My criticism is not on account of what you pursue, but on account of your polemical tone and tendency to re-interpret what others say in order to attack it on your own terms — Janus

Who would ever do such a thing?? :scream:

No doubt we all do it at times, and would benefit from having it pointed out when we do. Some do it more than others, too. :wink:

Whether they say something interesting about the metaphysics of nature is akin to whether you find a particular poet interesting. — Janus

No it bloody isn't. Not if naturalism is the position that there is something more at stake here than merely "interest".

Some things are actually measurably the case because they are said from within frameworks that make predictions. These frameworks also have their internal logical coherence as well as their measurable external correspondence. So they are truth-apt in the two complementary senses needed. Rational and empirical.

So, Peirce allowed that there might be other kinds of 'truths'; aesthetic truths, spiritual truths, that the community of enquirers would never come to agree upon? — Janus

You can read him for yourself. It is an important question why - given all his monstrous system mongering - he said so little about the aesthetic. He wanted to. But found when he got to that bit, there wasn't much that was substantial enough to formalise.

Certainly he did make some gestures. He came up with a really toe-curling notion of "universal love" or agape. But Peirce scholars - after the first theistic flush of interest in his unpublished manuscripts - tend to note the way he falls silent at about the point Hegel and Kant start to turn up the deontological volume.

He of course made his famous "neglected argument" for God - or some kind of godhood that he said was quite unlike the regular notion - as an idea that can't be avoided by a community of reasoning inquirers, hence it must be the truth.

But I will say again, I don't find that bit convincing. However if you water down the conception of the divine enough - like Peirce had to do to make it consistent with his excellent understanding of evolutionary theory and developmental cosmology - then it is not as if there is some biblical difference from what I see as pure athetistic naturalism. In other forums, where many of the well-read Peirceans were theologians, I never got into any bitter arguments on that score. But those were also academic discussion boards of course.

So for example, Peirce picked out something essential about evolution and cosmology. He rejected the blind mechanical determinism of his day to insist that chance or spontaneity must be as basic to nature as their constraint. Darwinism, for example, could be only half the story as it could only remove variety from nature, not create it.

That was a pretty deep insight so early in the game for evolutionary theory. In the same way, what did quantum physics later come to tell us about the basic indeterminism of nature? Give old Charlie credit there. And what does a Peircean approach to inferential reasoning - where it all has to start with a creative abductive leap - have to tell us about the current dreams concerning machine intelligence?

So yeah. You can find a few false steps and clumsy moves. But I know the difference when someone can appreciate Peirce in his actual historical context.

If your question is whether a community of inquiry would settle on a truth about every possible aspect of life - even a taste in poetry or women - then of course the answer should be obvious. The actual metaphysical system divides the phenomenal into its necessities and its contingencies. Some things have a mathematical strength inevitability. Others - by definition - are just meaningless differences. That free spontaneity missing from the deterministic science you so deride, as if Peirce hadn't done that already.

So you might like detective novels, I might like something else. We live in societies that encourage quite a degree of personal choice - saying that the choices don't need to be determined because the resulting spontaneous variety is also an essential complementary part of society being a developing, evolving, system.

If you but understood Peirce, you would see how silly it is to try to lump him in with your scientistic foe. He explained why the free or accidental was also necessary, why the whole is a combo of the one and the many, why Newtonian determinism was already a scientific crock soon to be rewritten.

Whitehead withdrew from scientific contact with the world. He retreated into the merely poetic. Peirce took on scientism and so recovered philosophical naturalism for the modern era. But for various reasons - too difficult, too early, too cut off from the Continent's academic centres, not exactly great at greasing up his lesser contemporaries - he was very poorly understood at the time he was working all this out.

However if you water down the conception of the divine enough - like Peirce had to do to make it consistent with his excellent understanding of evolutionary theory and developmental cosmology - then it is not as if there is some biblical difference from what I see as pure athetistic naturalism. — apokrisis

I am considering the notion that the so-called ‘firstness’ actually corresponds with, and manifests as, the first person perspective. So that as organisms evolve, 'firstness' is what manifests as the subject, or gives rise to subject-hood, being 'a subject of experience', or being-as-such (as distinct from the imputed being of objects of perception).

I noticed from the article I mentioned on Uexküll:

Uexküll claims that the apperception process, although lawful, cannot be mathematically described. Thus, for principal reasons, biology cannot be reduced to physics. For example, the laws of color complementarity are laws of the subject that govern the appearance of things in space but cannot be reduced to spatial relations. Therefore they go beyond physics which is limited to spatio-temporal relations.

“We have shown that, in Kant’s sense, there is no such thing as absolute space (there is no Newtonian space) on which our subject is without influence. For both the specific material of space, namely local signs and direction-signs, and the form this material assumes are subjective creations. Without the spatial qualities and the bridging of them together into their common form that apperception makes possible (Kant’s ‘apperception process’) there would be no space at all, but merely a number of sense-qualities, such as colors, sounds, smells, and so forth, these would of course, have their specific forms and laws, but there would be no common arena in which they could all play their part” (1926, 49).

Uexküll introduced a biology of subjects which he seems to be tempted to expand to a cosmology and physics of subjects and their Umwelts (1973, 324, 339). The combination of signs into complex unities is understood as the activity of a Kantian transcendental subject that is beyond experience:

“[…] the impulses that build up our bodies elude our knowledge. And so it is self-evident that the whole impulse-system, which is at once the architect and the director of our body, is forever hidden from our view. As Kant would say, we have to do with a transcendental subject i.e. a subject lying beyond what we can experience, far wider in its embrace than the spirit, which embraces only the life of our ego”

The point being, this can't be interpreted as a form of 'atheistic naturalism', because one of the fundamental drivers of the process is, as the passage says, 'eludes our knowledge' and in any case 'can't be reduced to physics'. This is reminiscent of other schools of transcendental philosophy, for instance, Vedanta, where ātman, as 'transcendental subject' is the counterpart or reflection of Brahman, who is to all intents 'the first-person' aspect of the Universe.

But in any case, I don't see why such an understanding would be alien to C S Peirce, who was, as has been shown, quite indebted to both Emerson and Schelling, both of whom have some resemblances to Vedanta, and all three of whom are recognised as generally idealistic in attitude.

And I think the reason Peirce didn't devote that much effort to that side of his work was because he was a working scientist and of a mainly pragmatic bent. But whenever he did write about such matters, it was often from an idealist standpoint.

So is Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, or Toy Story. That is a requirement of poetic worlds too. That is what makes them realities which our imaginations can inhabit. — apokrisis

Peircean math is not utilized in a systematic way either. It's not taught as THE theory of everything that totalizes sciences. However, I can see your system and Whitehead's being used to overlay this and justified in just about the same way. I'm not Whiteheadian scholar, but I can imagine a counter-universe with there is bizarro-apokrisis advocating for Whitehead's system in much the same way as you do the Peirce system.

Huh? To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent. — apokrisis

Oh, well I've seen you say in the past that newborns have no reference to distinctions (what is green if they don't know what not-green is? etc.) and I've seen you say various similar things about animals. I can try to copy and paste what you've said if you want. The linguistic- socially constructed brain seemed important to you for the "illusion" of experiential qualia and other internal states.

Feel free to fuck off anytime you like. — apokrisis

So I guess you agree, arrogant you are, but don't give a shit. Noted.

I am considering the notion that the so-called ‘firstness’ actually corresponds with, and manifests as, the first person perspective. — Wayfarer

It really doesn't. That has to arise as Thirdness. A meaningful perspective or point of view has to have the other thing of a stable context.

I can know that thing over there is a cat because I know it is not a dog, cow or rocket launcher.

Apperception is then me being able to categories that as a "cat". Whatever it is that it might be as the thing-in-itself, to me, I am reading that part of my world, my umwelt, as the sign of a cat. And so I will act towards it as if it is a cat until further notice.

And I think the reason Peirce didn't devote that much effort to that side of his work was because he was a working scientist and of a mainly pragmatic bent. — Wayfarer

Yeah. He had a foot in both camps. So you get to claim him for yourself and reject him also. You win both ways. Congrats.

You post links to stuff you haven't even viewed. Noted.

Then when the content is discussed, you change the subject. Noted.

I wouldn't call it arrogant. But I would call it something.

But you didn't address the other things in the post.. specifically baby and animal experiences, Peirce not accepted as THE theory but is overlayed on top of other ones post-facto, and the big glaring one, how is the "interpretant" magically turned into experience without the interpretant being experiential.

But you didn't address the other things in the post.. specifically baby and animal experiences, — schopenhauer1

I did.

"To the degree there is a constructed "self", there is a matching unwelt. So animals and newborns are clearly experiential due to their relevant degree of biologically constructed selfhood. But not in terms of a linguistically structured one to the degree that remains absent."

But I can't be arsed to correct your every misrepresentation of what I have said in the past.

Peirce not accepted as THE theory but is overlayed on top of other ones post-facto, and the big glaring one, how is the "interpretant" magically turned into experience without the interpretant being experiential. — schopenhauer1

Pfft. I can't even be bothered with an arrogant retort.

No it bloody isn't. Not if naturalism is the position that there is something more at stake here than merely "interest". — apokrisis

Naturalism is essentially the view that there is no ontologically transcendent reality. It seems that what else it is besides that is a matter of taste. Another problem I see for your exclusivist position is the question as to whether nature really is exhaustively measurable, or even really measurable at all.

The further point is that there may be only one method which yields the best practical results and technological advancement; a methodologically naturalistic one; but from that fact it does not follow that the possibilities for naturalistic thinking are exhausted by science. There are probably very many ways of thinking about nature in the metaphysical sense that are not in accordance with, or not directly or primarily based upon, modern science but which could be useful as conceptual schemas for the living of lives. Phenomenology and existentialism, and some examples of post-modern thought could be examples. We don't even need to have a preferred metaphysic, we could remain sceptical about all metaphysical systems and yet nonetheless be interested in them purely as conceptual schemas that allow us to look at the world in different ways.

It seems that what else it is besides that is a matter of taste. — Janus

Why does it seem that?

I say it seems that the alternative you just specified is then ontological immanence. So thanks for agreeing.

Another problem I see for your position is the question as to whether nature really is exhaustively measurable, or even really measurable at all. — Janus

If it ain't measurable, then it would indeed be a "matter of taste". Pull your answer out of the hat and who cares.

[And must I repeat the same old things in every post? Does absolutely nothing ever sink in here?

It is the bleeding effing point of Peircean semiotics that measurement doesn't exhaust the thing-in-itself. Models never eliminate uncertainty. They simply constrain that uncertainty to the degree it pragmatically matters to form the signs we call our facts. Beyond that point it is just differences that don't make a difference.]

Beyond that point it is just differences that don't make a difference.] — apokrisis

Sure those differences may make no difference to measurement or the practice of science, but they may matter to different individuals in other ways. That is really the only point I've been making here. I certainly haven't been prescribing any particular metaphysical commitments for everyone. And I do agree with you about immanence; I don't believe ontological transcendence can be coherently spoken about, because there is nothing there to intersubjectively share, a point I have repeated over and over.

Pfft. I can't even be bothered with an arrogant retort. — apokrisis

I can then always say, that is because you have no good answer for it. That has been the main problem the whole time and why others keep on throwing Whitehead your way, as at least if its silly gobblygook poetry, it makes more sense then stones coming to life via the fiat of using words like "modeling" and "umwelt".

We do agree more than we disagree..
umwelts (check),
neurobiological processes and environmental interactions involved in experience (check)
experiential-ness = triadic modeling.. I can get on board with, but it just seems like there's a lot of modeling with no there there in regards to what the modeling IS. Just saying its "emergent" is almost as Woo as saying everything is experience.

but they may matter to different individuals in other ways. — Janus

Everyone has their umwelt. So the semiotic model applies across the board. That is what it says.

Just as it then defines science in terms of the opinions on which a community of reasoning inquirers would arrive at in settled fashion by the end.

You are just pretending to find fault with exactly what semiotics covers.

We do agree more than we disagree.. — schopenhauer1

Pfft.

Just as it then defines science in terms of the opinions on which a community of reasoning inquirers would arrive at in settled fashion by the end. — apokrisis

Look I know this applies to science; I already agreed with that. I just don't accept that it applies to philosophy ( at least not to the same degree). That is because philosophy seems to me to be a hybrid of science and art, and although there is art even in science itself, the more strictly corroborable nature of science compared to philosophy (not to mention art itself), means it will inevitably remain, to a subtantial degree, a matter of taste or predilection or whatever you want to call it, as to people's preferred metaphysic (if they have one).

Look I know this applies to science; I already agreed with that. I just don't accept that it applies to philosophy — Janus

What about metaphysics? What about philosophical naturalism.

It doesn't matter to me if people want to go off in all sorts of esoteric directions. Whatever floats their boat. I'm happy to hear of their travels.

And yet also I assert my own right to follow a path. I'd like to know what our best unified understanding of reality looks like. And so that has resulted in a particular journey through science and philosophy.

If that offends your sense of where boundaries ought to be drawn, that's on you.

No, nothing about your journey offends me in the slightest. :smile:
But this is your path we are talking about, not the universal path of the community of enquirers.

Say you had a wave tank, with a wave generator on each side of the tank, 180 degree out of phase. They both pump waves to the middle. Since they are out of phase, the wave crest from the left will meet with the wave troughs from the right; and vice versa, and cancel in the middle of the tank.

In this scenario, we have energy being pump into the wave tank from both directions, but we have calmness in the middle; bottom line of the image below, due to the waves adding and cancelling. It looks like there is nothing going on in the middle.



If we placed a partition in the stillness of the middle, like a large wooden board, this will upset the cancelling waves. This will cause the waves to appear on both sides of the board. The primordial atom of the Big Bang theory was the partition in the stillness of canceling waves, which caused waves of matter and antimatter to appear.

This isa way for something to have appeared from what seems like nothing. The symbolism of brooding over the deep was connected to starting in the stillness of the cancelled waves. A partition forms; space-time, and the hidden waves appear; let there be light.

Yes, interesting stuff. However, this is still within the realm of the ontic, i.e. science. "Cancelling waves" are still beings, they still exist. A partition is a thing, stillness is a state, formation is a process.

I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself.

Pfft. — apokrisis

Your signs and interpretation takes place in the physical world. What is the physical interpreting?

Modelling. Information. What I always tell you. Do you keep forgetting?

So again, what is modeling in the physical world?

Besides the point "Wouldn't modeling 'feel' like something". That isn't answering what "feels like something is, other than referencing a synonym or causation rather than identity.

http://www.academia.edu/3144895/The_Necessity_of_Biosemiotics_Matter-Symbol_Complementarity

I want to know what the being of these things are, though. I want to know what it means for a thing, state, or process to be rather than not, as it exists in and of itself. — darthbarracuda

Existence in the sense you are using it here means to be individuated. So you are asking what causes individuatation. What are the options you are then willing to entertain on that?

Options that are not already individuated themselves, which is obviously precluding plurality, individuality, identity, etc. Being, irrespective of what has it. I'm not looking for a causal explanation because causality implies Being. What does it mean for something, anything, to exist?

I'm addressing the confusions in your own questions.

So your phrasing focuses on individuation. And I agree that is key. So is individuation something that happens - is caused by - a process? And if so, doesn't that mean it emerges from - in some sense or other - the unindividuated?

Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed.

And now that constraints-based developmental view can be contrasted with its "other" that might seek to make existence something eternal and unchanging. We now switch to the materialistic view that asks what is the unchanging stuff or substance which underlies all the more superficial changing and transforming?

Again, the conversation is fleshing out. We are getting somewhere. We can contrast two approaches. We can see that the eternal material story has a problem if cosmology and science generally is telling us that everything develops into being out of some deeper undetermined or unindividuated condition. If there is actually a creation issue, then we encounter the problem that something can't come out of nothing. We are being pushed towards the other alternative. We need to explore that more seriously.

Of course if reality is uncreated and founded on material being - individuation is some kind of emergent and superficial illusion - then no problem for Existence. It just is as you are claiming it has no cause for its Being.

It is only because creation seems a hard fact - we have the Big Bang, as well as all the science saying we have developed and evolved too - that an uncreated story of Existence is not good enough.

So again, focus. Follow the logic of agreeing individuation is what it means to exist in a strong sense as far as you are concerned. Then begin to follow that trail backwards to where it rationally has to lead.

My complaint is that you aren't following either option with any rigour. You are mixing them up to perpetuate a state of confusion.

Thus the conversation starts to have a meaningful direction. It is getting somewhere. It is becoming clear that to exist is to persist, to be formed, if not in fact in-formed. — apokrisis

I agree that the individuated would seem to need to come from the unindividuated. Plurality, diversity, individuality, all come from a breakage of uniformity. The basic, fundamental "theater" is a single unity. Lately, I prefer to simply call this the posteriority. There is the puppet theater, and while the illusion is that the puppets are operating on their own, we understand that there is something "behind", pulling the strings. There is the anterior appearance, and the posterior ... "whatever".

In space-time, we can always move beyond. There is always more. But the posteriority, by its nature, cannot be finite, there cannot be anything further behind it. It is where we move to once we move beyond all else, including space-time itself. It is infinite, but dimensionless. When we talk of nothing existing, we may say that there are zero entities. Yet zero is still a description, an entity. So paradoxically, one comes before zero. There is before there is not.

Is this fundamental reality what we mean when we refer to Being? Do entities Spinozistically participate in Being as clumps of transient solids participate in a non-Newtonian liquid?

Or, to use another representation from a favorite album of mine:



If this is true, it is true only in a qualified sense, in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, because Being is not an entity, nor is it a process, state or event. All of these have Being, but they are not Being itself.

Somewhat relevant, though it's difficult to explain exactly why: one of the best memories I have is when I had the opportunity to go scuba diving through the BSA in the Florida Keys. Humans are not suited to live underwater for extended periods of time and so it can be disorienting at times. When you're underwater, noises seem to come from nowhere. It's an utterly surreal experience, the deep, gaping blue surrounds you, 360-degrees in all three axes. You are suspended in an impossibly large medium, and while nearby it is transparent, beyond a variable distance it turns into an opaque blue (or black, if you're night diving - I both recommend and do not recommend doing this, it's almost nightmarish). So you're gazing around, and all you see is blue and you're not sure how far away from you what you are looking at is. It's not until an entity, a fish, or a turtle or something else suddenly materializes that you can gauge how far away you can see. I remember instinctively curling up into a fetal position out of fear a few times, it kind of gets to you.

When you are swimming around the coral reefs, the world is domesticated, even if the terrain is different. In shallow waters, the reef (solidity) is primary, the water is secondary. But when you are beyond the reef, where the shelf drops off into the deep and all that remains is the water, you get this feeling, and it really is just a feeling, that reality is far, far more strange than you could possibly wrap your head around. Familiarity is not the norm. It seems to warp your mind. Beyond is the great blue and you realize you cannot go there, it is off-limits, there are no discernible landmarks that could make it familiar, it's just a never-ending abyss. Consciousness must be different for the fish, since the only objects encountered are other living creatures - the ocean, the water, must not even be recognized. Consciousness must be more specialized and advanced, closer to the shore where there are objects that can be manipulated. Fish do not have being-at-hand.

At this point, you hear the bubbles coming out of your respirator, but it sounds funny, it sounds different, almost like you can separate the noise from the ocean, as if the noise exists elsewhere, echoing in the recesses of your mind. It's a very peculiar experience, bordering between panic and awe. It's hard to describe, all I know is that it was simultaneously one of the most real and surreal experiences of my life, definitely something I would classify as "spiritual".

Interpret this as you wish.

(Different video, found a better one):