Let's say that 'ontological idealism' means that fundamental reality is mental and every other kind of 'realities' are dependent on that ultimate reality. — boundless
No. I was making an argument completely in a realist register there. No "mind stuff" or "qualia" at all. Our cognition has a physically real structure (or physically
realised structure), just as the world has a physical structure too. And the semiotic point is that the cognitive structure is an embodied modelling relation which has the general purpose of regulating an organism's extended environment.
What we "experience" is not a re-presentation of reality, nor some epiphenomenal illusion, but a semiotic Umwelt. Which is what it feels like to be in the flow of living a life from a self-ish point of view.
This is a structuralist metaphysics that stands opposed to the usual materialist story. And it is thus – according to semiotic theory – an irreducibly triadic story, not the usual tale of some fundamental or monistic "stuff".
The triadic relation is the fundamental reality. And while it is easy to talk in a phenomenological register about the mind as being its own separate realm of experience or qualia, we know even from neuroscience that there is no structured experience without our brains being in interaction with an already structured world.
In a sensory deprivation chamber, we soon loose any normal sense of being in a body, and even being in a normal flow of thought. Just to see the world in a stable fashion, we need to jitter our eyeballs and keep "surprising" the photoreceptors with the fact that the boring backdrop that was there an instant ago is still there – and remains ignorable – right now.
So my argument starts from an enactive cognition perspective. There is a brain in a modelling relation with a world, and so already we are talking about the reality of a functional, physically-embodied, process.
After that, in talking about our intellectual modelling of causality and logic, we can assign each to its "realm" in the fashion of the good old Cartesian mind~world divide. This is the conventional socially-constructed way of looking at things which of course was the basis for how humans even added self-awareness, "freewill", complex feelings, and all the rest as sociocultural habits of cognition.
Breaking things into mind and world is physically incorrect (a cognitive neuroscientist would say), but it is also the cultural convention which turns a smart ape into a self-actualising human being.
Sorry, that is a lot of complexity. But it goes to the stress I lay on there being not just a triadic semiotic modelling relation in play, but with the physical reality of life and mind, this dynamic plays out at four key levels of semiotic mechanism – genes, neurons, words and numbers. So in terms of causality vs entailment, I was making a case of how this applies semiotically at the level of human sociocultural organisation once it has become a talk at the level of "pure abstraction" – a symbolism of number systems.
I ask you this because, unless your view is a sort of 'panpsychism' it should be called 'realism' as defined above. — boundless
After my explanation, you can see I am definitely neither arguing for a monistic, nor dyadic, version of panpsychism. But also I am not arguing for a conventional realism.
I wasn't trying to argue a general case at all, just saying something about how – after the ancient Greek "mathematical turn" – logic and causality became their own divergent academic domains. That can be simply described as scholarly convenience. It could be construed as causality speaking to the experiment-restricted physics and entailment speaking to the Platonically soaring maths.
However if you want the full Peircean semiotic position, that says we know life and mind to be biosemiotic. That is just everyday psychology and biology now. It is grounded in biophysics and gives us a consistent account of the structure of human relations with the world through all its four levels of semiotic mechanism.
Controversially on PF, that means all of the humanities fall under the domain of biosemiosis as a general science of meaningful thought and behaviour.
And then also speculatively and controversially, one can go with Peirce and wonder about pansemiosis as a metaphysics of reality in general. The same triadic relational structure could account for the deep causality of the Cosmos as a whole. The Big Bang Universe becomes Peirce's "growth of universal reasonableness". The emergence of hierarchical or topological order from out of a "quantum foam".
You say you did condensed matter physics? Dissipative structure can be seen as this pansemiotic thesis now being realised in physicalist theory.
Peirce's position was that what works as a structure of phenomenology – the givenness of our experience – should work as the structure of logic as the refined product of how we find ourselves thinking and feeling and reasoning. So the first step is from our psychology to our logic.
Then the second step is finding that the world beyond is also structured by the logic that we found in our minds. It too has a causality that is a process of reason – or at least triadically structured in some meaningful way.
Of course Peirce didn't know about genes and so had no concrete model of how there could be an actual machinery of semiosis. So that meant he got a little woo in treating mind and cosmos as being a little too literally the same. But the Universe, as a dissipative structure, lacks an encoding machinery. We only kind of imagine that as the case in now talking about holographic spacetime boundaries and suchlike. A useful metaphor with calculable consequences.
Biosemiosis has since come along to make that difference clear. And that also sparked the conversation about pansemiosis as now being covered by dissipative structure theory.
So it is all a concrete realist project. But one that hopes to ground the sciences of life and mind in the sciences of physics and chemistry, with now an "epistemic cut" to glue the two sides of the divide, and so get rid of the tired old "Cartesian gap".
This is why I take my pragmatist approach in this thread. Logic and causality are both modelling constructs so come from the same place – human matheo-semiosis. They are taken to speak to a Cartesian divided reality, but we should expect them to be pragmatically related by the triadicism of the semiotic modeling relation.
If one seems to deal in entropic relations, the other in informational relations, then well, this is just what a biosemiotician would expect. A biosemiotic story is all about how this division is actually necessary to get to the next thing of its fruitful interaction which is the "living and mindful" point.
I am not saying that your view is wrong but IMO grounding logic in an uncertain knowledge doesn't seem a real 'grounding'. — boundless
Isn't this like being nervous of riding a bicycle as its obviously unstable and only going to get more dangerous the faster you pedal?
A tripod is a firmer base than a single point of contact, no? So just think of how soundly based pragmatism seems when compared to the instability of the folk flipping between whether maths is a free construction or a Platonic truth. Trying to balance the pencil on it tip and wondering why it always falls.
Or another metaphor, calling for a grounding does the very opposite as we find with the "tower of turtles" infinite regress. If we try to find solid ground, it immediately drops endlessly away.
The triadic hierarchical approach instead grounds in the pragmatism of the dialectic. The middle ground is that which is bounded both looking up and looking down.
Looking down, the middle ground dissolves into a blur of smallness. A random jitter of events that just smooths over into one kind of continuum. And likewise, looking up and any differences swell until just one "difference" so completely fills our vision, like the sky, that it becomes a global continuum to match the local one.
So our middle ground is secured by the closure of being the meat in a sandwich of complementary limits. Or in the parlance of cosmology, a de Sitter conformal universe. A global container specified by general relativity with a local contents specified by quantum field theory.
So your instinct is to demand a reduction to a single monistic ground. The Peircean counter-argument is that reality is a hierarchical structure of relations, and that makes it irreducibly triadic.
Reality doesn't come stacked up on an infinite tower of turtles. It instead is a structure of relations that exists by growing in de Sitter fashion. It expands and cools, doubles and halves, in geometric fashion until – as far as any middle-grounders living at the classical scale of medium-sized dry goods knows – any quantum small and hotness dissolves into a lower bound blur, while any relativistic difference smooths over into the large and coldness of a cosmic event horizon. The de Sitter Heat Death void as it becomes at the effective end of time. The ultimate largeness that stretches way past the edges of our merely middle ground scale of view.
If 'semiotic modelling' - I am wrong to call it 'mentation'? - has only been working since a certain point of this universe history, doesn't it lead us to an emergentist view? — boundless
Again, there are two conversations. The first is that life and mind are now explained by the causality/logic of biosemiosis. It is a conventional view in the relevant sciences. We can talk about its mineral beginnings in warm ocean floor sea vents where you had a natural starting point of alkaline vent mixing with acid ocean and setting up a proton gradient across thin vent walls suitably laced with the chemical "enzymes" to start producing complex amino acid crud.
The second is pansemiosis – just dissipative structure before informational mechanism started getting its hands on it. So that covers everything out to the Big Bang as the foundational dissipative event. A hylomorphic mix of its energy potential or quantum indeterminism and the symmetry structures that Platonically lay in wait to shape it topological transformations.
BTW, are you familiar to the late Bohm views on 'active information'. I think that you would find them akin to yours. — boundless
Sort of the same. Everyone is feeling the same elephant once they get fed up enough with reductionism.