I can agree with you all day that modelling relations have feel like something aspects to it. — schopenhauer1

Finally. That being so, case closed.

Except a backwards triadism that relies on brute fact monism rather than emergence...

Sounds legit. — apokrisis

It's backwards because it doesn't rely on emergence? As I've demonstrated to you, over and over again, in a multitude of different ways, emergence is untenable because it relies on an unintelligible premise. This renders the entire approach as unintelligible.

If that's your method for judging an ontology, by relating it to the concept of emergence, then it's no wonder that your metaphysics is so upside down. You need to apprehend emergence as fundamentally flawed, and this will not come about until you get a good grasp of some basic metaphysical principles.

What emergence claims is "we cannot understand what happened, so we'll just say that what happened is unintelligible, and claim that the unintelligible happened." This is the real problem with Peirce's philosophy which gives ontological status to vagueness, it allows one to claim that there are things which are impossible to understand, things which are unintelligible. Allowing the unintelligible into your metaphysics as a fundamental principle, is an act of a quitter. It is to say "I cannot understand it so I'll assume that it's impossible to understand", it's ontologically vague. But if the untintelligible (vagueness) is adopted, and employed as a premise, then it renders all the conclusions which follow (emergence being one), as unintelligible.

Intelligibility is what emerges. Therefore it would be incoherent to claim that what it emerges from is the intelligible as well.

Intelligibility is what emerges. — apokrisis

I am hoping that someone can summarize this theory of life emerging from non-life so I can bookmark it for future reference in other threads. The highlights for me are that:

1) Thermodynamics has purpose.
2) There is a Cosmic Goal.
3) Intelligibility emerges from chemicals.
4) Chemicals feel things.
5) Chemicals communicate with each other with signs.

Basically everything has a mind and purpose except humans.

Doesn't my ribosomal explanation account for the existence of DNA? — MikeL

Not the existence of it, but the fact that it works. How DNA came about, what caused it to exist, is what is at issue.

By the way, I don't have a 'religious background' other than to believe that what can be known through the physical senses, is not all there is. I certainly don't believe in creationism of any kind, but I do believe that the effort to avoid any kind of religious concept of life is one of the drivers of naturalism.

Incidentally, still no further explanation of what Claude Shannon's paper has to do with atomic physics.

Yeah, the fantastic thing is that mind emerges from mindlessness (according to some), which is effectively nothing more but the belief that something can come from nothing. Everything else is just mental gymnastics.

You are ridiculous. You don't even understand the fundamental question. You missed the target. It wasn't whether I can agree if modelling conditions "feel like something". Again, we can talk all day about constituents. WHAT is the feels like something? That case is definitely not closed as you have yet to either grasp the importance of the question or are dodging it.

If I may be so bold, I think I understand the theory. A thinking, breathing, living cosmos with purpose, infused itself into chemicals via thermodynamics to bring them to life.

I would say it is a cross between panpsychism and the Biblical Genesis story of God infusing life into Adam, where chemicals are the stand-in for humans. There is a subtle form of chemical worship in the theory which contrasts nicely with other similar theories that worship technology.

WHAT is the feels like something? — schopenhauer1

Clearly it is the feels like something! :P When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. So if you ask what is an apple? I can answer in terms of other things: a fruit, red, etc. Of course none of those independently are what an apple is. To a certain extent the debate between you isn't only about metaphysics, but also about what you mean when you each ask the questions you ask.

Notes on Peirce, Idealism, Mind, and Semiosis

Peirce names his philosophy that of objective idealism. It is his theory of metaphysics that envisions mind and matter, and psychical law and physical law, on a single natural continuum of reality. As soul and material nature, for Emerson, are connatural (or “consanguineous”) entities, mind and matter, for Peirce, exist as two ends of a single spectrum whose ontological difference is not absolute but a matter of degree. Their monistic vision of the world Emerson elegantly captures when he recollects the wonderful hint given to science of “a bough of a fossil tree which was perfect wood at one end and perfect mineral coal at the other.” Furthermore, the natural continuum of this worldview is ultimately mental in nature. Peirce is a votary of Emerson’s “oldest religion” as demonstrated by the astounding parallel formulation between the dictums, “matter is effete mind,” and “Matter is dead Mind.” His metaphysics of objective idealism (contra: subjective idealism), thus, in opting out of metaphysical dualism, rejects matter as an independently existing substance or reality, and rather interprets it as fundamentally mental in nature. Matter—or, more accurately, that which we ordinarily take to be matter—is a form of mind, in particular, “effete mind.” There is no material substance in the absolute sense, that is, no mind that is absolutely dead. As Peirce likes to qualify it, matter is “partially deadened mind”. The psychic vitality of matter receives full articulation in “Man’s Glassy Essence,” and is briefly exposited in “Architecture” when Peirce connects the psychological phenomena of feeling, sensation of reaction, and general conception to the physiological activities found in nerve-cells. In Peirce’s monistic reduction, material particles and events turn out to be one with the great cosmic mind, a position consonant with Emersonian idealism.

From The Intelligibility of Peirce’s Metaphysics of Objective Idealism, Nicholas Guardiano Department of Philosophy Southern Illinois University Carbondale, my underlines.

The question this leads to is, would C S Peirce have described his philosophy as naturalistic or physicalist in the current sense? Presumably not the latter. From the review of Paul Forster's Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism (Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews):

Peirce understood nominalism … as the view that reality consists exclusively of concrete particulars and that universality and generality have to do only with names and their significations. This view relegates properties, abstract entities, kinds, relations, laws of nature, and so on, to a conceptual existence at most. Peirce believed nominalism (including what he referred to as "the daughters of nominalism": sensationalism, phenomenalism, individualism, and materialism) to be seriously flawed and a great threat to the advancement of science and civilization. His alternative was a nuanced realism that distinguished reality from existence and that could admit general and abstract entities as reals without attributing to them direct (efficient) causal powers. Peirce held that these non-existent reals could influence the course of events by means of final causation (conceived somewhat after Aristotle's conception), and that to banish them from ontology, as nominalists require, is virtually to eliminate the ground for scientific prediction as well as to underwrite a skeptical ethos unsupportive of moral agency.

I believe that here, the notion of these 'general and abstract entities as reals' are essentially a form of the Platonist eidos, which whilst modified by Aristotle, were never rejected by him.

In respect of the immortality of the soul:

In an 1893 manuscript "Immortality in the Light of Synechism," Peirce applied his doctrine of synechism to the question of the soul's immortality in order to argue in the affirmative [i.e. in favour of the immortality of the soul]. According to Peirce, synechism flatly denies Parmenides' claim that "Being is, and non-being is nothing" and declares instead that "being is a matter of more or less, so as to merge insensibly into nothing." Peirce argued that the view that "no experiential question can be answered with absolute certainty" (fallibilism) implies the view that "the object has an imperfect and qualified existence" and implies, furthermore, the view that there is no absolute distinction between a phenomenon and its substrate, and among various persons, and between waking and sleeping; one who takes on a role in creation's drama identifies to that extent with creation's author. Carnal consciousness, according to Peirce's synechism, does not cease quickly upon death, and is a small part of a person, for there is also social consciousness: one's spirit really does live on in others; and there is also spiritual consciousness, which we confuse with other things, and in which one is constituted as an eternal truth "embodied by the universe as a whole": that eternal truth "as an archetypal idea can never fail; and in the world to come is destined to a special spiritual embodiment." Peirce said in conclusion that synechism is not religion but scientific philosophy, but could come to unify religion and science.

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Synechism, my underline.


Finally we come to Peirce's conception of 'agápē-ism', where ' agápē' is the self-sacrificing love associated with early Christian teachings:

In 1893, the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce used the word " agápē-ism" for the view that creative love is operative in the cosmos. [1] Drawing from the Swedenborgian ideas of Henry James, Sr. which he had absorbed long before, [2] Peirce held that it involves a love which expresses itself in a devotion to cherishing and tending to people or things other than oneself, as parent may do for offspring, and as God, as Love, does even and especially for the unloving, whereby the loved ones may learn. Peirce regarded this process as a mode of evolution of the cosmos and its parts, and he called the process "agápē-ism", such that: "The good result is here brought to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general purpose."[1] Peirce held that there are three such principles and three associated modes of evolution:

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agápē-ism." — C. S. Peirce, 1893[1]

1. Peirce, C. S. (1893), "Evolutionary Love", The Monist, v. III, n. 1, pp. 176–200. Reprinted also in Chance, Love, and Logic pp. 267–300, Philosophical Writings of Peirce pp. 361–74.

2. Peirce, C. S. (1870), Review of Henry James, Sr.'s The Secret of Swedenborg, in North American Review 110, April, pp. 463–8, Google Books Eprint.


The other point that should be considered is that Peirce says that 'nature forms habits'. The unavoidable implication is that nature has or is mind. In this respect, there is convergence with Rupert Sheldrake's (maverick) theory of 'morphic resonance'.

With respect to the naturalistic vs idealistic tension in Peirce's writings,

Thomas Goudge (1950) argues that Peirce’s works consist of two conflicting strands, one naturalistic and hard-headedly scientific, the other metaphysical and transcendental. Others take Peirce’s work, both naturalistic and transcendental, to be part of an interrelated system.

IETP

Obviously a variety of interpretations are possible, however note that many current adaptions of Peirce assume the 'hard-headed scientific Peirce' but eschew the 'idealistic and metaphysical Peirce'. However when it comes to theories such as pansemiosis which purportedly provide a purely naturalistic or scientific account of the origin of life, the question ought to be asked, would Peirce himself have agreed with or endorsed this form of naturalism? Does it stand, in the absence of the idealist metaphysics which he thought underwrote it? Is his notion of 'matter as effete mind' something which contemporary naturalists ought to accept? And, if so, does this mean that naturalism is now tending towards idealist philosophies, as many physicists (e.g. Eddington, James Jeans, Schrodinger, Heisenberg) have argued?

Thanks very much for a summary I have saved to disk.

An exquisite post in my view.

The question this leads to is, would C S Peirce have described his philosophy as naturalistic or physicalist in the current sense? — Wayfarer

The other point that should be considered is that Peirce says that 'nature forms habits'. The unavoidable implication is that nature has or is mind. — Wayfarer

In attempts to compliment you post, I think it should be remembered that C S Pierce was never privy to Georges Lemaitre’s hypothesis that everything could be mathematically traced back to a single point (the beginning of the Big Bang cosmological model from which the model obtained its pejorative term of “Big Bang”), nor was he aware of all the epistemological criteria that since then followed, which is used to nowadays substantiate this model as depicting an ontic fact. (We often forget, it is only a model of what might have been.) In essence, using Pierce's model of objective idealism, the effete mind of his time did not yet organize into forms that contained this, then non-existent, information.

Focusing in on the quasi-meta-physical* implication of this Big Bang model, that something emerged from (what for all technical purposes is) nothing, would Pierce then have viewed this awareness-evidence supported, mathematical model of the Big Bang as nullifying his metaphysics of objective idealism? Or, conversely, would he interpret this Big Bang model and all the empirical evidence since then acquired for it as only one, itself yet evolving, aspect of the ever evolving effete mind he explains via his objective idealism?

To my understanding, this difference in answer gets to the root of whether he’d today become a triadic-relations physicalist / naturalist or, as I very much believe he would, remain a non-physicalist, remain an objective idealist.

It would result in the same thing from all practical purposes of everyday life; it would however make a big difference as regards the ontic nature of being.

* Though itself an issue of possible contention, I say “quasi-meta-physical” because one cannot address the ontic reality of the metaphysical by basing one’s epistemology regarding what is in what one intuitively knows to be the realities of the physical (regardless of how concrete or abstract these might be). From the metaphysics of Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, to list only three of the long since gone guys, so doing would certainly be understood to be a self-contradicting enterprise. The ontic reality of the metaphysical is in a top-down relation to the ontic reality of the physical, not the other way around; else there would be no “beyond-physical”. This, then, includes the metaphysical issue of whether or not something can emerge from nothing, again alluding to what the Big Bang model of cosmology implies.

From Peirce's Law of the Mind:

"I have begun by showing that tychism must give birth to an evolu-
tionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of
mind are regarded as products of growth, and to a Schelling-fashioned
idealism which holds matter to be mere specialised and partially
deadened mind."

From this, I observe:

1) Peirce favored labeling his papers as Laws, apparently enjoying the additional gravitas.

2) Cosmology is the product of chance (tychism). He favors the naturalist "it just happened" approach to science. A convenient and all encompassing explanation for pretty much everything and anything that science has no explanation for.

3) First came Mind and then came Matter.

For my taste, very muddled but juxtaposes nicely with the current scientific point of view, that everything just happened, with the big exception that Peirce places Mind ahead of Matter in evolutionary growth. Current naturalist thinking apparently puts Matter first with the additional observation that Cosmic Purpose is sort of hovering around ready to strike at the soul of chemicals. I think this is the story. After this, chemicals just start communicating with each other as any normal chemical might, about their feelings, emotions, dietary preferences, favorite sports team etc.

Clearly it is the feels like something! :P When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. So if you ask what is an apple? I can answer in terms of other things: a fruit, red, etc. Of course none of those independently are what an apple is. To a certain extent the debate between you isn't only about metaphysics, but also about what you mean when you each ask the questions you ask. — Agustino

WHAT is experience as opposed to its constituents. If you read the thread from the beginning and other ones between me and apokrisis, it should be apparent.

Edit: For the record, I kind of resent your style on here. You come into my conversations and appear to troll my answers. I can't put my finger on it. I can debate apokrisis all day and I'm fine with that, but your style seems meant to provoke it seems. At least that is my reaction, and I rarely get that from other members I disagree with. Just food for thought on your style.

When you ask "what is" you can only answer in terms of other things. — Agustino

That's right. The Hard Problem has bite because in the end, causal explanations (about anything) rely on counterfactuals. You can believe the answer is A because you believe the answer isn't not-A.

And so when you make the question about the cause of some totality - like "the Cosmos", or "the Mind" - then there just is no not-A permitted by the question. Or rather you get the ridiculous answer that the only alternative is "not". Existence arose out of nothing. Mind arose out of nothing.

Talk about qualia has the same formula. Why is green green? Why is the scent of a rose like the scent of a rose? The question form itself fails the counterfactuality test. There just is no comparison possible as green is always green. And it still would be as far as I'm concerned even if it were to switch to bleen. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_riddle_of_induction)

Aristotle made the same point. Talk of causality is always a question about a reason for a change. Without counterfactuality, the game doesn't even get off the ground. The question you are asking is not really a question if you the questioner fail to provide a reasonable counterfactual basis for it.

The burden is on Schop to show why he is asking a good question ... if he now again denies that the question was answered.

Then to repeat what I've said about a Peirce-style organicism a million times, it does provide you with a critical extra counterfactual resource when asking questions - another dimension to standard metaphysics. It may not eliminate the problem here, but it is a further way to minimise it, to shrink it as small as we know how.

That extra resource is the (still pretty Aristotelean) notion of vagueness. So Peirce stood for a developmental metaphysics in which all things originate in a state of ultimate vagueness (or Firstness). Then by a mutual or orthogonal act of separation - a dichotomisation, a symmetry-breaking - you get a fundamental opposition arising. And from that dyadicy of a bare relation - a now crisp distinction that gives you your requisite either/or - you can develop further to the third thing of an interaction that hierarchically goes to equilibrium over all possible scales of being. The vague (as a formless chaos) becomes the crisp (a structured and law-like state of affairs in which change becomes minimal).

So this is a tale of how emergence and process can lead to the kind of deadened world we observe - a Cosmos nearly at its Heat Death doing nothing but entropifying. And thus - counterfactually - life and mind can be understood as "other" to that. We are distinguishable from our context by our negentropic qualities.

Semiotics is then a further part of this developmental story in both being the triadic logic of the metaphysics - the vague to crisp tale of developmental organisation just described - and also the particular story of the mechanism, the modelling relation, which accounts counterfactually for life and mind.

So to deal with both of philosophy's hardest problems - what is existence?, what is mind? - Peircean semiotics calls on the further metaphysical resources of the vague~crisp to get us further down the road towards an intelligible reply. Vague vs crisp is another source of counterfactuality to motivate the framing of the questions.

And vagueness is in fact defined logically as a perfect lack of counterfactuality. Peirce said vagueness is that to which the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply. Crispness is thus the opposite - where the counterfactuality has developed to a point we might consider it absolute.

This is all very neat. Logic - the way we can ask definite questions - has just been extended in formal fashion so that it can safely talk about the indefinite. We can begin our metaphysical conversation even before counterfactuality arises - as the emergence of counterfactuality is what semiosis fundamentally explains.

This is not so new. Anaximander did it at the dawn of metaphysics with his much misunderstood tale of existence's emergence by symmetry-breaking from the Apeiron.

Indeed, something similar is the basis of most ancient wisdoms. You have the Judaic Ein Sof, the Taoist Dao, the Buddhist dependent co-arising, etc.

And of course - if you can get past the Scholastic misrepresentations - Aristotle was striving towards the same with his Hylomorphism. His "prime matter" was a logical attempt to vague-ify the basis of being.

So when it comes to asking the most interesting open questions - why mind? why existence? - the search is for some position of counterfactuality that can make those questions seem more sensible. And a Peircean developmental logic, one that is rooted in a notion of vagueness, a complete lack of counterfactuality, is the bold new metaphysical approach that deals directly with this very issue of counterfactuality.

That is why he summed up existence as "the universal growth of reasonableness". Such a statement sounds very mystical and is open to obvious misinterpretation. But that is why you actually have to study and learn the new logical notion that lies behind it.

Obviously a variety of interpretations are possible, however note that many current adaptions of Peirce assume the 'hard-headed scientific Peirce' but eschew the 'idealistic and metaphysical Peirce'. — Wayfarer

Darwin believed in God. So did Newton and Einstein. Thus it makes no difference if Peirce believed in God.

That is the splendour of the scientific method. Eventually any superfluous mental scaffolding falls away to leave the naked physicalist reasoning. Talk about stuff that can't be measured - stuff that is not being talked about counter-factually - dies its death. It becomes classed as the "not even wrong".

The purity of scientific reasoning is the most marvellous realisation one can have. All the nonsense of life just falls away. One can penetrate to the core of the mystery that is existence. An idea as powerful as semiosis is giddy with beauty.

Grubby religious beliefs are to Peircean metaphysics as porn is to real sex. ;)

Or, conversely, would he interpret this Big Bang model and all the empirical evidence since then acquired for it as only one, itself yet evolving, aspect of the ever evolving effete mind he explains via his objective idealism? — javra

The first essay I mentioned, by Guardiano, discusses the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Peirce as depicted in a series of essays in a publication called The Monist. Emerson was something of a fountainhead of wisdom in the American literary tradition, and was also deeply interested in Vedic religion, one of the factors that lead him to break from the Church. I think the influence is that Peirce's 'primordial firstness' which precedes everything that exists, is influenced by Emerson's conception of Brahman. But there is huge scope to Peirce's writings on such matters, far more than can be summed up here.

The purity of scientific reasoning is the most marvellous realisation one can have. All the nonsense of life just falls away — apokrisis

And you get snarky when you think you're being accused of scientism, when surely that's the gospel you're preaching, bro' ;-) Anyway, pointless to argue, obviously.

And you get snarky when you think you're being accused of scientism, when surely that's the gospel you're preaching, bro. — Wayfarer

Sure its annoying that you can't be consistent. But since you are really just accusing me of being relentlessly reasonable, I can't complain.

I'll just remind - and you have to be reminded as frequently as a goldfish circling its bowl - that my "scientism" is systems science and not good old fashion reductionism. I am an organicist, not a mechanicist. I am about full four causes explanation, not just bottom-up atomistic construction .... etc, etc.

I'd define snark as an effort to be unpleasant in a way that rides rough-shod over the facts of the matter. Whether you are extremely forgetful, never really understood, or merely desperate to regain the ideological upper hand, I can't tell, and don't really care.

But the fact remains that I am not applying the same metaphysics as your totems of Scientism like Dawkins and Dennett and Krauss. So your snarky comments just undermine any credibility you might have hoped you have established here.

I'll just remind - and you have to be reminded as frequently as a goldfish circling its bowl - that my "scientism" is systems science and not good old fashion reductionism. — apokrisis

Oh good. Then please explain to me again what the origin of 'downward causation' is - what are the 'final causes' towards which living beings are striving? What final aim are they endeavouring to realise? It seems the only 'final cause' that all is tending towards, is indeed the 'maximisation of entropy' - which I personally think is quite hard to reconcile with the Aristotelian and Platonic ideal of 'the good contemplating itself in eternity'. I think Peirce retained that element of the Western idealist tradition, whereas it seems to be absent from your interpretation of systems science. But I'm happy to be corrected.

Incidentally I will always acknowledge that your attitude is very different to the lumpen materialism of Krauss et al. You're streets ahead of anyone like that. I have already said that I think the whole movement towards biosemiotics is a consequence of recognising the failures of materialism. So my criticisms of their kind of reductionism, which is highly influential in today's culture, are not about your systems science. But when you elevate science to the only valid avenue of knowledge - that is what I mean by 'scientism', because that's what it actually does mean. My references to other cognitive modes are invariably met with vitriol - you show no understanding of it, other than to tell me you got trained by or as a Zen Buddhist and it's all nonsense, or something along those lines.

The first essay I mentioned, by Guardiano, discusses the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson on Peirce as depicted in a series of essays in a publication called The Monist. Emerson was something of a fountainhead of wisdom in the American literary tradition, and was also deeply interested in Vedic religion, one of the factors that lead him to break from the Church. I think the influence is that Peirce's 'primordial firstness' which precedes everything that exists, is influenced by Emerson's conception of Brahman. But there is huge scope to Peirce's writings on such matters, far more than can be summed up here. — Wayfarer

I can understand this possible relation between Pierce’s “primordial firstness” and the Vedic Brahman. Thanks for the info.

To be frank, via my own philosophical skepticism based understandings (yea, kind of like those of Plato’s Academy, but different), I can hold my own till the cows come home that there is no way of justifying any belief regarding whether or not existence has a metaphysical beginning – never mind what kind of metaphysical beginning it might have had if it indeed had one. Lots of words to say: to my best current reasoning, nobody can know if existence ever had a beginning.

In Vedic tradition, Brahman is the end aspired for, a state of being that has always been, awaiting, without which there would be nothing which can stand. There’s a bit of a cognitive jump to then thinking that this Alpha and Omega of Vedic tradition, so to speak, once existed of itself in manners devoid of anything standing. To me, it, in a way, would parallel the fallacy of thinking that, once, there was only Nirvana … from out of which then emerged (via some variant of efficient causation, no doubt) all our cycles of death and rebirth via dependent originations. No Buddhist in his/her right mind could ever entertain such as thing without laughing … which, I believe, can be viewed as one reason for the Buddhist schism from Hinduism. Of course, this together with disagreement on the homunculus notion of self which Hindu tradition - at times - makes itself, arguably all to easily for Buddhists, prone to.

Musings that could all be disputed (save for the lack of justification in upholding a metaphysical beginning, I strongly contend) - given despite my limited knowledge of the cultural topics at hand. But again, thanks for the shared info. I haven’t read anything by Emerson yet. Nice when you find new readings to look forward to. I’ve placed The Monist on my list.

My references to other cognitive modes are invariably met with vitriol — Wayfarer

So justify those cognitive modes in reference to my explanation of my cognitive mode.

I've highlighted the centrality of counterfactuality to metaphysical-strength reasoning. How are you going to reason employing a mode that rejects counterfactuality? That rejects measurable facts in other words. How are you escaping falling into the class of metaphysical explanations that is formally "not even wrong"?

You are welcome to challenge me with your alternatives. But you have to do more than name them here. You have to argue for them ... well, counterfactually. :)

And how does the remark you quoted differ from Peirce's view? — Πετροκότσυφας

Peirce's view of science was very expansive - it blended into many aspects of his thinking which would not, I think, be regarded as 'scientific' by many today. That was the point of the extended quotes I provided.

This is not so new. Anaximander did it at the dawn of metaphysics with his much misunderstood tale of existence's emergence by symmetry-breaking from the Apeiron.

Indeed, something similar is the basis of most ancient wisdoms. You have the Judaic Ein Sof, the Taoist Dao, the Buddhist dependent co-arising, etc. — apokrisis

First off Ein Sof is a Kabbalistic-specific expression which is far closer to Zen Buddhist notions of emptiness (interpretable as absolute selflessness, and not nothingness) than that of the processes of becoming you've mentioned.

Secondly, you hold a long history of degrading them mystics / spiritualists while you then go ahead and use their own notions to support your views. Can you clarify why?

Lots of words to say: to my best current reasoning, nobody can know if existence ever had a beginning. — javra

Nobody knows as usual. This Mr Nobody sure seems one heck of a smart guy.

It is always just so easy taking the sceptic's position isn't it. "I don't believe you yet. Tell me again. Nope, still not believing you." Etc, ad infinitum.

Anyway, the Peircean answer - like other ancient wisdoms - is that if there was a beginning, it would also have to be the opposite of a determinate event, the product of an efficient cause. It would have to instead be a beginning that was some form of ultimate vagueness or state of indetermination.

Rather like a quantum Big Bang indeed. Why did the atom decay right at that moment? We now have physical models that say efficient cause evaporates when you get down to the fundamental level of material events. We have to start thinking less conventionally, more holistically, about causality.

So now there is a happy coincidence between the physics and the metaphysics. And why - actually understanding the metaphysics - would we not see it is more than just some coincidence?

Secondly, you hold a long history of degrading them mystics / spiritualists while you then go ahead and use their own notions to support your views. — javra

Yes it must be baffling. I acknowledge all the efforts in the same obvious direction and yet also criticise those efforts to the degree they remain mystic and unformalised.

I'm also a constant critic of Peirce, don'tcha know? The ability to be self-critical like this - to highlight flaws so as to keep improving on the understanding - is such a rare thing. Outside of a scientific training.

OK then, the impetus is on you to illustrate via logical argument that existence had a metaphysical beginning. Is the Apeiron you uphold an uncaused given; is it nothingness from out of which something originates; it is itself caused by nothingness into being; etc. And, logically, why must your conclusion so be? This, by the way, addresses metaphysical (and not physical) beginnings.

And yet these mystics you gleefully put down in their place, with nothing more than their states of (non-measurable) awareness, came to the same conclusions you did via "scientific rationalism". How?

Have I not explained this often enough. The first thing is to stop talking about it as a nothingness. An apeiron is an everythingness in being a pure potential without limitation.

So if you want a mental image, it is a chaotic sea of fluctuations. A maximally confused host of actions in "every direction", and thus expressing "no direction in particular".

Constraints then emerge to regulate this chaos, give it form, bring it into a state of relative peace and order - an equilibrium that persists.

So start by switching out the image of a nothingness and bringing in an image of a seething directionlesss everythingness. Then start to subtract the concreteness that that imagery appears to demand.

I agree it ain't easy. But that is also how you get your head around mathematical conceptions of symmetry, or physical conceptions of quantum path integrals. With practice, you start to get the required level of abstract intuition.

But also, at the end of the day, any kind of "picture in the head" is not the point. The scientific method accepts that the final judge of all conceptions is not "how convincing it feels to my imaginative powers" but "is this idea publicly useful as a system of theory and testing?" - a modelling relation or interpretive habit.

Whose talking about phenomenal representations of what is non-phenomenal. Think of the four Aristotalian causes, together with all other possibilities of causation that have accumulated in our history (such as that of co-arising, etc.) and logically justify the causal principle by which the firstness came to be. It could be an uncaused given (another possibility of causation). Whatever you choose, how do you justify it was ontically so.

And yet these mystics you gleefully put down in their place, with nothing more than their states of (non-measurable) awareness, came to the same conclusions you did via "scientific rationalism". How? — javra

It is hard to reply if you insist on being ridiculous. Anyone who ever came up with a powerful metaphysical view was reasoning from experience of the world.

Do you think it would be possible to have clever thoughts about existence if you are blind, deaf and dumb?