I didn't mean to suggest that a real world would have a fake history. I meant to suggest that (in this hypothetical world) the bones we see when we dig don't exist before we see them; instead what "exists" is the "function" that determines that when we dig in a certain spot we will see bones.

How is making weathered dinosaur bones not faking an entropic history?

Sure I accept that your argument is that the bones are only made at the very instant they need to be struck by our spade. But it is the same issue as for creationists. Why go to the extra trouble of building in the look of a history if this is an essentially a-historic world creating process?

It seems illogical for such a world to have a reason to create a look of history in contradiction of what it actually is as a "create it as you go" kind of world.

You're calling Plato a mystic.

Well you seemed to be taking a materialist position and that's hardly Platonic form is it? So you make less and less sense here. If you are arguing Plato, say so.

(And it might make more sense if you did that in relation to Plato's own concept of the chora - the material receptacle of his forms.)

I recognize metaphysical reductionism, therefore I believe there to be a prime substance.

Again your use of jargon is confusing. Do you mean prime matter? It seems that you mistake Aristotle's hylomorphic doctrine of substance for material cause.

And I don't think Aristotle's prime matter is a concept that works except as another name for vagueness or apeiron.

So sure, my argument is that everything is "made of apeiron", which sounds like talking about a primal stuff.

But the difference is that your notion of this stuff is that it is already concrete. It is already formed. It already obeys a conservation principle and a locality principle.

My notion instead treats it as the limitless, the unformed, the unmaterial. It is not fixed by conservation or locale. It is just pure open-ended possibility. So it is pre-material in any usual sense of matter, just as much as it is pre-form in not yet having undergone the phase transition which is its structuring organisation to become a something definite.

At what point does something go from vague to crisp? Is it vague, vague, vague BOOM crispness? Why does this happen? And how does this happen outside of time?

The change is the beginning of time and space. Those are both aspects of the emergence of a global dimensional organisation. So it is what "happens" in the earlier time, and the higher energy, which would be the "before" of the Planck scale. Except before the Planck scale, there just isn't anything determinate in existence, so talking about the before does't really make sense.

Why is it of no real interest? Because you don't find it exciting or personally interesting? Because it's not useful?

I'm not interested in poetic visions. So I agree. If vagueness and this general way of thinking can't be cashed out in real physics, its nothing in the end. It has to be a mathematical strength model or chuck it in the bin of metaphysical speculation.

Luckily, it is a way of thinking that is increasingly common in science. There is a lot of maths to support it.

What I don't understand is, if this great narrative of naturalized metaphysics was so successful, why it's not well known today.

Mechanics is not wrong. It has worked splendidly to serve the interest of humans the last 500 years. If you think of existence in terms of the causality of machines, you start to get good at making machines. So mechanics has repaid its makers many times over. And it is not wrong as - in its carefully limited sphere - it works.

But if you are talking about the bounding extremes of our existence - the quantumly small, the cosmically large, the neurally complex - then yes it breaks down and a bigger modelling paradigm is needed.

What seems to be the case is that these people you speak of have literally left behind these questions in favor of ones that are more useful or stimulating while continuing to use the term "metaphysics" when they're really doing philosophy of science or science itself.

I'm not interested in your narrow definition of what counts as metaphysics. I merely point out that I defend the very first important metaphysics model in philosophy - Anaximander's hierarchical symmetry breaking tale of the apeiron.

This is what I'm questioning. Is it necessary that a real world incorporates a global history? Or is it metaphysically possible for a real world to behave in the same sort of way where "more world" is generated from a single point of view?

So it seems possible if your existence is just a computer simulation. But if this about a material reality, what could generate the level of accumulated material history that we observe. Why would a real world have to fake a history - like you dig in the ground and find the mineralised bones of dinosaurs?

Sure you might say some magical process just generates stuff as far as your eye can see. But why would it fake layers of entropic history rather than just generate shiny new untouched stuff?

We account for our world in the way it actually seems to be - which is historically conditioned. If this alternative way of making worlds is always making new stuff, it adds considerable implausibility that it would go to the trouble of make the new stuff look "suitably old".

A shadow cannot exist without a body blocking out the light. The properties of the world are like shadows and depend upon a body that has no properties. — darthbarracuda

Ye gods. Outright mysticism.

It's why asking "what caused God?!" misses the entire point of the argument - under the metaphysical scheme from which they are operating, God is a necessary component.

So it is necessary there is a first cause. And it must be a first substance indeed. Otherwise your hypostatic reductionist framework is in deep shit. Isn't that a rather personalised invocation of final cause?

I'd say, because there's no explanation as to how this vagueness exists, as if its vagueness isn't dependent upon anything else and is just floating around somewhere in non-spacetime.

Well the obvious retort is that vagueness exists vaguely. And we can speak about that intelligibly as being the antithesis of the crisply formed world from where we ask such questions.

So sure, one has to use a little poetic licence to introduce the idea. But it is of no real interest unless it can be mathematically modelled. Just like quantum foam, virtual particles, zero point energy, spontaneous symmetry breaking and the many other useful physical concepts that depend on a notion of "pure fluctuation".

I mean do you think our 4D Universe "floats" in anything? Do you think the modern maths of curvature only makes sense if you re-introduce a pre-Goethean embedding space? Do you think infinity only exists if someone has counted all the way to its limit?

You are raising quibbles that have long been left behind in science and math informed metaphysics.

For each time we postulate a process, we need to postulate a stage in which this process is occurring. — darthbarracuda

And you find this a self-evident and undeniable truth because? .... [please fill in blank].

I mean has science found some such ultimate basis? Surely what science is finding that wind the clock back to beginnings and it all goes quantum vague (indeterminate).

And is it even an intelligible clam? Just because most of what we know from our own scale of being seems to have a substantial underpinning, how can it be turtles all the way down? How can there be a first definite stuff with no cause? Doesn't that do the ultimate violence to the very notion of causality you hope to employ.

So a more radical alternative is already demanded as reductionism can't ground itself. We should accept the fact and move on, opening our minds to the other alternatives out there.

Peirce's semiotic approach - which grants that beginnings can be vague, an unstructured sea of fluctuation - is the one that fits a generally informational and developmental metaphysics (of the kind to be found in physics and cosmology today).

Aha! So there's the 'implicit mind' in semiotics. Knew it was there somewhere. ;) — Wayfarer

Yep. Except to access that, you would have to redefine your notion of "mind" in radical fashion. And you would still want to argue that mind is something transcendent and substantial, no?

With a complex algorithm and a single seed an entire universe (264 planets) and everything in it is accounted for (although obviously not generated). It is predetermined what you will find if you fly off into the distance – even though that distant thing doesn't actually "exist" yet. — Michael

Interesting article. But it does say that further random seeds are being generated all the time. Now it then tries to backtrack and argue that this is still deterministic because the original seed is the source of the pseudo-random generation of new seeds. And yet - if the principle of indifference does apply in the program - then there is a constant generation of randomness, for all practical purposes.

Plus of course there is the human making decisions when playing the game. So the gamer is outside the "procedure" as the critical source of unpredictability.

So the model kind of captures reality in imagining a few basic laws that get kicked along by randomised variables being plug in to generate the actual dynamics.

But there are big chunks of reality missing - like entropy. There is no energy cost, speed of light restrictions, decay, and much else in the model. So the model represents a very thin view of physical structure.

The clunky level of randomness and interaction being modeled is illustrated by...

Minor adjustments to the source code can cause mountains to unexpectedly turn into lakes, species to mutate, or objects to lose the property of collision and plummet to the center of a planet. “Something as simple as altering the color of a creature,” Murray noted, “can cause the water level to rise.”

So the major thing is that this world is driven from a single point of view and does not reflect a god's eye coherent point of view. It generates "more world" from wherever you have got to in the game's structure - so incorporates a local personal history. But the real world incorporates a global history in generating its every next step.

That is what makes it possible for there to be chameleons that change their colour without it destablising plate tectonics. The constraints that form the real world have a hierarchical organisation which makes it meaningfull whether we are talking about universal conditions baked in generally from the first moment of the Big Bang or instead the very arbitrary choices a human is free to make when deciding whether to shoot or sit back and watch computer generated aliens on imaginary planets.

Well I think processes are dependent upon a hypostasis. It doesn't make any sense to talk of structure, vagueness, proto-objecthood, process, or what have you without an underlying hypostasis. — darthbarracuda

Thanks for restating your conventional reductionist understanding of reality. But assertions aren't arguments.

The interpretant is essentially the already-baked-in observer here. Whence interpretation? My prediction is you will say that we cannot go any further than this semiotic ground and thus just a brute fact. — schopenhauer1

That's a good point. And it is the point of the semiotic view to generalise or universalise the notion of the observer.

So in the panpsychic view, this is done by spreadiing mind about everywhere, over every scale of being. But who knows what this "mind" is? It is a concept without causal structure or useful meaning.

In the pansemiotic view, it is interpretance or the sign relation that is spread around every scale of being. And so observation is modelled in terms of an ontic process.

Of course that is just a broad brush sketch. Then you have to cash it out in more useful ways. Which is what modern thermodynamic/information theoretic descriptions of the Universe have been doing.

This infodynamic perspective for instance adds formal and final cause - the story of the top-down constraints - to the bare science. The development of structured being is granted an entropic shape, direction and purpose. The universe becomes "mindful" in this self-organising regard. The universe can be considered a dissipative structure that is dissipating hot quantum uncertainty so as to produce a cool realm of robust classicality.

So the panpsychist starts with a reified notion of "mind" and simply imagines diluting it - thinning out its substance until it is there in fundamental particles in some deaf, dumb and blind fashion. The basic question of "what is observation" is simply brushed under the carpet by fading it away to nothing except the regular physics of mechanical masses and forces.

Pansemiotics is part of the new information revolution where observerhood is defined at the Planck grain in terms of "the questions that could even be asked" of a physical locale. Quantum uncertainty is due to the fact of hitting a physical limit where you can no longer ask all the questions you need to to precisify the state of a locale. So the breakdown of observation is exactly determined. Hence the beginnings of (classically certain) observation is also made physically measurable and theoretically tractable.

Once you can say where things stop and start in terms of concrete existence, you are away. And that is what physics can now do.

Every physical constraint is a sign. It is information to be read as a constraint on free dynamics. And information theory can account for both the negentropy of constraints and the entropy of degrees of freedom.

That view of things is now being take back into mind science to account for the kinds of things that brains do in terms of forward modelling or Bayseian information uncertainty reduction.

Consciousness becomes not the generalised substance of panpsychism but instead a massive ensemble of accessible modelling states - a massive ensemble of particulars. In any moment, the brain could be in any number of states that represent a meaningful observer~observables modelling relation. The fact that just one state is selected, the rest suppressed, is what gives brain consciousness its exceptional adaptive variety.

So in pansemiotics, the observer is the interpretance, which is the habits, which is the constraints, which is the negentropy. That is how you go from the highly complex specificity of observing brains to the most simple, universal and fundamental level of observation that is the basic entropic condition of the Universe described through dissipative structure theory.

The metaphysician isn't concerned with how universals evolved. He's concerned with whether or not universals exist. The evolving structure narrative can be explained without universals. — darthbarracuda

So metaphysics doesn't include process philosophy in your book. Great. You win.

Where does this sparrow emerge from? How is this "ancestral" generality not a particular? The fact that we can identify it and communicate about it shows that it's something. Maybe not like a sparrow, a chair, or a hydrogen-fusing hypergiant star, but something regardless. — darthbarracuda

The sparrow emerges from the capacity of information to organise a dissipative flow of matter into an anticipated, purpose-serving, structure. It's negentropy and entropy, constraints and freedom - the usual systems story.

And sure we can say something about a sparrow. But again, don't mix synchronic epistemology and the diachronic ontological issue of universals.

Yes, you said that many today are disregarding universalism because of social issues - universalism is closely tied to essentialism, and essentialism has a rather blotchy history of labeling non-conformers as dysfunctional. — darthbarracuda

What? Are you saying a liking for systems thinking is like homophobia?

Could such 'fundamental constants of nature' be considered as analogous to universals? — Wayfarer

It could go either way. The big problem for fundamental physics is that the constants seem instead to be the most contingent of all particulars. So they just are brute numbers that are true of our universe by some kind of random accident. That view of the constants is why there are multiverse theories. If the constants are particulars, then there is no reason to limit the values they take and no reason for there not to be an infinity of universes.

The other view is that the constants instead represent some kind of deeply rooted equilibrium balance or geometric ratio. So - if we had a theory of everything - they would pop out of that as the only possible ratios, in just the same way that pi, phi, e and Feigenbaum's constant are all explained as straightforward ratios that result in these really arbitrary seeming numbers.

So most physicists would lean to the idea they are contingent particulars. The more interesting alternative would turn out to be that they express a pure geometric relation that we might one day discover.

Explaining how generalised simplicity becomes particularized complexity doesn't really tell us whether or not universals exist, because at any moment of time, a property is instantiated in virtue of the fact that something exists. — darthbarracuda

Generally I'm not following your post (sexual ethics essentialism???).

But I draw attention to the synchronic supposition upon which you try to argue your case. For you it is natural to talk about what exists at some moment in time. But it is fundamental to my position that spatiotemporal scale is itself what is hierarchically organised. And this is now standard physics - as in lightcones, event horizons and quantum events.

So generality is defined by it being the very largest possible spatiotemporal scale over which action is being integrated - that is, the visible universe in the case of physical law.

A sparrow is made up of protons and electrons. Those parts are standard across a universe over a scale defined by the particle horizon and the electro-weak symmetry breaking temperature.

But the organic chemistry that is the sparrow is a far more local and specified state of affairs - generic only over about a billion or so years.

Then the genomic sparrowness of the sparrow is information that impinges on a location in a substantial way (such as we would say - there's a sparrow) over perhaps a few million years of evolutionary memory forming.

And so we could continue on to what makes this particular sparrow about to spread its wings and have the property of being scared (the sight of the lurking cat).

So you make pointing at particulars seem like something we can freely do at any chosen moment. But that is to confuse epistemology and ontolology if you are hoping to talk about the complicated and hierarchical structuring of nature that sees a sparrow emerge as a natural kind - a genus - let alone produces some particular bird before us.

Of course, it I am not claiming that the reflection must be perfect, just that there must some reflection if our categories and hierarchies are not to be completely arbitrary. — John

Another ontological point that distinguishes Pragmatic naturalism here is that it indeed embraces the arbitrary along with the necessary.

So the traditional Platonic conception of universals (and natural laws) is they are necessitating or determining principles. Universal causation applies because every effect must have its prior cause.

However Peircean pragmatism was explicit in saying universal causation may be the generalised habit, yet there is also actual spontaneity or arbitrariness in life. And this claim was made on the basis of the emergence of probalistic thinking in science, particularly in thermodynamics and evolutionary theory. Of course, this doctrine of tychism also foreshadowed quantum theories demonstration that existence is fundamentally spontaneous in this fashion.

So Aristotle got it right at the beginning in accepting brute accident in nature, as well as the fact of nature being organised by a hierarchy of increasingly generalised constraints or lawful habit. And that more subtle metaphysics is what Pragmatism picked up on, and post-quantum science is now really driving home.

The scholastic argument about realism vs nominalism seems hugely quaint in that light. It is of historical interest having become such a familiar part of the general culture of the humanities. But metaphysics/science has long ago moved on to much more sophisticated conceptions.

(Even if, as I say, most scientists have their own rather culturally wonky take on these philosophy of science issues because - in usual dialectical fashion - science seeks to define itself as other to the humanities, returning the favour.)

Nothing changes if I adopt a trope theoretic position or a nominalist position, because metaphysics is not an empirical science in the sense that physics is. — darthbarracuda

You miss the point of science talking a hierarchical naturalistic view on the question. It does mean you can go out and measure universality in terms of generalised simplicity vs particularised complexity - gravity vs sparrows.

So the debate about universals carried on "metaphysically" in the hands of scholastic realists vs nominalists. Meanwhile science continued on with Aristotle's natural kinds metaphysics where universals were really various grades of a genus~species dichotomy.

Peirce in particular took this forward by identifying the universalising tendency in nature with constraints or habits. So the naturalness of hierarchical organisation is explained by the naturalness of developmental/evolutionary processes. Which in turn, is explained by symmetry breaking structural principles.

So the conventional metaphysical debate is non-naturalistic in being between the platonic idealists and the hardline social constructionists. The Aristotelean tradition is the metaphysics that science has cashed out with great success via Pragmatism - even if Reductionism/Scientism/Positivism is a further modern anti-universals tendency (being that part of science's success that quixotically wants to reject its own philosophical grounds for social reasons.)

I don't see why we should expect that a physicist in say 400 years' time will see universals as the same as we do now. It certainly hasn't worked out that way so far. — mcdoodle

Metaphysics began with Anaximander taking just such a hierarchical view of nature and has relentlentlessly followed the same path ever since. So from a historical point of view, there has only been the one story.

To shrug your shoulders and say "lucky accident, hey", is supremely optimistic as an argument here.

Other than Aristotle what are some good resources on four cause causation, in particular its relationship to science? — darthbarracuda

That's a broad question. It's just basic in systems science and theoretical biology. But for example there would be Robert Rosen's relational biology and anticipatory systems books.

I would be interested in any comment you might have on convergence, posted above. — Wayfarer

Convergent evolution is a good example of how contexts shape up their contents in teleological fashion. So ecosystems have niches for vultures. In the old world they evolved from hawks. In the new world, they evolved from storks.

So yes. Reductionist science is in line with nominalism in always wanting to discount the reality of formal and final cause. Convergent evolution should make reductionist stop and think. But prejudice normally wins out.

The particular present-day hierarchy of sciences is however a historically-situated way of organising, that happened for contingent reasons. In other eras or in other possible worlds understanding might be organised quite differently. — mcdoodle

Regardless of your alternative world scheme, gravity is going to be a more universal fact than sparrows.

So Hegel's statement that "pure Being is one and the same as pure Nothing" amounts to just that...nothing. It's gibberish. When we imagine "Being as Nothing" we end up thinking about some kind of vast black void, or a feeling of emptiness. But that is simply poetry. For most metaphysics, then, these statements are pseudo-statements: they bastardize the meaning of a word and use it in a fictional way. — darthbarracuda

Alternatively, Hegel was making a deeply logical point that Carnap's brand of logic fails to describe.

Carnap's metaphysics presumes all logical possibilities to be crisp or counterfactual. Things are either one or the other. And from that reductionist axiom, all his deductions may proceed.

But Hegel, like Peirce, was introducing the further grounding category of the vague or indeterminate. So pure being and pure nothing were the same in their - logical - absolute lack of determination. A state of everythingness and a state of nothingness are in effect the same in their lack of of any somethingness.

So Hegel was simply pointing out the further category of the indeterminate that grounds all the happy logical apparatus of reductionist logic - the kind of logic that simply then presumes everything that is, does fit its Procrustean binary A/not-A format.

. What you are arguing here here is not something you can demonstrate with scientific references, although, granted, you can make a powerful argument from scientific knowledge to the realm beyond science. — mcdoodle

So why is science hierarchically organised in to physics, chemistry, biology, psychology? Did humans just invent a crazy set of divisions for no reason or does that reflect the ontic fact that existence is found to have levels of constraint that range from the very general to the highly specific?

I believe nominalism claims that those things which particulars have in common are not independent of those particulars. There is no such thing as roundness in the absence of a round object. — Michael

Again, the real point is that the realist-nominalist debate is founded on a metaphysical dichotomy. And so the resolution lies not in an eternal battle to decide which is the real, which is the epiphenomenal. Being a dichotomy, each requires the reality of the other to be real itself.

So there can be no particularity without generality. And vice versa. You need a symmetry to have a breaking. And the breaking is what reveals there was a symmetry.

The problem with universals and Platonic ideas is that they are not generally understood in a hierarchical fashion. So roundness and sparrows and teacups are all names for individuated ideals. Platonia quickly fills up with a bestiary of perfect representatives of classes.

Nominalism is right on that score. We humans freely name abstractions without really being systematic about the formal and final causality that the names mean to refer to.

But reality is organised hierarchically. So teacups are ideals that have their formal and final cause very locally within the sphere of human culture. And sparrows likewise are the product of very local biological and ecological constraints - the symmetry breaking information to be found in a genetic and ecological developmental history.

So if we are talking about the truly universal, we are talking about the cosmologically fundamental. And roundness becomes a good example of that.

The reason for roundness is rotational symmetry. Along with translational symmetry, it is simply one of the basic facts of their being spacetime. And it is a universal in the fashion I specify - a difference that doesn't make a difference. To spin on the spot is inertial. Rotation freely happens because it makes no difference.

So roundness becomes the name we give in recognition our (geometric) reality has this fundamental boundary property. A circle is a representation of the symmetry which is an unbreachable limit - you can't get more round than this roundest thing. The circle embodies the difference that doesn't make a difference because it could be spinning madly, it could be standing still, and you couldn't see any change.

And then from that state of cosmic Platonic perfection, even the slightest deviation becomes the symmetry breaking, the difference that makes a difference. Mark the circle with the tiniest dot and now it's state of motion is made a counterfactually definite thing.

So the whole realist-nominalist debate is a result of the usual wrong turn when faced with a metaphysical strength dichotomy or symmetry breaking.

The way to make sense of an apparently fundamental opposition is to step back to the triadic or hierarchically organised point of view where you instead see how it is a case of two complementary principles in mutually formative interaction. Each extreme is making its other in a mutualised symmetry breaking.

Wayfarer should recognise this as Budhist dependent co-arising even if he doesn't get the more advanced formulations of systems science and Peircean semiotics.

I am a simple nominalist about universals. We are universalising creatures, and such universalising is indeed the only way we could make sense of events and objects. To differentiate is to deny identity; and then to quantify over properties is to universalise, from redness to sparrows. — mcdoodle

But sparrows and redness are names of qualities. So how did you get from quantification to that?

It would make more sense to say that we are differentiating creatures and then generality or quality arises in the limit where differences no longer make a difference to what we are talking about. A sparrow is still a sparrow if it red or blue, plastic or flesh, fat or thin.

So universals - as ideas, conceptions, qualities or the many other terms we have to denote bounding constraints - are not merely merological composites of all their possible instances. They stand just as firmly as the ground to acts of differentiation. For differences to make a difference pre-supposes the simpler state of differences that don't change a state of affairs.

This isn't about predicate logic as that is itself a highly reductive version of what I would mean by logic.

So it is about sign relations as a whole - propositions merely being the signs themselves, the targets of some habit of interpretance.

That is the usual commonsense position but it runs into the problem that causation is what in the end folk want to get at. Cartesian dualism seems a fact because we are minds that seem to be able to make things happen. That may also be causally insoluble under dualism, but it would be incoherent to deny that it is the very thing that most needs explaining.

So I would say - like Peirce - you are arguing the wrong way round in saying universals are just a logical way of talking. The Peircean position is that causation is a logic-like process - a universal growth in reasonableness or intelligibility.

Logic works for us not by accident but because the Universe itself operates "logically".

As to ideas and change, it is Platonism that treats forms as eternal abstract objects. A systems view treats them as informational constraints. So forms capture limits on free material variety. They are thus the directors and channellers or actual change. Also forms can develop or evolve in time. Or more accurately, as limits, they only get fully expressed at "the end of time" - that is, whenever things come to an equilbrated state of rest.

Peirce said reality was organised by sign relations. That is a little different. Or even completely different.

Yet still you have two ontic choices here - either you are going to go for an immanent or a transcendent metaphysics. I choose immanent.

Where I would agree with you about your usual target here - Scientism or Materialism - is that these too are transcendent in effect. They want to put formal and final cause in the realm of ideas. The only difference is that they add the word "merely" ideas. Scientism pretends that questions about observers and minds and purposes are not real (causal) questions.

But if you are an adherent of immanence, then the job is to account for everything - causes and effects - from within.

And that was what the irreducible triadism of Peircean metaphysics was aimed at.

That's fine. Except my point is that it is the very thing of trying to make one "the real", the other "mere appearance", that is the wrong move that engenders this eternal debate.

So we have the traditional problem of universals because of a dualistic thinking - the usual divine vs material dichotomy - which then wants to make one side of the argument the ultimate winner.

My view is the systems' one where the ontology is irreducibly triadic. So when we are talking about the formal vs the material causes, those are both real - as causes. And so too is the world of formed matter that is the result of that causal action. So the effect is also real.

At which stage talking about what is real or unreal doesn't really make much sense as what we have is talk about a system for holistic emergence. We wind up with the three aspects of coming into existence which are the two types of causality - formal and material - plus the third thing which is where causes ceases to make a difference and instead we have what we call a stable effect, an individuated state of being.

Another a way of resolving matters is to see both the general and the particular as equally "unreal".

So where all the issues stem from is our need to identify the causes of states of affairs. And following Aristotle, we can make a broad division into the essential abstract causes - form and purpose - and then the accidental or particular causes - the material and efficient.

So particular things are not really individuals but the individuated. They arise because of a hylomorphic interaction between top-down constraints (universal forms) and bottom-up constructions (material contingencies).

Thus talk about "reality" gets confused as instead everything is part of an irreducibly triadic emergent process. An individuated object is really a process, an act of individuation in which the universal stands for the shaping causes and the particularity is about the material contingencies. The object in question is made of this lump of stuff, in this place, at this moment.

So from a systems perspective, universals are real as a critical part of the causes of reality - reality being what we usually mean as the persisting result of causal actions, the individuation that results in concrete appearing states of affairs.

Another entropy based way of visualising it is like gas condensing to water. Gas moves about in constant disorderly fashion. Then it cools and gets organised. It develops a dimensionality of flow. Talking about directions makes sense because there are now counterfactual directions not being taken.

So is the gas timeless or too busy flying in any old direction? What we know as a dimension of time is a global entropic flow, against which any negentropic counter-action becomes a difference that makes a difference. Something "really happens" only to the degree that it can't very easily unhappen anymore.

Its only a problem if you believe scientific models have to be "the thing as it really is", rather than a pragmatic model.

So the source of the time symmetry in mechanical descriptions is hardly a metaphysical-level problem - science built its models that way. But the next step would have to be a quantum gravity model of existence. And at that stage, spacetime is going to have to be statistically emergent from a more fundamental symmetry (and symmetry breaking).

Sure, Smolin talks about the need for real time. But on closer inspection, does that mean more than thinking that flux or change is fundamental? It is the (quantum foam) ground out of which spatial coordinates and persistent lawful organisation develops.

Entropy is the only thing that could explain time (as global change) having a direction.

So the problem for all of physics is that it is "mechanical" - an assumption of local time reversibility is built into the very form of its equations. Any equation is a statement of a symmetry which is then broken by you the observer plugging in some actual physical number of a variable.

To then talk about the whole of the Universe, including the emergence of time, you have to have equations that already encode some sort of temporal direction - a symmetry breaking.

Thermodynamics or statistical mechanics give you such a framework. It says if you let a system freely randomise, it will freely keep randomising until that randomness reaches its equilibrium maximum.

But a theory of the universe has to include not only the story of its initial conditions (the local material contents that get shifted around randomly) but also the reason for their being "the system", quantum or otherwise, that is the boundary conditions.

So ordinary thermodynamics - which likes to take a bounded spacetime for granted - is only half an answer, which is why ordinary entropy accounting doesn't get you too far here.

On the specific thing of quantum information loss (or decoherence, as I believe you likely mean) then yes, that is a useful model.

The general idea is that as things tend towards a cold residual fizzle of radiation, all particular local information has been erased and you only need two global measurements - the general temperature (or energy density) of the universe and its scale factor (how big it is in terms of the visible event horizon).

At the Heat Death, with both these at their maximum, time has pretty much halted in terms of meaningful change. Like gas particles in a flask, everything might still be in motion, but nothing new is happening in any physical sense.

Heh. Well as PF is buggered...

Applying entropy concepts to the whole universe is tricky. But two simple points we can make are:

1) The Heat Death state is as cold as it gets and so that limits rather severely the possibility of hot thermal fluctuations that might spawn something new.

2) Having said that, it is only the Planck scale that puts a floor under the ultimate temperature drop and so if the Planck scale is not a true physical limit for some reason (that is, our vacuum state is only a false vacuum) then theoretically some further symmetry breaking could arise and the universe would plunge on through, getting larger and colder than 0 degrees K.

Then starting to get into the complications, the old cosmological problem was that the universe really ought to gravitationally roll itself back up into an a negentropic super hot ball given enough time - setting up a simple eternal recycling.

The new dark energy universe tells us there will indeed be eternal expansion and so an actual heat death. But the new get out clause could be that dark energy is a residual inflation (a scalar field that expands exponentially without "cooling" - believe that if you like) and so at some point in an eternal Heat Death there could be a fluctuation that again breaks the symmetry and inflation takes off all over again in its "cost less" fashion - the so-called Big Rip.

The point is that any scenario can be concocted. But the observable state of the universe should suggest some scenarios are highly unlikely (because the Heat Death just now has the look of a one way trip).

However in popular science, no one likes a dull answer. So eternal recycling and other wild rebirth scenarios get plenty of airtime.