Do you not apprehend the necessity of a "being" which applies these constraints? — Metaphysician Undercover
This demonstrates very clearly that you do not understand final cause, nor do you understand freewill. — Metaphysician Undercover
However, I think that Peirce had very little to say about either of these, and you are just projecting your misunderstanding of final cause and free will onto Peirce's metaphysics. — Metaphysician Undercover
But the fact of the matter is that the existence of artificial things is much more accurately described by the philosophy of final cause and freewill, and naturalism can only attempt to make itself consistent with final cause by misrepresenting final cause. — Metaphysician Undercover
Furthermore, I never described any "collection of instants", nor did Newton rely on any such conception. — Metaphysician Undercover
That is the issue which modern physics faces, it does not respect the substantial difference between past and future. — Metaphysician Undercover
But If I visited another planet and found only mountains and rivers, plate tectonics and dissipative flows, then I would conclude something else. An absence of intelligent creators. Only the presence of self organising entropy-driven physical structure. — apokrisis
He emphasised the role of habit instead. Constraints on action that explain both human psychology, hence “freewill”, and cosmology if the lawful regularity of nature is best understood as a habit that develops. — apokrisis
And note that the argument I’m making seeks to resolve the continuous-discrete debate via the logic of vagueness. — apokrisis
It would not be appropriate to refer the "application of constraints" unless there is something which is applying constraints. — Metaphysician Undercover
Then you proceed into nonsense about self-organizing systems, as if inanimate matter could organize itself to produce its own existence from nothing. — Metaphysician Undercover
A habit is the propensity of potential to be actualized in a particular way. What is fundamental to "potential" is that no particular actualization is necessary from any specific state of potential. — Metaphysician Undercover
There exists middle ground where one could be open to all possibilities, not just the binary ones. — Dan Cage
All possibilities are binaries if they are to be clear and not vague. To take a direction, you have to be moving away from whatever is its counterfactual. — apokrisis
Possibilities come in matched pairs. Or to the degree that they don't, then - as a possibility - they are vague. — apokrisis
Does nature offer counter-examples? What are they? — apokrisis
...around these parts, question everything and believe nothing. — apokrisis
That's just what they called the introductory epistemology class back when I was little. Hume, Berkeley, Descartes, Kant. The usual crew. — apokrisis
Must I don the cape of my favorite philosophical crusader in order to be “worthy” of this forum? — Dan Cage
I am open to anything, but I find very few human thought-inventions compelling. Is there a label for that? — Dan Cage
Skeptic would be a good thing to be labelled. It would mean you have mastered the basics of critical thought. — apokrisis
You are the one referring to the "application". And the obvious answer from my point of view is that the constraints are self-applied. — apokrisis
Nonsense? Or science?
Cosmolology shows how everything is self-organising back to the Planck scale. I provided you with the hyperbolic curve as a model of how there need be "nothing" before this self-organising was already going. — apokrisis
That is why we are talking about habits developing. At first, everything would try to happen willy-nilly. Then later, things would self organise into an efficient flow. — apokrisis
Possibilities come in matched pairs. — apokrisis
If the constraints are fixed constraints (what the laws of physics are generally believed to describe)... — Metaphysician Undercover
Potential is completely incompatible with with the bivalent system, and therefore needs to be represented in a completely different way — Metaphysician Undercover
Possibility is something general. If it is reduced to a particular possibility such that we can represent its binary opposite, we are not representing the possibility properly, because possibility always relates to numerous things, not one thing. — Metaphysician Undercover
If actualizing possibility X means not actualizing possibility Y, this does not mean that X is the opposite of Y. — Metaphysician Undercover
A possibility does not have the capacity to actualize itself. — Metaphysician Undercover
In the world of pure mathematics, a vector field in the complex plane describing a function F(z) having an "indifferent" fixed point a=F(a) might show the enormous differences of displacement as z=a is "tipped" a tiny bit to one side or the other. — jgill
Yes. But what if this non-linear sensitivity is being regulated by a parameter that is a reciprocal relation such as y=1/x? And so yx = 1? A tiny tip one way is yoked to a tiny tip that compensates. Unit 1 has been fixed as the identity element, the common departure point. The indifference lies in now giving it any particular value to denote some quantified scale. It is now always just a generalised quality - the way an identity element behaves as a symmetry awaiting its breaking. — apokrisis
The current approach in cosmology and particle physics would be to see any global regularity in terms of emergent constraints. That is why symmetry and symmetry breaking are at the heart of modern physics. They describe the form of nature in terms of the complementary emergent limits on free actions. A probabilistic view where change is change until change can no longer make a difference. At that point, the system is "stable" and its equilibrium balance can be encode as "a universal law". — apokrisis
Yes. That is the distinction I have made all along. Potential would be simply a vagueness. The PNC fails to apply. — apokrisis
It is all made actual and concrete by the fact that every possibility is bivalent. A direction is asymmetric as it breaks - and hence reveals - an underlying symmetry. — apokrisis
Vagueness is where there just isn't any such general backdrop to local events or acts. If you are in a canoe in a thick fog on a still lake, do you move or are you still? The PNC can't apply unless there is some context to show that a change is happening, and even not happening. — apokrisis
You dispute the distinction between vague potential and crisp possibility and then repeat the basic argument. — apokrisis
The Peircean model says vagueness is only regulated. — apokrisis
↪jgill
So what was the point you hoped to make? How does it relate to the physics of a Big Bang universe? Break it down for me so that I might understand. Give us an example in a physical context. — apokrisis
The "vague potential" we are talking about is ontological indeterminacy, — Metaphysician Undercover
So is the vagueness of a quantum potential ontological or epistemic? — apokrisis
Do you believe nature is counterfactual all the way down despite the evidence? — apokrisis
I think it's very clearly epistemic... — Metaphysician Undercover
the physicist might not be willing to accept the fact that the apparent vagueness is due to deficiency in the principles. — Metaphysician Undercover
But hidden variables have been experimentally ruled out. If it is epistemic, you are left with a truly pathological metaphysics like MWI as your only refuge. — apokrisis
Physicists in fact tried their hardest to avoid ontic vagueness. — apokrisis
Our experience of time indicates that there is a substantial difference between future and past, and therefore no necessary continuity of substance at the present. — Metaphysician Undercover
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