Any raw recruit can choose not to follow the instruction of the drill sergeant, and suffer the consequence. — Metaphysician Undercover

So they can't choose not to suffer the consequences?

The consequences are thus quite real as the corollary of their choices. It is all a bit like choosing to jump of a tree and fly, then having to accept the consequences that the law of gravity mandates. Nothing you can do will change anything about the consequences in either situation.

You reveal with your words what you really believe, that it is not the army which is doing the regulating, the army is the passive, artificial thing, which is being regulated by the intentions of human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nope. You just again show a problem with reading skills.

This contradicts constraints arising "immanently", which implies that the constraints come from within the individual part, as I described by referring to intention and free will. So you haven't explained how two apparently opposed processes, "constraints arise immanently", and "constraints of downward causation" are supposed to be the same thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

Another thing I have explained to you a thousand times, a thousand ways.

My position is based on the causal notion of synergy. So parts construct the whole, and the whole shapes the parts. There is a dichotomistic mutuality at the heart of all things systematic.

Things are happening in both directions. You only notice them happening in the one direction.

But essentially I'm thinking about the feeling you get when you know you "get" something but aren't sure how to articulate what exactly you "get". — darthbarracuda

That's Peircean abduction - the leap which can be recognised as already the coherent answer as it is still crisply forming.

And it can be explained neurologically in terms of symmetry breaking. Answers form in the mind as we organise a field of uncertainty. The brain starts to suppress some possibilities as "noise", focus attention on other possibilities as "signal". If it is working - the symmetry does want to break itself in that direction - then rapid feedback drives both kinds of action. What counts as noise, and thus what counts as signal, become ever more strongly felt to us as we "tune into" the best inference to an explanation.

This is important to the epistemology of reasoning of course because it shows how induction does ground rational insight. We are searching for a deductive truth. But we can only get there on the back of a snowballing process of inductive confirmation. Each step, as noise and signal start to be divided in the brain, has to feed back either positively or negatively as a "test" for the germinating concept. As an attempt at symmetry breaking, it either finds that it works and so runs to self-justifying completion, or it stalls and dies, quickly forgotten.

Gestalt psychology of course celebrated this as the aha! experience. Or perceptual pop-out. So it applies just as much to our phenomenal impressions of the world as our rationalistic conceptions.

It is pretty much definitional of why brains (in their creative organicism) are not like computers (in their rigid mechanicalism).

What am I missing? It seems pretty simple. — Michael

Well, for a start you made a huge swerve and avoided my actual question about unicorn dung. Let's see how you would run the actual argument I posed to you.

We can see how your own carefully chosen examples - hinging on socially accepted fictions like legalised monogamy and legalised citizenship - are just a dodge to avoid dealing with any physicalist ontic commitments.

So if you are not going to try harder here, what's the point?

I don't know if they understand the mental to be self-organising and closed for causation. But that's not relevant to my question. — Michael

Of course it is bloody relevant. And who is this mysterious "they"? Why are you being so shifty here?

Again, given that you define the physical as being self-organising and closed for causation, it must then follow that you understand the dualist's claim "the mind isn't physical" to be the claim "the mind isn't self-organising and closed for causation". — Michael

I've already explained why it doesn't have to follow in just the same why that it makes no real difference if unicorns shit or don't shit.

Do you take a firm position on unicorn dung? Perhaps you can run me through the irrefutable train of logic that demands that imaginary shitting is something imaginary beasts must do.

I just wanted you to clarify this. You don't seem to have given me an answer. — Michael

You just didn't like the very reasonable answer I have given.

So at the moment you haven't explained how your physicalism differs from their dualism. — Michael

As I said, I can't agree or disagree with the "not even wrong". It doesn't even achieve the threshold of intelligibility.

But if you want to now flesh out the views of this mysterious "they" who can offer a counterfactual account of how their notion of the mental is "self-organising and closed for causation", then I'm all ears. What do "they" mean exactly when they say that (if it is ever in fact actually said).

I do not see how the real existence of "the army" could be understood as anything more than individuals acting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep. I get you don't see it and likely never will.

There are individuals who chose to act together toward a common goal, and we goal this an army. — Metaphysician Undercover

So there are freely chosing individuals and then ... somehow ... the separate thing of a common goal.

Let's put aside your fanciful notion that drill sergeants offer raw recruits a lot of free choice during boot camp training. We call an army an army (and not for instance a rabble or a rout) because it really is being regulated by some actual state of form and purpose.

And again, my account explains why soldiers exist individually such that they can exhibit collective behaviour. It explains the atomism involved in terms of global limitations on personal freedoms, such that the individual also becomes the interchangeable.

So what you think is so critically important is exactly what I explain for you in causal terms.

Then we seek the internal source of this causation rather than looking for some phantom external top-down causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

So what I said in the end, eh?

Therefore the two views are not necessarily in competition. — Michael

Well they are. One is coherent, and the other incoherent (according to the position I have taken on physicalist explanation).

Again, my position is distinctive in recognising (nay, necessitating) vagueness as a further category of existence or being. And so dualism - in simply failing to talk about being in properly counterfactual terms - can be classed with the explanations that are merely vague, or "not even wrong".

So my employment of counter-factuality cannot be used against me in the way you appear to be attempting. Again, it is moot whether your imagined unicorn of a position either shits or doesn't shit as a necessary further corollary of its non-existence.

Your disagreement, then, would seem to be simply a terminological dispute. Whereas you use the term "physical" to refer to everything that is self-organising and closed for causation, the dualist uses the term "physical" to refer to just some of the things that are self-organising and closed for causation, with "mental" referring to the rest and something like "real" referring to both. — Michael

Well, in fact consistency demands that in the end I don't really believe in "mind" or "mental" as an ontically foundational category.

As I have said often enough, my physicalism is semiotic. So the deep and foundational distinction would be that between matter and sign, not matter and mind. "Consciousness" is just a word that people bandy about. A metaphysician is going to get a lot further talking in concretely counterfactual terms about habits of interpretance rather than states of experience.

I'll say it again. The inability to think of the "mind", or the "mental", except as another dualistic kind of stuff - a witnessing soul, a phenomenal display, a state of experience, a substantial property - is where philosophy so regularly goes off the rails.

It is just reductionist materialism doubling down, reducing formal and final cause to more of the same old materially-effective "stuff".

In practice.

I don't know what you mean by this question. How would you make sense of the causal connection between one physical thing and another? — Michael

I'm losing interest if you are going to start pretending there is no causal issue regarding mind~matter dualism.

If you define the physical as "self-organising and closed for causation" then you must understand the claim "the mind isn't physical" to mean "the mind isn't both self-organising and closed for causation". I'm just asking you to confirm that this is what you understand the dualist to be saying. — Michael

Again, the incoherence of dualism starts before we even get to such niceties in my view. So I'm struggling to see the relevance of the question. It is like asking whether the non-existent unicorn either shits or doesn't shit.

The claim "the mind isn't physical" is not a claim that holds up under my definition of physicalism. So it becomes moot to worry about whether or not dualism then has self-organisation or causal closure as well-formed properties of its position.

So yes. My approach demands that there be always a self-organising and causally closed dichotomy at the heart of things. But by definition, that is an internalist perspective that stands in opposition - an actual rejection - of any externalism.

So dualism is simply moot - so ill-formed as to not even be dialectically opposed in my view (even if there is a religiously-inspired tradition in philosophy that takes the dichotomy of mind and the physical with all apparent seriousness).

And thus it appears does physicalism. It welcomes light, quanta, emotions, qualia, consciousness, all types of forces including dark forces and dark matter under its umbrella. If we sense it, if we feel it, if it is conjectured, if it is needed for mathematical equations, if it is anything other than God or angels it is welcome. — Rich

I think you skipped over the crucial bit - if it can be measured. So in the end, physicalism reduces to pragmatism.

Quit being an idiot. You said reductionism vs holism lacked rigorous definition. I supplied my rigorous definition. You started bleating in irrelevant fashion. I can't give a fuck about how you might self-identify until you can state it in a fashion that might be relevant to the discussion.

This proposed dichotomy between the mind and the world is a false one. Rather the dichotomy is between the mind and the physical, with both making up the world. — Michael

So again, what is the causal connection?

I myself prefer the dichotomy of mind and world as its speaks to the semiotic modelling relation that is our fullest causal account of physicality.

Your switching it to a dichotomy of mind and the physical suggests you are stuck in the mode of thinking of Being in terms of two imcompatible kinds of "stuff" or substance.

Also, what counts as a physicalist fashion? Presumably a fashion that is both self-organising and closed for causality? Well, that's the question I asked of you. Is the dualist claiming that the mental is either not self-organising or not closed for causailty? — Michael

I confess that I can't make substance dualism a coherent metaphysical position for you. And if you can't manage it on your own, then I suggest you simply abandon it as a bad job.

So what are you calling yourself and what is its rigorous definition?

Can this dualist account for the causal basis of the apparent interaction between mind and world in physicalist fashion?

I'm sure you will launch into an explanation at any minute. X-)

Yep. I am defining physicalism as opposed to the transcendental/supernatural. So I am claiming immanence and naturalism.

How do those terms then cash out?

Well immanence in the end has to be a claim about a self-organising or bootstrapping existence. And that riddle has to be solved through its own dichotomy - the developmental concept of the vague vs the crisp.

And naturalism is a claim about existence being a system closed for causality. So again, it is about self-organisation and bootstrapping. But also it stresses the naturalness of hierarchical organisation as the crisply developed outcome. So the dichotomy that gets recognised is that of complexity vs simplicity, or negentropy vs entropy.

So physicalism has to stand against something. And in being a totalising claim, it has to stand against the brokenness of any actual dualism.

Yet it can't achieve that monadistically - through actual reductionism to material being. Instead it must incorporate all valid dichotomies within itself. So physicalism - as holism - winds up being irreducibly triadic (triadicism itself having these two "internal" complementary moves of vague beginnings vs hierarchically organised outcomes).

Great. So you are talking about people like yourself who would call themselves something, but then who aren't able to define why they would call themselves that something.

Sounds legit.

But physicalists can be both reductionist and holist. I would say I am resolutely physicalist in rejecting any transcendental or supernatural causes of Being. Yet I treat telos and mathematical form as proper physical causes of being.

And then I go one further in being a semiotic physicalist. So it is important to Being that sign or symbol also really exists by virtue of the fact that it (pretty much) escapes or transcends its own physicality to become a source of regulation over the physical.

Even within its own house, the very fact of "strong physicality" conjures up its own "immaterial" other - even if all codes must be a system of physical marks,

So what you describe is physicalism as reductionism or materialism. You are taking the position of a physicalism that wants to reject all the "otherness" that seems dualistically to betray a desire for monadic oneness.

So every time a metaphysical dichotomy arises, one of the complementary terms must be rejected and cast into the wilderness.

Your kind of physicalism wants to be atomistic, local, mechanistic, deterministic, and therefore not holistic, non-local, organic, probabilistic.

And given quantum theory is what we have discovered to lie at the end of the trail of our atomistic inquiries, don't you think your definition of physicalism ought to take that into better account? The material reductionist project ran right off the road about a century ago now.

So you said holism vs reductionism doesn't necessarily have a rigorous definition.

I supplied my rigorous definition (one that I have to say is commonplace among the systems scientists and hierarchy theorists I know).

You continue to reply with fatuous irrelevancies. And there we have it. :)

Thanks for illustrating my point about how a reductionist would want to conceive the causal story.

Mine would be story about cranes rather than sky hooks because I am saying that the constraints would have to arise immanently from the world they also limit. So the constraints are what get constructed.

The obvious analogy is that armies need to be composed of soldiers to really exist. So armies recruit young people (those with the most degrees of behavioural freedom or plasticity) and mould them to fit. As a set up, the army exists because it has narrowed human variety to produce some interchangeable set of near identical military parts.

And then all those soldiers, acting together in ways that manifest their highly specific military properties, reconstruct the very system that made them. Good soldiers become drill sergeants, captains and generals. Good soldiers take their soldierly habits even back into civilian life. So soldiering perpetuates soldiering.

Thus there is a synergy of the local and global in which a limitation of variety creates the components that are then able to self assemble into systems that keep churning out said components.

Strong reductionism of course just presume components exist already formed. Thus anything they collectively construct is an accident without purpose. However a holist or systems view says components - the kind of regularity that gives us the many similar parts that could have a collective behaviour - must be deliberately shaped.

Contingency has to be limited for there to be these parts. So already their existence is dependent on the reality of some global reason for being, and even an idea of the form of the part that would be necessary to the job in mind.

So reductionists have changed the definition of reductionism since Bacon so famously defined it?

Perhaps you can explain what has changed?

Why would I be under the impression that I was describing some common definition rather than providing the rigorous one?

Again, if you have a complaint about my definition, then back it up. As usual, your complaint amounts to "this is all news to me".

But I guess from your comments that you haven't even caught up with Bacon's definition of reductionism in the New Organon. (And who do you think wrote the old Organon?)

If you have a quarrel with my rigorous definition, take it up with my rigorous definition.

Maybe you meet all your "holists" down at the yoga retreat. But your arguments from personal incredulity are not actually any kind of argument you realise.

Most people haven't looked into the issue rigorously so they would share your lack of rigorous insight.

...reductionism versus holism isn't necessarily defined that rigorously. — Terrapin Station

Reductionism aims to reduce all causality to material and efficient cause - ie: bottom-up constructive cause. The story of substantial parts in contingent combination.

Holism reduces causality to Aristotle's four causes. So formal and final cause are taking to be (physically) real as well. And together they are the downwardly acting constraints. So a difference in kind is recognised (as cause via constraint is fundamentally difference from cause via construction).

Advanced holism shows how upwardly acting material freedoms and downwardly acting formal constraints are then each other cause, so closing the circle. Each is the emergent product of the other.

Constructive cause is made possible by a restriction on local material degrees of freedom (parts gain particular properties because they are prevented from trying to do "everything").

Global constraints are then the states of general coherent organisation that collections of these parts must consequently exhibit, or perpetually re-construct.

I'm asking in what sense strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism are not forms of dualism, as laid out in the OP. — Marchesk

They certainly all suffer the same issue of severing causality and so creating disconnected realms. But strong emergentism and non-reductive physicalism would still presume that mind arises from material systems "somehow" (a material system is all that is needed for the magic to happen) while dualism usually would be taken to be a claim about the need for a proper "other" to the material ... ie: the spiritual, the divine, etc.

So it boils down to whether mind is being considered as a property of material organisation, or a property of an immaterial substance. And both break down in the same way because they do reductively think about nature only in terms of "substances with properties".

That is, they both fail when it comes to explaining the causes of causes. They both in the end point only to the existence of "brute unexplained properties".

You offered to make sense of your post.

Might be a reach, but sure, give it a go.

To put it another way, the physical state of the universe does not logically determine strongly emergent or non-reductive properties. They could not in principle be deduced by all the rules and facts of the entire state of the universe before they came into existence. — Marchesk

This is the advantage of a pansemiotic physicalism.

The meaning of symbols cannot be read off the physics of marks. The realm of sign or code is opaque from the brute physicalist point of view.

And yet physicalism predicts the constraints to which the freedom of any naturally arising code system will respond. Any symbolic form of existence will have to have the general purpose of furthering the goal of the second law of thermodynamics.

So physicalism predicts the existence of symbols - the zeroed dimensionality of a code being a physical freedom that can't be constrained (because how can you restrict dimensionality to less than nothing?).

And then physicalism predicts what will happen as a result of the evolution of symbolic complexity. Global entropy will be significantly increased.

By say that the particular is a generality you have denied that there is a dichotomy between the particular and the general. — Metaphysician Undercover

Idiotic. THAT particular is A particular, but THE particular is A generality. It's basic grammar - the dichtotomy of the definite and indefinite article.

Dissolved? Seriously, WTF?

Strewth. What's so difficult about seeing that "general" and "particular" are both names for generalities?

One, or both of us, is not making the required effort to understand the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

Give me strength...

A dichotomy opposes generality against generality. So it is not about the other thing which is the hierarchical division between the general and the particular, or the universal and the singular.

So when it comes to viewpoints, the dichotomous contrast here would be between the notions of the one and the many, or the fixed and the variable.

The Newtonian view presumes one fixed spatiotemporal backdrop. The Relativistic view presumes as many variable backdrops as you like (because now, under relativity, local mass is what breaks the symmetry and fixes "some point of view").

. The abstracted ideas "space" and "time", exist within the human minds. This is what you continually neglect, and overlook in your semiotic descriptions, the necessity for a human mind. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah. So why do I/semiosis call it a "sign"? In what way is that ignoring observers rather than invoking them?

No, there is no time operator in quantum mechanics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Really? Or do you just mean that it doesn't completely work out because in the end, Newtonian continuous time is something QM has to assume as its backdrop. So the fact that there is indeed - empirically - an uncertainty relation is further evidence against the correctness of the Newtonian conception.

So what kind of an ontology is that then, if you have no approach to the material aspect of existence? — Metaphysician Undercover

How is a model of vagueness as unbounded action not an approach? I'm just not over-claiming about what in the end explanation might achieve.

Until you recognize the weakness of this attitude, you will never recognize how often it is that "everyone" is wrong. See, the vast majority are followers, the leaders are few and far between. — Metaphysician Undercover

Uh, yeah. Nah. You've given an accurate description of the typical crank.

The principle called "relativity of simultaneity" demonstrates this very well, the importance of the point of view. — Metaphysician Undercover

Who calls this an example of a metaphysical dichotomy apart from you?

The observer is making a judgement about a pair of events (so that's three things already). And the observer could now have "any" momentum - which is a new lack of constraint on "material content" that leads to the viewpoint being a "relative" variable.

So yes. You are showing you really, really, don't get it.

Well, if we assume that there is consistency in the amount of time that it takes for the repetition to occur, then the "amount of time" is something other than the repetition itself. Therefore time is something other than the repeated change, it is derived from it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Amazing, clocks and rulers measure space and time and yet only take up some interval of space or time. One would almost think that signs of things were not the things themselves. What inspired insight.

Actually you very distinctly said that spacetime is God's way of causing the separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was very distinctly being facetious. Its an old joke in physics.

If the temporal separation is only determinable by us through the means of a spatial separation, how does this produce the logical conclusion that a temporal separation is necessarily a spatial separation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Who said it was a spatial separation. Isn't it an energetic one? Doesnt quantum physics take time and energy as the two complementary operators of an uncertainty relation for that reason? Doesn't time stop for a body travelling at light speed while its energy density goes reciprocally to infinity?

Isn't this exactly what you do, "duck" into the symmetries necessitated by the general theory of relativity? — Metaphysician Undercover

But as I say, I don't pretend that this explains the material side of the deal, only the ontic structure of reality. Of course suitably advanced physics might even explain matter by maths. But everyone who does even string theory knows the matter fields still have to be inserted into the compactified dimensions by hand. They don't fall out of the maths as yet.

.

Any random designation of "it is not this.." could be wrong if we have not first made a designation of what it is. — Metaphysician Undercover

Again this is just you not getting the logic of a dichotomy - what if means to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive.

It was neuroscience/philosophy of mind that led me to biosemiosis as the best ontic model. So it is the empirical support that convinces me.

It explains things like the very fact that our models of the world are not driven by the kind of philosophical completeness that you hold up as the only criteria. Modelling is Pragmatic.

And so right there again is the counterfactuality. You may not have framed your opinions in that fashion, but I have.

It could be the case that brains evolved to faithfully re-present the noumenal. So phenomenology becomes some sort of knowledge failure.

Or it could be the case that phenomenonolgy - the world reduced to bare signs - is precisely the way that minds ought to work. That is, semiotically.

Given two sharply contrasting paradigms, my approach can positively compare itself to others - even the shrill hermeticism of the circle SX is won't to form wiith himself. :)

So, yes, you're always going to be right, because you've defined what right is, and defined yourself out of possibly being wrong — csalisbury

I missed this. You're wrong because the Peircean system is a hypothesis set up counterfactually. If it fails to accord with nature, then nature will make that plain.

So for instance a prediction of Peircean metaphysics is that the universe and its laws evolve. Peirce actually suggested experiments to measure the curvature of space as Euclidean flatness shouldn't be taken Platonically for granted. And his whole philosophy - based on a metaphysics of propensities - foreshadowed the current quantum probabilistic conception of nature.

So sure, the metaphysical model has pleasing completeness in comparison to other schemes. It is much more mathematically definite in what it claims. And by the same token, that makes it empirically testable. It could be wrong - where the majority of metaphysics ought to be dismissed as the "not even wrong".

Poor SX. Not waving but drowning.

When we count a repetitive change, to provide us with a notion on passed time, there is an assumption that each repetition takes the same amount of time. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. And....? (I mean if that's how we design a clock, then what else do we expect?)

To represent the cause of separation as "spacetime" is what I affirm is a mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I said that the requirement for separation is the cause of spacetime.

So separation must be first, then (temporal) order, then (spatial) relation. Notice that the primary separation is therefore not a spatial separation. — Metaphysician Undercover

We've been through this a thousand times. Separation does come first. Time and space (or change vs stasis) is then what separation looks like.

You are just doing the very thing you complain of in reducing your notion of "separation" to "not being spatial separation". Your attempted apophatic definition of temporal separation in terms of not being "a spatial separation" ends up resting on a spatialised notion of separation as its primary distinction.

That is why I prefer to make vagueness primary. In immanent fashion, it avoids that error of metaphysical reasoning.