I’m now seeing Britney Spears in front of a chalk board of equations. An audience of enthusiastic wizened professors thumping the benches. — apokrisis

The Britney-dvg fun version (rap slightly slowed down):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHy4G24_nBM

note: Since this was the first service, it was done in public, so the readers could follow the process. In the future, it could be done via private messaging.

This is not talking about Symmetry in the traditional mirror-image sense. — Gnomon

But that is exactly what gauge symmetry does. It explains why particles are created and annihilated in matter-antimatter pairs. You break a chiral or mirror symmetry into its two halves and then these annihilate in a burst or energy when they come back together again.

That’s why fermions are spin-1/2 and charge can exist. It is why anything exists to start making the Universe a complex place of material structure.

It is against to the thesis that matter is a passive receptacle for external and transcendent forms (first cause), while symmetry breaks give matter (to which they are immanent) the ability to generate forms without external intervention. — JuanZu

I’m not sure what you mean there. But the fact that fundamental physics is rooted in the maths of symmetry is rather Platonic and hylomorphic. It is a pointer to a strong version of structuralism.

See SEP on https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/structural-realism/

So in talking about the prime cause of Being, the shape of Nature gets imposed by the constraints that it can’t help but generate in its Becoming, to use the Aristotelean model.

If we start with the idea of pure unformed potential - fluctuations without directions; an infinity of dimensions without cohesion - then what kind of dimensionality could begin to cohere out of that fundamental vagueness?

Well symmetry seems to tell us that there is only one dimensionality that is the possible outcome of any such striving to become organised in some exact and balanced fashion. Only 3D could be where actuality begins as it is only in three dimensions that the number of rotational degrees of freedom match the number of translational degrees of freedom. As a metric, only 3D has the property that then produces physics as we know it. A dimensionality with the basic Newtonian principles of the conservation of momentum as both translations and rotations, and so the holism of the Galilean group of symmetries.

Also only 3D has a doubling-halving story built into it in the fashion which gives gravity and force their inverse square law and so sets up a metric that can expand geometrically while also diluting at the same rate. You can have a metric driven by the “explosion” of its hot content, but that explosion then lasts forever as the hot content is getting cooled by that expansion and so the whole thing takes until the end of time to cool to zero and come to a complete stop.

So you have a story where there is symmetry and it’s breaking that starts right from some ultimate state of vague potential. A symmetry where everything was possible as nothing had yet started to happen in any cohesive sense. An infinity of dimensions that was both an everythingness yet also less than nothing.

Then all this potential could be poured into the generation of something. It could become broken by the fact that 3D was a stabilising solution. A Platonic form. If any kind of physical geometry was going to exist, it had to be this one.

Of course you then have to explain the other aspects of the Big Bang. Like how this 3D receptacle started Planck small and so Planck hot because of quantum mechanics and its gauge symmetries. And how it was also the start of time in any proper sense as the speed of light got added to give the metric its 4D relativistic symmetry - it’s Poincare group of symmetries.

It all gets quickly complex in topological fashion.

But this picture says we have a metaphysics where anything was possible, and yet that everythingness was immediately being constrained by mathematical principles. To become actualised, it had to strike on a structure that made the most geometric sense. It had to be a hot 4D spacetime speck that would instantly begin to expand and cool. A speck whose dimensionality was defined in unit 1 terms by its three critical constants of c, G and h.

That is, the strength of gravity to define the flatness of its translations, the quanta of action to define its fundamental unit of particle spin or intrinsic rotation, and the speed of light as the unifying rate at which the relativistic metric and its quantum contents could thermally decohere and start becoming a realm of material particles.

The gauge constraints could kick in and start to fashion raw fluctuations into the vectors and spinors that are the zoo of Standard Model “matter”. The shapes of the excitations we know as the electrons, protons, neutrons and photons of a world organised under the ultimate gauge simplicity of U(1) electromagnetism and the messy hierarchy of mass terms added to particle fields by the Higgs mechanism. The further symmetry breaking that turned on gravity by breaking 4D spacetime into an effectively 3D story of an inertial rest frame of co-moving matter particles.

So in a nutshell, the Universe exists in a complex fashion by striving to become as simple and balanced as possible in symmetry terms.

It only arrive in its current state having eliminated infinite possibility and boiled itself down to what remained as the simplest possible state with its now locked in remaining order. It eventually arrived at its destination - a dust of gravitating and electrically neutral atoms in a void of uniformly scattered 2.7 degree K photons. And even that stage will pass with the ultimate concrete simplicity of a Heat Death. Just a last baseline sizzle of absolute zero photons radiated by the cosmic event horizon. The comoving spacetime metric finally reaching its doubling-halving halt.

doubling-halving — apokrisis

Another great post!

This is related to this:

differentiation emerge from a state of uniformity — JuanZu

Reading your post again, it does sound like you are stressing that my view would be based on immanence rather than transcendence in terms of any "first cause" or first symmetry breaking. And that would be right.

And between Plato and Aristotle, this would be more Aristotle (although the Timaeus tantalises us with its notion of chora, or the "receptacle" that the forms need to become actualised in material being).

So in this thread, I have argued for the immanent and hylomorphic view of causality. The systems science view. And that is a metaphysics that has even come into vogue – because of gauge symmetry – in recent philosophy as Ontic Structural Realism. It has also come into vogue in fundamental physics as more and more is understood about the maths of topological order – and so how the gauge physics of quantum field theory can be properly generalised to cover, for instance, condensed matter and other emergent material phenomena.

Likewise, the idea of dimensionality as it might account for a hot Big Bang is leading to a dissipative structure approach – as first pushed in cosmology by David Layzer. So a thermodynamics, but one more appropriate to a cosmos as a self-organising structure of dissipation. One that gets beyond the roadblock of the Second Law and its world built on systems already gone to the equilibrium of a Heat Death. Again a tale of immanence where even "entropy" emerges or evolves in topological fashion.

So it is all about symmetry and symmetry-breaking. But then also about that as itself an evolving hierarchy of topological order.

Our current universe is in its very complex – and yet also very simple – state. This seems an odd thing to say, but that itself stresses we are dealing with a logic of dichotomies. Things start to happen when two complementary things are happening at once. This is the thought that breaks the logjam of metaphysics. And has done so ever since Anaximander figured out the logic of the Apeiron split by the dichotomising action of apokrisis.

Anyway, our current universe has achieved a state that is matter dominated – as the radiation background has already cooled itself to causal irrelevance. The CMB has been redshifted out of sight and may as well be a literal a-causal void of Newtonian fancy. And also, all the anti-matter that did exist has been almost completely annihilated – fizzled to join that CMB because of a charge-parity violation buried in the fine print of gauge symmetry and the Standard Model hierarchy of particles it produced.

So as I said, SU(3) exists but is balled up into protons and neutrons and doesn't organise the universe at any more general level than being the strong nuclear force making atomic-level matter possible. SU(2) hangs around as the weak force which allows Standard Model particles to rotate their way down its thermal ladder and become the final most massless versions of their type. Pretty much everything has degenerated to up and down quarks, electrons and neutrinos, by now.

And U(1) runs the show in conjunction with the gravitational degrees of freedom embodied in this simple collection of Dirac particles. Charge is permanently broken as protons and electrons can't be rotated into each other anymore. As quark matter and lepton matter, the temperature of the Universe is too cold and they are now locked into that final lowest level slot on the Standard Model's gauge structure.

So charge is permanently broken, but then also permanently in a dynamical state of dichotomised balance. Protons and electrons have to be arranged into neutralising atomic forms just to settle things down enough for matter to be locally electrostatically bound and globally gravitationally organised as the stars and galaxies of the great Cosmic Web of dynamically swirling mass.

It is dances within dances. Symmetries broken at one level that need to be healed to create the symmetry to be broken the next. The story of topological order. First the universe breaks everything down so that all that seems to be left in the void is a residual dust of positive protons and negative electrons. But then that broken charge must restore its lost symmetry however it can. Hence the emergence of what we actually call matter. Atoms of hydrogen, helium and lithium.

And then because these atoms have mass as well, you get the clumping of clouds that reheats this dusty matter to the point it catches fired and becomes a star. A fusion furnace that is self-organisd for longevity as it exists as a yo-yo balance of gravity and its heat. Its own weight collapses it, but its own heat expands it. And so it can hang in space, radiating into the void, neatly balanced at its critical point.

A lucky fact as fusion starts making heavier elements. And then the exhaustion of the fuel and final collapse of the star is an explosion that loads up every possible slot of the periodic table with all the atoms its symmetries represent. The symmetries determined now by electron shells or orbitals.

And so it goes on. Dichotomies all the way up and so all the way back down. Simplicity creating complexity. Symmetries get broken and create some new brand of complexity. That in itself is the cause for some new re-simplification which fixes what just got broken. In a world broken by U(1) charge, structure must arise that can neutralise that destabilising fact. Order must be restored. Protons and electrons must get bound into neutrons.

If no charge symmetry had been broken, then the Cosmos could have rested its self-organising immanence right there. The only matter to talk of would be dark matter – cold clouds of non-interacting particles just dancing the dance of a gravitating dust. And too cold to even make interesting emergent patterns doing that.

The Big Bang might be a fireball – for quantum uncertainty reasons, as Planck hot as it was Planck small – but most of that disorganised potential got spent quickly under the doubling~halving expansion and cooling of a Minkowski spacetime metric – the Poincare group organisation of Special Relativity.

So the spacetime container that emerges from relativistic symmetry was disposing of the heat as fast as it could run. And running at the speed of light – in being at first just a ball of radiation, a chaotic soup of relativistic excitations – that was so fast it would have gone to zero about now. Or as the CMB, it has now fallen to 2.7 degrees K, and will halve that temperature once again in another 14 billion years.

(Or in fact 10 billion years, as dark energy has shown up to hurry things along. A further topological complication to add to the long list of things that are immanently emergent due to symmetry breakings we still need to figure out.)

One final point to toss in – as I was trying to give a feeling for why gauge symmetry-breaking is the cause of the "complex simplicity" which is our current "atoms in a void" universe – is that it should be noted how the symmetries are (dichotomously) divided between the real number symmetries of relativity and the complex number symmetries of quantum theory.

The U in the SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1) formula means a unitary matrix. A matrix description in which rotation and translation can be entangled. Or indeed, re-entangled. The view of reality as it was before rotation and translation got broken and so what it looks like again when that symmetry is restored.

Likewise the key symmetry at the heart of relativity is the Lorentz group SO(3,1). An orthogonal matrix group – orthogonal meaning it is fully broken at a dimensional level and so described in disentangled real number values. No complex number mixing. Just the three orthogonal rotations of the 3D spin group SO(3). But with the addition of a time~energy conservation "direction" that is created by the speed of light as the universal limit on interactions with directions. This then makes it the 4D spacetime group of SO(3,1).

The Poincare group is then this 4D Lorentz group of relativistic "boosts" added to the standard 3+3D standard symmetries of 3D space to construct the 10D Poincare group – not literally ten dimensional, but that is how many degrees of freedom you have to package together in a self-constraining fashion where you have 6 Euclidean or flat space degrees of freedom (three translations/three rotations) being traded off against the contractions and dilations demanded to make the resulting metric properly Minkowski and speed of light restricted.

Phew. So gauge symmetry comes in forms that are real number to speak to the globally-broken symmetry of spacetime as the dimensional container. And then also that are the complex number or unitary gauge symmetries to describe what remains as the open freedoms to be expressed at every point of this spacetime container. Just by constraining the metric to a collection of points itself sets up an "inner space" of intrinsic quantum spin that has now been set free to to add its topological order to the whole mix. You get all the possible kinds of local excitations or particles that become possible under the hierarchy of SU(3)xSU(2)xU(1).

At least once inflation is over and has dumped a load of reheated vector particles into the vacuum. Which also must have the different thing of a scalar Higgs field – although that has to be SU(2) to later mix quantumly with the electroweak force and thus break it to become the weak force plus electromagnetism.

Then dark matter could be anything. Black holes, a condensed matter effect that results in "2D" anyon particles, all sorts of exotic stuff – which would somehow have to also be explained in Platonic structural terms. There are always more symmetry groups to be pulled out of the maths bag.

And dark energy! If it exists as some kind of quantum uncertainty effect within dimensionality itself and isn't just an optical effect of viewing the universe from some locally underdense "gravitational well".

But immanence rules. And it rules as possibility can't help but stumble its way into orderly patterns. And it doesn't do this just once. Order always creates its own new possibilities which then have to stumble into new patterns.

Symmetry thinking is then just the way to discover this kind of immanent pattern making. The invariant structures that can't help but emerge when everything is trying to happen all together and all at once.

Shake up possibility and it settles down into whatever conformity that is its stable equilibrium state. A state where differences can no longer make a difference as the same old pattern just keeps re-emerging. The pattern that was immanent and then emerged dynamically to become something that looked permanent and even fore-destined.

But every such pattern then becomes its own state of free possibility. A higher level symmetry to be broken at a higher level – shaken and shaken until it to settles into its own dynamical balance.

A Cosmos is more complex from the start as it has to be symmetry-breaking in two complementary directions at once. It is itself already a symmetry-breaking in progress. A Big Bang that is a mix of its relativistic metric doing the expanding and a hot quantum content doing the other thing of a cooling. A plasma fireball that is turning itself from a radiation soup into a matter dust via a series of topological phase transitions as the container expands and the contents spread out and dilute.

So good job we have both the real number matrices and the complex number matrices to keep track of both sides of this symmetry equation. Poincare invariance married to gauge invariance by little particle creating tricks such as that SU(2) is the double cover of SO(3). A Minkowski metric point can harbour the further inner complexity of a half-spin fermion that has to rotate 720 degrees to look like a 360 degree revolution. The mirror reflection trick that allows fermions to come as the creation~annihilation pairs of matter and antimatter.

The symmetry that gets broken to arrive at a world made of just matter and a void of long-spent radiation. The relic antimatter gone to join all dark matter and other stuff like neutrinos that has become causally irrelevant in this ruthless game of cosmic Darwinism. Or self-organising immanence.

And so it goes on. And on. Symmetry-breaking out to the furthest horizon. :wink:

It is against to the thesis that matter is a passive receptacle for external and transcendent forms (first cause), while symmetry breaks give matter (to which they are immanent) the ability to generate forms without external intervention. — JuanZu

I'm not a physicist, so this stuff is over my head. I had to Google "symmetry breaking"*1 to see if it can happen spontaneously without any causal inputs.

Does this contrarian-thesis mean that physical evolution occurs randomly and without causal inputs from the environment? In other words, without rhyme or reason. If so, how can scientists make any sense of the evolutionary process?*2

Is this symmetry-breaking argument intended to offer an explanation for non-classical acausal Quantum phenomena, and to deny the necessity of any cosmic First Cause of the Big Bang? How can Randomness explain anything other than Chaos . . . . or our ignorance of quantum scale reality?*3

It seems to me that human Reasoning & Logic are based on, or intuitively derived from, our experience with causation in the real world. Does this acausal thesis mean that millennia of philosophical reasoning has mis-interpreted fundamental Randomness*4 in terms of useful & meaningful Reasons, such as First Cause? :smile:


*1. Acausal Symmetry Breaking ? :
Arguments of the above kind — that is, arguments leading to definite conclusions on the basis of an initial symmetry of the situation plus PSR — have been used in science since antiquity (as Anaximander’s argument testifies). The form they most frequently take is the following: a situation with a certain symmetry evolves in such a way that, in the absence of an asymmetric cause, the initial symmetry is preserved. In other words, a breaking of the initial symmetry cannot happen without a reason, or an asymmetry cannot originate spontaneously. Van Fraassen (1989) devotes a chapter to considering the way these kinds of symmetry arguments can be used in general problem-solving.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/symmetry-breaking/

*2. "Evolution without causation" refers to the philosophical debate about whether evolutionary processes, particularly natural selection, should be understood as non-causal statistical phenomena rather than as processes driven by specific causal forces. While the majority of biologists and philosophers view evolution as a causal process involving factors like mutation, inheritance, and selection, a minority, often associated with the "statisticalist" school of thought, argue that natural selection is a non-causal epiphenomenon. This concept challenges the traditional understanding of evolution by suggesting it can occur due to statistical patterns and the differential survival of individuals, rather than by inherent causal forces shaping life forms.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=evolution+without+causation

*3. Ignorance of quantum scale reality refers to the deep conceptual and observational gap between the quantum realm and our classical, macroscopic experience, stemming from quantum mechanics' fundamental indeterminacy, observer-dependent phenomena, and non-intuitive properties like entanglement and non-locality. Physicists are actively working to resolve these mysteries and formulate a unified theory that bridges quantum theory and general relativity to better understand the true nature of reality.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=ignorance+of+quantum+scale+reality
Note --- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle merely means that there's a "fundamental limit to how precisely certain pairs of physical properties, like an electron's position and momentum, can be known simultaneously". How can that sub-atomic sample of apparent randomness be scaled up to the evolution of a whole universe?

*4. Randomness is the apparent lack of pattern, cause, or predictability in an event, often associated with chance and probability, while reason implies a logical explanation or justification for an action or occurrence. Reason points to a specific cause, whereas randomness describes an event where the cause (if any) is not discernible, creating uncertainty in the outcome.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=randomness+vs+reason

I like the Britney version for being more like how the words would echo in their own confusion. Serious, but not taken seriously. :cool:

in the absence of an asymmetric cause, the initial symmetry is preserved. In other words, a breaking of the initial symmetry cannot happen without a reason, or an asymmetry cannot originate spontaneously. — Gnomon

This does not mean that symmetry breaks are acausal; symmetry breaks belong to an ontological continuum in which the slightest variation in the environment can lead to such a break. The cause is not external because it is not the first cause giving matter its form. The cause of the symmetry breaking may be due to a discrepancy between the symmetry of one system and the symmetry of another system with which it comes into contact. As I understand, everything occurs between different symmetry systems.

So in this thread, I have argued for the immanent and hylomorphic view of causality. . . . .
Our current universe is in its very complex – and yet also very simple – state. This seems an odd thing to say, but that itself stresses we are dealing with a logic of dichotomies. Things start to happen when two complementary things are happening at once. This is the thought that breaks the logjam of metaphysics. And has done so ever since Anaximander figured out the logic of the Apeiron split by the dichotomising action of apokrisis. — apokrisis

Again, I apologize for butting-in to your scholarly dialog with . The terminology alone is baffling to a late-blooming amateur philosopher with no formal training. But sometimes when I Google some esoteric language, I may actually learn something useful & meaningful. For example, "the dichotomising action of apokrisis" meant nothing to me, until Google revealed some associated concepts that I was already familiar with.

In the overview below*1, the evolution of the world is described in terms of two kinds of causes : Top Down = a creator/programmer, who serves as both First and Final Cause, bracketing the origin & development of what we call space-time Reality. Bottom-Up = the degrees of freedom that we call fundamental randomness/uncertainty on the quantum scale of reality. Working together, Cause (Law ; Regulation) & Chance (Stochastic Randomness ; Freedom) produce a Complex Adaptive System of "dynamic, non-linear systems of interacting agents that exhibit emergent, self-organizing behaviors and co-evolve over time". This kind of Emergent Evolution is compatible with my own notion of EnFormAction*2. :smile:


*1. Dichotomizing action of apokrisis :
A systems view of causality: In a philosophical discussion on causality, the term apokrisis has been used to describe a foundational split. It is argued that a systems approach to causality dichotomizes the notion of cause into two complementary types:
Top-down constraints: The action of formal and final causes, representing global limitations.
Bottom-up degrees of freedom: The action of material and efficient causes, representing local spontaneity and construction.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=+dichotomising+action+of+apokrisis.
Note --- Formal causes are natural laws (Logic). First & Final causes are design intention. And Material & Efficient causes are the Energy/Matter cycle of thermodynamics. This is my interpretation, which may not be the original intent of the dichotomizing split. Working together, Constraints & Freedom are "complementary" and creative.

*2. EnFormAction :
Ententional Causation. A proposed metaphysical law of the universe that causes random interactions between forces and particles to produce novel & stable arrangements of matter & energy. It’s the creative force (aka : Divine Will) of the axiomatic eternal deity that, for unknown reasons, programmed a Singularity to suddenly burst into our reality from an infinite source of possibility. AKA : The creative power of Evolution; the power to enform; Logos; Causation.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Note --- "Ententional Causation" is the top-down lawful constraints, and "Random Interactions" are the bottom-up spontaneous degrees of freedom that allow for the emergent creativity of Evolution.

For example, "the dichotomising action of apokrisis" meant nothing to me, until Google revealed some associated concepts that I was already familiar with. — Gnomon

AI gives a nice summary….

Anaximander used the term apokrisis (separation off) to explain how the world and its components emerged from the apeiron—the boundless, indefinite, and eternal origin of all things. In his cosmology, this process involved the separation of opposites, such as hot and cold or wet and dry, from the undifferentiated primordial substance.

The process of apokrisis
A contrast to Thales: Anaximander's teacher, Thales, had proposed that water was the fundamental principle (archē) of all things. Anaximander disagreed, arguing that if any one of the specific elements (like water) were infinite and dominant, it would have destroyed the others long ago due to their opposing qualities.

The function of the apeiron: To resolve this issue, Anaximander proposed the apeiron as a neutral, limitless, and inexhaustible source. The apeiron is not itself any of the known elements and is therefore capable of giving rise to all of them through an eternal motion without being depleted or overpowered.

Cosmic differentiation: The apokrisis, or "separating off," is the key mechanism by which the universe comes into being. Anaximander held that an eternal, probably rotary, motion in the apeiron caused the pairs of opposites to separate from one another.

Formation of the cosmos: This separation led to the formation of the world. For instance, the hot and the cold separated, with a sphere of fire forming around the cold, moist earth and mist. This ball of fire later burst apart to form the heavenly bodies. This dynamic interplay of opposites is regulated by a sense of cosmic justice, with each opposite "paying penalty and retribution to one another for their injustice," according to the "disposition of time"

You might note that your own AI prompt ends up referencing a lot of my own PF posts. :lol:

Also only 3D has a doubling-halving story built into it in the fashion which gives gravity and force their inverse square law — apokrisis

Another vid for your lecture tour:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTWWXcso-4E

Anaximander used the term apokrisis (separation off) to explain how the world and its components emerged from the apeiron—the boundless, indefinite, and eternal origin of all things. In his cosmology, this process involved the separation of opposites, such as hot and cold or wet and dry, from the undifferentiated primordial substance.

Thanks for the summary. My philosophical vocabulary is narrow & limited, and obtained mostly since I retired. Before retirement I was more interested in physical sciences.

So I was not familiar with Anaximander's theory of Apeiron, but it seems to be generally compatible with my own amateur philosophical hypothesis of how the world works*1, based on Quantum physics and Causal Information.

My own term, Ideal Formal Potential (source of all real forms), may be equivalent to Aperion (unlimited possibility), or Spinoza's Substance (infinite unformed stuff). This boundless Potential is similar to Plato's unformed Chaos (infinite realm of unactualized Form). It's also imagined as the source of Causal Energy (EnFormAction) that exploded --- for unknown reasons --- into what we call the Big Bang.

Whether the Enformer is viewed as a god may be a question of personal taste, but it serves the same purpose of Creator of our Reality, without meddling with the automatic functions of natural Evolution. Because of the role of Information in the process of evolution, I like to think of the Enformer as a Programmer. And the execution of the program is what we call Causation.

My personal worldview is built upon what I call the BothAnd principle*1 of Complementarity or the Union of Opposites. Instead of an Either/Or reductive analysis, I prefer a Holistic synthesis. We seem to be coming from divergent directions, with different vocabularies, but eventually met somewhere in the middle of the Aperion. :smile:


*1. Both/And Principle :
My coinage for the holistic principle of Complementarity, as illustrated in the Yin/Yang symbol. Opposing or contrasting concepts are always part of a greater whole. Conflicts between parts can be reconciled or harmonized by putting them into the context of a whole system.
# The Enformationism worldview entails the principles of Complementarity, Reciprocity & Holism, which are necessary to offset the negative effects of Fragmentation, Isolation & Reductionism. Analysis into parts is necessary for knowledge of the mechanics of the world, but synthesis of those parts into a whole system is required for the wisdom to integrate the self into the larger system. In a philosophical sense, all opposites in this world (e.g. space/time, good/evil) are ultimately reconciled in Enfernity (eternity & infinity).
# Conceptually, the BothAnd principle is similar to Einstein's theory of Relativity, in that what you see ─ what’s true for you ─ depends on your perspective, and your frame of reference; for example, subjective or objective, religious or scientific, reductive or holistic, pragmatic or romantic, conservative or liberal, earthbound or cosmic. Ultimate or absolute reality (ideality) doesn't change, but your conception of reality does. Opposing views are not right or wrong, but more or less accurate for a particular purpose.
# This principle is also similar to the concept of Superposition in sub-atomic physics. In this ambiguous state a particle has no fixed identity until “observed” by an outside system. For example, in a Quantum Computer, a Qubit has a value of all possible fractions between 1 & 0. Therefore, you could say that it is both 1 and 0.
https://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page10.html

My personal worldview is built upon what I call the BothAnd principle*1 of Complementarity or the Union of Opposites. Instead of an Either/Or reductive analysis, I prefer a Holistic synthesis. We seem to be coming from divergent directions, with different vocabularies, but eventually met somewhere in the middle of the Aperion. — Gnomon

There are many many versions of this in world culture as it is simply what is obvious once you think about how anything could come to have existence. Unless you go for some Big Daddy in the Sky divine creator figure, you are going to have to posit an ultimate stuff so vague it is just the potential for stuff, which then becomes something by dividing against itself in the complementary fashion that allows it to evolve into the many kinds of things we find.

One such philosopher whom you might like to add to your list is Schelling and his Ungrund.

A quick AI summary…..

Schelling's theory of the Ungrund (non-ground) posits a primal, ungrounded principle that precedes and underlies all existence, including the rational mind. This "ungrounded ground" is a chaotic, indeterminate, and free force that is the source from which all reality and consciousness emerge, a concept that departs from purely rationalistic systems and emphasizes the importance of the unconscious and irrational.

Key aspects of the Ungrund

Primal, undetermined principle: The Ungrund is an "unfathomable" and "incomprehensible" starting point that has no prior cause or ground itself. It is a pure, indifferent identity that exists before the separation of subject and object, logic and existence.

Source of freedom and creativity: Because it is not bound by pre-existing structures or reason, the Ungrund is inherently free and allows for the possibility of change and development. This freedom is the basis for creativity and action in both nature and the human being.

Precedes reason: For Schelling, reason and rational structures are not the ultimate source of reality but rather emerge from this ungrounded source. The world contains a "preponderant mass of unreason," with the rational being merely secondary.

A link between philosophies: The Ungrund serves as a bridge between Schelling's early philosophy of identity and his later division into negative and positive philosophies. It is introduced to explain the origin of difference and existence from a prior, non-dialectical unity.

Connection to the divine: Schelling also uses the concept of the Ungrund in a theological context, suggesting that God has an inner ground that precedes existence, but that God is also the principle that gives rise to this ground, as seen in his discussions on freedom and God

Schelling and his Ungrund — apokrisis

no prior cause or ground itself

What is Eternal is ever, and so there's no point at which any design could be put into it in the first place that never was; thus it must be Everything, either as potential or there all at once - and it still IS.

Tao: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5NFAInEizU

Aperion — Gnomon

philosopher — apokrisis

Solving the Eternal Equation…

The great silence of the Unanswerable
Induces a clamor in us, relieved but by
Embracing the audacity of being:
To live, to love, to cherish each moment…
This is the answer to Eternity’s question.


However, to philosophically go further, I still need to know whether the mode of time is presentism or eternalism or growing block. Which is it?

Growing block has the advantage that we have the stable foundation of our past and the open challenge that is our future - to the degree we haven’t already wasted too much of our free potential.

If time is frozen or there is only the present moment, that rather makes existence seem rather directionless and meaningless.

Growing block — apokrisis

Yet, we can't tell the difference among the three modes; how can we find out?
…
How was the music of the 'double-halving' vid?

How was the music of the 'double-halving' vid? — PoeticUniverse

To be honest, I hated it. Absolutely not my taste. But I am very picky about my music.

The rap works - and harder would be better - as the bombast of the music would match the bombast of what I wrote. It makes it impossible to take it too seriously.

But cheesy musical just sounds low budget. Fake sincerity that goes in one ear and out the other.

It’s fun that you are having a go. But AI has to evolve a little more.

Yet, we can't tell the difference among the three modes; how can we find out? — PoeticUniverse

Philosophy of time is a mess. And that’s because physics doesn’t actually provide a general model.

So eternalism is what you get out of special relativity - where everything happens at the one massless speed of c and so time can’t even elapse.

And presentism is what you would get out of general relativity where there is now mass and so the idea of a comoving reference frame. Particles can have a rest mass that locates them to a point in spacetime. They can stay in one place - relatively speaking - and so lag behind c as the general rate of causal interaction. To talk about the present has some meaning.

Then thermodynamics is starting to get somewhere as it has an arrow of time. There is an entropic gradient from past to future which breaks the symmetry of the relativistic descriptions.

The final model to be added into the mix has to be quantum physics. This is a work in progress but it looks to add the idea of contextually - the claim that the past does constrain the future in a decoherent fashion that fits with the thermodynamic arrow of time and thus supports the growing block universe approach.

But quantum theory brings a dose of retrocausality too, Time has to be emergent in a complex way where not every event is settled all at once. The current moment of the Universe is some present moment summary of all that has happened - all the quantum possibilities that have been decohered and made real. And then there are also all the events yet to be finalised as - in the timeless fashion of a photon under special relativity - the light from some star in the night sky will only hit your eyeball tonight when you stand outside and look up.

So - combining the stories told by our major models - we have this messy and emergent story. But it does support the growing block universe option … once we account for the lags that make time the kind of thing we think it to be. Something that measures an elapsing duration.

These lags are the possibility of observers to be at rest in the Universe - to be comoving observers that have zero velocity in respect with each other and not zipping around at the speed of light.

And then the matching possibility to be still waiting for some c-rate interaction to happen - for that photon to finally cross a billion lightyears and its wavefunction to collapse as an act of thermal decoherence.

So time emerges as the “waiting for something to happen” becomes a concrete physical thing. The lags are what divide our world into that which has definitely happened and that which has yet to happen and still remains only probabilistic.

It takes time for two rest frame objects to move closer together or further apart. And it takes time just for them to interact just via lightspeed photons or gravity. Rest mass objects have a rich experience of time as they are both separated and connected by a duration - the gap they have between each other that would have to be crossed at some speed, and then the gap they have which is already being closed by c-rate thermal and gravitational interactions.

And all this doesn’t work unless time is essentially timeless for the relativistic photon. And indeed, in some sense quantumly retrocausal. These would be the symmetries that the passing of time would be breaking so that particles with mass could be found at some particular location in time, as well as space.

(EDIT): That probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to you. But you can see that time is treated somewhat differently by four useful models of the Cosmos. And that what we experience as time is the emergent combination of that in the current universe where - as it’s observers - we are rest mass objects in a comoving frame.

So we live in the world as it is with several levels of symmetry having been broken. We live in a world that as developed a topologically rich structure. Things have changed from time as it would be for a gas, then a liquid, and now as a solid - to use the phase transition metaphor.

And to recover the past of time itself, to recover its origin, we would expect to need a theory of quantum gravity as the description of the Universe with all its time symmetries still intact and waiting to be broken.

So the Planck scale had its Unit 1 symmetry as I previously said. Quantum gravity ruled. Then the rapid expanding and cooling of the baby Universe saw it crack and crack again. Time as we know it emerged with its growing block structure. A topologically richness that arose as the speed of change, the speed of causal connection, got dichotomised so that every event involving a mass term had some concrete speed that ranged between the relativistic limits of travelling at c and sitting at rest.

Unless you go for some Big Daddy in the Sky divine creator figure, you are going to have to posit an ultimate stuff so vague it is just the potential for stuff, which then becomes something by dividing against itself in the complementary fashion that allows it to evolve into the many kinds of things we find. — apokrisis

Precisely! That's why non-philosophers typically think in terms of real-world experiences --- Father in heaven --- instead of groundless abstractions : Ungund.

I scanned an article about Schelling's Ungrund, and found, among the paradoxes & enigmas, one statement that is akin to my own BothAnd Principle : “idealism is the soul of philosophy; realism is its body" . . . . "only both together can constitute a living whole”.
https://epochemagazine.org/77/freedom-god-and-ground-an-introduction-to-schellings-1809-freedom-essay/

I don't follow most of his arcane reasoning, but the common notion of positive Potential makes more sense to me than the negation Ungrund. Potential even has a physical & scientific application, exemplified in storage batteries. "Vague" Potential per se is Ideal and does nothing, but when integrated into a real System (circuit), "both together" transform into Causation, and the voltage possibility of stored Energy is enabled to do actual Work.

I suspect that the OP argument "against cause" is talking about ideal & abstract Cause & Effect reasoning instead of the real & concrete natural cycles of Transformation in the real world. Hume argued that the notion of Causation was not real, but ideal : a "habit" of thinking based on experience with causal sequences, in which no physical connection between Cause and Effect can be seen, only inferred. Energy is not a real thing, but an ideal relationship : a ratio.

Philosophical Idealism is feckless & worthless by comparison to Scientific Realism. But working together, metaphysical Ideas & physical Actions allow human animals to dominate the natural world, by imagining invisible Potential, and then transforming mere possibilities into Actualities by means of Technology. :nerd:

Time as we know it emerged with its growing block structure. — apokrisis

AI Whitehead to the Rescue:

This goes straight to the heart of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy. While Whitehead never explicitly uses the term “growing block universe,” his metaphysics of “actual occasions” maps remarkably well onto that model — though with some crucial differences that make his vision far more dynamic and organic.

Let’s break it down carefully.

⸻

1. The “Creative Advance” — Time as Process

Whitehead’s central idea is that reality is made of events, not substances — what he calls actual occasions. Each occasion is a moment of experience that arises, becomes, and perishes. Once it has perished, it becomes a datum or objective fact for later occasions.

He calls this the creative advance into novelty — an ongoing flow where each moment:
1. Prehends (takes in) the past,
2. Synthesizes its experience into a new unity, and
3. Perishes into the past, contributing itself to the growing universe.

So time is not a container in which things happen — it is the happening of things.
Each new event is the present’s contribution to the ever-growing totality of reality.

This is precisely a growing block mode of time:
• The past remains real and permanent (every perished occasion endures as fact).
• The present is the locus of creative becoming.
• The future is not yet real — only a field of potential (“eternal objects”) waiting to be actualized.

⸻

2. The Block Grows, But It’s Alive

In classical “growing block” theories, time is often imagined geometrically — as a block that expands with each new layer of existence.
Whitehead’s version is subtler: the universe is not a static structure that grows, but a living organism of becoming.

Every new actual occasion:
• Re-enacts the past (by prehending it),
• Creates novelty (a fresh synthesis of feeling, relation, and value),
• And then “objectifies” — becoming an immortal component of reality.

In this sense, the block grows organically — each new moment is a creative transformation of all that has come before.
The past never vanishes, but it is no longer active — it is “what has become.”

⸻

3. Past, Present, and Future in Whitehead’s Ontology

Thus, Whitehead integrates three layers of temporality:
1. The Objective Past — what has become.
2. The Subjective Present — what is becoming.
3. The Potential Future — what may become.

This triadic structure fits perfectly into a growing block framework, with a metaphysical emphasis on the creative pulse of each new becoming.

⸻

4. The Asymmetry of Time

Whitehead also provides a reason why time feels directed — because:
• Every event prehends the past, but not the future.
• The causal arrows all point forward (from completed to emerging).
• The novelty introduced in each occasion ensures that time has an arrow — an irreversible creative growth.

This makes his version richer than purely physical eternalism or geometric growing block models: it’s not just that the universe adds new slices of spacetime, but that each new event changes the meaning of the whole. Reality evolves in significance as well as in extent.

⸻

So while Whitehead shares the core structure of the growing block, he transforms it into a metaphysics of creativity — what he calls the many becoming one, and being increased by one.

⸻

5. A Poetic Summary

The world is a poem in progress:
each verse written, fixed in memory —
the next still shimmering with potential.
The ink of time dries, line by line,
as eternity grows by living thought.

Causation. — Gnomon

See my post above.

Whitehead’s central idea is that reality is made of events, not substances — what he calls actual occasions. — PoeticUniverse

I prefer Bergson to Whitehead, although you are right about the triadic structure of relations and how all this fits the thermo-picture of the growing block universe.

Digging into my own database of notes about this issue, I find I long ago related Bergson notion of durations to the hierarchy theory view of Stanley Salthe which speaks of cogent moments. Something that is also illuminating in terms of the OP as it is about causality as the contextual integration – the collapsed of the wavefunction – as it must be when it is structured by the growing block universe as a spatiotemporal hierarchy. The lightcone structure that special relativity produces and "freezes" as its baseline representation of spacetime.

So what everyone has in common here is the triadicity of the systems approach. And that then gets expressed as a fractal or scalefree hierarchy of durations or cogent moments. The kind of block universe view that expands~cools from every point of its metric. Any disturbance at a point propagates at c to create an expanding space of its ripples.

A star has its probability of emitting a hot ray or a gravitational wobble. That potential spreads and cools until it becomes a concrete event at some other point. It could be not very far and so still very hot if the causal interaction is with a mote of dust in near orbit with the star. Or if could be a very dim and redshifted photon that has travelled an incredible distance to reach your eyeball looking up to the heavens at night.

So the speed of light sets a baseline spatiotemporal scale for the expanding and cooling. It creates regions in lightcone causal contact. And every such lightcone region or cogent moment grows like a swelling bubble until there is the event that decoheres it and locates it. The event that makes the bubble go pop and fix a place and a temperature where that ray met its concrete fate. The event that turned a future possibility into a definite past event. The present is then the surface of the bubble as the spacetime point where the event was actualised – and thus all the other possible points on that spacetime surface where it counterfactually didn't.

We get the classical locality of a photon having been emitted and then being absorbed. But also the quantum nonlocality of the counterfactuality of a lightcone region where the photon could have been absorbed and yet equally certainly wasn't.

Anyway this is a post I once wrote on the similarity of Bergson and Salthe, and how the triadic logic can be set up as a nested hierarchy of process. The same basic "event creating" story of a causal connection, but set in a growing space of such "eventful moments".

So time from the point of view of its individuated happenings vs time from the point of view of all the expanding and cooling that was happening inbetween and so became the durational context to the event.

Post on time as cogent moment or a hierarchy of durations….

Hierarchy theorist Stan Salthe dubs this the "cogent moment". Henri Bergson had a similar idea.
If the world is understood in terms of a hierarchy of processes, then they all will have their own characteristic integration times. Time for the Cosmos is not some Newtonian dimension. It is an emergent feature of being a process as every process will have a rate at which it moves from being just starting to form a settled state - reaching some sort of cogent equilibrium which defines it as having "happened" - and then being in fact settled enough to become the departure point, the cause, for further acts of integration or equilibration.

So this view of time sees it not as a spatial line to be divided in two - past and future - with the present being some instant or zero-d point marking a separation. Instead, time is an emergent product of how long it takes causes to become effects that are then able to be causes. For every kind of process, there is going to be a characteristic duration when it comes to how long it takes for integration or equilibration to occur across the span of the activity in question.

We can appreciate this in speeded up film of landscapes in which clouds or glaciers now look to flow like rivers. What seemed like static objects - changing too slowly to make a difference to our impatient eye - now turn into fluid processes. They looked like chunks of history. Now we see them as things very much still in the middle of their actualisation. They will be history only after they have passed, either massing and dropping their rain, or melting and leaving behind great trenches etched in the countryside.

So the present is our intuitive account of the fact that causes must be separated from their effects, and the effects then separated from what they might then cause. There is some kind of causal turnaround time or duration - a momentary suspension of change - that is going to be a physical characteristic of every real world process. Thus there is some rate of change, some further "time frame" or cogent moment, that gets associated with every kind of natural system.

At the level of fundamental physics, this turns out to be the Planckscale limit. Time gets "grainy" at around 10^-44 seconds. The Planck distance is 10^-35m. So the Planck time represents the maximum action that can be packed into such a tiny space - the single beat of a wavelength. That primal act of integrated change - a single oscillation - then also defines the maximum possible energy density, as the shortest wavelength is the highest frequency, and the highest frequency is the hottest possible radiation.

So the shortest time, the smallest space, and the most energetic event, all define each other in a neat little package. Actuality is based on the rate at which a thermal event can come together and count as a "first happening" - a concrete Big Bang act of starting to cool and expand enough to stand as a first moment in a cosmic thermal history.

Then psychological time for us humans is all about neural integration speed. It takes time for nerve signals to move about. The maximum conduction speed in a well-insulated nerve, like the ones connecting your foot to your brain is about 240 mph. But inside the brain, speeds can slow to a 20 mph crawl. To form the kind of whole brain integrated states needed by attentional awareness involves developing a collective state - a "resonance" - that can take up to half a second because of all the spread-out activity to become fully synchronised.

So there is a characteristic duration for the time it takes for causes to become the effects that are then themselves causes. Input takes time to process and become the outputs that drive further behaviour. Which is why I mention also the importance of bridging this processing gap by anticipation. The brain shortcuts itself as much as it can by creating a running expectation of the future. It produces an output before the input so that it can just very quickly ignore the arriving information - treat it as "already seen". It is only the bit that is surprising that then takes that further split second to register and get your head around.

But between this physical Planckscale integration time and this neural human information processing time are a whole host of other characteristic timescales for the processes of nature.

Geology has its own extremely long "present tense". Stresses and strains can slowly build for decades or centuries before suddenly relaxing in abrupt events like earthquakes or volcanoes.

A process view explains time in a more general fashion by relating it to the causal structure of events. Every system has some characteristic rate of change. There is a cogent moment graininess or scale created by the fact that not everything can be integrated all at once. It requires "time" to go from being caused to being a cause. There is a real transition involved. And that happens within what we normally regard as the frozen instant when things are instead finally just "actual". Brutely existent and lacking change, not being in fact a transition from being caused to being a cause in terms of our multi-scale accounts of causal flows.

One could also throw Deleuze into this conversation. My point is that time has this nested hierarchical structure as all reality is indeed a process of durations growing the space of a potential that is then terminated at some point as a history-fixing event. There is the positive collapse of a possibility which was swelling at some general characteristic rate, but then gets punctured at some also characteristic rate, even if that rate is by contrast not a global constant but a local random accident. Like the half-life of a decay curve.

So again, this is the growing block universe view. But it is a step more complicated as it marries the general pace of an expanding~cooling cosmos – the growing block bit – to the quantumness of the events that fix the history as being probabilistic. There is randomness to the puncturing of all the bubbles that are getting blown.

Early in the Universe, everything is so hot and close that this randomness is maximally compressed. It seems pretty classical as any two particles are bound to interact almost immediately and without any real cooling. We have the plasma state of annihilating particles, as we get with the matter~antimatter brew of the quark~gluon plasma.

But as the Universe spreads right out and cools right down, it can start to take longer and longer for two particles to interact. The average time to the thermal decoherence of a particle can stretch out to billions of lightyears, as it does for distant star light seeking the absorbing terminus of our eyeball.

The indeterminacy stretches out for eons now. So when we are thinking of the passage of time, it is like the fast ticking clock of the plasma state has become the immensely slowed or time dilated clock of the current universe. We look around at the stars sprinkling the light sky and there are now both so few photons arriving, and they have been coming at us for so long.

The duration/cogent moment point of view turns time from something spatialised to something "processuralised". Not a simple geometric dimension but a topologically complex dimension growing effect.

My notes also remind me of a paper by Arran Gare on Whitehead and Pythagoras where he argues why Whitehead doesn't quite get it right...

One of the features of the whole tradition of process thought, from Anaximander onwards (including Peirce, and to a lesser extent Bergson), has been the view that order in the world has in some sense emerged from a background of disorder, flux or chaos.

Anaximander characterized the cosmos as developing through the limiting of the unlimited, and emphasised the precarious nature of what emerged in this way, characterizing its existence as an ‘injustice’ that eventually would have to be paid for. Even the Pythagoreans accepted the dichotomy between the limited and the unlimited. Heraclitus, to some extent defending Anaximander against later philosophers, characterized the cosmos as in perpetual motion and emphasised the central place within it of strife and conflict. It is only through a balance between opposites that the existence of anything is maintained, and nothing is permanent except this principle, Heraclitus claimed.

As noted, Peirce also assumed that necessity in the world arose from chaos and chance through limitation. Recently, it has been argued in process physics that it is necessary to postulate an ‘intrinsic randomness’ or ‘self-referential noise’ to generate a self-organising relational information system, sufficiently rich that self-referencing is possible.

Hierarchy theorists, notably by Howard Pattee, Timothy Allen and Stanley Salthe, among others, who have argued that emergence is associated with new constraints emerging which are not in the initial conditions. While developed without reference to pre-twentieth century thought (or to Bergson), this conception of nature revives Anaximander’s conception of cosmos as having formed through the limiting of the unlimited (an idea also taken up further developed by Schelling at the end of the eighteenth century).

Along with the notion of different minimum durations, or different process rates, this has enabled Pattee, Allen and Salthe to clarify the nature of both emergence and hierarchical ordering in nature. Treating time as pulsational rather than atomic and treating causation as essentially a matter of constraining, overcomes a number of difficulties in Whitehead’s philosophy,

Actually Gare is a good general cite if you are puzzled by where my own "worldview" comes from. He has a slew of papers covering the same pattern of intellectual connections.