raw feelings are socially constructed then they are not raw feelings; there would be no raw feelings. Then how much more so would the notion of raw feelings or anything else be socially constructed; which would mean all of our idea and theories are nothing more than arbitrary social constructs. — Janus

I'm not saying it is social construction all the way down. I am saying it is semiosis all the way down. So there is the biological level of perception that is foundational for the social. Animals are aware. It is just that their awareness would be extrospective rather than introspective. They would have what we would call phenomenal states or raw feelings - but that is what we would call it, not how they could view it.

So we are imagining ourselves being inside their heads and watching a parade of raw feelings playing out. We are adopting the "homunculus beholding a representation" model that is our notion of the right way to introspect. That social intentional stance - that kind of narrative selfhood - is what a non-linguistic animal can never have. The animal is just thoughtlessly reacting to the world it experiences. It doesn't see its experience as an appearance.

Claim or description, same point. The raw feelings are socially constructed. They are not primary in the sense being claimed/described.

We have to learn the trick of “experiencing the pure redness of red.” So the raw feeling is the product of a particular philosophically framed effort. We are striking a conceptual attitude where we are seeing the “reality of an appearance.”

I guess this is a hard case to make in a modern western context where we grow up with red crayons and red traffic lights. We are taught from a young age to regard colour as an abstract general quality. Anything could be painted red if we choose.

But even so, cross cultural comparisons show how an abstracted notion of colour is a learnt point of view.

So we might well describe red as ... what if feels like to see red. We can point towards our idea of just an abstracted hue filling awareness as a mental image. But how is that direct or raw? Abstraction is by definition indirect surely?

No this me just is immediate awareness, immediate feeling. it is the feeling upon which everything else is constructed.

You are still overthinking it. — Janus

Can you make this claim in a way that feels meaningful without asserting the presence of a witnessing self. Can there just be "the immediate experience"?

And when we have deconstructed matters to that level, is this immediacy present in a way that isn't mediated by a temporal context - a sense of past constraints/future possibilities? Isn't it still essential that the essence of being is "immediate" in terms of an intentionality that speaks to the non-immediate?

We can keep drilling down, but when do we just get to bare particulars, raw feelings, or actual qualia? Some foundational atomism upon which everything is then "constructed"?

I'm not overthinking anything. I'm pointing out how you are just applying reductionist metaphysics in another guise.

Banno wants to talk about the point of view that sees the real. You want to talk about the point of view that sees the ideal. You are both trapped in an atomist metaphysics in which everything is simply a product of bottom-up construction.

Points of view - the fact of a viewing self - is taken for granted. The argument then becomes whether experience is the product of atomistic idealism or atomistic realism. Experience is either of fragments of mentality or of states of affairs.

And thus the true triadic richness of a modelling relation never comes into metaphysical view.

There has to be a "me" to tell the story to in the first place, otherwise no story can be told. — Janus

So this "me" is directly aware of this "me"? This "me" can perceive its perceptions and perceive its self?

I agree that "me-ness" develops as a habit. A sense of "me" is just basic to the logic of modelling the world. Animals have to have an embodied sense of being so that they can also know a world. And humans have a social sense of self. Psychology has all the facts about how this sense of "me" arises.

But as soon as you insist on making this sense of "me" primal, unmediated, direct, etc, you get into all sorts of logical binds and homuncular regresses.

It is up to you to straighten those out. I've pointed to the fact they exist.

So sure, there is a "you" telling "your story". And go back to your infancy, we can see this "you-ness" developing due to biology and culture.

Using conventional cause and effect logic, you then want to insist that there can't be a narrative without a narrator. Any action implies an author. Agency is a primal fact.

But a systems logic says individuation is a process of habit-formation. You become a story-teller by learning to tell stories. So it is being born into a narrative culture that forges you the narrator. From infancy, you are being encouraged to make those first attempts that eventually produce your heightened "me".

The seeing of things has the quality of directness; to ask whether it is "really" direct is a malformed question. — Janus

So you are doppleganger Banno here. He wants to treat criticism of naive realism as malformed questions. You want to treat criticism of naive idealism - the claim raw feelings are direct access - as also just bad metaphysics.

Yes, but doubts should at least be interesting. — Janus

That's a bit random if I am defending pragmatism here.

Is it interesting that we could doubt that we type with two hands as it might appear to us?

The more relevant question is what use it might have, what functional advantage it might have. Clearly in an everyday context, there isn't a good reason to doubt. But critical thinking doesn't even get started except by the forming of assertions that have sufficient counterfactual definiteness to be doubted.

I suspect that truth is too subtle - or too simple - to be trapped in an algorithm. — Banno

Suspect away. If you have an actual argument, that might be interesting.

Exhibit A would be that philosophy is entirely founded on dialectical reasoning. The only difference is that some treat dichotomies as having to be either/or choices - one right, the other wrong - and others treat dichotomies as complementary bounds on existence. So both "horns of a dilemma" are right, both exist, both together compose the unity of opposites.

You are referred to as apokrisis; it is true that you are referred to as apokrisis. That's not something that is approached asymptotically; it's just true. — Banno

Predicate logic is for reasoning about contingent particulars. Dialectical logic is for reasoning about metaphysical wholeness.

So your argument here is both correct and irrelevant. What we are named is not a necessary metaphysical truth. But why would we expect it to be?

One might be tempted to treat all justifications, beliefs and hence knowledge as approached asymptotically. — Banno

This is talking about measurement now. Another issue again.

But even here there are things that we do not doubt, That this conversation is in English; that I have two hands with which to type - these are things taken as being undoubted, as certain. — Banno

That we take things as undoubted is merely pragmatism.

On logical grounds, they could be doubted - even if you would be right that doubt would seem strained. To assert A is certain requires that not-A was at least a possibility. And if it was a possibility, then the possibility of doubt remains. Your measurement of the world might have been in error concerning the facts.

So truth defined tautologically might seem undoubtable. A is A by definition. But that is just a state of belief within a mind. And even if is a communally shared belief - a language game - it is still just something folk agree to say.

When it comes to metaphysics, that is pretty trivial. But I get that your philosophical project is to deny metaphysics.

So, in short there is something it is like for me to see, and that is not an assumption, but something experienced. — Janus

You are arguing that the seeing is done by the "me". I am arguing that the "me" is produced by the seeing. Perception (or cognition) is about the product of the self that stands apart from its world so as to be able to act purposefully within that world. To perceive, is to feel the self as well as feel the world. And psychological science tells us all about how that works. The facts are not in dispute on this score.

So perception is a triadic process. A sign is formed in the middle that anchors a self~world distinction. I feel strongly like an observer of the world because I can see "a tree" and that it is "coloured", and its "leaves rustle in the breeze", and a whole lot of other interpreted signs that confirm all that is not me, at the same time as I feel the limits of my body, the way the same breeze ruffles my hair - all the me-ness that is also present.

I said that our experience seems direct. We cannot be wrong about its seeming direct. — Janus

What exactly do you mean to say here? If it only seems direct, then your position appears to be that it is not direct - it just seems so.

Or are you saying it is direct, and this directness is something we also directly experience?

What I commented on is the striking way that qualia are the product of a socially-constructed state of perception. Through a philosophical/scientific set of concepts, we learn to look at green-ness or tree-ness as the qualities of an appearance, a mental representation, rather than as qualities of the world.

So introspecting on "raw feelings" is a curious business. Instead of the natural realism for which the brain is designed - the one where we just interact with the world we perceive without question - we introduce a learnt stance towards perception. We "know" it is actually a perceptual state seen from "the inside". And so there is something going on that "regular materialism can't explain". In causal terms, it is "an intractable mystery".

So your heightened notion of subjectivity - defined in opposition to a counter notion of objectivity - depends on a learnt stance. And yet you then treat the qualia thus conceived/perceived in this fashion as "direct and real". The essence of the mental realm is that it is founded on "raw feelings". That is the stuff of which consciousness is composed. No qualitative experience, no mind to speak of. The real world has dropped out of the picture. There is just these primal mental events. And they are directly accessed, they are substantially real.

I think it is worth analysing this in detail because what I suggest you are doing is simply re-focusing the usual direct realism folk have about the "objective world" to make it a direct realism about the contents of the "subjective mind".

In other words, this remains a hard causal dualism. And that justifies your claims of "an intractable mystery".

But my approach is triadic rather than dyadic. Semiotically, the world and self emerge co-jointly via the mediation of the sign. So it gets around all need for direct access by just accepting nothing is direct, everything emerges. Subjectivity and objectivity only arise as complementary limits on being. Thus there is no intractable causal mystery ... except for the very generalised one expressed by the usual ultimate question, "Why anything?".

...all that you say is to me just another abstract story. compared to lived experience. — Janus

But you say both that your experience (of the world? of qualia? of appearances?) is direct AND that that fact is an intractable mystery.

So perhaps I find your "intractable mystery" to be an equally pale and unconvincing thought. And it is certainly part of an abstract story you want to tell. You are not escaping your own line of criticism.

Sure, the way I conceive of my self (in other words the mode of "my belief in my qualia" is produced in socially constructed terms, but the raw feel of subjective experience (obviously prior to being conceived of as such) is not... — Janus

Sure, there is something that in the end (ie: in the deconstructed limit) there is something which it is like to be you experiencing. But it ain't direct. It is semiotically constructed all the way down to the "raw feelings".

So my point was that qualia are a product of philosophy. They are socially constructed in that they are a learnt way to conceive of experience.

The direct realist does it too. If he sees a green tree, that is how he categorises the experience. He just sees the tree that is there. And he sees that it is green.

And now you have learn that there is a psychological process to experience. You have learnt that what you are really looking at is an appearance. An image. A mental qualia. And you call seeing this the direct thing. You just look and you see the tree is an image, its greenness a quality that occurs only within "awareness".

So you have adopted another socially correct attitude. When you see the green tree, its greenness is a generic quality. It can be abstracted and thought about as a particular hue. The question can arise if I am seeing it too in just the same way. Yes, we both say we see a green tree, but what would we say if we could do the generic thing of comparing our perceptual states, comparing our direct beholding of the qualia in question.

Claiming to see your appearances directly is as bad as claiming to see the world directly. It is only due to a certain history of philosophy and psychological science that you conceive of "raw feelings" as something you ought to be able to see that way.

Now qualia do appear hard, definite, factual, when conceived of appropriately. They answer to a requirement of worldly invariance. They seem as undeniable as the real world that their social-construction might seem to deny.

Qualia realism, or appearance realism, is as bad as any realism. It is making an object of what you intended to be the subjective. Subjectivity escapes the grasp of direct qualia realism because it is a philosophy of mind that fails to talk about the matching problem of how a self arises to be the beholder, to be the interpretant, to be the point of view.

Object-making is half the process of organising experience. Subject-making is the other half. Given that irreducilbly complex relation at the heart of experience, talking about raw feelings and direct experience of qualia is failing to get to grips with the actual issue of subjectivity.

I am taking more about the raw feeling of subjective experience, of being in a living world, and yet of being something more than merely that, too. — Janus

I realise that. But epistemology has to be founded on some logical abstraction if it is going to "see" what is going on "objectively".

How this is given is the "intractable mystery", and to be honest, nothing you said in response to me solves, or dissolves, that mystery in the least; — Janus

Well the objective explanation is that your belief in your qualia is a socially-constructed point of view. It required philosophical training for you to come to frame your experiences of "the world" this way. And as I argued, this "coming to frame" is a double-edged business. You must produce a particular heightened sense of "you-ness" to have this heightened sense of "apartness" in which qualia are "subjective facts of the world".

So how I account for things should be deflationary. But they can't be for you while you take "you" for granted as being already always there, and not merely part of a co-construction.

I really can't see how any explanation "from the outside" could ever solve that mystery, or dissolve that profound sense of mystery. — Janus

Yep. If the inside is taken to just brutely exist, then there will always be that mystery.

I can tell you about pragmatism's epistemology in which the internal~external dichotomy is a distinction that must form as a mutual symmetry-breaking, but because you don't accept the logical force of that kind of emergentist ontology, your thinking leaves you no choice but to compute a mystery here.

Of course I don't completely deny mystery. There is still a fundamental issue when we ask the question "why anything?". So if I am talking about a triadic modelling relation as the way to minimise any mystery concerning "self", "world" and "qualia" (or interpretant, representamen and sign), then there is still the fundamental mystery of "why the existence of a modelling relation?".

However it is important to epistemology that the usual dualistic mind/world, explanatory gap, hard problem, causal issue has in fact been minimised.

If both insides and outsides must co-arise simply as a matter of logic (see Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form for instance), then the great Hard Problem mystery stands revealed as a socially-constructed mindset - the belief in a mind that actually stands causally apart from the world.

Idealism makes the existence of the world problematic. Realism makes the existence of the mind problematic.

Pragmatism sees mind and world as two aspects of the one irreducibly complex relation. The self exists, for "us", only to the degree the world exists, for "us". Which should give a clearer idea of who the foundational "us" really is ... a state of undifferentiated vagueness when you objectively get down to it. :)

why would I want to dissolve the greatest richness of life, and reduce it all to banal explanations, even if that were possible? — Janus

Again, no problem.

If selfhood is a construction, and its "world" is other to that, then you can see why building up a richly-felt world, one full of personal meaning, would be a natural desire.

You are just saying you don't want to reduce your rich world to banal accounts, like scientific equations. I could equally say that revealing the complexity of everyday experience to be the product of powerful and elegant constraints of complete generality is something perfectly marvellous to behold.

I don't think the beauty of rationality or mathematics stops me enjoying sitting in the garden or hosting a big family gathering. They are complementary rather than incompatible.

So the problem may be that you can tolerate only one image of "the world" - the one that you would describe as maximally subjective. And you would oppose that to the aridity of the maximally objective.

My own approach is saying that our actual "world" ought to be anchored in terms of these two extreme views. They should be the poles of our experience. And thus where we "live" is a spectrum of possibilities that arises in-between. We can move between the immersed subjective and the dry objective "at will".

People do that anyway if they have a normal rounded development. Society understands it is a good and pragmatic thing to be formally educated and also to enjoy life.

I am just providing the epistemic account which makes the case objectively. I am explaining how it can happen that we can make choices in our current mental style, smoothly moving between philosphical argument and just "being in the moment", for example.

If we didn't form these two poles of being for ourselves, we couldn't really be "selves" with that kind of choice of when and how to move.

The objective understanding of the process of perception tells us nothing about how it could give rise to the most real thing we know: subjective experience. — Janus

The key is that the self arises within perception. It is part of the whole act. Perception involves making a self~world discrimination. So the self and the world co-arise as ideas in a complementary way - a symmetry-breaking.

Any phrasing of the situation which posits an experiencing self is already presuming part of what must in fact arise as part of the perceptual act. A self-image has to be formed in response to a determination of what is the not-self - both generally in a long-run conceptual fashion and immediately right in every here and now moment.

So consciousness is a strongly felt state of contrast where a "self" stands in sharp distinction to "the world". We don't need to reify the self as then a thing. It is no more than the complementary part of a single (sign relation/epistemic cut) process.

A bunch of folk in the USA said we could only approach it asymptotically. — Banno

Heh. The right epistemic algorithm has been discovered. It is the dichotomy or dialectic. The "truth" is approached asymptotically in two directions. Or rather it emerges within the bounds of two complementary limits.

So as I just described, self and world act as complementary bounds. We become selves in the world to the degree we experience this strong sense of separation.

Remember how you agreed a point of view has to have two ends. To point at something out there, there must be the "other" that this very relation points back at. So if pointing at the "world" is interpreted as pointing at "hard recalcitrant fact", then looking at this same deictic relation the other way will reveal its complementary other - the maximally flexible and intentional "self".

We become subjective beings to the degree we can perform the perceptual act that points towards everything else in experience that can be labelled the objective "other".

So yes. It is really important that folk seem to be able to make a reliable self~world discrimination in almost any circumstance they encounter. It becomes routinised perceptual habit. It becomes locked into common language.

If they can't perform a quick and clear labelling, then their self doesn't exist as much as the world doesn't exist.

And that is what we see in dreams and other confused states where self and world blur - become vague.

So the basic epistemic algorithm has been found. It never really went missing. It is the logic of the dichotomy. Everything definite is the product of a developmental symmetry-breaking. For one half of a dyad to exist, that definiteness must be underwritten by its production of its "other".

Self and world are the "two directions" of the one experience-sharpening act. That is what is "revolutionary" in a modern epistemology like pragmatism.

There is absolutely nothing mysterious here. It isn't philosophy, it's well established engineering and mathematics. — fdrake

Well hardly. Time remains physics biggest problem really.

The central concept here is periodicity, or the propensity for something to repeat with high regularity. Regularity of measurements - oscillations in phase, periodic phenomena. — fdrake

Note how these are all spatialised concepts of time. Whether it is the rotation of a clock hand or the rotation that is a periodic sine wave, it is is about repeating a round trip locally. Time is measured by the how long it takes to complete a repetitive motion. Going around in a little circle zeros the clock to make a cycle. The hand travels forever and winds back up crossing the same spot.

A problem with spatialised time is that it inherits the symmetry of spatial dimensionality. It makes no difference whether the clock hand rotates clockwise of counterclockwise. And yet time has an arrow that points in a direction. Spatialised clocks can’t measure that essential quality of actual temporal duration - the fact that the symmetry is broken.

But there is the other angle we could employ to measure time. And that would be in terms of energy, or entropy. A thermometer could measure time as falling temperature.

And indeed that is how we now measure the age of the universe. We read it off in terms of the average temperature of the cosmic background radiation.

The cosmic time is currently 2.725 degrees kelvin.

I'm a panpsychist who agrees with this conception of substance. If I understand you, of course, which I probably don't. — bert1

I was arguing that the Aristotle's hylomorphic story on substance can be read two ways. And the radical one here would be the "top-down" individuation version.

The panpsychic version would instead be the more familiar bottom-up story where substance is a stuff with properties. The only difference with panpsychism is that all stuff comes with two distinct classes of property - the material and the mental.

The top-down story is instead "mind-like" in stressing the role of formal and final purpose in the act of individuation. So Being is the result of constraints imposed on potentiality. Concrete material stuff is produced by acts of individuation that limits formless "material" potential. And material is in quotes as ultimately the notion of potential - Aristotle's prime matter - has to be as matterless as it is formless.

Hah. Yes you are right. Complete brain fart to call it radioactive decay. I was meaning the radiative decay of electron transitions in atomic clocks.

Maybe a sundial then. That would obviously work any time, any place.

You’ll have to try harder than that if you’re wanting to troll me MU.

What alternative did you have in mind? Chinese water clock?

Yep. Sounds legit. Can't imagine anyone not believing that. Snore...

The confident predictions of science providing a naturalistic 'theory of everything' seem to be getting more, not less, remote. — Wayfarer

That confident assertion would be more believable if it were backed up by some reasons to show science has been failing to make continual progress.

Only about a century ago, atoms were still half-regarded as a fiction. Now we can blow up the planet with nuclear bombs. :)

As far scientific cosmology is concerned, I am aware that at least some respectable scientists entertain the idea that 'The Big Bang' might have been one of a series. — Wayfarer

Only half a century ago, no-one had reason to be certain that the Cosmos was even created once by a Big Bang.

In which case, we're back at the Myth of the Eternal Return and a cyclical cosmos which, for unknown reasons, seems to have formed the backdrop of ancient Indian cosmology. — Wayfarer

And so you just reveal how you are happy with any old theory - just so long as it chimes with your own metaphysical preferences.

The same with panspermia and any other half-baked speculation that gets a good run in the popular press.

That's why we need numerous different types of clocks. Each has its own peculiarities. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. We need the single best process that could be used at any time and any place. Radioactive decay would be that. Or some similar "free" quantum process.

It ought to give pause to any form of physicalism that such questions are still so wide open. — Wayfarer

It should give far more pause to the peddlers of metaphysical stories that "can't even be wrong".

What you are saying is science knows that the Big Bang is a story of symmetry and symmetry-breaking. It even has mathematical theories backed up by experimental confirmation of just how much symmetry-breaking is being delivered by particular physical mechanisms. And so now, the job is finding the machinery to explain the amount of symmetry-breaking that is known to be missing.

You do realise that you only hear about these "crises in physics" because physics is right on the doorstep of an answer?

It has a range of candidate theories - any number of them generated by its armies of theoreticians. It has quantified the amount of "missing information" it might looking for. It is searching for what it knows has to be there - some known unknowns. And all it needs is a few billion of your tax-payer dollars to take the next step.

The cosmological constant problem and the hierarchy problem are just the same. Physics is advertising the work it could get going with if you give it the grants.

It may indeed be the case that the physics community will prove that on these ones "it just doesn't have a clue".

But when it comes to antimatter, Dirac already predicted positrons, or anti-matter electrons, had to be the case back in 1928. That just fell out of the maths of relativistic quantum physics.

Then once the Big Bang became a thing, everyone immediately knew that there had to be some mechanism for favouring particles over their anti-particles for particles to even exist. It is was as obvious as stumbling into a city in a forest and asking, well who built this?

Sakharov defined the three symmetries which would have to be broken to fit the facts - particle number, charge and/or parity, and the thermodynamic arrow of time.

So you must end up with more than one than the other (otherwise any pair would mutually annihilate). And then time symmetry must be broken, otherwise the Universe could grow hotter again and just melt any matter particles.

So the critical part of the machinery must be charge/parity. The finger pointed at the maths of intrinsic spin. Something about that had to be the key - the explanation for why a hot swamp of Big Bang radiation would produce slightly more of one kind of matter than the other.

And so since the 1960s, science has chewed is way through a lot of theories, a lot of experiments. The level of understanding has become spectacular.

But to keep climbing towards the critical energy range is an exponential effort. Testing weak force level theories is easy-peasy compared to achieving the collider energies to test strong force level theories.

So stop being so cheapskate and vote Cern the trillions it needs to get on with the job. ;)

So we can simply take two objects that are ''in sync'' and take that as a measure of regularity? How do we check for synchronization? I think it'll be imprecise. — TheMadFool

SX is wrong if he suggests the clocks could be used to check each other in this fashion in any absolute sense. But in a relative fashion, that's fine.

You can definitely tell if two clocks start to beat a different time. And from there, you can make an inductive case for why that might be. One clock might be faulty. Or in fact someone might be secretly accelerating it. And one of those explanations might have the grounds to be the more likely.

The same is the case if the two clocks keep perfect synchrony. It could be that one is being accelerated, and yet also it is faulty to exactly the degree needed to compensate. We are now talking of something that both remains a possibility yet is completely unlikely. And so two clocks are better than one as a constraint on such uncertainties.

There is no evidence to the contrary. That's how universal claims work. See the Kant excerpt again with that in mind... — creativesoul

Yeah. Sounds legit.

Provide the evidence for the argument. I think that's how arguments usually work. :)

One example to the contrary is all it takes... — creativesoul

The contrary of what? It is your lack of any properly grounded claim that I drew attention to.

You contradict yourself to the degree you confuse metacognition as a semiotic position.

You could try to rescue your claim that writing makes a critical semiotic difference when it comes to perception. That simply speaking - simply an oral culture - isn't enough.

I already agree - with the literature :) - that literacy does make a difference. Just not a critical one in terms of human perception.

So continue to talk and act like a crackpot. I've done my best to help you sort it out.

As I understand it, the Planck constant is defined in terms of meters^2 per kilogram per second. — fishfry

If you check it out, you will see that "the Planck time comes from dimensional analysis".

So you may as well set every value to 1. The dimensioned units fall out of it. We are talking only of the reciprocal relations that connect the three corners of a triad - c, G and h. We are talking about a relation with irreducible internal complexity.

So we peered into the heart of nature and found - this bare triadic relation. We have G to scale any departure from continuous flatness, h to scale any departure from discrete curvature, and c to scale the "rate" at which the G and h can "communicate".

So what we call "time" is an aspect of a triadic knot, a fundamental hierarchical relation.

In simplistic terms, the Planck time is the view of the knot that gets emphasised when you draw out its knotted relation in this fashion - hG/c. (The fuller equation is (hG/c^5)1/2.)

So the dimensioned units do drop out of the story. You can set all the units involved to 1. And then you are left with this triadic knot that ties together three things in irreducible/reciprocal, fashion - h, G and c.

So time doesn't "exist" itself in some fundamental Newtonian way. It is emergent from this triadic relation. The equation for the Planck time is the formula for making that particular kink in the knot "flat enough" to act as a measurement baseline.

Doubts of the uniformity of nature are theoretical. They are 'silly.' But they are fascinating. — t0m

How so? It is a metaphysically logical position.

Nothing can be definitely talked about except in terms of being measurably "other". If you want to talk about non-uniformity - as in a rate of time that could vary - then there is no choice but to talk about that in contrast to a rate that is uniform.

It isn't some unjustified whim. It is the way metaphysical-strength logic works.